President: Woman Gras, you prefer to feign indignation and deny everything. You have the right. I will read your examination before the examining magistrate. I see M. Lachaud makes a gesture, but I must beg the counsel for the defence not to impart unnecessary passion into these proceedings.
Lachaud: My gesture was merely meant to express that the woman Gras is on her trial, and that under the circumstances her indignation is natural.
President: Very good.
The appearance in the witness box of the widow's unhappy victim evoked sympathy. He gave his evidence quietly, without resentment or indignation. As he told his story the widow, whose eyes were fixed on him all the time, murmured: "Georges! Georges! Defend me! Defend me!" "I state the facts," he replied.
The prisoners could only defend themselves by trying to throw on each other the guilt of the crime. M. Demange represented Gaudry as acting under the influence of his passion for the Widow Gras. Lachaud, on the other hand, attributed the crime solely to Gaudry's jealousy of the widow's lover, and contended that he was the sole author of the outrage.
The jury by their verdict assigned to the widow the greater share of responsibility. She was found guilty in the full degree, but to Gaudry were accorded extenuating circumstances. The widow was condemned to fifteen years' penal servitude, her accomplice to five years' imprisonment.
It is dreadful to think how very near the Widow Gras came to accomplishing successfully her diabolical crime. A little less percipitancy on her part, and she might have secured the fruits of her cruelty. Her undoubted powers of fascination, in spite of the fiendishness of her real character, are doubly proved by the devotion of her lover and the guilt of her accomplice. At the same time, with that strange contradiction inherent in human nature, the Jekyll and Hyde elements which, in varying degree, are present in all men and women, the Widow Gras had a genuine love for her young sister. Her hatred of men was reasoned, deliberate, merciless and implacable. There is something almost sadistic in the combination in her character of erotic sensibility with extreme cruelty.
I found the story of this case in a brochure published in Paris as one of a series of modern causes celebres. I have compared it with the reports of the trial in the Gazette des Tribunaux.
I In the May of 1874, in the town of Montpellier, M. Boyer, a retired merchant, some forty-six years of age, lay dying. For some months previous to his death he had been confined to his bed, crippled by rheumatic gout. As the hour of his death drew near, M. Boyer was filled with a great longing to see his daughter, Marie, a girl of fifteen, and embrace her for the last time. The girl was being educated in a convent at Marseilles. One of M. Boyer's friends offered to go there to fetch her. On arriving at the convent, he was told that Marie had become greatly attracted by the prospect of a religious life. "You are happy," the Mother Superior had written to her mother, "very happy never to have allowed the impure breath of the world to have soiled this little flower. She loves you and her father more than one can say." Her father's friend found the girl dressed in the costume of a novice, and was told that she had expressed her desire to take, one day, her final vows. He informed Marie of her father's dying state, of his earnest wish to see her for the last time, and told her that he had come to take her to his bedside. "Take me away from here?" she exclaimed. The Mother Superior, surprised at her apparent reluctance to go, impressed on her the duty of acceding to her father's wish. To the astonishment of both, Marie refused to leave the convent. If she could save her father's life, she said, she would go, but, as that was impossible and she dreaded going out into the world again, she would stay and pray for her father in the chapel of the convent, where her prayers would be quite as effective as by his bedside. In vain the friend and the Mother Superior tried to bend her resolution.
Happily M. Boyer died before he could learn of his daughter's singular refusal. But it had made an unfavourable impression on the friend's mind. He looked on Marie as a girl without real feeling, an egoist, her religion purely superficial, hiding a cold and selfish disposition; he felt some doubt as to the future development of her character.
M. Boyer left a widow, a dark handsome woman, forty years of age.
Some twenty years before his death, Marie Salat had come to live with M. Boyer as a domestic servant. He fell in love with her, she became his mistress, and a few months before the birth of Marie, M. Boyer made her his wife. Madame Boyer was at heart a woman of ardent and voluptuous passions that only wanted opportunity to become careless in their gratification. Her husband's long illness gave her such an opportunity. At the time of his death she was carrying on an intrigue with a bookseller's assistant, Leon Vitalis, a young man of twenty-one. Her bed-ridden husband, ignorant of her infidelity, accepted gratefully the help of Vitalis, whom his wife described as a relative, in the regulation of his affairs. At length the unsuspecting Boyer died. The night of his death Madame Boyer spent with her lover.
The mother had never felt any great affection for her only child.
During her husband's lifetime she was glad to have Marie out of the way at the convent. But the death of M. Boyer changed the situation. He had left almost the whole of his fortune, about 100,000 francs, to his daughter, appointing her mother her legal guardian with a right to the enjoyment of the income on the capital until Marie should come of age. Madame Boyer had not hitherto taken her daughter's religious devotion very seriously. But now that the greater part of her husband's fortune was left to Marie, she realised that, should her daughter persist in her intention of taking the veil, that fortune would in a very few years pass into the hands of the sisterhood. Without delay Madame Boyer exercised her authority, and withdrew Marie from the convent. The girl quitted it with every demonstration of genuine regret.
Marie Boyer when she left the convent was growing into a tall and attractive woman, her figure slight and elegant, her hair and eyes dark, dainty and charming in her manner. Removed from the influences of convent life, her religious devotion became a thing of the past. In her new surroundings she gave herself up to the enjoyments of music and the theatre. She realised that she was a pretty girl, whose beauty well repaid the hours she now spent in the adornment of her person. The charms of Marie were not lost on Leon Vitalis. Mean and significant in appearance, Vitalis would seem to have been one of those men who, without any great physical recommendation, have the knack of making themselves attractive to women. After her husband's death Madame Boyer had yielded herself completely to his influence and her own undoubted passion for him. She had given him the money with which to purchase a business of his own as a second-hand bookseller. This trade the enterprising and greedy young man combined with money-lending and he clandestine sale of improper books and photographs. To such a man the coming of Marie Boyer was a significant event. She was younger, more attractive than her mother; in a very few years the whole of her father's fortune would be hers. Slowly Vitalis set himself to win the girl's affections. The mother's suspicions were aroused; her jealousy was excited. She sent Marie to complete her education at a convent school in Lyons. This was in the April of 1875. By this time Marie and Vitalis had become friendly enough to arrange to correspond clandestinely during the girl's absence from home. Marie was so far ignorant of the relations of Vitalis with her mother.
