Tarlton Law Library
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". . . l'absurde vous sauve de l'horrible."
      -- Henri de Latouche, La Reine d'Espagne, Act IV, Scene 1

     Truman Capote clearly had no eye to literary history when he claimed to have created in his crime study, In Cold Blood, a new genre, the "nonfiction novel." The genre may be defined as a combination of reportage of a current event (such as a criminal case) with an imaginative commentary in which the author attempts to apply fictional talent and method to the reconstruction of the motivation or interior dialogue of the persons involved in the factual drama. Far from being a modern invention, the nonfiction novel, as a device for crime narrative, dates back at least to the early nineteenth century. One of its first notable examples in France was The Memoirs of Madame Manson, published in 1818 (all quotations are taken from the rare English edition, London, 1818). The Memoirs, which purport to have been "edited" from the original draft of Clarisse Manson, the enigmatic principal witness in the Fualdès murder trials, in fact were for the most part the original work of the versatile man of letters Henri de Latouche, who was later to find an important place in French literary and journalistic history as first editor of the poetry of André Chénier, as editor in chief of Le Figaro, and as mentor and sponsor of Balzac and George Sand.
     Controversy had always surrounded Latouche, both in his personal life and in his professional career. He was born in 1785 at La Chatre in the Berry region. He was of an aristocratic family, and an uncle had been named a peer of France. If Laurence Sterne is correct that many a child has been Nicodemused into nothingness, then Latouche was doomed at birth to the stylistic excesses of which his critics complained by the incredible name bestowed on him: Hyacinthe-Joseph-Alexandre Thabaud de Latouche. Married at twenty-two, he became, in the words of one commentator, "quite rapidly unfaithful." Gossip claimed that he was the father of a child born in 1810 to Marceline Desbordes, who was then a young actress and was to become, with the encouragement of Latouche, a writer of elegiac poetry.
     The professional career of Latouche prior to his appearance on the scene of the Fualdès case had been varied. He had held a sinecure with the tax authorities traditionally reserved for literary men and had written some unimportant pieces for the theater. He later joined the editorial staff of the Constitutionnel and was personally responsible for 

having that periodical suppressed in 1817. Having been given the assignment of writing reviews of the art shows at the Salon, he defied the censor's blue pencil by retaining in one of his reviews a seditious allusion to the tricolor and the King of Rome. When the Fualdès case arose, he was offered the assignment of writing reports of the trial for the Gazette de France. His willingness to accept the assignment is attributed by some to his desire to make his name and line his pockets out of a case that seemed destined to prove a great sensation with the public. However, he is also credited with having had a strong penchant for the bizarre. In 1821, shortly after the Fualdès case, he again was to make disaster his subject, when he wrote the supposed memoirs of two victims of the plague at Barcelona. A more favorable explanation of Latouche's attraction to the Fualdès case and other spectacular events on the European scene could rest on his unremitting attachment to the profession of journalism. This profession was new enough in the early nineteenth century to account for much of the charge of sensationalism that still clings to Latouche's name. In fact, Frédéric Ségu, Latouche's principal biographer, writes that Latouche had the temperament of a reporter and was "on the lookout for news."
     Certainly Latouche was correct in sensing the degree of interest the public would take in the details of the Fualdès case and in its personages. The case preoccupied public interest not only in all France but beyond its borders. Armand Fouquier writes that in Paris the Fualdès murder provided welcome relief from the fevers of renewed political activity in the capital. Therefore, despite the political significance many tried to read into the murder of Fualdès, the case served primarily as an antidote to postwar politics, much as the trial of the mass murderer Landru in 1921 at Versailles provided distraction from the aftermath of World War I.
     The Fualdès murder came to light on March 20, 1817, when a woman walking by the banks of the Aveyron River outside the town of Rodez in southern France saw a body floating in the water near a mill. When the corpse was retrieved, the victim, whose throat had been cut, was identified as a well-known citizen of Rodez, the recently retired magistrate Joseph-Bernardin Fualdès. During the Revolution Fualdès had served as a juryman of the Revolutionary Tribunal and was on the jury that condemned Charlotte Corday. However, Fualdès was not a radical and had briefly served as royal procureur under the Restoration. Nevertheless, many persisted in seeing the death of Fualdès as the retributive work of the White Terror, which was still active in other parts of France.
     The murder of Fualdès, though its solution remains in controversy to this day, probably had a more prosaic motivation. The police inquiry 

