Existentialist Murder?

In a crude wooden hut 20 miles from Paris, agents of the Paris police studied a fantastic corpse. It was the bloated body of a white man, but it had turned a ghastly, gleaming black. On each side of the torso, from rib to groin, the flesh had apparently been burned by a powerful chemical.

The police knew who the dead man was, and who owned the hut. Both were Existentialists--followers of the morbid postwar philosophy which holds that man is nothing but the sum of his experience and that all experience is inexplicable and tragic (TIME, Jan. 28). Was this an Existentialist murder? The police asked that question of the hut's owner. "An interesting problem," he answered tranquilly.

Living by Larceny. The dead man was Franc,ois Vintenon, a habitue of Paris' Latin Quarter. The sensitive, introverted son of a well-to-do merchant, Franc,ois had joined a group of Left Bank surrealists. He was tall and thin; his friends said he had the face of a "perverse angel." He wrote poems which nobody understood. He lived by stealing. After the German invasion, Franc,ois' father, who had turned collaborationist in order to save his business, persuaded his son to write for a Nazi publishing enterprise at 10,000 francs a month. After eight months, Franc,ois quit.

Googoo, Gobgoo, Googoo. During the German occupation, some of the surrealists escaped labor battalions by pretending insanity. One howled like a wolf, another barked like a dog, a third capered about like a ballet dancer, gurgling "googoo, googoo, googoo!" But Franc,ois joined the Resistance, carried messages and dropped underground pamphlets.

After the liberation, drab life closed in again, and he started taking eubine, a morphine derivative. It increased his boudoir prowess. His girl, Jeanne, lived with her family and saw him only on weekends. So at first he took the stuff only when he was with Jeanne. Then he began doping during the week. Soon he was forging doctors' prescriptions for eubine in tremendous quantities.

For eight months the police, alerted by druggists, tried to track him through the blizzard of fake prescriptions. Franc,ois eluded them. One day, unable to get eubine, he dosed himself massively with a soporific, and dozed on a public bench. Franc,ois landed in a public hospital. There his story came out.

Toxicologists were amazed at the quantities of the drug he had absorbed and survived. Psychiatrists were sympathetic. Criminal charges were deferred while he took the cure. But Franc,ois soon broke off his treatment and sought help from a doctor friend.

Dr. Satan. This doctor, Pierre Roumeguere, was as extraordinary as Franc,ois Vintenon, but in a different way. He had never practiced (except for wartime duty in the Navy), but kept on studying for years while he collected more degrees and diplomas. Three times after they had sentenced him to death, he escaped from the Nazis. He had a weather-browned, bearded face, black eyes, a long, pointed nose. The Maquis called him Dr. Satan.

Once a pupil of Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism's founder, Roumeguere had branched off into "psychophysiological" investigations of esthetic principles. In a wood near Gif-sur-Yvette, Dr. Satan had a hut he called "the House of the Good God." It was used for amorous frolics.

One Saturday night Vintenon and Roumeguere went to the hut. Next day Franc,ois' mistress arrived and the doctor left. Sunday night Franc,ois took the girl to Paris, then returned to Gif-sur-Yvette. In the village tavern he was seen to eat some food and swallow many pills; then he went off toward the hut. "Mon Dieu!" cried the doctor, when he found the body the next weekend, "there's an enormous Negro lying on the bed!"

Lecture. When the police took over, Roumeguere was suspect No. 1. He went on a hunger strike to sharpen his wits, parried all questions with ease. Then he lectured his interrogators on Existentialism. "How does it happen," the police commissioner bellowed, "that you know such crazy people?" Said Roumeguere: "I am a psychiatrist. It is my business to know crazy people. But how about the people you associate with? Aren't most of them criminals?" In a few days, Roumeguere was turned loose.

Jeanne, the dead man's mistress, had an alibi. On the night of the crime she was with her parents.

Farmers had seen a bearded man known as a painter near the hut. That brought in another suspect, an Existentialist artist named Georges Patrix, several of whose canvases hung in Roumeguere's Paris apartment. But Patrix was also cleared.

In the hut police had found Nazi documents mentioning one Claude Lormeau, a bearded painter who had fought with the Germans against the Russians. In the hut there was also an abstract painting by Lormeau, on the back of which was a remarkable gouache: a black face with bulging white eyes. It looked exactly like the head of the corpse. Had Lormeau killed Vintenon to provide a model for this gouache? Experts testified that the gouache had been done months before the murder.

Meanwhile Lormeau convinced the police that he had not been anywhere near the hut at the time of the killing.

Last week the Paris hawkshaws did not know who killed Franc,ois Vintenon, or what the cause of death was, or why the body was black, bloated and burned. If it was not an Existentialist murder, it was at least a very ingenious one.

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