The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll (9 page)

Alice was still resolved to return with Samson to France in December, as promised, and she enlisted Raymund’s newfound expertise in capturing and transporting animals to help her accomplish this feat. There is a note in Margaret Spicer’s diary that Raymund de Trafford dined and danced with Margaret at the Muthaiga Club on New Year’s Day, 1927. Alice is not mentioned. In fact, she had sailed in mid-December with Samson, the lion cub, and Roderigo, the monkey, now on his second trip to France. Once back in Paris, Alice delivered the animals to the apartment in rue Spontini, where her daughters Nolwen and Paola were living with Frédéric and their nanny. When Aunt Tattie arrived for her regular visits, she would be greeted by a monkey climbing on the furniture, a lion in the living room, and a baby Nile crocodile in the bathtub. It is not known whether Alice smuggled in this crocodile from Africa or whether she had bought it in Paris. Certainly, Samson had the run of the rue Spontini apartment, because Paola, then two and a half years old, distinctly remembers riding on the cub’s back while hanging on to his considerable ruff of a mane.

Alice remained in Paris for more than a month this time. One of the reasons for her delayed return to Africa was that Raymund was in England after having received word that his father had suffered a stroke. In February 1927, Alice told Moya and Aunt Tattie that she was moving out of the rue Spontini apartment to take a small pied-à-terre in rue Chalgrin: Evidently, she wanted to be free to receive Raymund without the encumbrances of her children, her husband, and her animals. Alice’s friends and family in Paris remained understandably concerned about this new relationship. Raymund was an unknown quantity, whereas Frédéric had proved himself to be loyal, devoted, and tirelessly kind. But Alice was in love, she was a woman of means, and she was determined. In Raymund’s letters to Alice during this time, he cautioned her not to move so fast. Instead, Alice simply urged her lawyers to hurry through the divorce proceedings even faster, fearing that Raymund’s interest was dwindling. She began to make plans for her wedding.

To his credit, Raymund had informed his family that he wanted to marry Alice. However, the de Trafford family, especially Raymund’s brother Humphrey had grave reservations about this new relationship. As son and heir to the baronetcy, Humphrey was a much more conservative member of the de Trafford family than his wilder younger brother. The aristocratic de Traffords considered the countess far below their social status, despite her enormous personal fortune. Alice was American, still married, and she had two children into the bargain. Above all, Raymund’s family were straitlaced Catholics and did not approve of divorce. As far as Humphrey was concerned, Raymund had been instrumental in breaking up a Catholic marriage—scandalous behavior, in other words. Divorce was a mere technicality, meaning nothing in the eyes of God. Only the Pope could rule on an annulment, as he had done in the case of the de Traffords’ sister, Violet, who had divorced her first husband, receiving an annulment in 1921. The mechanics of annulment were complicated. One argument was that annulment could be granted if the marriage had not been consummated. This obviously could not apply in the case of Alice and Frédéric, who had two children. (Nolwen once asked her sister, Paola, in later years “How can Mummy’s marriage be annulled when we are her two children?”) Another submission could be that the children had been unwillingly conceived. A large payment to the Pope (Pius XI) was also deemed to be a help. Alice’s French lawyers provided a very competent submission, combining the argument of reluctant conception with a considerable offer of money.

The lawyers did not move fast enough, however. On Friday, March 25, 1927, less than a year after their first meeting, Raymund visited Alice at her apartment in Paris in order to inform her that the relationship was over and that he was leaving the next day by the four o’clock boat train. His parents were threatening to cut him out of his inheritance and would stop his allowance altogether unless he ended the relationship immediately. The threat of disinheritance terrified Raymund—he relied on regular injections of the family’s cash to fund his love of gambling, travel, and luxury. Alice told him there was no need to worry about money; she had quite enough for both of them. Raymund explained that he could not turn his back on his family, his religion, and his country. It was too much of a sacrifice. Alice reminded him that she had given up her husband and her children for him. Raymund could not be persuaded. He argued that if he continued his relationship with her, he would further jeopardize his father’s health. He even went as far as to suggest that Alice would probably be better off going back to Frédéric.