disclosed that on the evening before the discovery of his body, Fualdès had left his house for an appointment, carrying with him a bulky package. There was speculation that he was meeting to arrange for the negotiation of a considerable amount of securities which he had received as proceeds of real estate he had sold to provide for his retirement. However, Fualdès's trail led to a strange place for the transaction of such business. Investigators determined that he was murdered in the kitchen of the town's only brothel and house of assignation, operated by a couple named Bancal. Witnesses indicated that a crowd of murderers and accomplices took part in the crime and later formed a macabre cortege which brought the body to the river. M. Bancal was arrested and a number of other arrests followed. Among the principal suspects taken into custody were Bernard Charles Bastide-Gramont, Fualdès's godson, and Joseph Jausion, Bastide's brother-in-law, who acted as Fualdès' agent and securities broker. Despite the White Terror rumors, the police theorized that the magistrate was murdered either to obtain valuable securities or to cover up maladministration of his financial affairs.
     Bancal, while in prison, made a "confession," which added a new element of mystery to the case and prepared the way for the dramatic appearance of Clarisse Manson as star witness. He told police that before the murder a veiled woman had entered the kitchen and Bancal had hidden her in a closet. According to Bancal, he forgot about her presence and was astonished when Bastide found her there just after the crime had been committed. Only the intervention of Jausion prevented Bastide from murdering her, and instead Bastide compelled her to give a terrible oath of silence.
     Bancal died in prison the day after his confession. The most pressing business now before the police, as well as before the gossips of Rodez, was to identify the mysterious veiled woman who had the double misfortune to be caught by many unwanted observers in the act of paying a visit to a house of ill repute, and to have become the unwilling witness of a murder on those usually convivial premises. The names of many young women were mentioned, but they soon yielded to the intriguing figure of Clarisse Manson. A young officer named Clémandot, who was aide-de-camp to General Vautré, told the prefect, Count d'Estourmel, after being pressed to do so by friends to whom he had already told the same story, that an acquaintance of his, Clarisse Manson, had confided in him that she had been at the Bancal house on the evening of March 19.
     Clarisse Enjalran Manson, the daughter of a judge at Rodez, appears to have had a deep-seated taste for the romantic. In her early dreams she saw herself as a princess, or as the wife of a robber chief. Her dreams had a bitter clash with reality when, at the instance of her 

parents, she married an uncultured army officer, Marc-Antoine Manson. Just as contemporary accounts did not rate her a Cleopatra, so her husband was in her eyes a Mark Antony in name only. She had the poor taste to tell him that her ideal man was a certain cavalry lieutenant to whom she had given the intimate nickname Klein-King, and who in her eyes had all the mercurial and fantastic qualities her husband lacked. Manson went away to fight in Spain, and she made up her mind not to have him back again. However, when he returned, he decided that even without an exotic name like Klein-King, he could play the romantic as well as the next man. He supposedly serenaded his wife under her window. When she let down her ladder in a Pavlovian response to romantic music, she may have been shocked to see that it was her husband who was entering her room. In any event, she went along with the game for a while by granting him access to her bedroom on the condition of strict repetition of the music and ladder ritual. Finally Clarisse became bored with this routine and separated from Manson, to live alone in Rodez. Gossips were certain that she was not suffering deprivation of male society.
     Clarisse had a romantic view of herself, as well as of life. To borrow words applied to a Joyce Cary heroine, Clarisse saw in the mirror "her-self surprised." She liked to think herself capable of unexpected actions and to view her actions as separate from their consequences. In the introduction to her memoirs she is quoted as having written in one of her letters:

I am astonished at myself: I am inexplicable; so says my mother. I do nothing like other people. . . . I rarely calculate on the effects that will result from an action that my heart prompts me to perform, and I seldom have cause to regret it. I always act without premeditation.

that she was under constant threat and pressure from relatives and friends of the principal defendants to lie, to retract, to remain silent.
     The first story that Clarisse Manson told the authorities on being summoned for questioning had at least the virtue of a truly Doric simplicity. Her Version One may be summarized briefly: I deny everything which M. Clémandot has said. I hardly know him.
     Version One was as short-lived as it was brief. The day after Clarisse made her first statement, the prefect received a letter from her, agreeing to a meeting with Clemandot, which the young officer had requested. Upon being confronted with Clarisse, Clemandot repeated his statements. Clarisse, in response, produced Version Two of her story, which still does not bear the marks of the genius she was later to show. Version Two may be summarized as follows: Everything which M. Clémandot has reported about my conversation with him is correct, except that our conversation took place during the evening of July 20 and not during the night. However, I told him the story in jest. Actually, I have never been at the Bancals' house.
     Version Two did not convince the prefect, nor did it satisfy Clarisse's father. Accompanied by two other persons, they took Clarisse Manson to see the scene of the crime, where she grew pale, trembled, wrung her hands and fell down in a faint. When she revived, she was taken into the Bancal kitchen and seemed to recognize the closet.
     When she was returned to the prefect's office, she was ready to talk, and promptly produced a deposition containing Version Three of her story. The substance of this statement was the following:

     At nightfall, on March 19, 1817, I was walking in the Rue des Hebdomadiers. In order to avoid several people whom I heard coming, I entered into an open doorway, which I later have learned to be that of the Bancal house. When I crossed the passageway, I was seized by a man who was coming either from the outside or inside the house. My confusion in the darkness didn't permit me to see. I was quickly put in a closet. A voice told me to be quiet; the door was closed and I stayed in the closet as if in a faint. I don't know how much time went by, but I heard people from time to time talking and walking around. I tried to open a door or a window and bumped my head. Then a man came into the closet, took me rudely by the arm, and made me cross a room where I could only see a weak light. Then we went out into the street. The man quickly led me to the Place de Cité. He assured himself that I did not recognize him and did not know where I was coming from and had not heard anything. He said: "If you talk, you will perish."He let me go but after I had taken refuge under the stairs of the convent of the Annonciade he caught up with me again. I repeated that I did not recognize him. He 

said that he was not one of the murderers and that he had let me go out of pity since I was a woman. He asked me what I had been going to do at the Bancal house. I told him that I had seen someone enter whom I thought I had recognized and that I wanted to make sure.

