France is in turmoil over François Hollande's new love affair, while we have just buried Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister, who died from a fatal stroke he suffered in his office about eight years ago. There seems to be no connection between the cases, but a brief look into French history can provide us with an interesting connection between the two.
The lover who killed me
To do this, we must go back about 115 years in time to February 16, 1899. President France At that time, Felix Faure was there, who until now had been known mainly for his opinions on French cars (“Your cars are ugly and stinky,” he said during his speech to the heads of the French automobile industry, thus anticipating many generations of Israelis, who thought exactly the same thing) and the support he gave to the French army during the Dreyfus Affair. However, that day, Felix Faure would leave an indelible mark on the history of France, and not necessarily of his own volition.
It all started when the president, who was apparently bored with his job, decided to summon his mistress Marguerite Steinheil to an “urgent presidential meeting” at the Élysée Palace. After the lady arrived, the doors to his office were closed and the office staff were asked to “vacate the premises.” However, some time later, screams of terror were heard from the president’s office. His personal assistant, who was the first to enter the office, found the following picture: Mrs. Steinheil was only partially clothed while the president lay dying on the couch. The doctors had no choice but to diagnose a fatal stroke, which caused a massive brain hemorrhage and the president died that evening, thus saving France millions of francs…
That same day, rumors began to circulate about what really happened in the presidential office. The main rumor was that the president had suffered a stroke while his mistress was performing oral sex on him, and this created quite a few vicious wordplays, which in order to understand, it is necessary to know that the verb Pomper in French slang means to receive oral sex. The future president Clemenceau went even further, wittily eulogizing Por, saying that he tried to live like Julius Caesar but died like Pompey... Mrs. Steinhel also did not escape the French wit and since that incident she has been nicknamed la pompe funèbre (the name of the shops located near cemeteries where funeral bouquets are sold, however, if we use the slang interpretation of the verb Pomper, her nickname can also be translated as “fatal blowjob”).
The Deadly Mistress Returns
Those who thought that Mrs. Steinhel had disappeared from the pages of history after the incident were mistaken, and she was to return to the public spotlight a few years later and star in another deadly affair. On May 31, 1908, the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law were found in their home in Paris. Both died of asphyxiation, with the husband apparently strangled by a rope and the mother-in-law by her dentures. Marguerite was found tied up in her room and told police investigators that the murders were committed by three men dressed in black and a woman.
However, contradictions in her testimony soon began to emerge and she was accused of murder. During the trial, it became clear that the lady had quite a few lovers, including the King of Cambodia, and the far-right newspaper Le libre parole even tried to claim that Marguerite murdered not only her husband and mother-in-law but also the French president because the latter opposed a retrial of Dreyfus. Despite all this, the police were unable to prove beyond reasonable doubt her involvement in the murder, and Mrs. Steinhel was released and quickly traveled to England. There she managed to write her memoirs, marry Baron Abinger, bury him too in 1927, and die at the age of 85, just like Ariel Sharon…
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