For fifteen years, Sylvie Lausberg has investigated Marguerite Japy-Steinheil, alias Madame S. ”
His life is a novel“, she says.
She was born Marguerite Japy, in Beaucourt, a small village in the Ballon d’Alsace, on April 16, 1869. Heiress to a large family of Protestant industrialists, she dreams of elsewhere and she dreams big. Overprotected, or even more, by a father who bridles her, she breaks the banns on the latter’s death and goes up to Paris. She marries “a neurasthenic and introverted painter“(these are the words of Sylvie Lausberg) and dashes into the whirlwind of a life she wants free. Surrounded by lovers, plunged into the heart of a state scandal (she was the one in company of president Félix Faure when he died, in the midst of coitus) and accused of murder, Madame S.’s life reads like a novel, but also like an investigation…
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