The lovers had many secret meetings, and even when they met at parties could not conceal their affection. Friends warned Weiss; but he only laughed at them. Was not his wife the most religious woman in Oran? Had he not the evidence of his own senses that she was devoted to him and to their little boy and girl? "You are talking nonsense, my friend," he would answer calmly, and go about his duties, and once, to show his confidence in his wife, asked Felix Roques to take her to an evening party because business would detain him at his office.
The time came, however, when Madame Weiss and Felix Roques decided that it was impossible for either of them to be content with simple dalliance. The hypnotized engineer declared that Jeanne must give herself completely to him.
The suggestion was met with a pleased laugh. Jeanne liked a strong, determined lover, and not a milksop of a husband who let her have her own way in everything. I will give her own description of this scene with her lover. It reveals the temperament of the woman in a remarkable way.
"I loved Monsieur Roques as the master of my thoughts, of my intelligence, of my body, of every fibre of my being, as a master whom I worshipped, and in whose presence I myself ceased to exist," she wrote. "When he asked me for the first time to appoint him an assignation we were walking with some other people. Instead of saying yes or no I took out a coin and said to him, 'I don't wish to take on myself the responsibility of a decision; you know that if once we begin to love it will be no light thing for me. I shall lead you far, perhaps farther than you think. If it comes down heads it shall be yes; if tails, no.' He looked very astonished; he blushed very deeply and said, 'So be it.' I spun the coin; it came down heads, and I was his."
The astounding nature of this female criminal is proved by the fact that to celebrate her downfall she had a ring engraved with the date, November 13, 1889!
Once she was committed to him her love became a mania. She wrote to him daily, and at night, when she had superintended the putting to bed of her children, she would sit down beside their cot and scribble pages of ecstatic praise of the young engineer.
Some of those letters have been preserved, and I will give one or two specimens.
"Dearest," she wrote a fortnight after she had betrayed her husband, "you do not know how I hold to life now. Does it not promise to me in the future days of radiant happiness, intimacy, affection growing daily stronger, with you, my beloved, you to whom I am proud to belong, you for whom I am capable of any sacrifice, any act of devotion? How I love you, Felix! Take all the kisses I can give you and many more. I embrace you with all the strength of my being.—Your wife, Jeanne."
Several months passed, and everybody in the district except Weiss knew of the intimacy between his wife and Roques. The infatuated man refused to believe a word against her, and his wife rewarded him by eventually coming to the conclusion that he was in her way, and that she must "remove" him in order to attain to the fullest happiness with Felix Roques.
The guilty couple often discussed the possibility of murdering Weiss without having to pay the penalty. Like everybody else they had been fascinated by the lurid English drama known as "The Maybrick Case." They had read full details of the "removing" of James Maybrick by arsenic, and the very complete French reports of the sensational Liverpool trial introduced Jeanne Weiss to many of the mysteries of arsenical poisoning. She knew that there were ways of obtaining poison without having to name that dread word, and when the fatal step was resolved on she voted for Fowler's solution as the medium.