former pupil. He himself had failed in life, but he saw his
rival prosperous, arrogant in his prosperity, threatening, dangerous
to his peace of mind; he envied and feared as well as hated him.
Cruel, cunning and sinister, Fenayrou spent the next two months in the
meditation of a revenge that was not only to remove the man he feared,
but was to give him a truly fiendish opportunity of satisfying his
ferocious hatred.

And the wife what of her share in the business? Had she also come to
hate Aubert? Or did she seek to expiate her guilt by assisting her
husband in the punishment of her seducer? A witness at the trial
described Mme. Fenayrou as "a soft paste" that could be moulded equally
well to vice or virtue, a woman destitute of real feeling or strength of
will, who, under the direction of her husband, carried out implicitly,
precisely and carefully her part in an atrocious murder, whose only
effort to prevent the commission of such a deed was to slip away into a
church a few minutes before she was to meet the man she was decoying to
his death, and pray that his murder might be averted.

Her religious sense, like the images in the hat of Louis XI., was a
source of comfort and consolation in the doing of evil, but powerless
to restrain her from the act itself, in the presence of a will stronger
than her own. At the time of his death Aubert contemplated marriage, and
had advertised for a wife. If Mme. Fenayrou was aware of this, it may
have served to stimulate her resentment against her lover, but there
seems little reason to doubt that, left to herself, she would never have
had the will or the energy to give that resentment practical expression.
It required the dictation of the vindictive and malevolent Fenayrou to
crystallise her hatred of Aubert into a deliberate participation in his
murder.

Eight or nine miles north-west of Paris lies the small town of Chatou, a
pleasant country resort for tired Parisians. Here Madeleine Brohan, the
famous actress, had inhabited a small villa, a two-storied building. At
the beginning of 1882 it was to let. In the April of that year a person
of the name of "Hess" agreed to take it at a quarterly rent of 1,200
francs, and paid 300 in advance. "Hess" was no other than Fenayrou--the
villa that had belonged to Madeleine Brohan the scene chosen for
Aubert's murder. Fenayrou was determined to spare no expense in the
execution of his design: it was to cost him some 3,000 francs before he