Marguerite Steinheil
Encyclopedia
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
woman famous in connection with the deaths of President Félix Faure
Félix Faure
Félix François Faure was President of France from 1895 until his death.-Biography:Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of a small furniture maker...
and her own husband and stepmother.
Early life
Born in BeaucourtBeaucourt
Beaucourt is a commune in the Territoire de Belfort department in Franche-Comté in northeastern France."Beaucourt Revisited" is a war poem by A.P. Herbert.-References:*...
, in the Territoire de Belfort
Territoire de Belfort
The Territoire de Belfort is a department in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France.-Administration:Its departmental code is 90, and its prefecture is Belfort...
, in a rich industrial family, she married the well-known French painter Adolphe Steinheil in July 1890. She became a prominent figure in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
ian society, and her salon
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
was frequented by men of eminence in French political and social circles, including Gounod, Ferdinand de Lesseps
Ferdinand de Lesseps
Ferdinand Marie, Vicomte de Lesseps, GCSI was the French developer of the Suez Canal, which joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas in 1869, and substantially reduced sailing distances and times between the West and the East.He attempted to repeat this success with an effort to build a sea-level...
, Rene Lalique, Jules Massenet
Jules Massenet
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...
, François Coppée
François Coppée
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...
, Émile Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
, and Pierre Loti
Pierre Loti
Pierre Loti was a French novelist and naval officer.-Biography:Loti's education began in his birthplace, Rochefort, Charente-Maritime. At the age of seventeen he entered the naval school in Brest and studied at Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906...
.
Mistress of President Felix Faure
In 1897, she was introduced, at ChamonixChamonix
Chamonix-Mont-Blanc or, more commonly, Chamonix is a commune in the Haute-Savoie département in the Rhône-Alpes region in south-eastern France. It was the site of the 1924 Winter Olympics, the first Winter Olympics...
, to President Félix Faure
Félix Faure
Félix François Faure was President of France from 1895 until his death.-Biography:Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of a small furniture maker...
, 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 and 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
Oral sex
Oral sex is sexual activity involving the stimulation of the genitalia of a sex partner by the use of the mouth, tongue, teeth or throat. Cunnilingus refers to oral sex performed on females while fellatio refer to oral sex performed on males. Anilingus refers to oral stimulation of a person's anus...
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.
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.
L'affaire Steinheil
On 31 May 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 affairDreyfus Affair
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...
.
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
Sisowath of Cambodia
Sisowath I was king of Cambodia from 1904 to his death in 1927.Sisowath was born in Battambang in Cambodia. He was the son of King Ang Duong and half brother of Prince Si Votha and King Norodom....
. 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 14 November 1909, although the judge called her stories "tissues of lies".
Later life
After the trial she came to live in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, where she was known as Mme de Serignac. She wrote My Memoirs in 1912. On 26 June 1917, she married Robert Brooke Campbell Scarlett, 6th Baron Abinger, who died in 1927. She died in a nursing home in Hove.