“To die of love”, by Jacqueline Carroy and Marc Renneville: hot blood

“To die of love. Autopsy of a Criminal Imagination”, by Marc Renneville and Jacqueline Carroy, La Découverte, ” To the source “318 p., €20, digital €15.

Who discovers or sees again North Hotelby Marcel Carne (1938), or is filled with the vertigo of lovers for a dayexalted by the voice of Edith Piaf (1956), he remembers that the couples who committed suicide for love who are staged and sung there are inspired by one of the most mythical criminal facts of the Third^e Republic: the Chambige affair? An enigmatic affair (the court file has disappeared) and a passionate tragedy that Jacqueline Carroy, historian of psychology, hypnosis and dreams, and Marc Rennevillecriminologist and historian, author of the monster book cowherd the ripper (Millon, 2019), exploit in all its dimensions: legal, social, scientific and literary.

Double suicide or murder?

January 25, 1888. The scene is in Constantine (Algeria), in the bourgeois villa Sidi Mabrouk. Four shots ring out, spaced out, in a locked room where, with the knowledge of friends and the coachman who took them there, Henri Chambige (1865-1909), 22 years old, student in Paris, and Magdeleine Grille (1857-1888), 30 years old, mother, no profession. Once the door has been pulverized, we discover, naked and spread out on an unmade bed, the body of the Grille wife, who died of two bullets in the forehead and in the temple; Chambige, haggard, only has a punctured cheek. What happened ? Double amorous suicide that elation and helplessness have caused to fail, or meticulously staged murder? Is what happened there an additional episode of the immemorial series of “dying of love”? The mystery lurks.

Belonging to the best colonial bourgeoisie, each marked by bereavement (a sister and a father, committed suicide, for him, a son for her), the protagonists have only known each other since May 1887 and have only seen each other a few times. Are eight months enough to ignite a lethal crescendo of passion, a mad and totally impossible love that a common sacrifice would empanache? Was Magdeleine Grille consenting or the victim of the shenanigans of a pleasure-loving, nihilistic and emotional gandin, with a mind spoiled by his Parisian frequentations? The seven years of hard labor to which Henri Chambige is sentenced after three days of trial will be commuted to seven years of imprisonment. Released in 1892, he married and became, under the name of Marcel Lami, a journalist and writer.

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