Above: Pauline’s sister and mother
look sadly on at her trialremembered a remark Pauline had
made. “I don’t want Felix to be happy
with another woman – I don’t love him
enough for that.’’
The detectives shook their heads.
It was beginning to look as though
Pauline had murdered Felix Bailly out of
jealousy or possessiveness.
“Did she ever say what she would
do?’’ Inspector Dubois asked.
“She told me she felt like finishing it
all. I didn’t take the remark seriously,
but a couple of days later, when I was
cleaning her room, I saw a gun. I asked
her about it. She said it was a toy. For
a few days she seemed to take things
lightly again. Then she brooded in bed
for forty-eight hours.’’
Towards the end of the second day
the landlady suddenly heard Pauline’s
voice in the hallway: “Goodbye,
Madame Gerard.’’ And Pauline was
gone. She had taken her best clothes. On
the table she had left a note.
“I wish my personal belongings be
disposed of in the following manner,’’
Pauline had written. Then she went on
to distribute her medical books, her two
cats, what jewellery she had, keepsakes
and clothes among various friends.
Madame Gerard knew Felix’s father
was a physician and she knew where
he lived. Over the phone she got Felix’s
address from him – Felix had no phone,
his father said. He had to call from
outside. So Madame Gerard sent a
wire to Felix saying, “Pauline in Paris.
Avoid any meeting. Telephone urgently.
Signed, E. Gerard.’’
“So Pauline is back in Paris again,’’ he
said when he finally called her. “I had
dinner with her the other night.’’
Felix gasped when she told him that
Pauline was carrying a gun. “Thanks,’’
Felix said. “I won’t let her in any more.’’
The detectives wound up their visit
at Madame Gerard’s after searching
Pauline’s room. They took back to Paris
one item only, but that packed as much
fire as any gun. It was Pauline’s diary.
It was a kind of catalogue of vice.
The lists of lovers read like a telephone
directory. It spoke of them as though
they were guinea pigs and it went into
the ecstasies of her embraces, some of
them rather unusual.
“A guidebook to orgies,’’ a detective
called it. Aside from its sexual
revelations the diary was invaluable in
trying to assess what made the strange,
intelligent girl become a murderess.
The diary started in 1942 when
Pauline was 14. The place was Dunkirk,
the war-wrecked town on the Channel,
then under Nazi occupation. One night
in May, Pauline missed dinner. Her
father went on the hunt for her among
the ruins of the city. He found her in
a dugout in a passionate clinch with a
German soldier.
In school she soon became a
disruptive influence. The principal
called her father in and asked him to
remove her. She inflamed the adolescent
imaginations of her classmates with tales
of orgies in which she took part, the
school principal said.
Occasionally, in her diary, she
reflected on her early depravity and
blamed her parents for it. “They are
made of ice,’’ she wrote. “They don’t
know what feeling is. I’ve always been
lonely and unhappy because of it. Now I
seek love where I can find it – even if it’s
only for an hour.’’B
y the time she was 16, Pauline began
to fear that the Germans might
stick her into a slave-labour battalion,
as they did millions of other girls. Nazi
recruiters used to roam the streets and
snatch all healthy-looking boys and girls,
who were never seen again.
Those who could took to the hills.
Pauline picked a different type of
protection: she snared German Colonel
Busch Dominick, commanding medical
officer of the Wehrmacht hospital in
Dunkirk. “He is tall, handsome and 55,’’
she recorded in her diary. “I make him a
delicious mistress.’’
In May 1945 when Colonel
Dominick, along with all the other
Germans, was chased from Dunkirk,
Pauline was in trouble. Mademoiselles
who had blatantly fraternised with the
hated occupiers had their heads shorn
and were chased naked through the
streets by fervent patriots. To spare her
this fate, Pauline’s parents put some
mileage between their daughter and the
scene of her wartime conduct.
So she went to Lyons where nobody
knew her. But soon many would –intimately. She enrolled in medical
school – Colonel Dominick’s influence- and besides being top in her grades,
she was also the female Casanova of the
campus.
The following year, 1946, her parents
made her enrol in the university at
Lille, where she would be nearer their
residence in Malo. The first time she
went to a lecture she spotted Felix Bailly.
At the end of the lecture she turned her
baby eyes on him and asked him to lend
her his notes.
“He was breathing heavily when he
handed them to me,’’ she wrote in her
diary. “From that moment on I owned
him. He makes a nice pet. Everyone on
the campus is green with envy.’’
Three fantastic years of lovemaking,
torment and hatred followed. It wasn’t
planned that way, but Pauline found
herself straining at the leash. She never
stopped chasing adventures elsewhere.
At the same time she wouldn’t let go
of Felix, who was an idealistic young
man, deeply in love with her. She
two-timed him not only with her fellow-
students, but also with her professors.
Why did Felix put up with it all? He
probably didn’t understand it himself.
At any rate, her diary noted: “He never
stops telling me he is sticking with me
only because he wants to save me from
my terrible instincts. He thinks I would
be a lost soul without him. Maybe he is
right.’’