Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Didn’t he say that you flirted with him, that you marked him out?’

  ‘Me, flirt?’ ‘Moi, coquette? Marie smiles sadly.

  ‘I don’t want to say anything that will offend you,’ Bachelier offers. Tm only pointing out that polite, familiar, sophisticated relations were established between you.’ He goes on to evoke their excursion to Saint-Sebastien, the promise of a rendez-vous in Paris, the fact that she found Gentien handsome, elegant, amiable, well brought up, and a man in a hurry ... Marie agrees to this last, and emphatically to the fact that her mother knew nothing of the tryst.

  Président Bachelier pushes her on this: ‘See here, you were twenty- eight years old, no longer a child, an inexperienced girl. You’d spent ten years in the world of the theatre. You must have known very well what M. Gentien expected of you?’

  Marie bows her head and says nothing.

  Bachelier then leads her through to her discovery of her pregnancy during her time in Brussels. He interrogates her statement that Gentien urged an abortion first, there and then, with Dr Rouch in Paris. But even though Marie seems to be caught in an assertion that both Gentien and Dr Rouch deny, an accusation that the judge calls ‘ill-founded’, she insists in a firm voice, above the growing murmurs from an excited public, that her accusation is true.

  ‘Monsieur Gentien finished by saying you were mad. Are you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Marie answers drily.

  The interrogation now moves towards the eve of the birth of her child, and Marie’s responses take on an intensity that provokes outbursts from the public. The president of the court has evidently nettled her by evoking how sick Gentien was of all the complications she ‘created’, how he didn’t want to ruin his relations with his family by publicly admitting her as a lover, how all this led to his decision to terminate his relations with her.

  Marie bursts out, ‘Yes and on the eve of the birth of my child, he came to see me in a fury. He was full of reproaches. He left me in a terrible state. He clearly wanted to see both mother and child dead.’

  ‘Calm yourself,’ Bachelier orders. ‘What is certain is that he didn’t want to recognize the child as his. He didn’t want you to recognize her either.’

  ‘That’s correct. Robert demanded that we be separated.’

  As the story of her life moves towards the death of her daughter, Marie grows more and more visibly agitated. She quotes Robert saying, ‘This child disgusts me!’ when she tries to have him see the infant. She re-enacts her response, which is to look her lover straight in the face and say, ‘Your life, Robert, is attached to that of this child! If she dies, you’ll die, because I’ll kill you.’

  The court erupts in shock and excitement and Marie falls back on the bench, so distressed she can barely respond to the rest of the questioning.

  Bachelier asks why, after the baby’s death, she had continued to see Robert.

  Marie replies in a murmur that she wanted another child. ‘Mothers will understand me,’ she says.

  He takes her through the rest of their relations, including the scene in which she threatened to kill herself and after which she didn’t see Robert again, though she sent him pleading letters asking him to come back.

  ‘But he was bored with you: this man of the world’s patience had reached its end ... Then came your demands for money.’

  Marie justifies her wish to be independent of the man who had made a martyr of her and doomed her child. She sits quietly through the reading of her journal and her vengeful notes, and finally affirms that she had planned to murder her former lover.

  Robert Gentien is the first of sixty witnesses up on the stand. He limps markedly as he makes his way there. The papers note that despite his ‘correct’ attire, he looks far older than his years. In a monotone, he attests the points of his deposition. Apparently Marie’s eyes never leave him, though her expression is sad and resigned. Drama erupts amongst the public and the key players over the question of whether he had wanted her to have an abortion.

  When he denies this, Marie rises to intervene in the proceedings. ‘You remember the evening when you first talked to me of Dr Rouch? That was the night I first felt the child move inside me. I said to you, “Here’s a sign from God!”’

  There is a wave of noisy murmuring amongst the public, which Bachelier contains. He moves things on with a rapid question.

  ‘You didn’t want to come to the birth.’

  ‘I was forced to be out of Paris at the time.’

  ‘Did you demand that the child be sent to a wet-nurse at Saint- Denis?’

  Robert’s denial elicits a forceful intervention from Marie: ‘He did demand it.’

  ‘Everything she did, she did herself,’ Robert contends.

  ‘But did you ask her not to recognize her daughter?

  ‘Indeed I did. It was for her mother’s sake.’

  Sniggers are heard amongst the public.

  ‘She holds you responsible for the child’s death: she failed to give the child sufficient maternal care because of you.’

  Gentien replies in a bored voice, ‘She’s always upheld that thesis.’

  And Marie bursts in once more, contempt in her voice. ‘Everything he says is false.’

  Now Maître Lachaud, Marie’s defence counsel, rises to his feet.

  At sixty-five, Charles Lachaud (1817–82) was the period’s leading criminal defence lawyer. He had risen to fame under Napoleon III and had served as one of four defence counsels for the notorious twenty- four-year-old Marie Lafarge, accused in 1840 of the long-distance poisoning of her husband. Lachaud was renowned for his ‘agile wit’, ‘his fiery eloquence’ and his ‘magical influence over juries’. He was also deemed to be ‘a better psychologist than those that bear the name’. Certainly, his performance in Marie Bière’s case showed him as a masterly advocate whose timing and way with the jury, singling each one out as an individual, were impeccable and turned the case into a precedent for posterity.

  Maitre Lachaud intervened to make more of Gentien’s attitude to his child and his refusal to see it. Perhaps he realized that Alexandre Dumas was amongst the public. The latter had exclaimed loudly when Gentien repeated that not only was he unhappy about the child’s birth, but that seeing it would have meant a tedious journey out of Paris, all the way to Saint-Denis. Lachaud pressed on: So when Marie had had the child brought to her flat one evening when Gentien was visiting and begged him to see the baby, why had he refused to do so then?

  There was a stranger present,’ Gentien replies.

  ‘What stranger?’ Lachaud asks.

  Gentien’s response – The nurse’ – draws more protests from the public. This perhaps gives Marie the added courage to stand up, lean on the bar and stare down her former lover.

  ‘But you could have seen the child alone. I would have brought her to my room and told the wet-nurse to go. It was that night that I said to you, “Beware, Robert, your existence depends on this tiny being; if she dies, so will you.’”

  There are noisy gasps, then another outburst of murmurs from the public as Gentien withdraws.

  The next sequence of witnesses is called by the prosecutor. Yet, according to Albert Bataille’s columns, they all sound as if they have been called by the defence, so great is the esteem and regard they all express for Marie. The married conductor of the Opéra Comique, whom a gossiping rag had salaciously linked with Marie, utterly denies the mendacious slur. The famous Escudier from the Théâtre-Italien, the chief of the Brussels Opera, a lawyer from Auch and a flurry of others all testify to her gentleness, her charm, her uprightness, her honesty. It is as if Marie really is an utter stranger to the values of the Bohemian demi-monde that her profession would normally ally her to. Even her concierge – a category of witness known more for malice than sweetness – states how touched she was by the affection Marie showed for her child and elaborates on her evident and genuine pain at Gentien’s treatment of her. Why, the woman had even once seen Marie throw down the money Genti
en had sent her.

  Président Bachelier raises an eyebrow at this. Himself a man of the world, he suggests that Marie, of course, then picked the money right up again. The concierge turns this straight round. When she sometimes encouraged Marie to hope that marriage might be the outcome of her and Gentien’s relations, Marie would raise her eyes to heaven and cry, ‘Alas, he’s too rich!’

  Dr Rouch, the purported abortionist, takes the stand and contests, even after Marie’s direct questioning, that he ever had abortion on offer. What he had said was that he could arrange for the baby to be adopted after birth.

