From France to the United States

Zulma Marache in French Manhattan, 1842-1844

Zulma Marache and the Law, May 1843-March 1844

Zulma Marache Basney: Beyond Seduction and Abortion

Works Cited

From France to the United States

Zulma Ernestine Marache was born March 15, 1818 in Craonne, Laone, Aisne France, to Constance Adelaide Novellal and Theodore Louis Marie Marache(“Zulma”). They married in 1809, seven years into the Napoleonic Wars (“Théodore”). According to the memoir of Zulma Marache’s great-nephew Herbert W. Marache, Sr., Theodore served as a “non-commissioned officer in the French Army of the 3rd Regiment of the Line” (1). The war concluded three years before Zulma Marache’s birth.

Marache was the fourth child born to Constance and Theodore. More children followed Marache’s birth, with one born to Constance and Theodore. The others came from Thedore’s relationship with Eleanor Waflard. Although I've been unable to confirm that Constance and Theodore divorced, both French and American legal documents after the late 1820s identify Eleanor as Theodore’s wife. 1

Theodore, Eleanor, and their daughters, Sophia and Eleanor, planted enduring roots in Morehouse, Hamilton County, New York. Hamilton County had been founded by businessman and speculator Andrew K. Morehouse, recruited immigrants to settle and farm the Adirondacks’ expansive land (Biographical). Materials preserved in the Archives and Special Collections at the Adirondack Experience, a museum that preserves the history of the Adirondack region, show that Morehouse successfully used New York City-based agents to attract settlers.2 Theodore and family may have emigrated to the United States intending to settle where other French immigrants were making their imprint on the land, or may have learned of opportunities upstate through Morehouse’s agents or advertisements after they arrived in New York. Local records and vital statistics show that the family had formed economic and communities ties in Morehouse by the mid-1830s. For example, in May 1843 Theodore signed a note for a correction of error in “charging goods” that promised reimbursement at the Morehouse store (Note). By 1835, Theodore and Constance’s youngest child, Charles, and Theodore and Eleanor's daughters Sophia and Eleanor, were attending School District #1 (School). Theodore and Eleanor continued to expand their family as well. Lodvishka was born in 1835; Eugenia followed eight years later (“Various”). Constance and Theodore’s eldest daughter, Virginie, also had ties to Morehouse. She and her husband, Hippolyte Bleuet, had married shortly after her arrival in the United States. The 1860 United States Federal Census places them in Morehouse in 1860.3

The legacy of Theodore, Eleanor and their children is discernible today in local histories, archives, and headstones bearing the names of the families they married into—the Tuckers, Remondas, Haremakers and Kruezers. However, those archives bear only faint traces of the children Theodore had with Constance, or of Constance herself. She and the elder children built their lives in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Like her elder sister, Virginie, Zelia married shortly after arriving in the United States. She was a widowed mother by the time she testified in the People v. Catharine Costello, alias Maxwell, et al., the abortion trial that her sister Zulma set in motion (“General,” March 23; “Tancrede”). Napoleon established himself in Brooklyn, where he married his first wife, Rebecca Seaman (“Died”). In the mid-1840s he advertised his hair products in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Advertisement).

Constance Marache’s movements are harder to track than those of her children. By 1842, she resided in Brooklyn, possibly living with Napoleon and his wife (“General,” March 21). By July 1842, she lived at 90 Leonard Street in Manhattan; an 1843/1844 city directory identifies her as “Marache, Constance, dressmaker” (228).

And what of Zulma Mararche? Where was she between 1831, when she disembarked from the Sully with her family, and 1842, the year the “Memoir” begins? There are few clues. During the abortion trial in 1844, one witness claimed he’d known her for four years, which places her in New York in 1840 (“General,” March 23). Her own testimony places her visiting her mother in Brooklyn in 1842 (“General,” March 21).

The only other evidence of Marache’s movements prior to 1842 raises more questions than answers. It is an 1886 marriage record for Edward Basney and Mary Cannon Laight. It asserts that Edward was born in 1840 to Zulma Marache and John Basney, the man whom she married in 1846 (“Edward”). This marriage record is the only information I’ve yet discovered about Edward Basney. It is possible that he was John’s son from a previous relationship, and that Marache was his stepmother. It is also possible that she was his birth mother. However, neither newspaper coverage of Marache’s story nor District Attorney records mention the existence of a son prior to her relationship with Napoleon Loreaux, whom she identified as her former fiancé, seducer, and father of her aborted child. The omission of a son in any legal materials is odd, to say the least, since breach of promise lawsuits such as the one she filed against Loreaux 1843 hinged on the idea that a woman had exchanged her chastity for false promises (DeWolfe 316), and since Loreaux’s attorneys scrutinized her sexual and reproductive history when she testified against him in March 1844. The existence of a son prior to her alleged seduction in 1842 would almost certainly have come to light.

