Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  21. Afterlife

  Despite acquittal, Marie Bière herself profited little from her crime. However great the attendant publicity in the spring of 1880, there was no tabloid paper to pay her for her story. Respectable young woman that she tried to be, nor did she relish the publicity: she tried ineffectively to stop the torrent of sensational reporting her acquittal received – damned by the conservatives, made into a monster or a heroine by others. On 13 April, just a few days after her trial ended, she wrote a pleading letter to a leading morning paper, reprinted in the popular Le Petit Journal:

  I beg the press to pay no more attention to me. Since I have been acquitted, any rancour, curiosity, or sympathy I may have excited is turned into articles. In these, I’m in turn praised, blamed, and ridiculed. I merit neither the honour nor the relentlessness of the pursuit... Might not just a little respect be due to a poor, unhappy woman?

  I know very well that it was wrong to take justice into my own hands: everyone has told me so, from the policeman who initially arrested me to the President of the Court of Assizes. I know I should have been more patient, more resigned and above all stronger. I also know the Jury didn’t intend to glorify my crime. It was only touched by my sufferings and convinced of my sincerity. That is how I understand my verdict...

  I have many duties now to fulfil – my poor parents to console, the memory of my child to honour, as well as work to undertake to assure my independence. I would like to be left alone to accomplish these difficult tasks.

  Marie sounds like a contemporary woman trying to reason with a hungry media that knows no bounds. Nor is maintaining a modicum of independence easy for a woman who has aspirations to respectability but no financial means. The papers have a few more stabs at her, bandying her name about every time a new crime of passion comes up. Finally they deliver an all but fatal blow.

  On Monday, 7 February 1881, Marie Bière tried to relaunch her career by taking part in a concert in Nice. The fliers had gone out and critics were dispatched to cover her post-trial debut, which she had delayed and refrained from undertaking in Paris amidst the media frenzy of the last year. The Figaro reporter interviewed her prior to the concert. He found a woman who was more bourgeoise than he had anticipated and who seemed very worried about her undertaking. She told him she was appearing on stage once more because she didn’t want to be dependent on her parents. But her strength didn’t seem up to the task. In Nice with her mother, she was leading an isolated life and staying at a hotel frequented only by the English. She was nervous, and worried that the press would see her debut as a mere exhibition. Being a celebrity was taking its toll on her, but she had to earn her keep. She had heeded Alexandre Dumas’s advice to lie low for as long as she could. Now, she resisted talking about anything other than her music. The reporter, Jules Prével, sees good sense, given her apparent frailty, in her choice to perform only three classic pieces in a concert that is neither follies nor full opera. But after the concert, Prével pens a brief and damning review.

  The auditorium at Nice’s Théâtre Français was bursting at the seams, he writes; the prices of seats had doubled for the occasion and the boxes were crammed with women in elegant attire and men in tails. But Marie Bière was stricken with stage fright at her entrance. She was badly made up and looked far less well than in Paris. Emotion seemed to paralyse her voice. Even the melody was off-key. The crowd grew agitated. People booed, hissed, whistled.

  Marie Bière’s attempt to return to the stage could hardly be deemed happy.

  Poor Marie, with her frayed nerves and her damaged voice, her need to earn her keep – and, one imagines, both egged on by and needing to prove herself to her mother – attempted only one more public performance, this time in Aix on 1 March. But her stamina failed her, and despite the advance publicity the concert was cancelled.

  After that, her main appearances in the press are only as a glamorous icon of crime, thepatronne de Vamour an revolver, as Le Figaro dubs her in a piece from the spa resort of Royan near Bordeaux, where Marie is holidaying that August. Then on 13 January 1882 appears an advertisement laying naked her need to work and offering ‘Corns et Lemons de Chanf. Three months later, on 26 April, her mother dies. After this there seems to be nothing more in the newspapers about Marie Bière.

  The record office, however, reveals an intriguing footnote to her trajectory. On 31 January 1883, just nine months after her mother’s death – and three years after she took a shot at her one-time lover – Marie Bière marries thirty-nine-year-old Constantin Boudesco, a divorced engineer/rentier from Bucharest. The wedding takes place in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, a wealthy and fashionable area in the 1880s with large new boulevards of impressive apartment blocks. Present at Marie’s wedding are her father, Philippe, and the groom’s friend, an industrialist. Then at last, on 21 August 1889, Marie gives birth to a little girl, Blanche Marie Claire, a replacement for the child she had so savagely grieved.

  The contradictory position of women as mothers, the honour and respect due to them in a belle époque France that is adamantly pro- natalist and idealizes motherhood while doing nothing to protect mothers, remains a key theme in a growing number of the period’s crimes of passion.

  22. Revolvers and Vitriol

  In the wake of Marie Bière’s much reported trial and acquittal, copycat crimes of passion break out across France, perpetrated by a rash of women the papers call the émulo de Marie Bière.

