![]() Lacenaire’s case inspired one of the earliest true crime fandoms. “I kill a man as I drink a glass of wine,” he told visitors who flocked to his prison cell. He had somehow touched that deep nerve of perverse freedom that runs through everyone. What was most revelatory about Lacenaire was neither the man himself nor his crime spree but the fact that Paris was so captivated by him. Stories like his are “more exciting than all possible novels because they light up the dark sides of the human soul that art does not like to approach.” Violence was acceptable in novels, but senseless, wanton violence seemed too unruly for art. ![]() In 1861, Dostoevsky was looking for material for a magazine he was starting called Vremya, and Lacenaire’s story, which Dostoevsky helped translate into Russian for the publication, fit perfectly.* Lacenaire “is a remarkable personality, enigmatic, frightening, and gripping,” he told his subscribers in a note. The intersection of Dostoevsky’s life and the life of Lacenaire, which I chronicle in my new book, The Sinner and the Saint, was a crucial moment in the history of the novel. It was crude, sensationalist, and irredeemable. ![]() It romanticized the murderer, doted on his courtroom theatrics, and barely glanced at his implicitly culpable victims-a con man of “infamous habits” (contemporary code for a man who consorted with other men) and the con man’s widowed mother, who presumably condoned her son’s behavior. ![]() This was the worst type of true crime story. Send me updates about Slate special offers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |