Someone Is Stealing Children in Paris

On 25 June 1906, the readers of the daily newspaper LE MATIN discovered this terrifying headline: “SOMEONE IS STEALING CHILDREN IN PARIS! EVERY DAY! On the Grands Boulevards and quiet residential streets! Children have disappeared Boulevard Montmartre, Rue Caumartin, Rue Royale, Rue Racine, Avenue Niel, Passage des Panoramas, Cité Rougemont. In full daylight, with diabolical cunning and monstrous audacity! Under the very eyes of their mothers! This is not fiction, a horror tale designed to scare our readers, but the terrifying truth!” The police being incapable of finding the perpetrators, the French Government appoints a special scientific commission to investigate. Its leader is the notorious German doctor Professor Flax. But is he really the benefactor he claims to be? Louis Forest (1872-1933) was a journalist for various Parisian newspsapers, including Le Matin, for which he wrote this ground-breaking serial about the artificial creation of supermen through brain surgery.