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Susannah Wilson, "A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Susanna Wilson, Associate professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick, to talk about her new book, A Most Quiet Maternity, Affliction and violence in late 19th century France, out this year 2025 with Cornell University Press. Hello, Susanna.
- [01:30]
C
Hello, Yana. Thank you for having me on.
- [01:32]
B
Yeah, thanks so much for joining me. How are you on this beautiful winter day?
- [01:37]
C
Very good, thank you.
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B
Are you finished with your semester?
- [01:41]
C
Yes, finished last Friday, but still mopping up this week, so won't be finishing until just before Christmas, I don't think.
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B
Yeah, the end of the semester time, it's so joyful, but then you really have a lot to do. The students are gone and. And off on their party, and you're like, yeah, indeed.
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C
Yeah.
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B
All right, so let's start with this book that I really. I just need to say up front, I adored. I love this book. It was so much fun to read. So I'm not even pretending to be an impartial interviewer right now. This was just a masterclass in how to write a micro history, which we'll get to in a minute, but. So let's just. Let's get going. This book is a happy accident. Yeah. You just found this case while you were working on something else?
- [02:31]
C
That's right, yeah. Thank you for your kind words. So I was working on another book, an as yet unfinished book on the cultural history of morphine and opiates in 19th century France. And as I was looking into the medical literature on morphine and how the. The medical profession were reacting to the presence of this new drug and the effects it was having, but also the unwanted effects, I kept stumbling across a reference to a thesis, a medical thesis that had been written about crime, crimes committed by morphine addicts that in French were called morphine or morphinomaniacs, which is quite interesting because in France there was no word. Well, there is no word for addiction in French latterly. So more recently they've absorbed the English word addiction. But at this time there was no concept for addiction. So they used the kind of framework of manias. So, yeah, I was looking up cases of morphinomania and came across this reference to what was called in French the Fiquet affair, which is often what in French, when they talk about criminal cases, they call them affairs. And it was a case about a woman who'd. Who was a morphine addict who'd murdered a child. And this had been considered a sort of test case in the effects of morphine on people and whether it made them criminal. So I looked up the sort of attached to this case. There were two medical investigations kind of instructed by the judge in the case or the investigator, and they were written by two French doctors who were fairly well known. One was called Marondon de Montiel, who was director of a public asylum in Dijon initially, and then he went on to become. To have quite an illustrious career in Paris. And the second doctor was called Emile Blanche, who was also a very famous alienist or psychiatrist. And so I thought that was interesting that those two people had written these medical reports. So I decided to go and delve into the story a bit more. I located the original criminal dossier in the archive in Dijon, in the city archives, and I found that it was all still there and all the witness statements were there, and letters and communications between investigators and so on. I don't think it had been opened since the conclusion of the trial in 1883. So I thought, well, this is an interesting story. What do I do with this?
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B
In the early hours of Friday 30th June, 1882, a passing workman discovered the body of a young girl lying on the left bank of the Canal de Bourgogne. At the southwestern edge of Dijon, a small city in the east of France. So let's start with her. Who is this girl?
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C
This girl is a five year old child called Henriette Barbet. She was a school pupil. She went to a local nursery school in French called Maternelle. They were called Salle d' Azile in French because these were schools that were really there to provide childcare for working women in factories. So she was the child of a working woman, came from a very kind of modest family who lived in sort of in a way typical of their class. They lived in a kind of cramped small flat in the middle of the city. Parents worked in sort of industrial jobs. I think her father was a cobbler. The mother worked in the tobacco factory along with a lot of other women. She was described in witness reports. So various members of her family were interviewed. She was described as being very shy, very uncertain, nervous child. Her teacher said she was not very intelligent, she was very shy. She was bullied by other children. So there's a kind of vulnerability around this child. She perhaps was likely to be identified as a potential victim by somebody in terms of her being easy to manipulate or to lure away. So would you like me to say more about where she was the day before and.
- [07:16]
B
Yeah, tell us about that. That would be great.
