The Monist, Vol. 1, 1890-1891 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 1, 1890-1891 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
M. Héricourt justly finds that many features of this woman are to
be met with in Gabrielle Fenayron, the accomplice of her husband.
Gabrielle Fenayron is about thirty years of age: she is a tall dark
woman with a very pale complexion; her hair is very black, the oval
of her face elongated, and her eyes have a certain hardness that
accentuate the projecting and unsightly cheek-bones. Gabrielle
Fenayron, as we know, pretended to have been terrorised by the threats
which her husband had uttered against her, and to have been infatuated,
on the other hand, by the love that she felt for him; she had thus
submitted her will in order to repair her fault. In the appreciation
of this system of defence, the bill of indictment stated that the
energy and the coolness exhibited by this woman in the preparation of
assassination, the facilities that she had during the course of the
long premeditation which had preceded the murder to warn Aubert without
danger to herself, induced the belief that she had in the commission
of the crime yielded to a profound hatred against her old lover. But
this interpretation appears to me, psychologically, to be a clumsy and
a forced one. It is not necessary to have recourse to motives left
mysterious in order to explain the absolutely strange conduct of some
women.
Perhaps Zola would have completed his picture if he had known Gabrielle
Gompard; who allies and unites the passion of murder with prostitution
when she attaches herself to a wicked man, but who grows animated
for virtue and denounces herself an accomplice when she becomes the
mistress of a virtuous man. These women change their personality in
changing a lover, and then make a point of playing a role in the
miserable world where their fickle passions destroy them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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