After Raymund’s departure, Alice was left in an uneviable position: She had abandoned her husband and children for a man who was now about to abandon her. Alice was a naturally unstable person, displaying a dangerous combination of vulnerability and determination. Faced with the sudden ending of the relationship with Raymund, she quickly began to unravel. That Friday evening, she visited Frédéric and her daughters at the rue Spontini apartment. Frédéric could see that Alice was distraught, and he asked her what had happened. Alice told him about Raymund’s announcement. Although Frédéric was already aware of Raymund’s reputation and can hardly have been surprised, the count comforted Alice as best he could. Then, in an act that demonstrates Frédéric’s impressive decency, he decided to defend the very woman who had rejected him. He went to see Raymund at his hotel, accusing his wife’s lover of dishonorable cowardice and instructing him to marry Alice as promised. Frédéric’s words, although well intentioned, had little or no effect. Later that same evening, Raymund arrived at Alice’s apartment on the rue Chalgrin to inform her, yet again, that he was leaving. This offered Alice one more opportunity to change his mind. She begged him, shouted at him, tried to reason with him, offered him money, and even tried to seduce him, but to no avail. Raymund was determined to leave for London the next day. He told her that he had no source of income without his family’s support and no intention of being kept by anyone else. He agreed to one more lunch to say good-bye the following day before he caught his train, but nothing more.

That night, Alice decided there was no future she could imagine for herself without him. The best and only possible way out of this situation was also the most extreme. She barely slept. By Saturday morning, she was resolved. If she couldn’t persuade Raymund to stay, she was going to have to take the most drastic action imaginable.

O
N THE MORNING OF
S
ATURDAY,
M
ARCH
26, 1927, Alice awoke from a fitful sleep in the bedroom of her apartment at 20, rue Chalgrin. She got out of bed and began to prepare for lunch with Raymund. She dressed with great attention to detail; if this was to be their last meeting, then she wanted to look her best. She had arranged to meet him at the Maison Lapérouse, a restaurant and
salon de thé
on the quai des Grands Augustins, overlooking the Seine. That week, Alice was looking after a friend’s Alsatian dog and she decided to take the animal with her, glad of the company. After a short cab ride along the banks of the Seine, she arrived at Lapérouse. Alice and the dog made straight for a private dining room reserved especially for the meeting with Raymund. Lunch consisted of champagne, fois gras, and salmon. Raymund must have been nervous, but Alice was determined to lighten the mood, and, consequently, the meal went smoothly as they ate and drank, laughing and even joking together. So amusing was their meeting that Alice had to remind herself of the gravity of the situation: Raymund was planning to leave.

When lunch was over, Alice suggested they do some shopping before going to the station in time for Raymund’s four o’clock train. She informed him that she had to run an errand for Frédéric at a nearby gun shop and suggested she could also buy a parting gift for Raymund there. The gun shop was on the avenue de l’Opéra, a short walk across the Pont Neuf and through the courtyards of the Louvre. The owner of the shop, a Monsieur Guinon, recognized Alice. She had visited with Frédéric to buy hunting equipment for their trip to Kenya in early 1925. For that same reason, no special permits or licenses were required for Alice’s purchase. Raymund chose some knives and a twelve-bore shotgun. Alice elected to buy herself a small revolver—a .38-caliber Colt with pearl-inlay handle and a box of nickel-plated bullets. The countess paid for the weapons and asked for them to be wrapped separately. She watched attentively as her gun was carefully enclosed in brown paper, with the box of bullets placed in the same bag.

The Gare du Nord was a cab ride away. When they arrived at the station, it was bustling with Saturday-afternoon shoppers on their way home to the suburbs. The boat train to Boulogne was waiting at platform one, at the far end of the station. Alice and Raymund made their way through the crowds, picking up some snacks from a boulangerie along the way. As Alice looked up at the station’s enormous overhead clock, she would have realized that she had only a little time left. She told Raymund she would meet him on the train to say their farewells. Next she went to the ladies’ room to unwrap her gun from its parcel, load it with bullets, and place it in her handbag. As she walked toward the boat train, Alice maintained her resolve. She had decided she was going to die in Raymund’s arms. Suicide was both a solution to her impossible predicament and a twisted restitution of justice. In other words, she would rather kill herself than allow herself to be abandoned by another man.

Alice boarded the train and found Raymund in his first-class compartment, stowing his luggage above his seat, ready to settle down with his newspaper for the journey ahead. He got up and moved toward Alice, who was standing in the entrance to the first-class carriage.

“Do you really want to leave?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he replied.

