A young man of good family is told he is not his father's son but a foundling, and that a document proving otherwise can be bought — for a price that ruins everyone who touches it. Gaboriau was a cavalry trooper and a lawyer's clerk before he invented Monsieur Lecoq and, with him, the detective novel in France; Conan Doyle read him carefully and then had Holmes sneer at Lecoq, which is its own kind of tribute. Fifty-seven plates after Daumier and Caillebotte, from lawyers in court to shipwrecks and the execution of Marshal Ney, give this Paris of blackmail and ruined fortunes its visual weather.
