The red widow, p.23
The Red Widow, page 23
On July 17, 1954, Meg died in a nursing home in Hove at age eighty-six.48 The myth would remain, but she would take her secrets with her to the grave.
AFTERWORD
MEG AND THE BELLE Époque are long gone. For the most part, that’s for the best. As charming as she was, she also had a capacity for destruction and even cruelty. And while Paris in the years around 1900 was a constant party for some, it was also a place of constraint, vast inequalities, and entrenched prejudices.
So much of Meg’s day seems distant from us. Many women today benefit from expanded professional opportunities and a cultural climate where divorce isn’t seen as a source of shame or scandal. If Meg were living in the twenty-first century, she would have faced more choices when she contemplated the failure of her marriage to Adolphe. Homophobia and antisemitism are still with us, but many in contemporary America don’t see Jews and queer folks as a danger to the nation. There’s a part of me that would love to be a time traveler to Meg’s Paris—but only for a few hours, until I could go back to my own timeline where I can have the job that I have, love the person that I love, and move through the world with a relative amount of ease as a Jewish person.
Yet for all the changes that have occurred in the last century, we are in many ways inheritors of Meg’s world. Ours is still one of double standards for men and women, a vast gulf between rich and poor, and nasty stereotypes. The sensationalist headlines of the mass press in the Belle Époque seem a whole lot like a version of today’s clickbait.
Then, as now, sex sells. And Meg resembles a particular type of figure who sells really well: the sexual celebrity. These are women who capitalize on their sex appeal and high-profile liaisons, who live and love with intensity under the glare of the spotlight as drama swirls around them. Meg is different from many of today’s sexual celebrities. Women like the Kardashian sisters embrace their fame, while Meg ultimately sought to run away from hers. Likewise, she stood apart from the sex goddesses of her own day. These women were often actresses or courtesans (or both) and projected an aura of availability and notoriety, whereas Meg so often sought to present herself as a society matron, even as she played up her sexualized persona behind closed doors. And yet it’s easy to understand that, in eras where the rules for female behavior are rapidly changing, alluring women who break them in relatively acceptable ways hold a particular appeal.
Meg also serves as a reminder of the power of scandal. Her life was shaped by scandal from her adolescence to her death, as she sought to avoid making a scandal, capitalize on doing so, or retreat in the wake of a media frenzy. As much as we are fascinated by sex scandals, we also have a complicated relationship to that fascination. Sometimes we regard them as a distraction from what’s really important, whether that’s international affairs, the state of the economy, or the latest policy debate. These were arguments that could be heard in 1908 about the Steinheil Affair, with newspapers admonishing readers to pay attention to the real stuff of politics, even as their headlines promised the latest salacious revelations about Meg’s life.1
It’s true that the Steinheil Affair had plenty of tawdry elements to it. It’s also true that few people’s lives were affected by the precise details of what Faure and Meg were doing when he had the stroke that killed him, even as Parisians speculated endlessly about those details. But it is also the case that the Steinheil Affair allowed ordinary citizens to see the reality behind the façade of propriety, to understand the inner workings of the state, and to learn how much had been hidden from them. Scandals allow us to peer into the mess of other people’s lives. Sometimes we’re fascinated by them for purely voyeuristic reasons. But sometimes we’re fascinated because they show us how power really operates.
What’s more, the Steinheil Affair led to discussions about gender and sexuality and the line between the acceptable and the transgressive. Sex scandals often do this: I was in college in the late 1990s, an era of intense slut-shaming, including in the context of the revelations about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. I’m still unlearning the toxic messages I imbibed at the time about women’s sexuality. Many of us acquire a sense of what’s shameful and what’s not, or how men and women should behave, from sex scandals. To think of this as somehow unimportant, somehow separate from politics, would be a mistake.
The Steinheil Affair is a story about sex but also about crime, justice, and status. Here, too, elements of Meg’s era are uncomfortably lodged in our own. In the Belle Époque, many of the wealthy saw themselves as inherently good, unlike the poor, who they regarded as prone to crime and sexual immorality. That’s an attitude that is still alive and kicking today, one that often shapes who the criminal justice system treats with leniency and who it punishes harshly. If you are poor and Black and arrested, you’re more likely to be regarded as a danger to society who needs to be punished. In contrast, if you are a rich, white person who is charged with the same crime, you are better able to argue that you deserve a second chance because you just made a mistake—the idea being that bad behavior isn’t intrinsic to your person. Likewise, the media and defense lawyers sometimes frame alleged perpetrators as incapable of serious wrongdoing on the grounds that they are from a “good family.”2 It’s a phrase where the association between high status and a high sense of morality remains fully intact.