     To the statements in her deposition Clarisse added the information that during her visit at the Bancal house she was disguised as a man.
     The first trial of the accused murderers of Fualdès began in May 1817. Things had been going slowly, when Madame Manson was called to the stand at the session of August 22. We are told that she was dressed simply, and that a veil of tulle half covered her face. When Clarisse passed in front of the bench on which the defendants sat, Jausion made her a deferential bow. This gesture may have cost him his life.
     The presiding judge first asked Bancal's widow if she knew Madame Manson. Clarisse showed from the very beginning that she would not take a passive role in the trial. She turned sharply in front of la Bancal, lifted her veil and said firmly, "Do you know me?" La Bancal said that she did not. Bastide and Jausion were asked the same question by the judge. Jausion said that he only knew her through having seen her two or three times at his house, about four or five months before, paying a visit to his sister-in-law Madame Pons. Clarisse took great offense at this response and cried out, "You don't know me! Then how did you have the audacity to salute me in open court?" After the commotion which this outburst caused died down, Bastide responded that he did not know Madame Manson except that he had met her once on the highway.
     The presiding judge then, in extremely affectionate terms, pleaded with Clarisse to tell what she knew about the murder of Fualdès. Clarisse's response was an effective curtain-raiser. She gave the defendants a dramatic look and then fainted into the arms of the nearest spectator, who happened to be Field Marshal Despérières. When revived with smelling salts and vinegar, she cried, "Take those murderers out of my sight!" and shook her hands about as if she were defending herself against something frightening.
     The testimony that followed this drama was a distinct anticlimax, much like the fatal last act the self-indulgent playwright should have cut. She said, "I have never been at the Bancals." After a pause, however, she won her public back by adding, "I believe that Jausion and Bastide were there."
     Asked to explain this apparent contradiction, she said she based her belief on anonymous letters sent her and attempted intercessions which she ascribed to the camp of the defendants. Pressed further by the court, she said she based her belief on "conjecture." Turning to Jausion, she 

added a further incriminating allusion grounded on the public's knowledge that he had once been suspected of attempted infanticide: "When one kills one's children, one can kill one's friends, one can kill anybody."
     Despite her intention to cling to the position that she knew nothing, Clarisse Manson was far from finished with her performance on the stand. The presiding judge pleaded with her "as the daughter of a magistrate" to tell the truth. The witness's reaction was again not what was looked for. She fainted once more. When she came to, her eyes first lighted upon the sword of her loyal attendant, the field marshal. She pushed him off with one hand, pointed to his weapon with the other, crying, "You have a knife -- a knife." She fainted again. The marshal was gallant enough to take off his sword, and Madame Manson responded by recovering her senses.
     When the presiding judge urged Clarisse to overcome her fears, she took heart and returned again to the role of cross-examiner. She requested the judge to ask Jausion if he had not saved a woman's life at the Bancals.' Jausion persisted in his denial. After another of her fainting spells, which now appeared to be punctuating her testimony quite regularly, Clarisse recounted that a M. Blanc had told her that Jausion had saved the life of a woman who had been hiding in a closet at the Bancals.' She persisted in her position that she was not that woman.
     The presiding judge, in a new effort to conquer the witness's fears, ordered the army commander to place a cordon of soldiers between the witness's chair and the defendants. The court then turned to Bastide and attempted to obtain his admission that he had been in the Bancal house at the time of the murder. Bastide, interrupting him, repeated his statement that he had never had any relationship with the Bancal house, "whatever Madame Manson says." Clarisse was as stunned by Bastide's contradiction as she had been by Jausion's greeting. She interrupted him by stamping her foot and crying out, "Confess, you wretch!"
     Recalled to court on September 3, after the cases of all parties were closed, Clarisse Manson had one more dramatic scene to play. When Maitre Romiguières, Bastide's lawyer, addressed her in his argument, Madame Manson interrupted him: "Ah! No, all of the guilty are not in chains!"
     After the arguments were over, Madame Manson was put back on the stand and produced Version Four of her knowledge of the Fualdès murder. It may be summarized as follows: I was not at the Bancal house. However, I have learned the details of the crime from Mademoiselle Rose Pierret. I am not saying that she was the woman who was in hiding at the Bancals but she certainly tried to give me the impression that she was.

Rose Pierret, a girl friend of Clarisse's brother Edward, was called to testify and denied that she had ever been at the Bancals.'
     It is doubtful whether this new accusation by Clarisse, against Pierret, had any impact on the trial, but her earlier outbursts seemed clearly reflected in the verdict. La Bancal, Bastide, Jausion and two others were unanimously found guilty of premeditated murder. Most of the other defendants were found guilty of lesser crimes.
     Two days after the verdict, Clarisse Manson was arrested, charged with false testimony. She soon found herself in bad company. In October, the judgment of the Rodez court was reversed on the ground that the registrar had, in the case of the testimony of nineteen witnesses, failed to insert into the court record the full witnesses' oath as required by law. Since the principal defendants now had to be retried, this time in the court at Albi, the authorities decided to try Clarisse Manson with them as an accomplice. In the meantime, she languished at the Prison of the Capuchins. It was here that Latouche, who was reporting the trial for the Gazette de France under the nom de plume le Stenographe parisien, came to see her and ultimately proposed the "editing of her memoirs." It is difficult to reconstruct the birth of the collaboration of Latouche and Clarisse Manson. If we are to believe the bad press that Latouche has received from many writers, we would have to conclude that he won her confidence through conversational glitter and craftiness. Armand Fouquier wrote of him:

A sly man, a false friend, he exercised an irresistible seduction through the caresses of his voice and of his pen. But he hastened to sacrifice the best comrade to an epigram. It was he, it is said, who invented the word camaraderie; but one can see how he understood the concept. Vain, thin-skinned, a poseur, bitter, quarrelsome, captious, hiding his claws under velvet, de Latouche nevertheless had charming qualities of wit, vivacity and finesse, but little depth and mediocre learning . . . He possessed a gift which, in our days, is the greater part of success: he knew how to maneuver people, and had a nose for popular fashion.

