On the morning of August 27, 1830, servants at the Château de Saint-Leu found the 74-year-old Prince de Condé dead in his quarters, hanged by handkerchiefs tied to a window handle. Those who knew the frail old man found the scene almost impossible to believe: he had grown so feeble in recent months that he could barely tie his own shoelaces. Yet the authorities ruled it suicide, dismissed the case without meaningful inquiry, and the royal court moved on. The rumor that the prince’s longtime mistress, Sophie Dawes, had murdered him—possibly with the connivance of King Louis-Philippe himself—never died, but no investigation would ever prove it.
Sophie Dawes had come a long way from the beaches of the Isle of Wight. Born on September 29, 1790, into a family of ten children headed by an alcoholic fisherman who dabbled in smuggling, she spent part of her childhood in a Newport workhouse and survived by collecting winkles from the shore. Six of her siblings died young. By her teens she was working as a servant, then as a chambermaid at a Portsmouth hotel, and eventually drifted to London, where she worked as a milliner’s assistant and sold oranges after losing that job.
She had developed a fierce instinct for survival. That instinct carried her into the orbit of Louis-Henri de Bourbon, Duke of Bourbon and future Prince de Condé, one of the wealthiest men in Europe and a prince of the French royal blood. He was 34 years her senior, a widower who would never remarry, and in 1810, at a Piccadilly brothel where Sophie had taken up residence, the duke won a bizarre card game against two English aristocrats for the right to take her as his mistress. By 1811 she was installed in a London house with her mother, studying classical and modern languages, philosophy, and court manners under a tutor.
The duke paid her an astonishing £8,000 a year. When the Napoleonic Wars ended and the French nobility began returning to Paris, Sophie followed. To legitimize her presence at court, the duke arranged a marriage between Sophie and Adrien Victor de Feucheres, an officer of the Royal Guard, who was told she was the duke’s natural daughter and the widow of a Richard Clark. The duke made the new husband a baron and bestowed a dowry of 200,000 francs on Sophie.
She entered French society, became a noted Parisian socialite, and was well received at court. The fiction collapsed in 1822 when her husband learned the true nature of her relationship with the prince. He separated from her, returned the dowry, and obtained a judicial separation in 1827. When King Louis XVIII learned of the deception, he banned Sophie from court, calling her no more than a common street wench.
The affair continued regardless. Sophie weathered the scandal, cultivated relationships with members of the king’s wider family, and by 1829, with the prince in his early seventies and without a legitimate heir, pressured him into signing a will that left two million francs and several properties to her and a larger portion of the estate to the Duke of Aumale, son of the future King Louis-Philippe. In 1830, after the July Revolution forced Charles X to abdicate and Louis-Philippe became King of the French, Sophie was allowed to return to court. She lived at the Château de Chantilly, installed family members as staff, and became known as the queen of Chantilly.
But that summer, the old prince, unhappy with Louis-Philippe’s succession, was considering changing his will and planning a move to Switzerland. He died before he could do either. The suspicious circumstances of his death, the dismissal of the case, and the swift confirmation of the will enriched Sophie and the Duke of Aumale, while the collateral heirs’ challenges failed. Sophie returned to England, sold her French estates, bought a manor in Hampshire and a house in London, and placed her elderly mother in a convent.
She died of dropsy on December 15, 1840, leaving an estate worth £500,000, the equivalent of tens of millions today. Her journey from workhouse to fortune remained a subject of fascination in France for decades. Half a century later, on the other side of the world, another woman’s rise and fall unfolded in far bloodier terms. Queen Min, born on November 17, 1851, into the aristocratic Yeoheung Min clan, married King Gojong of Korea in 1866.
Their early marriage was difficult: Gojong preferred drinking and banqueting to governing, and favored concubines over his wife. But by the early 1880s, Queen Min had removed the king’s powerful concubines from the palace and effectively ruled in his place. Her reforms were ambitious. Inspired by Chinese diplomatic writings advocating modernization, she opened Korea to Western trade, began reforming the military with modern armaments, drew Korea closer to Russia to counter Japan, invited American teachers, sent fact-finding missions to the United States, established schools for girls, reformed the bureaucracy and taxation, imported steam engines, built telegraph lines, reformed the coinage, and introduced modern agricultural methods.
The goal was to make Korea strong enough to resist outside invasion, particularly from Japan. The reforms faced fierce opposition. A military rebellion in 1882, the Imo Incident, was put down but allowed China and Japan to meddle further. An attempted coup in 1884 by disillusioned aristocrats failed but pointed to what was coming.
In 1894, the Donghak Peasant Revolution broke out across the country and was suppressed in the spring of 1895, but it provided a pretext for renewed Japanese and Chinese intervention and triggered the First Sino-Japanese War. Japan, now determined to make Korea a vassal state, concluded that Queen Min was the primary obstacle. She had driven Korea’s modernization and fended off Japanese influence for over a decade. The Japanese decided she had to be removed.
On the morning of October 8, 1895, more than fifty Japanese men, including military officers, entered the Gyeongbokgung Palace with the complicity of hundreds of Korean soldiers. The queen tried to disguise herself and flee but was caught in an outer chamber and killed by troops led by a Korean officer. Her body was burned in an apparent effort to conceal the manner of her death. The assassination, orchestrated by the Japanese minister in Korea, sparked outrage at home and abroad.
A sham investigation charged fifty-six people, but all were acquitted for lack of evidence. The murder backfired. Instead of diminishing resistance, it strengthened opposition to Japan. In 1897, Korea was declared the Empire of Korea, with Gojong as emperor and Queen Min posthumously honored as an empress.
