Corneille's investigation did not continue for two main reasons.
First, there was no body. That was crucial evidence for determining whether it was a murder case or a missing-person case, and it was also why Georgiana had gone to the cemetery to inspect the gravestones.
In that era, when news traveled slowly, many people believed dead would suddenly reappear. And in a port city like Rouen, someone could board a passing ship at any time and set off for any corner of the world.
Second, after the Harpy incident, "Whistling Jack" appeared. He might have been a blend of the Pied Piper and Jack, the Dark wizard who roamed around Bavaria.
This wizard was somewhat like a legend. No one knew his real name, so they called him "Jack."
At the time, Louis XIV was busy with his Palace of Versailles and conquering the Netherlands. He had no interest in what was happening in Rouen, far from Paris.
It was not only craftsmen and teachers who formed guilds; booksellers did as well. In seventeenth-century France, the publishing industry was not controlled by the Church.
Louis XIV was a highly centralizing monarch. He granted publishing rights through licenses to publishers loyal to him, while the inspection of books was handled jointly by inspectors from the booksellers' guild and the police.
Those within the trade knew the trade best. Once these booksellers got hold of the prints, they could tell from the ink where they had been produced. Rouen's guard locked up the shopkeepers selling that kind of ink, then the prints vanished, and the matter was quietly dropped.
There was no census at the time, much less anything like identification papers. The dead had names and occupations, but nearly all of them were independent craftsmen or shopkeepers with hardly any social