Reading Corpses: Interpretive Violence

WHEN THE POLICE ARRIVE at the house of the widow Lerouge in the first pages of Emile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge, they are confronted with a grisly sight. The widow Lerouge’s corpse is sprawled on the ground in her bedroom, her partially burned head in the fireplace. This descriptive detail adds visible mutilation to the already shocking violence apparent in the crime scene: “In the second room, which was the bedroom, the disorder was even greater. It looked like some furious hand had taken great pleasure in turning everything upside down. Next to the fireplace, with her face in the ashes, lay the corpse of the widow Lerouge” (15).1 The brutality of the murder that has taken place is conspicuous even for the most casual reader-modern or Gaboriau’s contemporary-but it is almost tangibly more apparent for someone who might have read the story at the time of its publication, in 1866. The twentieth-century reader, less familiar with the historical detail of the period than Gaboriau’s contemporary reading public, would not necessarily realize that in the description of this first scene, the author was quite likely alluding—consciously or unconsciously—to the modus operandi of certain well-known bands of criminals who terrorized the French countryside during the early part of the nineteenth- century.