In the earliest hours of January 14, 1877, Georges de Saint Pierre walked alone up the alleyway leading to the lodging of Jeanne de la Cour on the Rue de Boulogne. The woman was returning with him from the masked ball at the Opéra; she made a show of shutting behind them the small wicket gate, though she left it unlatched. A man waited in the shadows of a pavilion. He dashed a corrosive fluid into Georges’s face, then fled. The victim lost the sight of one eye; the other was gravely imperiled. He survived, but his life was altered forever. Yet, in those first days, no one suspected the woman who had walked beside him.
These facts are drawn from the retrospective account of H. B. Irving (1918), who claimed to rely on the Gazette des tribunaux and the volume by Macé, a former chief of the Sûreté. It is not an unabridged trial transcript: Irving arranged the depositions into a dramatic chronicle. He refers to the victim as Georges de Saint Pierre; we retain this name without substituting any other identity for it.
The Charmer
Aménaïde Brécourt was born in Paris in 1837 and, in 1855, married an grocer named Gras. According to Irving, a benefactress rescued her from a childhood spent partly in the streets; the marriage soon degenerated into domestic strife. Her husband vanished, only to die later at the Hôpital de la Charité. Aménaïde re-emerged under the name of Jeanne de la Cour. The unflattering portraits sketched by Irving remain the judgments of a chronicler, rather than facts established by the judicial inquiry.
At Vittel, Irving relates that a wounded pigeon took refuge in Jeanne’s chamber following a shooting match. She tended to it, and onlookers dubbed her “the Charmer.” Later, the chronicler himself seized upon this image of the injured bird to illuminate the design he attributed to the widow: that of keeping Georges at her side by rendering him entirely dependent upon her ministrations. This remains Irving’s metaphor, not judicial proof of her motive.
In 1873, at a ball, she met Georges de Saint Pierre, then twenty years of age. Their liaison endured. When he departed for six months in Egypt in 1876, he granted her access to his Parisian lodgings and entrusted her with his private papers. Upon his return, he wrote of his wish to live with her, while his family pressed him to choose a suitable wife. Irving presents this divergence as the backdrop of the drama, though his chronicle offers no direct access to the inner thoughts of the young man, his relations, or Jeanne herself.
A dancer of her acquaintance was then caring for a blind lover, hoping to secure her future through marriage to him. Irving links this circumstance to the design of reducing Georges to dependence; it remains a retrospective interpretation.
The Chosen Auxiliary
Nathalis Gaudry had known Aménaïde in her childhood. A former soldier, he now labored in an oil refinery at Saint-Denis. A widower since 1875 and the father of two children, he renewed acquaintance with her in Paris. The chapter depicts him as a respected workman, deeply enamored of Jeanne, and notes that he assisted her about her apartment, where certain neighbors took him for her brother. This private intimacy became one of the circumstances whose meaning the investigation sought to fathom.
In November 1876, Jeanne summoned him under the pretext of a family grievance. According to Irving, she claimed to have been wronged by the father of a young man and sought vengeance through the son. She placed a set of brass knuckles in Gaudry’s hands and pointed out Georges, without initially disclosing their liaison. The first scheme reportedly entailed striking the young man in the abdomen to render him an invalid. It was never carried out. The chronicle hesitates between Gaudry’s reluctance and the widow’s own vacillation, unable to determine who stayed the blow.
In January, Jeanne prevailed upon her nephew, a gilder’s apprentice, to procure her some vitriol, representing it as an agent for cleaning brass. On the 11th, she showed the vial to Gaudry and reiterated her thirst for revenge. He resisted at first; according to his subsequent testimony, the promise of marriage finally broke his resolve. The motive he professed—his passion and the hope of marriage—differs from that which Irving imputes to Jeanne: holding Georges fast by making him dependent on her care.
The Ball and the Alleyway
Jeanne asked Georges to escort her to the Opéra masked ball on January 13. He hesitated, his letters hinting at an uneasy foreboding he could not explain, yet he traveled to Paris. Gaudry repaired to the lodging and concealed himself behind a drapery while Jeanne attired herself in a pink domino and a blonde wig. When Georges departed to fetch a carriage, she released her accomplice and rehearsed her instructions.
The topography of the place was central to the design. The building stood at the far end of an alleyway secured by a heavy carriage gate; a small wicket gate afforded passage between two pavilions. Gaudry was to wait within one of them and fling the vitriol into Georges’s face. Jeanne was to linger by the gate to prevent it from swinging shut before his escape. These particulars, drawn from Irving’s account, would later become the material clues by which Macé sought to reconstruct the path of the crime.
