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Following French judicial practice, the trial began with the presiding judge interrogating the defendant. In theory this procedure was designed to determine the facts, but in this case it was clear that de Valles was going to serve as a prosecutor. He led Meg through a catalog of her lovers. (The scandalous episode with President Faure was not mentioned.) Hadn’t she been happy with Steinheil, who had enabled her to create a salon in his house in Paris? He was “a simple man,” Meg replied. “Too simple.” 9 Hadn’t Meg humiliated him? de Valles asked. Meg realized this was a trap and retorted that her husband had known nothing of her extramarital affairs. Nonetheless, she was sorry she had not been a good wife to him. When he fell in love with her, she had been merely a child. As she grew, she wanted lovers — friends — who understood her intellectual needs.

De Valles asked about money. Wasn’t that her real reason for taking lovers? Meg denied it, saying that she had never sold herself. Chouanard, who had rented the country villa, was the only one to give her large sums, and that was his choice, not hers.

Meg still insisted that the three black-clad men and the red-haired woman, never found, had committed the crimes. She also tried to excuse the false accusations she had made in the case. She had not been thinking clearly, she said, because the press had persecuted her, making it appear as if she were the murderer. Finding the unmailed letter in Couillard’s wallet had made her think he had deceived her on other matters.

After the first day, the newspapers generally gave Meg high marks for successfully parrying de Valles’s questions, more by theatrics than by the veracity of her answers. One reporter dubbed her “the Sarah Bernhardt of the Assises.” 10

The examination resumed on the following day, and Meg seemed to have gained confidence. De Valles had discovered that a detective novel, Les cing doigts de Birouk (The Five Fingers of Birouk), described a crime very similar to the one in Meg’s account of the murders — black-robed burglars and all. The police had found several books by the same author, Louis Ulback, in the Steinheils’ library. Did Meg enjoy those novels? She replied that she did, but had never read that particular one.

Various inconsistencies in Meg’s story were noted, and she attributed them all to police incompetence. The cotton gag that she said she had spit out to cry for help was found to have no traces of saliva on it. Meg responded that the police had probably picked up the wrong piece of cotton. Why would the burglars strangle Meg’s mother and husband with pieces of cord they had cut from a supply in the kitchen? “They told you all of this?” Meg responded as if surprised, drawing laughter from the spectators. 11 Irritated at Meg’s riposte, de Valles suggested that she was indeed a cold-hearted killer, for she had murdered her own mother to cover up the fact that her intended victim was her husband. Meg was waiting for this and launched into an extended soliloquy about the love she had for her mother.

So it went for three days of examination. Questions from the judge were answered by passionate speeches from Meg. Even the fact that Meg had placed the incriminating pearl in Couillard’s case, something she could hardly deny, was brushed aside. “I have been punished enough for that!” she said. “I have been in prison a year for having placed Couillard there for a day.” 12

The prosecutor, Trouard-Riolle, now took command of the case. He was to call some eighty witnesses to testify, most of them experts of various sorts reporting on the physical evidence. Bertillon, for instance, said that he had found ninety-one fingerprints at the crime scene, but that only a fraction of these were clear enough to identify. Much of this testimony was tedious for the jury to sit through.

When the prosecutor summoned young Couillard, however, the jurors sat up to listen. Now serving his required military service and hence decked out in