Fenayrou: No; it was my revenge, mine alone.
The view that regarded Mme. Fenayrou as a soft, malleable paste was not the view of the President.
"Why," he asked the woman, "did you commit this horrible murder, decoy your lover to his death?" "Because I had repented," was the answer; "I had wronged my husband, and since he had been condemned for fraud, I loved him the more for being unfortunate. And then I feared for my children."
President: Is that really the case?
Mme. Fenayrou: Certainly it is.
President: Then your whole existence has been one of lies and hypocrisy. Whilst you were deceiving your husband and teaching your children to despise him you were covering him with caresses.
You have played false to both husband and lover—to Aubert in decoying him to his death, to your husband by denouncing him directly you were arrested. You have betrayed everybody. The only person you have not betrayed is yourself. What sort of a woman are you? As you and Aubert went into the drawing-room on the evening of the murder you said loudly, "This is the way," so that your husband, hearing your voice outside, should not strike you by mistake in the darkness. If Lucien had not told us that you attacked Aubert whilst he was struggling with your husband, we should never have known it, for you would never have admitted it, and your husband has all along refused to implicate you.... You have said that you had ceased to care for your lover: he had ceased to care for you. He was prosperous, happy, about to marry: you hated him, and you showed your hate when, during the murder, you flung yourself upon him and cried, "Wretch!" Is that the behaviour of a woman who represents herself to have been the timid slave of her husband? No. This crime is the revenge of a cowardly and pitiless woman, who writes down in her account book the expenses of the trip to Chatou and, after the murder, picnics merrily in the green fields. It was you who steeled your husband to the task.
How far the President was justified in thus inverting the parts played by the husband and wife in the crime must be a matter of opinion. In his volume of Souvenirs M. Berard des Glajeux modifies considerably the view which he perhaps felt it his duty to express in his interrogatory of Gabrielle Fenayrou. He describes her as soft and flexible by nature, the repentant slave of her husband, seeking to atone for her wrong to him by helping him in his revenge. The one feature in the character of Mme. Fenayrou that seems most clearly demonstrated is its absolute insensibility under any circumstances whatsoever.
The submissive Lucien had little to say for himself, nor could any motive for joining in the murder beyond a readiness to oblige his brother be suggested. In his Souvenirs M. Berard des Glajeux states that to-day it would seem to be clearly established that Lucien acted blindly at the bidding of his sister-in-law, "qu'il avait beaucoup aimee et qui n'avait pas ete cruelle a son egard."
The evidence recapitulated for the most part the facts already set out. The description of Mme. Fenayrou by the gentleman on the sporting newspaper who had succeeded Aubert in her affections is, under the circumstances, interesting: "She was sad, melancholy; I questioned her, and she told me she was married to a coarse man who neglected her, failed to understand her, and had never loved her. I became her lover but, except on a few occasions, our relations were those of good friends. She was a woman with few material wants, affectionate, expansive, an idealist, one who had suffered much and sought from without a happiness her marriage had never brought her. I believe her to have been the blind tool of her husband."