On March 20,1817, a body was found in the waters of the Aveyron River in southern France. It was soon identified as being that of Antoine-Bernardin Fualdès, a magistrate and criminal prosecutor from Rodez who had served the revolution and the empire and who had come out of retirement during the Hundred Days. On the previous evening, Fualdès had left his house with a substantial IOU tucked in the pocket of his frock coat and was on his way to redeem the debt. He was followed into a rough part of Rodez where, at about eight p.m., he was ambushed at the corner of the rue Hebdomadiers, gagged with a handkerchief, and bundled off into a gambling den aptly named the Crooked House, a notorious haunt of smugglers and prostitutes. After the assassins had forced their hostage to sign letters of exchange for the IOU, Fualdès was stretched out on a table. Sawing with a blunt knife, his murderer opened a transversal section across his neck from the right to the left carotid arteries. Posted by the assassins at the corner of the street outside, hurdy-gurdy players ground out their eerie melodies, obliterating the screams of the victim. The murderer smeared the body of the ex-magistrate with a little of the blood he had let while the rest dripped steadily into a bucket. When full, this was given to a pig to drink. The animal, having gorged himself, subsequently died. At around ten o’clock in the evening, the bloody body of the hapless Fualdès was placed on two poles, wrapped in a sheet, covered with wool, tied, and then carried to the river by four individuals who dumped the corpse into the Aveyron and hence, they thought, into oblivion.
That is the gist of the official account of the crime as presented by the public prosecutor in Rodez. Despite lengthy trials, and an eventual verdict, the truth behind the murder of Antoine-Bernardin Fualdès has, until recently, remained an enigma. Certainly, it had all the ingredients of a very murky mystery: the roughness of the isolated, in-ward-looking town of Rodez, which was torn by the furious political quarrels that had afflicted France over the previous decades; the probability that the murder was the work of an avenging ultra-royalist gang; the rumors, lies, and faked convictions; above all, the barbarity of the crime itself, made to seem even more vicious by the official verdict that the murder was carried out by men who were among the victim’s best friends.1 It was also obvious from the start that the authorities in Paris, anxious about their judicial hold on the volatile south, took a special interest in the case.
After hearing hundreds of witnesses, confessions, and denials, a verdict was returned in early September, which was annulled by the appeals court in Montpellier a month later. A retrial opened in the spring of 1818, one year after the crime had been committed. By that time the Fualdès affair had become a media sensation with reporters from the large Parisian papers in attendance.
Considering Fualdès’s lengthy career serving the Revolution, it was obvious that he would be a prime target for royalist revenge. The comte François Régis La Bourdonnaye, an ultra deputy for Maine-et-Loire, listed a thousand heads that should tumble; Antoine-Bernardin Fualdès was on that list.2
The intrigue surrounding the murder of Fualdès was, like the Medusa scandal, testimony to the running sores that plagued France after a quarter of a century of revolution and civil and foreign war. Yet though the Medusa scandal was brought before the public in order to discredit the ultra-royalists, the truth behind the Fualdès affair was hushed up in order to suppress evidence of civil strife.
The falsification of the Fualdès verdict was, to a large extent, made possible by the volley of lies, contradictions, and hysterical accusations that tumbled from the mouth of a celebrity-seeking woman named Clarisse Manzon. Just as Corréard decided to expose the Medusa scandal in print, so the mysterious and highly strung Clarisse Manzon published her version of the events in Rodez. She was the quintessential publicity seeker who understood that if you say something sufficiently shocking, however ill-advised or stupid, people will lap it up. The thirty-two-year-old Clarisse soon achieved her aim of making Rodez “famous from Gibraltar to Archangel.”3
Unlike the Medusa investigation, which was conducted in camera, the Fualdès case was a civilian affair, providing flamboyant copy for an avid press. La Quotidienne observed that “no one thinks of greeting a friend without asking for the news from Rodez.”4 Indeed, as the trial became the preoccupation of salons throughout Europe, it attracted the attention of writers, painters, and printmakers and a mini-industry grew up around the spurious proceedings. In Paris, along the quays of the Seine, booksellers hawked numerous images and lithographs treating the murky affair.5
Théodore Géricault’s interest in the Fualdès murder and his subsequent obsession with the Medusa scandal reflect his developing absorption with crime and catastrophe—with the violent and shocking phenomena that were the staple of broadsheets, and with their starkly embellished woodcuts dramatizing sinister events. Such publications fascinated people and fed popular literature with tasty morsels suitable to the Gothic novel, a genre that has been described as a “literature of cannibals that feeds on bits of human flesh.”6
In the second half of 1817 the Fualdès affair had somewhat eclipsed the wreck of the Medusa as the talk of the town but, with the publication of The Shipwreck of the Frigate, the Medusa, once again the maritime atrocity seized the public’s imagination. The sheer scale of the loss, the mortifying tale of selfishness, cowardice, cannibalism, and murder—to which must be added the resolve and courage of the authors of the book for getting their version of events into print—was simply staggering; Savigny and Corréard’s narrative exposed nothing less than the government’s failure in its duty to its subjects.
