Trials of Passion (22 page)

In his 7 July description of the ‘crisis' scene to Monsieur Oudinet, a former tutor of Robert's who serves as their ‘business' go-between, Robert says Marie started by taunting him, then very calmly went to her mirrored wardrobe and opened the door while saying, ‘It's all decided then? Fine, I'll show you how a woman who loves you behaves.'

On 30 June, immediately after the threatened suicide scene, Robert, ever wary of his reputation, had written to Marie advising courage and above all no more impetuous mad acts or
coups de tête.
He was happy, he said, to have been at her side and prevented her folly and the eruption of a scandal. Rupture, as difficult as it might seem for the moment, would give her the tranquillity she needed. What has he been to her for such a long time now, but a good and devoted friend? He will remain so if she allows him to - that is, by not creating a furore and by giving him the right to conduct himself as a
galant-homme,
a gentleman.

We don't know Marie's response to him. An undated July entry in her notebook records that she had the opportunity to kill him, but didn't, God only knows why. He has humiliated her. Can it be, she asks, that despite herself she still holds out hope? In a calmer mood she writes to Monsieur Oudinet, who, as the subsequent trial would make apparent, was himself rather taken with Marie, and less than enamoured of Robert's ways with women. To Oudinet she announces the end of Robert's relations with her. She has been alerted by a letter from him saying she doesn't have to worry about the future, since he'll pay her a monthly sum. This has so humiliated her that she feels she no longer has to shield him from public disgrace. She's prepared to take back her full liberty; but she doesn't want to be at his mercy and
dependent on the monthly sum he'll choose to give her. So she's going to ask him for a lump sum. She doesn't see this as an offering, but as a small restitution of what he owes her, since he has ruined her life and her future, rendering her incapable of doing anything.

Almost simultaneously Robert writes to Oudinet saying that the split having taken place, he is prepared to pay Marie a monthly sum for the foreseeable future, but he wants his freedom in return and he'll be rigorous about the rupture. He won't see her. T know a lot of men who wouldn't do as much: they wouldn't keep a woman for two years having been her lover for some two or three months.' He wants Marie to have a holiday: a rest will lessen her distress.

She finally goes to Royan, a resort on the Atlantic coast, with her mother. Here she sees a graphologist, those experts of the time who, not so unlike the neurolinguists of today, were said to be able to read personality – in their case, from handwriting. She is told she has an astonishing power of loving, or
amativité.
(Mrs Robinson's phrenological reading attributed a similar power to her.)

Over the course of the summer, Marie learns that Robert has replaced her with another woman. She had already spied on him a year ago, while she was heavily pregnant with Juliette. Now she does so more assiduously. Her need for revenge has grown into an obsession. She can't bear Robert's total abandonment: the desire for vengeance, the steps towards its implementation, are a continuation of the affair by different means.

Like a divorcing partner who, however reasonable her statements, can't yet let go, she turns to monetary demands as a form of communication – now that sex is over and the matter of children settled. In October she writes to Robert to ask for a lump sum of three thousand francs in addition to the three hundred a month he has been sending her, since favours presumably ceased, so that she can install herself as a music teacher. His contemptuous reply, telling her he is skint, infuriates her. She threatens to expose his conduct to his family, to write to Oudinet and to his brother-in-law and create a scandal if he doesn't comply. She visits his flat and bursts in on his new mistress.
He writes to say, Tour visit this morning was wholly inconvenient. One doesn't force oneself into people's houses unexpectedly. The day I broke with you, I intended to take back my liberty wholly and I have begun a serious liaison since then.'

On 10 November she tells her notebooks that seven months have passed since her daughter's death and she hasn't seen Robert in four. He sends her a paltry pension, and imagines that she can live this life. But she can't. She has resolved to die because he doesn't love her and because all hope of being a mother again is lost to her. Yet she doesn't want another woman to be the mother of his children. Because of that, she has to kill him.

She also writes that she feels she is going mad.