The man who was later to be the recipient of the most touching tokens of affection was distinctly ugly and had a most clumsy limp. He was carefully, though not elegantly dressed, and through the veneer of his polite manners, an underlying vulgarity could be detected.

large straw hat trimmed with black ribbons, must have been disappointed by his looks and regretted the trouble she had taken.
   evertheless, somehow Latouche was able to win her agreement to permit him to edit and arrange for the publication of her memoirs. His techniques of persuasion are probably largely matters for speculation, but it is suggested that he did not neglect flattery. Clarisse, while in prison, had turned to poetry, and had scratched some verses on the mantelpiece of her cell. It is surmised that Latouche may have recited these verses in suitably appreciative tones. In the aftermath of the publication, it was to appear that more material means of persuasion had been employed. When the moment was right, Latouche offered to purchase from Clarisse the handful of roughly drawn pages she called "memoirs." She modestly suggested that perhaps the writing had some value and tentatively requested a few francs. Latouche countered by presenting her with a purse containing twenty-five louis. But he did not leave the financial arrangements on this basis. After his return to Paris, he asked the publisher to make an immediate payment of twelve hundred francs to Madame Manson, to be followed by an equal payment three months later. Finally, with a touch of gallantry, or perhaps a mocking reference to the mysterious disguised woman in hiding at the murder house, Latouche had his publisher send Clarisse a magnificent veil of black lace.
     The form and style of the Manson Memoirs, which resulted from the collaboration of Madame Manson and Latouche, proclaim a close kinship to the sentimental epistolary novel of the eighteenth century. Written in the form of a letter to Clarisse's mother, the Memoirs invoke and trade upon family emotion -- the concern of Clarisse's mother and nostalgia for the days of her protection, the anger and dominance of Clarisse's father, the gallant support of her brother and, overriding all, Clarisse's love for her little son, Edward, and fears that he is in danger and will be taken from her. In this emotional setting of family loves and fears run three separate strands of narrative: the development of the relationship between Clarisse and Clemandot; the course of her confessions, denials and court performances; and her crowning achievement, the discovery that the veiled woman at the Bancals' was Rose Pierret.
     The story of the young officer Clémandot clearly had an important role in any explanation of Clarisse's conduct, but in the Memoirs, the early days of the acquaintance between Clarisse and the officer take on a life of their own. The spirit of the English novelist Samuel Richardson dominates the scene. Perhaps Latouche was working the materials of Clarisse's revelations in a manner designed to meet prevailing literary taste. However, it may not be too much to suggest that the name Clarisse aroused in him, and perhaps in Madame Manson herself, 

memories of the heroine of Richardson's popular Clarissa. Armand Fouquier makes this literary play on Madame Manson's name in summarizing the public expectations of Clémandot's testimony at the first trial: "It is not only the confidant of a horrible mystery which the public wants to see in M. Clémandot, it is the Lovelace of Clarisse."
     Clarisse's first meeting with Clémandot did not appear to presage future intimacy. One day, while she was standing in the millinery shop of Madame Constans, a stranger came in. He talked so familiarly to the milliner "and took so many indecent liberties" that Clarisse felt "obliged to retreat hastily, without purchasing anything." She learned next time she saw Madame Constans that the stranger was aide-de-camp to General Vautré "and a zealous royalist." Clarisse did not think that either of these distinctions excused his rude behavior.
     It appears that Clarisse's passion for the theater favored M. Clémandot's advances. He met her again at a theater in Rodez where a company of comedians was performing. She blames her attendance on the spirits of evil: "an evil genius, bent on my destruction, inspired me with so strong a passion for the spectacle, that I could not any longer resist the inclination of being present."
     On one occasion of her attendance at the comedians' performance, Clémandot, lucky to find the tier of boxes where she sat to be thinly filled, took a vacant seat by her side and launched into a praise of "the beauty, symmetry, and elegance of manner" of another young lady. With apparently more grace than logic, he followed up this conversational line with a request to be permitted to offer Clarisse his arm and see her home. She thanked him civilly, and enjoyed being able to pronounce him outranked: She had come to the theater with a general and his nieces and would go back with them. However, it turned out that the general had no lantern and Clémandot took the occasion to come up behind with one, efficiently lighted. The general met this unexpected assault by lighting a wax taper and Clémandot went his way.
     Clarisse's escape from Clémandot was not long-lived. The very next day, while she was in the company of her brother Edward, Clémandot, who knew him as a fellow soldier, called him by name. This family contact apparently softened Clarisse's feeling to the point of her permitting Clémandot to walk with her while her brother walked ahead with his friend, Rose Pierret. Clémandot told Clarisse that he was leaving town in two days and asked unsuccessfully to be allowed to call upon her to say goodbye. Clarisse declined and, in fact, was more concerned that he seemed to be lagging behind the pace of her brother. He blamed his slow progress on his corns, but she rather unfeelingly asked him to redouble his steps. The two couples' outing appeared to last all night, being 

