She Stands Accused | Page 3

already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois
Benedictine College" within the 60 days following each date you
prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?

The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois Benedictine
College".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

Scanned with OmniPage Professional OCR software donated by Caere
Corporation, 1-800-535-7226. Contact Mike Lough


SHE STANDS ACCUSED BY VICTOR MacCLURE

Being a Series of Accounts of the Lives and Deeds of Notorious
Women, Murderesses, Cheats, Cozeners, on whom Justice was
Executed, and of others who, Accused of Crimes, were Acquitted at
least in Law; Drawn from Authenticated Sources

TO RAFAEL SABATINI TO WHOSE VIRTUES AS AN AUTHOR
AND AS A FRIEND THE WRITER WISHES HIS BOOK WERE
WORTHIER OF DEDICATION
I: INTRODUCTORY II: A FAIR NECK FOR THE MAIDEN III: THE
COUNTESS AND THE COZENER IV: A MODEL FOR MR
HOGARTH V: ALMOST A LADY VI: ARSENIC A LA BRETONNE
VII: THE MERRY WIDOWS INDEX

INTRODUCTORY: I.
I had a thought to call this book Pale Hands or Fair Hands Imbrued--so
easy it is to fall into the ghastly error of facetiousness.
Apart, however, from the desire to avoid pedant or puerile humour,
re-examination of my material showed me how near I had been to
crashing into a pitfall of another sort. Of the ladies with whose
encounters with the law I propose to deal several were assoiled of the
charges against them. Their hands, then--unless the present ruddying of

female fingernails is the revival of an old fashion--were not pink-tipped,
save, perhaps, in the way of health; nor imbrued, except in soapsuds.
My proposed facetiousness put me in peril of libel.
Interest in the criminous doings of women is so alive and avid among
criminological writers that it is hard indeed to find material which has
not been dealt with to the point of exhaustion. Does one pick up in a
secondhand bookshop a pamphlet giving a verbatim report of a trial in
which a woman is the central figure, and does one flatter oneself that
the find is unique, and therefore providing of fresh fields, it is almost
inevitable that one will discover, or rediscover, that the case has already
been put to bed by Mr Roughead in his inimitable manner. What a nose
the man has! What noses all these rechauffeurs of crime possess! To
use a figure perhaps something unmannerly, the pigs of Perigord,
which, one hears, are trained to hunt truffles, have snouts no keener.
Suppose, again, that one proposes to deal with the peccancy of women
from the earliest times, it is hard to find a lady, even one whose name
has hitherto gleamed lurid in history, to whom some modern writer has
not contrived by chapter and verse to apply a coat of whitewash.
Locusta, the poisoner whom Agrippina, wanting to kill the Emperor
Claudius by slow degrees, called into service, and whose technique
Nero admired so much that he was fain to put her on his pension list,
barely escapes the deodorant. Messalina comes up in memory. And
then one finds M. Paul Moinet, in his historical essays En Marge de
l'histoire, gracefully pleading for the lady as Messaline la
calomniee--yes, and making out a good case for her. The Empress
Theodora under the pen of a psychological expert becomes nothing
more dire than a clever little whore disguised in imperial purple.
On the mention of poison Lucretia Borgia springs to mind. This is the
lady of whom Gibbon writes with the following ponderous falsity:
In the next generation the house of Este was sullied by a sanguinary
and incestuous race in the nuptials of Alfonso I with Lucretia, a bastard
of Alexander VI, the Tiberius of Christian Rome. This modern Lucretia
might have assumed with more propriety the name of Messalina, since
the woman who can be guilty, who can even be accused, of a criminal
intercourse with a father and two brothers must be abandoned to all the
licentiousness of a venal love.
That, if the phrase may be pardoned, is swatting a butterfly with a

sledge-hammer! Poor little Lucretia, described by the excellent M.
Moinet as a ``bon petit coeur,'' is enveloped in the political ordure slung
by venal pamphleteers at the masterful men of her race. My friend
Rafael Sabatini, than whom no man living has dug deeper into Borgia
history, explains the calumniation of