Her daughter sent away, Madame Boyer surrendered herself with complete abandonment to her passion for her lover. At Castelnau, close to Montpellier, she bought a small country house. There she could give full rein to her desire. To the scandal of the occasional passerby she and her lover would bathe in a stream that passed through the property, and sport together on the grass. Indoors there were always books from Vitalis' collection to stimulate their lascivious appetites. This life of pastoral impropriety lasted until the middle of August, when Marie Boyer came home from Lyons.
Vitalis would have concealed from the young girl as long as he could the nature of his relations with Madame Boyer, but his mistress by her own deliberate conduct made all concealment impossible. Whether from the utter recklessness of her passion for Vitalis, or a desire to kill in her daughter's heart any attachment which she may have felt towards her lover, the mother paraded openly before her daughter the intimacy of her relations with Vitalis, and with the help of the literature with which the young bookseller supplied her, set about corrupting her child's mind to her own depraved level. The effect of her extraordinary conduct was, however, the opposite to what she had intended. The mind of the young girl was corrupted; she was familiarised with vice. But in her heart she did not blame Vitalis for what she saw and suffered; she pitied, she excused him. It was her mother whom she grew to hate, with a hate all the more determined for the cold passionless exterior beneath which it was concealed.
Madame Boyer's deliberate display of her passion for Vitalis served only to aggravate and intensify in Marie Boyer an unnatural jealousy that was fast growing up between mother and daughter.
Marie did not return to the school at Lyons. In the winter of 1875, Madame Boyer gave up the country house and, with her daughter, settled in one of the suburbs of Montpellier. In the January of 1876 a theft occurred in her household which obliged Madame Boyer to communicate with the police. Spendthrift and incompetent in the management of her affairs, she was hoarding and suspicious about money itself. Cash and bonds she would hide away in unexpected places, such as books, dresses, even a soup tureen. One of her most ingenious hiding places was a portrait of her late husband, behind which she concealed some bearer bonds in landed security, amounting to about 11,000 francs. One day in January these bonds disappeared. She suspected a theft, and informed the police. Three days later she withdrew her complaint, and no more was heard of the matter. As Marie and Vitalis were the only persons who could have known her secret, the inference is obvious. When, later in the year, Vitalis announced his intention of going to Paris on business, his mistress expressed to him the hope that he would "have a good time" with her bonds. Vitalis left for Paris. But there was now a distinct understanding between Marie and himself. Vitalis had declared himself her lover and asked her to marry him. The following letter, written to him by Marie Boyer in the October of 1876, shows her attitude toward his proposal:
"I thank you very sincerely for your letter, which has given me very great pleasure, because it tells me that you are well. It sets my mind at rest, for my feelings towards you are the same as ever. I don't say they are those of love, for I don't know myself; I don't know what such feelings are. But I feel a real affection for you which may well turn to love. How should I not hold in affectionate remembrance one who has done everything for me? But love does not come to order. So I can't and don't wish to give any positive answer about our marriage—all depends on circumstances. I don't want any promise from you, I want you to be as free as I am. I am not fickle, you know me well enough for that. So don't ask me to give you any promise. You may find my letter a little cold. But I know too much of life to pledge myself lightly. I assure you I think on it often. Sometimes I blush when I think what marriage means."
Madame Boyer, displeased at the theft, had let her lover go without any great reluctance. No sooner had he gone than she began to miss him. Life seemed dull without him. Mother and daughter were united at least in their common regret at the absence of the young bookseller. To vary the monotony of existence, to find if possible a husband for her daughter, Madame Boyer decided to leave Montpellier for Marseilles, and there start some kind of business. The daughter, who foresaw greater amusement and pleasure in the life of a large city, assented willingly. On October 6, 1876, they arrived at Marseilles, and soon after Madame bought at a price considerably higher than their value, two shops adjoining one another in the Rue de la Republique. One was a cheese shop, the other a milliner's.
The mother arranged that she should look after the cheese shop, while her daughter presided over the milliner's. The two shops were next door to one another. Behind the milliner's was a drawing-room, behind the cheese shop a kitchen; these two rooms communicated with each other by a large dark room at the back of the building. In the kitchen was a trap-door leading to a cellar. The two women shared a bedroom in an adjoining house.
Vitalis had opposed the scheme of his mistress to start shop-keeping in Marseilles. He knew how unfitted she was to undertake a business of any kind. But neither mother nor daughter would relinquish the plan. It remained therefore to make the best of it. Vitalis saw that he must get the business into his own hands; and to do that, to obtain full control of Madame Boyer's affairs, he must continue to play the lover to her. To the satisfaction of the two women, he announced his intention of coming to Marseilles in the New Year of 1877. It was arranged that he should pass as a nephew of Madame Boyer, the cousin of Marie. He arrived at Marseilles on January 1, and received a cordial welcome. Of the domestic arrangements that ensued, it is sufficient to say that they were calculated to whet the jealousy and inflame the hatred that Marie felt towards her mother, who now persisted as before in parading before her daughter the intimacy of her relations with Vitalis.
In these circumstances Vitalis succeeded in extracting from his mistress a power of attorney, giving him authority to deal with her affairs and sell the two businesses, which were turning out unprofitable. This done, he told Marie, whose growing attachment to him, strange as it may seem, had turned to love, that now at last they could be free. He would sell the two shops, and with the money released by the sale they could go away to-gether. Suddenly Madame Boyer fell ill, and was confined to her bed. Left to themselves, the growing passion of Marie Boyer for Vitalis culminated in her surrender. But for the sick mother the happiness of the lovers was complete. If only her illness were more serious, more likely to be fatal in its result! "If only God would take her!" said Vitalis. "Yes," replied her daughter, "she has caused us so much suffering!"
