June 2, 2021 • 43 mins
Welcome to SISTER MONTH. We’re starting in 1930s France, where Christine and Lea Papin do everything together. They work together. They live together. They ignore everyone else together. They kill together.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime?
Speaker 3 (00:05):
Loving you dear like I do. If it's a crime,
then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
Hello, my friends, and welcome to Criminal Broads, a true
crime podcast about wild women on the wrong side of
the law. It's June, the lovely month of June, and
you guys, we have a theme this month. This is
Sister's Month. Every week we're gonna meet back here and
talk about another case involving sisters. Sisters who work together,
(00:41):
played together, made bombs together, spoke a secret language together,
and died together. There is something about the bond between
sisters that everyone who has a sister knows is special.
I have a sister, Love you, Anna. But there's something
about that bond that, when it goes wrong or becomes extreme,
or becomes twisted, makes for bizarre and very compelling stories
(01:06):
that really baffle the mind. In my experience researching these cases,
the cases that involve sisters leave people's head spinnings, basically
kind of like what George with her sister, She did
this with her sister.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Sisters could do this.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
So we're going to get into all of that this month.
We're going to start with the case of the Paupon Sisters,
one of France's most gruesome crimes and a favorite of
academics everywhere. Academics love interpreting this crime. There is so
much there that you can interpret or try to interpret
or feel like you're interpreting. This case was requested by
(01:41):
beloved listener Michelle w. So thank you Michelle for sending
me down this gruesome rabbit hole. And before we get
into it, I just want to say that I'm recording
this in the next episode in May time travel. I'm
recording them in May because I'm going to see my
grandparents or the first time in forever. Now everyone vaccinated
and they're going to get to meet their little, adorable
(02:03):
great grandson. So anyway, if something happens in the world,
like I don't know, Criminal Broads has awarded the Nobel
Prize and I don't mention it on the podcast for
the next two weeks. That's why, because I'm recording these
ahead of time, okay, and I'm going to thank all
my new patrons at the end of this two week period. Okay,
Now you know where I'm at when I'm at, So yeah,
(02:23):
let's get into the story. We're going to travel back
to nineteen thirties France, and we are going to meet
the crime scene. There was an eyeball on the stairs
(02:50):
to the second floor. It lay there, staring blankly at
the ceiling. It reflected the gleam of the policemen's flashlights.
Policemen shown their flashlights a little further up a few
more stairs, up to the stair landing, and their lights
fell across bare legs, matted hair, blood. They saw that
(03:14):
things were only going to get worse the farther they
went up the stairs. So they told the father of
the house, who was waiting nervously below, to stay down there,
don't come up. You'll see things you can never unsee.
The eyeball in question belonged to a young frenchwoman named
Genevieve Lancelin, who lived with her parents in the sleepy,
(03:37):
polite town of le Mont. Up until then, her life
had been rather idyllic. She spent her days shopping, playing cards, socializing,
and dressing for dinner. Her dishes were always clean and
her clothes were always wrinkled free, because her family employed
two great maids who lived with them in a little
(03:59):
attic room. But now Genevieve's life was over. Her eyeball
was on the stairs to the second floor, staring blankly
at the ceiling. A little further on, her body lay
in a pool of blood, next to the body of
her mother. Genevieve's thighs were covered in neat little cuts,
(04:22):
like the slices on top of a loaf of bread.
One of her own teeth was buried in her scalp.
The flashlights of the policemen shone on all of this.
They were using flashlights because the rest of the house
was dark, except for the little attic room where Genevieve's
(04:43):
killers waited to be found. The maids who worked at
the Lancelas house were sisters. Their names were Christine and
(05:05):
Lea Papin. They looked alike, even though Christine was seven
years older. They could have been twins, but they didn't
want to be twins. They wanted to be something else,
something even closer. Christine would say that in another life,
she was her sister's husband. Christine and Leah were poor
(05:26):
girls from a tough background. They grew up in rural France,
in a region which had a reputation for being sort
of backwards, at least that's how city folks saw it.
Their working class parents were named Gustave and Clemens, and
they had an older sister, Amelia, who was rumored to
be the product of an affair. Later, Clements would accuse
(05:47):
her husband of molesting Amelia. Their family tree had other
troubled branches on it, an uncle who hanged himself, a
cousin who went mad. Their mother seemed to have no
interest in being a mom. When Christine was born in
nineteen o four, Clemens gave her to her sister in
law and let her sister in law raise the baby.
(06:08):
Seven years later, Little Lea was born, and the Papa
family splintered even further. Their parents divorced, and Amelia and
Christine were sent to an orphanage while little Leah went
to live at an uncle's house. Eventually, Amelia landed in
a convent, where she stayed for the rest of her life,
as far as we know, completely out of touch with
(06:29):
her family. That life, being out of touch with her
family must have sounded amazing to Christine because she tried
to join a convent too, but her mother said no.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Instead.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
When Christine was about sixteen, her mother forced her to
become a different type of woman, not a nun, but
a maid. Her mother may have had a nefarious reason
for this money. As a nun, Christine wouldn't be bringing
home any spending money, but as a maid would. A
few years later, her little sister Lea became a maid too.
(07:06):
Now being a maid was no easy job. If you're
picturing women in frilly bonnets wielding feather dusters, think again,
As one journalist for The New York Times wrote, even
with the best of employers, wages were low, hours were long,
food was poor. Humiliations were frequent. If the maids messed up, say,
if they broke a plate, it could be taken out
(07:28):
of their wages, which would be a crushing blow to morale.
Employers loved to complain about their maids. It was practically
a pastime of the bourgeoisie, and in La Mant, the
town where the Papas sisters ended up, people would often
categorize their maids. There were the drunken ones, the horrish ones,
the thieving ones. Christine was the insolent one. According to
(07:52):
earlier employers, her little sister Lea was more of a wallflower.
She shrank back like Christine take over for her. People
would later wonder if Leah's personality had been completely absorbed
into her older sisters. But no matter their personality flaws,
you couldn't deny that they were great workers. They kept
(08:14):
the place sparkling, They always looked immaculate, They cleaned up
after their messes. At this point in their lives, Christine
and Leah were pretty much estranged from the rest of
their family. Their dad kept away from them, their older
sister was behind convent walls. They were in contact with
their mother sometimes, but again, their mother wasn't really a
(08:36):
mother to them. She hadn't raised them, and all she
did those days was ask them for money. Later, newspapers
would report that she had become a religious mystic whose
practices verge on hysteria. Rumor had it that she forced
her daughters to keep changing jobs, thinking that they could
make even more money by cleaning for different, better families,
(08:57):
So the girls couldn't turn to her for help or
guidance or affection. Not really, all they had was each other,
But that was okay with them, because all they wanted
was each other. Let's take a quick break to hear
(09:32):
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In February of nineteen twenty seven, Christine got a new
job as a maid for the lance Law family. Two
months later, Lea joined her. The lance Laws patriarch, Monsieur Renee,
was a retired lawyer who seemed like a fine upstanding
member of the town. Decades later, a documentary about the
Papa Sisters would reveal that he was actually involved in
(12:36):
a major financial scandal involving a lot of Lemon's finest
businessman at the time. But then he just seemed like
a nice older man who spent his afternoons at his
private club and his knights with his family. The matriarch's
name was Madame Leoni lais Lan, and she was the
one who gave orders to the Papa sisters. Genevieve was
(12:57):
their daughter. She was grown unmarried, I lived with her parents.
