Trials of Passion (26 page)

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.

Three years before the trial, Dr Blanche states, he examined Madame Bière after she had been apprehended by the police on a minor charge. Since the period was one in which ‘kleptomania' became a frequent diagnosis, it is just possible that Madame Bière was caught in the act in one of the city's tantalizing department stores, like Le Bon Marché, designed by the very same Eiffel as the tower that bears his name. Madame Bière seemed quite mad. She was in a state of ‘mental hyper-excitation', and although she was soon released, Dr Blanche was reminded of her case when he read about Marie in the press, and he informed the police of it.

After Dr Blanche has run through the incidence of ‘heritable' madness in this family of
aliénés
, he interestingly points to Marie's childhood environment as implicated amongst the causes of her condition – as if Pasteur's increasingly popular germ theory of contagion also had psychological applications. He describes Marie's rearing by an extravagant mother, who was at times depressed, and at other times manically nervous. One day Marie was threatened with a knife; on another, with being thrown from a window. And so she acquired her disposition to illness. From a very young age, her exalted intensity was in the making.

To the public's own ever-growing excitement, Dr Blanche then tells the story of how at the age of twelve at her convent school, Marie fell head and heart in love with one of her classmates. When her friend appeared indifferent, this ‘violent affection' led to two suicide attempts.
Marie's state of excitation followed her into adulthood and she became a woman dominated by passion. She was always in the sway of her emotions. She told me, Dr Blanche states – adding that her sincerity was manifest – that the day her child died, she resolved to kill her lover.

Blanche's next statement provokes commotion in the courtroom, so rare is it to utter such thoughts in public: T know that she considered abortion early in her pregnancy. But once she felt her baby move, her maternal affection was awakened: it was profound and all powerful. I have no doubt that this exalted, exaggerated maternal sentiment was the motive for her murder attempt on 7 January.'

A seasoned court performer, Dr Blanche then iterates what it means to be an expert witness in France, where the psychiatrists are attached to the courts. He never appears, he says, either for the defence or for the prosecution. He is a man of conscience, as befits a member of a profession working in the service of the public.

Indeed, unlike their contemporaries in Britain's open market in alienism, the remuneration that French psychiatric experts officially received for their medico-legal work was small: ten francs for a consultation of three hours, a sum that some have argued remained largely unchanged since it had been set down in the Napoleonic
Code d'instruction criminelle
in 1808; (though in 1884 in the case of Hippolyte Forgerol, a trio of doctors including Blanche and Motet were receiving seventy francs each for visiting the patient and reporting, so perhaps payment hadn't remained altogether fixed). As a man of conscience, Blanche can testify that when Marie Bière aimed at Monsieur Gentien she knew very well what she was doing, but she was under the influence of such passions – of such morbid exaltation – that ‘there was no resisting the forces that dominated her and obliterated her moral sense.' She was, in other words, at the mercy of what the US courts will call an ‘irresistible impulse'.

It is this last formulation that will serve as the doctors', and often enough the jury's, explanation for crimes of passion: reason, responsibility, the moral sense are overcome by violent emotion. Irrational
impulse holds sway, doing away with rational volition. It may seem that such a description could be given to any violent crime: rational judgement fails before strong emotions, passion topples reason and crimes are committed. In Anglo-Saxon courts such a plea for reduced responsibility or mitigation rarely passes muster. Nor does the French penal code ever altogether designate a crime of passion. But French courts did have something of a precedent to build on. The 1810 Code Napoleon contained one entry that provided a circumstance for a justifiable love crime. In the section dealing with ‘Excusable Crimes and Delicts', Article 324-1 reads:

Murder, committed by the husband, upon his wife, or by the wife, upon her husband, is not excusable, if the life of the husband or wife, who has committed such murder, has not been put in peril, at the very moment when the murder has taken place.

The mitigation here is self-defence, a principle that also holds in English courts and was extended by a 1992 precedent sometimes also to include psychologically damaged abused wives for whom longterm mistreatment could equal provocation. But the next line, 324-2, defines the famous in flagrante delicto exception:

Nevertheless, in the case of adultery, provided for by article 336, murder committed upon the wife as well as upon her accomplice, at the moment when the husband shall have caught them in the act, in the house where the husband and wife dwell, is excusable.

Men, the code in its patriarchal wisdom allowed, could murder their wives if their wives were caught in the act of compromising their and the family's honour. An understandable passion of jealousy would then prevail, and provide mitigation. Women had no parallel exception in law: their husbands could only be fined for an adulterous offence, and then only if it had taken place in the family home. (The exception for wife murder was only repealed in 1975.)

During the
belle époque
, however, women occasionally behaved as if the law stretched to mitigate their passionate crimes as well as men's, particularly if their honour was at stake. Juries were more often than not on their side. The period's understanding of the feminine as less attached than the masculine to reason and moral judgement meant that in any event women were considered constitutionally more susceptible to passion and extreme, volatile emotion. Such a view slipped effortlessly into the ragbag diagnosis of hysteria, which could as easily implicate any woman, or apply to the very essence of femininity, as refer to what Freud later called ‘conversion hysteria', with its more extreme set of symptoms from paralysis, to anaesthesia and muteness.

