The Murders at Impasse Louvain

by Richard Grindal

  The Ministry of Justice had staged the spectacle well. The great Assize Court was impressive in its majesty, with the three judges in scarlet robes seated on a dais at one end and the spectators, the 100 ‘lucky ones’ as they were called, in the public seats at the other. Between them the drama was enacted: the prisoner in the dock to the left of the judges, the jury facing her, the semi-circular witness bar in the centre beside the desks of the public prosecutor and the defence counsel and a table carrying the exhibits of the case. Near the dock was another enclosure where scores of barristers watched the trial with professional interest, looking in their black gowns and white cravats like so many carrion crows lined up and waiting for the end of the victim.

  The president of the court was Judge Fourcroy and under the procedure of French criminal law, it was he in effect who conducted the trial. After the clerk of the court had read the indictment, the president examined first the prisoner and then the various witnesses. The advocate general, who was conducting the prosecution’s case, and the defence counsel, Maître Bonnard, could also question the witnesses, but they had to put their questions through the president. The examination of the prisoner and witnesses would be followed by the final speeches for the prosecution and defence and the prisoner could then, if she wished, make a statement before the jury retired, without any direction or summing-up by the judge, to consider its verdict.

  Gautier knew that both Judge Fourcroy and the advocate general, Rombout, were brilliant lawyers of great prestige. For this reason their appointment as president and prosecutor had been welcomed by the press and the public as proof that the government was sincere in its intention to put Josephine on trial and that there was not to be a cover-up of the scandal. Knowing the two men, he was surprised at the course which the trial took and at the tactics which the prosecution employed.

  Their main objective, it seemed to him, should have been to prove that Josephine Hassler’s story about the bearded robbers and the long robes was palpably untrue. This proposition should have been simple enough to demonstrate, but the advocate general handled it clumsily. He seemed to be concentrating his efforts on trying to blacken the character of the accused, always a doubtful strategy and liable, in the case of a beautiful woman to be counterproductive and win the jury’s sympathy for the prisoner.

  The burden of the prosecution’s case was that Josephine Hassler murdered her husband in order to be free to marry a wealthy admirer who was never named; that she contrived for her mother to be present simply as a blind since people would be unlikely to believe that she would have killed her husband while her mother was in the house; that she put a sleeping tablet in her mother’s grog but that this had not prevented the old lady being woken by the noise when Félix Hassler was strangled and having then had to be murdered herself; that she had explained the murders with her story modelled on an incident which she remembered from her youth.

  A massive amount of evidence could have been produced to show that Josephine Hassler had lied. The prosecution, it seemed to Gautier, had selected the least convincing parts of it, introducing unsupported assertions and statements that were open to doubt if not to absolute refutation and using witnesses whom the defence were well able to confuse or discredit.

  One example of this was the totally disproportionate amount of time which the prosecutor spent on the grog which Félix Hassler and his mother-in-law were supposed to have drunk on the evening of the murders. The suggestion was made that the accused had either tried unsuccessfully to poison the drinks or had put into them a sleeping draught and that she had taken the glasses downstairs to the kitchen and washed them before staging the scene for the pretended robbery. The defence then immediately produced expert witnesses who stated that autopsies had revealed no poison or noxious substance in the bodies of the two victims.

  Another clumsy attempt to prove that Josephine Hassler had lied, which also misfired, concerned the cottonwool which was supposed to have been used to gag her. Professor Bize, head of the government analytical laboratories, gave evidence that he had analysed a lump of cottonwool sent to him by the police and this had contained no traces of human saliva, which proved that it could never have been in Josephine Hassler’s mouth. The counsel for the defence then pointed out that large quantities of cottonwool had been found all over the bed and on the floor of the bedroom. What proof was there, he demanded, that this particular piece of cottonwool was the one which his client had claimed to have been used to gag her? The prosecution were unable to answer the question.

  The matter of the ink stain found on the sole of Hassler’s foot was made into a critical issue. The family doctor who had attended Josephine Hassler on the morning after the murders, confirmed that he had noticed ink stains on the hem of her night-dress. Under questioning Madame Charon, the wife of Hassler’s cousin, agreed that at Josephine’s request she had taken the latter’s dressing-gown to be cleaned on the day following the murders and that when handing the garment over to the cleaner, she had noticed ink stains on it.

  When it was the turn of Maître Bonnard to question Madame Charon he asked her: ‘You believe the ink stains on your cousin’s dressing-gown were similar to those found on the body of Monsieur Hassler?’

  ‘I cannot say. The police appear to think so.’

  ‘And that this was ink from the ink-well which had been knocked over in the drawing-room?’

  ‘That is what they told me.’

  ‘We may conclude therefore that the robbers knocked over the ink-well when they were searching in the drawing-room for valuables and that some of the ink found its way on to their persons or their clothes?’

  ‘That seems likely.’