topped off by a coach trip to Espalion for breakfast. According to Clarisse's account, it was a decidedly chaste occasion.
     The climactic scenes in Clémandot's pursuit of Clarisse are pure Richardson. He finally gave up reconnoitering for direct assault. One night after supper, Clarisse heard a "gentle rap at the door" and Clémandot entered. She asked him to leave, but he answered that he was not in any particular hurry. After her arguments failed, she decided to make a prompt retreat and to leave her enemy in possession of the room. Returning in about an hour, she made a careful inspection of the room, was satisfied that he had left, and went to bed. The next day she was told by her neighbor that Clémandot had visited her again in the morning. The assault was renewed after dinner, when she heard the "creaking of boots" in the corridor leading to her room, and "two distinct raps at the door," discreetly separated by a half hour's interval. Sometime later she heard another rap, and remembering that the door had been left unlocked, rushed to turn the key, but was too late.
     Clémandot entered, and by this time Clarisse saw him in full light as a man from the pages of Samuel Richardson and hardly as a Richardsonian hero. She writes, with emphasis: "The man, who is anybody but Sir Charles Grandison, pressed violently forward."
     Perhaps to the disappointment of her readers, Clarisse "conjured him so pathetically to withdraw, that at last he consented."
     Clarisse might have been spared another round with her antagonist had not her love for the theater intervened again. She went to the opera, where she again caught glimpses of Clémandot, who finally left, after giving her "a fierce and menacing look." Shortly after her return home, Clémandot entered her room again, and this time was careful to lock the door.
     Clarisse interrupts her account of this interesting turn of events to deliver a speech worthy of Richardson's virtuous heroine, Pamela:

From that dreadful night I date all my misfortunes! What have been the sorrows of a whole life, when put in competition with those that have overwhelmed me for the last few months! How many bitter tears have I shed! O my father, mother, brothers, my son! ties ever dear and sacred, that alone reconciled me to life! without you, without the consolations of religion, I had made an attempt upon my life!

go, and announced his intention to stay until three o'clock in the morning, the hour fixed by the general for the departure of his troops. The remainder of his accomplishments in that room were hardly in keeping with the self-advertisements he had made during the trip to Espalion: "He yawned repeatedly, and fell asleep, or pretended to do so."
     He woke up after half an hour and, according to Clarisse, it was at this point that the fateful conversation about the Fualdès case occurred. He told her that he had something very interesting to communicate to her. It was reported, he said, that a young woman had been at the Bancals' during the murder. One person had accused Mlle. Avit, the daughter of the court registrar. Clarisse interrupted him, saying that she did not believe that Mlle. Avit would have entered a house of such poor reputation. However, the registrar's daughter appears to have been merely an opening gambit, since Clémandot went on to say that some other people "pretended" that Clarisse had made an assignation at the Bancal house, and that Bancal's wife, hearing footsteps, had concealed her in a place where she could see and hear everything.
     In her version of what then transpired, Clarisse maintained that her "confession" was in jest:

I looked at him with astonishment.
"Come," cried he, "was it not you?" "Come, confess it was."
"Oh!" I replied, "certainly; there can be no doubt of it!"
Clemandot gratefully replied: "Poor creature, how interesting this makes you in my eyes!"

played such an unfortunate part in their relationship, that she learned that Clémandot had betrayed to the authorities her mock confession that she was the mysterious woman at the Bancal house. It is no surprise that after she received this distressing news the performance seemed to her "tediously long." This was undoubtedly the last straw. She reacted to this ultimate theatrical setback with the fervor of the alcoholic who was so shaken by Ray Milland's performance in The Lost Weekend that he resolved to give up movies. Clarisse writes: "From that moment I renounced all plays, and am resolved religiously to keep my vow."
     In addition to satisfying the public curiosity about her relationship with Clémandot, the Memoirs attempt to explain Clarisse's curious conduct in admitting and then denying that she was at the Bancals' and in finally suggesting, by her strange conduct in court, that she had firsthand knowledge of the crime. In the Memoirs Clarisse holds rigorously to Version Two of her testimony, namely, that she spent the fateful night at her home and that her confession of being at the scene was made in jest. She brings forward a great mass of selfless family considerations as well as personal fears to justify her departure from the truth in deposing before the prefect that she had been at the Bancals' when Fualdès was murdered.
     Having leaped the hurdle of explaining Clarisse's "false" deposition, Madame Manson and her editor faced a greater challenge: how to justify her strange performance in court, which so strongly incriminated defendants of a murder of which she disclaimed all knowledge. Clarisse repeats in the Memoirs her earlier stories as to the attempts of Madame Pons, one of Bastide's sisters, to dissuade her from giving testimony harmful to the defendants. There is the suggestion in the book that Clarisse resented attempted threats and intercessions from friends of the defendants. In fact, she writes that at an interview before her court testimony she obtained assurances from Madame Pons of the falseness of recent reports that Jausion had asked for a dagger when he heard that Clarisse had been subpoenaed as a witness. But Clarisse's relations with Madame Pons are left in obscurity. Clarisse had told the prefect of her receipt of an anonymous note believed to have come from the defendants' supporters. In the Memoirs she observes that Madame Pons had been asserted to be the author, and gratuitously adds that the assertion is "a thing not impossible." On the other hand, she refused instructions not to see Madame Pons and "saw her in no other light than that of a benefactress." Ultimately, Clarisse would have us believe, she felt so close to Madame Pons that through an intermediary she asked the woman to procure her a gun so that she could shoot Clémandot in open court and save her brother Edward, an indifferent marksman, from the danger of a duel, which he was threatening. Although disliking what she 

