Fantômas Read online

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of the work first published by Brentano’s Publishers Inc., New York, in 1915.

  9780486145778

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION - “The Emperor of Crime”

  I. THE GENIUS OF CRIME

  II. A TRAGIC DAWN

  III. THE HUNT FOR THE MAN

  IV. “NO! I AM NOT MAD!”

  V. “ARREST ME!”

  VI. “FANTÔMAS, IT IS DEATH!”

  VII. THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT

  VIII. A DREADFUL CONFESSION

  IX. ALL FOR HONOUR

  X. PRINCESS SONIA’S BATH

  XI. MAGISTRATE AND DETECTIVE

  XII. A KNOCK-OUT BLOW

  XIII. THÉRÈSE’S FUTURE

  XIV MADEMOISELLE JEANNE

  XV. THE MAD WOMAN’S PLOT

  XVI. AMONG THE MARKET PORTERS

  XVII. AT THE SAINT-ANTHONY’S PIG

  XVIII. A PRISONER AND A WITNESS

  XIX. JÉRÔME FANDOR

  XX. A CUP OF TEA

  XXI. LORD BELTHAM’S MURDERER

  XXII. THE SCRAP OF PAPER

  XXIII. THE WRECK OF THE “LANCASTER”

  XXIV. UNDER LOCK AND KEY

  XXV. AN UNEXPECTED ACCOMPLICE

  XXVI. A MYSTERIOUS CRIME

  XXVII. THREE SURPRISING INCIDENTS

  XXVIII. THE COURT OF ASSIZE

  XXIX. VERDICT AND SENTENCE

  XXX. AN ASSIGNATION

  XXXI. FELL TREACHERY

  XXXII. ON THE SCAFFOLD

  INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

  “The Emperor of Crime”

  By Robin Walz

  Listen up, all! Silence, please,

  To these acts lamentable,

  Of crimes unmentionable,

  Tortures and brutalities

  Ever unpunished, alas!

  By the criminal, Fantômas.

  —Robert Desnos, The Ballad of Fantômas (1933)

  The first Fantômas crime novel by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain was released on February 10, 1911. The cover, featuring a masked man in tuxedo and top hat looming across the urban landscape of Paris, resting his chin on one hand and clutching a bloody dagger in the other, promised readers spine-shivering thrills. They were not disappointed: treated to brutal murders and spectacular crimes on the pages within, the exploits of the villain continued to shock and delight over the course of thirty-two consecutive novels. Fantômas poisons a baroness with opium-laced black roses. He leaves severed hands scattered about a Monte Carlo casino. His bandits crash a city bus into a bank to pull off a dazzling heist. He places a double-crossing minion face up in a guillotine to witness his own execution. He releases plague-infested rats on ocean liners, withholding the serum for himself as he watches the infected passengers writhe in agony. The crimes of Fantômas do not go unchecked, however, as Inspector Juve of the Sûreté, the detective branch of the French judicial police, and his energetic companion Jérôme Fandor, journalist for La Capitale, doggedly pursue the villain. Yet the criminal continually eludes the heroic duo’s grasp. The ever-evasive Fantômas—Lord of Terror, Genius of Evil, Emperor of Crime—gets away with it all.

  A criminal celebrity, Fantômas was and continues to be popular among both mass audiences and intellectual elites. The original novel series sold over five million copies. Gaumont studio director Louis Feuillade adapted five Fantômas novels for the silver screen. Avant-garde poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob founded the Society of the Friends of Fantômas, and the Surrealists claimed Fantômas as one of their own. Other eminent writers and artists, including Robert Desnos, Jean Cocteau, Julio Cortázar, Juan Gris, and René Magritte, have been inspired by Fantômas. Throughout the twentieth century, he has spread terror through movies, magazines, comics, television programs, and web sites. Yet in the beginning, Fantômas was the creation of two rather ordinary journalists, Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, who had only recently begun to write popular fiction.