She hardly ever talked to the maids. We don't know
all that much about her. It seems that the family
led a relatively normal, if narrow life. Financial scandals aside.
By the fall of nineteen twenty nine. After about two
and a half years of working at the Las LANs,
(13:18):
the Papa Sisters cut off all contact with their mother.
Their lives were becoming increasingly insular. They were almost literally
not speaking to anyone but each other. They never went
out to dinner, or to the theater, or to dances,
or to any of the other entertainments available to the
servants of the town. They didn't date, they didn't see family,
(13:38):
and they didn't talk to their employers. They hardly exchanged
a single word with the people they lived with. Now
this seems bizarre today and full of significance, but it
was probably more common than we think. Here's what two academics,
Rachel Edwards and Keith Reader write in The Papa Sisters,
which is the best book about the girls. Quote the social, economic,
(14:01):
and above all cultural gulf between employing and employer classes
was far too immense to be bridged by fleeting pleasantries
or yield meaningful conversations. In other words, there was no
way maids could talk with their bosses. What in the
world would they say? Now? A central question of the
(14:22):
case is this, were Christine and Lea Paupon treated badly
by their employers? Sure, you could argue that any live
in maid who lives in a little room in an
attic is by default treated badly. But in nineteen thirties France,
in a world where people had live in maids in
little attic rooms, where the papons treated particularly badly, was
(14:43):
there something unusual about the house where they lived and worked.
There are rumors that things weren't great, rumors that Madame
Lancelaw was a cruel mistress. One story goes that Leah
dropped a piece of paper on the floor and Madame
Lancelaw pinched her arm.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
So hard that she started bleeding. There are other.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
Stories of Madame Lanslaw being, if not cruel, then sort
of irritatingly picky. Rumor has it that she put on
white gloves to make sure the maids had dusted properly.
She'd run her white gloved fingers along the bookshelves, and
that if she had a problem with their cooking, she'd
write a note and have her daughter deliver it to
the kitchen. But she made sure they had enough food
(15:24):
to eat, and she let them have heat in their bedroom,
which is more than some employers did. And later on,
after the eyeball on the stairs and all the horror
around it. The sisters themselves would admit at certain points
that the lancelaws hadn't been all that bad. In fact,
Monsieur Laislaw once implied that the people with the most
(15:46):
control in the house were the sisters. He said that
after the girls cut off contact with their mother, their
personalities changed. The quarrel with their mother certainly embittered the sisters,
who became gloomy and taciturn. He said, Since then neither
my wife nor I had any conversation with them outside
their work. They were polite, and since we felt that
(16:08):
they would take exception to any comment, and they did
their jobs in the house impeccably, we were patient. Let's
zoom into that sentence a bit. Since we felt that
they would take exception to any comment, we were patient.
This isn't a sentence about dominating one's servants. This describes
(16:28):
a situation where the employers are waiting for the servants
to make the next move. It implies, as Rachel Edwards
and Keith Reader write, that the papans exerted a bizarre
kind of power over their employers. But could maids ever
truly have the power. In nineteen thirty, after three years
(16:50):
of working for the Lancelai family, the sisters went to
the mayor of the town and told him that they
were being persecuted. They were highly emotional, but they made
a rather incoherent case for themselves. No one was exactly
sure what they were talking about. The town hall secretary
told the mayor that the girls were quote nutcases. Today,
(17:10):
almost one hundred years later, we'll never really know what
the vibe was like between the Papins and the Lancelans.
Were the Lancelans cruel and overbearing, or did the Papon
girls wield a strange power from their tiny upstairs room.
All we know is that one evening, after working there
for six years, the maids suddenly felt like they couldn't
(17:33):
do it anymore. By January of nineteen thirty three, Christine
was almost twenty eight, Leo was twenty one. They'd been
(17:55):
working for the lance Law family for the past six years.
At the end of the month, something irritating happened. The
household iron stopped working, and the girls had to take
it to get it fixed. Worse, the cost of the
repairs came out of their own salaries, which must have stung,
especially since the girls were scrupulous about saving their money.
(18:15):
On February first, Christine went to pick up the iron,
which was supposed to be repaired the next day. As
they were using it, the iron broke again. It blew
a fuse, and the whole house plunged into darkness. This
would obviously be annoying, maybe even infuriating, but the way
the Pompons reacted implied that it was utterly unbearable. Maybe
(18:40):
there was something about the idea that they'd have to
get the iron fixed again and that the cost would
come out of their wages again that they just couldn't stand.
Or maybe it was the darkness itself that triggered them.
The lights went out around five pm, and they were
alone in the dark house for about an hour. Christine
and Lea. Lea and Christine. Did they talk? Did they plot?
(19:04):
Did they hold each other's hands?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
And wait?
Speaker 4 (19:08):
Did they just sit there in the dark rooms totally silent,
reading each other's minds. Madame Laislaw and Genevieve came home
around six pm. They were displeased to find the house dark.
Madame Laslas saw Christine going upstairs with a candle in
her hand. Christine explained what had happened with the iron
(19:30):
and the blown fuse, and according to Christine, Madame Laslaws
reacted with fury and lunged at her. This was the
last straw for Christine. She wasn't just going to stand there.
As she said later, I'd rather have had our bosses
hide than for them to have had ours. She went
(19:51):
into a black state of anger.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
She said.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
There was a table nearby with a pewter picture on it.
She reached for the p swung it around, and slammed
the picture into her mistress's face. Genevieve heard her mother
screaming and came running. She flung herself on Christine and
pulled out a chunk of her hair. And then Christine
swung the picture around and brought it crashing down on
(20:16):
the daughter. To Leah then came running and joined her
sister in the battle. And then, well, let's let Christine
tell it.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Madame las La is you avic midwir saying that Madame
Laslan was going to rush at me. I flung myself
in her face, and to raise out with my fingers.
When I say that I flung myself at Madame Lassan,
that is wrong. I flung myself at Mademoiselle Genvie Lansla
and Toretta Rise. While this was going on, my sister
(20:50):
Leah looked at Madame Lasla and to raise out. When
we've done that, they laid and squared it down on
the spot. Then I hurried down to the keychen to
get a humor and a kitchen knife. But these two instruments,
my sister and I said about our two mistresses. We
hit them over the heads with the hammer and slashed
our bodies and legs with the knife. We also hit
(21:12):
them with a little pure jug which was on the
little table on the landing, and we changed instruments several times.
I handed the hammer to my sister and she handed
me the knife. We did this thing with the pure jug.
The victim began howling, but I don't remember that actually
saying anything.
Speaker 4 (21:33):
Leah confirmed Christine's narration of events like she was a
child reciting something from memory.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
It came to everything my sister told you is correct.
The crimes happened exactly as she told them to you.
My role in this matter is that Soltally, the one
she told you, I hit them as much as her.
Like her, I affirmed that we did not plan to
kill our buses. The idea come to us instantantly when
(22:02):
we heard that Madame Lancelas reproached us. Just like my sister,
I have no regrets for the crime we have committed.
Like my sister, I would rather have had the skin
of my busses than for them to have mine.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
After the killing, the sisters turned to each other and said,
that's a clean job of it. They were maids again. Now.
They tidied up as best they could. They washed off
the murder weapons. They splashed their hands and faces with water.
They took off their blood stained dresses and put on
matching blue robes. And then they got into bed and
waited to be found below them on the stair landing.
