The murder of Jean-Marie Leclair, eighteenth-century composer and violin virtuoso, is a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie. The Paris detective forces headed by Lieutenant of Police Antoine Gabriel de Sartine picked their way through a maze thickly populated with suspicious characters and lying witnesses and, to make their path more difficult, encountered many red herrings. The motive for the crime was perhaps the most bewildering enigma of all; the investigators were compelled to consider the possibility that Leclair’s sudden death was due to robbery, marital discord, professional hostility, or perhaps the dark act of a sardonic psychopath.
In 1764 the sixty-seven-year-old Leclair would have been justified in resting on the laurels of his distinguished career. Born in 1697 in Lyon, the eldest of eight children of a master lace maker, he reportedly made his debut as a dancer at Rouen. He later followed his father’s profession for a while in his native city, where he married the daughter of a liquor merchant in 1716. In 1722 he went to Turin to serve as principal dancer and ballet master. It was in the Turin theater that he mounted his first stage works, mythological ballets composed in the popular taste of the time. He then returned to Paris, where in 1723 he published his earliest work of instrumental music (which was to be his principal genre); this maiden effort was a book of sonatas for violin and basso continuo. Five years later Leclair made a brilliant debut as a violinist in the Concert Spirituel. About that time he published a second book of sonatas in which his characteristic and frequent use of double stops showed the influence of the violinist Giovanni Battista Somis, with whom he had studied at Turin. Leclair’s first wife died, and in 1730 he married Louise Roussel, a music engraver who had published some of his works.
Leclair’s career continued to blossom. Beginning in 1733 he performed in the Royal Orchestra, where he encountered a formidable rival, violinist Pierre Guignon. Neither of them wanted to play second fiddle to the other’s first violin, so they agreed to change places on a regular monthly rotation. Guignon allowed Leclair to begin the new arrangement by occupying first place. However, it is said that when Leclair’s month had run out he resigned from the orchestra rather than pass to the second rank.
After leaving the Paris orchestra, Leclair spent several years in Holland under the sponsorship of Princess Anne of Orange and of François du Liz and was subsequently called to the court of Don Philip of Spain at Chambéry. In 1746 Leclair’s only opera, Glaucus et Scylla, was performed with moderate success at the Paris Opéra. In about 1749 he came under the protection of his last patron, the Duke de Gramont, who had established a fashionable theater in his villa at Puteaux. Here Leclair served as first violinist and contributed ballet pieces and divertissements to its repertory.
By the end of the next decade, a streak of misanthropy, quite in the style of Molière, seems to have afflicted Leclair. In 1758 he left his wife and lived alone in a house on the rue de Carême-Prenant in a northeast suburb of Paris near what is now the St. Martin Canal. It was a small, ramshackle two-story structure situated within a walled garden entered through a gate from the street. The Duke de Gramont was concerned about the dangerous circumstances of his favorite musician living in seclusion and many times offered Leclair lodging at his own residence. According to Barnabé Farmian Durosoy, the principal authority on Leclair’s last years, the composer was going to accept the offer, but he was not fated to do so.
At about 6:00 A.M. on October 23, 1764, Louis Bourgeois, a sixty-fouryear-old gardener, passed by Leclair’s garden gate and noticed that it was open. This seemed strange—but not strange enough to overcome his early-morning appetite, and he went on to his regular place for breakfast. On his way back he met Jacques Paysant, who tended Leclair’s garden, and told him about the open gate. Shortly afterward, Paysant appeared at Bourgeois’ house in obvious distress. In the garden he had found his employer’s hat and wig lying on the ground. Fearing some calamity, he did not dare enter the house alone and wanted Bourgeois to accompany him. They summoned other neighbors and, buoyed by the strength of numbers, returned to the garden. Near the front door of the house lay the hat and wig, as Paysant had said. The door was open, and even before they entered the vestibule they could see Leclair’s body.
He was lying on his back on the floor of the vestibule in front of the staircase, with his bare head resting against the door leading to the cellar. He was dressed in ordinary street attire—gray jacket, a vest, two shirts (one heavy and decorated and the other of mousseline), trousers, black woolen stockings, and shoes with copper buckles. His shirts and camisole were stained with blood. He had been stabbed three times by a pointed instrument: above the left nipple, in the lower stomach on the right side, and in the middle of his chest. Frightened by what they found, the witnesses locked the garden gate. Paysant ran to notify Mme Leclair and Leclair’s son-in-law, the painter Louis Quenet. Within an hour Mlle Nigotte Petitbois, the Leclairs’ goddaughter, arrived after having alerted Commissaire Thiot at the Paris police headquarters in the Châtelet. She was accompanied by a lawyer named Godard, whom one of her neighbors had summoned. Quenet arrived shortly afterward.
