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.