(22:44):
The Lancelaw women were quiet forever. The murder scene was
like something out of a horror movie. The women's faces
were unrecognizable. Their thighs had been sliced neatly, like loaves
of bread or meat ready for the oven. One journalist wrote,
blood had softened the carpet till it was like an
elastic red moss. And most shockingly of all were the eyes,
(23:09):
or the lack of eyes. That same journalists wrote that
this was the only criminal case on record, where eyeballs
were removed from the living head without practice of any
instrument except the human finger. In the meantime, Monsieur las
(23:37):
Law was confused. He had spent the afternoon at his
private club, and he and his family had plans to
eat with his brother in law that night. They were
supposed to eat at seven, and so a little bit
before that he went home to pick up his daughter
and his wife. But the doors were locked and there
were no lights on in the entire house, which was weird. Wait,
there was a light coming from the attic where the
(23:58):
maids lived, but it was a soft, flickering light, and
when he started knocking on the door, even that soft
light went off. As he left, the light came back on.
It was spooky. He told all this to his brother
in law, who agreed that the situation was weird. The
two of them went back to the house and noticed
the same things, the darkness, the strange little light that
(24:21):
vanished and reappeared. That was enough for them. They got
the police. Three policemen forced open a window, and the
men crept inside the silent, dark house with flashlights. They
walked upstairs and when they got to the second floor.
Their flashlights illuminated the scene, the twisted limbs, the bloody faces,
the eyes. The policeman told Monsieur Laslan to stay below,
(24:44):
and they continued up to the attic. They figured that
with such a brutal killer on the loose, those two
poor maids had surely met a similar fate, and so
they were shocked to discover that the Papa sisters were
alive and well. They were in the same bed in
their matching blue robes. The room was lit by a
single candle. Christine instantly admitted that they'd done it, though
(25:08):
she had been the one who started the killings, the
sisters had agreed that they'd accept responsibility for the crime
the same way that they did everything else in life together.
(25:31):
Christine and Lea were taken to jail and photographed in
their blue robes. In the photos, their hair is disheveled
and they look a little bit confused. A journalist who
saw them in jail described them as neurotics who often
appear to be under hypnosis. They were separated, which they
couldn't stand. Each of them went on a hunger strike,
(25:52):
and they wouldn't eat or drink for a week in
protest but still authorities kept them apart. Though Lea was
the one who was under Christine's influence, Christine was the
one who really deteriorated when she was kept apart from
her sister. As the weeks stretched into months, Christine started
running around her cell, calling for Lea and sometimes calling
(26:14):
out for an imaginary husband and child. She said that
she dreamed that Lea was hanging from a tree with
her legs cut off. Once she flung herself on the
ground and started making the Sign of the Cross with
her tongue on the floor and then the walls and
furniture of her cell. Another time, she screamed out of
her cell window. Sorry, sorry, I will not do it again.
(26:37):
It was I who attacked Madame Laslan. Her condition escalated
until she tried to tear out her own eyes, and
she was promptly put into a straight jacket. Finally, authorities relented.
They'd let Christine see her beloved younger sister and maybe
it would help with her mental state, and so they
(26:59):
arranged a re union between the two imprisoned girls. As
soon as Christine saw her sister, she ripped off her
shirt and cried, tell.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Me yes, tell me yes. This moment is.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
One that journalists and psychoanalysts alike really hone in on.
What did Christine mean? Her cry felt sexual incestual? No
one could deny it. Though Christine herself denied that she
and her sister were lovers, there were several reasons to wonder.
At one point, she had said that in another life,
(27:35):
she was her sister's husband. A doctor who interviewed them
insisted that Christine's agony at being separated from her sister
was the agony of a lover. The Papal sisters give
every appearance of having an abnormal relationship that of lovers.
He said, they never went out, neither was known to
have any emotional adventures. When they were separated in prison,
(27:56):
Christine showed the most intense despair. A love forcibly removed
from his beloved mistress would not have shown greater signs
of grief. And then there was this bizarre detail. During
the killings, Christine had moved Genevieve's clothing aside, revealing her genitals.
When detectives asked Christine why she'd done that, she responded,
(28:20):
I was looking for something whose possession would have made
me stronger. This sentence was ripe for psychoanalysis. Was she
talking about a penis? And if so, what In the
world today, it's pretty common to read that the Papa
(28:41):
sisters were discovered in bed together after the crime totally naked,
and some reports of their reunion in jail say that
Christine exposed herself and fondled her breasts in front of everyone.
In other words, the little hints that we have of
incest have grown into big rumors over the years that
make their stories seem even more sad, sexual, even more extreme.
(29:03):
But when Christine cried, tell me yes, tell me yes,
was that necessarily a sexual statement? It seems to me
that there are a lot of ways to interpret that.
The word yes is full of meaning. Was she saying,
tell me yes, we're going to be okay, tell me yes?
The crime was all in my head? Tell me yes,
(29:24):
we get to live together again. The ripping off of
her shirt could be sexual, or it could be a
way of expressing a desire to be free, as though
she were ripping off her straight jacket. And there's one
other interpretation that comes to mind. Instead of being each
other's lovers, is there any chance that Christine thought of
(29:44):
herself as Leah's mother. Their own mother was missing from
their lives as we know, and they seemed to long
for a mother figure.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
They would sometimes call.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
Madame Laslan Mama behind her back, and weirdly, they called
their real mind Madame. When Christine was taking off her
shirt and calling to her sister, was she making a
confused gesture towards something like breastfeeding. Maybe it's too dangerous
to search for meaning in the papal sister's gestures. Much
(30:17):
of what they did, like searching under Genevieve's skirts for
a metaphorical penis, had no basis in reality. The only
things we can say for certain are real are the
things like the blood on the floor and the glassy
eyeballs staring at the ceiling. The sister's trial started on
(30:49):
September thirtieth, nineteen thirty three. People protested outside the courthouse,
yelling that they wanted the sisters to get the death penalty.
The courtroom was crowded with journalists who appeared curiously at
the sisters and noted that they didn't look scary or
large or even all that old. They looked like little girls.
The Vanity Fair. Journalists noted how unwell they looked in
(31:12):
the courtroom, they were stick thin and pale. As the
trial proceeded, the spectators could have thought the court was
judging one paponk cadaver scene double. So much the sisters
looked alike and dead, she wrote. A very dramatic journalist
for a paper in Spokane, Washington described them like this.
(31:32):
In the dock, Christine, pulling her long gray coat around her,
squirmed and settled back, like a panther whose hunger has
been appeased and who lungs for sleep. Leah, swathed in black,
stared into space with lackluster eyes. Now everyone knew that
the girls had committed the crimes. They had admitted that
(31:54):
right away, So the question at stake was whether or
not they knew what they were doing. Were they sane
or were they insane? Most people who spent any time
with the sisters saw that they were clearly unwell. Remember
the journalists who saw them in jail shortly after the
crime and described them as neurotics who often appear to
be under hypnosis. Still, the prosecution argued that they were
(32:17):
perfectly sane and should be charged as such. Three psychiatric
experts for the prosecution testify that they were guilty as
charged and merited no mercy. They declared, Christine and Lea
Papin are in no way tainted. They do not suffer
any mental malady. They do not carry in any way
the weight of a tainted heredity. From the point of
(32:38):
view of intellect, affections, and emotions, they are entirely normal.