The police investigation, under the immediate direction of Commissaire Thiot and Inspector Hubert Receveur, was soon in full swing. Jacques-Pierre Charles, master in surgery, was called in to examine the body. He observed bruises in the lumbar area and on the lips and jawbone, which tended to show that, after a struggle with his assailant, Leclair had been thrown onto his back. His body had been surrounded by a number of oddly assorted objects that seemed to have been deliberately arranged by the murderer to create a bizarre mise-en-scène, much in the manner of whodunnit authors of the 1930s. In addition to the hat and the wig, the police found near the vestibule door a roll of blank music manuscript paper and a book (apparently from the victim’s own library) on which the hat had been placed. The book was a collection of witticisms entitled L’Elite des bon mots. Caught up in a trellis outside the vestibule door, the police also found a hunting knife with its bare, unstained blade pointed downward; it fit precisely the scabbard attached to the sash Leclair wore. At a corner of the trellis, which showed no signs of being disturbed, the police came on another knife lying on the ground. It was a blunt table knife and appeared to be stained only with rust.
A search of Leclair’s pockets turned up a snuff box (with only two pinches left), a black leather case containing a pair of spectacles, a bread roll, and two handkerchiefs, one of them wrapped around a meat sandwich. It was observed that his gilded copper watch was missing. The detectives surmised that the murderer might have taken the watch to lay a false trail, for they ransacked the house without uncovering any evidence of theft or breaking and entering. It was noted, however, that many of the shutters of the windows facing the garden were open and that two panes of the first-story window were half open; one of the leaves of the vestibule door had been found ajar by the original investigators. In the locked drawer of a commode in Leclair’s bedroom, the police found four louis d’or of twenty-four livres and two and a half louis in six-franc crowns—a cache of money sufficient to rule out burglary as a motive for the crime. Nevertheless, the garden and adjacent properties were also examined for possible evidence of a nocturnal intrusion. The police observed that about a foot of the coping of the garden wall facing the house was damaged; the plaster was detached, and many pieces of it lay on the ground of Leclair’s garden and his neighbor’s. It was also noticed that behind the wall on the left of Leclair’s garden (on the property belonging to the father of the gardener Bourgeois) there was a large mass of earth mold that would have made it very easy to pass over the wall onto Leclair’s premises. The police determined, however, that the mold had been placed there a very long time ago.
One of the central mysteries of the murder scene, the role played by the house keys in the fatal encounter, is not clarified in the surviving police archives. However, the testimony of Jeanne Louise Aubert, a sixty-yearold widow living on the rue de Carême-Prenant, suggests that keys to both the vestibule and garden door may have been found on the premises. She testified that when Leclair’s neighbors left the house after discovering the body, they locked the vestibule door and gave the key to her for safekeeping pending the arrival of the family. She also noticed on leaving the house that the latchkey to the street gate was resting on the trellis.
The police also investigated reports of movements of strangers in the neighborhood on the night of the crime. Pierre Dangreville, a sentry on duty nearby that evening, noticed a driverless carriage drawn by two horses coming from the direction of Paris toward the suburbs; it stopped at the corner of Leclair’s street. He approached the carriage and found it laden with pottery. About a quarter of an hour later, two soldiers who appeared to be on guard duty stopped in the middle of the road near the rue de Carême-Prenant. Dangreville observed them closely, concerned that they might steal the pottery. But they did not show the slightest interest in the vehicle. One of them passed beyond the carriage into the rue de Carême-Prenant and was lost to view; about fifteen minutes later he returned, running to rejoin his comrade. It was raining very hard, and Dangreville had assumed that this was the reason for his haste. While the soldier was absent, Dangreville heard no cries or noise from the direction of Leclair’s street. A few moments later the soldiers’ patrol appeared, and they rejoined its ranks on the way back to the city. Later that night the mystery of the driverless pottery carriage was solved: Dangreville was introduced to a cart driver, who inquired about the carriage. He said that after he entered a cabaret about 9:00 P.M. to have a drink, the horses wandered off. Police efforts to determine the identity of the suspicious soldier were fruitless.
Another mysterious stranger was seen on the night of the crime by Rose Pelletier, the wife of mounted patrolman Antoine Claude. At about 10:00 P.M., while entering the rue de Carême-Prenant on her way home from a visit to the Bourgeois family, she saw a large man standing with his back against a garden wall. He was dressed in a black or gray coat and had brown unpowdered hair. He frightened her, and she hurried home.
