Eavesdropping (17 page)

Harriette Wilson, an early nineteenth-century courtesan, used the first of these to achieve the second, and in doing so exerted an influence on the third. Harriette managed to sleep with several hundred of the most important members of the British aristocracy, and blackmailed almost all of them, including the Prince of Wales, the Lord Chancellor, and four future prime ministers. She had the perfect vehicle—her diary, published in 1825. Any of Harriette’s numerous lovers who failed to pay an exclusion fee found himself in
Memoirs
, and if that wasn’t enough, the book also sold well, especially to the lower and middle classes.
⁹

In the early 1990s blackmail was the subject of a detailed analysis by legal scholar Richard Posner. He examined 124 cases with a known motive that had occurred in the previous century. Of these, fifty-four involved a threat to divulge a criminal act that had not been previously prosecuted. In thirty-eight percent of the remaining cases, the act in question had been, by Posner’s classification system, “disreputable, immoral, or otherwise censurable,” a category that, in the mode of Harriette Wilson’s clients, included fornication and adultery.
¹⁰

Posner’s statistics indicate that nearly half of the cases involved a threat to publicize a crime. It is obvious why these were so numerous. No one wants to be exposed or punished if he can avoid it, and these people had been avoiding it. Why, then, did they spill their own beans by contacting the police? One possibility is that the blackmailer’s demand exceeded the severity of the punishment likely to be meted out by the courts. Another possibility, however, is that payment would not have ended the matter. By demanding “just a little more” the blackmailer could continue his relationship with the victim, to no certain conclusion. Law professor George Fletcher pointed out that the most objectionable feature of blackmail is often not financial at all, but relational. The question, according to Fletcher, “is whether the transaction with the suspected blackmailer generates a relationship of dominance and subordination.
¹¹

I assume that this feeling of subordination was unusually difficult to tolerate in cases where the victim was a person of some wealth, breeding, or stature, as he would have been, and the blackmailer was a sleazy character, as most certainly were.

Since cases of
successful
blackmail do not usually come to light, one wonders how many maids, repairmen, and others have happened upon, or positioned themselves to see, a single act that under threat of revelation set them up for life. When one considers the loss of social standing, marriage, employment, self-respect, and everything else that stands to fall when a wrongful act is publicized, the blackmailer might actually be offering his victim
a good deal
.

There might not have been much risk of the blackmailer’s being exposed, either, especially if he or she operated anonymously. When literacy reached the masses, poison pen letters enabled the middling classes to intimidate the rich and famous without fear of reprisal; handwriting experts did not appear for a century or more. Letters with a personal target were numerous, if the novels of Balzac are to be believed, though such letters were likely to be crumpled up and burned.

Public letters were another matter. British historian E. P. Thompson looked at the anonymous threatening letters that were sent to the
London Gazette
over a seventy-year period beginning in 1750. There were nearly three hundred letters in all. The majority were aimed at gentry and nobility, others at manufacturers or merchants. Clearly, some of these writers were attempting to get revenge, but others were seeking to redress various wrongs.
¹²

In a pre-existing relationship, the mere
possibility of disclosure
can alter the distribution of power between the present “possessor” of personal images and the individual from which they came. This process resembles blackmail, but is far less dark. I call it “graymail.” In a typical case of graymail, a person surprises a friend or associate in an embarrassing act, or is found to have learned something that he is not supposed to know. Nothing directly is said about this, and the parties being proper, nothing would be said. But the knowledge
is now in the mind of another, and this produces an automatic tilt in the balance of power, and possibly the offer of some sort of favor or unearned privilege—also unlikely to be discussed. Everyone has experienced graymail.

One of the oddest things about eavesdropping is the degree to which it is able to straddle both ends of the moral continuum. Historically, a violation of personal privacy was prosecuted if it produced community tensions, and was welcomed—even rewarded—if it served religious, political, or judicial interests. But there was a fine line, if there was any line at all, between looking
for
immoral or illegal behavior and looking
at
it.

The church wanted people to look for it. As we saw in
Chapter 1
, the Congregational church had said in 1582 that each parishioner could better serve the church “by overseeing and trying out wickedness. Also by private or open rebuke, of private or open of fenders.”
¹³
They called this “Holy Watchfulness.”
¹⁴

