20 FEATURE
Author Jan Bondeson tells a dark story sited in the city centre in another
extract from his book Murder Houses of Edinburgh
The
Demon
Frenchman
of George Street
Eugène Marie Chantrelle
and his wife Marie AnneE
ugène Marie Chantrelle was
born at Nantes in 1838, the son
of the ship owner Jean Etienne
Chantrelle and his wife Marie
Anne, born Martinet. He had a
maiden aunt in Nantes named
Marie Martinet, who was alive as late as the
1870s. According to his marriage certificate, he
was born in 1838, but his biographer Mr A.
Duncan Smith prefers the year 1834. He is
likely to have received some degree of a
university education, since he knew excellent
Latin and Greek, and good English and
German, and since his medical knowledge was
better than what could be expected from an
uneducated layperson. According to his own
account, he studied medicine in Strasbourg for
four years. He had taken part in the Paris riots
of 1851, being wounded when fighting on the
barricades, for the republican side. He then
claimed to have gone to America for a while, as
a teacher of languages.
In 1862, Eugène Chantrelle turned up in
England, visiting Newcastle, Leicester and
other places as a teacher. According to an
article in the Edinburgh Evening News,
published after Chantrelle’s downfall, he was
sentenced to nine month’s imprisonment in
Brighton for sexually assaulting a young lady,
presumably one of his pupils. In 1864 or 1865,
Eugène went on to Edinburgh, where he took a
comfortable house at 81A George Street, living
on the second and third floors above a shop. He
advertised for private pupils in the Scotsman
newspaper of January 4 1865. Since Eugène was
a rather handsome, elegantly dressed man, and
obviously a person of learning and culture, he
was employed at several schools, including the
private Newington Academy, where he beganwork in December 1865. Here, he met the
pretty 15-year-old schoolgirl Elizabeth Cullen
Dyer, who came from a distinguished
Edinburgh family. After a short acquaintance,
when she showed obvious signs of pregnancy, a
shotgun marriage ensued on August 11 1868.
On their marriage certificate, the bride’s age is
wrongly given as 18 and the groom’s age is
underestimated as well. Elizabeth moved into
81A George Street, where she gave birth to her
eldest son Eugène John later the same year. A
second child was born in 1870 but did not live
long.
Initially, Eugène and Elizabeth Chantrelle got
on well together: he kept teaching at various
schools and she minded her surviving son.
There was a schoolroom in the house where he
taught private pupils who wanted to brush up
their French or Latin. In 1875, he published
Reading Lessons in Latin with Practical
Exercises, a scarce and privately published
book not held by any library, although his
biographer William Roughead had a copy of it,which is now in the Signet Library. But soon
the marriage of the two Chantrelles was
breaking up. Eugène drank French wine and
champagne with enthusiasm, but he also
developed a taste for the Scottish national
drink, emptying a bottle of whisky per day. He
beat and mistreated Elizabeth, and sometimes
kicked her out into the common stair at night,
forcing her to take refuge in the flat below. He
cursed her in bloodcurdling terms, saying that
he would shoot her with a loaded pistol he used
to carry around, or that he would make use of
his medical knowledge to kill her with a poison
that could not be detected. Fearful for her life,
she wrote to her mother complaining of her
abusive husband, but old Mrs Dyer advised her
to stay with him. There was by now three little
Chantrelles to feed, with Louis being born in
1871 and James Ernest in 1876, and she did not
want the family to be split up. A man of
voracious sexual appetite, Eugène was a regular
at a fashionable brothel in Clyde Street, where
he drank champagne and caroused with the
harlots, sometimes firing off his pistol to make
them jump.
In 1877, Eugène left his pistol lying about
when the family was visiting Portobello: his son
Eugène John grabbed it and fired off a shot that
went through the hand of his brother Louis,
before lodging in the fleshy part of Eugène’s
thumb. The Frenchman gave a fearful yell when
a local doctor came and extracted the bullet.
This narrow escape from being shot dead by his
own son made Eugène consider insuring his
life, or so at least he claimed: in October 1877,
he took out £1,000 policies on both his own life
and that of his wife. Elizabeth was fearful that
Eugène would murder her now when her life
was insured, but her mother, who seems to