- [07:19]
C
So she'd been at school and when, as she was leaving school, a woman at that time, unidentified woman, approached her and said, come with me, your mother is waiting at home in my house for you. And the child believed the woman trusted her and went with her. And this was seen by two other children. One was Henriette's classmate whose name briefly escapes me, another five year old child who witnessed to having seen this, and a 14 year old girl who was called Louise Coquereau. And she recognized the woman as somebody else who worked at the tobacco factory with her. So these two girls had seen this woman leading the child away from school and then she wasn't seen again until she was found the following day on the banks of the canal.
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B
Right. And her father. Her father noted her absence and went looking for her. I mean, she was part of a family unit. She was not a lost child by any means.
- [08:25]
C
No, they realized that she hadn't come home and they were looking for her.
- [08:31]
B
So Dijon is a smaller city and it has a big working class population at this stage.
- [08:42]
C
Fairly big. Well, in the sense that in the decades that preceded the murder happened in the 1880s, you know, France was industrializing like lots of other countries and many people were moving from the countryside to the cities. And this would have been true of Henriette's family and also the family of the woman who killed her. And people were moving there to work in these new industries and so on. So fairly large. Yes.
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B
And not particularly commodious or nice neighborhoods, necessarily.
- [09:21]
C
Yeah, these were. I mean, they weren't the poorest of the poor, but there were moments in the lives of some of the characters where they really did kind of approach being indigent poor. And certainly some of the characters in the story accessed city services for the poorest people. And so a lot of them had quite irregular employment. Sometimes they had work with one particular manufacturer, other times work with another one. But sometimes from week to week they were trying to find work.
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B
Yeah. Not the most precarious lives. They're not clinging to the bottom rungs of the social ladder. But these are neighborhoods with not a lot of excess and not a lot of.
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C
Yes. And quite cramped living conditions. Yeah. People would have had. They would have heated their very tiny, you know, apartments using, you know, just wood fires and so on. So these would have been quite sort of dirty environments. But this is, you know, how most people lived at the time.
- [10:27]
B
Yeah, this is very typical kind of late 19th century urban environment. So the authorities very quickly fixed upon a suspect. Right. She's seen taking the child away and she lives in the neighborhood. She is not an unknown character. And the suspect is Marie Francoise Fiquet. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about her. Let's talk about her.
- [10:53]
C
Yeah. So she wasn't born in Dijon. She was born in the countryside nearby, near another town called Besancon, but was really from the countryside. She emerges in terms of her character. She's a very intelligent woman, but from a very young age had lived quite a chaotic and life and had certain vulnerabilities. But I guess in many ways her life was typical of women of her class, but very young. She had. I don't know how or why, but she was pregnant at 15, had a baby that apparently died, and then she had another child a year later. She wasn't married and that child survived. And then she did get married. And the person she married was this man called Pierre Fiquet, and he legally recognized or legally adopted her child. So he was officially the father, but not actually the father of this child. So this new family unit as a couple, they moved around the region doing various kinds of laboring jobs and so on. So the evidence that I found about her really came through the criminal dossier in that the investigation set out to find out as much as they could about her character, as they said. They had this whole section of the dossier which was called information on her character. So they were trying to find out about her reputation. They found from various witnesses that she'd been sacked from most of the jobs that she'd done for thieving or misbehavior. She was also considered to be sexually licentious. She kind of dragged around this husband who seemed to be quite devoted to her, Seemed to be quite a good person, I suppose, and looked after her and her child. But she didn't particularly care for him. He wasn't as intelligent as she was. And I think she looked down on him. So she had lots and lots of sexual liaisons. And they ended up moving to Dijon. And she worked in the tobacco factory. Her husband did various other just kind of manual working jobs, mostly factory work. But she had ambitions to become a midwife. She was quite interested in and obsessed with medical books, with medical locations. Like. She spent a lot of time in hospital. And the. The people who assessed her. Her. Did the sort of psychiatric assessment, said that she called her a simulator, which. Which they. What they meant by that was that she took herself to hospitals and doctors all the time with simulated illnesses and was a bit of a time waster. And through this she accessed medical services and medical treatments. Now, I think that some of her illnesses were probably real, but they were probably combined with things that weren't real. So she came to have a reputation as a troublemaker. Her neighbors said that thought that she was pretty reprehensible as a person. They strongly suspected that she'd poisoned some people. So there was one of their neighbors who was a kind of vulnerable older woman. They think that she poisoned her. She was interested in spiritualism. And there was some accusation that she might have poisoned somebody else. They also thought she'd tried to poison her husband. And that seems quite a plausible accusation because he was really very ill. And the neighbors club together to get him taken to hospital. And then he immediately recovered when he was in hospital. So she was a pretty unusual person, took lots of risks, was quite flagrant in her behavior, but seemed to be, I suppose, according to our current understanding of psychology, somewhat disturbed. And had sort of somewhat disturbed patterns of behavior that seemed to link back to, number one, an obsession with medical situations. But number two, some kind of obsession with children and babies that I hypothesize is linked to the fact that she lost a baby or two or two, at least.