  During the nineteenth century, French readers had developed a taste for stories about renowned criminals, crooked policeman, and vigilante avengers. Notable signs of this trend included the popularity of the memoirs of the shifty Sûreté detective Vidocq, the poetry of the debonair assassin Lacenaire, and the fictional exploits of Rocambole, Ponson du Terrail’s criminal-turned-avenger hero. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the adventures of the fictional American private detective Nick Carter and amateur British sleuth Sherlock Holmes began to develop a following in France as well. Some French writers capitalized upon this burgeoning interest with their own contributions to the emerging crime and detective genre. In 1905, Maurice Leblanc began to write short stories about the gentleman-burglar, Arsène Lupin. Two years later, Gaston Leroux wrote Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room), featuring reporter-detective Joseph Rouletabille, whose father had been the criminal mastermind Ballmeyer. In 1909, an installment novel about Zigomar, a hooded criminal created by Léon Sazie, was launched in the daily newspaper Le Matin, and Pathé studios produced movies featuring the villain shortly thereafter.

  Parisian publishing magnate Arthème Fayard II hoped to cash in on this wave of popular enthusiasm for criminal exploits, and Souvestre and Allain were more than happy to oblige. In 1905, Fayard had initiated the “Livre Populaire” series of full-length popular novels for the low price of sixty-five centimes each (roughly fifteen cents). Most of these were reprints of popular nineteenth-century feuilletons (newspaper installment novels) by Eugène Sue, Paul Féval, Émile Gaboriau, Ponson du Terrail, and Michel Zévaco, among others. In April 1910, Fayard approached Souvestre and Allain about writing a popular crime serial. The challenge was to generate an entirely new monthly series issued directly into novel format, without the intermediary newspaper installments. Misconstruing the co-authors’ suggested series title of “Fantômus” as Fantômas, Fayard contracted the pair to write twenty-four novels in as many months. The initial volume was sold at the reduced price of thirty-five centimes, and Fantômas quickly became France’s most popular serial killer.

  In order to churn out novels over 380 pages in length every month (as the contract stipulated), Souvestre and Allain employed the following strategy. During the first week of production, the authors would outline a particular novel’s plot. For the next two weeks, they took turns writing the chapters, or sometimes dictating them onto wax rolls for transcription. During this same period, they would convey details about the particular episode to illustrator Gino Starace, who designed the lurid, full-color covers for the entire series (with the exception of the original cover, which was anonymously produced). In the final week, Souvestre and Allain would review the transcribed text, work out transitions to get in and out of each other’s passages, and submit the edited manuscript to Fayard for publication. Exceeding the terms of the original contract, Souvestre and Allain wrote thirty-two Fantômas novels, comprising over 12,000 printed pages, in less than three years. Surrealist Philippe Soupault later declared that such a prodigious output was only possible under strict obedience to an “absolute psychic automatism.” Fantomas was a modern mythology conjured from the collective unconscious.

  But what made Fantômas such a popular villain? Foremost, he is elusive. In every novel, Fantômas assumes multiple guises to commit outrageous crimes that cross class, national, and even gender boundaries. In the first tw
elve novels in the series, his aliases include businessman Etienne Rambert, English soldier Gurn, surgeon Dr. Chaleck, ruffian gang leader Loupart, banker Nanteuil, German ambassador Baron de Naarboveck, the Marquis de Serac of Hesse-Weimar, concierge Madame Cerion, tramp Ouaouaoua, swindler Père Moche, American detective Tom Bob, London dentist Dr. Garrick, interrogating magistrate Pradier, and Tsar Nicholas II, as well as numerous peripheral identities. When not assuming an alias, Fantômas is simply the “Man in Black,” a figure en cagoule, in black tights, cape, and cowl. To the consternation of Inspector Juve, the man of a thousand faces and the man without a face are one in the same. In a heart to heart conversation with Fandor, the detective laments,

  “For, who is Fantômas—the real Fantômas, among so many probable Fantômas? [. . .] As for seeing Fantômas himself, just as he is, without artificial aid, without paint and powder, without a false beard, without a wig, Fantômas as his face really is under his hooded mask of black—that we have not yet done. It is that fact which makes our hunt for the villain ceaselessly difficult, often dangerous! . . . Fantômas is always someone, sometimes two persons, never himself!” (Souvestre and Allain, Messengers of Evil, pp. 194–195 )

  In his undercover detective work, Juve is also a master of disguise. To complicate matters, occasionally he assumes one or another of Fantômas’s aliases (which lands him in prison on two occasions). Other principals in the series assume false identities as well—the reporter Jérôme Fandor, the love-tormented Lady Beltham, and Hélène, the daughter of Fantômas. There is no real unmasking in Fantômas, only the circulation and proliferation of masks.