Indeed, in the midst of contemporary debates about policing, Meg seems to operate as a forerunner of the figure known as the “Karen.” This is the white woman who calls the cops on a Black neighbor, fellow customer, or passerby and, in doing so, polices racial boundaries. Meg’s actions in the wake of the double murder are more malignant, as she tried to frame innocent individuals to reroute suspicion away from her. In doing so, she sometimes blamed Jews, Brazilians, or North Africans, all of whom were racialized others in her era. But many of her efforts were trained on those who had the protections of whiteness but not wealth: Burlingham, Davidson, Noretti, Rémy Couillard, and Alexandre Wolff. In all cases, she used her credibility, access, and privilege to put a whole host of people in danger out of a belief that the authorities were there to make her more comfortable and maintain the dividing line between who gets protected and who gets mistreated.
Meg’s life also speaks to another kind of story that we’ve heard all too often: the one about the prominent individual who doesn’t behave as they should behind closed doors. In our day, many of these stories are about the issue of consent. They gathered steam in 2002 with the reporting about Catholic priests who were sexually abusing children, erupted in 2017 when the hashtag #MeToo took over social media, and have continued pouring out since then.
The Steinheil Affair isn’t a #MeToo story. Meg might have been a victim of sexual violence, but there were no allegations that she or any of the powerful men she associated with violated anyone’s consent. What’s more, accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of clergy and powerful figures in the media, entertainment industry, and politics came out in part because individuals decided to speak up about their experiences. They often did so despite the personal and professional risks of speaking the truth. For instance, in 2017, some of the horrors of the Hollywood system came to light when women broke nondisclosure agreements that had bound them from revealing parts of their personal history. The constraints in Meg’s case were far different. Frequently, it was bourgeois codes of honor and journalistic norms—not legal documents—that prevented the truth from coming out. And in large measure, the Steinheil Affair was regarded as an entertaining spectacle of illicit sex, whereas recent revelations of sexual misconduct have been heart-wrenching, infuriating, and nauseating.
Despite all the differences between the Steinheil Affair and the stories about sexual abuse and harassment that have come out in the past few decades, there are important similarities. These contemporary cases all ask us to think about the resources the wealthy can use to manage their reputations, just as the Steinheil Affair did for the individuals of the Belle Époque. They are galling because they expose how institutions, from churches to media companies, often work to spare insiders from the consequences of their actions. That, too, was central to Meg’s life. For months after the murders, she relied on a system that saw prominent individuals as worthy of protection and the poor as disposable. Meg benefited from these structures until her actions led the state to throw her under the bus—even as it’s quite likely that they were doing so in part to continue shielding the murderer from scrutiny.
Indeed, many in the Belle Époque saw publicly revealing misbehavior as more disruptive than committing it. Sadly, this is an attitude many victims of sexual assault and harassment face today. When they speak up, they, rather than the perpetrators, are sometimes treated as the troublemakers. We don’t live in a world where men fight duels to uphold their honor or where women are routinely discouraged from getting a divorce to protect their family’s reputation. But until institutions stop protecting those who are prominent at the expense of those who are not, those who bring bad behavior to light will still be regarded as problems.
As much as the parallels between Meg’s era and our own offer a depressing spectacle of how so much has remained unchanged in the past hundred years, they also provide hope. Once her transgressions came to light, members of the public became outraged and decried the hypocrisy of the elite. In our own day, we’ve seen how speaking up about wrongdoing can spur anger, activism, and calls for change. Because if secrets and silences help maintain inequalities, then knowing the truth allows us to imagine a more honest and fairer society.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a book about a woman who lied her entire life. Meg lied to protect or enhance her reputation, she lied because she could, and she lied because she lived in a society where maintaining appearances was often more valued than telling the truth. Her story is partly about how lies and silences maintained the inequalities of this era.
Others around her told their own falsehoods about her. Some of her friends, family members, and acquaintances tried to protect their reputations by claiming that she was entirely respectable. Others spread rumors about her out of malice or because the story was simply too good not to repeat.
Even those who we tend of think of as having professional obligations to the truth—journalists and investigators—had a different sense of where their duties lay in Meg’s day. Journalistic standards were lax and many newspapers had no compunctions about publishing wild speculation or unverified statements. Reporters were under such pressure to produce that they were often sloppy in their telling of events. When Leydet was directing the criminal investigation into the Steinheil Affair, the police file was compiled to make Meg look good. When André was in charge, much of the material looked much worse for her. In other words, none of the sources about Meg’s life from her day provide unmediated access to the truth.
Meg’s memoirs are also problematic. They were ghostwritten by the Belgian journalist Roger de Chateleux. He was her lover for years and no doubt heard many of her stories during the course of their affair.1 A careful reading of her memoirs reveals that they include a fair amount of verifiable information that only Meg would have known, which indicates that they were not entirely his invention.2 She was so attentive to her reputation that she would have closely monitored what information they contained. However, precisely because Meg had such a hand in writing them, they contain outright lies. For these reasons, I have used them with care. They are useful in filling in the gaps where we have very little information, such as her childhood and her life in prison. They can also provide her perspective or details in instances when other sources back up essential elements of her account. For instance, in part 2, some of the scenes from the investigation into the double murders are reconstructed by blending information that appears in her memoirs with what is in either the police investigative record or newspaper accounts.
