She Stands Accused

by She Stands Accused(Lit)

  % IV

  While she had been looking after herself Sophie Dawes had not been unmindful ofthe advancement of hangers-on of her own family. She had about her a nephew and a niece. The latter, supposed by some to have a closer relationship to Sophie than that of mere niece, she had contrived to marry off to a marquis. The Marquise de Chabannes de la Palice need not here concern us further. But notice must be taken of the nephew. A few million francs, provided by the Prince de Conde, had secured for this James Dawes the title of Baron de Flassans, from a domain also bestowed upon him by Sophie's elderly lover. De Flassans, with some minor post in the Prince's household, acted as his aunt's jackal.

  If Sophie, after the election to kingship of Louis-Philippe, found it necessary to be in Paris a great deal to worship at the throne her nephew kept her well informed about the Prince de Conde's activities. The old man, it appeared, had suddenly developed the habit of writing letters. The Prince, then at the chateau of Saint-Leu expressed a desire to remove to Chantilly. He was behaving very oddly all round, was glad to have Sophie out of his sight, and seemed unwilling even to hear her name. The projected move to Chantilly, as a fact, was merely a blind to cover a flight out of Sophie's reach and influence. Rumour arose about Saint-Leu and in Paris that the Prince had made another will—one in which neither Sophie nor the Duc d'Aumale was mentioned. This was a move of which Sophie had been afraid. She saw to it that the Prince did not get away from Saint-Leu. Rumour and the Prince's conduct made Sophie very anxious. She tried to get him to make over to her in his lifetime those properties which he had left to her in his will, and it is probable enough that she would have forced this request but for the fact that, to raise the legal costs, the property of Saint-Leu would have had to be sold.

  This was the position of affairs about the middle of August 1830. It was believed the Prince had already signed a will in favour of the exiled little Duc de Bordeaux, but that he had kept the act secret from his mistress.

  On the morning of the 11th of the month the Prince was met outside his bedroom in his night attire. It was a young man called Obry who thus met the Prince. He was the old man's godchild. The old man's left eye was bleeding, and there was a scratch on his cheek as if made by a fingernail. To Obry the Prince attributed these wounds to the spite of the Baronne de Feucheres. Half an hour later he told his valet he had hit his head against a night-table. Later again in the day he gave another version still: he had fallen against the door to a secret staircase from his bedroom while letting the Baronne de Feucheres out, the secret staircase being in communication with Sophie's private apartments.

  For the next ten days or so the Prince was engaged in contriving his flight from the gentle Sophie, a second plan which again was spoiled by Sophie's spies. There was something of a fete at Saint-Leu on the 26th, the Prince's saint's day. There was a quarrel between Sophie and the Prince on the morning of the 26th in the latter's bedroom. Sophie had then been back in Saint-Leu for three days. At midnight on the 26th the old man retired after playing a game or two at whist. He was to go on the 30th to Chantilly. He was accompanied to his bedroom by his surgeon and a valet, one Lecomte, and expressed a desire to be called at eight o'clock. Lecomte found a paper in the Prince's trousers and gave it to the old man, who placed it on the mantelshelf. Then the valet, as he said later, locked the door of the Prince's dressing-room, thus —except for the entrance from the secret staircase—locking the old man in his room.

  The Prince's apartments were on the first floor of the chateau. His bedroom was approached through the dressing-room from the main corridor. Beyond the dressing-room was a passage, turning left from which was the bedroom, and to the right in which was an entrance to an anteroom. Facing the dressing-room door in this same passage was the entrance to the secret staircase already mentioned. The staircase gave access to the Baronne de Feucheres' apartments on the entrance floor. These, however, were not immediately under the Prince's rooms. An entresol intervened, and here the rooms were occupied by the Abbe Briant, a creature of Sophie's and her secretary, the Widow Lachassine, Sophie's lady's-maid, and a couple named Dupre. These last, also spies of Sophie's, had their room direcdy below the Prince's bedroom, and it is recorded that the floor was so thin that they could hear not only the old man's every movement, but anything he said.