The prosecutor's narrative was that the girls were angry at
their employers for the way that they'd been treated over
the years, and that that anger boiled over into murder
on the evening of February two. He described them as
a vicious bitches who bite the hand that no longer
(32:59):
caresses them, and declared, since they behaved like wild animals,
they must be treated like savages and wild animals. The defense,
of course, insisted that the sisters needed to be examined further,
but no one really listened. It was too tempting to
turn the girls into larger than life figures of evil
(33:19):
or of resistance. Yes, outside of the courtroom, the girls
had become famous among the communists and the surrealists and
the poets as a symbol of class warfare. They were
not vicious bitches. They were warriors. Who quote paid evil
back in coins of red hot iron, as two poets wrote.
But both the prosecution's narrative and the poets narrative were
(33:43):
contradicted by the sisters themselves.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
In court. They said that.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
They didn't really have any reason to resent their employers.
They mentioned that they didn't know their employers all that well,
but that Madame Laslan had allowed them to have heat
in their room and so on. They didn't seemed concerned
with creating an excuse for themselves or with upholding any
narrative of persecution. The only thing the sisters seemed to
(34:08):
care about was making one thing very clear that they
were both equally responsible for the crime. Maybe they thought
that if they were given equal responsibility, they'd get the
exact same sentence and they could live out the rest
of their days in a cell together. No one believed
that they were equally responsible, though Lea herself had said
(34:31):
at one point, I am deaf and dumb, which seemed
to mean let my sister speak for me. It was
obvious that Christine was the ringleader. The jury took a
staggering four minutes to deliberate, and they came back with
tellingly unequal verdicts Lea was sentenced to ten years hard labor.
(34:53):
Christine was sentenced to be executed at the guillotine in
the town's main square. When she heard her fate, Christine
dropped to her knees. What was she feeling in that moment?
She was kneeling like a woman in a confessional. Maybe
she was feeling the same thing that she used to
(35:15):
scream out of the bars of her cell Sorry, sorry,
I will not do it again? Or wait, am I
(35:40):
over interpreting Christine?
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Now?
Speaker 4 (35:42):
Was she feeling something entirely different as she kneeled in
the courtroom. It's really impossible to say. And that's what
makes the Papa sisters so haunting, so intriguing. It's not
just the violence of their crime or the lack of
a believable official explanation for it. Their silence. Everything they
say is mysterious, and more often than not, they don't
(36:05):
say anything at all. And this means that it's very
easy and very tempting to turn them into a metaphor.
As their biographers write, the sister's own inarticulacy appears like
a virgin page on which the temptation to write is endless.
We've already touched on how the Communists saw them as
(36:25):
clear examples of class struggle, two revolutionary maids who slaughtered
their bourgeois masters. Of course, it was tempting to interpret
their crime that way, but the Papa sisters never said
much about class at all. The closest thing they ever
gave to a revolutionary war cry was Christine's quote, I'd
rather have had our bosses hide than for them to
(36:46):
have had ours. But whatever the sisters did or did
not say, didn't stop them from becoming obsessed over by
France's intelligentsia. Writers like Jean Jeannet, Jean Paul Sartre, Simon
de Bouvois, and the psychiatrist Jacques all took a stab
at understanding them. Here's Simond de Bouvois in its broad outline.
(37:07):
The tragedy of the Papa sisters was immediately clear to
us in Rouen, as in La Man and perhaps even
among the mothers of my pupils. There were, no doubt,
women who deducted the cost of a broken plate from
their maid's wages, who put on white gloves to find
forgotten specks of dust on the furniture. In our eyes,
they deserved death a hundred times over with their wavy
(37:31):
hair and their white collars. How sensible Christine and Lea
Papin seemed in the old photo that some papers published.
How had they become those haggard furies offered up to
public condemnation in the photos taken after the drama. One
must accuse their childhood orphanage, their serfdom, the whole hideous
system set up by decent people for the production of madmen,
(37:54):
assassins and monsters. And here's lacan. That fateful evening, under
anxiety of an imminent punishment, the sisters mingled the mirage
of their illness with the image of their mistresses. They
detested the distress of the couple who they carried away
in an atrocious quadrille. They tore out their eyes as
(38:15):
bacantes castraate their victims. The sacrilegious curiosity from which the
beginning of time has anguished man moved them in their
desire for the victims, and in their attempt to track
down in the dead woman's gaping wounds, what Christine, in
her innocence, later described to the court as the mystery
of life. He's referring there to Christine's odd quote about
(38:40):
searching for something under Geneviev's skirts that would give her power.
So as people who were luckier and more educated than
the sisters were tried to understand them, the sisters themselves
were locked up. Christine was never sent to the guillotine.
The president of France changed her sentence to hard labor
(39:01):
for life. She and Leah were sent to the same prison,
but kept apart there. In prison, Christine deteriorated more and more.
She insisted that she didn't deserve to live, referred to
herself as good for nothing, and stopped eating. On one
of the rare occasions, or perhaps the only occasion, that
she saw her sister, she said the most shocking thing
(39:24):
that she had ever said. She is very nice, but
she's not my sister. Eventually, Christine was moved to an asylum,
where she wasted away further and died in the spring
of nineteen thirty seven of a lung infection. Now there
was only one. Without the overwhelming influence of her sister,
(39:46):
Leah made her way back to a somewhat normal life.
She served her time and was released in nineteen forty three.
She moved back in with her mother, and worked as
a maid again. She kept a little collection of mementos
from her old life, some of Christine's things, and a
little bit of lace that had come from the lance
La house. A journalist tracked her down and described her
(40:08):
as looking like a ghost of the past that has
burnt her until she is the color of ash. In
nineteen eighty two, the newspapers reported that she was dead,
but decades later, in two thousand, a documentarian found out
that she was still alive. In his film In Search
of the Papa Sisters, he finds Lea in a hospice room.
(40:30):
She's had a brain hemorrhage and she can't talk. Christine
was long gone, but at the end of her days,
Leya had become the silent sister once again. Even though
the screams of the lance Law women must have been
terrible as they ricocheted through that dark house, the most
important noise of the entire story is silence. After the
(40:56):
sister's trial finished, a French newspaper published a little sentence,
And today it still feels like the only thing any
of us can definitively say about the case quote. Nobody
can claim fundamental knowledge of the complex souls of women,
and especially of the serving women who each day make
(41:18):
their way among us in silence. And that's the spooky,
(41:42):
spooky story of the Papalla Sisters. My dear listeners, I'm
sorry about all the details of the eyeballs, but you
really can't tell the story without it. We didn't even
really get into the metaphorical significance of eyes, eyeballs, eyes
being the windows of the soul. Christine tearing out eyes
and then trying to tear out her own eyes. I mean,
(42:04):
you can see why. You know, France's most educated people
were just like salivating to interpret this case. It seems
so rich for interpretation. But you can interpret it all
you want. I've tried. I've felt the temptation myself, and
then you just inevitably end up at this place where
you're like, maybe that's what Christine meant, but also ultimately,
(42:28):
who can say? All Right, I hope you enjoyed that story,
or at least weren't too horrified by it. Go to
instagram dot com slash criminal Brods if you'd like to
see pictures of the sisters and let me know if
you have any interpretations of them that you'd like to
share with me if you're enjoying the podcast, I would
be eternally in your debt. If you would rate and
(42:49):
review on Apple Podcasts, preferably, please do it and then
send me a note and I'll officially send you a
note back saying I am eternally in your debt and
this you can use this legally in court, okay, And
I'll meet you back here next week for our second
tale of Sisters. This one is a big tonal shift.
We've talked about some sisters who did something very bad,
(43:11):
and we're gonna shift and talk about sisters who at
least tried to do some very good things. Although the
story is not without its extreme violence. All right, until then,
have a lovely week, enjoy the first week of June,
and I'll see you here next week.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
Bye bye.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Loving you deal like guid.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty. Guilty loving
Is it a sin?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Is it a crime?
