Steinheil, however, refused to let the matter fade. Few believed her, but for lack of evidence, the case was dropped. Steinheil claimed that four strangers in black robes had sneaked in, bound and gagged her, and committed the murders. In adjoining rooms lay the bodies of her husband and her mother, both apparently strangled. On May 30, 1908, “ la pompe funèbre” herself was found by one of her servants tied to her bed. But the marriage afforded her the opportunity to climb to the pinnacle of Parisian high society, and the couple came to an amicable arrangement: Her lovers bought his paintings this financed their grand lifestyle. The union was not a love match among other problems, Adolphe’s tastes ran to men. The best joke of the epoch is only barely translatable: Marguerite was assigned the title “ la pompe funèbre,” meaning both “the undertaker” and the deadly rendition of a particular sex act.īorn in 1869 to a family of prominent Protestant industrialists in western France, Marguerite Jeanne Japy (known as “Meg”) married the painter Adolphe Steinheil in 1890. The press was barely able to contain its glee. If no one quite knows whether the story is true, it feels like too fine a story to be false. And no wonder: “The president was clutching her hair in his clenched fist.” Faure died later that evening. He encountered a lurid scene: “The president unconscious, in a fit, in the most significant state of undress,” according to the diplomat Maurice Paléologue. According to one version of events, the couple retired to a bedroom shortly afterward strange noises could be heard and Faure’s aide Louis Le Galle forced the door. In February of 1899, Steinheil arrived for an assignation at the Élysée Palace. As Sarah Horowitz, a professor of history and the head of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Washington and Lee University, recounts, Steinheil’s salon was adorned by the great eminences of the Third Republic, and among her lovers was the French president, Félix Faure. THE RED WIDOW: The Scandal That Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It, by Sarah HorowitzĪlthough she is not universally known to Americans, Marguerite Steinheil is a household name in France, the subject of books, plays and television specials - and with some reason.

The red palace book