For the most part the police inquiries as to Leclair’s actions immediately before the crime were not illuminating. As was his custom, Leclair had played several games of billiards on Monday evening, October 22, at the establishment of Pierre Lamotte. Lamotte recalled that at 9:30 P.M. Leclair invited him to join him for supper at an inn and, after he declined, bid him good night. At about 9:45 Leclair entered Charles Roussel’s food shop and purchased a roll, perhaps having decided to dine alone. From his sentry box Pierre Dangreville saw Leclair light a candle within a little paper lantern and proceed on his way home. His last stop before reaching his house was at the neighboring shop of Jean Thibault, where he purchased a ball of twine.
Inspector Receveur was able to account for the probable sources of the money found in Leclair’s commode. Mme Leclair told him that she had given Leclair some funds about ten days earlier and that M. Geoffroy had given him five louis about two days before his death. An intriguing piece of information was supplied by the café keeper, Roussel. On Sunday, October 14, Leclair had awakened him around midnight and asked him for the duplicate house key he had left with him about eighteen months earlier for safekeeping. He told Roussel that either someone had stolen his keys at a theatrical performance or that he had lost them during the day.
From the many dubious figures referred to in the police interrogations, two principal suspects emerged. The first was Leclair’s gardener, Paysant, who aroused the interest of the investigators with his lies, misleading testimony, and defensive, hostile gossip. When no watch was found on Leclair’s body, Paysant claimed that Leclair had not possessed one for eighteen months. But Lamotte, the proprietor of the billiard parlor, told the police that he had seen Leclair consult his watch before leaving the parlor on the night of the crime. Paysant also swore that Leclair had no money, a statement contradicted by the testimony of others and by the police’s discovery of cash in Leclair’s commode. The gardener also may have given inaccurate information about the time of his discovery of the body and his whereabouts on the night of the murder. He asserted that he had first seen the open garden gate at 6:00 A.M., but other witnesses stated that Paysant and Bourgeois had awakened them as early as 4:30 to ask their help in inspecting Leclair’s house. Paysant also informed the police that he had returned home at 7:30 P.M. on October 22, but his mistress told a woman named Laborgne that he had not actually come back until 10:30, perhaps a half hour after Leclair had completed his evening’s purchases and arrived at his house.
The gardener’s talkativeness also weighed against him. He remarked to one of the neighbors whom he had enlisted to visit Leclair’s house on the morning of October 23 that perhaps Leclair had an attack of colic, to which he was prone, and had died for want of assistance. He repeated this when the body was discovered, even though the blood-drenched shirt should have convinced him that a more violent incident had occurred. Paysant was not present at the burial of his employer in the St. Laurent Church on October 25, and his brother drew many questioning looks by his efforts to eavesdrop on the conversations of those in attendance. At the very moment when the body was to be lowered into the grave, a woman from Leclair’s neighborhood exclaimed, “M. Paysant told me that he would do the same to my husband.”
Questioning by the investigators indicated that the gardener’s odd behavior might be partly due to his having a police record that he feared might bring him under suspicion. Paysant also remarked that this was the second time he had had the misfortune of having an employer die during his service. However, Paysant’s past encounters with the police had nothing to do with murder or other serious crimes. He had been jailed for some minor scrape during his service in a regiment of the French Guard and had been brought before the Châtelet as the putative father of an illegitimate child borne by a woman of bad reputation with whom he had lived for many years.
Paysant’s worries about his past inspired him not only to equivocate about his own actions and knowledge but also to suggest a rival suspect to the police. Why not, he suggested, investigate the Duke de Gramont himself? The duke had often visited Leclair in his presence, he said, and the gardener drank wine with both of them. This testimony, when the duke heard of it, drove him to fury. The gossip about his drinking in ill-assorted company had the ring of truth about it, for he was reputed to be a drunkard who “looked as if nature had intended him for a barber.” But he did not care to be branded an alcoholic or a murderer and dashed off an angry (and misspelled) letter to Lieutenant Sartine: “It has come to my attention through the nephew of M. Leclair that his gardener said to Commissaire Guiot [sic] in his interrogations that he had seen me many times with M. Leclair and that the three of us had often drunk together. I have been at M. Leclair’s house only twice and I have never drunk or eaten there. Besides such company is not made for me. Furthermore, for about seven or eight years I have drunk nothing but water. A man who, in order to clutch at straws as best he can, says whatever comes into his head is a man to be mistrusted.”