  ‘I agree. And if so is it not also likely that since the ink rubbed off onto Monsieur Hassler when he was being strangled, some of it might also have been expected to rub off on Madame Hassler’s night attire when she was being bound and gagged?’

  Maître Bonnard was allowed to score this point. To Gautier’s amazement the advocate general did not intervene to point out that Josephine Hassler would not have been wearing her dressing-gown at the time when the intruders were supposed to have attacked her and that no ink stains had been found on the sheets of her bed.

  The prosecution also seemed strangely half-hearted in capitalizing on the most glaring falsehoods which Josephine Hassler had told the police. Not more than a passing mention was made of the way she had falsely accused York and Claudine nor of her deliberate attempt to implicate Mansard and even her story of the duplicate rings passed almost unchallenged.

  By contrast the lengths to which the prosecution went to blacken the prisoner’s character were extraordinary. A stream of witnesses were produced, many of whom could have known Josephine Hassler only slightly, while others were plainly biased, society women jealous of her success with men, or artists who resented the commissions which she had obtained for her husband. When the two servants, Mansard and the cook, who might have been expected to know something about the character of their mistress, were giving evidence, the president of the court made it clear from the outset that he would not allow them to be questioned about either her character or her habits.

  ‘I can see no reason,’ he announced firmly, ‘to listen to the gossip of the servants’ hall.’

  For fourteen days the trial continued, each session seeming longer and more futile than the last. As he listened to the questions and the arguments, Gautier would find himself thinking about Suzanne and whether she might be taking advantage of his absence to entertain her lover. He was doing all he could to make her life tolerable, to make her feel at ease, but, even more than her sense of guilt, the gratitude which she could not disguise was an insurmountable barrier between them. Whatever happened, even if she were to break with her lover and even supposing she could be convinced that he felt no jealousy or rancour, their life together could never be the same. As it was they were living from day to day, an artificial existence made up of the trivial routines of married life. Wha
t made it worse was that for some totally irrational reason he could not bring himself to see Claudine.

  As he sat in the Assize Court watching Josephine Hassler, he could not help comparing Suzanne’s attitude to her lapse from fidelity, probably the only sin of any consequence in her life, with that of the woman in the dock. Not once did the latter show any sign of shame or even of remorse. When she was accused of adultery she denied it imperiously in a manner which suggested not so much that she was innocent, but that she did not recognize that anything so vulgar as justice had the right to question her.

  She did not, however, deny the spectators their moments of drama. From time to time she would clash with the president or the advocate general. Once when the president was losing patience with her evasive answers and high-handed manner, he instructed her to confine herself to answering his questions.

  ‘Ah! You make your motives plain!’ She turned on him accusingly. ‘You don’t wish me to protest my innocence! You want me to confess to these crimes because in your mind you have already tried and condemned me. Is this how you uphold justice?’

  Judge Fourcroy who in Gautier’s view had been more than fair to the accused was stung to rebuke her. ‘Madame, you do your cause no good by this hysterical behaviour.’

  ‘Hysterical?’ She almost shouted the word at the judges. ‘And why should I not be hysterical? Have you any idea how much I have suffered? Imprisoned for months with women of the streets, tortured by the examining magistrate, deprived of the company of my loved ones. Can you even conceive what this kind of treatment has done to me, a girl brought up in love and refinement? Do you not know I have been in the care of doctors who have despaired of my life?’

  ‘Madame, for one so close to death your voice is astonishingly robust, your temper surprisingly violent.’

  At last the long process of examining and re-examining more than 80 witnesses was concluded. All that remained before the jury would retire to deliberate were the speeches of the prosecution and the defence. The advocate general spoke first and his speech, lasting for almost seven hours, created a sensation, not only among the public but among the many prominent lawyers who were in court to hear it. Both his presentation of the case against Josephine Hassler and the defence of her counsel, Maître Bonnard, were later included in the series Great Criminal Trials of France, standard reading for all law students.

  The advocate general, Rombout, besides his great intellect and powers of oratory, was known as a calm, unemotional man who won convictions with the deadly logic and simplicity of his arguments. Maître Bonnard, on the other hand, was a brilliant pleader who by his eloquent persuasion had often led juries into shutting their eyes to damning evidence.

  In the trial of the Impasse Louvain murders, their usual roles were reversed. Rombout constructed his speech around an attack on the prisoner which in its bitterness and contempt surpassed anything that had been heard in the courts of France for many years. He began by speaking of Josephine’s childhood, describing how her wilful and selfish behaviour had turned her father into a drunkard and made life unbearable for the rest of the family. Her engagement to the young army officer had, he claimed, been broken off not by her parents but by his, when they had learnt about her scandalous behaviour. He went on to assert that Josephine had only married Félix Hassler to get to Paris where she could lead a life of depravity, that she had turned her sister-in-law out of her husband’s house, that she had bullied her servants, that she had shamelessly used her body to advance her ambitions.

