“Meg” – The French woman known for her many love affairs with important men.
Marguerite Steinheil was a woman who lived a very interesting life. She was a socialite whom became famous for her many affairs with very prominent French men at the turn of the century, she became embroiled in international political scandals and once attempted to frame her manservant for the brutal murders of her husband and mother, a crime for which she was heavily implicated but never convicted.
However, it is for her relationship with Félix Faure, 7th President of France, that she became infamous.
Steinheil was introduced to Faure at a social event and quickly became his mistress. She would often visit his office at the Élysée Palace and disappear with him into his private chambers. On 16 February 1899, Félix Faure called Marguerite by telephone, asking her to come to the palace at the end of the afternoon. Briefly after her arrival, Steinheil rung urgently for the servants, who entered to find Steinheil adjusting her clothing and Faure having a seizure on the sofa. Within a few hours he was dead.
The story that came out was that Steinheil had been performing oral sex on Faure when he suffered a fatal stroke.
It’s tragic, but undeniably a pretty awesome and quintessentially ‘French’ way to go. The Presidents legacy lived on through a ship named for him, which ironically went down a few years later.
Unverified legend has it that she was performing oral sex on him when he suffered a fatal stroke, his convulsed hands tangled in her hair. This was not officially announced, but rumours started spreading immediately, although for several years it was believed that his partner at the time of his death was actress Cécile Sorel.
The embarrassment and shame that surely ensued after her connection with the death of the President did not, however, deter her having affairs with other men; in fact, she became the mistress of many more prominent men. Later doctors would go on to describe her as, “a highly neurotic subject with a pronounced tendency to hysteria, she seems to have exercised a curious spell upon all the men with whom she came in contact”. Her je ne sais quoi and femme fatale charms might explain why there were reports that men including the President even entrusted her with secret documents and manuscripts.
Scandal was not to stop there. On May 31 1908, Marguerite’s husband and stepmother were found dead having been gagged, bound and strangled with a cord. Marguerite was also found gagged and bound to the bed but notably unharmed. Although she told police that there had been four intruders dressed in long black robes, she was a suspect from the start. The police initially did not have the evidence to prosecute but her stories began to unravel when she went on to deliberately frame her valet de chambre by planting a piece of evidence in his room. When her plot was unveiled she subsequently accused her housekeeper’s son of committing the murders. She was arrested later in the year and charged on complicity in the double murder.
The events surrounding the murder and the trial caused a feeding frenzy in Paris and there was a gender divided opinion. And although the court had called her stories a “tissue of lies”, the rather theatrical trial climaxed with Mme Steinheil’s unexpected acquittal. After her narrow escape from the guillotine, Steinheil moved to England and in 1917 she married the 6th Baron Abinger, Robert Brooke Campbell Scarlett who served in the Royal Navy.
Marguerite Steinheil (Meg) Childhood & Early life
There’s a strange golden age of Parisian life before World War I shattered the cosy comfort of their lives, and it’s an odd irony that one of its most infamous denizens was almost German rather than French. Marguerite Japy, known throughout her life as Meg, was born in Alsace in western France in 1869, but two years later Alsace was ceded to the German Empire in the treaty of Frankfurt. However the small area of Alsace where Meg was born, the Territoire de Belfort, was specifically exempted from the treaty due to the French ethnicity of its inhabitants and the resistance they offered to German occupation. So the estate of Edouard Japy stayed part of France, and so his daughter too remained French. On such things do the wheels of history turn.
Meg’s father, Edouard, came from a rich industrial family. He had split from them over their opposition to his marrying the daughter of an innkeeper, Meg’s mother Emilie. Perhaps it was her youth rather than her class that upset them – Edouard reportedly fell in love with her when she was only fourteen years old, and arranged for her to attend a boarding school in Stuttgart for two years before they were married. Meg, of course, adored her father and her autobiography paints him as the perfect gentleman. Of course Meg was, according to her governesses, a wilful child who would often get herself out of trouble through charming behavior. At the age of seventeen she became involved with a friend of her brother’s, Lieutenant Edouard Sheffer, but her father broke the affair up before things went too far. Then, in 1888, Edouard Japy died of a heart attack. Meg, who was by now 19, was devastated.