The couple spent several hours at the ball. Irving reports that Jeanne danced and appeared in high spirits, though this detail hardly suffices to establish what she harbored in her mind at every moment. Between two and three in the morning, the cab brought them back to the Rue de Boulogne. Georges walked alone up the lane; Jeanne remained by the wicket. Gaudry cast the liquid and took to his heels. At first glance, neither the witnesses nor the victim’s kinsmen perceived any link between the wounded gentleman and the ruffian who had struck him down.
In the early days, the theory of mistaken identity gained currency. Georges believed he had no enemies and wished to avoid public scandal. He remained under Jeanne’s roof, where she nursed him and kept his family at bay. Irving records that she kept vigil beside his bed for thirty nights. He placed his trust in her. Devotion and isolation thus became indistinguishable: that which the sufferer took for protection appeared to his friends a cause for grave alarm.
The Letters and the Wicket
On February 2, an examining magistrate arrived, accompanied by Macé, the police commissary. Georges protested that he had no enemy in the world and begged to be allowed to recover in peace. He desired to remain with Jeanne and later journey to the country for a change of air. The magistrate forbade any departure from the department until the inquiry was concluded; the house was placed under surveillance. The police learned that Jeanne had carried off Georges’s secretaire and had met an unknown man at the Charonne cemetery. Irving does not permit the identification of this stranger.
Macé gathered further details: Jeanne had insisted upon attending the ball; Georges had walked ahead of her; the heavy gate would have swung shut had no hand held it back. None of these circumstances, taken alone, unlocked the mystery. Taken together, they turned all eyes back to the gate and the presence of his companion. When the couple removed to Courbevoie, the magistrates resolved to separate them. On March 6, Jeanne was taken into custody and conveyed back to Paris.
A search of her lodgings brought to light a leather portfolio concealed beneath her linen. It contained letters from Georges, half-burned. When his sight was failing, he had entrusted them to Jeanne to be cast into the fire. Macé surmised that she had spared some; he interpreted their retention as an instrument of extortion over her lover. The discovery alone did not establish such an intent. But Georges realized that documents he believed destroyed had been preserved, and his faith was shattered.
Gaudry remained at large. While in prison, Jeanne wrote to a fellow captive, an Italian dancer, urging her to convey a message to her accomplice: she entreated him to give himself up as the assailant and promised to look after his son. The dancer spoke of the matter to her companion, who refused to meddle; the report reached Macé. The police ran Gaudry to earth at Saint-Denis, seizing letters from Jeanne in his possession. He confessed his part, declaring he had acted out of love, in the hope of making her his wife. On May 12, confronted with the widow before the examining magistrate, he maintained his story; she denounced him as a liar.
Three Days at the Assizes
The trial opened before the Paris Assize Court on July 23, 1877, and lasted three days. Charles Lachaud appeared for Jeanne; Maître Demange represented Gaudry. Each advocate sought to cast the principal guilt upon the other party. Demange portrayed Gaudry as a simple man enslaved by passion. Lachaud contended, on the contrary, that he had acted alone, goaded by personal jealousy.
In the witness box, Gaudry declared he would have done whatever Jeanne commanded. She denied that he had been in her apartment on the night of the ball. The presiding judge confronted her with her earlier admissions; she persisted in her denial. Georges testified without rancor, according to Irving, stating that he came merely to recount the facts. Jeanne appealed to him to speak in her defense; he did not retract a single word of his deposition. The chronicler casts this moment as a dramatic confrontation, though the words recorded do not constitute the full verbatim proceedings.
The verdict visited upon Jeanne the heavier share of retribution: Irving writes that she was found guilty without extenuating circumstances, whereas Gaudry was granted their benefit. The widow was sentenced to fifteen years of penal servitude; Gaudry, to five years’ imprisonment. The disparity of their punishments reflects the distinction drawn by the jury between the instigator and the tool, as recorded by the chronicler.
On the Rue de Boulogne, the gate marked a passage; the letters marked another, that of a shattered trust. Macé read in them material clues; Irving ordered them around an intention he imputed to the widow and the memory of the bird sheltered at Vittel. The judicial inquiry of hinges, movements, and papers thus stands apart from the dramatic coherence devised by the chronicler. Between the two lingers the ambiguity of devotion: an act of mercy to the afflicted man, an object of suspicion to those who pieced together the crime.