There is an account of this case in Bataille "Causes Criminelles et Mondaines" (1882), and in Mace's book, "Femmes Criminelles." It is alluded to in "Souvenirs d'un President d'Assises," by Berard des Glajeux. The murder of the chemist Aubert by Marin Fenayrou and his wife Gabrielle was perpetrated near Paris in the year 1882. In its beginning the story is commonplace enough. Fenayrou was the son of a small chemist in the South of France, and had come to Paris from the Aveyron Department to follow his father's vocation. He obtained a situation as apprentice in the Rue de la Ferme des Mathurins in the shop of a M. Gibon. On the death of M. Gibon his widow thought she saw in Fenayrou a man capable of carrying on her late husband's business. She gave her daughter in marriage to her apprentice, and installed him in the shop. The ungrateful son-in-law, sure of his wife and his business and contrary to his express promise, turned the old lady out of the house. This occurred in the year 1870, Fenayrou being then thirty years of age, his wife, Gabrielle, seventeen. They were an ill-assorted and unattractive couple. The man, a compound of coarse brutality and shrewd cunning, was at heart lazy and selfish, the woman a spoilt child, in whom a real want of feeling was supplied by a shallow sentimentalism. Vain of the superior refinement conferred on her by a good middle-class education, she despised and soon came to loathe her coarse husband, and lapsed into a condition of disappointment and discontent that was only relieved superficially by an extravagant devotion to religious exercises. It was in 1875, when the disillusionment of Mme. Fenayrou was complete, that her husband received into his shop a pupil, a youth of twenty-one, Louis Aubert. He was the son of a Norman tradesman. The ambitious father had wished his son to enter the church, but the son preferred to be a chemist. He was a shrewd, hard-working fellow, with an eye to the main chance and a taste for pleasures that cost him nothing, jovial, but vulgar and self-satisfied, the kind of man who, having enjoyed the favours of woman, treats her with arrogance and contempt, till from loving she comes to loathe him--a characteristic example, according to M. Bourget, of le faux homme a femmes. Such was Aubert, Fenayrou's pupil. He was soon to become something more than pupil. Fenayrou as chemist had not answered to the expectations of his mother-in-law. His innate laziness and love of coarse pleasures had asserted themselves. At first his wife had shared in the enjoyments, but as time went on and after the birth of their two children, things became less prosperous. She was left at home while Fenayrou spent his time in drinking bocks of beer, betting and attending race-meetings. It was necessary, under these circumstances, that someone should attend to the business of the shop. In Aubert Fenayrou found a ready and willing assistant.