‘
Je sens queje deviens folle
' are the first words scribbled in pencil in a small day diary covering the period from 21 November till the eve of her murder attempt. (The police discovered the diary in her cupboard: she threw it into the fireplace during one of her interrogations, so its entries are somewhat singed.) Marie has just bought a revolver and has started stalking her former lover. The investigating magistrate's report says that she has also started practising how to use it. In her first diary entry she vows to kill Robert, but a note of two hours later, at six o'clock, declares he is still alive. Her strength betrayed her. Next time it won't, she tells the page and her daughter. Many of these entries are addressed to little Juliette, in whose name she wants this death.

On 13 December she tells the notebook that she wrote to Robert, but the insolent man didn't answer. ‘He has forgotten me. And thinks because he sends me pennies to eat with, we're quits. I don't want your money, Robert. I want your life. I don't want to live on charity or prostitution! I can't work, because my health is destroyed and my courage has abandoned me ... I want to die, but I want him to die first.' Her use of the word ‘prostitution' for the first time marks her self-abasement, as if she has finally allowed herself to acknowledge that her notions of romantic love with Robert were a veil thrown over her real status, that of the kept coquette she has always resisted.

On 19 December she goes to the Fête des Inondations de Maresie, knowing that he'll be at this major event in the Paris social calendar. She has her revolver with her. But although she sees Robert, he is too far away for her to take aim. The crowd, she writes, is his shield. But she'll get him in the end.

On Christmas Day she notes in her diary: ‘My little Jesus is dead, rots in the earth while I'm still here ... her mother. Mother ... what a gentle word: it's so sad to have already lost it.' New Year's Day has her scrawling on the reverse side of a photo of Robert: ‘RG – condemned to death by me, Marie.' That morning he had sent her five hundred francs, wanting to get rid of her, humiliating her further, or so she says in her deposition. She no longer sleeps, or goes out. She hardly eats, sees no one: she is altogether given over to her obsession.

At four o'clock on 3 January, Marie heads out once more with her revolver. Her diary entry salutes her own mother, the woman whose all-encompassing form of maternal love she has interiorized as an ideal. She asks her mother to forgive her: ‘... but you know the power of maternal love and you'll understand that I've gone off to find my child again.' At eight o'clock, she notes, ‘he's still alive. Until tomorrow then.'

Periodically in her notes she calls Robert ‘the monster': dehumanized, it is easier to shoot him. She hires a carriage and sits in front of his house in the Rue Auber, waiting for her moment. Now, as she says in her statement, her mind was ‘in chaos'. Women come and go from the premises. She follows the starlet from the Palais-Royal, watches her carriage take a tumble, and sees the younger woman thrown. Marie evidently looks so pitiful that the driver, once he has dropped her at her mother's, says he'll stake out Robert's premises for her. It is he who tells her that her former lover's new inamorata is Mile Colas.

On the evening of 7 January, Marie at last spies Robert. He comes out of the apartment with Mile Colas and sees her off in a carriage. He then heads towards the Rue Scribe. Marie launches herself out of her vehicle, rushes after him and takes aim. At her first shot, he falls. She doesn't know whether vengeance is at last hers, or if he has merely
taken fright and dropped down. She shoots again, and this time he gets up and starts to run. He's shouting and she realizes he doesn't recognize her beneath the large hat and lorgnon she has donned as a disguise. She fires a third shot which goes wide. Passers-by have gathered and a guardian of the peace has jumped on her from behind. He disarms her and she now can't turn the pistol on herself, as she had resolved to do.

Robert is staring at her, but he doesn't recognize her. She identifies herself, and publicly points a finger at him, accusing him of having murdered her daughter.

‘She's mad,' he says, and turns away.

In her signed deposition, which describes the scene, Marie states that in those first moments she regretted not having managed to kill him. In her calmer state, without for an instant regretting what she has done – because this man merited a punishment for toying with her love and all the rest of her feelings – she no longer wishes him dead. She is indifferent: life will perhaps be a greater punishment for him. ‘I've experienced both physical and moral pain and I don't know which is harder to bear,' she writes.

