On May 31, 1908, the cries of the valet Rémy Couillard drew a neighbor into the house in the Impasse Ronsin. Two bodies were discovered within: Madame Japy, mother to Marguerite Steinheil, and Adolphe, Marguerite’s husband. In a third bedchamber, Marguerite was found alive, bound upon her bed. She recounted having seen three men attired in long black robes and a red-haired woman. The house appeared at first to tell of a robbery; soon, however, every detail of that night became an interrogation directed at the sole soul who had returned from it.
She was the daughter of the industrialist Japy, the wife of the painter Adolphe Steinheil, and had been intimately linked to President Félix Faure, who died at the Élysée Palace in 1899. This worldly past would nourish the public chronicles of the affair, wherein adultery, power, and bloodshed mingled long before the judicial inquiry could establish their true connection.
On the night of May 30 to 31, according to the account she published several years later, Marguerite was sleeping in the bedchamber of her daughter Marthe, who was absent that evening; her mother had taken her own room. Her husband occupied his, while the valet Rémy Couillard slept elsewhere in the house. She declared that she had awakened beneath a cloth pressed over her face, beholding three men and a woman. She had been questioned, she claimed, regarding money and jewels, then bound and gagged. She heard, or so she said, her mother calling to her. In her memoirs, she relates that the police initially assured her that the two other occupants were recovering, only revealing their deaths to her later that afternoon. The same account indicates that jewelry, money, and a packet of papers had vanished.
The doors already offered an initial thread to the examining magistrate. Marguerite explained that an iron gate separated the garden from the dead-end lane and that three persons possessed keys to it. Couillard’s key had been lost several months before the crime; she maintained that she had repeatedly requested that the lock be changed, without ever persuading her husband. The question was no longer merely who might have entered: it was necessary to determine who stood to profit from the absence of that key.
In her initial depositions, Marguerite did not speak of all that had disappeared. She would later admit in her memoirs to having concealed the existence of certain pearls and papers, fearing their contents might disclose her past liaison with Félix Faure to her kin, most of all to her daughter. She wished to protect that chapter of her life; yet her silence was to weigh heavily upon the credit the investigators accorded to the rest of her declarations. She did not immediately place into their hands every piece she believed connected to the crime.
The garments described by the survivor led toward a still more singular trail. In her memoirs, she reproduces depositions stating that three black robes and a long cloak had been hired for a performance at the Hebrew theater of Paris; four costumes were missing when the hampers were returned, including three robes and the cloak. Employees reported that the hampers had been unpacked and their contents thrown into disorder. On May 31, in a metropolitan railway carriage, a ticket inspector had gathered up two distinct cards, according to the official report she cites: one was an invitation to an exhibition of Steinheil’s paintings, the other bore the name of a patroness alongside several addresses, among them that of the theatrical costumier Guilbert. The coincidence was striking, yet it pointed toward no culprit.
On June 19, Inspector Pouce showed Marguerite a photograph of a group that included a bearded man. She stated that his countenance resembled that of one of the men she had described. The officer believed he had seized upon the true scent; the face belonged to the American journalist Burlingham. In the continuation of her own narrative, Marguerite specifies that she had not identified him with certainty; she also records that Burlingham was absent from Paris at the hour of the murder. The resemblance had cast the inquiry down a misleading path.
The summer slipped away without a decisive arrest. In late October, Marguerite caused a letter to be published in the Écho de Paris, demanding that the search be resumed. The gesture once again drew the newspapers, hauling the slaughter back into the public square. In the meantime, attention settled upon Couillard. The discovery of a pearl within his pocketbook seemed to incriminate him; Marguerite would subsequently confess that she had placed it there to force him to speak, convinced as she was that he knew something. In her memoirs, she depicts the act: a pearl taken from a drawer, folded in tissue paper, and slipped into the pocketbook. She intended to confess the ruse should the valet prove innocent. Yet the false clue was already in the hands of those bound to deliver it to the police.
Following an interrogation through the night of November 25 to 26, Marguerite was arrested and remanded into custody at Saint-Lazare on the 26th. In her memoirs, she describes a grueling series of questions, an accusation levied against Alexandre Wolff, the cook’s son, followed by a wavering over that charge. These declarations belong to her own narrative; they were revisited and contested over the course of the preliminary investigation. The Journal du Lot, in its dispatch of November 26 published three days later, confirms the date of her arrest and imprisonment. Couillard and Wolff were subsequently discharged, whilst Marguerite remained in detention.
The trial opened on November 3, 1909. Throughout the proceedings, prosecution and defense returned incessantly to the doors, the jewels, the robes, the suppressed papers, and the shifting testimonies. Marguerite’s reputation obtruded into every debate: some judged her before the facts were heard, while others saw in her composure a mark in her favor. According to her memoirs, a young man appeared at the hearing professing to have taken part in the murder; she claimed not to recognize him as any of the men she had described. On November 14, after deliberation, the jury pronounced Marguerite not guilty of both homicides.
The acquittal brought an end to her captivity, yet not to the enigma. The lost key, the vanished costumes, and the displaced pearl had each opened an avenue; none yielded the name of a killer established by the law. The survivor had guarded a secret, then accused a servant by means of a clue she had herself introduced. These facts illuminate the contradictions of the inquiry without resolving the deaths of her mother and her husband. The affair reached its conclusion in the courtroom, whilst the house in the Impasse Ronsin kept its question unanswered.