Speaker 3 (00:05):
Loving you dear like I do. If it's a crime,
then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.
Speaker 4 (00:20):
Hello, my friends, and welcome to Criminal Broads, a true
crime podcast about wild women on the wrong side of
the law. It's June, the lovely month of June, and
you guys, we have a theme this month. This is
Sister's Month. Every week we're gonna meet back here and
talk about another case involving sisters. Sisters who work together,
(00:41):
played together, made bombs together, spoke a secret language together,
and died together. There is something about the bond between
sisters that everyone who has a sister knows is special.
I have a sister, Love you, Anna. But there's something
about that bond that, when it goes wrong or becomes extreme,
or becomes twisted, makes for bizarre and very compelling stories
(01:06):
that really baffle the mind. In my experience researching these cases,
the cases that involve sisters leave people's head spinnings, basically
kind of like what George with her sister, She did
this with her sister.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Sisters could do this.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
So we're going to get into all of that this month.
We're going to start with the case of the Paupon Sisters,
one of France's most gruesome crimes and a favorite of
academics everywhere. Academics love interpreting this crime. There is so
much there that you can interpret or try to interpret
or feel like you're interpreting. This case was requested by
(01:41):
beloved listener Michelle w. So thank you Michelle for sending
me down this gruesome rabbit hole. And before we get
into it, I just want to say that I'm recording
this in the next episode in May time travel. I'm
recording them in May because I'm going to see my
grandparents or the first time in forever. Now everyone vaccinated
and they're going to get to meet their little, adorable
(02:03):
great grandson. So anyway, if something happens in the world,
like I don't know, Criminal Broads has awarded the Nobel
Prize and I don't mention it on the podcast for
the next two weeks. That's why, because I'm recording these
ahead of time, okay, and I'm going to thank all
my new patrons at the end of this two week period. Okay,
Now you know where I'm at when I'm at, So yeah,
(02:23):
let's get into the story. We're going to travel back
to nineteen thirties France, and we are going to meet
the crime scene. There was an eyeball on the stairs
(02:50):
to the second floor. It lay there, staring blankly at
the ceiling. It reflected the gleam of the policemen's flashlights.
Policemen shown their flashlights a little further up a few
more stairs, up to the stair landing, and their lights
fell across bare legs, matted hair, blood. They saw that
(03:14):
things were only going to get worse the farther they
went up the stairs. So they told the father of
the house, who was waiting nervously below, to stay down there,
don't come up. You'll see things you can never unsee.
The eyeball in question belonged to a young frenchwoman named
Genevieve Lancelin, who lived with her parents in the sleepy,
(03:37):
polite town of le Mont. Up until then, her life
had been rather idyllic. She spent her days shopping, playing cards, socializing,
and dressing for dinner. Her dishes were always clean and
her clothes were always wrinkled free, because her family employed
two great maids who lived with them in a little
(03:59):
attic room. But now Genevieve's life was over. Her eyeball
was on the stairs to the second floor, staring blankly
at the ceiling. A little further on, her body lay
in a pool of blood, next to the body of
her mother. Genevieve's thighs were covered in neat little cuts,
(04:22):
like the slices on top of a loaf of bread.
One of her own teeth was buried in her scalp.
The flashlights of the policemen shone on all of this.
They were using flashlights because the rest of the house
was dark, except for the little attic room where Genevieve's
(04:43):
killers waited to be found. The maids who worked at
the Lancelas house were sisters. Their names were Christine and
(05:05):
Lea Papin. They looked alike, even though Christine was seven
years older. They could have been twins, but they didn't
want to be twins. They wanted to be something else,
something even closer. Christine would say that in another life,
she was her sister's husband. Christine and Leah were poor
(05:26):
girls from a tough background. They grew up in rural France,
in a region which had a reputation for being sort
of backwards, at least that's how city folks saw it.
Their working class parents were named Gustave and Clemens, and
they had an older sister, Amelia, who was rumored to
be the product of an affair. Later, Clements would accuse
(05:47):
her husband of molesting Amelia. Their family tree had other
troubled branches on it, an uncle who hanged himself, a
cousin who went mad. Their mother seemed to have no
interest in being a mom. When Christine was born in
nineteen o four, Clemens gave her to her sister in
law and let her sister in law raise the baby.
(06:08):
Seven years later, Little Lea was born, and the Papa
family splintered even further. Their parents divorced, and Amelia and
Christine were sent to an orphanage while little Leah went
to live at an uncle's house. Eventually, Amelia landed in
a convent, where she stayed for the rest of her life,
as far as we know, completely out of touch with
(06:29):
her family. That life, being out of touch with her
family must have sounded amazing to Christine because she tried
to join a convent too, but her mother said no.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Instead.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
When Christine was about sixteen, her mother forced her to
become a different type of woman, not a nun, but
a maid. Her mother may have had a nefarious reason
for this money. As a nun, Christine wouldn't be bringing
home any spending money, but as a maid would. A
few years later, her little sister Lea became a maid too.
(07:06):
Now being a maid was no easy job. If you're
picturing women in frilly bonnets wielding feather dusters, think again,
As one journalist for The New York Times wrote, even
with the best of employers, wages were low, hours were long,
food was poor. Humiliations were frequent. If the maids messed up, say,
if they broke a plate, it could be taken out
(07:28):
of their wages, which would be a crushing blow to morale.
Employers loved to complain about their maids. It was practically
a pastime of the bourgeoisie, and in La Mant, the
town where the Papas sisters ended up, people would often
categorize their maids. There were the drunken ones, the horrish ones,
the thieving ones. Christine was the insolent one. According to
(07:52):
earlier employers, her little sister Lea was more of a wallflower.
She shrank back like Christine take over for her. People
would later wonder if Leah's personality had been completely absorbed
into her older sisters. But no matter their personality flaws,
you couldn't deny that they were great workers. They kept
(08:14):
the place sparkling, They always looked immaculate, They cleaned up
after their messes. At this point in their lives, Christine
and Leah were pretty much estranged from the rest of
their family. Their dad kept away from them, their older
sister was behind convent walls. They were in contact with
their mother sometimes, but again, their mother wasn't really a
(08:36):
mother to them. She hadn't raised them, and all she
did those days was ask them for money. Later, newspapers
would report that she had become a religious mystic whose
practices verge on hysteria. Rumor had it that she forced
her daughters to keep changing jobs, thinking that they could
make even more money by cleaning for different, better families,
(08:57):
So the girls couldn't turn to her for help or
guidance or affection. Not really, all they had was each other,
But that was okay with them, because all they wanted
was each other. Let's take a quick break to hear
(09:32):
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(12:14):
In February of nineteen twenty seven, Christine got a new
job as a maid for the lance Law family. Two
months later, Lea joined her. The lance Laws patriarch, Monsieur Renee,
was a retired lawyer who seemed like a fine upstanding
member of the town. Decades later, a documentary about the
Papa Sisters would reveal that he was actually involved in
(12:36):
a major financial scandal involving a lot of Lemon's finest
businessman at the time. But then he just seemed like
a nice older man who spent his afternoons at his
private club and his knights with his family. The matriarch's
name was Madame Leoni lais Lan, and she was the
one who gave orders to the Papa sisters. Genevieve was
(12:57):
their daughter. She was grown unmarried, I lived with her parents.
She hardly ever talked to the maids. We don't know
all that much about her. It seems that the family
led a relatively normal, if narrow life. Financial scandals aside.
