Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt

"All is dust and lies. So much the worse for the men who get in my way. 

Men are mere stepping-stones to me. As soon as they begin to fail 
or are played out, I put them scornfully aside."

I.

Love is blind. But when a woman gets into her 30s and sees her looks are starting to fade and hair beginning to whiten, it's only natural that she begins to doubt the veracity of this expression ...


II.

Eugénie Brécourt was born in Paris, in the spring of 1837. She was fated to become one of France's most notorious women; a true femme fatale who broke many hearts and ruined the lives of numerous men, before finaly ending up behind prison bars ...  

Neglected as a child, she was adopted by a nobelwoman who took pity on her. Her parents, however, reclaimed their daughter when she was eleven and immediately put her to work selling gingerbread on the streets. At seventeen, the kindly Baroness found her a job at a silk factory and agreed to once more care for the young woman. She even stumped up a dowry of 12,000 francs when Jeanne decided to marry the local grocer.

Unfortunately, married life didn't suit Jeanne and after a rumoured affair with an army officer, her husband left her and she went missing ... When she reappeared, having apparently tried her hand (and failed) at acting, literature and journalism, it was as a prostitute calling herself Jeanne de la Cour.     

I don't know the secret of her deadly charm, but she obviously had something; one of her lovers committed suicide; another died by taking an overdose of Spanish fly; a third was taken to hospital in suspicious circumstances, where he, too, eventually died.

Brécourt was completely indifferent to their suffering and something of her attitude towards men can be gleaned from the quotation above with which I open this post; it's a libertine philosophy that has a distinctly Sadean feel to it.

To be fair, working as a prostitute had also taken a toll on Jeanne's health too and in 1865 she was obliged to enter an asylum, suffering from hysterical seizures and a loss of speech. Hospital records describe her as being of dark complexion, with very expressive eyes. Although clearly of a nervous disposition and prone to fantasy, she was also said to be agreeable.

After several months, she was discharged though advised by her doctors to spend time resting in the spa town of Vittel, in northeastern France. Here, Jeanne claimed the title of Baroness for herself and nursed a wounded pigeon back to health. She also determined to find a permanent benefactor who would secure her future, having no intention of ending her days destitute, which, alas, was the fate of many a woman in her position.

Enter Rene de la Roche ... 

III.

Roche was a wealthy young man who had the misfortune to meet Jeanne at a ball in Paris, in 1873. He quickly became infatuated by the woman 16 years his senior and by the end of the year they had entered into a fateful relationship ...

Whilst Roche was away on a six month trip to Egypt in 1876, Jeanne went to visit a fellow prostitute with a lover who was blind not only to her moral shortcomings, but who, being visually impaired, incapable also of witnessing the very obvious signs of her physical decline. This got Jeanne thinking and on Roche's return to France she hatched a plan to deprive him of his sight.

Jeanne managed to persuade an old friend from her childhood days to help her, having told him (falsely) that Roche was the son of a man who had done her wrong. As arranged, Nathalis Gaudry carried out the diabolical assault in January 1877, throwing sulphuric acid in the face of the innocent victim.

Roche completely lost the sight of one eye and that of the other was significantly damaged; he was also, of course, terribly disfigured. Just like the injured pigeon, Roche was now made dependent upon Jeanne's loving care and, initially, neither he nor anyone else suspected her role in the matter.

Jeanne undertook the duty of care with every appearance of genuine devotion. Roche was consumed with gratitude for her untiring kindness; thirty nights she spent by his bedside and it was his wish that she alone should nurse him.

Gradually, however, his friends and family became suspicious and increasingly concerned by Brécourt's behaviour; frustrating, for example, their attempts to see or communicate with him. Eventually, the police were alerted and opened an investigation. Despite brazenly informing them that they would never find any evidence against her, they did just that and six months after the attack, both she and Gaudry found themselves standing in the dock.

Brécourt was defended by one of France's top criminal lawyers and her case aroused great public interest. Several famous faces and well-known writers sat in the public gallery to observe and record the proceedings. She was, if you like, the Roxie Hart of her day - although, unlike Roxie, Jeanne wasn't acquitted.

Having been found guilty, she was, rather, sentenced to fifteen years penal service; her accomplice got off with just five years jail time, having pleaded guilty but with mitigating circumstances - namely, being under the spell of a woman who was part-witch, part-seductress. He told his interrogators that he was madly in love with Brécourt and would have done anything she asked: Ses désirs sont des ordres!

What, if anything does this case teach us? I'm not sure. Some might cite it as evidence that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, but that's just a piece of sadomasochistic fantasy, isn't it?

Note: readers interested in this case might also find the following two posts to their tastes: the first in memory of Cora Pearl and the second in memory of Laura Bell: click here and here respectively.

 

Heads You Lose: Reflections on Craniopagus Parasiticus (with Reference to the Case of Manar Maged)

Manar Maged displaying Islaam, her parasitic twin head, 

seemingly with pride and tender affection

I. Two heads are better than one ... 

I've never been convinced by this old English proverb: indeed, in my younger, more schizonomadic days, I thought the ideal was to be both headless and homeless and had a picture of André Masson's acephalic figure as a screensaver on my laptop.    

I was convinced that human life is debased when it becomes a purely head-bound affair and physical experience bartered away for mere representation; that freedom had to involve escaping from all utility and the tyranny of reason.