Zulma Marache in French Manhattan, 1842-1844

Zulma Marache’s movements and location between 1842 and 1844 stand out in stark clarity in contrast to what is known about her in the previous decade. By July 1842, she and Constance resided at 90 Leonard Street. 90 Leonard was located in a bustling and close-knit Manhattan French community that New York City’s French and English-language press bring to life (“General,” March 21). Advertisements in the French Courrier des Ètats-Unis highlight the patterns of transcience and permanence common in working class and immigrant urban areas. It announced rooms for French renters at 74 Broad Street and available rooms at 72 Broadway (“A Louer”; “No. 72”), as well as advertised the opening of new Broadway stores that sold fashionable hats and Paris’s latest linen and lace (“Chaeplier”; “Nouvel”). The latter advertisements also indicate Americans’ growing interest in all things French. For example, J.B. Stouvenel, an acquaintance of Marache’s fiancé Napoleon Loreaux, advertised a range of French wines (“Good”), while one American youth posted a notice in the Courrier seeking lodging with a French family in order to learn French (Notice).

The Marache women’s own movements in the early 1840s also demonstrate the rhythms and realities of urban living, as does their address at 90 Leonard Street. New York City's landlords met the challenge of housing the “ebb and flow” of its increasing population by converting single-dwelling homes into multi-family residences, and by adding buildings to their property (Scherzer 19). 90 Leonard housed several families, including that of Catharine Guetal, who would later be one of the three parties named in procuring Marache’s abortion. Guetal lived one floor above Marache at 90 Leonard, where she resided with with her husband and seven children (“City," April 13). Down the block, a two-story wooden house with an attached room at the back provided shelter for “several families” until, as one witness explained in court, arson displaced them (“Court of Oyer”). Close quarters within discrete residential units, buildings, and neighborhoods limited “domestic privacy” on the best of days.

Zulma Marache’s relationship with Napoleon Loreaux began in these liminal spaces, when they met through her work as a washerwoman and they commenced a relationship that occurred within the “intricate network of surveillance” characteristic of urban life (Stansell 85). The “Memoir” consistently shows the two trying to evade the “intricate network of surveillance” typical of close urban quarters (Stansell 85), and includes their speaking English rather than French in Constance’s presence. They did not “assume freedom of movement” or “the right not to be seen” or heard (Margolis 4; Ross 102).

There may have been an element of romance in their attempts to evade the ears and eyes of 90 Leonard and its surroundings, but the stakes rose when Marache became pregnant soon after she and Loreaux became engaged. Loreaux advocated for terminating the pregnancy on the grounds that he was not yet in the position to marry her. Marache recounts in the “Memoir” that he worried about what people would think and was also concerned about the consequences for his employment. He worked for his elder brother, Remy Loreaux, a successful importer of French baskets and a force in his younger brother’s life. According to Marache, Loreaux purchased miscarriage-inducing medicines, known as abortifacients, from French doctor John Abeille at 18 1/2 Reade Street. When Marache refused to take the medicines, Loreaux threatened her life.

Marache and Loreaux first sought to conceal two secrets from her mother and 90 Leonard’s inhabitants: her pregnancy, and then Napoleon’s increasingly abusive behavior. They continued to speak in English as tensions rose between them. They performed politeness in Constance’s presence to avoid raising her suspicions. They also were wary to creaking floorboards and lingering people. At one point, they lowered their voices and paused conversation after Loreaux feared that an upstairs neighbor witnessed him attempting to force medicines down Marache's throat. They also aligned their behaviors to the routines of those who lived at 90 Leonard and 343 Broadway. Loreaux hid the abortifacient bottle “among the boards in the Ponsot’s yard” (Marache), and waited until Constance and the neighbors had gone to bed before he retrieved it.

Of 90 Leonard’s inhabitants, only Catharine Guetal, Marache’s upstairs neighbor and Loreaux’s friend, was intentionally invited into their drama. Loreaux enlisted her help in supervising Marache’s consumption of the abortifacients, which he first brought to her on December 3, 1842. For the next two months, Guetal administered the medicines in increasingly strong and dangerous doses. When they failed, he determined there was “but one thing to do”: to send her Madame Costello's for a surgical abortion (Marache).

Costello marketed herself as a “female physician” with “long experience and surprising success in the treatment of disease incidental to her sex” (“Important” ), veiled terms that women understood as announcing that she sold abortifacients and provided abortions. In the “Memoir,” Marache shares that Loreaux had previously sent her to Costello’s to ask if she would “displace the child.” On February 14, 1844, Marache went to Costello’s at 34 Lispenard, unknowingly followed by Guetal.

When Marache arrived, Costello negotiated $15 for the procedure, with $10 down and $5 to be paid later. Marache writes that she “suffered extremely” during the five-minute procedure. When she was able, she left Costello’s and ran errands until she began to miscarry. She returned to 90 Leonard and experienced the “utmost agony” as she began to miscarry. Ironically, Constance was then assisting a French woman's labor, and was away while her daughter miscarried. Guetal and Loreaux provided sheets and linens for Marache, and she wrapped “the child” in linens before hiding it and evidence of the birth from Constance (Marache). Later, Guetal secreted the fetus away in a basket.

Constance was not naive. As mother several times over and as a midwife, she knew the signs of pregnancy and of miscarriage. She dismissed her daughter’s claims when that it was “cholic” that had consigned her to bed, and searched her room for evidence.