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B
Yeah, that we know. I mean, this this, the dossier which is. What is it? Information on morality. It's. It's pretty damning. She comes out as quite. I mean the miserable marriage trying to poison her husband. I mean, you know, whomst among us. Right. Like in the 19th century. But she's. She has many adulterous relationships quite openly, including a relationship with a priest, which isn't that odd. But it's still not something people enjoy. Right. Like that is not judged fairly or kindly.
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C
What do you mean by it wasn't judged fairly or on kind?
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B
I mean, what I want to say is, you know, celibacy for priests is always through most of the, you know, pre. Modern period, well into the. Into this period. Celibacy is demanded, but it's not enforced. Right. So, but, but this. It's still being the adulterous lover of a priest is not. It's not a position that a woman wants to find herself in.
- [16:41]
C
Oh no, it's not respectable. I think she doesn't seem to have cared much about respectability. She was, she. She seemed to sort of do what she wanted and was quite flagrant in that, in her behavior. So that's an interesting element to it in terms of her disregard of her own reputation, her sort of seeming lack of awareness. I think she seems to. I mean, one of the things I'm trying to delve into in the book is that she seems quite an unlikable, unpleasant individual. He would not have kind of inspired sympathy or pity. Which makes it all the more interesting, I think, to delve into. One of the interesting things about the trial at the end is that her defense attorney lawyer decided to build his case on what he called her. Well, he kind of called it hysteria, but he sort of claimed that she was mad. And I think we might today consider her to have a sort of personality disorder of some kind. That might be how we'd explain it. But yeah, she certainly wasn't particularly likable. Yeah.
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B
I mean there's also. There are questions about her is abortion like getting. Or perhaps providing abortions as part of midwife, which again, this is a thing that is a regular part of life when it's, you know, but. But is not the sort of thing you want to publicize. Right. It's. It's. There's this whole group of behaviors that loads of people do and it's okay until it isn't or until you get caught or until something else happens to cast a light. Right. And I just see so many of these things that I kind of found myself thinking it's astounding she got on this long without going to trial or having a major row with her neighbors.