The whistle blew and the train gave a jolt, signifying its imminent departure. Alice went for her gun, but at this moment, she later described, she had a sudden change of heart. Why should Raymund continue to live without her? Why should he be allowed to go on with his life when hers was about to end? Alice leaned forward to kiss him, throwing one arm around his neck while removing the gun from her bag. Then she pressed the muzzle against Raymund’s chest and pulled the trigger. He collapsed. Next, Alice turned the gun on herself. Another crack. Witnesses reported that as she fell to the floor, she smiled.

Neither Alice nor Raymund remembered the furor that followed. The guards were summoned, someone was sent to call for an ambulance, and within a matter of minutes train officials had boarded the train. The guards found the couple motionless and bleeding, their bodies half in and half out of the first-class compartment. Alice’s Alsatian was growling so ferociously that it initially proved impossible to rescue the dying couple. Finally, someone threw a rock at the head of the dog so that the police were able to approach and remove the bodies from the train. Raymund was able to utter, “It was she who fired,” while Alice’s chief concern was with the Alsatian, which was now lying unconscious on the platform. “Take care of my dog!” she managed to gasp to an onlooker.

Alice and Raymund were taken to Lariboisière Hospital, directly adjacent to the Gare du Nord, where operations were performed to remove the bullets. The condition of both parties was desperate and there was a possibility that neither would live through the night. Raymund’s family was notified and members of the de Trafford clan left the deathbed of their father to sit in the hospital’s anteroom while the youngest son of the family slipped into a coma. Alice’s gun was a fairly large-caliber pistol, and an examination of the bullet extracted from Raymund’s wound showed the muzzle had been pressed directly against his chest as he had leaned forward to kiss her good-bye. By a miracle, the bullet had missed his heart by a few millimeters, and it is a tribute to the skill of the Parisian surgeons that he was revived at all. Meanwhile, Alice was fairing slightly better. Her bullet had passed through her stomach before penetrating her lower abdomen.

The events at the Gare du Nord made headlines in the United States, France, and Great Britain. The
Fort Covington Sun
in New York State printed the following account on April 14, 1927:

Certainly the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald must have seen the newspaper reports. At the time, he was hard at work on his novel
Tender Is the Night,
which would finally be published, after many redraftings, in 1934. In the novel, an American acquaintance of Dick and Nicole Diver, a woman named Maria Wallis, is depicted shooting an Englishman on a railway platform in Paris. She “plunged a frantic hand into her purse; then the sound of two revolver shots cracked the narrow air of the platform.” The train stops and the man is carried away on a stretcher while the police take the woman away. Dick is at the station seeing a friend to the train and races to find out what has happened. He reports back to his group that Maria Wallis just shot an Englishman. Although Fitzgerald changed the setting of the shooting from the Gare du Nord to the Gare Saint-Lazare, Maria Wallis is unmistakably Alice: “The young woman with the helmet-like hair.” The murder weapon, like Alice’s, is “très petit, vraie perle—un jouet!”

The French police soon pressed charges against the countess, with the district police commissioner preparing a tentative indictment accusing her of attempted homicide. The task of formally bringing these charges against her was assigned to the prosecution. All charges were deferred, however, until the two principals of the shooting either succumbed to their wounds or recovered. Alice spent nearly six weeks at Lariboisière Hospital recovering enough to be transferred to the hospital ward of the all-women’s prison, Saint-Lazare. The French authorities had already tried to interview her on several occasions. The first time, her sole response was, “I decline to give the reason for my act. It is my secret.” However, as the police started to interrogate her more thoroughly, she was forced to seek legal advice. In April, she made the following statement: “I was determined to die in his arms, and when the whistle blew, I suddenly changed my mind and resolved to take him with me into the Great Beyond. Slowly, very slowly, I loosened my grasp around his neck, placed the revolver between our two bodies and, as the train started, fired twice—into his chest and into my own body.”

Alice’s use of the phrase “Great Beyond” is significant. Death was the ultimate gesture for Alice, the one aspect of her existence over which she could have complete control. She had been brought up in the Presbyterian faith and so she would have been taught that when a person dies, his soul goes to be with God, where it waits for the final judgment. After the final judgment, souls are restored to bodies, eternal rewards and punishments are handed out, and everything and everyone is “refreshed and restored.” In other words, in heaven, Alice would finally be reunited with Raymund and with her long-departed mother. The existence of an afterlife was a credo to which Alice passionately subscribed. Ever since her adolescent suicide attempt, she had continued to wish to “escape this world.” According to her friends and acquaintances, she frequently made use of expressions such as the “other side” or “the Great Beyond.”