  Adjacent to the Prince's room, and on the same floor, were the rooms occupied by Lambot, the Prince's aide, and the valet Lecomte. Lambot was a lover of Sophie's, and had been the great go-between in her intrigues with the Orleans family over the will. Lecomte was in Sophie's pay. Close to Sophie's apartments on the entrance floor were the rooms occupied by her nephew and his wife, the de Flassans. It will be seen, therefore, that the wing containing the Prince's rooms was otherwise occupied almost completely by Sophie's creatures.

  You have, then, the stage set for the tragedy which was about to ensue: midnight; the last of the Condes peaceably in his bedroom for the night, and locked in it (according to Lecomte). About him, on all sides, are the creatures of his not too scrupulous mistress. All these people, with the exception of the Baronne de Flassans, who sat up writing letters until two, retire about the same time.

  And at eight o'clock next morning, there being no answer to Lecomte's knocking to arouse the Prince, the door is broken open at the orders of the Baronne de Feucheres. The Prince is discovered dead in his bedroom, suspended by the neck, by means of two of his own handkerchiefs knotted together, from the fastening of one of the French windows.

  The fastening was only about two and a half feet off the floor. The handkerchief about the dead man's neck was loose enough to have permitted insertion of all the fingers of a hand between it and the neck. The second handkerchief was tied to the first, and its other end was knotted to the window-fastening, and the dead man's right cheek was pressed against the closed shutter. The knees were bent a little, the feet were on the floor. None of the usual indications of death by strangulation were present. The eyes were half closed. The face was pale but not livid. The mouth was almost closed. There was no protrusion of the tongue.

  On the arrival of the civil functionaries, the Mayor of Saint-Leu and a Justice of the Peace from Enghien, the body was taken down and put on the bed. It was then found that the dead man's ankles were greatly bruised and his legs scratched. On the left side of the throat, at a point too low for it to have been done by the handkerchief, there was some stripping of the skin. A large red bruise was found between the Prince's shoulders.

  The King, Louis-Philippe, heard about the death of the Prince de Conde at half-past eleven that same day. He immediately sent his High Chancellor, M. Pasquier, and his own aide-de-camp, M. de Rumigny, to inquire into the matter. It is not stretching things too far to say that the King's instructions to these gentlemen are revealed in phrases occurring in the letters they sent his Majesty that same evening. Both recommend that Drs Marc and Marjolin should be sent to investigate the Prince's tragic death. But M. Pasquier mentions that ``not a single document has been found, so a search has already been made.'' And M. de Rumigny thinks ``it is important that nobody should be accused who is likely to benefit by the will.'' What document was expected to be discovered in the search? Why, a second will that would invalidate the first. Who was to benefit by the first will? Why, the little Duc d'Aumale and Dame Sophie Dawes, Baronne de Feucheres!

  The post-mortem examination was made by the King's own physicians. During the examination the Prince's doctors, MM. Dubois and Gendrin, his personal secretary, and the faithful one among his body-servants, Manoury, were sent out of the room. The verdict was suicide. The Prince's own doctors maintained that suicide by the handkerchiefs from the window-fastening was impossible. Dr Dubois wrote his idea of how the death had occurred:

  The Prince very likely was asleep in his bed. The murderers must have been given entrance to his bedroom—I have no wish to ask how or by whom. They then threw themselves on the Prince, gripped him firmly, and could easily pin him down on his bed; then the most despe
rate and dexterous of the murderers suffocated him as he was thus held firmly down; finally, in order to make it appear that he had committed suicide and to hinder any judicial investigations which might have discovered the identity of the assassins, they fastened a handkerchief about their victim's neck, and hung him up by the espagnolette of the window.

  And that, at all hazards, is about the truth of the death of the Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde. There was some official display of rigour in investigation by the Procureur; there was much play with some mysterious papers found a good time after the first discovery half-burned in the fireplace of the Prince's bedroom; there was a lot put forward to support the idea of suicide; but the blunt truth of the affair is that the Prince de Conde was murdered, and that the murder was hushed up as much as possible. Not, however, with complete success. There were few in France who gave any countenance to the theory of suicide.

