Pierre François Lacenaire
Pierre François Lacenaire (born 1800 in Lyon; died 1836) was a famous French poet and murderer.
He is portrayed in the epic Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), a film by Marcel Carné. There is also a Hollywood film called Lacenaire, all about him.
Dostoevsky read somewhere about Lacenaire's case and it inspired him to write Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov's crime was a copy of Lacenaire's almost down to the last detail.
For more information, see the French Wikipedia entry for Lacenaire: http://fr.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Pierre_Fran%C3%A7ois_Lacenaire
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