  But Maître Lachaud is on his feet again. Reinforcing the idea that Robert sent Marie to an abortionist can only bring the jury onto her side. He interrogates Dr Rouch about a letter the juge d’instruction seized from the dossier. It is from an unknown woman who pleads in the most emotive terms that she can’t bear the thought that she is pregnant, that doctors must have ways of dealing with this, that her husband knows nothing. And now Président Bachelier intervenes once more. He has for some time been pressing Gentien’s case – as if he has a glimmering that what is unfolding before him is less about fact, or even psychology, than a contest in values: old and new, masculine and feminine, aristocratic and petty-bourgeois. He now firmly states that all doctors receive letters of this kind.

  19. ‘A Hyper-excitation of the Affective Faculties’

  Next in line on the witness stand are the two medico-legal experts from the University of Paris faculty. Their faces may already be familiar to the court public. They certainly will be as the decade rolls on.

  Docteur Émile Blanche (1820–93) is a celebrated alienist, well known in literary circles, and son of Docteur Esprit Blanche (1796–1852), who ran a private asylum in Montmartre and then in Passy. Émile worked with his father from a young age and inherited the second establishment. Though costs at the asylum were high, some three thousand francs per year, both father and son were known for their dedication to their patients.

  The great Romantic poet and translator of Goethe, Gérard de Nerval, who so influenced the Surrealists with his vivid depictions of waking dream and who walked his pet lobster Thibault through the streets of Paris, was confined in Montmartre under the care of Esprit in 1841 when he first broke down. A later breakdown in 1853–4 saw him under the care of Émile Blanche. De Nerval suffered from ‘lucid mania’ – hallucinative delusions in which he was persecuted or thought the soul of Napoleon had migrated into him, or considered himself a god and blessed people in the streets. In these manic crises he could also sometimes become aggressive.

  Nerval’s writings on his experiences comprise some of the most evocative depictions of altered states in any language. He also described the treatment offered by the Doctors Blanche. This differed remarkably little from that available either in the English spas or in the better madhouses. It largely consisted of hydrotherapy, or hot and cold showers – to shock the subject out of fury – and baths, to calm the nerves. Sometimes there was an application of ice to the head while feet were plunged into very hot water. De Nerval conceived of this treatment as a mode of purification. There were walks too, and exercise, plus the presence of the doctors, by turn encouraging or intimidating as they engaged in the ‘moral’ – what we would now call ‘psychological’ – therapy that the best of the mid-century asylums provided.

  Émile Blanche, in the manner that the pioneering doctor Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) had initiated of getting the disturbed to care for their fellows, had the good idea of interesting de Nerval in another young patient, a soldier returned from Africa who neither spoke nor seemed to see, had refused food for some six weeks and was being tube-fed. De Nerval’s own state improved remarkably when he managed to get this young man to speak. Despite what were on the whole good relations with his doctor, however, de Nerval left the asylum well before Blanche thought he could manage in the world. Blanche turned out to be right. Increasingly ill and impoverished, de Nerval hanged himself from window railings on a narrow street near the Châtelet three months after he had left the asylum.

  Émile Blanche’s reputation didn’t suffer as a result. He remained the literary world’s alienist of choice: the writer Guy de Maupassant was confined in Passy during his last years, and died there (of tertiary syphilis, not then recognized as having a final stage of dementia). Blanche was apparently a charming man, who frequented France’s famous chroniclers of the time, les frères Goncourt, and was on occasion a dining partner of both Pasteur and Turgenev. Indeed, in 1871 the people of Montmartre would have made a politician of Blanche if it hadn’t been discovered that a cousin of his had also been successful in the election and the law prevented two members of one family taking office.

  Auguste Motet (1832–1909), Marie Bière’s second medico-legal expert, was another well-known courtroom alienist, who aside from his penal duties ran a private establishment in the Rue de Charonne, off the Boulevard Voltaire, a bit of Paris that had only been annexed to the city in the 1860s. Motet was a frequent contributor to the journal that helped shape the field of public medicine, the Amahs d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale. He was a follower of the brilliant Charles Laségue (1816–83), a clinician who always insisted on a thorough knowledge of a patient’s extended medical history and whose work had defined areas of psychosomatic illness. Lasègue was also the first doctor to describe the condition of anorexia nervosa. Like others in his time, Lasègue and his disciples linked certain aspects of female derangement to the physiological processes associated with late or precocious menstruation, childbearing and lactation.