  The serial crimes of Fantômas also captured the reader’s imagination, each novel replete with fantastic exploits and sensationalism. In every episode Juve and Fandor track down Fantômas, but at the last minute the criminal devises some miraculous escape, which permits the continuation of the serial into the following episode. He is also a thoroughly modern criminal, skilled at utilizing technological gadgets to assist him in the commission of crimes. But above all, Fantômas exudes an aura of unmotivated evil, for it is impossible to explain why the villain commits spectacular crimes in endless succession. While money, adultery, and familial disputes may constitute surface motivations for crime, the degree of Fantômas’s violence—sinking an entire cruise ship filled with passengers simply to rid himself of an alias, setting off bombs filled with blood and gore in a maid service employment agency office, scalping a woman alive by catching her long hair in the ringers of an automatic washing-machine—surpasses understanding. Yet such unmotivated violence constitutes a vital source of reader fascination. Surrealists Georges Sadoul, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, and Yves Tanguy used to play a game where one of them would call out a Fantômas title, and the others would recall how many murders the Lord of Terror had committed in that particular episode. The pleasure in crime serial lay in continually postponed desire, “to be continued.”

  Yet Souvestre and Allain’s series did come to an end with La Fin de Fantômas in September 1913. Though even this was a false ending. A decade after Souvestre’s untimely death by influenza in 1914, Allain resurrected the villain with the weekly “New Adventures of Fantômas,” and he continued to write Fantômas adventures for newspapers, comics, theater, radio, and photo-novels until his own death in 1969. The immense shadow of Fantômas has stretched from Paris across the world, as even today he continues to inspire poets, playwrights, graphic novelists, and musicians.

  Bibliography of Fantômas by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain

  I. The original 32 novels published in the “Livre Populaire” series by Arthème Fayard II (Paris, 1911–1913): 1. Fantômas. 2. Juve contre Fantômas (Juve versus Fantômas). 3. Le Mort qui tue (The Murderous Cadaver). 4. L’Agent Secret (Secret Agent). 5. Un Roi prisonnier de Fantômas (A Royal Prisoner of Fantômas). 6. Le Policier Apache (The Crooked Detective). 7. Le Pendu de Londres (The Hanged Man of London). 8. La Fille de Fantômas (The Daughter of Fantômas). 9. Le Fiacre de nuit (Night Taxi). 10. La Main coupée (The Severed Hand). 11. L’Arrestation de Fantômas (Fantômas Arrested). 12. Le Magistrat cambrioleur (The Burglar Judge). 13. La Livrée du crime (Crime’s Employment Agency). 14. La Mort de Juve (The Death of Juve). 15. L’Évadée de Saint-Lazare (The Escapee from Saint-Lazare Prison). 16. La Disparition de Fandor (Fandor Disappears). 17. Le Marriage de Fantômas (Fantômas Married). 18. L’Assassin de Lady Beltham (Lady Beltham’s Murderer). 19. La Guêpe rouge (The Red Wasp). 20. Les Souliers du mort (Death’s Shoes). 21. Le Train perdu (The Vanishing Train). 22. Les Amours d’un prince (A Prince’s Love Life) 23. Le Bouquet tragique (The Tragic Bouquet). 24. Le Jockey masqué (The Masked Jockey). 25. Le Cerceuil vide (The Empty Coffin). 26. Le Faiseur de reines (The Queen Maker). 27. Le Cadavre géant (The Giant Corpse). 28. Le Voyeur d’or (The Gold Thief). 29. Le Série rouge (A String of Bloody Crimes). 30. L’Hôtel du crime (Crime Hotel). 31. La Cravate de chanvre (The Hemp Necktie). 32. La Fin de Fantômas (The End of Fantômas).

