Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Abortion was a criminal act in Third Republic France and could carry a heavy prison sentence, both for the woman and the abortionist. So Robert, though he thinks the abortion has taken place, never mentions the act by name. Marie confesses her thoughts of undergoing one to the judge because she is trying to make sense for him of Robert’s innuendoes – and of course to point a vengeful finger at her one-time lover. When Robert’s letter states that it really isn’t up to him to make a judgement about what she has done, that ‘her generous soul has perhaps led her to extremes’ but there is nothing he can do to change matters because her letter arrived too late, he is referring to the abortion.

  Marie is eager for the judge to know all this, since one of her strikes against Robert is that she has told the investigating magistrate – and will tell the court – that her one-time lover urged her to have an abortion on his return to France, even though it was now very late in her pregnancy. He even supplied a doctor’s name. Gentien, of course, will refute this.

  On 12 March 1878, in response to a letter in which it seems Marie evoked her lacerating situation in dramatic terms, Robert writes to his pauvre amie to tell her how he sympathizes with her suffering. He really hadn’t expected all these complications. Bitter reflections of his guilt now pursue him: he came to trouble her gentle quiet and now he is unable to give her the compensation that she is within her rights to expect. Marie interprets this as his recognition that he owes her marriage!

  Robert doesn’t mention that word, but he does write, ‘Decidedly your mother was perhaps right: I’m your evil genius and instead of facilitating your career as I had so much hoped to do, it’s I who stop you on the first step of the ladder.’ He goes on to ask her to burn all his correspondence since one never knows what worries can grow out of it – a sign, Marie notes, of his bad conscience. Since none of Marie’s letters except for a few roughs find a place in her sizeable judicial dossier, it’s clear that he burnt hers.

  Back in Paris in early May, Robert at last arranges a rendez-vous, though not at his home. He has serious reasons not to want anyone in his entourage to see her or know anything about her state. According to Marie’s later testimony, this is the moment when he bullies her into going to see a certain Dr Rouch for a late abortion: women, she claims he said to her, should do what their lovers ask. Marie protests and feels her child move at the very same time as Robert demands its life be terminated. Needless to say, both Robert and Dr Rouch deny Marie’s unprovable imputation. Rouch says that it was she who wanted the abortion and he made it clear that it was too late and counselled patience. Whatever the exact truth, what is clear is that Robert, playboy that he is, is out of sorts and inconvenienced by Marie’s pregnancy, while she states, T love you too much to kill your child.’ He makes appointments and breaks them, frequently apologizes for lateness; sees her, but with little zest; then goes off on 20 July and delays returning to Paris until the autumn. He wants nothing to do with this baby and little to do with this maternal Marie.

  It is around this time that Marie begins keeping the journal that she headlines ‘Impressions, sufferings, tortures’. The erratic entries at first read like unsent letters to her lover. Like Christiana Edmunds, like Mrs Robinson, Marie had the writing urge, but Robert has warned her not to do so too frequently. Her notebook runs from 14 July 1878 to 10 November 1879, approximately the moment when her final obsession takes shape. There is a flurry of entries at the start when, pregnant and alone in her tiny rooms, she despairs of her love and her fate. A letter from Robert, and she weeps with joy, exclaims her faith in him to the blank page, says how much she values him as well as loves him. She should never have doubted his heart. Her own marginal notes here, written while she is in detention awaiting trial, tersely comment on the vagaries of illusion that love puts in train: ‘I was wrong in thinking that I esteemed him. I only loved him.’

  On Sundays she goes to church to ask God to inspire Robert with love for her and to beg him to bless their union – ‘because you must, my adored one, be mine one day! Isn’t it the case that the father of my child should be my husband?... God demands it.’

  Her magical thinking in her abandonment is wholly understandable. An eight-day silence from Robert and she is in despair again, recognizing that she is just a burden and, worse, a regret for him. Her thoughts leap to suicide and retribution: if men don’t condemn him, when she’s gone, then God in his justice will know how to deal with him.

