Violette Nozière : a story of murder in 1930s Paris / Sarah Maza

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-320) and index

A neighborhood in Paris -- Interwar girlhoods -- Violette's family romance -- A crime in late summer -- The accusation -- Letters to the judge -- A culture of crime -- A water lily on a heap of coal -- The trial -- Afterlives

On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication," which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette's act of "double parricide" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era, discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair

Bound in dark red paper board with black cloth shelfback stamped in gold; dust jacket