The police briefly arrested Paysant, but his release was ordered by the Châtelet. He undoubtedly was an untrustworthy witness, but there was little ground to consider him guilty of murder.
A more likely suspect was Leclair’s nephew, mentioned in the duke’s letter. François Guillaume Vial, aged forty, was the son of Leclair’s sister Françoise. Himself a musician, he came to Paris around 1750 and, abetted and pampered by Mme Leclair, never tired of beseeching his uncle to find him a post in the musical service of the Duke de Gramont. On many occasions Vial gave vent in the bitterest terms to his resentment of his uncle’s failure to advance his career. Among letters discovered at Leclair’s house, Inspector Receveur discovered four in which Vial asked Leclair’s pardon for grave offenses against him. But even his uncle’s murder could not induce him to moderate his expressions of grievance. He told the surgeon Charles that “his uncle had done him many injustices and had refused to introduce him to the Duke de Gramont.” To Mme Roussel he asserted that Leclair “had only received what he deserved, having always lived like a wolf” and that “he had always hoped to die suddenly.” To Tetart, the mounted patrolman who was on duty at the Leclair house, Vial delivered a tirade of abuse against his dead uncle. Leclair, he said, was a recluse who “didn’t want to see anyone from the family and desired to die suddenly, even by murder”; he “had never wanted his nephew to have a career or to give him his protection,” but now that Leclair was dead, “he [Vial] was going, thank God, to have a career!” When Tetart proposed to Vial that he view the body, he refused, stating that “he knew very well what it was like.”
Vial was anxious to establish an alibi for himself at the time of the crime. He said that he had arrived in Paris from Conflans (where he claimed to have gone to see the archbishop) and that on his return to Paris he had found waiting for him at home a procureur who advised him of his uncle’s death. He added that it was fortunate for him that he was not in Paris at the time of the murder, for otherwise people might perhaps have said that he was the guilty party. Inspector Receveur visited the archbishop and discovered that Vial’s alibi was a complete and shameless fabrication. He had not been to Conflans on the date of the crime, and he was unknown to the archbishop, the members of the archbishop’s household, and the religious community of Conflans. The methodical Receveur confirmed these facts through interviews, not only with the archbishop’s lackeys and valets de chambre but also with the mother superior of the neighboring convent. Receveur returned from Conflans resolved to redouble his measures to investigate Vial’s actions.
The inspector’s suspicions of Leclair’s nephew were strengthened by his strange behavior at his uncle’s funeral. According to Receveur, “a trembling and astonishing agitation on the day of burial called him to the attention” of police and others who were in attendance. To make matters worse, Vial had apparently attempted to influence the testimony of other witnesses in a direction that he may have thought favored his own alibi. Desnos, a soldier on guard at the Leclair house, saw Vial take the gardener Bourgeois aside and heard him say that he should not tell the police he had seen the garden gate open between 4:00 and 5:30; others, Vial whispered, had already testified that they had not seen the gate open until 6:00 or 6:30, and there was no point in creating contradictions in statements on the subject. Receveur also noted in his summary of the evidence that Vial’s physique appeared to match that of the large man dressed in black who had been seen moving along Leclair’s wall on the night of the murder, but he dutifully conceded that this point was “very vague.”
Bemused by the complexities and ambiguities of the case, Inspector Receveur summarized his tentative theories in a report to his superiors. He had arrived at the belief, he wrote, that it was not professional thieves who killed Leclair, and he was prepared to find the perpetrator of the crime among envious men or among those who would inherit from the victim. The nephew seemed to merit attention, and he was “prepared to look into him deeply.” Vial, he noted, was “well advanced in the good graces of the widow,” a fact that authorized him to extend his investigation to her as well. The canny Receveur had conceived a new means of reconciling the disappearance of the watch with the theory of Vial’s guilt; it was possible that the watch had been stolen by Bourgeois, the gardener, or one of the others who were among the first group to discover the body.
Despite Receveur’s suspicion of a conspiracy between Vial and Mme Leclair, the police archives do not indicate that an intensive investigation was made into the widow’s possible involvement in the crime. Her deposition was taken, but the questioning appears to have been superficial and pretty much limited to the circumstances under which she learned of her husband’s murder. Perhaps it is not unfair to read in her testimony an exaggerated effort to put herself at a safe distance from the crime. She stated that she did not learn of the murder until the afternoon of October 23, even though Paysant had brought the news to her apartment in the morning and had alerted Mlle Petitbois. Mme Leclair did not accompany her goddaughter to Leclair’s house, and although it is conceivable that she was not at home that morning, the police records do not indicate that she ever paid a visit thereafter to the scene of the crime.