fancied to be pressure from the defendants, Clarisse acknowledges that she herself had put out feelers to the other side, and had, in fact, before the trial, requested and obtained an interview with Didier Fualdès, the son of the murdered magistrate. She found him and his conversational style charming.
     Other external factors leading to her strange court performances are cited. But heavily obscured by the surface details of the Memoirs is an important disclosure which would link Clarisse's behavior with that of several other witnesses in the case, whom we would more readily admit to be "normal" -- it would appear that Clarisse, like so many others, had decided that repeated public rumor must be right. She became convinced that if there was so much talk about a hidden woman at the scene of the murder, such a woman must have existed. Moreover, so many people believed Bastide and Jausion to be guilty, she could no longer doubt their guilt. In directly asserting their guilt or indicating by courtroom behavior that they were guilty, she was merely giving hearsay affirmation of what a whole town knew to be true. The record of the trial at Rodez was replete with hearsay of the most remote sort, and as other witnesses were, without firsthand knowledge, piecing together the details of the crime, so Clarisse had recorded and was voicing the community's feeling as to what the jury's ultimate verdict should be. In addition, the public clearly was expecting something dramatic from Clarisse's testimony. She had to produce something for them, and if, as she claims, she knew nothing, all that was left to her was to voice and dramatize their own feelings.
     But this view of the meaning of Clarisse's courtroom testimony does not emerge clearly from defenses of her conduct put forward in the Memoirs. Characteristically, Clarisse and her editor drew upon a large arsenal of explanations for her behavior in court, and in the end there was no explanation at all. According to Clarisse, her agreement to testify followed a particularly violent scene with her father. She notes, emphasizing her words, that "in order to pacify him, I conceded the point once more, and promised to comply with his wishes to the fullest extent." She appeared in the courtroom and witnessed the impaneling of the jury and the reading of the bills of indictment. A number of people around her in the courtroom "assailed" her with demands that she speak the truth, and she felt that she was being looked at with contempt by common people and avoided by "persons of respectability." Encounters with the personages of the case increased her distress. She said that she had "never suffered so acutely" as when Bastide and Jausion saluted her in court, making her apparent complicity in the crime a subject for public speculation. Matters were not made better when she spotted her foe, Clémandot, in the courtroom wearing "an air of such provoking 

insolence" as to reawaken her fond hopes of shooting him. These first courtroom impressions were followed by a series of interviews with different individuals seeking to exercise influence on her for a variety of reasons: her cousin Amans Rodat, who tried to talk her out of what he assumed to be an oath of silence pledged to her savior, Jausion; the president of the court, who she claimed took the unusual step of advising her that she could "tax Jausion with his presumption" in bowing to her and put such questions to him as she judged proper; a young man who approached her in the witnesses' room to advise that Madame Pons was reckoning confidently upon her; and finally, Didier Fualdès, who told her of his conviction that she was at the murder scene and begged her to identify Jausion and Bastide as assassins.
     The Memoirs tell us that the appeal made by Didier Fualdès was persuasive. Clarisse records her reaction as follows:

A death-like shuddering overpowered me. I saw my suspicions were founded. My mind was disordered. I felt as though I had lost my senses and said, "You believe them guilty! Well! Let them perish: you shall be revenged!"

On the one hand, the imposing solemnity of justice: the awful consequences of it exhibited by the accused: my full conviction of their guilt: the wild air which characterised some of their countenances: the profound silence that reigned over the immense hall: the attentive curiosity of the public, who filled it, and who expected the development of some great mystery: my knowledge of the suspicions entertained of my father: the sight of the unhappy son of him whose fate was now to be avenged: and, lastly, the image of the saviour, which stood in front and reminded me of my duty; -- all these objects united, all these tumultuous ideas assailing the mind, overpowered me, and I fainted.

