ROUGH IN BRUTAL PRINT Frail shadow of a woman in the flesh, These very eyes of mine saw yesterday, Would I re-tell this story of your woes, Would I have heart to do you detriment By pinning all this shame and sorrow plain To that poor chignon,—staying with me still, Though form and face have well-nigh faded now,— But that men read it, rough in brutal print, As two years since some functionary's voice Rattled all this—and more by very much— Into the ear of vulgar Court and Crowd? Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, 2:679-89 (Browning apostro­ phizing Mme Debacker [Clara de Millefleurs], as he recalls an occasion on which he encountered her in the course of a stroll through Tailleville) Rough in Brutal Print The Legal Sources of Browning's Red Cotton Night-Cap Country Mark Siegchrist OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS : COLUMBUS Copyright © 1981 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Siegchrist, Mark, 1944— Rough in brutal print. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Browning, Robert, 1812-1889. Red cotton night-cap country—Sources. 2. Law in literature. 3. Caen (France)—Biography. 4. Mellerio family. 5. Mellerio, Antonio, 1827-1870. 6. Debacker, Anna Sophie Trayer, 1830-1887. I. Title PR4222.R353S55 821'.8 81-3993 ISBN 0-8142-0327-2 AACR2 For my mother CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1 Introduction 5 Chapter 2 The 1872 Pleadings 25 Chapter 3 The 1872 Trial 37 Maitre Allou—the Mellerio Heirs 38 Maitre Pilet des Jardins—Mme Debacker 50 Maitre Carel—la Delivrande 67 Maitre Allou—the Mellerio Heirs (Rebuttal) 81 Maitre Carel—la Delivrande (Rebuttal) 91 Summary by the Public Prosecutor 96 Chapter 4 The 1872 Judgment 115 Chapter 5 Strategies of Discrepancy 129 Chapter 6 Later Developments 153 The 1873 Briefs 154 The 1873 Appeal 159 The 1873 Decision 168 The 1874 Appeal 169 The Mellerio Family History 170 Appendix Concurrent Lawsuits 173 vii CONTENTS The Mellerio Family Tree 176 Addenda to List of Published Pseudonyms 178 Recent History of the Chateau of Tailleville 181 Notes 183 Index 185 Vll l Ackno wledgmen ts I am grateful to everyone who helped in the preparation of this small study, and I would especially like to thank the following for their various kindnesses: Agnes Scott College, for a grant for the summer of 1972 for travel to Normandy to obtain the documents; Huguette Kaiser, professor of French at Agnes Scott Col­ lege, for her diplomatic tact in dealing with the French bureaucracy; Louis Bolloc'h, Procureur de la Republique, Tribunal de Grande Instance de Caen, and Gildas Bernard, Directeur des Services d'Archives du Calvados, for making the original documents available for study; the University of Caen, for permission to use the library; Francois Mellerio, of the Mellerio-Meller jewelry firm in Paris, for allowing me to examine their privately printed family history; Jack W. Herring, director of the Browning Armstrong Li­ brary at Baylor University, for providing the Journal de Caen text of the 1873 appeal from the Meynell Collection; Roma King, professor of English at Ohio University, for his generosity in sharing the results of his own work with the Journal de Caen article on the 1873 appeal; Brigitte Coste, assistant professor of French in the De­ partment of Foreign Languages at Marquette University, for her linguistic finesse; Michael K. McChrystal, assistant dean of the Marquette University Law School, for his expertise in "terms of art"; and Carol Worm, whose typing skills are as extraordinary as her patience. IX ROUGH IN BRUTAL PRINT Advertisement I premise, and wish to have distinctly borne in mind by any reader of this poem, that it is no more nor less than a mere account treated poetically, of certain problematic facts taken just as I find them given, by parties to a dispute, in the pub­ lished pleadings of their respective legal advocates and the formal decision of a Court of Law. Each and every such statement, therefore, affecting the conduct of either party, must be considered as depending absolutely upon public au­ thority and pretending to no sort of guarantee for its truth obtainable from private sources of information—into none of which have I the will or power to enquire. My business confines itself to working a sum from arbitrary or imaginary figures: if these be correct, the result should follow as I give it—not otherwise. Nor would I attempt the working at all, had not the parties themselves begun by proposing the fig­ ures for examination. No fact has been purposely changed, although conversations, declared and described, could only be re-produced by a guess at something equivalent. Either party may—and one must have—exaggerated or extenuated or invented: my concern is exclusively with these presumable exaggerations and extenuations and inventions as they were presented to and decided upon by the Court of the Country, as they exist in print, and as they may be procured by anybody. R. B. (Letter to George Smith, Browning's publisher of Red Cotton Night- Cap Country, 8 March 1873, in New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Wil­ liam Clyde DeVane and Kenneth Leslie Knickerbocker [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950], pp. 211-12. The editors remark that this paragraph is presumably an outline of Browning's "first defense against a libel action" [p. 211].) 