Day Four: Thursday, 10 November
Among the reporters covering the trial was Lucien Coulond, a prominent former war correspondent who had travelled widely in the Middle East. Coulond, 38, was married to an actress and had once hoped to pursue a career on the stage. Writing for Le Journal under his pen name “Edouard Helsey”, he saw the trial as an unfolding drama rather than a dry legal process.
Despite Moro’s misstep with Philomène, Coulond thought the prosecution case had got off to an uncertain start. Coulond was particularly struck by the prosecution’s failure so far to produce any firm evidence that Landru had killed Jeanne and André Cuchet. It was all just conjecture: “The prosecution has told us nothing about the immediate circumstances of this first disappearance.” In Coulond’s view, if the case against Landru depended on l’affaire Cuchet, then it would be difficult to make the murder counts stick.
Coulond’s commentary led the front page of Le Journal on 10 November, followed by a long despatch by the newspaper’s trial reporter. All the other dailies featured Landru on their front pages, as they would continue to do for the rest of the trial. Even L’Humanité, which had initially sneered at the trial as a bourgeois divertissement, felt obliged to satisfy its readers on 10 November with a front-page report, illustrated by a cartoon of Gilbert.
Commentators and feature writers, looking for an excuse to write even more about Landru, attempted to invest his trial with a wider significance. The “Bluebeard of Gambais” was variously depicted as a distraction for a nation still in mourning for 1.3 million war casualties, a proxy for France’s frustrated need to avenge those deaths, and in the conservative press, a terrible warning of what could happen when the “feeble sex” was led astray.
With his thespian eye, Coulond came closest to the truth. Viewed as theatre, the trial was a lurid, unpredictable show, perfect for selling newspapers. Here was the lumbering Godefroy, out of his depth, “flapping his arms and shouting too loudly in an awkward voice which he quickly stifles.” Here was Moro, who “corners, strikes and disarms his adversary”. Here was Philomène and her “horrible dream” (Le Petit Parisien), weeping for her lost sister. Above all, here was a monster with a “savage audacity”, accused of slaughtering ten fiancées, repulsive, volatile and even comic; for when the audience heard that Landru had romanced 283 women, people had “burst out laughing”.
***
The star of the show arrived in court just before 1.00 pm on Thursday, laden down with green, red and yellow dossiers. He was soon absorbed in his notes, as the last of the witnesses in l’affaire Cuchet came and went in rapid succession.
Jeanne’s other brother-in-law, Louis Germain, “podgy and pleased with himself ”, was soon punctured by Moro. Germain (married to the late Martin Cuchet’s sister) denied that Jeanne had ever spoken to him about wanting to leave France with André for a new life in America. Moro pointed out that Germain had reported her comment to Bonin.
“Monsieur Germain was distraught,” Le Populaire reported. “His whole performance had been wiped out.”
Mme Pelletier, Jeanne’s former concierge, a short, stout woman in her late fifties, declared bluntly that Mme Cuchet had “worked a lot but wasn’t rich”. She then told a story about Landru turning up one day at the apartment with two little girls, aged about ten, who he said were his daughters.
“Landru, what do you say?” Gilbert demanded.
Landru ruminated for a moment. It was possible he had made this remark to Mme Pelletier, he said, “but that isn’t a reason why they might have been my daughters.”
A juror raised his hand, wanting to check something Philomène had said.
“Did Mme Cuchet wear earrings and what were they made of?” he asked Mme Pelletier.
“Oui, oui,” she replied, “I think they were made of gold.”
A thin, grey-haired woman, dressed in full mourning, was next on the witness stand. Mme Louise Morin, the mother of André Cuchet’s best friend Max, was allowed to sit, removing her veil and gripping the bar with her black-gloved hand to steady her nerves.
“André wanted to volunteer to fight in the war like my son, but his mother refused to let him go until his contingent was called up,” Mme Morin recalled, her voice almost inaudible. “One day, André declared full of joy that an imminent mobilisation law would allow him to go off without his mother’s consent. She was heartbroken and it was thus that we knew each other.”
Mme Morin told Gilbert how she had warned Jeanne not to marry “such a bandit”, following Jeanne’s discovery of Landru’s identity. “Later, this individual came to tell me that Mme Cuchet and André had left for England, but claimed not to know their address. I never received any more news of the mother. As for my son…”
She paused, sinking back into her misery.