For now, Alice found herself far from heaven. After her arrest, she was imprisoned in a cell in Saint-Lazare Prison on charges of attempted murder. The cell had hosted several notorious female criminals in the past, including Marguerite Steinheil, the former mistress of French president Félix Fauré. In 1908, Steinheil was arrested and taken to Saint-Lazare, where she was held for a year while she awaited trial for the double murder of her husband and stepmother. She tried to pin the blame on a gang of intruders and members of her household staff—stories that the judge called a “tissue of lies.” She was eventually acquitted. Another notorious inhabitant of the same cell was Henriette Caillaux, the second wife of the finance minister of France, Joseph Caillaux. She was imprisoned for shooting the editor of the French newspaper
Le Figaro
after he published a letter about her husband that portrayed the minister in an unflattering light. Although Henriette admitted her crime, her lawyers pleaded that she was the victim of “uncontrollable feminine emotions” and that the shooting was in fact a
“crime passionnel.”
The jury also acquitted her. Alice’s other famous predecessor at Saint-Lazare was Mata Hari (born Gertrud Margarette Zelle), the Dutch-born exotic dancer who was arrested as a double agent by the French in 1917 and convicted of treason, possibly on trumped-up charges. She had agreed to spy for France, but her employees had lost faith in her and accused her of working for the Germans. Unlike Steinheil and Caillaux, she was eventually sentenced to death by firing squad. Alice’s fate remained in the balance.

As the weeks slipped away, her attorneys worked furiously to secure her release. On May 19, 1927, after nearly six weeks in the prison ward, Alice was temporarily released, on the proviso that she would remain in secluded convalescence until she was sufficiently healthy to appear in court. It was true that Alice had been badly wounded and her lacerated stomach needed constant care. Despite everything that had come to pass, the obvious place for her convalescence remained her husband’s country residence, the Château de Parfondeval. In official terms, Alice was still married. What’s more, she had been the love of Frédéric’s life for six years and she was still in close contact with his family. Parfondeval offered countryside peace, the attentions of the kindly Moya, and those of her favorite manservant, Edward, both of whom had a soothing effect on Alice’s health and nerves. Although Alice claimed she did not fear death, there is no doubt she was terrified of imprisonment should she be convicted of attempted murder (or murder, should Raymund die).

During the nine months of convalescence before her court hearing, Alice rested at Parfondeval and wrote a number of letters to her friends and relatives. Despite the de Janzés’ generosity in looking after Alice during this time, they felt the “
scandale
” deeply, and at Parfondeval, she was made only too aware of her estrangement. During this dismal period of her life, she also visited her apartment in Paris to collect clothes and books. Meanwhile, the gossip about Alice continued to circulate in Chicago, New York, and London, and she soon found out that her imprisonment had isolated her almost completely. Although she received correspondence from her father, her stepmother, Louise, and close friends such as Paula de Casa Maury, other members of her acquaintance were evidently keen to put distance between themselves and the notorious countess. Joss visited London for his grandfather’s funeral in July, but there is no evidence that he made contact with Alice at that time, and besides, by the end of 1927, he was already hatching plans to marry Mary Ramsay-Hill. Alice heard from Margaret Spicer that Margaret was planning a visit to London via Paris in December 1927 and wondered if they could meet. They never did.

Alice did, however, exchange multiple letters with Raymund. Although his wounds were still causing him considerable pain, he had emerged from his coma and was well enough now to order his nurses about, barking at them to appear at his bedside “at the double.” Contrary to popular expectation, he was not about to cut Alice out of his life. In fact, her dramatic act seems to have piqued his vanity. On May 19, 1927, he even went so far as to tell the
New York Times
that a reconciliation with Alice was in the cards, although this may have had something to do with wishing to appear noble in the eyes of the public.

And what of Frédéric? It seems he remained generous and loyal throughout the scandal. Although many would have recommended he keep his distance from Alice, he did the reverse, agreeing that his family home was the best place for her recovery. By now, he had begun work on
Vertical Land,
his book of pen portraits of Africa—which would be published the following year—in which the female characters were directly inspired by his relationship with Alice. Like many who have been spurned, Frédéric evidently continued to remain attached to his lost love, at least in the pages of his notebook. Alice makes her first appearance in the book as Anna-Christine Mason, a cousin of the narrator, Bob, who has just arrived in Kenya by boat. Like Alice, Anna has wide-set gray eyes, wavy hair, and a distinctive voice. Frédéric wrote: