Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Over the course of the summer, Marie learns that Robert has replaced her with another woman. She had already spied on him a year ago, while she was heavily pregnant with Juliette. Now she does so more assiduously. Her need for revenge has grown into an obsession. She can’t bear Robert’s total abandonment: the desire for vengeance, the steps towards its implementation, are a continuation of the affair by different means.

  Like a divorcing partner who, however reasonable her statements, can’t yet let go, she turns to monetary demands as a form of communication – now that sex is over and the matter of children settled. In October she writes to Robert to ask for a lump sum of three thousand francs in addition to the three hundred a month he has been sending her, since favours presumably ceased, so that she can install herself as a music teacher. His contemptuous reply, telling her he is skint, infuriates her. She threatens to expose his conduct to his family, to write to Oudinet and to his brother-in-law and create a scandal if he doesn’t comply. She visits his flat and bursts in on his new mistress. He writes to say, Tour visit this morning was wholly inconvenient. One doesn’t force oneself into people’s houses unexpectedly. The day I broke with you, I intended to take back my liberty wholly and I have begun a serious liaison since then.’

  On 10 November she tells her notebooks that seven months have passed since her daughter’s death and she hasn’t seen Robert in four. He sends her a paltry pension, and imagines that she can live this life. But she can’t. She has resolved to die because he doesn’t love her and because all hope of being a mother again is lost to her. Yet she doesn’t want another woman to be the mother of his children. Because of that, she has to kill him.

  She also writes that she feels she is going mad.

  ‘Je sens queje deviens folle’ are the first words scribbled in pencil in a small day diary covering the period from 21 November till the eve of her murder attempt. (The police discovered the diary in her cupboard: she threw it into the fireplace during one of her interrogations, so its entries are somewhat singed.) Marie has just bought a revolver and has started stalking her former lover. The investigating magistrate’s report says that she has also started practising how to use it. In her first diary entry she vows to kill Robert, but a note of two hours later, at six o’clock, declares he is still alive. Her strength betrayed her. Next time it won’t, she tells the page and her daughter. Many of these entries are addressed to little Juliette, in whose name she wants this death.

  On 13 December she tells the notebook that she wrote to Robert, but the insolent man didn’t answer. ‘He has forgotten me. And thinks because he sends me pennies to eat with, we’re quits. I don’t want your money, Robert. I want your life. I don’t want to live on charity or prostitution! I can’t work, because my health is destroyed and my courage has abandoned me ... I want to die, but I want him to die first.’ Her use of the word ‘prostitution’ for the first time marks her self-abasement, as if she has finally allowed herself to acknowledge that her notions of romantic love with Robert were a veil thrown over her real status, that of the kept coquette she has always resisted.

  On 19 December she goes to the Fête des Inondations de Maresie, knowing that he’ll be at this major event in the Paris social calendar. She has her revolver with her. But although she sees Robert, he is too far away for her to take aim. The crowd, she writes, is his shield. But she’ll get him in the end.

  On Christmas Day she notes in her diary: ‘My little Jesus is dead, rots in the earth while I’m still here ... her mother. Mother ... what a gentle word: it’s so sad to have already lost it.’ New Year’s Day has her scrawling on the reverse side of a photo of Robert: ‘RG – condemned to death by me, Marie.’ That morning he had sent her five hundred francs, wanting to get rid of her, humiliating her further, or so she says in her deposition. She no longer sleeps, or goes out. She hardly eats, sees no one: she is altogether given over to her obsession.

  At four o’clock on 3 January, Marie heads out once more with her revolver. Her diary entry salutes her own mother, the woman whose all-encompassing form of maternal love she has interiorized as an ideal. She asks her mother to forgive her: ‘... but you know the power of maternal love and you’ll understand that I’ve gone off to find my child again.’ At eight o’clock, she notes, ‘he’s still alive. Until tomorrow then.’

  Periodically in her notes she calls Robert ‘the monster’: dehumanized, it is easier to shoot him. She hires a carriage and sits in front of his house in the Rue Auber, waiting for her moment. Now, as she says in her statement, her mind was ‘in chaos’. Women come and go from the premises. She follows the starlet from the Palais-Royal, watches her carriage take a tumble, and sees the younger woman thrown. Marie evidently looks so pitiful that the driver, once he has dropped her at her mother’s, says he’ll stake out Robert’s premises for her. It is he who tells her that her former lover’s new inamorata is Mile Colas.

  On the evening of 7 January, Marie at last spies Robert. He comes out of the apartment with Mile Colas and sees her off in a carriage. He then heads towards the Rue Scribe. Marie launches herself out of her vehicle, rushes after him and takes aim. At her first shot, he falls. She doesn’t know whether vengeance is at last hers, or if he has merely taken fright and dropped down. She shoots again, and this time he gets up and starts to run. He’s shouting and she realizes he doesn’t recognize her beneath the large hat and lorgnon she has donned as a disguise. She fires a third shot which goes wide. Passers-by have gathered and a guardian of the peace has jumped on her from behind. He disarms her and she now can’t turn the pistol on herself, as she had resolved to do.