  Marie swings to the pendulum of Robert’s letters, adoring him when they arrive, deploring him and her fate when they don’t. In her helplessness, the ups and downs and occasional illnesses of her pregnancy, she is every abandoned woman.

  Meanwhile, his letters are increasingly filled with pleas for caution and circumspection: secrecy is even more important now. He responds to her despair by telling her she isn’t the first woman to find herself in this situation and to make this ‘big journey’. Time passes. Things get sorted – or else what would become of the world!’ On 11 September he writes from his chateau saying that he would like to see her calm and certain of the future. Marie interprets this as a further demand to be guarded in her actions and a reminder of her promise to conform to his wishes. He wants her to go to a midwife in Montmartre and leave the child there, without telling her mother what has happened. Since Montmartre at this time was still an outlying village peopled by the poor and vagrant, alongside the apaches of the criminal classes, no one from Robert’s circle would see her there. Artists were only just beginning to trickle into what through the 1880s would become the capital of Paris’s Bohemia.

  In mid-September Robert comes to Paris for a day or so. Marie states in her deposition that on meeting her, he continues to make scenes, ‘ever and always reproaching my pregnancy. He leaves me just as my pains start. He hands me over to my concierge, giving her an envelope containing an address where she can reach him in case of accident. He had so tortured me that he hoped my death and the baby’s would take place.’

  Yet until June of the following year, Marie would still be holding out hopes of Robert.

  On 4 October 1878, Marie Bière, after a thirty-six-hour labour, was delivered of a little girl she named Juliette Claire. The birth certificate (with a slippage of Marie’s age) registers her as the natural daughter of Marie Madeleine Bière, artiste musicienne, twenty-five years old.

  The day after the birth Marie writes to Robert covertly to say that their friend has been delivered of a little girl and they are despairing of trying to save her. Indeed, it had been a difficult birth and there may have been some question whether the enfeebled child would live, but as Marie notes in her marginalia to a letter of Robert’s dated 9 October, she had deliberately masked the truth in order to save him from the worries he so hates. Believing what he wanted to believe, Robert thinks the child dead. He says, ‘I learned with great joy that you had been relieved of a heavy weight and that all in all everything happened for the best. Now, no brainstorms, you must rest and rest.’

  She finally admits to him that the child is alive and that her mother was with her for the birth. A tortuous tug of love and war then begins. Marie, as Robert has instructed, has put the child out to a wet-nurse – one in Saint-Denis, whom she found through an agency. She wants Robert to come and see her; she wants his love, so she succumbs to his wishes about the child. But Marie also wants him to meet and acknowledge his daughter, whom she adores and who, she says, is so beautiful and the very portrait of her father.

  Robert won’t do either. It takes him twenty-five days after the birth to visit Marie and he certainly doesn’t want the baby there.

  Marie begs. They have begun to sleep together again, though erratically. In her deposition she says she’s doing this for her child. But she also loves him in a ‘senseless’ way. She prostrates herself before him. He withdraws in horror. He hates her talking endlessly about the child. In her journal she writes that he detests her and doesn’t bother to hide it. ‘He’s thinking of getting married!!!’ sh
e notes with an army of exclamation marks. Robert spends long stretches of time away from Paris. In the trial documents she recounts how, having surreptitiously brought the child and her nurse home when Robert was due to visit, he erupted in fury and refused to enter the room where little Juliette lay. He tells her she lacks intelligence: T come here to distract myself and not to take part in scenes’

  In a letter of 5 December Marie threatens suicide:

  Robert,

  If you knew the tortures you make me undergo when you don’t see me two days in a row, you would shed tears of shame and regret: you aren’t as bad as you want to appear.

  Hell’s supplications are as nothing in comparison to those I have to endure: I must be very strong still to be alive.

  It’s five o’clock and you’re not here, so I won’t see you today.

  What are these many things you have to do?

