Authors: Susanne Alleyn
“Revenge … and love; love gone sour.”
“All the sweetness of love,” Brasseur murmured, “is steeped in bitter gall and deadly venom.”
Aristide glanced at him. “Racine?”
“No, it’s from a long poem written a couple of hundred years ago. Not well known.” He fell silent for a moment as he reread a letter at the top of his heap of papers. “This arrived fifteen minutes ago from the Conciergerie,” he added, handing it over.
Aristide read it through twice and returned it to Brasseur. “I’ll come by later,” he said, pulling the door open.
#
“
They brought him in early today,” the prison clerk at the Conciergerie told him. “Went off the Pont-Neuf at about two in the morning. Somebody saw him and raised the alarm, and they managed to pull him out half drowned. Then they found the letter on the parapet.” He handed Aristide a folded sheet of paper. “What should we do with him?”
The note was brief, only a few sentences:
#
To the commissaire of the Section de la Butte-des-Moulins.
I do not wish to live. I loved Célie and it was I who killed her. Juliette de Vaudray did not commit the crimes attributed to her. I, and I alone, am guilty of the deaths of Célie Montereau and Citizen Saint-Ange and Citizeness Beaumontel. May God forgive me. I regret, with all my heart, everything that has come to pass.
Tell Citizen Ravel that he was right.
Aubry
This 25 Frimaire, Year V.
#
The prison clerk eyed Aristide mournfully. “Do you want to see him? It would help if you could provide us with a preliminary identification. His identity card was spoiled in the water… .”
Aristide nodded. Once again he followed a turnkey through the ill-lit corridors to the door of a cell. The turnkey drew back the spy hole’s shutter with a bang.
The young man jerked about and for an instant Aristide glimpsed a pallid, haggard countenance before the prisoner buried his head in his hands once more, trembling. His hair hung in lank tangles as it had dried from the waters of the Seine.
“Do you know him?” the clerk began, behind him.
“That’s Philippe Aubry.”
“Does this letter make sense to you? Should we be taking it seriously, or should he be sent to Charenton, to the lunatic asylum? He claims he committed the murders at Rue du Hasard, and surely—”
“Keep him safe,” Aristide said. “And send word to the police at Monceau that you have him.” He slid the shutter back into place. “Keep him safe for Sanson,” he repeated as he marched away, without looking back, through the cold stone corridors once more to the courtyard, where the rain had ceased and a feeble sun was struggling through the cloud of the winter morning.
This is a work of fiction, although inspired by some actual people and events. Aristide Ravel is entirely fictional; Rosalie Clément is based loosely on a young woman executed for multiple murder in 1808; Henri Sanson was a real person.
#
The memoirs of the stylish thief, murderer, poet, gutter philosopher, and folk hero of 1830s Paris, Pierre-François Lacenaire (1800?-1836), suggested aspects of Rosalie’s character. Lacenaire claimed he had committed murder because he was at war with the society that had rejected him, and had chosen to commit “suicide by guillotine” in forcing the state to execute him. He tells us in his memoirs that he knew he was destined for “the Widow” since the moment when his father pointed at the scaffold and brusquely told him, “That’s where you’ll end up if you don’t mend your ways!”
The little-known history of an attractive and spirited, though undoubtedly sociopathic, young Parisienne named Manette Bouhourt suggested the bizarre details of Rosalie’s homicidal career. Manette, who called herself Auguste and dressed in men’s clothing to attract unsuspecting, random victims, was guillotined in Paris on May 16, 1808, for the murder of two men and a woman. The
Journal de Paris
described her as “an unheard-of example of the coldest calculation in crime and of unbridled audacity in the most tender youth … [she] defended herself with as much coolness as energy, and pleaded her cause in a manner that astonished the judges, the jury, and the public.”
Manette claimed to have murdered “eighteen or twenty” men during trysts at hotels, bludgeoning them to death with a hammer while they slept, in revenge upon the male sex for having been heartlessly seduced and abandoned as a young girl. She chose to go to her execution wearing her male costume. Invariably charming and coquettish, her final words on the scaffold were “Don’t you think it’s a pity to cut off such a pretty head?”
#
Henri Sanson (1767-1840) was the son of Charles-Henri Sanson, executioner of Paris, who executed nearly all the leading figures of the French Revolution. Described in 1793 by a contemporary English witness as “a very handsome, smart young man,” Henri accepted a commission in the National Guard that year, perhaps hoping that the upheaval in society would allow him to avoid inheriting his ancestors’ profession. He attained the rank of captain of artillery before transferring to the company of gendarmerie detailed to maintain order at the law courts. Eventually submitting to the inevitable, he succeeded to the position of “executor of criminal judgments” upon his father’s retirement in August 1795. His person, his character, and the principal events in his life are more or less drawn from historical fact. The relationship between Henri and Rosalie is, however, entirely an invention of the author’s imagination.
#
The case of the Lyons Mail robbery was sensational in its day and became a folk legend in nineteenth-century France, owing to persistent questions of mistaken identity. It has never been conclusively determined whether Joseph Lesurques was among the highwaymen who robbed the mail van and brutally murdered the courier and postilion on April 27, 1796.
Though Lesurques claimed to be a respectable landowner and had never been suspected of any crime, several eyewitnesses identified him as one of the gang upon seeing him, by chance, in the corridors of the Palais de Justice. Other witnesses insisted that Lesurques strongly resembled one Dubosq, an elusive career criminal who was probably the mastermind behind the robbery. Four years later Dubosq was captured, tried, and executed for complicity in the affair, but he refused to confess or to clear Lesurques’s name.
The question remained in the public gaze until the mid-nineteenth century, as Lesurques’ widow and children petitioned successive governments for reexamination of the case and a posthumous pardon. The affair has not, even now, disappeared from the public imagination in France; in the 1980s the French stage saw a new dramatization of the case, which invited the audience to be the jury and vote on the fate of Joseph Lesurques.
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