Neighbors were not oblivious, either. They would have noticed when a woman did not appear to go to market, complete her day-to-day tasks, use the privy, or dump the chamber pots (Baldwin 267).

In other words, not being seen in some instances was as dangerous as being seen, as Marache learned when her landlady, Madame Ponsot of 343 Broadway, asked after her. In the “Memoir,” Marache recalled that she went “out to the yard” shortly after the miscarriage so that “nobody would suspect anything in the house.”

Despite the subterfuge, neither her pregnancy nor abortion remained a secret. Three days before Marache’s abortion, Madame Ponsot received a letter signed “FROM A NEIGHBOR.” The text, which the Herald reproduced in its March 22, 1844 “General Sessions” column, exhorted Ponsot to tell Constance Marache that her daughter was pregnant. One day after the abortion, on February 15, 1843, several individuals involved in Marache’s abortion received similar letters.

Although both the “Memoir” and the Herald’s coverage of the trial refer to letters received after February 15, none of them specifies their contents. We are therefore left to speculate on what the writer wanted or what their goals were. Blackmail is a good possibility. Until the visibility of female physicians like Madame Costello, New York’s law enforcement had largely neglected to enforce the state’s laws that deemed early term abortion a misdemeanor. The popularity of female physicians services brought attention to women’s sexual agency and reproductive autonomy. In 1841, the deathbed testimony of Anna Maria Purdy, a married wife and mother who’d terminated another pregnancy at Madame Restell’s, made clear that abortion wasn’t a practice limited to certain “types” of women. Following Restell’s trial, physicians and journalists increased scrutiny of female abortion providers and lawyers zealously sought their prosecution. Importantly, only those who procured and provided abortions were targets of the law; women like Marache who had abortions were not.4 However, the standard bearers of American ideals upheld women’s sexual purity and idealized motherhood and the court of public opinion harshly judged women who violated those standards. In these contexts, it seems likely that the letter writer demanded something in exchange for not revealing the abortion to the police. Whatever the letters’ contents, Marache sought to contain the damages. At the same time, she disclosed her abortion and the letters to her sister Zelia. Zelia accompanied Marache as she went to Costello’s, Guetal’s, and Remy Loreaux’s. In the “Memoir,” Marache recounts how each recipient rebuffed her. Costello feigned unconcern while at the same time telling Marache that she would lie about her part in the abortion because she “could get in trouble.” Guetal asserted that she would deny everything and that “she would do me as much harm as she possibly could.” Remy Loreaux, Napoleon’s brother, shared he had burned his letter and sent Napoleon away until he could “see how the matter would turn” (Marache). Napoleon Loreaux, meanwhile, stopped visiting Marache and called off the engagement.

Constance remained in the dark, and kept pressing for Loreaux to marry her daughter long after he quit visiting their home. Finally, she learned the truth, although the record is unclear as to how. One version of the story indicates that Marache herself chose to disclose the truth after she received another threatening letter May 1843. Then, she realized she was “unable to any longer to hide from her that I had had a child.” In another version, which she testified to during the trial, it seems the choice was taken from her when Zelia told their mother “the circumstances” (“General,” March 21).

At her mother’s encouragement, Marache went to the police, but it is difficult to determine why, or when, given the entangled legal threads that followed.

An almost unbelievable series of events followed Marache’s disclosure to Constance, beginning with the civil suit for breach of promise that Marache brought against Loreaux in the summer of 1843. She “sought to recover damages” with the help of lawyer Henry P. Barber (“General,” March 21). Her civil suit proved a catalyst for a sinuous path that led to Marache’s own time in jail as the defendant in a slander case; to the statement she gave regarding her experience to Assistant District Attorney Jonas Phillips on September 12, 1843; to her complaint to the police on December 1, 1843 and the resulting arrest and indictment of Napoleon Loreaux, Catharine Guetal, and Costello; and finally, to her testimony against them in March 1844.

There’s reason to think that Constance encouraged Marache to pursue the breach of promise suit. No matter whether she acted on her own accord or with prompting, Marache’s turn to the law speaks to a sense of self-efficacy and self-worth rarely acknowledged in the 1840s press or in scholarship on abortion and seduction. The results of those attempts, by contrast, cast in stark relief the opportunities and limits that the law availed unmarried working-class women.5 The outcome of those events also illuminates the allegiances and rivalries among the French community, and their consequences for Zulma Marache and her family.

Zulma Marache and the Law, May 1843-March 1844

Breach of Promise, Summer 1843

“Pssst—do you see her? She’s the woman who…”

“That harlot tried to destroy the reputation of….”

“I feel sorry for her, but…”.

It’s not hard to imagine that Zulma Marache encountered whispers and pointing fingers among Lower East Side Manhattan’s French inhabitants between the time she initiated the breach of promise suit in the summer of 1843 and her willing testimony against Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello in March 1844, when the People v. Costello, alias Maxwell et al. went to trial.