- [18:45]
C
Yeah, I think that. I think it's interesting that one of the things that I hypothesize in the book is that what happened there was a long period leading up to this, and there was lots of repeated behaviors that seem to have been leading to this point. And in a sense, it was inevitable. I don't think she would have kept on getting away with this sort of thing. But the other thing that seems to have happened is that she seems to have sort of rehearsed this abduction in that there was a reported case of another small child being taken from near her home and then taken to the railway station and abandoned. And the railway station is where Madame Fiquet's husband worked. And it seems to me, just reading the witness statements that were quite brief, that he might have persuaded her just to let the child go. So it was as though she'd rehearsed it. And she certainly seemed to be quite fixated on wanting to be a midwife. And she wanted to try to do this was a profession that was becoming more of a medical profession than just something that local women did. And so she tried to complete the training, but she kept being kind of kicked out of the classes because she was drunk or drugged or something, so was considered unreliable. And then she just. This sort of didn't deter her. She still pretended to be a midwife and went and ingratiated herself among young women at maternity services who she obviously identified as being vulnerable. And so there was a kind of compulsion there that was. It wasn't just, I want to be a midwife because I find it interesting, and I want to help women. It was a compulsive behavior. She was drawn to it for some reason that perhaps she couldn't articulate. And that's one thing that she. In all the interrogations, the one thing that she does reliably articulate is this idea of, I don't know what it was that made me do it. I don't know what it was that pushed me towards this. And she would sometimes say, oh, it was a spirit guide, because she was into spiritualism. Sometimes she would say it was another. It was something else guiding her or something. Sometimes she would say it was the morphine. She said it was the drugs. You know, I took lots of morphine, or I took chloroform. That must have been it. Or it was a spirit guide. So she was trying to say there was something in me that pushed Me to do this, I don't know what it was. So I think that to me hinted at some sort of compulsion that she couldn't quite articulate.
- [21:33]
B
Yeah. And you've introduced her testimony, which I do want to talk about as well, because it's complex, it's hard to keep track of, it's kind of all over the place. But there seems to be a strategy. Tell us about what you think about her. Tell us about her testimony and what you think about it.
- [21:49]
C
The hardest part of the book to write, I felt, was the section where I was talking about the investigation because it was all the bits of information that came together that contradicted themselves and didn't make this clear picture. Now, obviously, when something goes to trial, there is a narrative that is placed upon the story. The case is made by the prosecutors. So they'd already decided what the case against her was. And then she has to respond to the questions. And then at the. I mean, her defender has the chance to kind of, to challenge some of those accusations, but they don't have control of the overall narrative in that sense. So essentially what they did was they just presented witness after witness who could testify that she had a terrible character and was unreliable and did lots of strange things and was probably hysteric and mad and all the. It was, there was not very much coherence in terms of the presentation of her psychiatric state. It was, on the one hand they didn't believe that they, they kind of proved, if you like, that the drugs didn't make her mad because they felt that drugs had a stabilizing influence rather than mania inducing influence. So they said it wasn't the drugs, the drugs were incidental. It wasn't this, that whole kind of idea was that there was no motive and they couldn't really find out what it was. So they, what they wanted to do was just to show the jury that it was plausible that she'd done it because she'd done all these other things. So it was really lots of circumstantial evidence. And so was your question really about how she presents herself in the trial?
- [23:42]
B
Uh, yeah, that's. They're just the, the, the issues with the trial in itself and how hard it is to kind of figure out what's going. How hard it is to figure out what's going on at all. But how she talks about herself is very interesting to me. Yeah.
- [23:58]
C
So interesting thing about the trial is that there's. Note that they said there's a newspaper in France or a periodical called the Gazette Des Tribunal, which is a kind of court reporting periodical. Now, this case did not appear in that because I guess it wasn't important enough to be recorded. And if it had, then there would have been a verbatim recording of the trial. But because there wasn't, it was all reported by journalists. And so what they did was they did a kind of edited version of the trial. And so whenever Madame Fiquet spoke, they. They tended to. To say things like, she enters into these long explanations that it isn't worth recounting. So we don't actually get exactly what she said, but she sort of presented her. She was quite shocking, I think, to the audience in that they were often somewhat aghast at her behavior, at the fact that she, she was seen as sort of being quite self dramatizing at the beginning. It suggested that she had to be carried into the courtroom on a bed because she was too ill to walk. And this was suggested as being sort of feigned or self dramatizing. In fact, her medical state was really quite bad, partly because she'd withdrawn from morphine while she was in psychiatric hospital, but also because, you know, the effects of that and also the effects of her poverty and also the other illnesses that possibly were real was that she just was in quite a bad state physically. But then she was sort of just presented as like ranting on and on about herself and about how, you know, trying to sort of justify things and. Yeah, so she didn't really. Well, first of all, we don't have exactly what she said, but we just have accounts of how she. The impression that she gave, which was really quite negative, I think.
