Louise Laboine’s death

Louise Laboine’s death turns an apparently anonymous body into the center of an investigation shaped by careful revision. Found at night in Place Vintimille, she is initially read through the conspicuous but misleading signs of a second-hand blue dress and a silver high-heeled shoe. Forensic findings establish the circumstances of her death, while Maigret’s later reconstruction of her movements shows why those details cannot be treated as a ready-made portrait of her or her final hours.

Discovery and the first assumptions

Maigret comes to the scene after Raymond puts through a call from Headquarters. Lognon is already there, and Maigret refuses to leave without learning what has happened merely to placate him. The body lies on the pavement with three uniformed policemen nearby. A man and a woman who had been passing through the area have seen her and raised the alarm. The street is unusually quiet at that hour: Maigret observes that a discovery only a hundred yards farther on would have drawn a much larger crowd, whereas few people pass through Place Vintimille at night.

Before the body is turned over, Maigret studies what can be seen of her clothing. Her blue dress is old, not very clean, and made of cheap-looking material; the silver shoe has a high heel and a worn sole. Those details prompt an initial association with the bar girls of Montmartre night clubs. Maigret first considers whether she was attacked on her way home and robbed, but notices that the missing shoe and the removal of her coat do not fit that simple explanation. He tells Janvier that she must have been killed somewhere else. At this stage, the scene offers clues, not a settled account of what happened.

Forensic findings and timing

The Technical Branch photographs the body before the doctor turns it onto its back, revealing a face that appears younger than it had seemed from the ground. Dr. Paul identifies a fractured skull as the cause of death. His later examination establishes that she was struck at least three times with force. He cannot identify the weapon: it might have been a heavy tool or another hard object. His findings also indicate that Louise fell to her knees and tried to cling to someone. Dark wool fragments beneath her fingernails suggest that she had seized a person wearing wool clothing, which Dr. Paul considers likely to have been a man’s clothes. The fragments are sent to the laboratory; their presence supports the conclusion that there was a struggle, but the evidence cited here does not identify the person she clutched.

Dr. Paul places her death at about two in the morning, probably earlier rather than later. He estimates that she had eaten roughly six to eight hours before she was killed, putting her last meal around six or seven in the evening. The distinction between food and drink matters to Maigret’s reconstruction: Dr. Paul expects to establish the blood-alcohol level and analyze the contents of her stomach, and the stomach evidence later shows an appreciable quantity of alcohol. These findings narrow the questions about her final evening without, by themselves, identifying where she drank or who was with her.

The last evening reconstructed

Accounts of Louise’s movements give the forensic timeline a human context. She had gone to Mademoiselle Irène for an evening dress after nine, then left the shop on Rue de Douai at about ten. Maigret considers the interval before midnight and the short walk to Rue Caumartin, but the evidence does not establish exactly how she spent those hours. He revisits Dr. Paul’s report because Louise had no opportunity to drink during the relatively brief time she was at Le Roméo, according to the head waiter. Her alcohol must therefore have been consumed either before the reception or afterward, between leaving it and being found in Place Vintimille.

A woman who had been waiting for Louise says she was out all night and returned at six the next morning. Louise explained that she had spent the night with a sick relative. She did not appear to have enjoyed herself, went to bed, and remained there for two days; the woman brought her meals and bought aspirin after Louise said she had flu. This account supplies a sequence after the night out, but it does not resolve what happened between the reception and her death. Maigret gradually builds an impression of the life Louise had shared with another woman in a dark, overcrowded apartment, while recognizing that reconstructing Louise’s own manner and thoughts is harder than describing the person standing before him.

Evidence, misrecognition, and the case

The later examination of the drink evidence corrects a particularly revealing assumption. Maigret reasons that Louise would probably not have sat down at the bar: she would have felt out of place among its regular customers, conscious that her dress was second-hand. Even if she had gone downstairs, he doubts she would have threaded her way through a crowd of customers to read a letter. More concretely, the postmortem identified rum in her stomach, whereas a martini consists of gin and vermouth. Albert Falconi had assumed she drank a martini, and Maigret points out that this was an automatic answer based on the women who ordinarily came to his establishment, not on Louise’s actual behavior. Albert admits that she drank nothing there.

Her death is thus clarified not by one dramatic clue but by the correction of accumulating errors: the clothing initially suggests a familiar night-life stereotype, the missing garments complicate a robbery theory, the injuries establish a violent struggle, and the stomach contents contradict Albert’s account. Maigret’s attention to Louise’s likely discomfort in a bar helps him distinguish her from the imagined customer Albert has substituted for her. The evidence establishes the time and manner of her death more securely than it establishes every step of her final evening. Its significance lies in that investigative contrast: Louise is first encountered as a body that could be mistaken for anyone, while the inquiry gradually recovers the particularity that the first assumptions erased.