Marache’s September 12, 1843 statement to Jonas B. Philips captures the basics of her breach of promise suit. She said that Loreaux “visit[ed] her for a number of months as a suitor and seduced her under a promise of marriage” (People). In addition to representing the ultimate betrayal of trust, seduction followed by the violation of an engagement imperiled a woman’s financial and marital future. A woman lost the prospect of financial support when an engagement was broken, and her loss of chastity damaged her reputation and made it more difficult for her to find a spouse to support her in the future (Lettmaier 9; Coombs 2).

Successful breach of promise suits compensated women on two levels. First, for the “disgrace and destitution” that resulted from their lost reputations, and second, for financial losses (“Kings”). Financial compensation in cases ranged widely, from small sums to hefty payments. For instance, on May 17, 1842, the Brooklyn Evening Star reported on one case in which the plaintiff was awarded $300 in damages (“Breach”). On December 18, 1844, the day that Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello were indicted in the abortion case, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted a Maryland case in which $2,000 was rewarded in damages (“Breach”). I suspect that financial concerns drove Marache’s lawsuit, and that Constance may have encouraged her daughter to pursue it. The other Marache daughters had married before or by the age of 20. By contrast, Zulma was 24 years old when Loreaux began courting her in July 1842. She was unprotected and unprovided for, and she and Constance made their living in a difficult trade that exacted great physical tolls for little financial gain.6 Marrying Loreaux would have offered both women financial security.

Breach of promise cases were risky. Women who brought such charges publicly acknowledged their own sexual behaviors, in violation of idealized concepts of womanhood that denied women were sexual beings. Further, women who sued for breach of promise were repeatedly charged with seeking revenge and of unwomanly behavior (Livengood, “‘Her Voice,’” 35-36). Additionally, the Daily Eagle’s insouciant comment in a July 12, 1843 article that the jury thought a plaintiff’s “feelings [had been] damaged to the amount of five thousand dollars” indicates that some viewed such cases as overblown (“Breach”).

In short, even successful cases came at a cost. There is no evidence that Marache’s case was successful, but she and Constance paid dearly as they endured hostility and displacement as their neighbors and the wider French community closed ranks.

Sued and Jailed for Slander, August and September 1843

Marache may have expected the personal toll of her turn to the law, but she probably did not anticipate the other cost: Catharine Guetal’s August 1843 lawsuit against her on the charges of slander (“General,” March 21). Marache’s experiences after her breach of promise suit show that “even when women pursued legal options against the men who betrayed and discarded them, the law’s inherent inequities often worked against them” (Livengood, “‘Her Voice’” 36). These inequities prevailed in seduction and abortion cases involving poor and unsupported women. Both the Tribune and the District Attorney identified these as factors in Marache’s situation ([A Case]; “General,” March 24).7 The slander suit was, they contended, manufactured to derail Marache’s breach of promise case. It succeeded because Marache was a “poor washerwoman” whose brother Napoleon’s absence from the city left her without male protection and financial assistance (“General,” March 24.). Because of her poverty, she was unable to pay bail. She was jailed at the Eldridge Street Jail, a debtor’s prison located at 22 Eldridge Street. The authors of A Second Report of the Prison Association of New York condemned the jail as a “monument of public injustice” that too harshly punished those for the crime of being unable “to pay what they owed” (71 and 70). The windowless cells were unsanitary and prisoners had limited access to water. The lack of any “screen of decency” meant that men and women experienced a “gradual loss of delicacy”(70).

Zulma Marache may have been without legal or financial assistance, but she was not helpless. She sent for a legal representative from the District Attorney’s office. On September 12, 1843 she gave her statement to Assistant District Attorney Jonas B. Phillips. In it, she outlined the whole story, from her seduction under the “promise of marriage” to the abortion at Madame Costello’s. She identified Catharine Guetal and Dr. John Abeille as being involved. She ended the account with the birth of the child and Napoleon’s assertion that he had “disposed of it” (People).

The New-York Daily Tribune first mentioned the suit against Marache on September 13, 1843 but was far more interested in its larger contexts: that is, the seduction and what followed. It omitted names but reported the details of a “young girl, recently from France,” who had been seduced, betrayed, sued for slander, and imprisoned at Eldridge Street. The Tribune erroneously identified Loreaux as the instigator of the suit after she told her “friends of the outrageous means he had forced her to conceal” that he seduced her. The Tribune celebrated the city’s lawyer for reducing bail and “set[ting]…her at liberty.” It wished the lawyer success in bringing “the author of this outrage to summary judgment” ([A Case]).

Zulma Marache, “Accuser,” December 1843

What happened with the slander suit remains a mystery, as do the events between September 12, 1843, when Marache gave her statement from jail, and December 1, 1843. On that day, she went with Constance to report her abortion to the police court. The District Attorney case files reveal that she re-swore her September statement. The wrapper that encloses the six-page statement reads “Zulma Marache v. Napoleon Loreaux, Cath. Geutal, Catherine Maxwell, alias Costello.” It identifies the charges as “Procuring Abortion.” The District Attorney files also include statements signed by Marache’s sister, Zelia, and her brother, Napoleon.8 Loreaux, Geutal, and Costello were arrested soon after. They were indicted on December 18, 1843 (People).