To Madame Boyer her illness had brought hours of torment, and at last remorse. She realised the duplicity of her lover, she knew that he meant to desert her for her daughter, she saw what wrong she had done that daughter, she suspected even that Marie and Vitalis were poisoning her. Irreligious till now, her thoughts turned to religion. As soon as she could leave her bed she would go to Mass and make atonement for her sin; she would recover her power of attorney, get rid of Vitalis for good and all, and send her daughter back to a convent. But it was too late. Nemesis was swift to overtake the hapless woman. Try as he might, Vitalis had found it impossible to sell the shops at anything but a worthless figure. He had no money of his own, with which to take Marie away. He knew that her mother had resolved on his instant dismissal.
As soon as Madame Boyer was recovered sufficiently to leave her bed, she turned on her former lover, denounced his treachery, accused him of robbing and swindling her, and bade him go without delay. To Vitalis dismissal meant ruin, to Marie it meant the loss of her lover. During her illness the two young people had wished Madame Boyer dead, but she had recovered. Providence or Nature having refused to assist Vitalis, he resolved to fall back on art. He gave up a whole night's rest to the consideration of the question. As a result of his deliberations he suggested to the girl of seventeen the murder of her mother. "This must end," said Vitalis. "Yes, it must," replied Marie. Vitalis asked her if she had any objection to such a crime. Marie hesitated, the victim was her mother. Vitalis reminded her what sort of a mother she had been to her. The girl said that she was terrified at the sight of blood; Vitalis promised that her mother should be strangled. At length Marie consented. That night on some slight pretext Madame Boyer broke out into violent reproaches against her daughter. She little knew that every reproach she uttered served only to harden in her daughter's heart her unnatural resolve.
On the morning of March 19 Madame Boyer rose early to go to Mass.
Before she went out, she reminded Vitalis that this was his last day in her service, that when she returned she would expect to find him gone. It was after seven when she left the house. The lovers had no time to lose; the deed must be done immediately on the mother's return. They arranged that Vitalis should get rid of the shop-boy, and that, as soon as he had gone, Marie should shut and lock the front doors of the two shops. At one o'clock Madame Boyer came back. She expressed her astonishment and disgust that Vitalis still lingered, and threatened to send for the police to turn him out. Vitalis told the shop-boy that he could go away for a few hours; they had some family affairs to settle. The boy departed. Madame Boyer, tired after her long morning in the town, was resting on a sofa in the sitting-room, at the back of the milliner's shop. Vitalis entered the room, and after a few heated words, struck her a violent blow in the chest. She fell back on the sofa, calling to her daughter to come to her assistance. The daughter sought to drown her mother's cries by banging the doors, and opening and shutting drawers. Vitalis, who was now trying to throttle his victim, called to Marie to shut the front doors of the two shops.
To do so Marie had to pass through the sitting-room, and was a witness to the unsuccessful efforts of Vitalis to strangle her mother. Having closed the doors, she retired into the milliner's shop to await the issue. After a few moments her lover called to her for the large cheese knife; he had caught up a kitchen knife, but in his struggles it had slipped from his grasp. Quickly Marie fetched the knife and returned to the sitting-room. There a desperate struggle was taking place between the man and woman. At one moment it seemed as if Madame Boyer would get the better of Vitalis, whom nature had not endowed greatly for work of this kind. Marie came to his aid. She kicked and beat her mother, until at last the wretched creature released her hold and sank back exhausted. With the cheese knife, which her daughter had fetched, Vitalis killed Madame Boyer.
They were murderers now, the young lovers. What to do with the body? The boy would be coming back soon. The cellar under the kitchen seemed the obvious place of concealment. With the help of a cord the body was lowered into the cellar, and Marie washed the floor of the sitting-room. The boy came back. He asked where Madame Boyer was. Vitalis told him that she was getting ready to return to Montpellier the same evening, and that he had arranged to go with her, but that he had no intention of doing so; he would accompany her to the station, he said, and then at the last moment, just as the train was starting, slip away and let her go on her journey alone. To the boy, who knew enough of the inner history of the household to enjoy the piquancy of the situation, such a trick seemed quite amusing. He went away picturing in his mind the scene at the railway station and its humorous possibilities.
At seven o'clock Vitalis and Marie Boyer were alone once more with the murdered woman. They had the whole night before them. Vitalis had already considered the matter of the disposal of the body. He had bought a pick and spade. He intended to bury his former mistress in the soil under the cellar. After that had been done, he and Marie would sell the business for what it would fetch, and go to Brussels—an admirable plan, which two unforeseen circumstances defeated. The Rue de la Republique was built on a rock, blasted out for the purpose. The shop-boy had gone to the station that evening to enjoy the joke which, he believed, was to be played on his mistress.
When Vitalis tried to dig a grave into the ground beneath the cellar he realised the full horror of the disappointment. What was to be done? They must throw the body into the sea. But how to get it there? The crime of Billoir, an old soldier, who the year before in Paris had killed his mistress in a fit of anger and cut up her body, was fresh in the recollection of Vitalis. The guilty couple decided to dismember the body of Madame Boyer and so disfigure her face as to render it unrecognisable. In the presence of Marie, Vitalis did this, and the two lovers set out at midnight to discover some place convenient for the reception of the remains. They found the harbour too busy for their purpose, and decided to wait until the morrow, when they would go farther afield. They returned home and retired for the night, occupying the bed in which Madame Boyer had slept the night before.
