On August 4, 1920, railway staff at Nancy opened a trunk that had been sent from the Gare de l'Est in Paris and found a man's body inside, naked, shot with a revolver and badly beaten about the head and face. He was Ishmael Jacob Providence Weissmann, a commission agent born in Romania, who called himself Georges Bessarabo. He had been killed on the night of July 30 or 31 at the apartment on the Square La Bruyère in Paris that he shared with his wife, the novelist Marie-Louise Bessarabo.
She was well known in literary Paris under the pen name Héra Mirtel, and also wrote as Juliette de Boulogne and Juliette de Lotus: a prolific author of books of an amorous nature, a feminist and suffragist, and the hostess of a Friday salon attended, the New York Times reported, by men of letters, a marquis more or less authentic, and priests, where the talk ran to lovers and mistresses and where she was said sometimes to hold a black mass. She had been born Marie-Louise Victorine Grouès in Lyon on October 24, 1868. In 1897, in Saltillo, Mexico, she married Paul Jacques, a trader from the Ubaye valley of the French Alps who had grown rich in Mexico, and they had two daughters, Paule, born in 1898, and Louise, born in 1900.
Paul Jacques died in Paris on March 5, 1914, shot in the head with a revolver at his feet. The death was ruled a suicide. The police were said to have been suspicious, but they had no evidence of anything else, and the verdict stood; nothing since has displaced it. Popular accounts written later add that a maid had seen her put a white powder into his soup earlier that year and that he had it analyzed and found poison, and that in Mexico one admirer had killed himself over her and a lover had been found shot dead at her feet in a remote hacienda, killed, she said, by bandits. None of that was ever established. In 1915, in Mexico, she married Weissmann, and they settled in Paris.
When Bessarabo failed to appear at work, suspicion turned quickly on his wife and on Paule, then about twenty-two, who had been in the apartment and had helped move the body. Relatives of his asked where he was; his brother Gustave told her to her face that she had killed him. She said at first that her husband had gone off with a mistress and taken the big trunk with him. Confronted with the evidence, she confessed to shooting him out of jealousy, then retracted the confession, and in the months that followed she gave the investigating magistrate a series of contradictory accounts, including one of a note in her husband's hand ordering the trunk sent to Nancy. Paule, charged with murder alongside her, gave the police a detailed statement implicating her mother.
The two were tried together at the Seine assizes in June 1922, with the celebrated advocate Vincent de Moro-Giafferi defending the mother, in a trial full of dramatic turns; at one point Paule stood up to say she must and would tell the truth, and her mother shouted at her to be silent. The prosecution put the motive at a commission of 600,000 francs owed to Bessarabo for oil concessions in Mexico. On June 21, 1922, the jury found Marie-Louise Bessarabo guilty of the premeditated murder of her husband, with extenuating circumstances, and she was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. Paule Jacques was acquitted. Accounts that date the trial to February 1921 are mistaken.
She died in prison at Rennes on March 21, 1931, at sixty-two, and was buried at Saint-Paul-sur-Ubaye, in her first husband's valley. The writer Arthur Bernède retold the case, and it has been revisited in books and television documentaries in France under the name the newspapers gave it, the affair of the bloody trunk.