In all societies, everyone—neighbors, tradesmen, servants, and lodgers—kept an eye out for sexual misdeeds, and they could claim that they were doing the Lord’s business. In eighteenth-century Paris, a neighborhood was “a place where everyone was watched by everyone else,” according to Arlette Farge.
¹⁵
Two hundred years later, it still was. In Gévaudan an unusually informative social pageant took place in the village churches. “People noted,” wrote Michelle Perrot, “who attended mass, how frequently they received communion … and how long young girls remained in the confessional. Tongues began to wag,” she wrote, “when faces swelled and waists thickened only to thin down suddenly.”
^l6
Villagers also kept their eyes on another class of women—widows—counting how many months from their husband’s death they continued to wear their veil. “Woe unto the widow who, one torrid summer day, lifts her veil in order to breathe,” wrote Françoise Mauriac in 1926.
“Those who see her will say: ‘There’s another one who quickly got over her grief.”
¹⁷
Several decades later the writer Annie Ernaux would write of her village in Normandy that “the neighbours inspected the washing on the line to see how white and worn it was, and they knew exactly whose night bucket had been emptied. Although the houses were separated by hedges and embankments, nothing escaped people’s attention, not even at what time the men rolled in from the café, or which woman’s sanitary towels were conspicuous by their absence.
¹⁸

Exhibit 12 Holy watchfulness

These testaments are interesting, but they do not tell us who eavesdropped upon whom, what they saw and heard, how and why they did it, and what was done with the experience afterwards. Under the circumstances, it is hard to discover the deeper things that we need to know. What can we learn about the eavesdropping that occurred in previous centuries, when many people could not read and write?

Exhibit 13 L’épouse indiscrète (The indiscreet wife), engraved by Delaunay, 1771

A great deal, thanks to the English, who were good at keeping track of such matters. For one thing, adultery was illegal, and the enforcement of adultery laws was being taken very seriously. But in English courts, accusations had to be supported by eye-witness testimony. This caused individuals—usually at least two—to come forth and describe what they knew and how they knew it. Court reporters took down their statements in detail, even, in some cases, preserving subtle differences in the witnesses– manner of speaking.

Frequently these citizens were investigating suspected misbehaviors. In other cases, they were already eavesdropping when they
saw or heard something newsworthy or scandalous, which then snaked its way through the village until it reached the ears of the authorities. Given the sequence of events, one might be excused for thinking that a bout of domestic surveillance had somehow
caused
the criminal behaviors that, in fact, simply got caught in the eavesdropper’s net.

Exhibit 14
L’amour à l’épreuve
(Love on trial), Pierre-Antoine Baudouin, c. 1777

In July of 1666 Mary Babb was at home in York, England with Mr. Babb. But she was too much at home with him, given that he was her brother-in-law Richard, not her husband Ottiwell. These in-laws were clearly enjoying their moments of presumptive privacy, without realizing that a neighbor, Elizabeth Tullett, stood
silently watching them through a hole in an outer wall. Her eavesdropping was possible, Elizabeth would later tell a court, because there was “
only a wall
betwixt them.”
¹⁹

In fact, Elizabeth had been watching Mary and Richard for some time, and had seen the two cavorting around York with less than a wall “betwixt” her and them. On at least one occasion she had seen the lovers “together both on foot and horseback,” Elizabeth said, and had watched them “commit incontinency together and to carry themselves too lightly and wantonly” in a way that was “not becoming civil persons.”

The domestic incidence of the Babbs’ misbehaviors started in May. Elizabeth saw Mary Babb pass by the hole in the wall, “having her clothes and smock pulled up to her breast none being in the house with her but … Richard Babb.” Two months passed before the next incident. Then, in early July, Elizabeth saw the couple alone together in Ottiwell Babb’s house, where “they two did frequently kiss each other with as much eagerness and familiarity as man and wife could do.” Richard “put his hand under her clothes in an uncivil manner which,” Elizabeth added, his sister-in-law “allowed without resistance.”

That was on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, Elizabeth—at her post once again—saw Richard Babb return to his brother’s house several times. On one visit, Elizabeth saw him take his brother’s wife “on his knee and there kiss each other very freely and too familiarly and he put his hand under her clothes in very uncivil manner several times.” If that scene was not sufficient reward for her patience, the next one was, for Elizabeth then saw the siblings-in-law “in the very act of adultery or incest in a very beastly manner she the said Mary holding up her hinder parts and having her clothes and smock pulled up above her loins and he thrusting …”

I’ll spare you the rest, except to say how the scene ended. Two other eye witnesses, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Vintin, happened along and joined Elizabeth at the hole in the wall. Enraged by what they saw, the Vintins
charged into the house
, hoping to catch the incestuous adulterers in the act. Unfortunately for them, the lovers quickly
composed themselves. By the time the door swung open, Mary was sitting on the hearth with her brother-in-law on a bench beside her. “Lord Bless me,” Mary was heard to exclaim at the sudden entry, to which Mrs. Vintin replied, “The Lord hath nothing to do with thee.” Supportively, her husband Richard accused Babb of “playing nought” with his brother’s wife. The truth out, the adulterous couple slunk away.