On the morning of the 20th the lovers rose early, and a curious neighbour, looking through the keyhole, saw them counting joyously money and valuables, as they took them from Madame Boyer's cashbox. When the shop-boy arrived, he asked Vitalis for news of Madame Boyer. Vitalis told him that he had gone with her to the station, that she had taken the train to Montpellier, and that, in accordance with his plan, he had given her the slip just as the train was starting. This the boy knew to be false: he had been to the station himself to enjoy the fun, and had seen neither Vitalis nor Madame Boyer. He began to suspect some mystery. In the evening, when the shops had been closed, and he had been sent about his business, he waited and watched. In a short time he saw Vitalis and Marie Boyer leave the house, the former dragging a hand-cart containing two large parcels, while Marie walked by his side. They travelled some distance with their burden, leaving the city behind them, hoping to find some deserted spot along the coast where they could conceal the evidence of their crime. Their nerves were shaken by meeting with a custom-house officer, who asked them what it was they had in the cart. Vitalis answered that it was a traveller's luggage, and the officer let them pass on. But soon after, afraid to risk another such experience, the guilty couple turned out the parcels into a ditch, covered them with stones and sand, and hurried home.
The next day, the shop-boy and the inquisitive neighbour having consulted together, went to the Commissary of Police and told him of the mysterious disappearance of Madame Boyer. The Commissary promised to investigate the matter, and had just dismissed his informants when word was brought to him of the discovery, in a ditch outside Marseilles, of two parcels containing human remains. He called back the boy and took him to view the body at the Morgue. The boy was able, by the clothes, to identify the body as that of his late mistress. The Commissary went straight to the shops in the Rue de la Republique, where he found the young lovers preparing for flight. At first they denied all knowledge of the crime, and said that Madame Boyer had gone to Montpellier. They were arrested, and it was not long before they both confessed their guilt to the examining magistrate.
Vitalis and Marie Boyer were tried before the Assize Court at Aix on July 2, 1877. Vitalis is described as mean and insignificant in appearance, thin, round-backed, of a bilious complexion; Marie Boyer as a pretty, dark girl, her features cold in expression, dainty and elegant. At her trial she seemed to be still so greatly under the influence of Vitalis that during her interrogatory the President sent him out of court. To the examining magistrate Marie Boyer, in describing her mother's murder, had written, "I cannot think how I came to take part in it. I, who wouldn't have stayed in the presence of a corpse for all the money in the world." Vitalis was condemned to death, and was executed on August 17. He died fearful and penitent, acknowledging his miserable career to be a warning to misguided youth. Extenuating circumstances were accorded to Marie Boyer, and she was sentenced to penal servitude for life. Her conduct in prison was so repentant and exemplary that she was released in 1892.
M. Proal, a distinguished French judge, and the author of some important works on crime, acted as the examining magistrate in the case of Vitalis and Marie Boyer. He thus sums up his impression of the two criminals: "Here is an instance of how greed and baseness on the one side, lust and jealousy on the other, bring about by degrees a change in the characters of criminals, and, after some hesitation, the suggestion and accomplishment of parricide, Is it necessary to seek an explanation of the crime in any psychic abnormality which is negatived to all appearances by the antecedents of the guilty pair? Is it necessary to ask it of anatomy or physiology? Is not the crime the result of moral degradation gradually asserting itself in two individuals, whose moral and intellectual faculties are the same as those of other men, but who fall, step by step, into vice and crime? It is by a succession of wrongful acts that a man first reaches the frontier of crime and then at length crosses it."
There is an account of this case in Bataille "Causes Criminelles et Mondaines" (1882), and in Mace's book, "Femmes Criminelles." It is alluded to in "Souvenirs d'un President d'Assises," by Berard des Glajeux. The murder of the chemist Aubert by Marin Fenayrou and his wife Gabrielle was perpetrated near Paris in the year 1882. In its beginning the story is commonplace enough. Fenayrou was the son of a small chemist in the South of France, and had come to Paris from the Aveyron Department to follow his father's vocation. He obtained a situation as apprentice in the Rue de la Ferme des Mathurins in the shop of a M. Gibon. On the death of M. Gibon his widow thought she saw in Fenayrou a man capable of carrying on her late husband's business. She gave her daughter in marriage to her apprentice, and installed him in the shop. The ungrateful son-in-law, sure of his wife and his business and contrary to his express promise, turned the old lady out of the house. This occurred in the year 1870, Fenayrou being then thirty years of age, his wife, Gabrielle, seventeen.
They were an ill-assorted and unattractive couple. The man, a compound of coarse brutality and shrewd cunning, was at heart lazy and selfish, the woman a spoilt child, in whom a real want of feeling was supplied by a shallow sentimentalism. Vain of the superior refinement conferred on her by a good middle-class education, she despised and soon came to loathe her coarse husband, and lapsed into a condition of disappointment and discontent that was only relieved superficially by an extravagant devotion to religious exercises.
It was in 1875, when the disillusionment of Mme. Fenayrou was complete, that her husband received into his shop a pupil, a youth of twenty-one, Louis Aubert. He was the son of a Norman tradesman. The ambitious father had wished his son to enter the church, but the son preferred to be a chemist. He was a shrewd, hard-working fellow, with an eye to the main chance and a taste for pleasures that cost him nothing, jovial, but vulgar and self-satisfied, the kind of man who, having enjoyed the favours of woman, treats her with arrogance and contempt, till from loving she comes to loathe him—a characteristic example, according to M. Bourget, of le faux homme a femmes. Such was Aubert, Fenayrou's pupil. He was soon to become something more than pupil.
Fenayrou as chemist had not answered to the expectations of his mother-in-law. His innate laziness and love of coarse pleasures had asserted themselves. At first his wife had shared in the enjoyments, but as time went on and after the birth of their two children, things became less prosperous. She was left at home while Fenayrou spent his time in drinking bocks of beer, betting and attending race-meetings. It was necessary, under these circumstances, that someone should attend to the business of the shop. In Aubert Fenayrou found a ready and willing assistant.