The press wasted no time on reporting the arrests, with the Herald leading the way with its detailed summary of the case in its December 3, 1843 “City Intelligence” column. The New-York Tribune noted the arrests the following day in a column that contained more hyperbole and fewer details than the Herald’s story. It explained that Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello had been charged with “violently producing an abortion” and then removing “the evidence…in the most violent and forcible manner” (“City”). The Courrier followed on December 5, 1843. It held itself above its rival American papers, claiming that the “details are too disgusting for us to give them at length” (“Chronique”).

The press called attention to Zulma Marache’s own role as an active participant, possibly even the initiator, in the case. The Tribune announced Marache’s story with “Infamous Act” in its subheading. The Courrier trumped the story as a “Chronique Scandaleuse”—that is, “Scandalous Story.” Both are double entendres. They flag how unusual it was for women who terminated their pregnancies to willingly participate in legal action for abortion, even when the abortions had been coerced or forced. Women feared for their reputations, and sometimes their seducers or abortion providers pressured them against testifying and attempted to buy their silence. Judges sometimes censured, jailed, or fined female witnesses because of their refusal to discuss their pregnancies and abortions on the stand.9 The Tribune stressed the point that the “complaint rests on the affidavit of the ruined girl herself” (“City”). The Commercial Advertiser also noted, after the trial, that Marache had been the “accuser” (“Court”).

The Courrier’s views of Zulma Marache’s instigation of the abortion case offers some perspective on why a woman would prefer not to testify—and why Marache’s increasing legal travails proved so interesting to New York City’s French and English press. The Courrier sympathized, to a point, with the “long series of horrors” that Marache described. However, it held her partly responsible for them. First, she had “allowed herself to be seduced” and then eventually consented (the Courrier implied) to the abortion at Costello’s. It pronounced her “an accomplice as much as a victim” (“Chronique”). The Courrier applied the same judgmental logic that infused women’s breach of promise cases to Marache’s role in the abortion case. It did not entertain the idea that she sought some sort of justice for the abuse and grief she’d endured. Instead, it questioned her motives and assumed she desired revenge, since she had revealed her own sexual and (non)reproductive “infamy” (“Chronique”).

The Courrier was hardly an objective source. It supported, and represented, what amounts to New York City’s French establishment. It defended the elderly Dr. John Abeille, who had resided in New York for nearly three decades, whom Marache identified as giving Loreaux the abortifacients (“General,” March 23). On December 3, 1843, the Herald reported that there was a warrant out for his arrest (“City”). The Courrier bristled at Abeille’s association with the case; it also chafed at English-language papers’ misidentification of Napoleon’s brother Remy as the defendant (“Chronique”).

Unsurprisingly, the Courrier cheered when Abeille and Loreaux went on the offensive. According to Abeille, they had known each other for “7 or 8 years” (“General,” March 23). They seem to have acted in concert as they swore affidavits attesting to their innocence and published them as “To the Public” notices in the Herald on December 12, 1843. Loreaux and Abeille’s self-defense in an English-language American paper reminds us that this case had repercussions for their businesses and their family’s reputations. Abeille denied that he had “avoided the service of process,” as the Herald had originally reported. He distanced himself from Costello and rejected claims that he had “ever prepared any medicines for Napoleon Loreaux or the girl Zulma.” Loreaux’s notice appeared directly underneath Abeille’s. He asserted that the charges against him were “utterly false and without foundation” (“To the Public”).

Zulma Marache’s allegations struck at the very heart of the French community, and the consequence was that they disrupted the Marache family’s place in the social ecosystem. Both she and Constance were at a disadvantage. Their landlords, the Ponsots, seem to have been related to co-defendant Catharine Guetal; the Herald reported that George Ponsot paid Guetal’s $1,000 bail in December 1843 (“City”).10 Abeille, the Ponsots, and Loreauxs had deep ties to the community and each other. Little wonder, then, Marache and Constance were living with Zelia at 7 Thomas Street and not at 90 Leonard Street when Marache was jailed in the late summer of 1843. All three women had moved again by December 1,1843, when Marache reported her abortion to the police and she and her siblings re-swore their September 12, 1843 statements. This time, they resided at 116 Duane Street, which an 1845 city directory identifies as Theodore Marache’s address (“Marache, Theodore”). Why Theodore had an address in the city when he still resided in Morehouse is a mystery, as is the nature of his relationship with Zulma, Zelia, and the other children he and Constance had. The Marache women's residence at 116 Duane is the first concrete evidence of his presence in their lives since the family’s arrival on the Sully in 1831. It is also the last and only trace of that connection I have found.

Trial for Abortion, March 1844

There is no record of Theodore as being among the “certain portion of our French population” who had “much interest” in the abortion case’s outcome and who crowded the courtroom each day (“General,” March 23). District Attorney James R. Whiting and assistant District Attorney Jonas B. Philips represented the states’ case. Four attorneys represented the defendants. Costello had secured James T. Brady, a frequent defender of female physicians, as her counsel. Each long hour of each long day of the trial scrutinized the defendants’ lives and characters.11 However, Zulma Marache’s life and character garnered the most scrutiny of all.

