Murder in the hermitage

JANET FLANNER

MURDER AS COMEDY.— In the murders committed in southern France by the French lawyer Sarret, with the German Schmidt sisters as his aides, there were elements of levity too cheerful not to merit applause. The murdered seemed to have suffered no pain dying; and at least one victim departed in bliss as a result of the only good time she'd ever known. The murderers, of course, lived on to agonize; and the insurance companies had no fun either, they having been bamboozled out of two million francs.

The brains behind this murderous embezzlement was Georges Sarret, graduate of law, notary operating at Marseilles, a round, short, middle-class man of 55 with a large, square head, like a box full of brains, erect white hair like a clean, old, scrubbing brush and a reasonable, sensual face. As a criminal he was not a human but a mechanism. Of the two Schmidt sisters who helped the wheels go 'round, at the time of the trial Catherine still looked vaguely like a Dürer drawing, had been earlier inclined to pretty flesh, had the easy sentimentality of the German female and its easier obedience to any nearby male. She was 35. Philomène, at 40, was thin, had read Freud and didn't think much of him. looked like a bad dry-point of that good Lillian Gish, had been governess in the château of a French marquise till the war. It was then that both sisters, to escape concentration camps, fled to Marseilles, where by the armistice they were curiously established as culottières or pants-finishers. No matter what happened, after they met Sarret, this was to be their wretched future trade.

SULPHURIC ACID FOR THE GUESTS.— Though the trio only came to trial last year, their elimination started in autumn, ]924, when Sarret (who apparently ran a matrimonial agency on the side) procured for his then young German friends, two old French husbands. Philomène's— she had chosen him for her own because he seemed a hard drinker unlikely to get through the winter—was dead, maybe of wassailing, by Christmas. Cathie's, who was dropping from 202 lbs. to a skeleton of 118, hung on till Easter—since dying of unrequited love for one's wife (she had paid him 3,000 francs extra not to consummate matrimony) is a more tedious decline. But at least the funerals cost nothing. Both mates were tucked into the potters' field where their viscera were soon too general for exhumation, while the widows dug up the 100,000 francs life insurance Sarret had arranged. Thus the Sarret-Schmidt's vast murder-for-money racket was modestly launched.

Their next investment was a de-frocked priest named Chambon, a flighty, bearded giant who dabbled in usury and had a rich mistress, Mine. Alphonsine Ballandreaux, who was slightly addled in the head. In the summer of 1925 the Chambon menage was killed in peace at the Villa Hermitage in one of the most horribly humorous double crimes on French record.

The Hermitage was a lonely cottage near Aix which Sarret rented furnished for the month of August. He added to it, as comforts, one bargain bathtub without waterpipes. set up in the dining-room; in the toolshed one bargain motorcycle of which the engine but not the wheels ran: and in the kitchen 100 liters of sulphuric acid. Or. as he later explained to the Judge, Sarret had thought learning to ride a motorcycle would be fun for the Schmidt girls; his being French explained in itself why he'd had no interest in bathtub plumbing. As for the sulphuric acid—that was for Chambon.

On the 19th Sarret had Chambon fetched at noon in a taxi all the way from Marseilles. While Philomene strolled 'round the toolshed,—''Just promenading the way one does in the country air," she later told the Judge, who suspected she'd been in the toolhouse setting the motorcycle's backfire popping to hide the sounds from the house —Sarret, from behind a Chinese screen in a bedroom upstairs, murdered Chambon in the back with a shotgun. The ex-priest, at Cathie's request, was opening the shutters to admire the heavenly cypress-planted view.

NO CRY OF PAIN.—Before dusk Sarret had taxied back from Marseilles, this time with the bogus Mme. Chambon-Ballandreaux. Since she was a lady visitor, Cathie olfered her some lemonade in the dining-room; Philomene begged to be excused, she was still fussing with that brokendown noisy motorcycle. In the midst of her refreshment Sarret shot the guest, also in the back, but this time with a pistol and not two feet from the waiting bathtub. Sarret was a monstrously efficient man; the Chambons died instantly and gave no cry of pain.

As the sky darkened, while Phil held the lamp and Cathie helped with his feet, Chambon s big body was dragged down from upstairs. One on top of the other he and his lady were laid together in a last extra-marital embrace, plus 100 liters of sulphuric acid as a bridal winding-sheet. At dinner Sarret consumed the cold cuts which he had brought from Marseilles along with his late friends. Three days later he told the girls they must start emptying the tub with buckets, lb' also sensibls advised them to put on old clothes as the acid, not to speak of the Chambons, might spoil smart attire. By this time, the Chambons — as later described in Court by Philomene —had taken on the consistency of consomme en gelee. The rest of the month, daily, the Chambons were sprinkled onto the Hermitage's pretty flowers: during that last hot week in August what was left of them smelled awfully, finicky Philomene found.

THE WAY TO KILL WITH KINDNESS.—Once all back in Marseilles, Sarret managed to get 200,000 francs for Chambon s real estate, aided by a complacent pasty cook named Dufaux, or Mr. False-who, in a cassock rented from a costumers, posed to the buyer as the unfortunate priest. Sarret sentimentally kept his old friend Chambons gold watch.Whenever, in the next six long years before they were all arrested, Phil grew recalcitrant in public or Cathie cried too much, Sarret would slowly pull the Chambon watch from his pocket and ask the girls to tell him the time. . . .

