Marie Bessarabo was born in 1868, the daughter of a silk merchant, and was educated in a convent. In 1892 she went to work for her father's failing firm and travelled to Mexico. In Mexico City she met Paul Jacques, a wealthy silk merchant twice her age with businesses in Mexico and Europe. They married and moved to Paris, where their daughter Pauline was born in 1904.
In Paris she ran a literary salon and wrote romantic fiction and poetry under the name Hera Myrtel. A novel had some success and she was commissioned to write more. Accounts describe her as dominating her husband over twenty years and taking many lovers, which he accepted.
One evening in January 1914 she told the maid to take a tureen of soup to her husband, who was working late in his study. The maid saw her put a white powder into it and said to him as she served it that she hoped he liked the flavouring Madame had added. He did not eat it. He had a portion analysed by a chemist, and it contained a lethal poison. He did not go to the police, not wanting a scandal, and told friends he would never understand the dark corners of her mind.
On the evening of March 5, 1914 the maid was called to her bedroom. Paul Jacques was dead, shot in the right temple, with a revolver at his feet. The verdict was suicide. The police were suspicious but had no evidence for anything else, so it stood.
She then made the trip to Mexico she had wanted, taking Pauline, liquidated her husband's assets there, styled herself a mystical novelist and set up another salon. There she met Charles Bessarabo, a Romanian described as having dubious interests and a possible criminal background. He proposed, she accepted, and they returned to Paris in 1916.
The second marriage went the way of the first. She kept a salon and used drugs, particularly hashish. In 1918 he woke to find her on top of him trying to strangle him, and threw her off; she wept and said she did not know what had come over her. On July 8, 1920 he came home to find her dressed for an interview with a male writer, and she picked up a pistol and fired over his head as he dropped to the floor, then went calmly in to her dinner. When he told her he could not go on, she said that if he left she would expose his business dealings.
On the evening of July 30 or 31, 1920 she shot him dead at their home. With her daughter's help she put the body in a trunk and sent it by rail to Nancy. When he did not appear at work his chauffeur went to the police and told them what he knew of the marriage. She said her husband had gone to visit his mistress and had taken the large trunk with him.
The trunk was found. The body inside was naked, shot, and badly beaten about the head and face. Confronted with it she confessed to shooting him and said she had been jealous of the mistress; she afterwards retracted the confession.
Pauline, who had been woken by the shots and had helped move the body, was charged with murder as well. To save herself she gave the police a detailed statement implicating her mother. The trial opened on February 15, 1921 and was a sensation. At one point Pauline stood up and said she must and would tell the truth, and laid the blame on her mother, who shouted at her to be quiet. Pauline was acquitted. Her mother was sentenced to twenty years and died in prison in 1930.
Three things should be kept straight. She was convicted of one murder, and the old figure of one to two was a range of the sort this archive does not use; the 1914 death of Paul Jacques remains an official suicide that nothing has ever displaced. One of the two accounts on the record describes her as the killer of several lovers and husbands, and mentions a lover said to have shot himself over her and another found dead at her feet, supposedly shot by bandits; neither was ever established and neither is counted here. And the sources disagree about her name, one calling her Hera Bessarabo and the other Marie, with Hera Myrtel as the name she published under.