Nicolas de la Reynie has the distinction of being Paris’s first police chief, a position he stepped into during the reign of King Louis XIV.  Paris was a nasty cesspool full of criminals at the time, and de la Reynie turned things around by putting lamps up everywhere (which is how Paris came to be known as “the City of Light”). But not everything in Paris could be cured with a well-placed lamp.  During de la Reynie’s tenure, people in Paris were getting poisoned left […]