From 1876 to 1880, save for an occasional absence for military service, Aubert lived with the Fenayrous, managing the business and making love to the bored and neglected wife, who after a few months became his mistress. Did Fenayrou know of this intrigue or not? That is a crucial question in the case. If he did not, it was not for want of warning from certain of his friends and neighbours, to whom the intrigue was a matter of common knowledge. Did he refuse to believe in his wife's guilt? or, dependent as he was for his living on the exertions of his assistant, did he deliberately ignore it, relying on his wife's attractions to keep the assiduous Aubert at work in the shop? In any case Aubert's arrogance, which had increased with the consciousness of his importance to the husband and his conquest of the wife, led in August of 1880, to a rupture. Aubert left the Fenayrous and bought a business of his own on the Boulevard Malesherbes.
Before his departure Aubert had tried to persuade Mme. Gibon to sell up her son-in-law by claiming from him the unpaid purchase-money for her husband's shop. He represented Fenayrou as an idle gambler, and hinted that he would find her a new purchaser. Such an underhand proceeding was likely to provoke resentment if it should come to the ears of Fenayrou. During the two years that elapsed between his departure from Fenayrou's house and his murder, Aubert had prospered in his shop on the Boulevard Malesherbes, whilst the fortunes of the Fenayrous had steadily deteriorated.
At the end of the year 1881 Fenayrou sold his shop and went with his family to live on one of the outer boulevards, that of Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. He had obtained a post in a shady mining company, in which he had persuaded his mother-in-law to invest 20,000 francs. He had attempted also to make money by selling fradulent imitations of a famous table-water. For this offence, at the beginning of 1882, he was condemned by the Correctional Tribunal of Paris to three months' imprisonment and 1,000 francs costs.
In March of 1882 the situation of the Fenayrous was parlous, that of Aubert still prosperous.
Since Aubert's departure Mme. Fenayrou had entertained another lover, a gentleman on the staff of a sporting newspaper, one of Fenayrou's turf acquaintances. This gentleman had found her a cold mistress, preferring the ideal to the real. As a murderess Madame Fenayrou overcame this weakness.
If we are to believe Fenayrou's story, the most critical day in his life was March 22, 1882, for it was on that day, according to his account, that he learnt for the first time of his wife's intrigue with Aubert. Horrified and enraged at the discovery, he took from her her nuptial wreath, her wedding-ring, her jewellery, removed from its frame her picture in charcoal which hung in the drawing-room, and told her, paralysed with terror, that the only means of saving her life was to help him to murder her lover.
Two months later, with her assistance, this outraged husband accomplished his purpose with diabolical deliberation. He must have been well aware that, had he acted on the natural impulse of the moment and revenged himself then and there on Aubert, he would have committed what is regarded by a French jury as the most venial of crimes, and would have escaped with little or no punishment. He preferred, for reasons of his own, to set about the commission of a deliberate and cold-blooded murder that bears the stamp of a more sinister motive than the vengeance of a wronged husband.
The only step he took after the alleged confession of his wife on March 22 was to go to a commissary of police and ask him to recover from Aubert certain letters of his wife's that were in his possession. This the commissary refused to do. Mme. Gibon, the mother-in-law, was sent to Aubert to try to recover the letters, but Aubert declined to give them up, and wrote to Mme. Fenayrou:
"Madame, to my displeasure I have had a visit this morning from your mother, who has come to my home and made a most unnecessary scene and reproached me with facts so serious that I must beg you to see me without delay. It concerns your honour and mine.... I have no fear of being confronted with your husband and yourself. I am ready, when you wish, to justify myself.... Please do all you can to prevent a repetition of your mother's visit or I shall have to call in the police."
It is clear that the Fenayrous attached the utmost importance to the recovery of this correspondence, which disappeared with Aubert's death. Was the prime motive of the murder the recovery and destruction of these letters? Was Aubert possessed of some knowledge concerning the Fenayrous that placed them at his mercy?
It would seem so. To a friend who had warned him of the danger to which his intimacy with Gabrielle Fenayrou exposed him, Aubert had replied, "Bah! I've nothing to fear. I hold them in my power." The nature of the hold which Aubert boasted that he possessed over these two persons remains the unsolved mystery of the case, "that limit of investigation," in the words of a French judge, "one finds in most great cases, beyond which justice strays into the unknown."
That such a hold existed, Aubert's own statement and the desperate attempts made by the Fenayrous to get back these letters, would seem to prove beyond question. Had Aubert consented to return them, would he have saved his life? It seems probable. As it was, he was doomed. Fenayrou hated him. They had had a row on a race-course, in the course of which Aubert had humiliated his former master. More than this, Aubert had boasted openly of his relations with Mme. Fenayrou, and the fact had reached the ears of the husband. Fenayrou believed also, though erroneously, that Aubert had informed against him in the matter of the table-water fraud. Whether his knowledge of Aubert's relations with his wife was recent or of long standing, he had other grounds of hate against his former pupil. He himself had failed in life, but he saw his rival prosperous, arrogant in his prosperity, threatening, dangerous to his peace of mind; he envied and feared as well as hated him. Cruel, cunning and sinister, Fenayrou spent the next two months in the meditation of a revenge that was not only to remove the man he feared, but was to give him a truly fiendish opportunity of satisfying his ferocious hatred.
And the wife what of her share in the business? Had she also come to hate Aubert? Or did she seek to expiate her guilt by assisting her husband in the punishment of her seducer? A witness at the trial described Mme. Fenayrou as "a soft paste" that could be moulded equally well to vice or virtue, a woman destitute of real feeling or strength of will, who, under the direction of her husband, carried out implicitly, precisely and carefully her part in an atrocious murder, whose only effort to prevent the commission of such a deed was to slip away into a church a few minutes before she was to meet the man she was decoying to his death, and pray that his murder might be averted.
Her religious sense, like the images in the hat of Louis XI., was a source of comfort and consolation in the doing of evil, but powerless to restrain her from the act itself, in the presence of a will stronger than her own. At the time of his death Aubert contemplated marriage, and had advertised for a wife. If Mme. Fenayrou was aware of this, it may have served to stimulate her resentment against her lover, but there seems little reason to doubt that, left to herself, she would never have had the will or the energy to give that resentment practical expression. It required the dictation of the vindictive and malevolent Fenayrou to crystallise her hatred of Aubert into a deliberate participation in his murder.
