Orléans Louis - Blood royal: a true tale of crime and detection in medieval Paris

The detective as knight-errant must nonetheless sally forth, though he knows that his native chivalry is as hopeless as it is incongruous.

David Lehman, The Perfect Murder

I N THE 1660S , an unusual parchment scroll was discovered at an old chteau in the French Pyrenees. Thirty feet long and filled with small, neat script, the scroll had been lost for more than two and a half centuries. It was the original police report on a high-level assassination whose violent repercussions had nearly destroyed France.

On a chilly November night in 1407, Louis of Orleans, controversial brother of the French king, had been hacked to death in a Paris street by a band of masked assassins. After knocking him from his mount, they split open his head with an ax, splattered his brains on the pavement, and stabbed his body to a bloody pulp before throwing it on a pile of mud and disappearing into the dark.

The crime stunned the nation and paralyzed the government, since Louis had often ruled in place of the periodically insane king, Charles VI. As panic seized Paris, an investigation began. In charge was Guillaume de Tignonville, provost of Paristhe citys chief of police. Knight, diplomat, man of letters, and man of law, he was also very likely one of historys first detectives.

Guillaume soon learned that behind the murder lay an intricate conspiracy. But who had plotted it? A jealous husband avenging one of Louiss flagrant seductions at court? A foreign power eager to sow chaos in France? The mad king, who had once drawn a sword on Louis and tried to kill him?

Over the next several days Guillaume solved the case, astounding the city all over again as the mystery behind the crime was revealed. Yet his official reportcommitted to the scrolleventually disappeared, and with it many details. Now, in the 1660s, more than two hundred and fifty years later, it had come to light again.

. In the year of grace one thousand four hundred and seven

Like a torch ignited in the dark, the long-lost scroll revealed the gruesome facts of the assassination. It contained firsthand accounts of the grisly autopsy and the ensuing investigation as well as sworn depositions from shopkeepers, housewives, and other eyewitnesses who had seen the actual murder or the killers escaping afterward.

The parchment scroll also captured a great national calamity in the making. For Louiss murder had plunged France into a bloody civil war, leading to a devastating English invasion under Henry V, followed by a brutal foreign occupation that began to lift only with Joan of Arc.

Guillaumes inquiry took place hundreds of years before the

A brilliant sleuth, Guillaume directed the scores of officers and clerics under his command to examine the crime scene, collect physical evidence, depose witnesses, lock Pariss gates, and ransack the city for clues. The priceless scroll gives us a unique inside look at his investigation, conducted without modern forensic tools and mainly with shoe leather, intelligence, and a courageous pursuit of the truth.

There are some things we will never know about the case. The decadent court of the mad king swirled with scandalous rumors of adultery, poison, witchcraft, and treason. But the tattered scroll provides a rare window onto a turbulent week in Paris that changed the course of history, recording developments almost as they took place and before their huge, enduring consequences for millions became apparent.

The scroll also gives us a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Parisians who were going about their daily routines when they were suddenly caught up in great events. These people played small but crucial roles in the drama, speaking for themselves and in their own voices, as carefully recorded by the provosts scribes. Along with other surviving records spared by the teeth of time, the rediscovered scroll tells a story of conspiracy, crime, and detection that would be hard to believe were it not true.

This is that story.