“We know, madame,” said Gilbert, “that your son fell on the field of honour. Please believe that we too bow before your sorrow.”
“The defence, too,” Moro added, rising with his fellow veteran Navières.
Max Morin, André’s hero, had retrained during the war as an aviator. In March 1918 Max’s plane had crashed on take-off, probably from engine failure.
Mme Morin could not continue and was helped from her chair by the clerk of the court. She had offered a glimpse of Jeanne as a more complicated person than the supposedly besotted woman depicted by the prosecution: ambivalent about Landru after discovering his true identity and concerned above all to keep her naïve son André out of the war.
Mme Oudry, the elderly estate agent in Vernouillet, was too ill to testify about how she came to rent The Lodge to Landru in December 1914. Instead, Godefroy read out her witness statement, in which she noted that Landru had signed the contract as “Monsieur Cuchet”.
For some reason, Landru tried to deny what he called this “lie” by Mme Oudry. Moro, who had seen the contract, firmly corrected Landru.
“Let me speak!” Landru admonished Moro, who with the help of Navières finally got his furious client to sit down.
One of the jurors wanted to know why Landru had pretended in Vernouillet that he was Jeanne’s husband. It was a clever question that tricked Landru into tacitly conceding that he had used the name “Cuchet” on the contract.
“I was being pursued for an ‘indelicacy’ [criminal offence] and needed a false identity as cover,” Landru explained. “It was wartime. A man arriving in a small neighbourhood with a stranger could have seemed peculiar.” Landru stared at the twelve solid, provincial jurors and sensed their dissatisfaction with his answer. “Country folk are excessively curious and suspicious,” he informed them, with all the hauteur of a born Parisian.
***
Landru was beyond Moro’s reach for the rest of the afternoon. At 3.30 pm Gilbert moved on to the Argentinian-born Thérèse Laborde-Line, the third of Landru’s alleged victims. Thérèse had been 46 when she vanished at Vernouillet in July 1915.
Why did Thérèse’s concierge and several neighbours recall her speaking of being engaged to him, a fact that he denied?
Landru smiled: “Monsieur le président, here one has to make a little study in feminine psychology.”
(“Laughter”: Le Journal)
“Women do not like to admit they are financially embarrassed; they prefer to believe in a beautiful marriage. But this little lie proves nothing.”
Where was Thérèse now? Gilbert asked.
“I don’t want to know, it’s none of my business, I’m just a furniture dealer,” Landru snapped. “Don’t ask me about matters beyond my station.”
“Why, Landru,” Godefroy mocked, “you answer very well on certain points, but refuse to respond to others which have the potential to make your head fall off.”
Landru leant forward, “very on edge”, L’Ouest-Éclair reported. “This belongs to the domain of my private life. These women sold me their furniture. I paid them. I do not wish to know what became of them next.”
Moro got up, hoping to cut short this disastrous exchange before Landru incriminated himself. Landru had said all he could say about Thérèse’s disappearance, Moro observed; perhaps the court should proceed to the examination of witnesses.
Gilbert declined Moro’s proposal and returned to his pursuit of Landru.
Why did Landru maintain that Thérèse had never spent the night at The Lodge when a neighbour saw her picking flowers in the back garden?
Landru spread his arms in protest: “But it’s the pleasure of every Parisienne on a day out in the country to pick a flower, to prove that she has been there!”
“Why did you keep her personal papers?”
“It was a sacred deposit.”
(“Rumeurs violentes”: Le Gaulois)
“It’s a singular ‘sacred deposit’ that concerns a commercial matter,” Gilbert said. “Enfin, do you know where she has gone?”
“I have told you that I did not wish to know anything beyond the commercial sphere. Her private life does not concern me!”
“The same response as for Mme Cuchet.”
“And the same reserve, monsieur le président,” Landru said with dignity. “Her private life, like mine, is a wall.”
“Behind which you shelter.”
(“Sensation”: Le Gaulois)
“One last time,” said Gilbert, when the noise from the gallery had subsided. “You refuse to say where she has gone?”
“Absolutely.”
Mme Tréborel, Thérèse’s 34-year-old former concierge, was “thin, aggressive and disagreeable”, Le Populaire remarked unpleasantly. Moro salvaged something from a terrible afternoon when Mme Tréborel gave an incoherent answer during cross-examination and Gilbert interrupted to “clarify” what she had said.