  Robert is staring at her, but he doesn’t recognize her. She identifies herself, and publicly points a finger at him, accusing him of having murdered her daughter.

  ‘She’s mad,’ he says, and turns away.

  In her signed deposition, which describes the scene, Marie states that in those first moments she regretted not having managed to kill him. In her calmer state, without for an instant regretting what she has done – because this man merited a punishment for toying with her love and all the rest of her feelings – she no longer wishes him dead. She is indifferent: life will perhaps be a greater punishment for him. ‘I’ve experienced both physical and moral pain and I don’t know which is harder to bear,’ she writes.

  Marie Madeleine Bière, known as Maria Biraldi, is eventually charged with having voluntarily attempted to commit homicide on the person of Robert Gentien. The attempt failed only because of circumstances independent of her will. In other words, this is a murder attempt with premeditation. Under French penal law, Marie is remanded in custody in the women’s prison of Saint-Lazare, while the investigating magistrate, Monsieur Adolphe Guillot, prepares the dossier of her case – and deliberates on the exact charge.

  16. The Investigation

  French judicial procedure, fundamentally laid down in the Napoleonic Code d’instruction criminelle of 1808, differs markedly from the English and American.

  In France the trial itself is preceded by a long period of inquiry, or instruction, led by an investigating magistrate. This figure, a cross between chief detective and a judicial eminence – not altogether unlike the King’s magistrates of the ancien régime who themselves had sombre links to a secular version of the Spanish inquisitors – prepares the case against the defendant until he is satisfied that it is ready to be prosecuted by the court. The investigating magistrate has wide- ranging powers in what is understood as a procedure that will establish the truth. He carries out seizures and searches, orders expert testimony and verifies evidence. He interrogates the defendant as well as a host of witnesses.

  This instruction is scarcely limited to material evidence or witnesses to the crime. An entire life is under investigation here. Character and psychological make-up are of as much importance as material facts. It was this interest in the psychology of the defendant and of the crime that perhaps made the French judicial system in the nineteenth century so much
more permeable to the rising profession of psychiatry – even though the terms they used might not be the same. Psychology, after all, includes rational, cognitive processes as well as emotional and perceptual ones.

  In France, as in other continental jurisdictions influenced by the Napoleonic Code, the specific crime came to be understood as part of a larger context in which a criminal personality could be detected. Questions of material evidence and moral responsibility, so central to Anglo-Saxon jurists, would often come second to investigations into the dangerous personality of the defendant and the risk he or she posed to society. This – and the possibility of repeat offence that it implied – would also influence sentencing. When in 1876 the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso introduced his hereditarian theories of the ‘born criminal’, that reversion to an atavistic type supposedly common to those who offend, his work found a ready home in French medico-legal thinking, which had long been interested in the personality of the accused as much as in the particular crime committed.

  Lombroso’s view of the criminal woman – doubly exceptional and therefore a true monster – also influenced the courts. Already present in the characterizations of the female that Darwin and Maudsley offered, this criminal woman was a contradictory creature, both excessively ‘feminine’ in her deceitfulness – not seen to be at odds with her supposed limited intelligence – and somehow masculine in her eroticism, her increased sexuality. She shared in the epoch’s understanding of woman as childlike, morally deficient, sexually cold, pious and maternal – all stereotypes that were in play but at the same time challenged by the passionate criminals of the fin de siècle.

  To help build up a personality profile, the French investigating magistrate asks the defendant to submit an autobiographical account, a ‘memoir’ of her life and her acts, alongside letters, poems and writings. In this Rousseauian confessional, it is hoped the psychology of the crime will be laid bare and intention and motive made clear. Witnesses of the accused’s early life, even if from far-flung jurisdictions, are called: her ways of loving, her friendships, her faith, her family relations, her forebears, are all interrogated in order to arrive at a full picture. Gossip and hearsay often enough find a place in the final dossier. This ‘hearsay’ evidence provides intriguing testimony about the nature of the period’s received and accepted ideas. So, for example, when men – in the manifold instances of terrifying and drunken domestic abuse that then filled the courts – killed their wives, neighbours would often corroborate that, like the husband, they knew from the sounds of her many and therefore ‘acceptable’ beatings that the wife must be ‘straying’. No hard evidence for her unfaithfulness might exist – simply prejudice, which elided brutal punishment into proof of a prior crime.

  Meetings between the investigating magistrate (or his delegates) and witnesses are recorded in writing by a greffier, a clerk of the court. This is no true verbatim record, but the magistrate’s version of the interview proceedings dictated after the event by him, and then read, signed and approved by the witness. The magistrate may inevitably, however accurate his notes, transpose these into better French and subliminally offer an interpretation. This is why archival memoirs in the defendant’s own words can be so revealing: they haven’t passed through the disciplined structures of the magistrate’s style and language.

  The defendant herself may be present at witness interviews and ask questions, or indeed supply them to the magistrate if she can’t be part of the interrogation. She is also permitted to interrupt proceedings, even if it is her victim who is being interviewed. The magistrate, like some novelist, may then interpolate his sense of the scene and the tensions between the parties in his recorded account. (The defendant in the dock can interrupt witnesses on the stand in court, as well.) However, defendants did not – until reforms of 1897 – have access to representation by a lawyer during the instruction stage. Nor were charges against the defendant definitively stated or brought until the end of that stage. All the material gathered during the instruction, the so-called pièces, were then put together – and this continues today – into a large document, a dossier, and presented at court, where it forms the foundation of the trial. It is used and often referred to by the presiding trial judge, the président of the court, but rarely argued with.