  Women are suddenly liberated, or feel compelled by overpowering emotion, to take justice into their own hands. They have been given a new sense of agency. To protect their invigorated and now differently defined ‘honour’, they commit acts of vengeance against lovers who have abandoned them and their children, against betraying husbands and against the mistresses who are their rivals. Their preferred means are not the old-fashioned secret, slow and subterranean poisons, gendered feminine, but the emphatically public and masculine revolver and the burning horror of that sulphuric acid known as vitriol. The sheer quantity and novelistic force of crime reporting seems to feed their underlying sense of unhappiness at the lack of justice in the sphere of love, marriage and motherhood. Resentment explodes in violent expression. Despite the obsessive premeditation of their acts, they seem to expect acquittal or light sentences, not because they are deranged – the alienists called in will talk of hyper-excitation, or hysteria, but rarely attest to any failure of mental responsibility – but because they are in the right. The rules of society are askew and, without voicing it, they seem to feel they have natural justice on their side.

  If this is not feminism, it is not altogether unrelated. There is an underlying similarity between the iconography the press use to illustrate feminists and les vitrioleuses – as the women become known. Both are portrayed as Amazonian, possessed and rabid.

  At the end of an 1872 essay, VHomme–Femme, exploring the psycho- sexual nature of man and woman and the socio-religious settlement they were currently enmeshed in, Alexandre Dumas fils had outrageously suggested, tongue only a little in cheek, that the way to deal with straying wives was – Tue-la! Kill her! He was in part referring to the famous Dubourg affair, in which a husband had with dagger and sword attacked his unfaithful wife in flagrante delicto – or at least in the apartment of her lover. She had died three days later. In love with this man well before she had been forced by her father to marry Dubourg, Madame Dubourg had found herself incarcerated for a time in an asylum, and when released she had taken up with her first love once more. Dubourg had received only a five-year sentence following his murderous, premeditated attack.

  In his second most widely read novel, L’Affaire Clemenceau (1867), Dumas had already portrayed a virtuous husband killing a flagrantly deceitful wife and pleading his case in court. Having been criticized for his injunction to the male to kill his gallivanting wife, Dumas was also criticized for not allowing the betrayed wife in his play of 1872, La Princesse Georges, to carry out an equally passionate murder of her husband. The tim
es were changing, and Dumas rode the shift in sexual relations: after the Marie Bière trial he wrote a provocative new essay, Les Femmes qui tuent et les femmes qui votent (Women who Kill and Women Who Vote (1880)). The two are closely related, Dumas contends, thereby outraging his vocal, moralizing, often Catholic opposition. Until the law – ever several steps behind shifting public mores – recognizes contemporary social reality and instates justice for women – mistreated by their own fathers, by seducers who abandon, by husband/fathers who stray – they will attempt to kill. And juries as well as the public will support natural justice over and above laws that are no longer just.

  Dumas goes so far as to reproduce in the main body of his text a contemporary proclamation addressed to ‘the women of France’ and calling for women’s rights. In its argument for the vote for women, for seats on juries and in the judiciary as well as in Parliament, the declaration includes a telling line linking the treatment of women with the treatment of the mad, as if being woman were equivalent to being mad: ‘An Assembly of Men is about to legislate for women in the same way as it passes laws on and regulates the mad: are women then mad people to whom one can apply regulation from above?’

  This sentence grounds a linkage often made by late-twentieth- century historians between suffragettes and hysterics, and shows that the slippage between madness and feminism was one of which feminists as early as 1880 were aware. Dumas and the writer of the proclamation he cites both make the connection. There were two ways, the suggestion is, in which women could respond to the inequities of the day: they could become campaigners for change or they could become hysterics – either poised to shoot the men who had done them wrong or to fall ill of the oft-unarticulated injustices and conflicts that the values of the time trapped them in. In some cases, like that of Breuer and Freud’s famous Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim), the two paths were part of the same individual’s life.

  Dumas argues, following the most vocal French feminist of the time, Hubertine Auclerc, that since women are subject to taxes, they must also have the vote. They will then also have seats in the Assemblée, and will be able to change the laws – on divorce, on seduction, on the rights of mothers and children. Dumas and Auclerc’s logic didn’t see fruition until sixty-four years later, in 1944. Meanwhile, the rash of vitriolage and shootings spread.

  Trying to get to the root of why the public idealized these women, Dumas wonders whether it was because existing laws protected the guilty, not the innocent. The murderesses were The incarnation of an idea suddenly rising up against stubborn and insufficient traditions. The idea comes through fire and blood. It poses its personal and necessary demand against laws which were once excellent, but now that customs have changed, appear unjust and barbaric.’ Of course, the murderer hasn’t reasoned all of this out. No. She blindly obeys her passion. But her passion is seen to reveal a natural, incontestable human right, which society should have considered, but failed to.

  In the very month of Marie Bière’s trial, a woman of thirty, one Hélène Dumaire, buys a revolver and shoots her former lover, Dr Picart – a man whose child she bore while he was a medical student. Dumaire was, according to the press, a woman of not quite the impeccable virtue of a Marie Bière. She was certainly no innocent virgin, but she had supported Picart through his studies, only to be told at their end that he was now going to marry a richer, younger woman. Asked at her trial whether she regretted her crime, Dumaire answered forthrightly: ‘No, I’m happier that he’s dead than married; I couldn’t bear our daughter to have been an abandoned child.’ Given this implacable honesty, the jury couldn’t see their way to acquitting her. Nonetheless, given that she had killed a man – not merely wounded him, as in the case of Marie – her sentence was relatively light: ten years in prison.

