In 2014, France was buzzing over François Hollande’s (born 1954) latest love affair. Presidential affairs are nothing new in France, though, and a little digging into French history turns up one that ended far more dramatically.
The mistress who killed me
For that, we need to go back to February 16, 1899. The president of France at the time was Félix Faure (1841-1899), who up to that point was best known for his opinions on French cars (“your cars are ugly and they stink,” he told the heads of the French auto industry, beating generations of car buyers everywhere to the punch, since plenty of them have thought exactly the same thing) and for the support he gave the French army during the Dreyfus affair. But on that particular day, Félix Faure was about to leave an unforgettable mark on French history, and not exactly on purpose.
It all started when the president, who was apparently bored with his work, decided to summon his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil (1869-1954), for an “urgent presidential meeting” at the Élysée Palace. Once the lady arrived, the office doors were shut and the staff were asked to clear the area. A short while later, screams of horror came from the president’s office. His personal assistant, the first to rush in, found the following scene: Madame Steinheil in a state of partial undress, and the president lying on the sofa, dying. The doctors could only diagnose a massive stroke, which caused severe bleeding in the brain. The president died that same evening, sparing France millions of francs in the process.
That very day, rumors began flying about what had really happened in the president’s office. The leading rumor was that the president suffered his stroke while his mistress was performing oral sex on him, and the story produced no shortage of wicked wordplay. To understand the jokes, you need to know that the French slang verb pomper means “to perform oral sex.” The future president Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) outdid everyone else with his sharp eulogy for Faure, saying that he had tried to live like Julius Caesar but died like Pompey. Madame Steinheil didn’t escape the French wit either: after the incident, she was nicknamed la pompe funèbre (literally the name of the shops near cemeteries that sell funeral wreaths, but if you use the slang meaning of pomper, the nickname could also be translated as “the deadly blowjob”).
The deadly mistress returns
Anyone who thought Madame Steinheil had vanished from the pages of history after the incident was wrong. She was destined to return to the public spotlight a few years later, as the star of another deadly affair. On May 31, 1908, the bodies of her husband and her mother-in-law were found in their home in Paris. Both had died of strangulation: the husband apparently strangled with a rope, and the mother-in-law choked by her own dentures. Marguerite was found tied up in her room, and she told police investigators that the murders had been carried out by three men dressed in black and a woman.
But contradictions in her testimony soon began to surface, and she was charged with the murders. During the trial, it emerged that the lady had had no shortage of lovers, including the king of Cambodia, and the far-right newspaper La Libre Parole even tried to argue that Marguerite had murdered not only her husband and mother-in-law but also the president of France, since he had opposed a retrial for Dreyfus. Despite all this, the police couldn’t prove her involvement in the murders beyond a reasonable doubt, and Madame Steinheil was released and promptly left for England. There, she found time to write her memoirs, marry Lord Abinger, bury him too in 1927, and die at the age of 85.
