FRANCE: Gaston Bayle

The best-known policeman in France is dapper, jovial Jean Chiappe, Paris’s bowler-hatted Prefect. Last week the second best-known French policeman, meticulous Gaston Edmond Bayle, was shot three times in the back and died instanter.

Called by romantic French reporters Le Grand Inquisiteur, and Le Sherlock Holmes Parisien, M. Bayle played in real life that familiar character of all good murder mysteries, the scientific detective. Appearing seldom in public, he spent all his working hours in his laboratory squinting through microscopes, blinking at sputtering X-ray lamps, scrutinizing bloodstains. Elaborately indexed in his bureau were the record cards of nine million criminals, five million Bertillon photographs, a halfmillion fingerprints.

Despite his success in discovering murderers with nothing more than a scrap of cloth or a bloody hatchet to work on, crimes of violence did not interest the great Gaston Bayle.

“The educated man runs to fraud,” he once said, “while the uneducated person is more given to crimes of brutality and passion. The crime that interests me the most does not interest the public; for me, I love to unravel a really clever fraud.”

It was a very clever fraud that first brought international recognition to Gaston Bayle, a stupid fraud that caused his death. Five years ago one Emil Fradin, a shrewd peasant lad, dug up a number of curiously inscribed brick and clay tablets in a field at Glozel, France. Immediately the “Glozel Finds” attracted world wide attention. French archeologists announced that they were important relics of the Stone Age, wrote monographs. British and French illustrated weeklies printed elaborate facsimiles of the Glozel tablets, compared them in importance to Egypt’s Rosetta Stone, Britain’s Piltdown skull. Gaston Bayle was not impressed. With his test tubes, his X-rays, his spectroscopes, he proved that the Glozel finds were not more than 15 years old, and clumsy forgeries at that.

Fortnight ago Gaston Bayle, in the course of a morning’s routine work, proved fraudulent a document with which one Joseph Emile Philipponet, traveling salesman, had attempted to obtain a sum of money from his landlord. Last week the thwarted Philipponet came early to the Prefecture of Police, hung about the draughty corridor until Criminologist Bayle stepped briskly through the door, started upstairs to his beloved laboratory. Stepping forward, Salesman Philipponet fired three times. The great Gaston Bayle swayed, then rolled to the stairs, sprawled, gasped up a mouthful of blood, was dead.

As a dozen policemen rushed from offices in the Prefecture to collar Murderer Philipponet and clap him into a cell he screamed: “Monsieur Bayle committed an act of bad faith! My document was genuine! What I have done was worth the death of a father of five children!”

Soon Prefect of Police Jean Chiappe came to stand for long minutes looking down at the man he had often called his most valuable assistant. M. le Prefect is a Corsican, slick and hard, but his voice broke as he turned to M. Benoit, grimvisaged Chief of the Surete General (Secret Service). “You tell his wife, Benoit,” said Corsican Chiappe, “I can-not-the five poor little ones!”