By the fall of nineteen twenty nine. After about two
and a half years of working at the Las LANs,
(13:18):
the Papa Sisters cut off all contact with their mother.
Their lives were becoming increasingly insular. They were almost literally
not speaking to anyone but each other. They never went
out to dinner, or to the theater, or to dances,
or to any of the other entertainments available to the
servants of the town. They didn't date, they didn't see family,
(13:38):
and they didn't talk to their employers. They hardly exchanged
a single word with the people they lived with. Now
this seems bizarre today and full of significance, but it
was probably more common than we think. Here's what two academics,
Rachel Edwards and Keith Reader write in The Papa Sisters,
which is the best book about the girls. Quote the social, economic,
(14:01):
and above all cultural gulf between employing and employer classes
was far too immense to be bridged by fleeting pleasantries
or yield meaningful conversations. In other words, there was no
way maids could talk with their bosses. What in the
world would they say? Now? A central question of the
(14:22):
case is this, were Christine and Lea Paupon treated badly
by their employers? Sure, you could argue that any live
in maid who lives in a little room in an
attic is by default treated badly. But in nineteen thirties France,
in a world where people had live in maids in
little attic rooms, where the papons treated particularly badly, was
(14:43):
there something unusual about the house where they lived and worked.
There are rumors that things weren't great, rumors that Madame
Lancelaw was a cruel mistress. One story goes that Leah
dropped a piece of paper on the floor and Madame
Lancelaw pinched her arm.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
So hard that she started bleeding. There are other.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
Stories of Madame Lanslaw being, if not cruel, then sort
of irritatingly picky. Rumor has it that she put on
white gloves to make sure the maids had dusted properly.
She'd run her white gloved fingers along the bookshelves, and
that if she had a problem with their cooking, she'd
write a note and have her daughter deliver it to
the kitchen. But she made sure they had enough food
(15:24):
to eat, and she let them have heat in their bedroom,
which is more than some employers did. And later on,
after the eyeball on the stairs and all the horror
around it. The sisters themselves would admit at certain points
that the lancelaws hadn't been all that bad. In fact,
Monsieur Laislaw once implied that the people with the most
(15:46):
control in the house were the sisters. He said that
after the girls cut off contact with their mother, their
personalities changed. The quarrel with their mother certainly embittered the sisters,
who became gloomy and taciturn. He said, Since then neither
my wife nor I had any conversation with them outside
their work. They were polite, and since we felt that
(16:08):
they would take exception to any comment, and they did
their jobs in the house impeccably, we were patient. Let's
zoom into that sentence a bit. Since we felt that
they would take exception to any comment, we were patient.
This isn't a sentence about dominating one's servants. This describes
(16:28):
a situation where the employers are waiting for the servants
to make the next move. It implies, as Rachel Edwards
and Keith Reader write, that the papans exerted a bizarre
kind of power over their employers. But could maids ever
truly have the power. In nineteen thirty, after three years
(16:50):
of working for the Lancelai family, the sisters went to
the mayor of the town and told him that they
were being persecuted. They were highly emotional, but they made
a rather incoherent case for themselves. No one was exactly
sure what they were talking about. The town hall secretary
told the mayor that the girls were quote nutcases. Today,
(17:10):
almost one hundred years later, we'll never really know what
the vibe was like between the Papins and the Lancelans.
Were the Lancelans cruel and overbearing, or did the Papon
girls wield a strange power from their tiny upstairs room.
All we know is that one evening, after working there
for six years, the maids suddenly felt like they couldn't
(17:33):
do it anymore. By January of nineteen thirty three, Christine
was almost twenty eight, Leo was twenty one. They'd been
(17:55):
working for the lance Law family for the past six years.
At the end of the month, something irritating happened. The
household iron stopped working, and the girls had to take
it to get it fixed. Worse, the cost of the
repairs came out of their own salaries, which must have stung,
especially since the girls were scrupulous about saving their money.
(18:15):
On February first, Christine went to pick up the iron,
which was supposed to be repaired the next day. As
they were using it, the iron broke again. It blew
a fuse, and the whole house plunged into darkness. This
would obviously be annoying, maybe even infuriating, but the way
the Pompons reacted implied that it was utterly unbearable. Maybe
(18:40):
there was something about the idea that they'd have to
get the iron fixed again and that the cost would
come out of their wages again that they just couldn't stand.
Or maybe it was the darkness itself that triggered them.
The lights went out around five pm, and they were
alone in the dark house for about an hour. Christine
and Lea. Lea and Christine. Did they talk? Did they plot?
(19:04):
Did they hold each other's hands?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
And wait?
Speaker 4 (19:08):
Did they just sit there in the dark rooms totally silent,
reading each other's minds. Madame Laislaw and Genevieve came home
around six pm. They were displeased to find the house dark.
Madame Laslas saw Christine going upstairs with a candle in
her hand. Christine explained what had happened with the iron
(19:30):
and the blown fuse, and according to Christine, Madame Laslaws
reacted with fury and lunged at her. This was the
last straw for Christine. She wasn't just going to stand there.
As she said later, I'd rather have had our bosses
hide than for them to have had ours. She went
(19:51):
into a black state of anger.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
She said.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
There was a table nearby with a pewter picture on it.
She reached for the p swung it around, and slammed
the picture into her mistress's face. Genevieve heard her mother
screaming and came running. She flung herself on Christine and
pulled out a chunk of her hair. And then Christine
swung the picture around and brought it crashing down on
(20:16):
the daughter. To Leah then came running and joined her
sister in the battle. And then, well, let's let Christine
tell it.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Madame las La is you avic midwir saying that Madame
Laslan was going to rush at me. I flung myself
in her face, and to raise out with my fingers.
When I say that I flung myself at Madame Lassan,
that is wrong. I flung myself at Mademoiselle Genvie Lansla
and Toretta Rise. While this was going on, my sister
(20:50):
Leah looked at Madame Lasla and to raise out. When
we've done that, they laid and squared it down on
the spot. Then I hurried down to the keychen to
get a humor and a kitchen knife. But these two instruments,
my sister and I said about our two mistresses. We
hit them over the heads with the hammer and slashed
our bodies and legs with the knife. We also hit
(21:12):
them with a little pure jug which was on the
little table on the landing, and we changed instruments several times.
I handed the hammer to my sister and she handed
me the knife. We did this thing with the pure jug.
The victim began howling, but I don't remember that actually
saying anything.
Speaker 4 (21:33):
Leah confirmed Christine's narration of events like she was a
child reciting something from memory.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
It came to everything my sister told you is correct.
The crimes happened exactly as she told them to you.
My role in this matter is that Soltally, the one
she told you, I hit them as much as her.
Like her, I affirmed that we did not plan to
kill our buses. The idea come to us instantantly when
(22:02):
we heard that Madame Lancelas reproached us. Just like my sister,
I have no regrets for the crime we have committed.
Like my sister, I would rather have had the skin
of my busses than for them to have mine.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
After the killing, the sisters turned to each other and said,
that's a clean job of it. They were maids again. Now.
They tidied up as best they could. They washed off
the murder weapons. They splashed their hands and faces with water.
They took off their blood stained dresses and put on
matching blue robes. And then they got into bed and
waited to be found below them on the stair landing.
