File No. 113 by Émile Gaboriau

• FIRST PUBLISHED: Le dossier no. 113, 1867 (English translation, 1875)

• TYPE OF WORK: Novel
• TYPE OF PLOT: Mystery romance

• TIME OF WORK: 1866
• LOCALE: Paris

The Story:

Prosper Bertomy, a trusted cashier, came into the bank rather late one morning. Louis de Clameran was impatiently waiting, for the bank had agreed to have his three hundred and fifty thousand francs ready for him that day. Prosper hurried to the safe to get the money, but when he opened the door, he discovered that the money was gone.

In great agitation, he called for M. Fauvel. When a search failed to reveal the missing money, M. Fauvel called the police. During a preliminary questioning, it was learned that only Prosper and his employer, M. Fauvel, had keys to the safe. Only they knew the word to use on the alphabetical combination. Either M. Fauvel or Prosper had taken the money.

It was unthinkable that dignified, upright M. Fauvel would steal from himself. On the other hand, Prosper had lost heavily at the gaming tables, and he was the intimate of Raoul de Lagors, the dissolute nephew of Madame Valentine Fauvel. Prosper’s richly furnished apartment was presided over by the beautiful but notorious woman known as Gypsy. In light of these facts, M. Fauvel raised no objection when the police took Prosper to jail.

As Prosper left the bank, he contrived to throw a folded note to Cavaillon, a young friend. Following the directions, Cavaillon set off to deliver the message. Fanferlot, a detective, followed Cavaillon until the youth turned into an apartment building. There, the detective easily cowed Cavaillon and took away the note, which warned Gypsy to flee immediately. Fanferlot, posing as Prosper’s friend, delivered the note and induced the frightened girl to move into lodgings at the Archangel, a hotel run by Madame Alexandre, secretly Fanferlot’s wife. Well pleased with himself, Fanferlot went back to headquarters to report.

Convinced of Prosper’s guilt, the examining judge pried into the cashier’s financial affairs with detailed knowledge of that unhappy man’s speculations. He even knew that Gypsy’s real name was Chocareille and that she had once been in prison. The judge brought out the fact that Prosper had also been the favored suitor of Madeleine, the niece of the Fauvels, but that the intimacy had been broken off suddenly. Throughout the investigation, Prosper stoutly maintained his innocence. Unable to shake his story, the judge sent Prosper back to his cell.

At the Archangel, Fanferlot kept a close watch on Gypsy. One day, she received a note asking her to meet an unknown man at a public rendezvous. Fanferlot trailed her to the meeting and saw her talking to a fat man with red whiskers. When they left in a cab, Fanferlot jumped on the springs behind them. When the horses pulled up, he withdrew into an areaway to watch, but no one got out. Gypsy and her escort had given him the slip by getting in one door of the cab and out the other. Discouraged at his failure, Fanferlot went to report to Lecoq, his chief.

To his amazement, the fat man with red whiskers was in Lecoq’s apartment. Lecoq himself, with his great talent for disguise, had been Gypsy’s mysterious companion. Then Lecoq showed Fanferlot a photograph of the safe and pointed out a scratch on the door. With sure logic, he explained that two people had been involved in the robbery. One held the key and started to open the door; the second tried to draw away the hand of the first. In the struggle, the door was scratched.

After Lecoq had convinced the judge that there was no strong case against Prosper, the cashier was released in the company of Lecoq, who had become transformed into the clownish M. Venduret. Prosper put himself completely in the hands of his new friend, and the two of them began the work of locating the guilty parties.

Suspicion pointed to Raoul de Lagors and Louis de Clameran. They had great influence in the Fauvel household, and Valentine Fauvel seemed greatly taken with her brilliant, handsome nephew. Suspecting a clandestine love affair, Lecoq went to the south of France to ferret out the backgrounds of de Lagors and de Clameran. There, he learned that, in 1841, the de Clameran family had lived on the banks of the Rhone near Tarascon. The family consisted of the old marquis, his older son Gaston, and his younger son Louis. Across the river lived the Countess de la Verberie and her daughter Valentine. Between the two families, there had been a feud for generations.

Gaston, the older brother, fell in love with Valentine and often met her secretly. When their affair became known, Gaston defended her honor in a public brawl in which he killed two men. After the fight, he fled to South America. The old marquis died from the shock, and Louis left home to lead a life of depravity. Within a few months, Valentine gave birth to Gaston’s child in England, and her mother sternly took the baby away and placed him with an English family. Later, Valentine married M. Fauvel without telling him about her child.

By chance, Louis de Clameran discovered Mme Fauvel’s secret. Her son, he claimed, was the man known as Raoul de Lagors. With de Clameran’s help, the conscience-stricken woman introduced Raoul to her husband as her nephew and made him one of the Fauvel household. Raoul, at the instigation of de Clameran, extorted large sums of money from her.