Defense attorneys used a number of techniques to undermine the case and Marache’s credibility. On the first day, Brady argued that Marache should not be able to testify because her abortion made her an “accomplice" in the case (“General,” March 21). Defense attorney John Warner made the same argument on the second day, after he failed to extract Costello from the trial on the grounds that the indictment incorrectly identified her a “spinster” (“General,” March 22). In between these attempts to derail proceedings, Brady conducted a “long and close” cross-examination regarding the account Marache had given for the prosecution (“General,” March 21). Her testimony and her responses to Brady hewed closely to what she’d asserted in her September 12, 1843 statement and re-sworn in December. Marache also provided details that were not in her original statements. For example, she disclosed in her testimony that Guetal had removed the miscarried fetus from her room, and she later went up to Guetal’s rooms to see it. She said, “it was a little boy; I then began to cry” (“General,” March 21). Brady and other defense attorneys were less interested in these details than they were in interrogating her sexual history. She confirmed that she’d attended dances with a porter in Brooklyn, and that she’d stayed overnight with him at the store where he worked but did “not sleep” (“General,” March 21). The defense returned to her sexual history two days later, after the prosecution rested. Elizabeth Montelila, the third-floor neighbor who had nearly interrupted Napoleon’s violent attempt to get Marache to consume the abortifacients, testified that she’d seen Marache come home with men at night. Neighbor Joseph Pellesier said something similar through an interpreter (“General,” March 23).

The defense also aimed to cast doubt on Zulma Marache’s reproductive history and her claims that she had been pregnant. Madame Ponsot testified that Marache had told her, in January 1843, that she had had been unwell due to having had her “epoch”—her period—and that she had not appeared to be pregnant (“General,” March 22). George Ponsot and Joseph Pellesier testified that Marache looked “well” on February 14, 1843, the day she went to Costello’s (“General,” March 23). Finally, the defense questioned her motives in the abortion case. In testimony that echoes the Courrier’s language undercutting Marache’s character, Elizabeth Montelila asserted that Marache had confided in her about the seduction, betrayal, and abortion. Montelila said that after Marache's release from jail, she told Montelila that she “would have revenge; she would not give up if she would lose her fingers all to pieces” (“General,” March 23).

The four defense attorneys parted ways in their approaches to their clients, revealing the differing stakes for Loreaux and Guetal, on the one hand, and Costello, on the other. Attorneys for Loreaux and Guetal focused on establishing their “general good character” (“General,” March 23). Costello’s attorney James Brady, by contrast, made no attempt to prove that Costello was a woman of character. There would have been little point. From a normative cultural perspective, she violated all that was sacred. She was a female who operated in the economic marketplace selling products and services that contradicted the prevailing notion that motherhood was womanhood’s highest and holiest of duties. Instead, Brady sought to undermine the abortion case’s credibility, first, as noted above, by contending the indictment incorrectly identified his client, and then by claiming Costello had an alibi. He called several witnesses, including her daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth and Charles Allen. They claimed she had been with them in Newton, Massachusetts on February 14, 1843, and could not possibly have provided the abortion in New York (“General,” March 22). (The following day, a steamboat operator and witness for the prosecution challenged that idea. He showed that the passenger log for the day Costello had allegedly traveled to Massachusetts bore no record of either her non-de-plume or married name (“General,” March 23).

Brady offered his closing arguments at the end of the third day of the trial, after the judge rejected Whiting’s move to have witnesses testify to Zulma Marache's “general good character.” The Herald did not comment on Brady’s arguments other than to say he offered an “able and masterly argument” (“General,” March 23). However, the Herald’s extensive record of Whiting’s own closing remarks make it possible to get the gist of Brady’s argument: that Marache was a sexually fallen, brazen, calculating woman motivated by a desire for revenge rather than justice.

Whiting re-framed Brady’s characterization of Zulma Marache. Although he recognized Marache’s “temerity” in sending for legal assistance from jail, he deflected evidence of her own agency in the abortion case to present her as a disempowered and dependent victim. He drew on the conventions of popular seduction narratives, casting his witness as a naïve and vulnerable “girl,” a word he used at least 30 times (“General,” March 24; Livengood, “‘Her Voice,’” 38-39). She couldn’t help but be seduced, he argued, especially given a lack of wiser, older male supervision. Responding to the idea that she was an “accomplice” in her abortion, he emphasized her fear and what amounted to a lack of reason, something she had claimed and to which one witness had testified (“General,” March 23).

Whiting presented a powerful, sympathetic picture of Marache before he left the case in the jury’s hands. It found all three parties guilty after 30 minutes of deliberation. However, it recommended “special mercy” for Guetal (“General,” March 24). The following month, during sentencing, the judge took the jury’s recommendation to heart. On April 13, the Tribune reported Guetal had been fined a small amount because “she is poor and has a family of seven children.” By contrast, the court fined Loreaux $250 as well as sentenced him to jail. However, Costello was not sentenced because her lawyers had “carried” her case to the Supreme Court “upon a bill of exceptions” (“City”). In May 1845, the New York State Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Costello (“Supreme”). I have not found any evidence that any further action was taken.12 The People v. Costello, alias Maxwell et al. became one in a line of abortion cases, and Zulma Marache one of many women to testify. She and her story faded from public view. But she did not disappear.

