He was also without doubt a man of great genius. Without any doubt he was also a great drinker, though no man had ever seen him drunk.
He had exhibited several bronzes at the Salon, one, “A Fight between two Pterodactyls,” was of a ferocity to make one shudder. All his work was stained by gloom and ferocity, yet all his work was the output of a master. So said M. Le Notre in his funeral oration at the grave of Müller, and the words, though spoken in the course of a funeral oration, were strictly the truth.
Well, Müller one day made the acquaintance of M. Lefarge. The jeweller was not only wealthy but vain, and before long he commissioned Müller to execute a bust of himself (Lefarge) giving him numerous sittings for that purpose.
He also wished for a bust of his daughter, but Cécile Lefarge positively refused to sit. She had taken a dislike to the sculptor, one of those dislikes that are born of instinct.
One dark day in October, Lefarge drove up to the house where Müller lodged in the Rue de Turbigo. The concierge saw him enter. Müller was in, he lived on the top floor, and up the stairs went Lefarge to visit the sculptor.
An hour or so later he came down, carrying a black bag, got into his carriage, and drove home to the Rue de la Paix. Here he collected all his most valuable jewels. Jewels worth over a hundred thousand pounds. He drove in his carriage with them to the corner of the Rue d’Amsterdam, here he alighted. The coachman said he was carrying two bags, one the bag he had brought from Müller’s house, the other the bag containing the jewels. He told the coachman to wait for him, turned the corner of the street, and was never seen again.
An hour later, in the Rue de Turbigo, Müller’s landlady took some coffee up to him, she found his decapitated body lying on the floor. In the pocket of Müller’s coat was a letter, the copy of a blackmailing letter written by Müller to Lefarge some months before. In the description of the dead body of Müller the existence was mentioned of two initials, “W.M.” (the man’s initials) tattooed in pale blue ink over the second right costal cartilage.
That no one had entered Müller’s room after Lefarge had left it was indubitably proved by the concierge and several witnesses; proved so conclusively that there could not be any manner of doubt that Lefarge was the assassin. The collection of his jewels by Lefarge and his total effacement after the event sealed the matter.
Freyberger, having gone carefully through the reports, took a pen and began to draw up, for his own satisfaction, the points of similarity between the Lefarge and the Gyde case. Roughly, they were these, each assassin was a rich man, a man of pleasure and more or less dubious morals. Each victim was an artist.
Müller, the victim of Lefarge, had made a bust of his assassin.