The investigation into Leclair’s death was eventually closed without anyone being charged with the crime. Leclair’s devoted memorialist Durosoy had to content himself with inveighing against the unknown murderer: “There are no doubt monsters who do not belong to their country or their age. Such beings have nothing human about them except the face of a man.”
The detailed police records that survive provide some basis for hazarding an opinion as to the identity of the guilty party. Was it the gardener Paysant? It hardly seems likely. There is no apparent motive, although a secret grievance of an employee cannot be ruled out. But Paysant seems unfit for the role of murderer. He appears to have been one of those maddeningly unstable witnesses, in love with mystification for its own sake, with whom the annals of French crime have abounded from the Fualdès case of 1817 to the mysterious murder of “little Gregory.”
Mme Leclair, the estranged wife of the composer, is the choice of Nicolas Slonimsky. Though she seems to have had little to gain financially from her husband’s death—their community property was heavily burdened with debts to a butcher, a wine merchant, a grocer, a mason, and others—we cannot ignore Dorothy Sayers’s adage that in a murder case marriage itself can be a motive. Slonimsky, in placing the blame on Mme Leclair, notes that “the three wounds . . . inflicted in the front part of Leclair’s body as he faced his murderer . . . might have been caused by a sharp tool used for music engraving—yet there was no examination of these tools in Madame Leclair’s apartment in Paris.” He also observes that only a person “intimately acquainted with the victim’s mode of life” could have gone through the motions of placing the odd group of objects around the corpse and that such a person could only have been Mme Leclair.
Slonimsky, like a good detective-story writer, makes up in strength of assertion for what he lacks in logic. Given the evidence of the violence of Leclair’s resistance, it is unlikely that he could have been overwhelmed by a female assailant of advancing years. It also seems possible that Leclair, in wearing a hunting knife at home, may have had reason to fear an enemy more formidable than his wife; he may, in fact, have drawn the knife in his own defense, only to have been overpowered. Moreover, it is not true that only Mme Leclair had sufficient knowledge of Leclair’s household to assemble the hat, wig, book, and manuscript paper. Another such person is my candidate for the murderer, the composer’s nephew Vial. We cannot determine the cause of estrangement of the Leclairs or the widow’s feelings toward her husband; we only know that she claimed to be continuing to supply him with funds in his last days. However, there is no doubt of the depth of Vial’s malice or of his irrational conviction that his uncle stood in the way of his musical advancement. He would have known where to find Leclair’s manuscript paper (assuming that Leclair, still passionately engaged in composition to the end of his life, did not have the paper at hand when his murderer called), and presumably Vial could have located the joke book in Leclair’s library shelves. If the mise-en-scène near the vestibule door contained an ironic message from the murderer, it would have accorded with Vial’s bitter spirit for him to have said, through the empty manuscript page, that he had brought the career of his fancied rival to an end and to have sneered, through the title of the joke book, that he had had the last laugh.
Of course, it is possible that Mme Leclair egged Vial on. It is all too apparent that she did not mourn her late husband or grieve the abrupt end of his glorious career. Shortly after his murder, she applied to the police for permission to take an inventory of the contents of his house on rue de Carême-Prenant. On October 26 and 27, 1764, the sale of Leclair’s property was carried out and produced less than 2,000 livres, which was insufficient to pay the creditors in full. The following January Leclair’s widow sold her husband’s violins.
The principal source for biographical facts and the account of the crime regarding Jean-Marie Leclair (called the “elder” to distinguish him from a younger brother of the same name), and which contains Barnabé Farmian Durosoy’s work, is Lionel de la Laurencie, L’Ecole française de violon de Lully à Viotti, 3 vols. (Paris: Delagrange, 1922–24), 1:269–349 (Quotations on pp. 298, 302–3).
The records of the investigation of the Paris police into the murder of Leclair, on which this article is based, are located in Archives Nationales (Paris) Y13773 and Archives de la Bastille (Paris) 10068. These archives consist primarily of depositions of witnesses and Inspector Receveur’s summary of evidence.
Nicolas Slonimsky’s alternative solution to the Leclair mystery is contained in his collection of informal essays on musical subjects, A Thing or Two about Music (New York: Allen, Towne and Heath, 1948), 86–90.
The Leclair murder is the subject of a mystery novel by Gérard Gefen, L’Assassinat de Jean-Marie Leclair (Paris: Belfond, 1991).