Fashionable women filled the front rows at his trial. 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. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart.Send me updates about Slate special offers. I don't need to wish her anything, for she'll be happy with you. If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now. When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced.

Sin and punishment dostoevsky