FRANCE: The Possessed

Lightning flashed, a clap of thunder shattered the air and the lights in a crowded courthouse at Blois (pop. 26,774) flickered out. The superstitious in the audience considered this manifestation something of an omen. There on trial for murder stood straight-haired, sloe-eyed Denise Labbe, 30, and her lover, Jacques Algarron, 26. Ever since their arrest more than a year ago, neighbors and newspaper readers had known the pair as "the Possessed," but cool, handsome Jacques and his pale paramour looked anything but demonic as they sat, clad in black, listening impassively to the charges. The daughter of a poor postman, orphaned at 13 and self-educated, Denise had been a capable, serious-minded government secretary. Jacques, an illegitimate child whose parents had married only as an afterthought, was a graduate of Saint-Cyr, an artillery lieutenant and a dedicated student of philosophy.

A la Gide. The demon that possessed Jacques and his girl came from drinking deeply of the heady, dark brews of French intellectualism, from the Marquis de Sade to Jean Paul Sartre. Denise was the ardent disciple of them all, a girl so enamored of the intellectual life and so prone to bedding with students that she soon found herself the mother of a bastard child. Her lover Jacques had already fathered two bastards by the time they met, and his approach to women was always patterned on that of his intellectual idols. "In the manner of Gide," he would tell a susceptible girl, "I offer you fervor."

When they finally paired off two years ago, Jacques' love letters to Denise were steeped in philosophical maundering. Like his existentialist masters, Jacques believed that thought must be carried into action. It was all very well, he suggested, for Denise to say she loved him, but what about the proof? "To merit my love," said young Jacques, "you must go from suffering to suffering." He cited a passage in D'Annunzio in which a jealous husband kills the child his wife has had by another man, and asked, "Now, isn't that beautiful?" Denise agreed, "but," she said, "I haven't the right to do such a thing." "Exactly," said her lover, "that's the whole point."

A la Bernanos. Thus convinced, Denise did her best to please. Once she tried to drop her pretty little 2½-year-old daughter out of a window. A peering neighbor spoiled the fun, and Denise hastily pulled in the child, who laughed at mummy's new game. Jacques was furious; so a week later Denise threw the child into a canal.

A passer-by saved her. Once again Denise tried to please her lover, but the current washed her child safe ashore out of the river. Jacques threatened to leave. Desperate at last, Denise plunged her baby head first into a zinc washtub and held her there until she was dead. Then she telegraphed Jacques. "It takes courage," Jacques told a friend in admiration, "to kill your own daughter." The police were less enthusiastic.

Last week, as the lovers waited together for the verdict of guilty, and the pronouncement of sentence—life for her, 20 years for him—a superior smile still played over Jacques' lips. "Certain monsters," he mused in satisfaction, "are sacred because often the same qualities are found in a monster and in a saint."