Moro feigned shock at the judge’s intervention.
“I have the right to speak to the witness,” Gilbert said calmly.
“Yes, but not to draw conclusions from her evidence!” Moro retorted.
“Come on, maître, where have I done that?” Gilbert shot back.
“If you have something to say to myself or the jury, please say it after the verdict,” Moro scolded Gilbert, addressing him like a schoolboy caught cheating in class. It was pure flummery, as both he and Gilbert knew. All that mattered to Moro was giving the jurors an uneasy feeling that Gilbert might not be entirely impartial.
Mme Tréborel was followed by Thérèse’s only son Vincent, still a postal clerk and “very emotional” about insinuations in the press that he had not cared about his mother. Vincent insisted that if Thérèse had still been alive she would have written to him: “She had great affection for him, despite some differences that had arisen between her and his wife.”
No one had the heart to ask Vincent why he had made no further effort to track down Thérèse after she had failed to reply to his last letter.
The detective Riboulet was the final witness of the day, explaining at tedious length how he had established that Landru had given Thérèse the codename “Brésil” in his carnet. “During this deposition, the public gradually began to leave,” Le Rappel reported. “It was before an almost empty courtroom that the hearing ended at 5.25 pm.”
***
Day Five: Friday, 11 November
Lucien Coulond, the sketchwriter for Le Journal, was appalled by how fashionable women, down from Paris for a day out at the trial, were steadily invading the press benches. Coulond did a headcount on Friday: out of 60 seats reserved for journalists, 19 were occupied by “mincing, chattering ladies”, he noted in disgust. According to Coulond, these ladies “put their hands to their faces, brandish their lorgnettes, titter at every picturesque or scabrous detail and pout disapprovingly when one of the actors in the drama, defendant or witness, delivers a poor speech.”
“Parigotte”, a columnist for the newspaper La Justice, was convinced that most of the women in the gallery were sympathetic to Landru. “In remembering his mysterious history, they are, in spite of themselves, aroused with curiosity, vanity and jealousy; all of which predisposes them to be indulgent.”
***
Gilbert turned at the start of Friday’s session to Marie-Angélique Guillin, the 52-year-old retired housekeeper who had vanished at The Lodge in August 1915. Marie-Angélique was “uncultured” and foolish, Gilbert said; so stupid that she had fallen for Landru’s story about being the next Consul General to Australia, in search of a wife to accompany him to diplomatic receptions. On the evidence table, Marie-Angélique’s tatty pyjamas and cheap chestnut wig spoke of a woman more deserving of pity than contempt.
Marie-Angélique had told a neighbour that she had seen other women’s clothes and shoes at The Lodge while spying through the keyhole of a locked room. Was she mistaken? Gilbert asked Landru.
“Women always embroider stories because of their vanity,” Landru replied knowingly. “Do you really believe I would have left a woman’s clothes lying around if I was bringing another one to see me?”
(“Laughter”: Le Petit Journal)
Landru refused to say what had happened to Marie-Angélique, citing his familiar “wall” of privacy. However, he did wish to make an observation about the police.
“It has only been three years since the police began looking for Mme Guillin,” Landru said. “Give them a bit more time and perhaps they will find her!”
(“Laughter”: Le Journal)
He dismissed as absurd the allegation that he had forged a letter by Marie-Angélique to her bank in order to steal her savings. Regarding her possessions, he had not paid much attention to what she was selling him.
“Even her wig?” Gilbert enquired. To drive his point home, Gilbert ordered a court official to bring Marie-Angélique’s hairpiece to Landru.
“I don’t remember it,” said Landru, refusing to look at the wig. “When you’re buying en bloc you don’t open up everything to inspect the goods.”
Godefroy asked Landru why he would not reveal Marie-Angélique’s whereabouts.
“If I know something on this matter, it’s a secret that is not mine to share,” Landru said, giving Godefroy exactly the answer he wanted.
“You are not forgetting that your head is at stake, are you?” Godefroy taunted Landru.
“You have threatened me with my head!” Landru shouted back. “My only regret is that I have just the one head to offer you.”
“Messieurs les jurés,” Moro said, “you will understand that regardless of my client’s attitude, you will have to judge whether there is sufficient proof to cut off the only head that he possesses.”