Eight or nine miles north-west of Paris lies the small town of Chatou, a pleasant country resort for tired Parisians. Here Madeleine Brohan, the famous actress, had inhabited a small villa, a two-storied building. At the beginning of 1882 it was to let. In the April of that year a person of the name of "Hess" agreed to take it at a quarterly rent of 1,200 francs, and paid 300 in advance. "Hess" was no other than Fenayrou—the villa that had belonged to Madeleine Brohan the scene chosen for Aubert's murder. Fenayrou was determined to spare no expense in the execution of his design: it was to cost him some 3,000 francs before he had finished with it.
As to the actual manner of his betrayer's death, the outraged husband found it difficult to make up his mind. It was not to be prompt, nor was unnecessary suffering to be avoided. At first he favoured a pair of "infernal" opera-glasses that concealed a couple of steel points which, by means of a spring, would dart out into the eyes of anyone using them and destroy their sight. This rather elaborate and uncertain machine was abandoned later in favour of a trap for catching wolves. This was to be placed under the table, and seize in its huge iron teeth the legs of the victim. In the end simplicity, in the shape of a hammer and sword-stick, won the day. An assistant was taken in the person of Lucien Fenayrou, a brother of Marin.
This humble and obliging individual, a maker of children's toys, regarded his brother the chemist with something like veneration as the gentleman and man of education of the family. Fifty francs must have seemed to him an almost superfluous inducement to assist in the execution of what appeared to be an act of legitimate vengeance, an affair of family honour in which the wife and brother of the injured husband were in duty bound to participate. Mme. Fenayrou, with characteristic superstition, chose the day of her boy's first communion to broach the subject of the murder to Lucien. By what was perhaps more than coincidence, Ascension Day, May 18, was selected as the day for the crime itself. There were practical reasons also. It was a Thursday and a public holiday. On Thursdays the Fenayrou children spent the day with their grandmother, and at holiday time there was a special midnight train from Chatou to Paris that would enable the murderers to return to town after the commission of their crime. A goat chaise and twenty-six feet of gas piping had been purchased by Fenayrou and taken down to the villa.
Nothing remained but to secure the presence of the victim. At the direction of her husband Mme. Fenayrou wrote to Aubert on May 14, a letter in which she protested her undying love for him, and expressed a desire to resume their previous relations. Aubert demurred at first, but, as she became more pressing, yielded at length to her suggestion. If it cost him nothing, Aubert was the last man to decline an invitation of the kind. A trip to Chatou was arranged for Ascension Day, May 18, by the train leaving Paris from the St. Lazare Station, at half-past eight in the evening.
On the afternoon of that day Fenayrou, his wife and his brother sent the children to their grandmother and left Paris for Chatou at three o'clock. Arrived there, they went to the villa, Fenayrou carrying the twenty-six feet of gas-piping wound round him like some huge hunting-horn. He spent the afternoon in beating out the piping till it was flat, and in making a gag. He tried to take up the flooring in the kitchen, but this plan for the concealment of the body was abandoned in favour of the river. As soon as these preparations, in which he was assisted by his two relatives, had been completed, Fenayrou placed a candle, some matches and the sword-stick on the drawing-room table and returned to Paris.
The three conspirators dined together heartily in the Avenue de Clichy—soup, fish, entree, sweet and cheese, washed down by a bottle of claret and a pint of burgundy, coffee to follow, with a glass of chartreuse for Madame. To the waiter the party seemed in the best of spirits. Dinner ended, the two men returned to Chatou by the 7.35 train, leaving Gabrielle to follow an hour later with Aubert. Fenayrou had taken three second-class return tickets for his wife, his brother and himself, and a single for their visitor. It was during the interval between the departure of her husband and her meeting with Aubert that Mme. Fenayrou went into the church of St. Louis d'Antin and prayed.
At half-past eight she met Aubert at the St. Lazare Station, gave him his ticket and the two set out for Chatou—a strange journey Mme. Fenayrou was asked what they talked about in the railway carriage. "Mere nothings," she replied. Aubert abused her mother; for her own part, she was very agitated—tres emotionnee. It was about half-past nine when they reached their destination. The sight of the little villa pleased Aubert.
"Ah!" he said, "this is good. I should like a house like this and twenty thousand francs a year!" As he entered the hall, surprised at the darkness, he exclaimed: "The devil! it's precious dark! 'tu sais, Gabrielle, que je ne suis pas un heros d'aventure.'" The woman pushed him into the drawing-room. He struck a match on his trousers. Fenayrou, who had been lurking in the darkness in his shirt sleeves, made a blow at him with the hammer, but it was ineffectual. A struggle ensued. The room was plunged in darkness. Gabrielle waited outside. After a little, her husband called for a light; she came in and lit a candle on the mantelpiece. Fenayrou was getting the worst of the encounter. She ran to his help, and dragged off his opponent. Fenayrou was free. He struck again with the hammer. Aubert fell, and for some ten minutes Fenayrou stood over the battered and bleeding man abusing and insulting him, exulting in his vengeance. Then he stabbed him twice with the sword-stick, and so ended the business.
The murderers had to wait till past eleven to get rid of the body, as the streets were full of holiday-makers. When all was quiet they put it into the goat chaise, wrapped round with the gas-piping, and wheeled it on to the Chatou bridge. To prevent noise they let the body down by a rope into the water. It was heavier than they thought, and fell with a loud splash into the river. "Hullo!" exclaimed a night-fisherman, who was mending his tackle not far from the bridge, "there go those butchers again, chucking their filth into the Seine!"
As soon as they had taken the chaise back to the villa, the three assassins hurried to the station to catch the last train. Arriving there a little before their time, they went into a neighbouring cafe. Fenayrou had three bocks, Lucien one, and Madame another glass of chartreuse. So home to Paris. Lucien reached his house about two in the morning. "Well," asked his wife, "did you have a good day?" "Splendid," was the reply.
