A Paris bank fails, and the cashier has vanished with twelve hundred thousand francs — or has been left holding a theft arranged by men who will dine out that evening. Gaboriau was a cavalry trooper and a lawyer's clerk before he created Monsieur Lecoq and, with him, the French detective novel; this is his financial one, and the villainy is entirely legal until the last chapter. Fifty-eight plates of Paris and its people, from Degas to Daumier, mirror the ledgers, lawyers and laundresses of Gaboriau's vanished cashier.