Zulma Marache Basney: Beyond Seduction and Abortion

Marriage and Children

For the Herald’s readers, Zulma Marache’s life largely consisted of what they had learned during the trial and from the “Memoir.” Both began with the story of her seduction and ended with the trial. The “press’s coverage confined her…within the inked boundaries of her putative fall from sexual and reproductive innocence” (Livengood, “‘Her Voice,’” 31). Given popular tropes, archetypes, and hard realities, it may have been difficult for readers to imagine her life in any other terms. Familiar plotlines and sentimental narratives such as those that District Attorney Whiting drew on in his closing argument offered few horizons of opportunity for seduced women.

Or maybe not. Zulma Marache’s story suggests not. The historical record, scattered and untidy as it is, shows that Zulma Marache lived beyond the available imagined plot lines. Two years after her testimony against Loreaux, Guetal, and Costello, she got married. With this, she continued to write her own story, as she had when she sued Loreaux and later seems to have willingly testified against him. That she was able to live a what reads as a “normal life” as a wife and mother, to be immersed and, it seems, accepted in several communities, suggests that her story was not entirely the sensation that it appears to be. Maybe I and others who have treated her story and those of others associated with abortion in the 1840s have gotten some things wrong.

On September 6, 1846, Zulma Marache married French-Canadian John Basney (also identified as Jean Baptiste Bassinet) at St. Vincent De Paul, Manhattan’s French-Catholic church (“Zulma Marrache”). Basney was a shoemaker who lived in Connecticut. His February 10, 1844 petition for Naturalization is signed with an “X,” indicating he could not write (“John Basney”). The 1840 United States Federal Census records a female between the ages of 20 and 30 as residing in his household. It is also possible that the woman was Zulma, given the unknowns in the years following her arrival in the U.S. The 1850 census identifies a daughter, Lucina, as having been born in 1838, and the Basney’s marriage record identifies she and John of the parents of a son born in 1840 (“Edward”). However, as I noted above, it is unlikely that the existence of children would have gone unnoticed or unmentioned during an abortion trial set in motion by a woman who claimed to have exchanged her chastity on the promise of marriage! Further, Marache could not have birthed Angelina, who is also listed in the 1850 census as one of the Basney children and whose 1843 birth coincides with Zulma Marache’s own pregnancy and abortion in New York City. I think it most likely, then, that Basney was a widow and that Marache became a stepmother when they married in 1846. Nine months after their wedding, their son Ernest Alcide was born on June 6, 1847. He was baptized at St. Vincent de Paul one month later. His uncle Charles witnessed the event (“Ernest Alcide”).

For the two decades after their marriage, the Basney family had ties to both Manhattan and Brooklyn but lived in the rural industrializing towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Federal and state census records place the family in Colebrook, CT (1850), New Marlborough, MA (1855), and Winchester, CT (1860), the same town John Basney resided in in 1840. Children joined the family in each of those locations. Zelina, Rodolph, and Paulina were born in Connecticut in 1849, 1851, and 1853, respectively (1855). Eugenia arrived in 1855, in Massachusetts. The family had returned from Massachusetts and resided in Winsted, CT, when Melvina was born in 1859 (1860).

An Extensive Network in the Berkshires

The Basney family operated as a part of an extensive network that seems to have involved both spouses’ sides of the family. The Berkshire town of Winsted, in the township of Winchester, CT, proved the family’s anchor. Nicholas Basney, who is almost certainly John’s brother, emigrated from Canada in 1833, the same year as John.13 The Basney’s children may have played regularly with their Basney cousins. They may also have played with their uncle Charles Marache’s children, at least two of whom were born in Connecticut in the late 1850s (1875).14 The older Basney children certainly spent time with their grandmother Constance. In 1850, Constance, then in her early 60s, lived with Zulma and John in Colebrook. The 1850 census is the last official record of her that I have found.

In addition to family connections, employment opportunities probably motivated the Basney family’s movements throughout New England and New York. Census records consistently identify John Basney as a shoemaker, an occupation that evolved from family-centered outwork done in the home to factory work in the mid-nineteenth century (Mulligan 60-63). Rural New England towns like Marlborough and Winsted offered abundant timber and water for paper mills, tanneries, and shoe factories. These industries expanded in response to evolving technology and an increasingly mobile population of workers. Genealogist and historian Verna Gilson’s extensive research into Winsted’s industries indicates that John Basney could have worked for any one of those many businesses.

The Rockwell Tannery is a likely but as-yet unproved candidate as John Basney’s employer, with its geographic footprint running parallel to his family’s own. Theron Rockwell opened the tannery in Colebrook in 1814. Later, his sons joined him in the business and ultimately inherited it (Norcross 204). The Rockwell Tannery succeeded because its owners recognized opportunities and adapted to the newest technologies (Gilson; “Removal”; “About”). Frank W. Norcoss writes that the Rockwells closed the Colebrook factory, but that in 1852 they opened another in Winsted (204). Located on the Mad and Still Rivers, Winsted was a trade center even prior to the 1849 opening of the Naugatuck Rail Line. It connected Winsted to New York City, where in the 1840s J.S. Rockwell had offices along the same Manhattan streets Zulma Marache traversed.

