Around nine o’clock on the evening of 7 January, her chance came. Robert Gentien, accompanied by his new mistress Lucie Colas, a twenty-two-year old actress from the Palais-Royal, stepped out of the building. When Colas got into a carriage some way from the entrance, Marie hurled herself onto the street from her waiting vehicle and fired three shots at close range. After the first two shots, it was clear that Robert had been severely wounded in back and leg. The third bullet, fired as she was being stopped by passers-by, missed its target. To the police who were quickly on the scene Marie manifested no remorse. She regretted Robert wasn’t dead, she stated emphatically. As soon as she could she would try to murder him again. He owed her a life.
What circumstances had led Marie Bière, a gentle, sensitive young woman, to these straits? What concatenation of overwhelming emotion and social impediments had toppled her into carrying out a raging and murderous act? The mind doctors were called in to examine her state. But if Marie Bière was mad – then her madness was contagious. It was a condition that spread through the belle epoque and affected more women than at any time before or since.
Marie Bière, wearing her stage name of Maria Biraldi, had met Robert Gentien in the elegant Atlantic resort of Biarritz over two years before. At twenty-eight, she was a lyric performer of some standing. Considered a child prodigy in her native Bordeaux, she had sung at a young age with the Philharmonic Circle, and had then trained at the Paris Conservatoire. Her voice had charm and clarity. But its power was not altogether sufficient for her to attain the heights she hoped for. She had aspired to sing Verdi and Meyerbeer at the famous Theatre-Italien, one of Paris’s two leading opera companies: they had taken her on, but her ambitions were never fulfilled. The one major production she was scheduled for was cancelled for lack of funds. Nonetheless, at a time when any career for a young woman who also wanted respectability was a considerable achievement, Marie Bière certainly had one. She had regular engagements throughout the provinces. She appeared in famous resorts and spa towns – on the Riviera, at Pau, at the glittering Biarritz. Programmes headlining her still exist.
Despite her distinct ambition and sense of her own talent, Marie was strangely enough also well liked by her peers. There is something childlike about her. ‘She was a good and gentle soul’ until Robert Gentien led her astray, her friend and fellow artiste Mathilde Delorme said of her at the trial. She was certainly ‘no coquette’, the kind of woman whose successes in the artistic sphere could only be measured by her success in the bedchamber.
In the police-archive files that detail the period of her investigation and trial, which also contain letters, her ‘confession’ and notebooks, Marie Bière insistently repeats that she is no coquette, as if she is haunted by the very possibility. She is, she states, a respectable woman. She needs to distance herself both in the public eye and in her own mind from the courtesans, or horizontales, so prevalent at the time, particularly in the world of musical theatre and spectacle. One might even suspect that mixed up amongst the passionate motives that lead to her taking aim at Gentien is a sense that he stands for everything that she doesn’t want herself to be: his gaze, his very existence, turn her into the woman of easy virtue she despises yet verges on being. If class and finances collude, the slippage for a woman between virtue and easy virtue is as quick as it is precipitous.
In belle époque France, attractive women of uncertain class could supplement their living, all the while making their way up the social hierarchy, by providing sexual favours for men of the middle and upper classes. It was a time when marriage for men came relatively late and was contracted on grounds of property and progeny, rather than love. Sex with unmarried women of their own class, whose chastity and innocence were essential attributes for marriage, was a near-impossibility. So from a young age, men often had recourse to prostitutes or their higher-status version, the courtesans. This was at one and the same time a clandestine and an acceptable form of behaviour. Repectable bourgeois mothers would far prefer their sons being initiated into sex by a woman of easy virtue to having them engage in the wrong kind of marriage. Keeping a courtesan had the added advantage that the woman might be ‘cleaner’ than a prostitute – that is, uninfected by one of the many sexually transmitted diseases from gonorrhoea to syphilis that made the period’s sexual relations a risky business.