(22:44):
The Lancelaw women were quiet forever. The murder scene was
like something out of a horror movie. The women's faces
were unrecognizable. Their thighs had been sliced neatly, like loaves
of bread or meat ready for the oven. One journalist wrote,
blood had softened the carpet till it was like an
elastic red moss. And most shockingly of all were the eyes,
(23:09):
or the lack of eyes. That same journalists wrote that
this was the only criminal case on record, where eyeballs
were removed from the living head without practice of any
instrument except the human finger. In the meantime, Monsieur las
(23:37):
Law was confused. He had spent the afternoon at his
private club, and he and his family had plans to
eat with his brother in law that night. They were
supposed to eat at seven, and so a little bit
before that he went home to pick up his daughter
and his wife. But the doors were locked and there
were no lights on in the entire house, which was weird. Wait,
there was a light coming from the attic where the
(23:58):
maids lived, but it was a soft, flickering light, and
when he started knocking on the door, even that soft
light went off. As he left, the light came back on.
It was spooky. He told all this to his brother
in law, who agreed that the situation was weird. The
two of them went back to the house and noticed
the same things, the darkness, the strange little light that
(24:21):
vanished and reappeared. That was enough for them. They got
the police. Three policemen forced open a window, and the
men crept inside the silent, dark house with flashlights. They
walked upstairs and when they got to the second floor.
Their flashlights illuminated the scene, the twisted limbs, the bloody faces,
the eyes. The policeman told Monsieur Laslan to stay below,
(24:44):
and they continued up to the attic. They figured that
with such a brutal killer on the loose, those two
poor maids had surely met a similar fate, and so
they were shocked to discover that the Papa sisters were
alive and well. They were in the same bed in
their matching blue robes. The room was lit by a
single candle. Christine instantly admitted that they'd done it, though
(25:08):
she had been the one who started the killings, the
sisters had agreed that they'd accept responsibility for the crime
the same way that they did everything else in life together.
(25:31):
Christine and Lea were taken to jail and photographed in
their blue robes. In the photos, their hair is disheveled
and they look a little bit confused. A journalist who
saw them in jail described them as neurotics who often
appear to be under hypnosis. They were separated, which they
couldn't stand. Each of them went on a hunger strike,
(25:52):
and they wouldn't eat or drink for a week in
protest but still authorities kept them apart. Though Lea was
the one who was under Christine's influence, Christine was the
one who really deteriorated when she was kept apart from
her sister. As the weeks stretched into months, Christine started
running around her cell, calling for Lea and sometimes calling
(26:14):
out for an imaginary husband and child. She said that
she dreamed that Lea was hanging from a tree with
her legs cut off. Once she flung herself on the
ground and started making the Sign of the Cross with
her tongue on the floor and then the walls and
furniture of her cell. Another time, she screamed out of
her cell window. Sorry, sorry, I will not do it again.
(26:37):
It was I who attacked Madame Laslan. Her condition escalated
until she tried to tear out her own eyes, and
she was promptly put into a straight jacket. Finally, authorities relented.
They'd let Christine see her beloved younger sister and maybe
it would help with her mental state, and so they
(26:59):
arranged a re union between the two imprisoned girls. As
soon as Christine saw her sister, she ripped off her
shirt and cried, tell.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Me yes, tell me yes. This moment is.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
One that journalists and psychoanalysts alike really hone in on.
What did Christine mean? Her cry felt sexual incestual? No
one could deny it. Though Christine herself denied that she
and her sister were lovers, there were several reasons to wonder.
At one point, she had said that in another life,
(27:35):
she was her sister's husband. A doctor who interviewed them
insisted that Christine's agony at being separated from her sister
was the agony of a lover. The Papal sisters give
every appearance of having an abnormal relationship that of lovers.
He said, they never went out, neither was known to
have any emotional adventures. When they were separated in prison,
(27:56):
Christine showed the most intense despair. A love forcibly removed
from his beloved mistress would not have shown greater signs
of grief. And then there was this bizarre detail. During
the killings, Christine had moved Genevieve's clothing aside, revealing her genitals.
When detectives asked Christine why she'd done that, she responded,
(28:20):
I was looking for something whose possession would have made
me stronger. This sentence was ripe for psychoanalysis. Was she
talking about a penis? And if so, what In the
world today, it's pretty common to read that the Papa
(28:41):
sisters were discovered in bed together after the crime totally naked,
and some reports of their reunion in jail say that
Christine exposed herself and fondled her breasts in front of everyone.
In other words, the little hints that we have of
incest have grown into big rumors over the years that
make their stories seem even more sad, sexual, even more extreme.
(29:03):
But when Christine cried, tell me yes, tell me yes,
was that necessarily a sexual statement? It seems to me
that there are a lot of ways to interpret that.
The word yes is full of meaning. Was she saying,
tell me yes, we're going to be okay, tell me yes?
The crime was all in my head? Tell me yes,
(29:24):
we get to live together again. The ripping off of
her shirt could be sexual, or it could be a
way of expressing a desire to be free, as though
she were ripping off her straight jacket. And there's one
other interpretation that comes to mind. Instead of being each
other's lovers, is there any chance that Christine thought of
(29:44):
herself as Leah's mother. Their own mother was missing from
their lives as we know, and they seemed to long
for a mother figure.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
They would sometimes call.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
Madame Laslan Mama behind her back, and weirdly, they called
their real mind Madame. When Christine was taking off her
shirt and calling to her sister, was she making a
confused gesture towards something like breastfeeding. Maybe it's too dangerous
to search for meaning in the papal sister's gestures. Much
(30:17):
of what they did, like searching under Genevieve's skirts for
a metaphorical penis, had no basis in reality. The only
things we can say for certain are real are the
things like the blood on the floor and the glassy
eyeballs staring at the ceiling. The sister's trial started on
(30:49):
September thirtieth, nineteen thirty three. People protested outside the courthouse,
yelling that they wanted the sisters to get the death penalty.
The courtroom was crowded with journalists who appeared curiously at
the sisters and noted that they didn't look scary or
large or even all that old. They looked like little girls.
The Vanity Fair. Journalists noted how unwell they looked in
(31:12):
the courtroom, they were stick thin and pale. As the
trial proceeded, the spectators could have thought the court was
judging one paponk cadaver scene double. So much the sisters
looked alike and dead, she wrote. A very dramatic journalist
for a paper in Spokane, Washington described them like this.
(31:32):
In the dock, Christine, pulling her long gray coat around her,
squirmed and settled back, like a panther whose hunger has
been appeased and who lungs for sleep. Leah, swathed in black,
stared into space with lackluster eyes. Now everyone knew that
the girls had committed the crimes. They had admitted that
(31:54):
right away, So the question at stake was whether or
not they knew what they were doing. Were they sane
or were they insane? Most people who spent any time
with the sisters saw that they were clearly unwell. Remember
the journalists who saw them in jail shortly after the
crime and described them as neurotics who often appear to
be under hypnosis. Still, the prosecution argued that they were
(32:17):
perfectly sane and should be charged as such. Three psychiatric
experts for the prosecution testify that they were guilty as
charged and merited no mercy. They declared, Christine and Lea
Papin are in no way tainted. They do not suffer
any mental malady. They do not carry in any way
the weight of a tainted heredity. From the point of
(32:38):
view of intellect, affections, and emotions, they are entirely normal.
The prosecutor's narrative was that the girls were angry at
their employers for the way that they'd been treated over
the years, and that that anger boiled over into murder
on the evening of February two. He described them as
a vicious bitches who bite the hand that no longer
(32:59):
caresses them, and declared, since they behaved like wild animals,
they must be treated like savages and wild animals. The defense,
of course, insisted that the sisters needed to be examined further,
but no one really listened. It was too tempting to
turn the girls into larger than life figures of evil
(33:19):
or of resistance. Yes, outside of the courtroom, the girls
had become famous among the communists and the surrealists and
the poets as a symbol of class warfare. They were
not vicious bitches. They were warriors. Who quote paid evil
back in coins of red hot iron, as two poets wrote.