- [26:05]
B
And when she's being in question, she is. We have a record of that. But she's not a whole lot clearer, right?
- [26:12]
C
No, no, not really. No. No. Even, even by, by the time of the trial, her account is not stable at all of what happened. She just says things like, oh, I've forgotten what happened. I can't remember. It was all in a cloud of hazy memory because I'd taken this drug and it was true. I think one thing that was definitely true is that she was in withdrawal because she said that her syringe had broken. She was an injecting drug user. She said her syringe had broken and that she'd taken it to a silversmith to be repaired. And the silversmith testified that that was true. So that I think is a fact. And she still had some morphine, but the way she was taking it was to mix it in a kind of sugar liquid solution and she was drinking it. So presumably it would be administering it a bit like methadone or something like that. But presumably that meant she wasn't accessing the dose that she was used to having. She was taking a really high dose of morphine. By this point, the doctors said, oh, she can't possibly have been taking that much. It's not possible. But I have found other cases of people taking similar doses, so it was possible. It was certainly a big effort for her to get hold of these drugs and she went to great. To, you know, great efforts to get them. So she was in withdrawal. She did have some. She was taking other drugs as well. At the same time, she said that the child, Henriette, who she'd taken back to her house, either accidentally drank some of this morphine sugar solution or possibly she gave it to her because this is part of her history. Was this administering of medicines to other people, that kind of profile? So, yeah, no, her story is never stable. That's. What's the enduring mystery at the end, is that they can't. They sort of say, well, she did do it and we think she was responsible, but we're not quite sure how much because we don't really know. She's very evasive and constantly able to evade questions in the truth.
- [28:35]
B
Yeah, it is impressive because there's a narrative where she snaps, right. She can't get her job as a midwife. She can't. She's. There's no needle, so she's withdrawn from morphine. She tried to kill her husband. Maybe that doesn't work out. She's like. She has this lifetime of disappointment. She quits her job, kidnaps a child and kills her. Like that's a narrative. But then there's a way to understand this narrative where she's just quite clever and cold.
- [29:07]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think that's where. So, yeah, the calculated deliberateness of what she was doing. This is where the idea of the factitious disorder, I think, comes in, because this is one of the things I'm hypothesizing in the book, is that she seems to have had what psychiatrists call factitious disorder, which is an umbrella term for simulated illnesses. So we might be more familiar with concepts like Munchausen's and Munchausen's by proxy, where you induce illness, you either pretend you're ill, or you induce it in yourself or another person in order to get attention.
- [29:47]
B
She does a lot of things that are clearly very problematic right up to and including murder. But the outrage and the way she's considered. And the fact that this becomes an affair in the way only a French thing can be an affair, has a lot to do with expectations for gender.
- [30:09]
C
Yeah, so that's really interesting because you have concepts throughout historical periods of what constitutes virtue and what it means to be a virtuous woman or a virtuous man in any particular period, or a virtuous person, if you're not thinking in terms of terms of man, woman. And at this time, you know, we have to remember there was no really functioning contraception. I mean, there would have been certain contraceptive methods, but people didn't really have contraception, and particularly things like what we would call birth control pills and so on. But women still got pregnant, young girls got pregnant. So the idea was that you had to sort of live within certain parameters and live a certain way in order to be considered a good person or someone who was admitted to society, I suppose. And those values were different for the working classes than they were for the middle classes. But there was this idea of the sort of virtuous working classes who were still virtuous and well behaved, even though they had difficult lives. But the interesting thing about what you've said is that she did some things that were quite bad, but also some things that were not necessarily considered atypical. I mean, taking the example of infanticide, now, when women committed infanticide, it was usually obviously, you know, kind of desperate straights, women who were in desperate situations, who had a baby, maybe they were very young, or maybe they were in a particularly precarious situation, or perhaps they had lots and lots of children already. Sometimes they did experience a genuine psychosis as well. That. I mean, that still happens sometimes, but usually the courts, when. When these things came to court with infanticides, juries tended to be quite lenient because they usually understood that these were acts, the extreme acts that were carried out in extremists. And so they