  The Prince, it will be remembered, had a practically disabled left arm. It is said that he could not even remove his hat with his left hand. The knots in the handkerchiefs used to tie him to the espagnolette were both complicated and tightly made. Impossible for a one-handed man. His bed, which at the time of his retiring to it stood close to the alcove wall, was a good foot and a half away from that wall in the morning. Impossible feat also for this one-handed man. It was the Prince's habit to lie so much to one side of the bed that his servants had to prop the outside edge up with folded blankets. On the morning when his death was discovered it was seen that the edges still were high, while the centre was very much pressed down. There was, in fact, a hollow in the bed's middle such as might have been made by some one standing on it with shoes on. It is significant that the bedclothes were neatly turned down. If the Prince had got up on a sudden impulse to commit suicide he is hardly likely, being a prince, to have attempted remaking his bed. He must, moreover, since he could normally get from bed only by rolling on his side, have pressed out that heightened edge. Manoury, the valet who loved him, said that the bed in the morning looked more as if it had been SMOOTHED OUT than remade. This would tend to support the theory of Dr Dubois. The murderers, having suffocated the Prince, would be likely to try effacing the effects of his struggling by the former method rather than the latter.

  But the important point of the affair, as far as this chapter on it is concerned, is the relation of Sophie Dawes with it on the conclusion of murder. How deeply was she implicated? Let us see how she acted on hearing that there was no reply to Lecomte's knocking, and let us examine her conduct from that moment on.

  Note that the Baronne de Feucheres was the first person whom Lecomte and the Prince's surgeon apprised of the Prince's silence. She rushed out of her room and made for the Prince's, not by the secret staircase, but by the main one. She knew, however, that the door to the secret staircase from the Prince's room was not bolted that night. This knowledge was admitted for her later by the Prince's surgeon, M. Bonnie. She had gone up to the Prince's room by the main staircase in order to hide the fact, an action which gives a touch of theatricality to her exhibited concern about the Prince's silence.

  The search for documents spoken of by M. Pasquier in his letter to the King had been carried out by Sophie in person, with the aid of her nephew de Flassans and the Abbe Briant. It was a thorough search, and a piece of indecorousness which she excused on the ground of being afraid the Prince's executors might find a will which made her the sole heir, to the exclusion of the Duc d'Aumale.

  Regarding the `accident' which had happened to the Prince on the 11th of August, she said it was explained by an earlier attempt on his part to do away with himself. She tried to deny that she had been at Saint-Leu at the time of the actual happening, when the fact was that she only left for Paris some hours later.

  When, some time later, the Prince's faithful valet Manoury made mention of the fact that the Prince had wanted to put the width of the country between himself and his mistress, Sophie first tried to put the fear of Louis-Philippe into the man, then, finding he was not to be silenced that way, tried to buy him with a promise of employment.

  It is beyond question that the Prince de Conde was murdered. He was murdered in a wing of the chateau in which he was hemmed in on all sides by Sophie's creatures. It is impossible that Sophie was not privy, at the least, to the deed. It is not beyond the bounds of probability that she was an actual participator in the murder.

  She was a violent woman, as violent and passionate as she was determined. Not once but many times is it on record that she physically ill-used her elderly lover. There was one occasion, it is said, when the Prince suddenly came upon her in a very compromising position with a younger man in the park of one of his chateaux. Sophie, before the Prince could utter a protest, cut him across the face with her riding-whip, and finished up by thrashing him with his own cane.

  Here you have the stuff, at any rate, of which your murderesses of the violent type are made. It is the metal out of which your Kate Websters, your Sarah Malcolms, your Meteyards and Brownriggs fashion themselves. It takes more than three years of scholastic self-discipline, such as Sophie Dawes in her ambition subjected herself to, to eradicate the inborn harridan. The very determination which was at the back of Sophie's efforts at self-education, that will to have her own way, would serve to heighten the sick rage with which she would discover that her carefully wrought plans of seven years had come to pieces. What was it that the Abbe Pelier de Lacroix had in ``proof of the horrible assassination'' of the Prince de Conde, but that he was prevented from placing before the lawyers in charge of the later investigation, if not the fact that the Prince had made a later will than the one by which Sophie inherited so greatly? The Abbe was the Prince's chaplain. He published a pamphlet declaring that the Prince had made a will leaving his entire fortune to the little Duc de Bordeaux, but that Sophie had stolen this later will. Who likelier to be a witness to such a will than the Prince's chaplain?