For the next four years the Schmidts enjoyed peace—if you want to call it that. Cath developed insomnia and saw ghosts; though only in her late thirties, her hair started turning white; in her speech she developed a nervous tic and cried so much she spoiled her pretty eyes. Phil, who was more stoical, took out her suffering in a paralytic attack which left the right side of her face with a melancholy slight droop, especially when, rarely, she tried to smile.

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In 1929 Sarret decided that something really big could be done, say, with dear Cathie who was healthy and would make a lovely risk. . . . That year Sarret paid 60.000 francs premiums and insured Catherine Schmidt in various companies for 1 million 7 hundred thousand francs to he paid in case of her demise to her mother Frau Rose Schmidt who, in poverty-stricken Bavaria, would surely have been glad, had she known. The next year, all year long, poor Phil trudged through state hospitals; she was to find an investment which was (a) female; (b) tubercular in the last stages; (c) poor; (d) an orphan and (e) if possible illegitimate of birth and a state foundling which would eliminate friends, relatives or bothersome loving connections. Phil found her in January, 1931, in the Marseilles Conception Hospital; her name was Magali Ilerbin. Besides being everything from (a) through (e) she was 24 years old, of a grateful nature and extremely pretty. Phil got Magali out of bed and into, this time, a lonely rented cottage named Villa Graziella in the environs of Marseilles.

It was here that Magali had that first and last good time. Cathie gorged her on the very freshest eggs, cocktails, champagne, kept her up at night over jolly games of cards, in brief spoiled her utterly with indigestible goodies and (there seems no doubt of it) a really kindly affection. On February 15 Magali wrote to one of her former nurses that she was in Paradise. She erred by 1 month and 12 days. Her soul did not start for heaven from the Villa Graziella till March 29th.

Thanks to Sarret and his manipulation of legal papers, she was buried under the name of Catherine Schmidt. And the insurance companies paid Phil the 1.700.000 francs, when, in a white wig, mourning veil and shawl, she appeared in their office rigged out as Frau Rose Schmidt, the dear old quaint Bavarian mother. Le coup était joué.

Success had its drawbacks. By having buried Magali under the name of Catherine Schmidt, Cath was now legally dead—a nasty fix in France, where everyone has to have civil papers to prove that she was born, let alone is still alive. Sensing also the social danger if she should be recognized by neighbors vaguely mourning her as defunct, Sarret sent the constantly crying Cath to winter in a Nice hotel. With Phil he returned to Marseilles to counterfeit Cath's new civil papers. She never used them. The insurance companies had ceased being suspicious and become sure. On March 29th, a year to the day after Magali's death, Phil was arrested in the morning for false impersonation which she denied. When Cath heard it in Nice that afternoon she dried her eyes, went to the police and confessed. By dinner Sarret was arrested and had denied. That night and for the next 947 nights, or until the end of their trial, the trio slept in separate cells, in the same jail. Magali Herbin's body, exhumed, had been found to contain 2 grammes 75 centigrammes of zinc salts or enough to have killed exactly 11 men

The trial which was not held in the city of Aix-en-Provence till Oct. 21, 1933, owing to nearly three years of legal delays cooked up by Sarret, was a great event. Since part of humanity's idealism is the hope that some day a truly intelligent criminal will turn up, Sarret had been ballyhooed as the miracle-minded murderer, the killer with the cranium de luxe.

Yet, for the most part, he talked in Court like any 9-year-old-brained Dillinger. Alternately be said he had killed Chambon in self-defence in a money quarrel; that Mine. ChambonBallandreaux bad killed him in jealousy; that he, Sarret, had not killed Mine. Chambon-Ballandreaux; that the girls had poisoned her; that he had never heard of her. He also said he'd never heard of Magali, though he accompanied her to her grave and asked the hearse-driver to trot as he was in a hurry; he said the Schmidts were liars. They usually were, but turned terribly truthful those 10 days in Court, since the rest of their days on earth depended on their veracity.

If Sarret's intelligence lacked, his humor abounded. He told the jury that the idea for dissolving the dead was not his but had "just come up in the course of conversation with the girls"—the way things will. The Court events were even funnier. The fourth day of the trial a male witness fainted and five of the prosecution and three jurors were discovered asleep, intoxicated by a leak in the gas fixtures. Sarret caught the prosecution's financial expert on his ledger books in a 6,000 franc error in his, Sarret's, favor. The packed Court room giggled with hysteria when it was stated Sarret had certainly other corpses on his conscience than the mere three for which he was being tried.

It ended on the 10th day, Oct. 31, 1933, by the jurors being asked 174 questions which the clerk lost his voice reading. The jury were out nearly three hours. They came in hungry at dinner to give Sarret the guillotine and the girls 10 years each at hard labor. . . . The comedy lines were over. The public was disappointed. Sarret had been a sell. We are alone in our opinion that Sarret seemed stupefied in court because he was so intelligent that he knew the jig was up.

His trial was his last comic note. He was left to live out the rest of the pretty Provencal autumn, its sinister winter, most of its lovely spring in the Aix prison's one death cell; within his four walls he followed the political movements of the world outside, grieved when Prime Minister Herriot fell, and worried over the fate of good government.

The guillotine was set up in the town square two days before he was executed. Everyone in Aix except Sarret knew when he was to die. Yet when the headsman walked into his cell at 4:30 in the morning, April 10, 1934, Sarret said, "I was expecting you, sir." He refused the priests' prayers, the cigaret, the glass of rum.

In his life Sarret was hardly a gentleman. One hour and five minutes after he had been called on his last day, he died like a man.