tended not to punish women too much for that because they. I think they recognized that usually it was just a tragedy. But in the case of Marie Francois Fiquet, so I think she possibly may have committed infanticide or aborted one of her children, or it may just have died, but she certainly had a baby that was dead and disposed of. But I think the thing in her case that was different was the calculatedness of the way she sought out situations where she could get access to children, whether it was through pretending to be a midwife and accessing young women who may have been looking to have an abortion, or they may just have been wanting someone to look after them, but because she sought these situations out and she was manipulative and calculated. And also the abduction of Henriette was so shocking to people because they could not see a motive. So within a woman who. An infanticide, let's say, often people could join the dots and say, well, this person did that because of X. When they looked at Mel and Fouquet and they could not understand why she would do this thing, they only. All they could see was this must be a bad element that we have to eliminate. And I think that comes through in the press reporting where she's very much presented as a woman dressed in black, a mysterious woman who lured a child. And all the good characters in the story, like little innocent children dressed in white dresses and carrying white garlands of flowers at Henriette's funeral. All these details of innocence contrasted with guilt when in fact she was one of them. And she just seems to have reacted in this really extraordinary way to things that happened to her and appeared to have no kind of conscience or. But again, she couldn't explain what drove her, what she had this compulsion. So I think that she really was the opposite of whatever the culturally sanctioned vision of a working class woman was. She was the opposite.
- [34:46]
B
So we have a situation in this courtroom where there's no real question about who committed it. Right. So then we're trying to figure out why. And she can't give a compelling exam under explanation for why she's doing this. What is her. And her defense lawyer tries to mount kind of basically what we would call an insanity plea.
- [35:08]
C
Well, what he, he did was he kind of surprised. So in, in France, there's a person called the judge. The juge d' instruction is actually the investigator. And what we would call the judge is called the president of the trial. So what her defense lawyer did was he mounted a kind of surprise theory towards the end. So in his speech at the end, he basically said, he went away and read all these textbooks about hysteria and said she's definitely got some kind of hysteria because this doesn't add up. And so he kind of came up with this fully formed theory of madness, or a kind of madness. He was arguing this has been recognized in other cases. And it went against. His aim was to kind of discredit the psychiatric testimony. So the expert witnesses who testified that she was sane, effectively, he tried to undermine the credibility of what they'd said by going and looking at other experts who said something different. So in a sense, I think what he was getting at was somewhat related to what I'm saying in the book, which is that there does seem to have been some kind of history of compulsive behavior that was rooted in perhaps a trauma or maybe it wasn't. One of the things I want to say in the book is that perhaps the trauma wasn't so great. It's not to minimize what happened to her, but it was something that many women experienced all the time. But that perhaps she had this compulsion in her to be famous or there's this idea of ambition. She wanted to be notoriety. So there was something there that seems to have been different. And I think that's what her, her defense was trying to say in the end. But that wasn't really accepted by the, the jury. So what they did is they did accept the recommendation for attenuated circumstances or mitigating circumstances, we might say, but they didn't accept that she was a hysteric.
- [37:28]
B
All right, so mitigating circumstances then led to what?
- [37:34]
C
So it meant that she couldn't be executed and she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor instead of execution.
- [37:45]
B
And what do you know? What do we know about that?
- [37:48]
C
So we know that at the time people were transported to penal colonies. But what I know from a historian called Odell Krakowicz, who's written all about women in penal colonies, is that not very many women were transported to penal colonies. French women were given the choice. They could stay and serve out their sentence in France or they could go to the penal colony. Or sometimes they didn't get the choice because they tended to prefer, they wanted to send young women who could then populate the colonies after they had served out their sentences. And so Madame Fiquet, who was already 31 and not in great health and had a 20 year sentence, I think wasn't seen as a good breeder to send to the colonies, especially given her history. I think they probably thought that wasn't a good idea. So I think the likelihood is that she went to prison in France. And I think she is quite unlikely. She lived very long.
- [38:52]
B
She certainly would not have served 20 years.
