THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 49
But, he insisted, he had really had a
girlfriend who was murdered by a se-
rial killer. “It was just a young girl that
I met three times that I had sex with,”
he said. Later, he was more explicit:
“I invented that story because I was
afraid that people would think that...
I paid for a prostitute.”
Bourgoin didn’t want to give the
woman’s name, even if I promised not
to publish it. I asked if he could at
least give me the identity of the woman
in the photograph, but he claimed not
to remember. “I think she was Span-
ish!” he added later.
The only time Bourgoin truly came
alive was when he talked about the
anonymous collective that had brought
him down. We stood in his office, sur-
rounded by fright masks and first edi-
tions, and he said that he was “quite
happy it came out, but not the way
that the 4ème Œil did it.” He asked
me if I’d looked into the group’s mem-
bership. “You must have done some
research on the people who accused
me,” he said, suggesting that I get to
work on a counter-investigation of
his investigators.
C
laude-Marie Dugué found out
that her brother had been lying
to her for half a century when the Paris
Match article came out. She had never
suspected it, but the news didn’t shock
her. “Nothing surprises me in my fam-
ily,” she said. Nor was she offended,
on a personal level, by the breach of
trust. “He didn’t really deceive me,”
she said. “He let me into his world.”
Dugué’s son, Julien Cuny, told me
that one quote from the article jumped
out at him. “Parfois, je me fais des films
dans ma tête. J’ai toujours voulu qu’on
m’aime,” it read. “Sometimes I make
films in my head. I’ve always wanted
to be loved.” Cuny is an accomplished
tech executive in Montreal, but he has
always been daunted by his family’s
distinction. To him, Bourgoin’s words
were an almost inevitable response to
an overwhelming mythology, “a phan-
tasmagoric picture of distant family
members (you almost never meet) who
are always on an adventure somewhere.”
The first time Dugué and I ex-
changed e-mails, she told me some-
thing that I wasn’t expecting: she was
the product of an extramarital relation-
ship between Jean Bourgoin and her
mother, Béatrice Pourchasse, as was
her sister, who was born thirteen months
before her. The girls lived with their
mother in the Fourth Arrondissement.
Jean Bourgoin lived with his family—
Franziska and Stéphane—across town.
Jean organized his parallel lives strictly,
keeping them “watertight,” Dugué re-
called, but she always felt loved by her
father, who “followed and protected his
liaison with my mother until the end,”
providing money for the family, keep-
ing track of the girls’ studies, and see-
ing them regularly. Even if he didn’t
live with them, Dugué said, she felt
immense pride “to be the daughter of
such a man.”
One day, Dugué decided that she
wanted to meet her younger brother.
She was in her early twenties, and had
known about him her entire life. He
was maybe sixteen, a high schooler,
and had no idea that she existed. “I
posted myself discreetly inside the
building where he lived, waiting for
his return from the Lycée Carnot,”
Dugué recalled. When he came home,
she introduced herself: his secret sis-
ter. “He hardly believed me,” Dugué
remembered. Nonetheless, they im-
mediately got along. She remembered
Bourgoin as a shy and serious boy with
round glasses, adrift in a world of ex-
travagantly accomplished adults. “How
must Stéphane have perceived him-
self next to these two exceptional par-
ents, crushed by so much strength and
power?” she said. “He was happy to
discover all at once that he had two
sisters, and we started to communi-
cate amongst ourselves.” They sent
long letters between their father’s two
households, written in violet ink.
The incident may have been Bour-
goin’s initiation into the power of
secret lives. “Back to my childhood I
felt I didn’t do enough compared to
my parents,” Bourgoin told me. “So I
had always an inferiority complex.”
Cuny echoed the sentiment. “I decided
very early on that having a normal life
means boring, and that would be the
most horrible thing that could hap-
pen to me,” he told me. “My bet is
Stéphane would prefer this outcome
to being a local accountant who never
left town.”
In “My Conversations with Kill-
ers,” Bourgoin wrote, “The immense
majority of serial killers are inveterate
liars from a very young age. Isolated,
marginalized in their lives, they take
refuge in the imaginary to construct a
personality, far from the mediocre re-
ality of their existence.” “Parfois, je me
fais des films dans ma tête. J’ai toujours
voulu qu’on m’aime,” Bourgoin said, as
though he were performing a voice-
over for his own life. “Sometimes I
make films in my head. I’ve always
wanted to be loved.”
• •
