Trials of Passion (23 page)

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 against 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.'

Finally Marie asked: ‘Since you didn't get what you wanted of me, did you not then tell me to undergo the birth in Montmartre with a midwife and abandon my child there?' ‘I only said,' Robert replied, ‘that to avoid problems with your mother, it would be easier.'

When Marie was brought into the interview room for the read- through and signing of the deposition notes, she was extremely pale. She fixed her eyes on Robert without speaking. This strange judicial scene, translated into contemporary terms, has something of the feel of a professional mediation between divorcees who can't be brought to agree either on the facts or on a mutual language of negotiation, so opposed are their views on the etiquette and practices of love. After Robert's answers to her questions were read out to her, Marie simply stated: ‘I maintain the truth of everything I said. If Monsieur contests it, that surprises me not at all.'

Robert ‘absolutely' denied her imputation that he was lying. There was nothing he wanted to add to his deposition. ‘Nor I,' Marie stated, then burst out: ‘You're base, odious [
infame!
]! You're the cause of my daughter's death. If you'd left her at my side, she'd still be alive, and I wouldn't have tried to kill you.'

‘I protest emphatically,' Robert retorted. T didn't stop you from keeping your daughter and I'm not responsible in any way for her death.'

The complex slippage between truths and lies inevitable to passion rarely translates easily into the harder certainties of the courts. That Marie was guilty of attempting to murder Robert Gentien was clear to everyone, let alone herself Whether she was an ‘honest' woman – a virtuous innocent from the provinces, despite her appearances on the stage – or had wanted money or marriage from Robert, from the first; whether the wish for an abortion was his or hers, or in the early days both of theirs; whether Robert's whole attitude to love and parenting was deeply reprehensible, or hers naive and unrealistic, or alternatively mercenary – these were not easily resolvable questions at any time, and particularly not at a historical moment when values were clearly in flux. Needless to say, when the
juge d'instruction s
rendition of these interviews was read out in court, sensation ensued.

17.
Passion, Madness and Medics

Love relations, understandings of passion and sexual etiquette, were under strain in
belle époque
France. Old habits and ways were colliding with the new with increasing speed, like the railway that now cut through the nation. High migration from the traditionally Catholic and conservative provinces to the increasingly secular capital, where a largely progressive Republican and scientifically oriented government was in power from 1879, resulted in a vertiginous clash of mores. Moving from provincial Bordeaux to Paris, as Marie Bière had, constituted a leap not only across kilometres but into a different modernity. According to the mind doctors, such migration, like the speed of the trains themselves, could also cause psychological shock. Vagabondage, alcoholism and prostitution were some of the consequences, alongside the growth in the asylum population.

Prostitution (together with the vice squads who battled against it) increased significantly in the course of the Third Republic as women, out of financial need, were forced or fell into or resorted to the oldest profession. In a world of double standards that separated them out, sometimes by class, into ‘honest' and marriageable or fair game, punters were plentiful. A proportion of these were also single migrants from the country. Understanding of what behaviour was appropriately masculine, what respectably feminine, varied enormously from country to small town to capital city as well as, between the generations and the classes. The differences might be compared to some of our own confusions when old and young clash over the morality and appropriate etiquette for online and social networking sites; or when immigrant parents and their teenage children fall out over dating and sexual habits.

Against this kind of background, the trial of Marie Bière which
began on 6 April 1880 seemed to be far less about the crime of attempted murder than about the vagaries of passion, changing sexual relations and the nature of the human mind. What roles, what behaviour in men and women, would the new Republic value? Were seduction and abandonment – a gentlemanly Don Juanism – to continue to be permissible? Did men owe a debt of paternity to their ‘natural' children as well as official recognition to their mothers? Was marriage ‘for ever'? Crucially, what could passion – sexual and maternal – do to the mind?

The eighteenth-century
philosophes
had vested all that was good in the ‘triumph of reason'. Perhaps it was this absolutist emphasis that made passion and the irrational take on a competitive dynamic in the French thinking of the nineteenth century. In England, the Romantic movement had largely affected the arts and aspects of sentimental behaviour. In France, after the excesses of the Revolution, passion had also become an explanatory category, one used by the early alienists hand in hand with the diagnosis of monomania. They took it into the courtrooms as a mitigating factor. It was a category every citizen could understand. The mind, the mental faculties, could be overturned by an impulsive force that left rational will out of control, ‘alienated' reason and diminished responsibility.

French mind doctors had made their way into the criminal courts as expert witnesses early in the century. They had done so noisily in the landmark case of the child murderer Henriette Cornier in 1825. The great alienist Esquirol's follower Étienne-Jean Georget had even argued for a classification of
monomanie instinctive
, or instinctive monomania, for five brutal criminals whose reason and moral sense were palpably intact. They could tell right from wrong, yet they were driven to monstrous crime. Homicidal monomania, Georget claimed, was a subspecies of Esquirol's classification of monomania. It was a lesion of the will, rather than of the intellect, a perversion of the affective passions and sentiments which propelled the individual to sudden violent acts.

In his pamphlets, Georget championed two roles for alienists: conducting a pre-examination of offenders; providing expert witnesses
in court. Esquirol and other specialists testified in the case of Henriette Cornier, a young servant woman who had brutally killed a neighbour's toddler. They brought definitions of partial and not readily visible madness into the legal arena. Through them a diagnosis of monomania came to act as an extenuating factor in sentencing. Hidden madness, not readily visible to the lay observer, was now dissected by specialists in the criminal courtroom. Passion, love gone wrong, distorted or malignant love which bred violence rather than tenderness, perversion – all gradually became subjects both of forensic and of public discussion. Though, in the course of the century, a diagnosis of monomania went out of fashion and hereditarian explanations took on greater moment, French alienists continued to be interested in conditions that led to crime. In mid-century, the great clinician Charles Lasègue wrote detailed and evocative analyses of violence caused by persecutory delirium as well as studies of kleptomania and exhibitionism.