THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 43
cide, matricide, patricide, and the like,
followers of the genre had learned not
to count on anybody’s better angels,
or to underestimate humankind’s ca-
pacity for deceit. They were connois-
seurs of the self-valorizing lie, having
been trained by authors like the “mas-
ter of noir” himself.
One group of true-crime fans, dis-
turbed by inconsistencies in Bourgoin’s
stories, launched their own investiga-
tion, which would unravel his career.
“Can you imagine yourself in a long
hallway?” a member of the group told
me. “Each time you open a door, be-
hind it there’s another door. That’s how
many lies there were.”
O
ne seemingly grandiose element
of Bourgoin’s life story is true: his
father, Lucien Joseph Jean Bourgoin,
was a great man of history. Jean, as he
was known, was born in 1897, in Pa-
peete, Tahiti. He joined the French
military at the age of seventeen, fight-
ing with distinction in the First World
War before studying at the élite engi-
neering school École Polytechnique.
During the Second World War, he
made a bold escape from French-co-
lonial Indochina after being put under
surveillance for his support of the
Free French, and was personally sum-
moned by Charles de Gaulle to join
the government-in-exile in London.
As a civilian, Jean travelled the world
building roads, tunnels, railroads, irri-
gation systems, and electrical networks.
Later, he became a Commander of the
Legion of Honor, and took part in
UNESCO’s effort to relocate the ancient
Egyptian temples of Abu Simbel. His
twenty-two-page dossier in the Na-
tional Archives of France chronicles
countless missions, decorations, and
“special services rendered to Coloni-
zation” in roughly twenty countries.
“I’ve heard that there was much more
to the story, that he was also a high-
level intelligence officer,” Julien Cuny,
his grandson, told me.
Bourgoin’s mother, Franziska
Glöckner, was as mysterious and dar-
ing as her husband. Born in Germany
in 1910, she moved to France in the
thirties after marrying her second hus-
band, a French diplomat. In 1940, with
her husband at war, she took a job as
an interpreter with the German com-
mand at Saint-Malo, on the coast of
Brittany. “Intelligent, courtesan-like,
and calculating,” according to one
writer, she spent the war years facili-
tating fishing permits, attending cock-
tail parties, and consorting with the
Grand Duke of the Romanovs, who
was living in exile at a nearby villa. A
French official recalled that she even-
tually acquired “such an influence that
she was known to all as ‘Comman-
dante du Port.’” A newspaper article
later dubbed her the “Mata Hari of
Saint-Malo.”
Toward the end of the war, Fran-
ziska was arrested on charges of trea-
son and was accused of acting as an
informant. At her trial, ten local wit-
nesses, including the former mayor
of Saint-Malo, testified in her de-
fense. “It was thanks to her excep-
tional situation with the high Ger-
man command that the docks of
Saint-Malo, where ninety-six mine-
shafts had been set, were not ex-
ploded,” a newspaper article reported.
She was ultimately acquitted.
Jean and Franziska married in Sai-
gon in 1951. He was fifty-three and
she was forty. Two years later, their
only child, Stéphane, was born in Paris.
The family lived in a Haussman-style
apartment in the Seventeenth Ar-
rondissement, not far from the Arc de
Triomphe. Stéphane spoke French,
German, and English, and attended
the venerable Lycée Carnot. He seems
to have been an awkward child. “The
second the bell rang, three minutes
later I was outside with twenty peo-
ple, but he was rather isolated,” Jean-
Louis Repelski, a classmate, recalled.
An unremarkable student, Bour-
goin left high school without a di-
ploma. He was obsessed with cinema,
sometimes seeing five movies in a day.
“He was a walking dictionary,” Claude-
Marie Dugué told me. “He knew all
the directors and films by heart, and
inundated me with references and an-
ecdotes.” At some point, Bourgoin
parlayed this interest into a series of
jobs in adult film. He is credited as
the screenwriter of “Extreme Close-
Up,” “La Bête et la Belle,” and “Johnny
Does Paris,” a series of late-seventies
and early-eighties productions star-
ring John Holmes, the prolific Amer-
ican porn actor.
Bourgoin has said that his career
in movies got started in the U.S., but,
despite featuring some American
actors, the three films were shot in
France. Bourgoin did go to America
at least once in his youth, as I learned
from the papers of his father’s former
wife, Alice Gilbert Smith Bourgoin.
Alice was a New England patrician,
with a degree from Smith College,
who appears to have had an ardent
but melancholic relationship with Jean,
exacerbated by the turbulence of their
era. Toward the end of her life, she
wrote an affectionate letter to Jean of-
fering to return “two handsome and
valuable rings you gave me—a soli-
taire diamond and a beautiful dark
blue sapphire.”
Alice’s letter arrived in Paris on
June 7, 1977, but Stéphane was the
one to receive it. Jean had died, of a
heart attack, three days earlier, at a
ceremony hosted by his alma mater.
Jean’s death must have been a shock,
but Stéphane replied to Alice, in a
letter dated the same day. “You do
not know me, but I am Jean’s son,
Stéphane, born in 1953, and, by the
way, the only child of his last mariage
[sic],” he wrote, in English. “Perhaps
you want to know a little bit more
about me.”
He told her that he had recently
spent almost a year in America, but
the letter made no mention of a mur-
dered lover, or of a serial killer. “I love
very much the USA and the kindness
of the Americans,” he wrote. He added
that he was engaged to an American
girl who was living in France, a love
story just like Alice and his father’s.
“Right now, I am keeping aside every
penny I earn to be able to make an-
other trip to the States.” He concluded
by giving Alice his telephone num-
ber and his address.
In the bottom left-hand corner of
the second page of the letter, there is