     Interspersed in the narrative of justification for Clarisse's behavior as deponent and witness is another narrative of literary interest. It is a detective story, with Clarisse cast in the role of detective ten years before the appearance in France of the Memoirs of Vidocq and twenty-seven years before the publication of the Dupin stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The mystery is the identity of the veiled woman in hiding at the Bancals' and the denouement is Clarisse's discovery and conviction that the woman was Rose Pierret. It is a story that appears to be false, but this only strengthens the ground for claiming that The Memoirs of Madame Manson is an early entry in the genre of mystery fiction. Since the Manson mystery story is French, it is not surprising that, in the mode of French detective stories, including the Inspector Maigret series, the detection proceeds not by means of the examination and testing of physical evidence but through confrontations between the detective and various participants in the case and, finally, through the exercise of the detective's own intuition. Since Clarisse had revealed her charges against Rose Pierret at the first trial, the structure of the detective plot carries much of the fascination of the "inverted" detective story, where the reader knows at the outset the identity of the guilty party, and wonders how the detective will find out and just how long he will be about his business.
     Clarisse indicates early in the narrative of the Memoirs the first clues of Rose's knowledge of the murder. On March 23, only a few days after the discovery of the body of Fualdès, Rose Pierret, in a chance meeting with Clarisse at a millinery store, described the murder in some detail and identified Bastide as one of the murderers. Clarisse confides to her readers that it did not occur to her at the time that Rose had been at the Bancal house during the tragedy. On May 18 Clarisse met Rose again at the milliner's, and Rose mentioned that "there were two persons who had not yet been seized." Clarisse was still not suspicious that Rose had any direct knowledge of the case.
     We have seen that Rose also appeared in the pages of the Memoirs as an innocent bystander during Clemandot's amatory pursuit of Clarisse. But from time to time Rose, in conversations with Clarisse, dwelt again on the Fualdès murder. When Clarisse's brother Edward told them both that he had just seen Jausion in the street looking very pale, Rose observed that she had no desire to see him, that she pitied him and would not be at Rodez to see him executed.
     Shortly after this incident, Clarisse made an interesting discovery. In a linen chest in Rose's room, she saw a large black veil "such as the Spaniards wear" and placed it on her head. When she complimented Rose on its beauty and asked her where she had bought it and how much it had cost, Rose snatched the veil away, threw it into the chest 

and locked it up. Although her conduct was surprising, Clarisse did not connect the incident with the Fuaides murder because she did not then know that anyone had been seen wearing a veil in the murder house.
     The trail of the mystery continued to run through the world of feminine fashion. Prior to her testimony, her cousin Madame Castel warned Clarisse to admit that she had been at the Bancals'. She told Clarisse that there was a witness who would swear that on the day after the murder, the Bancals' little daughter, Madeleine, "had brought a bonnet to be made, which a lady had left her." According to Madame Castel, the bonnet was made out of the same material as one of Clarisse's gowns. A few days later, Clarisse mentioned this conversation to a gentleman in court. He recommended that she go to see Madeleine in person to examine the material of which her bonnet was made. "Perhaps," said he, "this may tend to happy discoveries."
     A moment later, before she could act on this advice, she was told by people sitting near her in court that a young woman had been summoned, and that according to report, this young woman had been in the Bancals' house. On questioning one of these court gossips, Clarisse heard that the name of Rose Pierret had just been mentioned to the president of the court "as one deeply acquainted with the whole affair." Suddenly the truth of Rose's identity as the mysterious woman dawned upon Clarisse: "In an instant, all our conversations on this subject rushed into my mind."
     After several days' delay, Clarisse went to her climactic interview with little Madeleine, accompanied by the milliner who had made the meaningful bonnet. As the milliner was known to the little girl, she first presented herself alone and left Clarisse outside the door. She soon returned to Clarisse with the disappointing news that Madeleine had sent the bonnet back to her mother, who had returned her a black one instead, for her to wear in mourning for her father. Clarisse decided that a sterner interrogation was in order. She had the child brought to her, and looking at her fiercely, told her that she had just come from the court; that the child's mother had saved her own life by confessing everything; and that soldiers would be sent to fetch the child unless Clarisse obtained the truth from her. In reply to her questions, Madeleine confirmed that M. Fualdès had been killed at the Bancals' and repeated the stories that she had already told to the public. Then Clarisse promised her a crown for telling who the lady had been who was hiding in the house. Madeleine said that the lady had worn a veil, and when Clarisse drew aside hers, saying, "Look at me -- am I the lady?" the girl gave the disappointing answer that she had not seen the lady's face. Nothing daunted, Clarisse dragged Madeleine off to the prefect. The prefect took a different tack, having Clarisse stand up and 

then asking Madeleine if the lady in hiding was of the same height. The girl produced a reply that vindicated Clarisse as detective and also, no doubt, flattered her vanity: the mysterious lady was not quite so tall as Clarisse and "much fatter."
     The detective story breaks off here. Clarisse never clearly identifies the short, fat woman with Rose Pierret, but she does add the information that she wrote Rose a letter imploring her to disclose whatever she knew about the case. She also tells us that she received no answer.
     It is probably debatable whether the narrative of the Memoirs shows Clarisse Manson as entirely appealing, whether in the role of flirt, witness or detective. But oddly enough, there are scattered throughout additional sidelights on her personality, which are distinctly unflattering. Armand Fouquier has referred to what he calls the "customary irrelevance" of Clarisse Manson's remarks and observations. Many examples appear in the Memoirs. She recalls early in the narrative that on the morning of the day following the murder, she "went into the kitchen to fetch a coffee pot." She adds that "this circumstance may not, perhaps, be unimportant." She never tells us why. Sometimes her irrelevancy appears to reflect an inappropriate human response. In recalling a communication Rose had made to her about rumors allegedly spread by the assassins that M. Fualdès had killed himself, she devotes an entire paragraph to a grammatical error Rose made in the use of "suicide" as a verb.
     The Memoirs also show Clarisse to be vain, anxious to curry favor with every man she meets and willing to trade in dangerous gossip, particularly in her comments on Madame Pons and Rose Pierret. But much darker suggestions appear. In one scene Clarisse watches without emotion a man being conducted to a place of execution. Asked by Rose whether he is not deserving of compassion, Clarisse reveals in her answer her ready willingness both to assume that a man is guilty and to see punishment inflicted: "He is no doubt an assassin: look, he wears a red mantle. I could see with as little compunction the murderers of the unfortunate Fualdès."
     Latouche appears to have inserted a passage that hardly seems designed to advance Madame Manson's cause and, in fact, may have whetted the appetites of those who continued to see the case as a political assassination. Although Clarisse was a woman given to digression, it is surprising to read a sudden expression of political opinion, apropos, it would first appear, of nothing at all:

Do not speak to me of weak people; they are more dangerous than vicious ones. We cannot guard against evils in a state of which the sovereign is devoid of energy. A weak prince is commonly the precursor 

of a tyrant. An example of this kind has been furnished in our times. Louis XVI prepared the revolution, of which Napoleon reaped the advantage.