  In trying to distinguish between criminal responsibility and states of derangement in an ‘objective’ manner for the courts, Motet was a compassionate doctor with an eye for human complexity, even for what the period saw as perversion. In 1881, for example, the year after Marie’s trial, he was called in to assess a case against public decency in which a man in a public urinal had been arrested for masturbating. Drawing on the period’s interest in automatisms and sleepwalking, ‘altered’ or hypnotized states, Motet had insisted that the poor man, who was of ‘feminine’ disposition, had been in a condition seconde, akin to trance, and was therefore not responsible for his actions. He had had bouts of nervous illness before his arrest and he remembered nothing of the urinal episode. Indeed his relatives had been looking for him that day, even in the morgue. During the trial, since the prosecutor didn’t believe that what Motet was saying was possible, Motet hypnotized the man and had him relive the urinal moment, only snapping him out of his somnambulist state when he was about to repeat the offence.

  Drs Blanche and Motet had assessed Marie Bière at Saint-Lazare several times during the period of instruction, and had submitted their report to the judge on 6 March. This stated – following the formal procedure of such reports – that although Marie Bière had a rational motive for the crime and had shown great lucidity during her various interrogations, there was nonetheless an obligation to check out whether in her past state of health, or in her family history, there were facts that needed to be taken into account in order to get an accurate measure of her criminal responsibility.

  Heredity came first: Marie’s mother, the report states, had never shown herself altogether balanced in her ‘cerebral functioning’. She was subject to crises of agitation which alternated with crises of hypochondriacal melancholy. Marie’s brother was of an adventurous spirit and intense imagination: as mentioned earlier, he had left his parents at the age of fifteen to go to America. A maternal great-uncle had died mad in the Pau asylum. Marie was thus born with a sorry predisposition and always gave evidence of extreme sur-excitation of the affective faculties. And although she never showed any symptoms of faulty reasoning or of disorders of the nervous system, the doctors concluded that she was evidently a woman of near-morbid intensity (exaltation), whose emotions and passions dominated and obliterated her judgement. These last were crucial statements for her case. But more followed, signalling that Marie�
�s passion was of the maternal kind:

  In her affective faculties, it is maternal love that seems to occupy the greatest place: she speaks of it in exaggerated terms which outstrip all measure. It was the violent pain she suffered with the death of her child that transformed the thought of vengeance into an unshakeable resolution. She nourished it for some time before it ended with the attempted murder of 7 January. She seemed sincere in her affirmations and also when she told us that if she had had a child a second time from the same father, she would have forgotten her grief and hatred in order to abandon herself altogether to the joy of maternity.

  In the long conversations the doctors held with Marie, she exhibited no sign of mental trouble. She told them all the important circumstances of her life in these last years, recounted her hopes and her disillusionment, her despair, her hesitation and her struggles. This, they state, allowed them to ‘chart the progress of the obsessional thoughts which overwhelmed her a little more each day as her ability to resist them diminished; and she was dragged along until she yielded to her obsession’.

  The doctors’ final opinion after their observations is that Mile Bière acted ‘under the influence of passions against which her constitution rendered her struggle extremely difficult. She did however know what she was doing and must by consequence be considered responsible.’

  According to Albert Bataille’s vivid account of the trial, when the ‘celebrated’ Dr Blanche was up on the witness stand in front of the large and attentive court public, his evocation of Marie’s state of mind and motive was rather more dramatic than the relatively terse report lodged in her judicial dossier. Bataille comments on the doctor’s ‘clear, elegant and well-chosen’ words, which begin, unlike the dossier, with a description of a past encounter with Marie’s mother.