Eleven days passed. Fenayrou paid a visit to the villa to clean it and put it in order. Otherwise he went about his business as usual, attending race meetings, indulging in a picnic and a visit to the Salon. On May 27 a man named Bailly, who, by a strange coincidence, was known by the nickname of "the Chemist," walking by the river, had his attention called by a bargeman to a corpse that was floating on the water. He fished it out. It was that of Aubert. In spite of a gag tired over his mouth the water had got into the body, and, notwithstanding the weight of the lead piping, it had risen to the surface.
As soon as the police had been informed of the disappearance of Aubert, their suspicions had fallen on the Fenayrous in consequence of the request which Marin Fenayrou had made to the commissary of police to aid him in the recovery from Aubert of his wife's letters. But there had been nothing further in their conduct to provoke suspicion. When, however, the body was discovered and at the same time an anonymous letter received denouncing the Fenayrous as the murderers of Aubert, the police decided on their arrest. On the morning of June 8 M. Mace, then head of the Detective Department, called at their house. He found Fenayrou in a dressing-gown. This righteous avenger of his wife's seduction denied his guilt, like any common criminal, but M. Mace handed him over to one of his men, to be taken immediately to Versailles. He himself took charge of Madame, and, in the first-class carriage full of people, in which they travelled together to Versailles, she whispered to the detective a full confession of the crime.
Mace has left us an account of this singular railway journey. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. In the carriage were five ladies and a young man who was reading La Vie Parisienne. Mme. Fenayrou was silent and thoughtful. "You're thinking of your present position?" asked the detective. "No, I'm thinking of my mother and my dear children." "They don't seem to care much about their father," remarked Mace. "Perhaps not." "Why?" asked M. Mace. "Because of his violent temper," was the reply. After some further conversation and the departure at Courbevoie of the young man with La Vie Parisienne, Mme. Fenayrou asked abruptly: "Do you think my husband guilty?" "I'm sure of it." "So does Aubert's sister." "Certainly," answered M. Mace; "she looks on the crime as one of revenge." "But my brother-in-law," urged the woman, "could have had no motive for vengeance against Aubert." Mace answered coldly that he would have to explain how he had employed his time on Ascension Day. "You see criminals everywhere," answered Madame.
After the train had left St. Cloud, where the other occupants of the carriage had alighted, the detective and his prisoner were alone, free of interruption till Versailles should be reached. Hitherto they had spoken in whispers; now Mace seized the opportunity to urge the woman to unbosom herself to him, to reveal her part in the crime. She burst into tears. There was an interval of silence; then she thanked Mace for the kindness and consideration he had shown her. "You wish me," she asked, "to betray my husband?" "Without any design or intention on your part," discreetly answered the detective; "but by the sole force of circumstances you are placed in such a position that you cannot help betraying him."
Whether convinced or not of this tyranny of circumstance, Mme. Fenayrou obeyed her mentor, and calmly, coldly, without regret or remorse, told him the story of the assassination. Towards the end of her narration she softened a little. "I know I am a criminal," she exclaimed. "Since this morning I have done nothing but lie. I am sick of it; it makes me suffer too much. Don't tell my husband until this evening that I have confessed; there's no need, for, after what I have told you, you can easily expose his falsehoods and so get at the truth."
That evening the three prisoners—Lucien had been arrested at the same time as the other two—were brought to Chatou. Identified by the gardener as the lessee of the villa, Fenayrou abandoned his protestations of innocence and admitted his guilt. The crime was then and there reconstituted in the presence of the examining magistrate. With the help of a gendarme, who impersonated Aubert, Fenayrou repeated the incidents of the murder. The goat-chaise was wheeled to the bridge, and there in the presence of an indignant crowd, the murderer showed how the body had been lowered into the river.
After a magisterial investigation lasting two months, which failed to shed any new light on the more mysterious elements in the case, Fenayrou, his wife and brother were indicted on August 19 before the Assize Court for the Seine-et-Oise Department, sitting at Versailles.
The attitude of the three culprits was hardly such as to provoke the sympathies of even a French jury. Fenayrou seemed to be giving a clumsy and unconvincing performance of the role of the wronged husband; his heavy figure clothed in an ill-fitting suit of "blue dittos," his ill-kempt red beard and bock-stained moustache did not help him in his impersonation. Mme. Fenayrou, pale, colourless, insignificant, was cold and impenetrable. She described the murder of her lover "as if she were giving her cook a household recipe for making apricot Jam." Lucien was humble and lachrymose.
In his interrogatory of the husband the President, M. Berard des Glajeux, showed himself frankly sceptical as to the ingenuousness of Fenayrou's motives in assassinating Aubert. "Now, what was the motive of this horrible crime?" he asked. "Revenge," answered Fenayrou.
President: But consider the care you took to hide the body and destroy all trace of your guilt; that is not the way in which a husband sets out to avenge his honour; these are the methods of the assassin! With your wife's help you could have caught Aubert in flagrante delicto and killed him on the spot, and the law would have absolved you. Instead of which you decoy him into a hideous snare. Public opinion suggests that jealousy of your former assistant's success, and mortification at your own failure, were the real motives. Or was it not perhaps that you had been in the habit of rendering somewhat dubious services to some of your promiscuous clients?
Fenayrou: Nothing of the kind, I swear it!
President: Do not protest too much. Remember that among your acquaintances you were suspected of cheating at cards. As a chemist you had been convinced of fraud. Perhaps Aubert knew something against you. Some act of poisoning, or abortion, in which you had been concerned? Many witnesses have believed this.
Your mother-in-law is said to have remarked, "My son-in-law will end in jail."
Fenayrou (bursting into tears): This is too dreadful.
President: And Dr. Durand, an old friend of Aubert, remembers the deceased saying to him, "One has nothing to fear from people one holds in one's hands."