How wide a digression, you will say! It is not, perhaps, so irrelevant as it may appear; for if the death of M. Fualdès be a cruel tragedy, the preceding reign was a series of cruel tragedies, of which it would be impossible to recount the number.

I have just formed an agreeable acquaintance with a young man from Paris, who has been kind enough to visit me in prison. He has obligingly taken charge of my memoirs, and has pushed his complaisance so far as to travel eight leagues, in order to convey them to you. Without his polite interference, I should not have had the means of transmitting this voluminous epistle.

second trial, at Albi, she accomplished the double purpose of rejecting Latouche's version of her memoirs, while at the same time attempting a solo flight into the literary heavens. She published at Albi a booklet entitled "A Plan of Her Defense Addressed to All Sensitive Hearts." As one commentator of the times noted, her plan of defense appeared much more to be a plan of attack on the editor of her popular Memoirs.
     She wrote in her new work:

I did not flatter myself that I could justify myself in the eyes of all the public. Moreover, there are certain individuals whose ephemeral opinion, most often based on simple appearances, matters little to me. The esteem of good people, of sensitive souls especially, will always be precious and dear to me. There is nothing that I would not do to possess it. Knowledge of my Memoirs must have left unfavorable impressions and have increased the prejudices which are already abroad on my account. The publication of this work has grieved me. It was not my plan to publish it yet. I yielded to the ideas of others, to the most insidious arguments, and to the flattering hope of a justification which the least delay was going to render impossible.

I am not too familiar with beautiful phrases, and I shall not say, like a certain individual whose name escapes me, "Phoebe lighted the world with her silvery rays," but quite simply, "The moon was shining."

Gautier novel based on the career of a historic transvestite. If the main value of his fictional oeuvre is in its influence, it may be said more generally of Latouche's literary career that his principal talent was his ability to detect and encourage budding talent and to provide editorial service and judgment. Thus, though a failure as a writer, he excelled as a literary sponsor and editor, the roles in which he served Clarisse. He published at his own expense Balzac's early novel The Chouans, and introduced the novelist into the literary salons of Paris. Latouche is also given credit for helping to launch the literary career of George Sand. She came from the same district as Latouche and went to see him after arriving in Paris to pursue her literary career. He is said to have been extremely stern in his criticisms of the first manuscripts she showed him, and softened his views only upon reading her novel Indiana. Despite his harsh judgment, he earned from George Sand a more flattering portrait than Clarisse Manson has left us as a result of that earlier literary partnership. George Sand, writing of her first interview with Latouche twenty years later, recalled him as "a man of forty-five, rather heavy-set, with a face sparkling with wit, with exquisite manners and with a refined conversational style. He had a sweet and penetrating voice, a pronunciation which was aristocratic and distinct, and a manner which was at the same time caressing and mocking." She acknowledged that Latouche remained for a long time her master in the art of writing.
     The greatest debt that posterity owes Latouche is for his service as the first editor of the poetry of Andre Chenier, which was published in 1819, shortly after the third trial in the Fualdès case. Ironically, in this greatest literary work of his career, as in the Manson Memoirs of the year before, his editorial integrity was called into question by his enemies. It has been claimed that he could not resist "collaborating" with fragmentary originals of Chenier's work.
     The career of Latouche's amateur collaborator on the Manson Memoirs, Clarisse herself, was much less distinguished. We are told by Armand Fouquier that after her heyday in the Fualdès case, Clarisse was for a while marketed by an entrepreneur who conceived the idea of placing her on show (like Lola Montez in the Max Ophuls film) at the counter of a cafe of the Palais Royal, and that she also made further sales of memoirs. Afterward, according to Fouquier's cryptic account, Clarisse fell into obscurity, "accorded a pension of 1000 francs by Count Decazes in compensation for her services."
     We hear nothing of any later literary efforts on her part. Perhaps the vein of imagination that she had displayed during the trial had been exhausted. However, modern study of the documents of the trial by the distinguished police criminologist Dr. Edmond Locard suggests that Clarisse must be credited posthumously with some additional literary 

creations. In his work Le Magistrat Assassine (Affaire Fualdès), published in France in 1954, Dr. Locard states that his analysis of the handwriting of one of the threatening letters Clarisse claimed to have received from those who wanted her to remain silent shows that the letter was forged by Clarisse. If Locard's conclusions are correct, then Clarisse's compulsion to create fiction and to put her myths into writing may have contributed to what he and other modern commentators regard as a miscarriage of justice in the Fualdès case.

* This article was previously published in 3 (3&4) Nineteenth-Century French Studies 165-191 and Innocence and Arsenic pp. 132-162.