Now, however, I'm not quite so Bataillean and - without wishing to sound too Kiplingesque - I very much admire those who can keep their heads as all about are losing theirs. But I still don't believe that two heads are better than one; and certainly not when the second head is fused to the first, as in the extremely rare cases of craniopagus parasiticus.    

It might be fun to have an identical twin. It might even be amusing to be one of a pair, rather than one of a kind, and be a conjoined twin. Abby and Brittany Hensel, for example, seem happy enough and have learned to cooperate and coordinate with an astonishing degree of success, despite being distinct personalities.

But to simply possess a parasitic twin head, that doesn't sound terribly appealing or in any way advantageous to the autosite. So it's probably fortunate that the tiny number of infants with this condition are usually stillborn, or die shortly after coming into the world. But not always, as the following case reminds us ...


II. The Case of Manar Maged (and Islaam)    

After an episode of Oprah featured her story, the whole world was talking about the case of Manar Maged, an Egyptian girl born in March 2004 with two heads - the second of which, named Islaam, had a separate brain and could (rather creepily) display certain autonomous facial features, but fully relied on its sister's vital organs to maintain it's own existence. 

As this parasitic twin head endangered Manar's wellbeing - and also prevented her from being able to crawl or sit up properly - it was decided to operate and attempt to surgically remove poor Islaam. The long, difficult, and extremely dangerous procedure was successfully performed in February 2005 and little Manar was released from intensive care the following month.

Sadly, however, she developed hydrocephaly, followed by a serious brain infection, and died shortly before what would have been her second birthday in March 2006. As for Islaam, she of the enigmatic smile, who knows what became of her ...?     


Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post. His own unique take on this case can be read by clicking here. If ever a post deserved a twin, it's this one; though which part is the parasitic head is debatable ... 

Diversity: What Would Nietzsche Think?

Image: Scotty Hendricks (2018)  

bigthink.com

I.

The word diversity is frequently used today, particularly by those who regard it as a value and like to signal their politico-moral correctness even if that means denigrating or disprivileging their own people, culture and history.

In order to illustrate this latter point, one might refer to the recent case of students at the University of Manchester who painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling and replaced it with a verse by the African-American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

This was done in the name of anti-racism - for Kipling, a well-known British imperialist, was said to dehumanise people of colour - and in order to celebrate the diversity of a student body looking to reclaim history by - quite literally - whitewashing it.            

I don't here wish to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of either Kipling's or Maya Angelou's work; nor do I want to express my concerns about historical revisionism and literary censorship. But I would like to say something further about diversity and the idea of multiculturalism, from a post-Nietzschean perspective ...


II.

If confronted with a world in which everyone was retreating to their own safe space from which to assert an identity (on the basis, for example, of sex, gender, race or religion) whilst, at the same time, speaking about the benefits of ever-greater diversity within society and culture, I suspect that Nietzsche would feel himself compelled as a philosopher to argue that greatness belongs only to the individual or the people who find a way to stylise chaos and give birth to a dancing star - the latter being a sign of unity within diversity.

Nietzsche loves words like difference, plurality and multiplicity; he thinks of the will to power as composed of a large number of competing forces, flows, and desires. But - and this is important to understand - he doesn't affirm diversity as a good in itself nor as a goal to be aimed at.

On the contrary, Nietzsche insists that culture, for example, has to be unified; that the only alternative to such is a civilization based upon a barbarism of styles and tastes and incapable of ever producing art or sovereign individuals. Nietzsche opposes the systematic anarchy, the aggressive philistinism, and the Volkerchaos that characterise European modernity and are the symptoms of culture's extermination.

Thus, whilst he may have announced the death of God and thereby decentered and demoralised the world, he still believes in shared ethical bonds between people. His nihilism is not the same as the nihilism of those who devote themselves to free markets and money-making, or to the neo-Platonic fantasies of science and technology; those who lack the ability to act under the constraint of a single taste or - as Heidegger would say - to dwell poetically upon the earth.


III.

Deleuze is right to say that, for Nietzsche, history can be read as the process by which "reactive forces take possession of culture or divert its course in their favour". That the will to diversity can therefore be understood as part of an ongoing slave revolt in morals and the overcoding of active forces by the modern State - that coldest of all cold monsters that thrives at the expense of culture and sucks the life out of people in the name of human rights and globalism.

Nietzsche is aggressively opposed to all this and when faced with the ways in which societies become decodified and unregulated, makes no attempt at recodification. But, again, we must be careful here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt to recodify along old lines or patch the holes ripped in the great social umbrella, he very much wants to bring together newly liberated forces onto what Deleuze terms a plane of consistency and regain mastery over the chaos that has been released.

Why? Because for Nietzsche culture is above all unity of style in all the expressions of a people and this requires harmonious manifoldness - not fake diversity built upon idiotic identity politics and an ugly jumble of all styles and peoples. Multiculturalism is not just a failed experiment, it's an absurd fallacy.

Of course Nietzsche's thinking has anti-democratic and illiberal implications - and he wasn't shy about saying so. But I would suggest we need to urgently think about these questions and not simply attempt to close down conversation by calling anyone who does so a fascist or a supporter of the alt-right. 


Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 139.