  Don’t overstep the mark, Robert. I’m capable of everything, even of killing myself, in order to cause you remorse and trouble you in your pleasures. From what rock can your heart have been hewn? I blush to have a child of yours: it will have no feeling and will damn its mother.

  Just tell me you’ll never change and I’ll get rid of both of us at the same time, mother and daughter; it will be better to finish things off immediately. It’s cowardly to go on with the life you make me live.

  Mercy, Robert! Take pity, let me live, because I swear to you, I feel myself dying; I’m at your knees, I cry, I implore! Come back. Love me. I love you enough to lose my reason or my life. M

  This letter went unsent. But it allows us to imagine the tenor of the others. Marie veers frantically between passionate declarations and hate and recrimination. According to the marginalia in this letter, Robert appeared while she was writing it. A terrible scene took place. To Marie’s reproaches, Robert responded that he would never see the child and would break off all relations if she carried on in this way. It’s clear that Robert is appalled both by Marie’s frantic state and the situation he has got himself into. He tries to behave correctly according to his own code: he must support Marie and the child, but that support certainly doesn’t include legally recognizing the child’s existence or loving both – a toxic bundle for a sybaritic gallant.

  Furious after his departure, Marie decides to take her revenge by going to complain to his uncle of his conduct towards her. The uncle refuses her visit.

  If Marie’s letters and the notebook she subsequently kept seem both melodramatic and masochistic, they are reflections of the rhetoric of love of her times. The operatic material she was so familiar with could easily have supplied her with both. But her writings also reflect the true terror of her situation. Her reputation, already compromised, would be completely wrecked if she lived openly with her child. Yet she loved her little girl, perhaps excessively, as her investigating magistrate notes, and wanted her close. Short of prostituting herself, nor were there any ready means, Robert aside, of earning her keep and recovering her injured pride. Her voice has gone. Her father won’t take her in. As he said in his deposition, ‘It was too shameful for me to see her. I allowed my wife to, but I couldn’t.’

  In a letter of 26 January 1879 to an old friend, a lawyer in Auch in southwest France, we hear Marie in a less frantic state. She assesses her situation coolly, noting that above all she is tormented by the fact that she can no longer sing. She recognizes that she is now only a burden for Robert. ‘My amour propre is disturbed by it, all the more so since he makes me feel it. How I regret not having remained faithful to my virginal vows! I would have kept your affection and esteem.’

  To give Robert his due – as Marie tried by fits and starts to do, since she wanted to keep both his love and her self-respect – a man of his background could neither recognize the child nor marry Marie without alienating his all-important family. The thought of marriage, it seems, had never entered his mind – nor, if she’s to be believed, Marie’s either, at least initially. She allowed passion to carry her away. Now, as she explains to her lawyer friend, Robert makes only ‘ceremonial visits’, regular but ‘very cold and monotonous’. Soon, he explains, a new business venture will mean even less time for her.

  Matters take a dramatic turn with little Juliette’s sudden death on 9 April of bronchial complications. She goes like a little bird, in the night’, Marie says. She had seen her daughter just the night before and she is now beside herself: bereft, guilty, tormented by her failed loves, both passionate and maternal. Robert has alienated her from her family and her work. And now her child is dead. Racked by guilt, she imagines if she hadn’t given her over to a nurse, the baby would not have died. The night after she learns of the death, she writes a vow on a photograph of herself, and places it in a box next to one of the child: ‘I give my life and that of her father to my little dead girl.’

  Robert, when she tells him of the death, seems pleased.

  15. ‘Going Mad’

  Marie blames herself for her daughter’s death. She also vehemently reproaches Robert, the man who has ‘bewitched’ her and coerced her into giving up her little one. Her suffering is terrible to bear. She asks him to give her another child to replace little Juliette. When he refuses, her despair is total. Vengeance enters her mind: a life for a life. Under May–June in her notebook there are only two entries. The first reads: ‘He comes and makes use of me, but he doesn’t love me. I’ll kill him!’ The second is a long poem about the baby, her beauty, the pride she took in her. She writes that like her daughter she is now going to leave this damned world, where death is the only truth. The last stanza asserts that before making her exit, however, she will take revenge on the father who damned the child and made a martyr of the mother: death will unite them in eternity.