  II. Original English translations of Souvestre and Allain’s Fantômas novels, the first five concurrently published by Brentano’s (New York) and Stanley Paul & Co. (London): 1. Fantômas, trans. Cranstoun Metcalfe (1915). 2. The Exploits of Juve, Being the Second of the Series of the “Fantômas” Detective Tales (1917). 3. Messengers of Evil, Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantômas (1917). 4. A Nest of Spies (1917). 5. A Royal Prisoner (1918). 6. The Long Arm of Fantômas, trans. A. R. Allinson (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1924). 7. Slippery as Sin, trans. B. J. (London: Stanley Paul, 1920).

  Robin Walz is a cultural historian of French popular fiction at the University of Alaska Southeast and the author of Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century France (University of California Press, 2000).

  I. THE GENIUS OF CRIME

  “Fantômas.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said: Fantômas.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Nothing. . . . Everything!”

  “But what is it?”

  “Nobody. . . . And yet, yes, it is somebody!”

  “And what does the somebody do?”

  “Spreads terror!”

  Dinner was just over, and the company were moving into the drawing-room.

  Hurrying to the fireplace, the Marquise de Langrune took a large log from a basket and flung it on to the glowing embers on the hearth; the log crackled and shed a brilliant light over the whole room; the guests of the Marquise instinctively drew near to the fire.

  During the ten consecutive months she spent every year at her château of Beaulieu, on the outskirts of Corrèze, that picturesque district bounded by the Dordogne, it had been the immemorial custom of the Marquise de Langrune to entertain a few of her personal friends in the neighbourhood to dinner every Wednesday, thereby obtaining a little pleasant relief from her loneliness and keeping up some contact with the world.

  On this particular winter evening the good lady’s guests included several habitués: President Bonnet, a retired magistrate who had withdrawn to his small property at Saint-Jaury, in the suburbs of Brives, and the Abbé Sicot, who was the parish priest. A more occasional friend was also there, the Baronne de Vibray, a young and wealthy window, a typical woman of the world who spent the greater part of her life either in motoring, or in the most exclusive drawing-rooms of Paris, or at the most fashionable watering-places. But when the Baronne de Vibray put herself out to grass, as she racily phrased it, and spent a few weeks at Querelles, her estate close to the château of Beaulieu, nothing pleased her better than to take her place again in the delightful company of the Marquise de Langrune and her friends.

  Finally, youth was represented by Charles Rambert, who had arrived at the château a couple of days before, a charming lad of about eighteen who was treated with warm affection by the Marquise and by Thérèse Auvernois, the granddaughter of the Marquise, with whom since her parents’ death she had lived as a daughter.


  The odd and even mysterious words spoken by President Bonnet as they were leaving the table, and the personality of this Fantômas about which he had said nothing definite in spite of all the questions put to him, had excited the curiosity of the company, and while Thérèse Auvernois was gracefully dispensing the coffee to her grandmother’s guests the questions were renewed with greater insistence. Crowding round the fire, for the evening was very cold, Mme. de Langrune’s friends showered fresh questions upon the old magistrate, who secretly enjoyed the interest he had inspired. He cast a solemn eye upon the circle of his audience and prolonged his silence, the more to capture their attention. At length he began to speak.

  “Statistics tell us, ladies, that of all the deaths that are registered every day quite a third are due to crime. You are no doubt aware that the police discover about half of the crimes that are committed, and that barely half meet with the penalty of justice. This explains how it is that so many mysteries are never cleared up, and why there are so many mistakes and inconsistencies in judicial investigations.”

  “What is the conclusion you wish to draw?” the Marquise de Langrune enquired with interest.

  “This,” the magistrate proceeded: “although many crimes pass unsuspected it is none the less obvious that they have been committed; now while some of them are due to ordinary criminals, others are the work of enigmatical beings who are difficult to trace and too clever or intelligent to let themselves be caught. History is full of stories of such mysterious characters, the Iron Mask, for instance, and Cagliostro. In every age there have been bands of dangerous creatures, led by such men as Cartouche and Vidocq and Rocambole. Now why should we suppose that in our time no one exists who emulates the deeds of those mighty criminals?”