  The investigation period and the work of the magistrate within it can be a long and tangled process. The notorious Madame Steinheil, the former mistress of President Félix Faure, who died in her arms – some said while she was performing fellatio on him – was nine years later implicated in the murder of her husband and mother-in-law: she went through two investigating judges and a year-long instruction before finally being acquitted in 1909. The German title of Kafka’s novel, The Trial – Der Prozess – as well as its arduous content and the mystified state of its accused hero who doesn’t know the charges against him, gives a better sense of the whole ‘process’ of the instruction and continental judicial procedure than its English title or Anglo-Saxon legal fictions.

  Marie Bière was fortunate in her juge d’instruction. Adolphe Guillot (1836–1906) was already in 1880 a highly respected judge, one of the crop of judges with socially liberal and Republican sympathies who had displaced the judicial stars of the earlier monarchy. Over the coming years his reputation, indeed celebrity, would grow because of his writing and campaigning work on behalf of the independence of the judiciary, as well as on jury and prison reform. Guillot called for the revision of the Code d’instruction criminelle, the rules governing investigatory procedure, and won the right for defendants to have a lawyer present during the interrogations of the instruction period. (Other changes included that any charge against the accused must be issued within two days.) He also campaigned on behalf of children’s rights, and took pioneering steps to have both children and young girls protected in the judicial system. His two volumes of the 1880s on Paris prisons, Paris qui Souffre, won him election to the elite circle of the Académie Française: contemporary femininists, criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso and the world-famous analyst of the crowd, Gustave Le Bon, all cited Guillot’s exemplary work.

  Like many defendants held on remand, Marie Bière developed a close relationship with her juge d’instruction. Saint-Lazare, the women’s prison where she was sent, was a vast place: in 1885 it housed some ten thousand women. Run by nuns, it was both a detention centre and a detaining hospital, and found its largest cohort of inmates among the so-called insoumises, the prostitutes who didn’t or wouldn’t register under the Paris vice squad clean-up plan and were sent to prison both as punishment and for deliberately demeaning hospital checks on their sexual health. In this atmosphere, Marie’s warmest links were with her inquisitor. Her letters to him have an intimate ring. On 16 February 1880 she writes from her cell, ‘Je suis horriblement triste’ – Tm horribly sad. I beg of you, save me.’ Attending witness interviews, being interrogated by Guillot, constituted Marie’s principal moments of human contact in jail.

  Marie was, according to the judge’s notes, too weak to attend the first interrogation session with Robert Gentien. He, too, couldn’t or wouldn’t respond to the investigating magistrate’s first summons to an interview at which Marie would be present. The doctors had warned him such an encounter would be bad for his health, he said. He had been slow to recuperate from his wounds after the shooting. These were serious, if not fatal.

  The documents seem to imply that through February and March, Marie Bière was impatient for this encounter to take place. She had written down five questions she wanted the judge to put to Robert, even if he refused to have her there. The questions already signal the substance of her character defence: she was an honest woman – no coquette, no prostitute – until Robert led her astray. He wanted her to have an abortion, and when that didn’t happen he coerced her into giving up her child, which ineluctably led to the child’s death.

  Guillot did indeed put Marie’s questions to Robert, who had acquiesced to the second request for interview agains
t his doctors’ orders. He limped badly: the doctors had not been able to extricate the bullet lodged in his right leg. But his speech, the deposition states, was clear and self-assured and he maintained his sang-froid throughout, even when Marie came in at the end for the signing of the statement.

  To Marie’s first question – ‘On the night of 16 October 1878 when I came to see you for the first time, was I an honest woman and did you consider me such?’ – Robert replied as the practical man of the world that he was: ‘It was in 1877 and not in 1878 and the question is embarrassing ... A young girl who accepts a rendez-vous with a young man and then comes to his house is really going too far if she expects to pass as an honest woman.’

  Marie’s second question focused on her ‘honesty’ once more: ‘When I was pregnant, did you ever for a moment doubt that the child was yours?’ Robert answered: T didn’t doubt it at the time, but now I do.’

  In response to her query as to whether he had wanted her to terminate the pregnancy when she was in Brussels, Robert answered: ‘All I had were her letters. These were habitually written in an intense [exalté – the suggestion is theatrically melodramatic] style. I thought she was in despair over what she believed was a pregnancy, and was prepared to go to any lengths. I told her to do nothing. I was trying to boost her spirits.’

  But had he not sent her to Dr Rouch to get an abortion? Marie pressed her point. ‘That’s an odious slur,’ Robert protested. ‘She wouldn’t go and see her family doctor, and I couldn’t for personal reasons send her to mine, so I got a recommendation from someone for her to see Dr Rouch. She told me he had simply confirmed that she was three to four months pregnant and advised various precautions.’