Sometimes the untruths are fascinating. But they are also frustrating and often prevent us from knowing what happened. Throughout this book, I have tried to tell a clear narrative of Meg’s life while keeping in mind the limits of the available sources. Sometimes that means reading into silences, sometimes that means making room for uncertainty, and sometimes that means privileging one account over another.
In some cases, I have presented multiple possible versions of the same event. This is true for Faure’s death and the double murders. These are turning points in Meg’s life, and I wanted to give the reader enough information so that they could decide what was most probable.
In other instances, however, I have privileged one conflicting account over another. For instance, Meg told one tale about why her father broke off her engagement with a young army officer at her trial, while the police report gave another. Likewise, Meg told two slightly different versions of how she met Faure, one to a newspaper in 1908 and one in her memoirs. In these instances, I have chosen the narrative that either makes the most sense or that is backed up by other independent sources.
The sources are one difficulty, language another. In this book, I sometimes use terms that are now regarded as outdated or problematic, like “prostitute,” “prostitution,” and “homosexuality.” I use the last term to talk about Adolphe’s affairs with men since our current language for queer sexuality does not match that of the Belle Époque. (In contrast, I use “lesbian,” since it was around at the time, although it had a slightly different meaning than it does now, as discussed in chapter 4.) Sex workers have also rejected the words “prostitute” and “prostitution” for their negative associations. But I use them precisely because these connotations were so important to Meg’s story and to how she defined herself and how others defined her. Likewise, I employ terms like “lowlifes” or “lower depths” when talking about the poorest of the poor and those who were presumed to be immoral. This is a vocabulary that has largely fallen out of use but is helpful here because Meg and so many people around her were invoking the twin concepts of low socioeconomic status and low sense of morality as they tried to make sense of her life and its many mysteries.
READING GROUP GUIDE
1.The marriage between Meg and Adolphe was contentious for a few reasons. What were they?
2.Discuss Meg’s upbringing and family dynamic. How do you think it influenced her behavior as an adult?
3.How were different social classes popularly characterized in nineteenth-century France? Were these depictions accurate?
4.Meg wielded her sexuality to climb the social ladder. In what ways was she successful? In what ways did her sexual barter system backfire?
5.Characterize Meg’s feelings for Adolphe Steinheil, Félix Faure, and Émile Chouanard. How did her feelings differ from man to man?
6.What are the prevailing theories regarding Adolphe’s and Émilie’s murders? Which do you think is the truth?
7.As a woman (with a working-class mother), Meg understood what it meant to be marginalized, yet she still disdained other oppressed groups, including Jews and the lower classes. Why do you think that is?
8.Discuss the role media played in the Steinheil Affair. Did they make the situation better or worse? Can you draw any parallels to today’s media?
9.In what ways do you think the trial and Meg’s time in prison changed her?
10.Meg became a celebrity but never wanted to be one. Can you think of other women today who became famous without wanting to be? How might their stories be similar to Meg’s?
11.Meg was simultaneously loved and hated by the public. Why do you think that is? After learning her entire story, how do you feel about her?
IMAGE CREDITS
Image on page 6: author’s collection (caption: Édouard and Émilie Japy)
Image on page 16: PixPlanete (caption: Meg at 17)
Image on page 37: author’s collection (caption: Adolphe Steinheil)
Image on page 39: author’s collection (caption: Adolphe, Meg, and Marthe)
Image on page 62: ©National Portrait Gallery, London (caption: Félix Faure in 1895)
Image on page 68: Léon Bonnat (1833–1922)/Wikimedia Commons (caption: Bonnat’s portrait of Meg)
Image on page 100: Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris/FRAPP_YB7_001 (caption: Bertillon’s photograph of Émilie’s corpse)
Image on page 101: Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris/FRAPP_YB7_012 (caption: Bertillon’s photograph of Adolphe’s corpse)
Image on page 102: Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris/FRAPP_YB7_016 (caption: The police floor plan…)
Image on page 106: Museum of the History of Justice, Crime and Punishment, http://criminocorpus.org (caption: The crime scene photograph of Meg’s study…)
Image on page 107: Museum of the History of Justice, Crime and Punishment, http://criminocorpus.org (caption: The crime scene photograph of Adolphe’s room…)
Image on page 147: Philippe Zoummeroff Collection/Museum of the History of Justice, Crime and Punishment, http://criminocorpus.org (caption: Le Matin’s image of Meg from November 3)