- [38:55]
C
I doubt it. It's possible, but I doubt it. So probably need to go and find out. Second edition.
- [39:02]
B
I mean, you haven't, you did look and she hasn't. There's no record of her being transported anywhere.
- [39:08]
C
No, there's no. I did look in the, the archives of the, the Archie Rue du Tremere in Marseille, which has all the records of people transported. She definitely wasn't transported to the penal colony.
- [39:21]
B
Yeah, but this happens. People just disappear. I mean, it's the nature of the historical work, particular when you're talking about people who wouldn't. She would have left no trace at all had she not been a murderer. And so, of course, you know, it's very easy for her to just simply drop out.
- [39:44]
C
Yeah.
- [39:44]
B
So we don't know. Ah, what a case. One final question about her, and I'm. Do you. Is she. I mean, there's. There are things about her that are clearly outstanding, indifferent. Like she. She clearly is not well. But how far out of the realm of normalcy is her case? I mean, she snaps, she kills someone. Most people don't do that. But. But like what? Her life in other ways seems fairly.
- [40:16]
C
I think she's quite far outside of normal. I think a lot of the things that happened to her would have been fairly typical of women of her class with her sort of personality. Perhaps she was a bit incautious, reckless by temperament, which meant she got pregnant. But she did get married, she did have jobs, she had. It just seems to be that what happened to her, that is very mysterious, or we will never know, is that she lost these babies. And she reacted to that loss in a way that seems to have got increasingly pathological, let's say. And so I think many of the things she did were very atypical. The poisoning, the pretending to be a midwife. I think possibly, you know, that fraudulent type of behavior maybe isn't that uncommon, but the motive for it seems quite dark. I don't think this is something that just. I'm not making the case that, oh, this could happen to anybody. I think this was an exceptional reaction, but these exceptional reactions do happen. And one of the things I say in the book is I talk about the idea of the repetition compulsion, which is this Freudian idea, but it is recognized in psychiatry and psychology the idea that you revisit difficult experiences in order to try and gain control over them. And I think that's what seems to have become the compulsion for her.
- [42:00]
B
Yeah, her response is very different. Many, many women lost children. Many, many women, you know, got pregnant at 15. Many women. Many women don't have relationships with priests, but they have adulterous relationships. And there her reaction, far outside the norm. But there is this way that she experienced, you know, the becoming addicted to morphine seems like something that could happen very quite easily.
- [42:33]
C
Oh, that could definitely happen easily. But then again, I think the reason she gained access to morphine was because of her. Because of her unusual behavior, which was constantly seeking out medical treatment advice, access to doctors and so on. She. She was really very preoccupied with medical things, and I think that was partly that. She seems to have been quite intelligent, and I think that maybe it was just curiosity. She was quite a curious person. Other characters in the story seem quite incurious. Like her husband doesn't seem to have been very curious. She was very curious, and I think that may have been what led her to actually access morphine because she was constantly saying she was ill and people of her class typically would not have had the access that she had to that drug. It was something that was quite established as a sort of middle. The middle class and upper classes who had money were more likely to be morphine addicts. It wasn't something that working class people really had access to in the same way until, you know, it wasn't. Didn't become the drug of the poor until later. I wouldn't say much later.
- [43:54]
B
Fascinating case. So what's next?
- [43:58]
C
Are you gonna.
- [43:59]
B
The. The what you were working on while you. When you found this case that distracted your life for three years?
- [44:04]
C
Yeah, so I did. Originally it was. The idea was to make this a chapter in the book about morphine addiction, but it didn't really fit, really, because it ended up not being about morphine at all, but being about this person's life. So the next thing is. Yeah, I'd like to finish off the project on morphine.
- [44:25]
B
Oh, thank you so much for joining me today, Susanna.
- [44:28]
C
Thank you. It's been really great to talk to you. Thank you.
- [44:32]
B
Yeah, an absolute joy. All right. And have a lovely rest of your day and a nice holiday season.
- [44:39]
C
You too. Thank you very much.