1 Introduction Although Browning wholeheartedly shared his public's admiration of The Ring and the Book (1868-69),l in all the twenty years—and fifteen volumes—that followed its publi­ cation only once more did he undertake the same sort of proj ­ ect as he had when he set out to resuscitate the Old Yellow Book. That poem was Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), and although it deals with a local and contemporary French scandal instead of a remote seventeenth-century Ital­ ian crime, it closely resembles The Ring and the Book in its aim to bring out of a historical episode the full imaginative truth from beneath the surface of the public record. Both poems begin with legal transcripts as their raw material, and both are concerned to display the ability of unprejudiced sympathy to arrive at a more sensitive understanding of the actors' real motives than is possible for either the biased self­ ishness of interested witnesses or the impersonal machinery of institutionalized inquiry. Consequently, in order to demonstrate this superior ca­ pacity of the imaginative vision as impressively as possible, both poems lay heavy stress on the extent of their reliance on publicly available testimony as well as on the strictness of their adherence to those directly reported facts. The twirling about of the Old Yellow Book by its cover and the verbatim quotation of evidence submitted to the French court are both dramatic gestures whose effect is to assure the reader that whenever he may come across occasional passages of inter­ pretation in these poems he can rely on their being based solidly on the "pure crude fact"2 of the actual events. Both these poems insist that their art is essentially not a fictional­ ROUGH IN BRUTAL PRINT izing transformation of objective fact but rather a revivifica­ tion, a discovery of the original truth hidden beneath an ob­ scuring crust of documentation. The reiterated claims of each of these works to full historical accuracy are important ele­ ments in determining the quality of a reader's response. Ev­ ery observing eye must, of course, inevitably interpret what it sees; nevertheless, for a reader to draw interpretation as hon­ estly as possible from a given set of historical data is undeni­ ably a different sort of experience from drawing that inter­ pretation from a set of fictions that he realizes has been deliberately invented for the occasion. There is no question here of making judgments about any type of inherent supe­ riority: the one set simply has a particular sense of being grounded in a public reality that the other does not, and it therefore elicits a different kind of response. Much of the effectiveness of these two works, therefore, depends on the completeness of the reader's confidence in their factual accuracy, and thus they provide unusually op­ portune occasions to study the processes by which Browning selected and arranged the material he chose as vehicles to present his themes. Much of the interest of the studies by Hodell and Gest, which compare the original material of the Old Yellow Book with Browning's version of those docu­ ments in The Ring and the Book, lies in their discovery of a far greater degree of discrepancy from that original material than could possibly have been suspected from Browning's repeated insistence within that poem on his faithful adher­ ence to the details in his source.3 These studies show clearly that, once Browning had decided on what his own interpre­ tation would be, he did not scruple to distort or even simply to omit fragments of evidence that inconveniently did not suggest the meaning he had decided that his murder story should display. Any writer is, of course, perfectly free to do whatever he pleases with his source material; but for Brown­ ing to have proclaimed his historical fidelity so loudly, while covertly smudging so many recalcitrant details, demon­ strates his awareness of how important that impression of fidelity is to his themes, while it reveals to what an unsus­ pected degree that impression is actually the result of a delib­ erate distortion of raw material. INTRODUCTION By way of sampling in The Ring and the Book the kinds and degrees of alteration and omission involved in what so strenuously purports to be an accurate transcription of his­ torical fact, let us glance briefly at the information brought foward by Hodell and Gest.