Written in ink

A friend had recommended me an exhibition at the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, so on this sunny Sunday afternoon I headed to Boulevard Saint Germain to a small museum undoubtedly unknown to many.

Did you ever wonder what the handwriting of Einstein looks like? Or that of Napoleon? At the museum they have letters, manuscripts, musical notes, military orders, etc. of many of the great men (and a few, very few women) of the last 500 centuries or so.

It was fascinating to look not only at the handwriting but also the content. Some had a terrible handwriting with lots of cross-outs whereas others had a neat and orderly handwriting. Some wrote big, irregular letters, others wrote small, almost printed letters. Some ordered their troops to withdraw, others wanted to sell a painting or asked that somebody be employed.

• In the music and science section I found myself in the company of Rossini, Mozart, Einstein, Marie Curie, Haydn, Edison, Ampere, Newton, and Pasteur, among others.
• In the literary and art section I was reading the notes of Van Gogh, Monet, de Saint-Exupery, Cocteau, Baudelaire, Gaugin, and Toulouse-Lautrec, only to mention a few.
• In the history section there were official declarations by kings I had never heard of, but also orders issued by Napoleon, demands made by Catherine de Medici, letters written by Clemenceau, telegrammes disctated by Eisenhower, and thoughts of Charles de Gaulle.

However, I had primarily come to see a temporary exhibition about the mass murderer Henri Désiré Landru, who was executed in Versailles  in 1922. I did not know his story but my guess is that Landru is a bit of a myth in French society because his story was made into a film by Claude Chabrol, and singers like Serge Gainsbourg and Renaud sings about him.

Landru, who was nicknamed Bluebeard because of his bushy beard, was convicted of killing 10 women and the son of one between 1915 and 1917, but nobody is really sure that he did not have more victims. His modus operandi was to put a personal advertisement in the Parisian newspapers stating that he was looking to marry a mature woman. I think he corresponded with some 283 women, and once he had gained the confidence of a woman, he would invite her to a house he had rented outside Paris. There he would kill the woman, cut her into pieces and burn her body in the woodstove. Afterwards he would sell her things to make money, and then he would find a new victim.

His defence lawyer was no other than Moro-Giafferi, whom I have written about earlier this year. This lawyer really sought the impossible, and his client ended not surprisingly under the guillotine at 6:10 on a clear morning on 15 February 1922 (according to the note of his executioner).

Page d'accueil - Musée des lettres et manuscrits

In the framework of its promotion and enhancement of the written heritage, the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits partnered this year with the word Marathon at Toulouse. This important literary ...

http://www.museedeslettres.fr/public/index.php?lng=en_US

Henri Désiré Landru

Henri Désiré Landru ( 12 avril 1869 à Paris ( XIXe arrondissement) - 25 février 1922 à Versailles) est un célèbre tueur en série et criminel français. Il fut surnommé " le Barbe-Bleue de ...

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_D%C3%A9sir%C3%A9_Landru