It was a feeble witticism, but Moro had at least reminded the jury that Landru’s wild behaviour did not prove he was a murderer.
***
Moro’s point was underscored by the witnesses who followed, none of whom had any evidence that Landru had killed Marie-Angélique. A woman who lived in the same apartment block recalled seeing Marie-Angélique and Landru walking arm in arm along the street below. Another neighbour remembered warning Marie-Angélique not to hand over her savings to her fiancé. Marie-Angélique’s estranged daughter admitted that she and her husband had not worried too much when they heard no more from her mother. They had decided that her boat to Australia with her new husband might have been sunk by a German torpedo.
Gilbert came to Landru’s theft of Marie-Angélique’s sizeable investments following her disappearance.
Monsieur Lesbazeilles was the bank manager who had allowed Landru to withdraw part of Marie-Angélique’s savings in November 1915, three months after she vanished. A tall, thin man in his forties, Lesbazeilles became flustered when Moro asked why he had agreed to bring the cheque to an address in western Paris that Landru had given him.
Lesbazeilles denied the whole visit, claiming that Landru must have withdrawn the money at the bank. Moro read Lesbazeilles’ witness statement back to him, making sure the jury grasped an important detail. Lesbazeilles had also recalled seeing a middle-aged woman in the little apartment on Avenue des Ternes when he handed Landru the cheque. This woman must have been Marie-Angélique Guillin, Lesbazeilles had told the police.
Landru had been waiting for this moment. The witness was correct, Landru remarked courteously to Lesbazeilles; his companion had indeed been Mme Guillin. Landru could even refresh Lesbazeilles’ memory about the apartment’s location: “45 Avenue des Ternes, ground floor, to the left of an interior courtyard, reached via two or three steps beneath a canopy”. At Moro’s invitation, Landru drew a precise sketch of the apartment.
All the newspapers grasped the significance of this exchange. If Lesbazeilles’ deposition was accurate, then Marie-Angélique must have been alive at 45 Avenue des Ternes several months after Landru allegedly killed her. In the circumstances, Gilbert could not refuse Moro’s request for further enquiries by the police at the address.
***
Day Six: Saturday, 12 November
Landru was on perky form when he entered the court on Saturday, flanked by his usual escort of guards. “He takes off his bowler hat and gives the jurors a pleasant wave… a nice, friendly one,” Le Gaulois remarked.
Moro was late and missed the first hour, which was devoted to the final witnesses in l’affaire Guillin. None of them had any first-hand knowledge of what had happened to Marie-Angélique when she left Paris.
Finally Moro bustled into court, full of apologies, just as Gilbert began examining Landru on a critical issue: Why had he terminated his lease at Vernouillet in August 1915 and then rented the Villa Tric outside Gambais four months later?
“Was it because the house where you lived in Vernouillet was squeezed between two other buildings?” Gilbert enquired, alluding to a murderer’s need for privacy.
It was partly a matter of cost, Landru replied carefully, and partly because The Lodge had been too “dark” for his taste. “Note as well that I rented at Gambais with an option to buy the property. Now, someone who commits a crime – I am being modest, since I’m accused of committing seven crimes at this place – seeks to flee as quickly as possible from the theatre of his exploits.”
Gilbert let the jurors dwell on Landru’s supercilious reply while officials spread a plan of the Villa Tric’s layout on the evidence table. Once the jurors had inspected the plan, Gilbert resumed.
Why had Landru used the name “Dupont” when he had signed the lease on the villa?
“What do you expect?” Landru said, amazed at the judge’s obtuseness. “I often changed my name because I was being pursued by the law.”
“This sally by Landru prompted a burst of giggling from some fashionable ladies,” Le Journal reported. Several of them had even crept to the front of the gallery to get a better sight of the defendant. As an official shooed the women back to their seats, Gilbert threatened to clear the court if he heard more laughter.
Gilbert wanted to know why Landru had bought his little oven for the villa. “The court insinuates that I bought this oven in order to burn my victims,” Landru said. “Here, I appeal to the good sense of the jurors. It was winter; I couldn’t just die of cold and not be able to cook a hot meal.”
It was a good riposte, but Landru could not resist spoiling the effect with an irrelevant complaint about how “persons unknown” had stolen most of his coal. “I didn’t go to the police, for reasons you will understand.”