J.S. Rockwell had a reputation for cultivating loyal employees and “selecting the right men for the right places” (Norcross 205). It is possible that John Basney was one of those “right men.” It is also possible, and somewhat whimsical, to think that John and Zulma may have met because of John Basney’s work as a shoemaker. In “The History of 116 Duane Street” Tom Miller identifies Manhattan’s Duane Street as a “shoe district” that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Miller notes that as early as 1841 shoes were being sold out of 116 Duane—the same address listed as Theodore Marache’s, and where Zulma, Zelia, and Constance Marache lived in December 1843. Even if the Rockwells were not Basney’s employers, it’s conceivable that Basney’s work could have brought him to Manhattan and into Zulma Marache's life.

Possibly Zulma Marache Basney kept a diary, a daybook, sent letters and received letters. Possibly they are stored somewhere waiting to be found. In the meantime, if they exist at all, their absence makes it difficult to understand the emotional or material textures of her life following the 1844 abortion trial. However, newspaper accounts and other documentation of the Basney family are available. They chart the family’s milestones, delineate their movements, and show that they that were intricately woven into their Connecticut and New York communities.

Basney Family Milestones: Civil War, Weddings, and Deaths

The Civil War, that tragic national milestone, cut across families and generations, including the Marache and Basney families. Zulma Marache's brother, Charles, and nephew, Oscar, both served (“Charles” ; “Oscar” ). So did her son, Ernest, who at aged 16 enlisted in Connecticut’s Second Regiment. Six months later, he and his company experienced 13 days of battle at Cold Harbor (“Ernest A.”). Theodore F. Vaill’s History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery describes the immediate aftermath of the battle: “survivors lay so supine and stupid that they could hardly be called survivors” (330). Some of Winsted's citizens traveled to Cold Harbor to identify remains. One account of these attempts recalled that the “bones were so scattered about it was impossible tell” to whom they belonged. Some bodies had been buried in mass graves, and others had not been buried at all. The contingent did its best to lay to rest its “own Winsted boys…our noble dead” and recommended that the town erect a monument in their memory (“Battle”). Ernest survived, but a life of alcoholism, delusions, and attempted suicide suggests that survival came at a cost (“Ill” and “Basney’s”). Today, those who visit Winsted's Soldiers’ Monument can remember Ernest Basney as among those who “charged splendidly, and would not either halt or lie down” during the battle (“Casualties”). Ernest was discharged from the military on October 22, 1864 with a serious shoulder injury (“Ernest A.”).

Life and death marched incessantly onward. As 1863 moved into 1864 and Ernest served his country, the Basneys marked several other milestones. Their daughter Angelina married Adolphe Millochan in Manhattan’s St. Vincent de Paul, the same church in which her parents married (“Angelina”). In January 1865, the Winsted Herald announced daughter Zelina’s marriage to George Wright in Winsted, noting the two were “all of the place” (“Marriages”). Just five months later, the same paper noted that Zelina had died in Burlington, CT of “congestion of lungs.” The paper identified the 17-year-old as the “wife of George Wright, and the daughter of Mr. John Bazney, of Winsted” (“Deaths”). On June 17, 1865, the Hartford Courant reported without comment that “examining physicians” believed that “poison” had been involved, and that the contents of her stomach were under examination (“State”).15 Perhaps Zelina’s untimely death facilitated John Basney’s own. In early December, the Winsted Herald reported that the 55-year-old died “suddenly” of heart disease November 30, 1865. He died in New York City, but was buried in Winsted, CT (“Deaths”).

John Basney’s death in New York and burial in Winsted, CT illustrates the interstate ties binding the Basney and Marache families. While John’s extended family appears to have clustered in Winsted, Zulma’s brother Napoleon and the Basney’s son, Ernest, were in Brooklyn. Several family members, including his sister Angelina, lived with him and his wife Emma over the years (1870 Census). Ernest and Emma gave Zulma a granddaughter, Addie, in 1868. In late August 1868, the Herald reported the Basney’s “infant daughter” had died, and that funeral services would be held (“Died”). 16

The extent of the losses that the Basney family experienced in the 1860s were hardly unique in nineteenth-century America. Yet, it is hard not to believe that the “apoplexia” that took Zulma Marache Basney's life in October 1869 was simply medical terminology for heartbreak(“Zulma”). She was 51 years old when she died at Ernest’s. She was not buried with John in Winsted, but instead in Brooklyn’s scenic Green-Wood Cemetery. Green-Wood’s records identify her as “Zulma Basnet,” and locate her remains as abiding with those of one “Alice Basnet.” The lot had been purchased on August 20, 1866. Who Alice was, and who purchased the grave, is unknown (Thatcher). I spent a warm and rainy June afternoon wandering Green-Wood in search of Zulma's grave. If it ever had a marker, it has been given subsumed by time and what author Lydia Maria Child described, in 1841, as Green-Wood’s “picturesque and resplendent beauty” (Child 37). It is a calm and fitting place of rest for Zulma Marache Basney, who lived before and beyond the seduction and abortion that brought her to public attention nearly 200 years ago.

Works Cited