At last, the time came when she had neither money nor jewels left, and de Clameran threatened to expose her. Overhearing his threats, Madeleine loyally stood by her aunt and promised to marry de Clameran to buy his silence. Raoul, playing on his mother’s sympathies, persuaded her to give him the key to the bank safe, and she even went with him to rob her husband. At the last moment, Valentine regretted her decision, and in her attempts to take away the key, she scratched the door. Ignoring her pleas, Raoul took the money from the safe.

When Lecoq told Prosper the whole story, the cashier was shocked. In an anonymous letter, he had told M. Fauvel that Raoul was Valentine’s lover.

Angry and grief-stricken after reading the letter, M. Fauvel confronted Raoul and his wife. He was threatening to shoot Raoul when Lecoq appeared, unmasked Raoul as an impostor, and returned the stolen money to M. Fauvel. Valentine’s real son had died years ago; Raoul had been coached in the part by de Clameran. M. Fauvel forgave his wife’s past and was reunited with her.

With his innocence established, Prosper was free to marry Madeleine. De Clameran went mad in prison. At last, Lecoq revealed that he had saved Prosper merely to shame Gypsy, who had deserted Lecoq to become Prosper’s mistress.

Critical Evaluation:

In his own day, Émile Gaboriau was enormously popular and considered second only to Conan Doyle as an expert of the detective story genre. Twenty years after his death, his crime novels were still bestsellers. In more contemporary times, however, he is largely ignored, and his books are mentioned only as important footnotes in the history of detective fiction. Since File No. 113 is a typical Gaboriau novel, it vividly demonstrates the author's strengths and weaknesses and helps explain his popularity in his own time—and later, his relative obscurity.

File No. 113 follows the basic pattern of all of Gaboriau’s crime novels. The robbery is discovered, and the police investigation commences. Led by Detective Fanferlot, who is erratic and overly eager, they immediately make false hypotheses, ignore important clues, and arrest Prosper Bertomy, the wrong suspect. After the preliminary investigation has been thoroughly bungled, Monsieur Lecoq enters the action disguised as the clownish Venduret. By the time his true identity is revealed, and his procedures made overt, Lecoq is well on his way to solving the case, and the story moves quickly to a preliminary revelation. He correctly identifies Louis de Clameran and Raoul de Lagors as the culprits—with well over half the book remaining.

Once the criminal is named, Gaboriau stops describing the investigation and shifts his narrative to chronicle the events leading up to the crime from the participants' viewpoint. Invariably, the crime of the moment turns out to be related to older concealed crimes and improprieties that center on a rich and famous family. Thus, personal scandal is added to felony crime, and the investigation threatens the culprits and the honor and fortune of an aristocratic name.

In File No. 113, the hidden scandal revolves around the premarital affair between Gaston de Clameran and Valentine Verberie (later Monsieur Fauvel’s wife) and the longtime villainy of Gaston’s brother Louis. Thus, the story contains all the sensational, melodramatic, and sentimental elements Gaboriau’s readers desired—victimized aristocratic ladies, frustrated love affairs, secret scandals, familial betrayal, fraud, deception, and immorality. When this family chronicle reaches the point where the investigatory narrative has been suspended, the two plot lines are joined, Lecoq explains his deductions and the malefactors are brought to justice—or, as in the case of Louis de Clameran, are punished by divine retribution.

However satisfying this double plot structure may have been to nineteenth-century readers, it can be viewed as cumbersome, digressive, melodramatic, and psychologically implausible for contemporary tastes. In his short seven-year career, Émile Gaboriau introduced many elements that were to become essential parts of the modern detective novel. Still, it remained for other writers to combine them into unified, realized works of art.

Principal Characters:

• Monsieur André Fauvela Parisian banker
• Valentinehis wife
• Madeleinehis niece
• Prosper Bertomyhis cashier
• Raoul de LagorsValentine’s nephew
• Louis de Clameranan adventurer
• GypsyProsper’s mistress
• Monsieur Lecoqa detective
• Fanferlotanother detective

Bibliography

"Émile Gaboriau." Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient & Modern, Vol. 15, Jan. 1896, p. 85. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=prf&AN=69958708&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Oct. 2024.

"File No. 113." Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, 4th ed., May 2015, p. 826. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=102942321&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Oct. 2024.

"File No. 113." Mysticbooks.org, mysticbooks.org/book/file-no-113. Accessed 22 Oct. 2024.

Horn, Pierre L. "Émile Gaboriau." Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition, Jan. 2003, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=164521098&site=ehost-live. Accessed 22 Oct. 2024.