Pierre Vallet, the cobbler in Gambais who had doubled up as the villa’s janitor, was the next witness. He was a lean artisan in his early fifties with a hunted, defensive manner. Vallet had seen more of Landru than anyone else in Gambais, yet he seemed confused about what he could recall and his testimony made no sense. Vallet’s son Marcel, who had also visited the house regularly, was scarcely more coherent. Marcel said he remembered almost nothing about Landru, and certainly nothing sinister or suspicious. It was hard to tell whether the Vallets were as dim as they seemed to be, or accomplished actors who wanted nothing to do with the trial.
Auguste Tric, the owner of the villa, broad-chested, frock-coated and possessed of a splendid waxed moustache, was a well-to-do provincial businessman who had made his money as a shoe manufacturer. Monsieur Tric was also long-suffering, his former home a ruin, repeatedly ransacked by souvenir hunters.
Like the Vallets, Tric appeared keen to get off the witness stand as quickly as possible. He told Gilbert that he had no complaints against his former tenant, save one. There had once been a muddle about whether Landru was really called “Dupont”. Landru had admitted to Tric that his real name was “Guillet”, in business with a man called “Dupont”. Tric had let the matter drop.
***
At the start of the mid-afternoon interval, the singer and film star Polaire, renowned for her tightly corseted waist and bizarre publicity stunts, saw a chance to get into the next day’s newspapers. She left her seat in the VIP section of the gallery, walked straight past the soldier guarding the well of the court, and approached Landru as he was about to leave the defence box with his prison escort.
“Landru shot her one of his enigmatic and intriguing glances which from time to time seems like a lamp that illuminates his soul,” Le Siècle remarked. “Polaire instinctively withdrew, struck by her encounter.”
***
After the break, Gilbert examined Landru about Berthe Héon, the 55-yearold cleaning woman who had disappeared at Gambais in December 1915. Gilbert related Berthe’s “cascade of sorrows” in the decade before she met Landru, losing her two legitimate children, her long-term partner, her son-in-law, and finally, in the spring of 1915, her adored natural daughter Marcelle in childbirth.
Landru was still incensed by his first sight of Berthe, when she opened the door of Marcelle’s apartment one summer’s day in 1915.
“As soon as I saw her, I could see she had lied about her age,” Landru recalled. “She had counted her years from the date of her first communion.”
(“Laughter”: Le Petit Parisien)
Landru insisted that he had only been interested in selling Berthe’s furniture and that his lonely hearts advert had merely been a subterfuge to get his foot in her door.
“Didn’t you object when Mme Héon presented you as her fiancé?” Gilbert asked.
“Absolutely not. Why should I contradict her? It did not worry me at all.”
“Mme Héon told her friends that you would take her to Tunisia after her marriage. Is that why she wanted to get rid of her furniture?”
“You will see very soon that she did it because she had debts,” Landru replied. “I even had to settle 260 francs in rent arrears that Mme Héon owed to her landlady.”
This was true, but Gilbert ignored the oddity of a marriage swindler settling his victim’s debts.
“Where did Mme Héon live after you sold her furniture?” asked Gilbert, closing in on Berthe’s disappearance.
“I will not allow myself to reply to you. Here, we come back once more to the same question.”
“Your private life, no doubt.”
“If you wish. I arranged the sale of Mme Héon’s furniture, that’s all. If we wanted to go further, we would have to discuss the whole basis of the charges.”
“But that’s what we’re here to do!”
“In these conditions, monsieur le président, I will reiterate my entreaty to you. It is now three years since I was charged; let the proofs be brought before me.”
“It’s not a question of that,” Gilbert objected. “Can you indicate, yes or no, what became of Mme Héon?”
“I have nothing to say.”
Landru denied he had taken Berthe to Gambais in early December 1915. He also had an ingenious explanation for why, on the day in question, he had written down the price of a return train ticket and a one-way ticket in his carnet. He was new to the area and had wanted a reminder of how much it would cost him to use the different stations that served Gambais. “It is curious to consider how my unfortunate carnet is the prosecution’s breviary,” he remarked.
At the end of the session, the journalist Lucien Coulond reflected on the prosecution’s “particularly nebulous evocation” of Berthe, the only alleged victim for whom there was no known photograph. No one had brought this lonely, bereaved woman to life, Coulond thought. “The widow Héon appears among these ghosts of the missing women like an indeterminate shadow.”