The French don’t remember much about 19th century President Félix Faure, according to historian Sarah Horowitz. But they do remember how he died. He breathed his last during a winter tryst in 1899 with a woman named Marguerite-Jeanne Steinheil, who’d later be known as the Red Widow.
Despite her nickname, the woman who went by “Meg” probably didn’t intend to kill her lover. However, Horowitz writes in her new nonfiction book, “The Red Widow: The Scandal That Shook Paris and the Woman Behind it All” (Sourcebooks, $26.99), “This is a book about a woman who lied her entire life.”
So, who really knows what happened?
And who really knows if, a little after the president’s demise, she was the one who killed her husband and mother? Someone did one night while Meg was very loosely tied to her bed.
Oddly, each of her toes was individually tied to the bedpost.
So Horowitz can’t definitively say who committed the murders, but after spending years combing through primary source materials and getting to know Meg, she has her opinions.
“I don’t actually think she murdered her husband and mother. I think she knows who did it,” Horowitz says by phone from Virginia, where she’s a history professor at Washington and Lee University.
Meg was a middle-class woman whose era severely limited her options, yet she managed to outsmart her station in life. Despite her marriage to an untalented, struggling artist she felt no love for, Meg hatched a plan to access Paris’ social stratosphere and triumphed.
She reached those upper limits through a form of sex work that sidestepped being a prostitute or a courtesan. Meg was, after all, a married woman with ambition and handled her affairs with extreme care.
Prostitution was legal at that time, and workers registered with the police and submitted to regular examinations, though they often did jail time anyway. Horowitz writes that because men were “thought to need regular sexual outlets, prostitutes protected society from male desire gone amok.” Subsequently, society’s view of the women was that they were “a revolting but indispensable element of urban life.”
Not the kind of employment that would win Meg admittance into the circles of power she strove toward; that route was out.
Proper courtesans, on the other hand — playthings of the rich and powerful whom she very much wanted to associate with — were shunned by those not directly involved with them. That wouldn’t get her where she wanted to go either.
Meg’s solution was genius; she used her biggest disadvantage to her advantage.
Her household income was that of a hack’s; no one wanted to buy her husband’s paintings.
So Meg spread the word to prominent men that if they’d buy her husband’s work, she’d toss in a sexual interaction. Some were one-night stands, others turned into lasting friendships, or lasting business deals between Meg and the many men who accepted her offer.
“Technically she’s not trading sex for money. She’s making connections. She’s furthering her husband’s career. And, she’s having affairs with her new connections, which is much, much more socially acceptable at the time than direct exchanges of sex for money,” Horowitz explains.
Horowitz, an academic, had originally intended “The Red Widow” to be a scholarly work like her first book, “Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France.” She thought an academic approach would be best because she’d uncovered meaty information about women’s roles in society as well as material she could use to theorize about crime and class of that time period.
Her friends disagreed. They said the book needed to be for a broader audience, because the tale was just too juicy.
“It’s a story where there are absurd lies, costumes, dramatic reveals and cliffhangers. And the woman at the center, she’s really — to use the slang of our…
Read More: A president died in bed with her. This new book delves into sex, society and murder