But both the prosecution's narrative and the poets narrative were
(33:43):
contradicted by the sisters themselves.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
In court. They said that.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
They didn't really have any reason to resent their employers.
They mentioned that they didn't know their employers all that well,
but that Madame Laslan had allowed them to have heat
in their room and so on. They didn't seemed concerned
with creating an excuse for themselves or with upholding any
narrative of persecution. The only thing the sisters seemed to
(34:08):
care about was making one thing very clear that they
were both equally responsible for the crime. Maybe they thought
that if they were given equal responsibility, they'd get the
exact same sentence and they could live out the rest
of their days in a cell together. No one believed
that they were equally responsible, though Lea herself had said
(34:31):
at one point, I am deaf and dumb, which seemed
to mean let my sister speak for me. It was
obvious that Christine was the ringleader. The jury took a
staggering four minutes to deliberate, and they came back with
tellingly unequal verdicts Lea was sentenced to ten years hard labor.
(34:53):
Christine was sentenced to be executed at the guillotine in
the town's main square. When she heard her fate, Christine
dropped to her knees. What was she feeling in that moment?
She was kneeling like a woman in a confessional. Maybe
she was feeling the same thing that she used to
(35:15):
scream out of the bars of her cell Sorry, sorry,
I will not do it again? Or wait, am I
(35:40):
over interpreting Christine?
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Now?
Speaker 4 (35:42):
Was she feeling something entirely different as she kneeled in
the courtroom. It's really impossible to say. And that's what
makes the Papa sisters so haunting, so intriguing. It's not
just the violence of their crime or the lack of
a believable official explanation for it. Their silence. Everything they
say is mysterious, and more often than not, they don't
(36:05):
say anything at all. And this means that it's very
easy and very tempting to turn them into a metaphor.
As their biographers write, the sister's own inarticulacy appears like
a virgin page on which the temptation to write is endless.
We've already touched on how the Communists saw them as
(36:25):
clear examples of class struggle, two revolutionary maids who slaughtered
their bourgeois masters. Of course, it was tempting to interpret
their crime that way, but the Papa sisters never said
much about class at all. The closest thing they ever
gave to a revolutionary war cry was Christine's quote, I'd
rather have had our bosses hide than for them to
(36:46):
have had ours. But whatever the sisters did or did
not say, didn't stop them from becoming obsessed over by
France's intelligentsia. Writers like Jean Jeannet, Jean Paul Sartre, Simon
de Bouvois, and the psychiatrist Jacques all took a stab
at understanding them. Here's Simond de Bouvois in its broad outline.
(37:07):
The tragedy of the Papa sisters was immediately clear to
us in Rouen, as in La Man and perhaps even
among the mothers of my pupils. There were, no doubt,
women who deducted the cost of a broken plate from
their maid's wages, who put on white gloves to find
forgotten specks of dust on the furniture. In our eyes,
they deserved death a hundred times over with their wavy
(37:31):
hair and their white collars. How sensible Christine and Lea
Papin seemed in the old photo that some papers published.
How had they become those haggard furies offered up to
public condemnation in the photos taken after the drama. One
must accuse their childhood orphanage, their serfdom, the whole hideous
system set up by decent people for the production of madmen,
(37:54):
assassins and monsters. And here's lacan. That fateful evening, under
anxiety of an imminent punishment, the sisters mingled the mirage
of their illness with the image of their mistresses. They
detested the distress of the couple who they carried away
in an atrocious quadrille. They tore out their eyes as
(38:15):
bacantes castraate their victims. The sacrilegious curiosity from which the
beginning of time has anguished man moved them in their
desire for the victims, and in their attempt to track
down in the dead woman's gaping wounds, what Christine, in
her innocence, later described to the court as the mystery
of life. He's referring there to Christine's odd quote about
(38:40):
searching for something under Geneviev's skirts that would give her power.
So as people who were luckier and more educated than
the sisters were tried to understand them, the sisters themselves
were locked up. Christine was never sent to the guillotine.
The president of France changed her sentence to hard labor
(39:01):
for life. She and Leah were sent to the same prison,
but kept apart there. In prison, Christine deteriorated more and more.
She insisted that she didn't deserve to live, referred to
herself as good for nothing, and stopped eating. On one
of the rare occasions, or perhaps the only occasion, that
she saw her sister, she said the most shocking thing
(39:24):
that she had ever said. She is very nice, but
she's not my sister. Eventually, Christine was moved to an asylum,
where she wasted away further and died in the spring
of nineteen thirty seven of a lung infection. Now there
was only one. Without the overwhelming influence of her sister,
(39:46):
Leah made her way back to a somewhat normal life.
She served her time and was released in nineteen forty three.
She moved back in with her mother, and worked as
a maid again. She kept a little collection of mementos
from her old life, some of Christine's things, and a
little bit of lace that had come from the lance
La house. A journalist tracked her down and described her
(40:08):
as looking like a ghost of the past that has
burnt her until she is the color of ash. In
nineteen eighty two, the newspapers reported that she was dead,
but decades later, in two thousand, a documentarian found out
that she was still alive. In his film In Search
of the Papa Sisters, he finds Lea in a hospice room.
(40:30):
She's had a brain hemorrhage and she can't talk. Christine
was long gone, but at the end of her days,
Leya had become the silent sister once again. Even though
the screams of the lance Law women must have been
terrible as they ricocheted through that dark house, the most
important noise of the entire story is silence. After the
(40:56):
sister's trial finished, a French newspaper published a little sentence,
And today it still feels like the only thing any
of us can definitively say about the case quote. Nobody
can claim fundamental knowledge of the complex souls of women,
and especially of the serving women who each day make
(41:18):
their way among us in silence. And that's the spooky,
(41:42):
spooky story of the Papalla Sisters. My dear listeners, I'm
sorry about all the details of the eyeballs, but you
really can't tell the story without it. We didn't even
really get into the metaphorical significance of eyes, eyeballs, eyes
being the windows of the soul. Christine tearing out eyes
and then trying to tear out her own eyes. I mean,
(42:04):
you can see why. You know, France's most educated people
were just like salivating to interpret this case. It seems
so rich for interpretation. But you can interpret it all
you want. I've tried. I've felt the temptation myself, and
then you just inevitably end up at this place where
you're like, maybe that's what Christine meant, but also ultimately,
(42:28):
who can say? All Right, I hope you enjoyed that story,
or at least weren't too horrified by it. Go to
instagram dot com slash criminal Brods if you'd like to
see pictures of the sisters and let me know if
you have any interpretations of them that you'd like to
share with me if you're enjoying the podcast, I would
be eternally in your debt. If you would rate and
(42:49):
review on Apple Podcasts, preferably, please do it and then
send me a note and I'll officially send you a
note back saying I am eternally in your debt and
this you can use this legally in court, okay, And
I'll meet you back here next week for our second
tale of Sisters. This one is a big tonal shift.
We've talked about some sisters who did something very bad,
(43:11):
and we're gonna shift and talk about sisters who at
least tried to do some very good things. Although the
story is not without its extreme violence. All right, until then,
have a lovely week, enjoy the first week of June,
and I'll see you here next week.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
Bye bye.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Loving you deal like guid.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty. Guilty loving
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