Chapter Five: Copycats
One of the red herrings Christie cunningly employed in The Moving Finger was a copycat. Inspired by the outbreak of poison pen letters landing in mailboxes all over Lymstock, Christie’s Copycat rode the coattails of the original writer in the hopes of thwarting a potential romance, and when said hurdle was cleared, and should the stars and planets align, they hoped to secure the affections of the object of their desire for themselves. (Sound familiar?) However, the only thing the Copycat actually managed to accomplish was muddying the waters, which nearly allowed the genuine Black Hat of the book to get away with murder. (Thank goodness for Miss Marple.)
Seems, much like their fictional counterparts, the residents of Tulle weren’t above a bit of copycatting either.
Whilst it’s generally accepted that Angele Laval wrote around one-hundred-and-ten of the known malicious missives — another hundred to two hundred (depending on the source) of these noxious notes bedeviled the citizenry of Tulle. Meaning there was at least one, but probably many more, copycats at work….including Marie-Louise Laval.
Angele’s mother.
It’s unclear if Marie-Louise knowingly provided fodder for her daughter’s letters, if she wrote letters to help disguise her daughter’s objectives, or if she owned her own fair share of spleen in need of venting and independently took advantage of the situation. Equally uncertain is how these copycats affected Angele, did her escalation occur in response to the evolution of Mouray & Marie-Antoinette’s relationship, because she needed to find newer & bigger ways to feed her addiction, or to differentiate her caustic correspondence from those riding her coattails?
Either way, Tulle’s copycats were put on notice when newspapers named Tiger’s Eyes on January 22, 1922.
Dr. Locard’s final report, the source of their scoop, proved divisive. A small minority of townspeople could not reconcile the Laval’s upright reputations with the venomous, lewd, and repugnant ideas and images filling the letters they’d received or seen. The majority of Tulle’s citizenry, either ecstatic at finally having someone to blame or hiding a guilty copycat conscience, immediately turned on Angele and Marie-Louise. Overnight the pair became social pariahs — newspapers splashed their names across their front pages, friends and neighbors shunned them, people hissed and spat on them in the street, urchins threw mud at them whenever they dared to walk through town, and their chosen pew in church would immediately empty when they sat down.
Compounding their woes, and despite Dr. Locard corroborating Magistrate Richard’s occultists’ prediction, the French Minister of Justice sacked Richard on January 28, 1922 (according to the NY Times). Leaving Angele and her mother to live under a heavy cloud of condemnation while anticipating the appointment of a new Magistrate who’d level official charges against them.
Sadly, this constant state of anxiety proved unbearable for the pair.
Ruffaud Pond
On March 13, 1922, Angele and her mother set out in their Sunday best. Sticking to scantly populated country lanes, they walked to Ruffaud Pond. Where they bound each other’s hands (or legs, as reported in some papers) with reeds & vines and jumped into the deep. Again there’s some discrepancies in the reports of whether woodcutters noticed a wet, shivering woman sitting alone under a tree. Who, upon spotting them, popped up and threw herself back into the pond. Whereupon the woodcutters fished her and her mother’s body from the water. — OR — The woodcutters alerted by Angele’s cries and thrashing raced to the pond and saved her. The authorities, once alerted to the events at said pond, recovered Marie-Louise’s body the next morning.
The first photo of Angele, taken paparazzi style from a hidden photographer on a nearby roof, while she took a walk.
Whichever way this tragedy unfolded, the outcome was the same Marie-Louise was dead.
Owing to the fact Angele lived whilst her mother died, the newspapers proclaimed Marie-Louise Tiger’s Eye’s latest victim. Theorizing that either: A) Angele and her mother slowly came to realize suicide was the only way for them to avoid the humiliation of a public trial — but when push came to shove Angele couldn’t follow through. B) Angele manipulated Marie-Louise into a suicide pact, then chickened out. C) Angele tricked her mother into committing suicide, without ever intending to follow through — to garner Tulle’s sympathy.
Whether Marie-Louise fought off Angele’s attempts to save her life or Angele left her to drown — there’s little doubt the daughter watched her mother die. A scene that undoubtedly left an indelible mark on Angele and rather than attempting suicide for a second or third time (some sources suggest she tried to end her own life prior to the attempt that claimed her mother’s), she fled Tulle.
Marie-Louise’s funeral procession lead by her son (and Angele’s brother) Jean.
In her absence, Angele was formally indicted.
When authorities located and arrested her in a nearby town a few weeks later, in April of 1922, Angele’s quoted as saying she’d run because, “…she simply could not endure the shame of facing the people of Tulle after the charges against her.” (Washington Times, April 22, 1922) Obviously viewing her as both a suicide and a flight risk, Angele was remanded to Limoges’s lunatic asylum. (However, there is some evidence to suggest Angele’s brother Jean, upon learning the prefecture had located his sister, may’ve asked that she be admitted to the asylum.)
Whilst inside, prosecutors scrabbled through lengthy law tomes trying to find something to charge Angele with.
Even though the papers loudly proclaimed Angele engineered her mother’s death, there were no witnesses or evidence to support her purported villainy. Adding insult to injury, since the act of composing or sending poison pen letters wasn’t a crime — authorities couldn’t prosecuted for Angele for murder. As she never raised a weapon, other than her pen, against Auguste Gilbert. Nor could they do anything about the marriages, friendships, and careers the malevolent messages destroyed by revealing the truth.
But what of the lives fractured by Angele’s lies?
Turns out, that bone still possessed a bit of meat.
Prosecutors determined they could charge Angele with public defamation. However, thanks to the statute of limitations, they could only mine the last fifteen of her poison pen letters for evidence. Despite needing to ignore the majority of her falsehoods Angele’s trial started on December 4, 1922.
My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2023
My 52 Weeks With Christie 