The Papin Sisters and the Murder Narrative

On February 2, 1933, the mother and daughter of the Lancelin family were killed by their two maids, Christine and Léa Papin, in an unexpected and violent attack. The maids assaulted their employers in a remarkably brutal manner, ripping the eyes out of the two still-living women, beating them to death with a pitcher and a hammer, then slicing their faces and bodies with a kitchen knife to such a point that they were no longer recognizable. The women’s bodies were found hours later by the husband and father, Monsieur René Lancelin. He arrived home to find the house seemingly empty, yet bolted from the inside. Unable to obtain entry, he called police, who helped him break into the house, then accompanied him inside where the grisly discovery was made on the staircase landing.


The two victims had been beaten and stabbed, but perhaps oddest detail of all, their legs had been slashed...striated, actually...in a manner curiously reminiscent of loaves of bread, like the lines on top of a baguette. Their undergarments had been pulled down, but they had not been raped. Blood covered the carpet.

Since the killers were unknown at the time these bodies were discovered, the two maids were assumed to have been killed as well, and the men fully expected to find more bloody carnage upstairs in the women's attic bedroom. Instead, they found the women alive, huddled together in a single bed behind their locked bedroom door. Between the time of the slaughter and the return of Monsieur Lancelin to the house, they had performed their domestic duties as usual, cleaning the blood off their bodies and changing into clean nightclothes. They had rinsed the butcher knife used in the killing and placed it in the kitchen along with the other cutlery in the drying rack. In short, they cleaned up their mess and got ready for bed. The police took them into the station for questioning, and they admitted to having murdered Madame and Mademoiselle with the kitchen knives and pewter pitcher.

What happened in the Lancelin house that evening is not a mystery in the traditional sense of the word. Whereas investigators of most murder cases initially look for the killer, in this case the identities of the murderers were known from the moment the crime was discovered. Neither Christine nor Léa ever denied her involvement in the killing—in fact, Christine was more than willing to provide details about the moment of the murders, giving police a clear account of the chronology of the attack. Yet over and over, she stumbled on one point: why had she and her sister slaughtered their employers? What provoked such a brutal killing? When investigators asked her the reason for the assault, she was unable to give them an answer. Similarly, younger sister Léa reported that she did not know why she had acted as she did, instead offering her own gruesome details about who stabbed whom, the words spoken by her sister, and the cries made by the victims.

As a result, this one unresolved element of the story—the motive—has haunted the crime ever since. How could two apparently rational women kill with such violence? Did something provoke them? These questions lead to others: Should their potential for violence have been noticed before the crime? Was the wrath they obviously carried with them somehow visible in their faces? In their actions? In their lifestyle? Should someone have known they "had it in them," to kill, given the odd upbringing of the women and their unhealthy attachment to each other? In short, how could this have happened without anyone seeing it coming? And what exactly is "it"?

Society needs an explanation, which is usually provided in the form of some kind of logical narrative. When chaos erupts, disrupting the (often imagined) smooth flow of events, logic and order are thrown into disarray, necessitating an explanatory narrative to put it all back into place, as it were. If we can grasp what happened, and why, we feel satisfied and the world is, if not put exactly right again, at least somehow understandable. Any violent crime is upsetting, of course, but if it can be packaged and placed into the existing tapestry of society, we can move forward. But the world becomes a very disturbing place when something this messy, this chaotic, this unexpected just happens, with no explanation whatsoever. Where do we file away this violence?

In the years since the murders, various writers have come up with possible explanations for the crime, some focusing on sociocultural causes for the unexpected violence, others examining it from a psycho-sexual point of view, taking into account the hints of an incestuous lesbian relationship between the sisters. Many have used the crime to support their own ideologies, bolstering psychoanalytic analyses of self and other, or theories about hidden violence in the female. Yet none seems completely satisfactory, as there is something about this crime that cannot be contained in one single explanation. What is important here is that the inability to resolve key mysteries around the event seems unexpected, as if the crime should be understandable. But on what are those expectations based? Why do we think motive can be pulled out, clearly stated, and analyzed?

Put another way, given the violence and chaos of a bloody murder, isn't it more logical that any explanation will be insufficient, that the logic of language is not compatible with the illogic of slaughter? What explanation for the above image of the two women could possibly satisfy us?