The new empire drifted closer to Russia, but that protection failed. Japan defeated Russia in 1905, and in 1910 the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty made Korea the first major territory of the expanding Japanese Empire. Queen Min’s reforms, intended to protect her country, had not been enough. Back in France, a different kind of scandal surrounded Marguerite Steinheil, born Marguerite Jeanne Japy on April 16, 1869, into a prosperous middle-class family.
She married an artist nearly twice her age in 1890 and moved to Paris, where she became a woman of the demimonde, celebrated for her beauty and discreet affairs. Her most famous lover was Félix Faure, President of France. On February 16, 1899, Faure emerged from his office at the Élysée Palace feeling unwell. He died that evening.
Most accounts agree he had been with Marguerite in his office, engaged in sexual activity, when he suffered a stroke or heart attack. Some newspapers at the time reported only that he had died suddenly of an apoplectic seizure, noting his existing heart problems. But Marguerite’s involvement eventually became public knowledge and followed her for the rest of her life. Conspiracy theories attached themselves to the case, including claims that she had poisoned Faure on behalf of a supposed Jewish syndicate connected to the Dreyfus Affair.
No evidence ever supported such charges. The scandal damaged her reputation in some circles but enhanced it in others; her salon remained popular, and she continued her affairs. On May 31, 1908, police found Marguerite bound and gagged in her Paris apartment. Her husband and her mother were dead elsewhere in the residence, strangled.
Marguerite claimed four individuals dressed in black robes had entered the home, tied her up, and killed the others. Police were suspicious, noting that she had been spared and nothing substantial had been stolen. They arrested her on suspicion of evidence tampering. Her trial in 1909 became a national sensation, with the judge openly hostile and the press calling the case the Impassioned Crime.
Marguerite remained consistent, blaming the murders on the four robbers, and in November 1909 the jury found her not guilty. The truth of what happened that night has never been established. She moved to England, published memoirs defending herself, remarried in 1917 to a British lawyer and peer, and lived quietly in the south of England until her death on July 17, 1954, at the age of eighty-five. An even darker mystery concluded more than a century after it began.
Baroness Mary Vetsera, born on March 19, 1871, into a socially ambitious Austrian family, became the mistress of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary. Their affair, begun when she was in her teens and he in his late twenties, was intense and well known at court by late 1888. On January 29, 1889, Rudolf excused himself from a family dinner, claiming another engagement, and traveled to his hunting lodge at Mayerling with Mary. The next morning, servants found both dead.
Rudolf sat lifeless by the bed, bleeding from the mouth; Mary lay motionless on the bed. The official version claimed Rudolf had died of a heart aneurysm, but that explanation collapsed quickly. Evidence pointed to a double suicide, though the investigation was rushed and secretive at the emperor’s order, and it remains unclear whether gunshot wounds were ever properly examined. The church granted a dispensation on the grounds of mental imbalance, allowing Rudolf a royal burial.
Mary was initially buried in a wooden box; her family had to beg the abbot of a local monastery for Christian rites before reburying her in a copper coffin. Conspiracy theories flourished for decades, including claims of political murder. Exhumations in 1959 and again in 1991 failed to settle the matter. Then, on July 31, 2015, the Austrian National Library released previously unseen letters written by Mary shortly before the deaths.
They stated unambiguously that the couple intended to take their own lives. The mystery was solved: Rudolf and Mary had died by suicide together. Why remains less certain, though most explanations point to Rudolf’s deep unhappiness, his strained marriage, his depression, and his history of suggesting a double suicide to at least one other mistress, who had refused. The final case also involved a woman who killed and walked free.
Henriette Caillaux, born Henriette Rainouard on December 5, 1874, into a wealthy family, married a writer and literary critic in 1894. The marriage was unhappy, and in time she began a serious affair with Joseph Caillaux, a prominent politician who would become Prime Minister of France in 1911. Both planned to leave their spouses. Henriette’s divorce came easily in 1908; Joseph’s took three years.
They married in 1911. The couple’s troubles came from an unexpected direction. Joseph’s ex-wife had given Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, letters written between Henriette and Joseph during their affair. Calmette, hostile to Caillaux’s politics, launched a sustained campaign against him, publishing increasingly damaging articles.
When a letter from Joseph to Henriette was printed on March 13, 1914, Henriette decided to act. Three days later she bought a Browning handgun, tested it at the shop, and went to the offices of Le Figaro. That evening, in Calmette’s office, she fired six shots at point-blank range. Four bullets missed or grazed him; two struck home.
Calmette died about six hours later. Henriette made no attempt to flee and was arrested. Her trial began on July 20, 1914, and dominated French public life even as Europe moved toward war. Her lawyers argued that she had been driven to irrational action by Calmette’s campaign, calling the shooting a crime of passion rather than premeditated murder.
The prosecution noted that she had purchased the gun and tested it in advance. Public opinion split along political lines: the left saw a woman driven to temporary insanity; the right saw a cold-blooded killer. The all-male jury deliberated for one hour and returned a verdict of not guilty. On July 28, 1914, Henriette walked free.
That same day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, but in France it was the verdict that dominated the front pages. Many suspected Joseph Caillaux had used his connections to influence the jury, though this was never proven. The crime and the acquittal became the subject of conspiracy theories, especially given Caillaux’s later advocacy for peace with Germany, which led to his own trial for treason and exile.
Henriette lived comparatively quietly afterward, studying art and writing about a nineteenth-century sculptor, until her death in Paris on January 29, 1943, under the Nazi occupation.