  On 18 May 1880, a month and nine days after Marie Bière’s much discussed trial and verdict, the distinguished Comtesse de Tilly stepped out of her house in Saintes, a prosperous small town of some fifteen thousand inhabitants in the Charente-Maritime, went to her local chemists and purchased a canister of vitriol – commonly used in housework but which also burns, disfigures and blinds. Standing by the window of her home, she happened to spy the young modiste or milliner, with whom her cheating wastrel husband had long been having an affair that had set the whole of Saintes chattering. She flung the vitriol at the younger woman. ‘I did it for the children,’ the ailing thirty-year-old countess, a woman known for her piety and seriousness, tells the magistrate. Her husband was robbing his children to pay for his mistress, who would become the mother of Madame’s children when she died.

  In court, Madame de Tilly was defended by the brilliant Maître Lachaud, now the women’s advocate of choice. He evoked the heroism of her maternal love, the brutality of her husband’s insults, the shaming clamour in the small town. He called Madame de Tilly a saint, whom the jury could only acquit so that she could leave the courtroom with her honour restored and utterly intact.

  Despite the seriousness of the crime, they did acquit. As in other crimes of passion, they were acting on that conviction intime, that inner conviction that they understood natural justice. After all, hadn’t they learned in the course of the trial that the young mistress had had an indemnity of twenty thousand francs settled on her by Monsieur de Tilly, who never appeared in court and was presumed to have fled to America.

  It was cases like that of Madame de Tilly, together with the emotional polemic played out in the press, in essays and plays such as those of Alexandre Dumas, that helped to modernize divorce laws in France. On 27 July 1884, the radical socialist member of parliament from the Vaucluse, député Alfred Naquet – a friend of the anarchist Bakunin and a Jew who had written much on marriage and divorce and been censored under the Empire – saw divorce legislation through the Assembly that effectively reinstated the revolutionary divorce law of 1792.

  The new law, which would last until the 1970s with only small modifications, instituted divorce with fault. Either party could sue. For women like Madame de Tilly, who had hitherto had no recourse against adulterous and often thieving husbands, it was a huge boon. Divorce was now possible on grounds of adultery (with the caveat that the adulterer could not marry the third party for three years), injury, cruelty, addiction or long imprisonment. The ‘innocent’ – wife or husband – was granted the children and a pension. Catholic France, whose 115 deputies voted against the law, was up in arms. The indissoluble union that made man and wife one was now dissoluble – by other means than vitriol. In 1885, France saw four thousand divorces.

  It is unlikely that a working-class woman like twenty-three-year-old Amélie Sanglé – who on 16 November 1883 threw vitriol at the man she thought had taken her husband away from her, had led him to drink and to other women while she and her children by him starved – would have found her sense of justice appeased in the divorce courts. But the Paris Assizes did acquit her, even though the man she took aim at died of what was thought to be an associated meningitis the next day.

  Before her trial, Amélie was observed by the nuns and doctors at the prison infirmary of Saint-Lazare, where she was also delivered, when the time came, of a child. A very full ‘mental state’ report on Amélie from Dr Auguste Motet shows what by now are the regular categories according to which avenging women are examined and clinically described, even when they (and their victims) are working- class. Motet searches in Amélie’s family and her past, where he finds reports of nervous crises, ‘not epileptic in nature’. This, together with late onset of menstruation and a promiscuous ease in moving between partners, leads him to diagnose a petite hystérie. Such a minor hysteria is so common a female malady as to be attributable to almost any woman, and brings in its train no mental aberration that can excuse a violent act. Whatever compassion Motet may feel for this young woman in her rage, jealousy and despair as she attacks her target, he can find no delusional imaginings in her, or moral confusion.

  Motet does, however, revealingly note the influence of ‘contagion
by example’. The notion of contagion comes from Pasteur’s work with microbes. The crowd psychologists borrowed it, hypothesizing that ideas and extreme acts could spread from mind to mind in the same way as disease. Dr Motet states that just such a contagion has driven women to vitriolic acts. But since this contagion doesn’t fall into any larger medical category of delirium, it cannot be an excuse for crime. A ‘transitory mental trouble’ that has no pathologic precursor in the patient’s history is no evidence of mental alienation.

  If in medico-legal eyes, despite her petite hystérie, Amélie is a responsible working-class woman who has committed a crime and should therefore be punished, the jury nonetheless acquits her. As Dumas might have said, they seem to think that Amélie, delivered of a baby while awaiting trial, has natural justice on her side. The epoch’s juries are on the whole more radical than the psychiatrists, who line up firmly behind the state, which also pays their fees. They may take thorough histories of their patients, they probe for signs of ‘insanity’, but they refuse to allow their ‘insights’ into the individual mind to be used as an excuse for crime. They are agents of control.