  Marie’s love has turned to hate. After a violent scene with Robert, she buys a revolver, intent on killing herself or him, or both of them: hatred and self-hatred blur into each other with slippery ease. By her own later admission, she writes him a despairing letter full of provocative insults. She says it’s over between them. He comes to see her, intent on complying with her wish for a final rupture, but when she hears him voicing it aloud, she goes to pieces.

  In his 7 July description of the ‘crisis’ scene to Monsieur Oudinet, a former tutor of Robert’s who serves as their ‘business’ go-between, Robert says Marie started by taunting him, then very calmly went to her mirrored wardrobe and opened the door while saying, ‘It’s all decided then? Fine, I’ll show you how a woman who loves you behaves.’

  With that, I see her with a revolver in her hand ready to kill herself. I only have time enough to throw myself on her and grab it from her hand. She then falls into a terrible nervous crisis. I call her maid and escape ... She exhausts me because at times she goes mad, like Estelle [a former mistress]. I’m going to take precautions, because she’s a woman who’s capable of all the mad things one can imagine. She’ll kill herself, or having now turned against me, what won’t she do ... ? I’m still shaken and ask myself whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to the police ... I’m going to wait two or three days to see if she calms down. After that, I’ll meet her, though with a little trepidation, and this time in the street: I don’t want to fall into a trap or be involved in a scandal. Ah! Women! My dear friend, they have their good side, but we pay for it dearly. Not a word of any of this at Tustal.

  On 30 June, immediately after the threatened suicide scene, Robert, ever wary of his reputation, had written to Marie advising courage and above all no more impetuous mad acts or coups de tête. He was happy, he said, to have been at her side and prevented her folly and the eruption of a scandal. Rupture, as difficult as it might seem for the moment, would give her the tranquillity she needed. What has he been to her for such a long time now, but a good and devoted friend? He will remain so if she allows him to - that is, by not creating a furore and by giving him the right to conduct himself as a galant-homme, a gentleman.

  We don’t know Marie’s response to him. An undated
July entry in her notebook records that she had the opportunity to kill him, but didn’t, God only knows why. He has humiliated her. Can it be, she asks, that despite herself she still holds out hope? In a calmer mood she writes to Monsieur Oudinet, who, as the subsequent trial would make apparent, was himself rather taken with Marie, and less than enamoured of Robert’s ways with women. To Oudinet she announces the end of Robert’s relations with her. She has been alerted by a letter from him saying she doesn’t have to worry about the future, since he’ll pay her a monthly sum. This has so humiliated her that she feels she no longer has to shield him from public disgrace. She’s prepared to take back her full liberty; but she doesn’t want to be at his mercy and dependent on the monthly sum he’ll choose to give her. So she’s going to ask him for a lump sum. She doesn’t see this as an offering, but as a small restitution of what he owes her, since he has ruined her life and her future, rendering her incapable of doing anything.

  Almost simultaneously Robert writes to Oudinet saying that the split having taken place, he is prepared to pay Marie a monthly sum for the foreseeable future, but he wants his freedom in return and he’ll be rigorous about the rupture. He won’t see her. T know a lot of men who wouldn’t do as much: they wouldn’t keep a woman for two years having been her lover for some two or three months.’ He wants Marie to have a holiday: a rest will lessen her distress.

  She finally goes to Royan, a resort on the Atlantic coast, with her mother. Here she sees a graphologist, those experts of the time who, not so unlike the neurolinguists of today, were said to be able to read personality – in their case, from handwriting. She is told she has an astonishing power of loving, or amativité. (Mrs Robinson’s phrenological reading attributed a similar power to her.)