Marguerite Steinheil
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Marguerite Jeanne "Meg" Steinheil, née Japy (April 16, 1869 - July 17, 1954) was a French woman famous in connection with the deaths of President Félix Faure and her own husband and stepmother.
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[edit] Early life
Born in Beaucourt, in the Territoire de Belfort, in a rich industrial family, she married the well-known French painter Adolphe Steinheil in July 1890. She became a prominent figure in Parisian society, and her salon was frequented by men of eminence in French political and social circles, including Gounod, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Jules Massenet, François Coppée, Émile Zola, and Pierre Loti.
[edit] Mistress of President Felix Faure
In 1897, she was introduced, at Chamonix, to President Félix Faure, who was giving an official contract to Adolphe Steinheil. Because of this, Félix Faure came often to their home on the Impasse Ronsin.
Soon, Marguerite had become Félix Faure's mistress was regularly ushered into the salon bleu in the private quarters of the presidential Palais de l'Élysée.
On 16 February 1899, Félix Faure called Marguerite by telephone, asking her to come to the palace at the end of the afternoon. Some short time after her arrival, servants were rung for: they found the president lying on the couch while Marguerite Steinheil adjusted her disordered clothing. Félix Faure was dead several hours later.
Legend has it that she was performing oral sex on him when he suddenly died, and that his stiff hands were tangled in her hair. Of course nothing of this was officially announced, but rumours started spreading immediately, although for several years it was believed that his partner in the last moments was actress Cécile Sorel.[1]
[edit] Femme du monde
After the death of Félix Faure, Marguerite Steinheil became the mistress of many famous men
In her Mémoires, she records how she and her spouse received a mysterious German guest, who bought back from them each of the pearls of a collar given to her by Faure (le collier présidentiel, as it became known in the press) and who reclaimed a manuscript of the president's memoires which he had entrusted to Marguerite.
In February 1908, she met the powerful industrialist Borderel, also from the Ardennes, and soon became his mistress.
[edit] L'affaire Steinheil
On May 31, 1908, Marguerite's stepmother and husband were found dead in their residence in the Impasse Ronsin, off the Rue de Vaugirard. Both had died of suffocation, the latter by strangling and the former by choking on her false teeth. Marguerite was found gagged and bound to a bed. She initially said that she had been tied up by four black-robed strangers, three men and a woman. Some papers speculated that they had come to her house in search of certain secret documents which Faure had entrusted to her keeping, possibly relating to the Dreyfus affair.
The police suspected her early on, but had no hard evidence and made a pretense of abandoning the investigation. But Steinheil herself would not let the affair rest. She made an attempt to frame her manservant, Rémy Couillard, by concealing a small pearl which she affirmed had been stolen at the time of the murder in a pocketbook belonging to Couillard; after that fabrication was proved, she blamed Alexandre Wolff, the son of her old housekeeper, but he could establish an alibi. She was arrested in November 1908 and taken to St. Lazare prison. The affair caused the greatest excitement in Paris. It was revealed that she had had a great number of admirers, including even King Sisowath of Cambodia. Opponents of the government tried to make political capital of the affair, the anti-Semitic Libre Parole even charging her with having poisoned President Faure. A sensational trial finally ended in her acquittal on November 14, 1909, although the judge called her stories "tissues of lies".
[edit] Later life
After the trial she came to live in London, where she was known as Mme de Serignac. She wrote My Memoirs in 1912. On June 26, 1917, she married Robert Brooke Campbell Scarlett, 6th Baron Abinger, who died in 1927. She died in a nursing home in Hove.
[edit] References
- ^ Armand Lanoux wrote a book about her affair with Faure, Madame Steinheil ou la Connaissance du président (1983). This title is a pun on connaissance meaning both "consciousness" and "acquaintance". The priest who came for Félix Faure's when he died allegedly asked a police officer whether the president still "had his consciousness/acquaintance", to which the police officer replied "no, she left through the backdoor".
- Alain Decaux : Les assassins, Perrin.
- Armand Lanoux : Madame Steinheil ou la Connaissance du président (1983).
- Christian Siméon, dramaturge : La Priapée des Écrevisses ou l’Affaire Steinheil.
- Pierre Darmon, historien : Magueritte Steinheil, ingénue criminelle? (Perrin, 1996).
- Jacques Neirynck : Le crime du prince de Galles, (2007)
