On the morning of Monday, 1 June 1908, in the narrow Impasse Ronsin in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris, a maid arriving for her usual eight o’clock shift at the Steinheil family residence found the front door unlocked, the household in silence, and her mistress lying in an upstairs bedroom bound at the wrists and ankles to the bedposts, gagged with a piece of cloth, and crying.
The mistress was Marguerite Japy-Steinheil, forty years old, the daughter of a successful Alsatian-Swiss industrial family, the wife of the modestly successful portrait painter Adolphe Steinheil, and — in a fact that was about to become the center of French public attention for the next eighteen months — the widely-acknowledged former mistress of the late President of France, Félix Faure, who had died in her arms in the Élysée Palace on 16 February 1899. The maid untied her. She was unhurt. The rest of the household was not so fortunate.
Adolphe Steinheil, the painter, was found dead in his own bedroom on the same floor, his throat partly cut and a length of rope around his neck. He had been bound to his bed in the same fashion as his wife but with no successful gag, and he had clearly struggled. The cause of death was strangulation. He had probably died at some point between two and four o’clock in the morning.
Émilie Japy-Steinheil, the painter’s mother-in-law — Marguerite’s mother — was found dead in a guest bedroom on the other side of the upstairs corridor. She had been gagged with a tightly wadded cloth that had been forced into her throat. The cause of death was suffocation. She had probably died at the same time as her son-in-law.
The household maid, the painter’s wife, and a chambermaid who had also been on the premises were untied, given coffee, and removed from the house. The police were called. The Sûreté générale’s chief inspector, Octave Hamard, arrived within the hour. By midday on 1 June 1908, the Impasse Ronsin murders were the lead story in every Paris newspaper. By the evening they were in every European newspaper.
The investigation that followed, the eighteen months of newspaper speculation, the eventual arrest of Marguerite Steinheil herself on 25 November 1908 for the murders of her husband and her mother, and the trial in November 1909, became — and remained, for the next forty years — the single most-followed criminal case of the French Belle Époque.
What Marguerite said had happened
Her account, given to Inspector Hamard within hours of being freed and elaborated in subsequent statements over the following weeks, was that four masked intruders had broken into the house in the early hours of 1 June. Three men and one woman. They had spoken in a foreign language she did not understand, possibly Russian. They had bound her, her husband, and her mother, demanded money, and ransacked the house. They had taken jewelry, cash, and several small portable items. They had left at some point before dawn.
The account had several immediate problems. The Steinheils’ household was not robbed of money or items remotely commensurate with the violence used. Almost everything of value in the house was still there, including substantial cash in a desk drawer in the murdered painter’s bedroom. The doors had not been forced. The locks were intact. The household dog, a small terrier, had not barked. The neighboring residents — the Impasse Ronsin was a tightly-packed Parisian street where every window faced another window — had heard nothing during the night.
The forensic evidence assembled by Inspector Hamard over the following months was even more difficult. The knots on Marguerite’s wrist bindings had been tied, the inspector concluded, by someone who could not easily have done them while their own hands were free. The gag in her mouth had been positioned so loosely that she could easily have spat it out. The chambermaid who had been at the house that night testified that the bedroom doors had been closed but unlocked; she had heard no commotion from any of the rooms. Marguerite herself, after the first interviews, contradicted herself on several specific details — the language the intruders had spoken, the number of men involved, the order of events. Hamard did not believe her.
By the autumn of 1908 the popular Parisian press, which had initially been sympathetic, had turned. The newspapers began suggesting, with increasing directness, that the Impasse Ronsin murders had been an inside job, that Marguerite Steinheil had either committed the murders herself or had arranged for them to be committed, and that her motive had been a combination of financial dispute with her husband and an aging mother who had become an obstacle to her social ambitions. The Faure connection from 1899 was repeatedly mentioned. The fact that she had been the President’s mistress was used to suggest that she was a woman of dubious moral character who was capable of anything.
On 25 November 1908, Hamard arrested her at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, where she had been admitted three weeks earlier in a state of nervous collapse. She was transferred to Saint-Lazare prison and held there for the next twelve months while the case prepared for trial.
What the trial revealed
The trial opened on 3 November 1909 in the Cour d’assises de la Seine, before a jury and the presiding judge Joseph Leydet. The prosecution case was a single argument repeated for a week. The Steinheils’ house had been the scene of a violent attack. The physical evidence was incompatible with an outside intruder. The household members had had no plausible motive for killing each other except for Marguerite, who had had several. The conclusion was therefore that Marguerite had done it.
The defense, led by the prominent advocate Antony Aubin, mounted a methodical demolition of each piece of physical evidence. The knots on the binding had not been definitively shown to be self-tied. The gag’s loose fit could have resulted from the gag working loose during a struggle. The locks could have been picked. The forensic case, Aubin argued, was a structure of inferences rather than proof. The witnesses for the prosecution — the maid, the chambermaid, the neighboring residents — had given testimony that was consistent with several different reconstructions of the events. The prosecution had not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Marguerite herself testified on the fifth day of the trial. She wore black mourning for her mother and her husband. She wept during portions of her own testimony. She maintained, under cross-examination, the original story she had given Hamard on the morning of 1 June 1908: masked intruders, foreign language, robbery. She did not vary the story under questioning. She did not provide explanations for the contradictions in her earlier statements; she simply denied that they were contradictions.
The trial lasted nine days. The jury deliberated for ninety minutes. The verdict, announced on 13 November 1909, was acquittal on both counts.
The acquittal was not, by any reading of the contemporary press, a vindication. The verdict was widely understood to mean that the prosecution had failed to prove its case rather than that Marguerite was innocent. Aubin himself, in private correspondence later published in his memoirs, wrote that he had argued the procedural standard rather than the question of guilt. The jurors, interviewed by reporters after the verdict, said that several of them had voted for acquittal because they were not certain, not because they believed Marguerite had not committed the murders.
She was released from Saint-Lazare on the evening of 13 November 1909 and went to stay temporarily with a sister in the country.
What she did with the rest of her life
She was forty-one years old. She was acquitted but socially destroyed. The Impasse Ronsin house was sold. Her fortune, which had been modest before the murders, was further reduced by the legal costs. She published her memoirs in 1912 — a 380-page volume titled Mes Mémoires, which gave her version of every major incident in her life including the death of Félix Faure (which she presented as a heart attack at his desk while she was visiting on a non-romantic matter) and the murders of 1908 (which she presented exactly as she had originally told Hamard, with foreign intruders speaking Russian). The book sold well in France and was translated into English and German. Critics on every side considered it a self-serving exercise.
She moved to England in 1917. She married, in June 1917, the sixth Baron Abinger — a minor English aristocrat named James Scarlett, then in his sixties — and lived for the rest of her life as Lady Abinger, in the small village of Hever in Kent. She had no children. She survived two world wars, occasional press attention (English papers periodically rediscovered her), and the deaths of most of her French contemporaries. She died on 18 July 1954 at the age of 85.
She is buried in the Hever village churchyard, under a small headstone reading Marguerite, Lady Abinger, 1869–1954. The stone does not give her maiden name. It does not mention the Impasse Ronsin. It does not mention the Élysée Palace.
A French newspaper covering her death noted that she had outlived, by half a century, every other person who could have testified to what had happened in the Impasse Ronsin on the night of 31 May 1908. The reporter did not draw a conclusion. The conclusion, the article observed, was open.