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several tramps had been found on the premises, and one of them started the fire.
    Outside 21 rue Le Sueur, the crowd had begun to grow. The smell—described asa sickening sweet smell that permeated everything—was now worse than it had been the previous night. One First World War veteran outside the property was reminded of his experience spending several days in a shell hole with five dead bodies. “After two days,” he said to Jean-François Dominique, a young journalist with Toulouse’s
La Républic du Sud-Ouest
, “it smelled just like this.”
    About two dozen police officers, faces pale with fear, tried in vain to usher along the crowd. Behind the barricades, while Massu showed police and legal dignitaries around the property, pointing out where they had found “a pile of skulls, tibias, humeri, broken thigh bones, and human debris of all kinds,” a team of four men continued the excruciating workof sifting out the remains from the lime pit. Massu’s assistants were horrified at the task, so the commissaire had hired gravediggers from Passy cemetery.
    Petiot’s neighbors talked to the police and to one another. Some residents claimed not to know that the house at No. 21 was inhabited, or at least not regularly by “respectable people.” Others discussed the owner’s strange behavior. A nearby concierge described how Petiot would enter or depart from his courtyard, invariably on a bicycle witha cart in tow. Each time, the physician nervously glanced over his shoulder and all around him to check that no one was watching him. The concierge at No. 22, Marie Lombre, agreed, noting that the man came almost daily and usually wore a Basque beret and workman’s clothes. His cart was often filled with furniture, works of art, and items of value. But sometimes, she said, “it was impossible to tell.”
    Victor Avenelle, a fifty-three-year-old professor of Romance languages who lived on the sixth floor of 23 rue Le Sueur, claimed often to hear shouts and disturbing “cries for help.” He had heard this screaming three or four times since Christmas, usually between eleven and midnight or perhaps one in the morning. The voice was always female. Another tenant in that building, Count de Saunis, said that he sometimes could not sleep for the yelling, or the odd hammerlike sounds that emanated from the house.Others claimed to hear laughter of women, strange popping noises that resembled the uncorking of champagne bottles, or even the sounds of an old horse-drawn carriage clip-clopping down rue Le Sueur about eleven thirty at night before stopping outside No. 21. The police, at this point, had no idea what to make of these statements.
    Massu’s detectives powdered for fingerprints and continued to search through the town house for any evidence of the crime or its victims. In one of the buildings in the back of the courtyard, police found a second,smaller pile of lime about fifteen to twenty inches high, six feet wide, and six to nine feet long. It, too, was filled with human bones. Nearby was a cart lacking a wheel. Was this the one neighbors had seen? At various other places of the mansion, agents found workman’s clothes,soiled with lime. In the entrance was a darkly stained brown suitcase that contained a nail file, an eyelash brush, the sheath of an umbrella, and eleven pairs of women’s shoes. The dark stains on the suitcase were almost certainly blood.
    In Dr. Petiot’s consulting room, police found a Czechoslovakian-made gas mask, which, they concluded, was used as protection against “the odors of the cadavers” as he transported them to the stove. A “needle for injections” was also found, as was a small bust of a woman made in wax.
    Agents Petit and Renonciat discovereda black satin dress with deep décolletage and adorned with two golden swallows, designed by Silvy-Rosa at rue Estelle in Marseille. The garment was still scented with perfume. Another officer uncovered a small, round,old-fashioned