Although "crowned" as the favorite of a king who came in transparent
incognito to Paris to visit her, though occupying princely quarters,
outshining the fading La Mesard and the rising Julia Barucci in
diamonds, Iza was still known as "the Clemenceau Statue."

Her mother, as lost to shame, was the mistress of the wardrobe in this
palace; she was spiteful as a witch, and began to resemble one in her
prime, bloated, red with importance and self-indulgence, before the
wrinkles came many and fast. One day, annoyed at the persistency with
which a friend of Clemenceau's watched the queen of the disreputable in
hopes to make her flagrancy a cause for legal annulment of the marriage,
she denounced him as a traitor in an anonymous letter to the fretting
husband, then in Rome. Her daughter agreed to make good the assertion
that the friend had failed monstrously in his trust.

Like Othello, Clemenceau swore that this demon of lasciviousness should
betray no more men. The force of depravity should no farther flow to
corrupt the finest and best. He entered the boudoir of the royal
favorite and stabbed her to the heart. In the morning, he gave himself
up to the police.

The victim was so notorious that the Clemenceau trial was a nine days'
wonder. His advocate was eloquent to a fault, but that inexplicable
thing, the jury, found no extenuating circumstances in the act and
brought in the verdict of murder. The good men were incapable of
appreciating the right he claimed to stop the blighting career of
Messalina--to divorce with steel where the state of the law, then meekly
following the ecclesiastical ruling, forbade any sundering of the
connubial tie except by death.