Fenayrou: I don't know what he meant.
President: Or, considering the cruelty, cowardice, the cold calculation displayed in the commission of the crime, shall we say this was a woman's not a man's revenge. You have said your wife acted as your slave—was it not the other way about?
Fenayrou: No; it was my revenge, mine alone.
The view that regarded Mme. Fenayrou as a soft, malleable paste was not the view of the President.
"Why," he asked the woman, "did you commit this horrible murder, decoy your lover to his death?" "Because I had repented," was the answer; "I had wronged my husband, and since he had been condemned for fraud, I loved him the more for being unfortunate. And then I feared for my children."
President: Is that really the case?
Mme. Fenayrou: Certainly it is.
President: Then your whole existence has been one of lies and hypocrisy. Whilst you were deceiving your husband and teaching your children to despise him you were covering him with caresses.
You have played false to both husband and lover—to Aubert in decoying him to his death, to your husband by denouncing him directly you were arrested. You have betrayed everybody. The only person you have not betrayed is yourself. What sort of a woman are you? As you and Aubert went into the drawing-room on the evening of the murder you said loudly, "This is the way," so that your husband, hearing your voice outside, should not strike you by mistake in the darkness. If Lucien had not told us that you attacked Aubert whilst he was struggling with your husband, we should never have known it, for you would never have admitted it, and your husband has all along refused to implicate you.... You have said that you had ceased to care for your lover: he had ceased to care for you. He was prosperous, happy, about to marry: you hated him, and you showed your hate when, during the murder, you flung yourself upon him and cried, "Wretch!" Is that the behaviour of a woman who represents herself to have been the timid slave of her husband? No. This crime is the revenge of a cowardly and pitiless woman, who writes down in her account book the expenses of the trip to Chatou and, after the murder, picnics merrily in the green fields. It was you who steeled your husband to the task.
How far the President was justified in thus inverting the parts played by the husband and wife in the crime must be a matter of opinion. In his volume of Souvenirs M. Berard des Glajeux modifies considerably the view which he perhaps felt it his duty to express in his interrogatory of Gabrielle Fenayrou. He describes her as soft and flexible by nature, the repentant slave of her husband, seeking to atone for her wrong to him by helping him in his revenge. The one feature in the character of Mme. Fenayrou that seems most clearly demonstrated is its absolute insensibility under any circumstances whatsoever.
The submissive Lucien had little to say for himself, nor could any motive for joining in the murder beyond a readiness to oblige his brother be suggested. In his Souvenirs M. Berard des Glajeux states that to-day it would seem to be clearly established that Lucien acted blindly at the bidding of his sister-in-law, "qu'il avait beaucoup aimee et qui n'avait pas ete cruelle a son egard."
The evidence recapitulated for the most part the facts already set out. The description of Mme. Fenayrou by the gentleman on the sporting newspaper who had succeeded Aubert in her affections is, under the circumstances, interesting: "She was sad, melancholy; I questioned her, and she told me she was married to a coarse man who neglected her, failed to understand her, and had never loved her. I became her lover but, except on a few occasions, our relations were those of good friends. She was a woman with few material wants, affectionate, expansive, an idealist, one who had suffered much and sought from without a happiness her marriage had never brought her. I believe her to have been the blind tool of her husband."
From motives of delicacy the evidence of this gentleman was read in his presence; he was not examined orally. His eulogy of his mistress is loyal. Against it may be set the words of the Procureur de la Republique, M. Delegorgue: "Never has a more thorough-paced, a more hideous monster been seated in the dock of an assize court. This woman is the personification of falsehood, depravity, cowardice and treachery. She is worthy of the supreme penalty." The jury were not of this opinion. They preferred to regard Mme. Fenayrou as playing a secondary part to that of her husband. They accorded in both her case and that of Lucien extenuating circumstances. The woman was sentenced to penal servitude for life, Lucien to seven years. Fenayrou, for whose conduct the jury could find no extenuation, was condemned to death.
It is the custom in certain assize towns for the President, after pronouncing sentence, to visit a prisoner who had been ordered for execution. M. Berard des Glajeux describes his visit to Fenayrou at Versailles. He was already in prison dress, sobbing.
His iron nature, which during five days had never flinched, had broken down; but it was not for himself he wept, but for his wife, his children, his brother; of his own fate he took no account. At the same moment his wife was in the lodge of the courthouse waiting for the cab that was to take her to her prison. Freed from the anxieties of the trial, knowing her life to be spared, without so much as a thought for the husband whom she had never loved, she had tidied herself up, and now, with all the ease of a woman, whose misfortunes have not destroyed her self-possession, was doing the honours of the jail. It was she who received her judge.
But Fenayrou was not to die. The Court of Cassation, to which he had made the usual appeal after condemnation, decided that the proceedings at Versailles had been vitiated by the fact that the evidence of Gabrielle Fenayrou's second lover had not been taken ORALLY, within the requirements of the criminal code; consequently a new trial was ordered before the Paris Assize Court. This second trial, which commenced on October 12, saved Fenayrou's head. The Parisian jury showed themselves more lenient than their colleagues at Versailles. Not only was Fenayrou accorded extenuating circumstances, but Lucien was acquitted altogether. The only person to whom these new proceedings brought no benefit was Mme. Fenayrou, whose sentence remained unaltered.
Marin Fenayrou was sent to New Caledonia to serve his punishment.
There he was allowed to open a dispensary, but, proving dishonest, he lost his license and became a ferryman—a very Charon for terrestrial passengers. He died in New Caledonia of cancer of the liver.
Gabrielle Fenayrou made an exemplary prisoner, so exemplary that, owing to her good conduct and a certain ascendancy she exercised over her fellow-prisoners, she was made forewoman of one of the workshops. Whilst holding this position she had the honour of receiving, among those entrusted to her charge, another Gabrielle, murderess, Gabrielle Bompard, the history of whose crime is next to be related.