On his arrival in Paris in late 1817, Géricault would seem to have had the time neither for the top stories of the day nor for painting. The months in Italy had only exacerbated his desire for his aunt and mistress and he rapidly fell into the arms of Alexandeine-Modeste, the woman he had left France to forget. In his private sketches he now expressed more intimate and personal evocations of loving. Mythology had once provided a way to sublimate the sexual dilemma of his life; now he was producing works that expressed the intensity of coitus or those gentle moments of tender intimacy either before or after.
These drawings and washes are celebrations of sex in which the woman is active, and not, as is so often the case, a displayed object to delight the male voyeur.7 The passionate hug of the woman on top in The Embrace reveals someone who clamors for, and enjoys sex. These are not titillating scenes, not confessions of psychological and physiological distress, but celebrations of the power and pleasure of physical union. Wash drawings such as The Kiss express the sheer exuberance of tenderhearted lovemaking, the sensual and spiritual rapture experienced by reunited lovers. Géricault revels in the plump form of his beloved. Their union was obviously intense and, as with all true love, supremely precious. Catastrophically, it was to prove short-lived.
For all their elation at being reunited, something occurred that crushed them. After more than a year without each other, they had plunged feverishly back into their affair. Within two months, Alexandrine was pregnant with Géricault’s child. It would soon no longer be possible to conceal their intimacy. Within a matter of months the pregnancy would be obvious to Alexandrine’s husband and her position in society, as a wife and mother, would be in jeopardy.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the upper classes of French society became obsessed by the subject of adultery. Alexandre Dumas dated this fixation from the 1804 civil code that abolished primogeniture, the right of the firstborn to inherit. Fathers, stewards of a family’s fortune who were suddenly obliged to acknowledge all the children produced by their wives, naturally became anxious over the question of paternity; bastards, under the Code Napoléon, were entitled to the same privileges as legitimate children. When such concerns were brought to bear on marriages complicated by decades of difference between husband and wife, anxiety increased. The divorce law under Napoleon had allowed a husband to get rid of his wife for adultery but, in 1816, the chambre introuvable abolished divorce. In the case of Géricault and his aunt, the kindred nature of the relation did make it easier to contain the problem within the family, the preferred course at a time when the guilty woman and her lover, if he was a bachelor, faced imprisonment for a period of up to two years.8
By April 1818, with his aunt’s womb swelling into scandal, Géricault had begun to play with the macabre subject of murder. After making a series of preliminary sketches, however, the Fualdès affair, already treated so well by the popular engravers of the day, appeared somehow wanting. Instinctively, Géricault was searching for a contemporary event of sufficient scale, energy, and universality to make a lasting impression. It was during this period, while his child was growing toward an uncertain life, that Géricault became interested in, and fixed on, a much grander tale of murder. It was a tale whose themes touched the deep and searching questions that the French were asking about their national identity, and it presented a particularly striking example of man’s inhumanity to man.
The period between the breaking of the Medusa story and the publication of Savigny and Corréard’s book, with its upsetting, in-depth revelations, had been a difficult time for Géricault. In early 1818, as a result of the calamitous twist in his secret relationship, he developed an even deeper engagement with suffering that would, in one way or another, transform him into a man who, for the rest of his short existence, would wrestle with questions of life and death. Géricault was facing the inevitable loss of his loved one along with the probable loss of his child. At this time, he decided to abandon the Fualdès murder for the horrors that followed the catastrophic loss of the Medusa.