Whatever, if any, her precise diagnosis, Marie Bière's was one of the cases that set a precedent for other women afflicted with a severe case of moral outrage at the prevailing sexual etiquette.

Law may wear a blindfold, but its judges and juries are rarely blind to gender differences. At the turn of the last century, public feeling transmitted through press and juries seemed to want a different balance between the sexes: women's intimate crimes of passion as played out in the courtroom crystallized some of the dissatisfaction, and saw it judged. Those judgements sent out moral signals to society at large. Perhaps in the same spirit as our contemporary worries about sexual violence towards women, from the 1880s on, male attitudes to women, particularly the attitudes of the worldly male to the mothers of the future, were found severely wanting.

20.
The Verdict

After Dr Motet echoed his eminent older colleague's testimony, Marie's trial moved towards its final moments. There were still witnesses to call and depositions, penned in Judge Guillot's fine prose, to be read. These include that of Robert Gentien's administrator and intermediary, Monsieur Oudinet, who during his deposition had stammered over Marie's questions – trapped, as Guillot's rendition made him seem to be, between his loyalty to his employer and his less than total approval of his relations with women and the Don Juanesque aspects of his behaviour. Oudinet also had an evident soft spot for Marie, though he didn't want it to be seen in open court.

To counterpoint, Mathilde Delorme, Marie's best friend since 1863, talked of her irreproachable character until Gentien had led her astray. The midwife who had delivered the baby in Montmartre described how difficult the birth had been, how sad Marie was, ever hoping that Gentien would fall in love with the child. Quizzed on whether Marie harboured plans of marrying Gentien, the midwife responded that Marie had hopes, of course: she had said, ‘Why not? I'm well brought up, my family is honourable.' But the coldness of his demeanour was distressing: when he came to visit, he didn't even want her dress to touch his trousers.

Then it was the turn of Gentien's friends, who told the court how he had been frightened of Marie's character, how it was clear she was mad and could kill, and how his friends had advised him to alert the police. The guardian of the peace who had stopped Marie from firing her third shot recounted that when he had taken away her revolver, Marie had exclaimed that there was no point worrying that she would kill herself – but if he was dead, of course she would. She had
also immediately blurted out that Robert was the cause of her daughter's death.

Here Marie interrupted, stating in a firm voice that she had no intention of starting all that again. She no longer considered Monsieur Gentien worthy of any passionate acts from her.

Finally, before the court rose on this penultimate day of the trial, which would be followed on the morrow by th
eplaidoirie
– the summing- up statements from the prosecution, the defence and the trial's president – the audience heard a reading of Robert's interview with the
juge d'instruction,
based on Marie's questions to him; and the tense encounter of the former lovers in front of the judge.

Marie's questions are about her personal honesty and love; Robert's answers are about playboy rules, in other words about sex for money. His repeated insistence that Marie was never a ‘disinterested' mistress, that she had always been calculating and dreamed of marrying him in order to get her hands on his fortune, won him no favours with the public. Nor did his recurrent emphasis on being
un parfait galant homme
, a perfect gentleman who had given Marie a monthly
pension.
After the public had heard Investigating Magistrate Guillot's finely honed description of Robert's cool assurance contrasted with Marie's extreme pallor, her fixed stare at her lover as she emphatically denied everything he said, came her dramatic final words to Guillot, uttered in exhausted despair: ‘I was sure he would be forewarned of my questions to him. He could prepare his defence, while my strength utterly left me. I feel dead. He's a liar, a dishonest man! May God lend me the strength to confound him before the court; without that, I'd be better off dying right away!'

Sensation erupted in the courtroom.

The next day, 8 April, Maître Lachaud makes his summary statement for the defence. It lasts three-and-a-half hours. According to the participants, these are dramatically breath-taking hours in which Marie's entire life and great love are given expression. Reading out her letters, evoking her trajectory, Lachaud describes a feminine heart tossed between indignation at her lover and hope that he might
recognize their child. The portrait that emerges is of an utterly honest woman, so innocent and decent, despite the theatrical world she moves in, that she doesn't recognize vice; a woman consumed by love for her child, a good woman who wanted only to love and instead found herself tormented, dishonoured and abandoned by a worldly seducer. Honour is key to Marie's final retributive act. There is more to life than mere life, Lachaud states: there is honour.

Lachaud's address is about far more than a justifiable
sur-excitation
on Marie's part: what is on trial here are the morals and sexual etiquette of an entire class. A war of values is under way. Why shouldn't an honest and good woman of heart, not a prostitute, a woman of rectitude and generous passion like Marie, sincerely believe a man like Gentien when he pays court to her, telling her she ‘makes him a better man', and not think he's in search of nothing more than a roll in the hay, a passing affair. But no, Gentien belongs to a class of men who only want fleeting liaisons. The prosecutor had made reference to the estrangement of Marie's ambitions. For him a difference of wealth would seem to put an insurmountable obstacle in the way of union. But Lachaud has only contempt for this attitude. He doesn't understand why a young independent man of a fortune, valued at eighty thousand francs in annual rents, shouldn't have the right to give his name to a poor but estimable woman, if he loves her and has made her a mother.