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The first defendant was Marguerite Steinheil (“Meg” to the newspaper writers), who was already notorious for her role in the sudden death of President Faure in 1899. Long after the event, the story still circulated that Faure had died while in the throes of a passion so intense that his dead fingers were impossible to prize from the hair of the naked young woman whose head was in his lap.

The legend only added a certain piquancy to Meg’s reputation. Looking at her husband, who had been forty when he married her in 1890 (she was then twenty-one), one could understand why a woman as beautiful and vibrant as Meg might want to take a lover. Steinheil was timid, balding, and dull. The only reason Meg had married him in the first place was that her recently widowed mother feared that her headstrong young daughter would marry a handsome but penniless young officer she had fallen in love with.

Steinheil, a mediocre academic painter, had no fortune. All he had to offer Meg was a large house in a fashionable cul-de-sac called the impasse Ronsin, in the fifteenth arrondissement, where they settled down after honeymooning in Italy. In June 1891, Meg gave birth to a daughter, Marthe, and soon became bored. All around her she saw people living in luxury, but Steinheil could not afford to give her fine clothes and jewelry. Meg looked for excitement and luxuries outside marriage, using her youth and charm to attract wealthy lovers. Her first was a government prosecutor, Manuel Baudouin. She was with him for four years; during that time she explained the lavish gifts she received by telling Steinheil they were from an Aunt Lily. Meg went to visit her aunt frequently, and it seems likely that if Steinheil was unaware of what was really going on, it was a willful ignorance on his part. At some point, Meg had also made it clear to him that the sexual part of their marriage was over. From then on they slept in separate bedrooms.

Steinheil received fringe benefits from Meg’s liaisons when her lovers asked him to paint portraits or other works of art. When Meg became the mistress of President Faure in 1897, Steinheil received a government commission for a large historical painting. His rising income enabled Meg to hold the weekly salons where she presided over three or four hundred guests, including some of the leading social, artistic, and political figures of the time. Among them were Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty; Émile Zola; Hippolyte-François-Alfred Chauchard, the founder of the Louvre grand magasin (department store); and Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. It was said that even the Prince of Wales graced her drawing room while on a visit to France.

Steinheil, however, was becoming more of a burden to her. He had begun to need opium to sleep at night, and now in his mid-fifties, he was less and less able to turn out canvases that Meg could “sell” to her lovers. Thus, in 1905, she took up with Émile Chouanard, a wealthy widower not much older than she. A man used to having his own way, he quickly tired of the game of meeting her furtively in hotel rooms. Instead, he offered to pay the rent for a villa where they could spend days (and nights) in privacy and comfort. Meg took him up on this and rented a place called the Vert-Logis, forty-five minutes by train from Paris, in the town of Bellevue. Meg signed the lease with the name of a friend but had to share her secret with her longtime maid, Mariette Wolff, who took on the duties of housekeeper at Vert-Logis.

Unfortunately, Chouanard broke off the liaison in November 1907, apparently because Meg had presumptuously tried to influence his choice of a fiancé for his daughter. Not long after, as if to console herself that she was still attractive, Meg fainted while riding the Métro — seemingly to entice a well-dressed young man standing nearby. She had a good eye for men, for he turned out to be the Count Emmanuel de Balincourt. He walked her home and was invited to dinner. Before long, he found