Barbara, Charles - The Assassin of Pont-Rouge (1855) aka L'Assassinat du Pont-Rouge

French historian Jean Tulard once criticized Julian Symons for lacking the freshness and humor of his French equivalent, the late Michel Lebrun. And sure Lebrun's Almanach du Crime was much funnier to read than Symons' Bloody Murder. The problem is, he was also much less informative and rigorous, and the complaint might be levelled to most French mystery scholarship. Years ago I heard about Henri Cauvain's early detective novel, Maximilien Heller which according to the aforementioned Lebrun was a possible, even certain, inspiration for the creation of Sherlock Holmes, as the eponymous character allegedly shared many similarities with the man from Baker Street. You can thus imagine my disappointment when I actually read the book and found that Monsieur Heller had as much in common with Mr. Holmes as Nick Carter has with Adrian Monk. I was therefore quite cautious about claims made that the father of the detective novel was not Gaboriau, but one Charles Barbara whose L'Assassinat du Pont-Rouge predated L'Affaire Lerouge by eight years and the painful on-screen reading of it proved me right. Not that L'Assassinat du Pont-Rouge is a bad book; like Maximilien Heller it is a work of many virtues but not the ones it is alleged to have.

Max Destroy, a young artist with a big heart and empty pockets, falls in love with his neighbour, the strikingly beautiful Mme Thillard-Ducornet who got from riches to rags after the bankruptcy of her husband, a handsome yet wicked stockbroker, who apparently committed suicide by drowning in the Seine as his misdemeanours were about to be discovered. Mme Thillard's old servant Frédéric is skeptical about this version as the departed was not the suicidal kind, though he prefers not to ponder on the other possibilities.

Max then meets an old friend of his, Clément, whom he hadn't seen for years and whose financial situation went the opposite way from Mme Thillard's. Clément, for all his good luck, is the perfect poster-boy for the old proverb that money brings no happiness: his wife Rosalie suffers from a mysterious and debilitating illness and he is clearly paranoid about this. Max suspects his friend has a secret but doesn't try to figure it out; he remains a puzzled bystander all through the book even though clues and strange facts pile up. Clément shortly before his change of fortune worked as an assistant to Thillard and pales at the very mention of his name; he has a curious lapsus (to which Max of course pays no attention) about the stockbroker having been "murdered" and the couple is positively frightened by their baby son who, as Max discovers without once again drawing any conclusion from it, bears a close resemblance to the departed... All that is quite transparent for the modern reader and, I suspect, for any reasonably clever nineteenth-century reader as well, yet Max falls ten thousand feet when Clément finally confesses to him, and he runs to Mme Thillard's open arms. We learn in the conclusion that Clément later fled to the Canada and amended himself by becoming a philanthrope while Max and Mme Thillard lived happily ever after.

It's up to you, on the basis of this outline, to decide for yourselves whether Barbara is the true father of the mystery novel or not. The decision, in the end, is a matter of which definition of the genre one abides for. If you are, like me, on the traditionalist side, then L'Assassinat du Pont-Rouge is admittedly a tale of (mildly) mysterious events of a criminous nature but certainly not a mystery. A secret is not a puzzle, and there is no detective, amateur or professional, to investigate it - the crime would've remain unknown to everybody had Clément not felt the burden was too hard for him to bear. The book, with his emphasis on guilt, punishment and redemption, is closer to Dostoevsky than to Poe or Gaboriau and is quite interesting to read in that perspective, all the more so as Barbara's writing style is fluid and elegant, though overwrought at times. Just don't expect it to be what it is not and has never been meant to be.

Interestingly, "L'Assassinat du Pont-Rouge", while not an orthodox detective novel per se, might well include the first detective *story* ever written in the French language. A magistrate, Monsieur Durosoir, entertains Clément's invitees (and unbeknownst to him, frightens his guilt-obsessed host) by telling an old case of his which revolves around the apparent suicide (in a locked room) of a poor old man and the murder of an elderly café owner that seems not to be related at all at first sight and yet...

Xavier