Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

IT WAS A TERRIFIC scandal. If you were in Paris at the time you certainly heard of it, and saw the picture printed in all the newspapers, of Giovanni just after he was captured. Editorials were written and speeches were made, and many bars of the genre of Guillaume's bar were closed. (But they did not stay closed long.) Plainclothes policemen descended on the quarter, asking to see everyone's papers, and the bars were emptied of tapettes. Giovanni was nowhere to be found. All of the evidence, above all, of course, his disappearance, pointed to him as the murderer. Such a scandal always threatens, before its reverberations cease, to rock the very foundations of the state. It is necessary to find an explanation, a solution, and a victim with the utmost possible speed. Most of the men picked up in connection with this crime were not picked up on suspicion of murder.

They were picked up on suspicion of having what the French, with a delicacy I take to be sardonic, call les goûts particuliers. These "tastes," which do not constitute a crime in France, are nevertheless regarded with extreme disapprobation by the bulk of the populace, which also looks on its rulers and "betters" with a stony lack of affection. When Guillaume's corpse was discovered, it was not only the boys of the street who were frightened; they, in fact, were a good deal less frightened than the men who roamed the streets to buy them, whose careers, positions, aspirations, could never have survived such notoriety. Fathers of families, sons of great houses, and itching adventurers from Belleville were all desperately anxious that the case be closed, so that things might, in effect, go back to normal and the dreadful whiplash of public morality not fall on their backs.