  ‘You see this woman before you,’ Rombout said to the jury pointing at the accused. ‘A courtesan who entertained men in her husband’s very home, who took lavish presents for the charms she bestowed so freely, who lied and cheated and schemed so that she could live a life of pleasure and luxury, who accepted the devotion of a husband all the time she was deceiving him, who, when she saw the prize she had always coveted within her grasp, had no hesitation in murdering this devoted husband so she would be free to marry into wealth and power.’

  Turning to the murders at Impasse Louvain, the advocate general denounced Josephine Hassler’s story as a tissue of lies, but he did not, as one would have expected, go over the story, exposing the contradictions and inconsistencies to destroy it step by step. Instead he explained that Madame Hassler was being accused only of her husband’s murder and that the prosecution believed that her mother’s death had been accidental. Madame Pinock, he said, had been brought to the house as part of the murder plan. She was to be attacked and tied up by the accomplices of the accused so that she would be able to confirm that intruders had broken into the house, which would lead the police to assume that it was these intruders who had killed Monsieur Hassler. In fact, even as the old lady was being attacked, Josephine Hassler was strangling her husband. Then Madame Pinock had upset the plan by swallowing her dentures and choking to death.

  This argument was the first admission by the prosecution that the murders could not have been the work of Josephine Hassler alone. Up to that point the possibility of her having accomplices had scarcely been mentioned throughout the trial. Now, having introduced the subject, the advocate general went on to make an extraordinary allegation.

  ‘We know that one of the accomplices,’ he stated, ‘was a relative of one of the accused woman’s servants. Unfortunately we do not have enough evidence yet to put that person on trial.’

  There could be no doubt about whom he was accusing. Pierre Malin, the son of the Hassler’s cook Françoise, had been interrogated more than once by the police and by the examining magistrate, and some newspapers had hinted openly that he was one of the suspects. For the advocate general to make such an accusation in his closing speech was unprecedented, a radical departure from French legal practise. It drew murmurs of surprise from all the lawyers in court and a dramatic reaction from Maître Bonnard.

  The defence counsel leapt to his feet. ‘The prosecutor speaks of knowing the names of accomplices. I know that as a man of honour he will not refuse to answer this question—Is he naming Pierre Malin, the son of my client’s cook?’

  Instead of replying, Rombout drew his gown more closely around himself and turning to the jury continued his speech. He said: ‘There is no law in France which says that this woman cannot be tried alone and without her accomplices. You the jury have seen her in the dock. You have seen her behaviour: proud, insolent and totally without remorse. She has spoken of her husband and her mother with equanimity and composure and without showing any signs of the grief one would expect from an innocent woman. You have no alternative, members of the jury, but to find her guilty and for a crime so heinous and so depraved the law can only demand the maximum penalty, the guillotine.’

  In following this speech, Maître Bonnard had, it seemed to Gautier, a simple task. Piece by piece he demolished the case of the prosecution, reminding the jury repeatedly that nothing but circumstantial evidence had been produced against his client. He explained the inconsistencies in her statements and her attempt to incriminate others by reminding the jury of the dreadful experience she had suffered, of the strain to which she had been exposed, of her interrogation by the police and of the way she had been pestered by journalists.

  ‘Indeed, you may think,’ Maître Bonnard added, ‘that these small slips, these lapses of memory are a sure proof of Madame Hassler’s innocence. A guilty woman, surely, would have had her story ready and stuck to it without ever changing a single word.’

  He pointed out how even during the trial the prosecution had shifted its ground on the question of possible accomplices. With heavy irony he mocked the attempt to produce scientific experts who would bolster up a weak case and poured scorn on the confusion of these experts and the failure of the prosecution to make anything of their allegations about the drugged grog, the ink stains and the cottonwool gags.

  Finally Maître Bonnard moved into an eloquent and impassioned plea for Josephine Hassler. Angrily he denounced the attempts of the prosecution to black
en her character. He told the jury of her devotion to her husband and her daughter, her good works, her gifts to the poor. Here was a woman, he told them, into whose house eminent people had been glad to go with their wives. Were the jury being asked to believe that such people would have consorted with an adulteress and a murderer?

  ‘The prosecution has sought to condemn this woman for her bearing in court, for the courage and determination with which she has denied the monstrous accusation of a repugnant and unnatural crime. She has fought, yes and why not? She is fighting for her life, members of the jury and that is all she has left. Her happiness and that of her loving daughter have already been destroyed not once but twice: once by the foul murderers who killed a devoted and beloved husband and father; once by the police, the newspapers and the public with their slanders, their accusations and their calumny. Josephine Hassler fights with dignity for her life and her freedom and I am confident that you, members of the jury, will in the name of justice, knowing her to be falsely accused, give her both.’