Marie Madeleine Bière, known as Maria Biraldi, is eventually charged with having voluntarily attempted to commit homicide on the person of Robert Gentien. The attempt failed only because of circumstances independent of her will. In other words, this is a murder attempt with premeditation. Under French penal law, Marie is remanded in custody in the women's prison of Saint-Lazare, while the investigating magistrate, Monsieur Adolphe Guillot, prepares the dossier of her case – and deliberates on the exact charge.

16.
The Investigation

French judicial procedure, fundamentally laid down in the Napoleonic
Code d'instruction criminelle
of 1808, differs markedly from the English and American.

In France the trial itself is preceded by a long period of inquiry, or
instruction
, led by an investigating magistrate. This figure, a cross between chief detective and a judicial eminence – not altogether unlike the King's magistrates of the
ancien régime
who themselves had sombre links to a secular version of the Spanish inquisitors – prepares the case against the defendant until he is satisfied that it is ready to be prosecuted by the court. The investigating magistrate has wide- ranging powers in what is understood as a procedure that will establish the truth. He carries out seizures and searches, orders expert testimony and verifies evidence. He interrogates the defendant as well as a host of witnesses.

This instruction is scarcely limited to material evidence or witnesses to the crime. An entire life is under investigation here. Character and psychological make-up are of as much importance as material facts. It was this interest in the psychology of the defendant and of the crime that perhaps made the French judicial system in the nineteenth century so much more permeable to the rising profession of psychiatry – even though the terms they used might not be the same. Psychology, after all, includes rational, cognitive processes as well as emotional and perceptual ones.

In France, as in other continental jurisdictions influenced by the Napoleonic Code, the specific crime came to be understood as part of a larger context in which a criminal personality could be detected. Questions of material evidence and moral responsibility, so central to Anglo-Saxon jurists, would often come second to investigations into
the dangerous personality of the defendant and the risk he or she posed to society. This – and the possibility of repeat offence that it implied – would also influence sentencing. When in 1876 the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso introduced his hereditarian theories of the ‘born criminal', that reversion to an atavistic type supposedly common to those who offend, his work found a ready home in French medico-legal thinking, which had long been interested in the personality of the accused as much as in the particular crime committed.

Lombroso's view of the criminal woman – doubly exceptional and therefore a true monster – also influenced the courts. Already present in the characterizations of the female that Darwin and Maudsley offered, this criminal woman was a contradictory creature, both excessively ‘feminine' in her deceitfulness – not seen to be at odds with her supposed limited intelligence – and somehow masculine in her eroticism, her increased sexuality. She shared in the epoch's understanding of woman as childlike, morally deficient, sexually cold, pious and maternal – all stereotypes that were in play but at the same time challenged by the passionate criminals of th
e fin de siècle.

To help build up a personality profile, the French investigating magistrate asks the defendant to submit an autobiographical account, a ‘memoir' of her life and her acts, alongside letters, poems and writings. In this Rousseauian confessional, it is hoped the psychology of the crime will be laid bare and intention and motive made clear. Witnesses of the accused's early life, even if from far-flung jurisdictions, are called: her ways of loving, her friendships, her faith, her family relations, her forebears, are all interrogated in order to arrive at a full picture. Gossip and hearsay often enough find a place in the final dossier. This ‘hearsay' evidence provides intriguing testimony about the nature of the period's received and accepted ideas. So, for example, when men – in the manifold instances of terrifying and drunken domestic abuse that then filled the courts – killed their wives, neighbours would often corroborate that, like the husband, they knew from the sounds of her many and therefore ‘acceptable' beatings that the wife must be ‘straying'. No hard evidence for her
unfaithfulness might exist – simply prejudice, which elided brutal punishment into proof of a prior crime.