For the kept women of the demi-monde – so sumptuously portrayed by Alexandre Dumas fils in La Dame aux Camélias, the basis for Verdi’s opera La Traviata, and in the novels of Balzac, Zola and Proust, whose Odette rises from murky origins to the height of Parisian aristocracy – there might be advantages of independence and financial ease to be had from their status, which was at once shadowy and showy. One of the many dangers, however, for both men and mistresses, was that while their arrangements were always most satisfactory if they provided a simulacrum of the passionate rituals and forms of romantic love, this could too often topple into the real thing. The unruly emotion then took over and played havoc with lives, since marriage, that sanctified ‘for ever’, was in most cases an impossibility. Families, inheritance, all of the bourgeois and indeed aristocratic world, stood in the way. Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias was based on his own enduring love affair with a courtesan whom he could neither give up nor marry.
Marie Bière clearly wanted to stress that she could never be mistaken for a woman of the demi-monde. She may also have wanted to distinguish herself from the notorious actress-courtesan charged as an accomplice to attempted murder by vitriol, Madame Gras, whose case less than three years before, in July 1877, had filled the pages of the press. Eugénie Gras, in her trajectory from rags to riches, shared something with Zola’s infinitely desirable and rapacious blonde Venus of the demi-world, Nana. The novelist was working on his portrait of the artiste-courtesan at the time of the case. He gave his public a vision of a tarnished masculinity and an irresistible, but utterly uncaring, femininity – a sex goddess enamoured only of luxury and destruction. In his research notebooks he said he wanted to describe ‘Abasement... of the naked man, throwing everything to the winds for cunt. Everybody led by the tail, and the women indifferent. A pack of dogs in pursuit of a bitch who’s not in heat and who mocks the dogs that follow her.’
In her deposition, Marie Bière was at pains to differentiate herself both from bitches in heat and courtesans. She stressed that she came from a respectable Bordeaux family, though one of modest means. Her father Philippe worked for the railways, the Chemin de Fer du Midi. Marie had gone to a convent school, and apart from being seen as a good, well brought-up young girl, had been known only for her slightly excessive sensitivity. She loved nature and poetry. She had a gift for ‘exalted’ states, a propensity for being carried away. Teachers interviewed in the pre-trial inquiry, led by the investigating magistrate, remarked on her intellectual and emotional precocity.
They also commented on one particular episode from her schooldays. Marie had become very closely attached to another girl: it was a friendship marked by vigilance, perpetual anxiety, and the pure passion of someone who had found a ‘soul sister’, a part of herself she couldn’t let go. When the young Marie sensed her soul sister had grown indifferent, she fell into profound despair and contemplated suicide. She had what one witness called a propensity to a ‘hysteria of the heart’.
Music back then had saved Marie from her despair: she was the star soloist at school. The best of Bordeaux’s music teachers took her up and promoted her, before she left for the Conservatoire in Paris at the age of eighteen accompanied by her mother. Indeed, the entire family moved around this time, her father’s job taking him to the railway office in Paris. Marie’s mother, a cook before her marriage, dedicated her life to her daughter and her talent. Her only other child, a son slightly younger than Marie, had left home at the age of fifteen to pursue adventure in South America. Whether his mother’s attention or inattention played into what commentators considered a radical departure is unclear. In any event, Madame Bière was her daughter
’s constant companion, at once agent and chaperone, in her professional itinerary across the country. The closeness between mother and daughter would echo through Marie’s life. When Robert Gentien paid court to her, he probably didn’t know he had her mother to contend with, as well as his own libertine lust and Marie’s awakened interest.
A handsome, amiable, wealthy thirty-year-old man about town, who loved his pleasures and the delights of Paris rather more than life on his sizeable estates in the Gironde in southwest France, Robert paid court to Marie throughout his stay in Biarritz and then by letter from his family home, the Chateau de Tustal. For a sentimental and inexperienced young woman, courtship and letters may easily have taken on the semblance of a serious affair of the heart, perhaps even a prelude to eventual marriage, rather than a worldly and fugitive romp. Robert addresses Marie as £ma chère Miss Fauvette’, my little Miss Warbler.
The letters are sent to her not at home, but via a trusted friend. Her suitor may hardly be nineteenth-century France’s most subtle stylist. Even so, it’s not beyond belief that his letters could be read romantically by an unjaded imagination such as Marie’s, one steeped in sentimental opera lyrics. She takes Robert’s courtship and his declarations of love seriously – at his word, rather than in recognition of a seductive game: ‘The more I think of the beautiful days we spent together, my dear friend, the more I think of how much gratitude I owe you for your charming welcome,’ he writes. ‘You are, without flattery, the most adorable woman I’ve ever met. Everything in you is honest, sympathetic and generous. I’ve known many young women in this world: none was as gifted as you are. I swear to you, you’re a real little phenomenon.’
He urges Marie to meet him on 16 October, when he will be in Paris. Anticipating the long-awaited date of their tryst, he writes the lines that a high-minded Marie might well have been swayed by:
Next to you, I feel myself better and raised in my own eyes. I’ve kept a delicious memory of our last day together: I felt I was impregnated by a heady perfume, which gave me exquisite dreams, like those of opium smokers.
Do you ever think of that evening in Saint-Sébastien and our first kiss, so long desired, and so often refused? Courage, my little warbler, and have faith in me. The future belongs to us. No friend could be more sincere and grateful, and if I can give you a little pleasure I’ll do it with an open heart.
In her comments to the investigating magistrate for whom these letters formed part of the trial dossier, it is clear that Marie thought such sentiments were evidence of Robert’s early love for her. Certainly, they were evidence of her belief in it. As she stated at her trial in April 1880, she would never have sacrificed her purity, her honour, for a mere three-month frolic. Since she claimed, honestly or not, that she had never expected marriage from Robert (which does not preclude her having wished for it), what seems clear is that Marie anticipated at least a simulacrum of marriage, a tender, somewhat high-minded, lasting relationship.
The date of 16 October that the lovers had settled on for their first Paris tryst proves difficult to arrange. Marie is still living at home, and secrecy has to be maintained at all costs. This makes even going to the post office to pick up letters a challenge. At the last moment, Mathilde Delorme, the old friend Marie calls her ‘sister’, won’t provide the cover she needs. Robert tells her that this is understandable and shouldn’t be reproached. He knows that they must take care, but they’ll find a means. The need for secrecy, which accentuates the forbidden, of course, also plays into their early passion, heightening excitement with obstacles and inaccessibility. ‘I so need you all to myself,’ Robert writes, ‘and to prove myself worthy of you, that I’ll go mad if I have to wait any longer.’
The tryst takes place. The lovers enter the summer of their relations. To facilitate their meetings (every second day and on Sunday), to keep their relations private from his own parents and sister, who come and go at the family home on the Rue de Vienne where their first meetings took place, Robert rents a small set of rooms in the Rue de Hanovre, not far from the Boulevard des Italiens. He is even more careful of appearances than Marie. He is, after all, a man of his world, that part of the French Republic that persists in aristocratic love arrangements: passion is extrafamilial, whether the ‘family’ consists of spouse or parents. The gentlemanly rules, the courtly code of the homme galant, or gentleman libertine – as he calls himself at the trial – put reputation, discretion and honour above much else. But that honour and reputation have nothing to do with seduction leading either to marriage or care of children. At best, the prize for Marie is pleasure and the security of being a kept woman. Robert’s assumption is that Marie, artiste that she is, is both aware of and shares this code. That she palpably doesn’t is evidence of the slowly changing nature of love arrangements and indeed class relations during France’s Third Republic.
Secure in her rather haughty sense of her own worth and the justice of her petty-bourgeois values, Marie seems to be at least partly oblivious to the impossibility for Robert of a recognized match between them. Hardly a protofeminist, she is none the less a working woman and in that sense an independent one; and when work becomes impossible, she stands up for what she believes is her due. Leaving the frame of conventional femininity in her ‘act’, she has to re-emphasize how centrally she remains within its bounds during her trial.
The secret lovers have not quite three months before Marie’s mother finds out about their liaison through an anonymous letter from a chattering concierge, urging her to go to the site of the lovers’ illicit acts. Madame Bière had already warned Marie about Gentien’s intentions in Biarritz. She had also told Gentien that she wanted to see her daughter married, and his frequent visits and attention would compromise her. According to gossip amongst the Bordeaux neighbours who were interviewed before the trial, Madame Bière had wanted to arrange a match between Marie and a wealthy forty- or fifty-year-old when her daughter was only fifteen. Marie had then refused, though perhaps the maternal value put on a wealthy marriage fed unconsciously into her relations with Gentien – as the prosecution would eventually argue.
Now, as she discovered the full extent of her daughter’s relations with Gentien, Madame Bière was furious. She went to see Robert and roundly rebuked him. She and her husband threw Marie out of the family home. ‘I reproached her severely when I learned she had strayed. I didn’t want to forgive her,’ Philippe Bière told the magistrate. ‘It was too shameful for me to see her.’
Faced with this familial response, Robert Gentien took fright. In January, he embarked on travels that led him first to the Midi, then through Italy, to Algeria and Spain. He advised Marie to take up an engagement in Brussels to perform in a new comic opera, La Fée des Bruyères (The Briar Fairy). Being away from Paris would temper family rage. It’s not difficult to imagine that he might have wanted to cool his own relations with Marie as well. He was not a man prepared for difficulties – as she claims again and again in her deposition. He wanted no worries at any cost.
Alone for the first time in her journeying life, Marie made her way to Brussels while Robert headed south. His letters to her are full of the excitement of his travels, the people, the hotels, the sights, the food, and with indications of the poste restante where she can reach him. Marie, however, is not at her best. She has prepared herself for her role, but now she is feeling ill. When she attends the first group rehearsal, her voice gives out. She takes herself to a doctor. He tells her she is pregnant.
Distraught, she writes to Robert, who counsels calm and tells her his thoughts are with her – though in fact he’s heading off from Naples to Tunis. Voiceless, Marie can’t fulfil her contract, and it is cancelled. Her employer writes to inform Madame Bière that her daughter can’t take on the role of the fairy and is very distressed. Luckily, despite the fact that, feeling humiliated, she had originally refused his offer, Robert is sending her five hundred francs a month. In the confessional narrative the investigation in France always demands of the ac
cused, it is clear that Marie is ever trying to distance herself from the shaming fact that she receives money from her lover. For her, their relations are always first and foremost love relations. As she points out, if she had really been interested in money, she would not have set out to kill the man who supplied it.
14. The Love Child
Not wanting to believe the doctor who tells her she’s pregnant, though she knows he’s right, Marie goes back to Paris and tries to make it up with her parents. A few days in Paris, and she’s once more persuaded that her pregnancy is real. She doesn’t want to shame her family, so she returns to Brussels. Here she is very ill and believes, retrospectively, that she only survived thanks to the care of a stranger. Back in Paris once more, she holes up in a small room in a hotel in the Rue du Chateau d’Eau. The only person who visits her there is her mother. She is very grateful to her mother for restoring her relationship with her.
Marie’s letters don’t survive. But she recaps her Brussels odyssey for the investigating magistrate in the margin of one of Robert’s early letters about the pregnancy. The contrast between her account and his travel document is in itself an indictment of not only their relationship but also of the period’s cavalier male–female relations. In the same breath as she charts her travails, he describes for her the formidable beauty of the Kabyl women. This, together with his repeated caution to ‘be calm’, acts as a reproach. Though her last letter was charming and affectionate, he writes, it was quite clear that she was allowing her petite tête folle, her mad little head, to dominate her. The proof lies in the folly of her journey to Paris.
A few weeks later, on 20 February 1878, he writes to express his sadness at all the trouble he has caused her. The trouble, Marie’s marginalia attest, is that he assumes she has gone ahead with the abortion she mooted in her own last letter. She had indeed considered it. She wanted to keep Robert’s worries to a minimum, and to do that, she had been prepared to sacrifice both her health and her position. But this thought of an abortion occurred while she was still uncertain that she was pregnant, and it had passed with the baby’s reality.
Trials of Passion Page 15