  It needs no great feat of imagination to picture what the effect of such a discovery would be on a woman of Sophie's violent temper, or to conceive how little the matter of taking a life especially the life of a feeble old man she was used to bullying and mishandling—would be allowed to stand in the way of rescuing her large gains. Murder of the Prince was her only chance. It had taken her seven years to bring him to the point of signing that first will. He was seventy-four years of age, enfeebled, obstinate, and she knew of his plans to flee from her. Even supposing that she could prevent his flight, could she begin all over again to another seven years of bullying and wheedling—always with the prospect of the old man dying before she could get him to the point again of doing as she wished? The very existence of the second will was a menace. It only needed that the would-be heirs of the Prince should hear of it, and there would be a swoop on their part to rescue the testator from her clutches. In the balance against 2,000,000 francs and some halfdozen castles with their estates the only wonder is that any reasonable person, knowing the history of Sophie Dawes, should hesitate about the value she was likely to place on the old man's life.

  The inquiry begun in September of 1830 into the circumstances surrounding the death of the Prince was cooked before it was dressed. The honest man into whose hands it was placed at first, a M. de la Hurpoie, proved himself too zealous. After a night visit from the Procureur he was retired into private life. After that the investigators were hand-picked. They concluded the investigation the following June, with the declaration that the Prince had committed suicide, a verdict which had its reward—in advancement for the judges.

  In the winter of 1831-32 there was begun a lawsuit in which the Princes de Rohan brought action against Sophie and the Duc d'Aumale for the upsetting of the will under which the latter two had inherited the Prince de Conde's fortune. The grounds for the action were the undue influence exerted by Sophie. The Princes de Rohan lost.

  Thus was Sophie twice `legally' vindicated. But public opinion refused her any coat of whitewash. Never popular in France, she b
ecame less and less popular in the years that followed her legal triumphs. Having used her for his own ends, Louis-Philippe gradually shut off from her the light of his cod-like countenance.[29]

  [29] Lacenaire, the notorious murderer-robber in a biting song, written in prison, expressed the popular opinion regarding Louis-Philippe's share in the Feucheres-Conde affair. The song, called Petition d'un voleur a un roi son voisin, has this final stanza:

  ``Sire, oserais-je reclamer? Mais ecoutez-moi sans colere: Le voeu que je vais exprimer Pourrait bien, ma foi, vous deplaire. Je suis fourbe, avare, mechant, Ladre, impitoyable, rapace; J'ai fait se pendre mon parent: Sire, cedez-moi votre place.''

  Sophie found little joy in her wide French possessions. She found herself without friends before whom she could play the great lady in her castles. She gradually got rid of her possessions, and returned to her native land. She bought an estate near Christchurch, in Hampshire, and took a house in Hyde Park Square, London. But she did not long enjoy those English homes. While being treated for dropsy in 1840 she died of angina. According to the famous surgeon who was at her bedside just before her demise, she died ``game.''

  It may almost be said that she lived game. There must have been a fighting quality about Sophie to take her so far from such a bad start. Violent as she was of temper, greedy, unscrupulous, she seems yet to have had some instincts of kindness. The stories of her good deeds are rather swamped by those of her bad ones. She did try to do some good with the Prince's money round about Chantilly, took a definite and lasting interest in the alms-houses built there by ``the Great Conde,'' and a request in her own will was to the effect that if she had ever done anything for the Orleans gang, the Prince de Conde's wishes regarding the use of the chateau of Ecouen as an orphanage might be fulfilled as a reward to her. The request never was fulfilled, but it does show that Sophie had some affinity in kindness to Nell Gwynn.