Trials of Passion (27 page)

The public erupt in cheers at Lachaud's moral fury. As if they were in a boulevard theatre, they applaud his peroration. Marie has given her word that she will never again target the man she now contemns. She has never lied.

‘Will you condemn her, Gentlemen of the Jury?' Lachaud asks. ‘No you won't: there is a limit to human endurance. You'll say that beyond the life of man there is something even more valuable: honour. You'll see beyond this regrettable act and you'll ask yourselves if this man shouldn't serve as an example to those sceptics who live life
á la
Gentien. That will be the great educative value of this trial.'

Turning to Marie, he offers her his closing remarks:

‘Courage, my child. Life is hard because this man has taken everything from you – your honour, your future, your tranquillity of spirit. You will suffer greatly; liberty won't give you happiness. The verdict of acquittal which will soon be pronounced won't be a consolation. None is possible. But at least it will give you some relief. Slowly through work, calm and a regular life, you'll pull yourself together, and achieve the rehabilitation you wish for.

‘I place this unfortunate woman in your hands, members of the jury. I have confidence in your justice.'

Apparently exhausted, Maître Lachaud then sat somnolent, head in arms, while the president of the court summed up. In his attempt to be even-handed and perhaps redress the feeling against Gentien, President Bachelier made the mistake of saying to the jury that they needn't worry, in their deliberations, about the set sentence: ‘It'll be as you wish it.'

Quick as lightning Maître Lachaud was on his feet again, creating the moment that appears in all his obituaries and which resulted in a change in French legal procedure.

‘You have no right to say this,' he tells the president. ‘No right to suggest that Marie Bière could serve a mere few months in prison, when you clearly know the contrary. The jury needs to have it plainly spelt out that if they condemn this woman without mitigating circumstances, it means death. With mitigation, the sentence still means a minumum of five years of forced labour.'

Bachelier's monocle falls from his eye, he loses his place in his notes. The public, meanwhile, have exploded in shouts of ‘Bravo!' For a full five minutes there is havoc in the courtroom. Everyone protests at the ways in which presidents present their résumés to the jury (in other words, ‘direct' the jury). When Bachelier speaks again, he is so befuddled that he calls Maître Lachaud ‘Monsieur Bière' and the accused ‘Mademoiselle Lachaud' ... Or so the papers like to report.

The jury go out for a mere five minutes before returning with a unanimous acquittal. It is clear that Marie Bière is guilty of having
attacked and maimed Robert Gentien. But these good men and true are acting on that
conviction intime
, that intimate conviction, that the revolutionaries of the 1790s had built into the jury system: they, better than all the professionals, know where justice lies. This waif- like suffering mother who has lost her child and mourned her with a passion beyond reason is a Republican heroine. Her criminality is only an excess of what is best in virtuous women – their nurturing, maternal souls.

Given that French newspapers could cover all aspects of a case both before and during the trial, and that juries had no restriction on what they could read or whom they could discuss the case with, their own ‘inner conviction' was inevitably also that most loudly sung in the press.

When the verdict on Marie Bière is announced, jubilation breaks out in the courtroom. According to Albert Bataille, no one wants to leave. People stay to watch the smile illuminating Marie's face, the kiss she gives Maître Lachaud, the hug she receives from her oldest friend ... Marie Bière has regained her liberty. She has also struck a new note of freedom for women of all classes. The insouciant and oft-damaging behaviour of careless cavalier seducers is no longer to be universally tolerated as a norm. To be poor, to be a performer, is no longer a certain mark of exploitable availability for rich rakes.

But the jury's and clearly the attendant public's verdict on Marie Bière sends out other unspoken signals to the ten-year-old Republic. It now seems more permissible for women to act, and to act violently if need be, to protect or avenge their honour. Passion that topples reason can create a mitigating partial madness, unwritten in law but understood by juries. This condition needn't affect the rest of one's mental properties, nor is it socially dangerous, in that it is unlikely to recur.

Over the next decades, love crimes committed by women become a feature of the
belle époque
– a period enamoured of the drama of public spectacle, whether on the boulevards, in the playhouses or in
the courts, in the press, in medical fora such as Jean-Martin Charcot's lectures where hysterics are paraded, or in Parliament. Through this multi-faceted theatre, the new Republican democracy is arguing out the values it wants to embrace: what it means to be a responsible citizen, what it means to be male or female, father or mother, mad or sane. Republican governments come and go, arguments about the secular and the religious state and the institutions that belong to each are as turbulent as those between the sexes, until in 1905 the separation of Church and state is enacted. Meanwhile, between 1871 and the turn of the century some 264 people pleading at the Central Criminal Court in Paris, the Cour d'Assises, claim their crimes are
crimes passionnels.

As Ruth Harris has pointed out in her groundbreaking study,
Murders and Madness
(1989), the crime-of-passion defence rose faster in this period than the overall rate of murder, though this also went up. In 1880, out of a total of thirty crimes in the Paris area there were six crimes of passion. By 1905 the number had risen to thirty-five out of a hundred. The great majority of these love crimes – two hundred – were committed by men against wives or partners in incidents of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, which archives show to be endemic and often too matter-of-factly accepted, particularly amongst the poor.

As a proportion of the total crime that women commit, the number of women's passionate crimes is much higher than men's. Male passionate crime never rises above a third of total murders or attempted murders. For women, it is the principal form: five out of six in 1881, nine out of eleven in 1905, fourteen out of fourteen in 1910. Juries tend to acquit ‘passionate' women more than men, though they also acquit men when their wives or partners can be shown, often enough through gossip or by suggestion with little grounding in hard material evidence, to be straying. When female offenders are not acquitted, the sentences they receive are proportionately far lighter than men's. Class plays its part in this configuration: middle- class and therefore virtuous women – popular myth admixed with a
degree of reality wants to show – will only engage in violent crime if catapulted into it by that passion which overturns reason and is akin to madness. And women's reason, as the mind doctors have long suggested, is more easily unseated than men's.

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
:

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, th
epatronne 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.