Death on Credit

October 19, 2005

Warning (October 22): I put up this page following a message received from a reader, who agreed to have his name appear: A. Lemaire, and who had himself had to live through the dramatic consequences of overindebtedness. He sent me the account of this drama "found in the press." I reacted a little hastily, without asking him, as I should do systematically, in which press organ he had found this information. It must be said that this account evoked two memories, one of which was particularly dramatic, referring to a friend who, 25-30 years ago, had caused the death of her daughter during a failed suicide. Now it happens that this Cartier affair is currently the subject of echoes in the press, which I have not been able to follow, my television being broken. It seems that a completely different interpretation of this account is emerging. Rather than removing this page, I preferred, until more ample information, to precede this text with this warning.

When one is read by thousands of people every day one must be concerned about the validity of the information one echoes, which is not always easy for a single person. The solution most often consists in not rushing and waiting some time for this information to settle.

Whatever the conclusions of this Cartier affair, that takes nothing away from this criticism of the techniques practiced by credit companies and banks, leading a growing number of people into a sort of headlong rush into overindebtedness that can have dramatic consequences.

Dear Mr. Petit,

I sent you the account of this drama, found in the press. A drama that is that of people pushed into debt and that led a head of family to suicidal despair. This method of incitement to overindebtedness, without scruples, is widely used by financial organizations as this article demonstrates very well.

I am myself coming out of the abyss of overindebtedness due to my credulity in the face of marketing discourse as well as the astounding "easiness" offered by this type of micro-credit. I was all the more touched since I too went, from one day to the next, through the infernal spiral of bank interdiction... in a situation of overindebtedness, suffice it to say that it is a condemnation to the street....

Fortunately for my couple and my daughters, I had the luck to have family to come to my aid and thus restore my untenable financial situation, notably by buying back and renegotiating credits. I am still paying the price but I am happy to have come out of it.

If I had not had my family behind me, who knows if I too would not have followed the path of despair.... it is quite possible.

A. Lemaire

Here is the account of this drama:

Strangled by debts, a couple decided to end it all. Only one of their five children succumbed. Trial of a drift.

Emmanuel Cartier always had the impression of living on credit and he liked that. "My mother already had one, it was like the air we breathe." He took out the first one just after his military service. It was for a stereo system. Or else a TV? It had seemed so easy to him that he keeps no precise memory of it. "You see an attractive offer, you call. You receive a form, you fill it out. The check arrives 48 hours later, as the ad says. Everything is done without ever seeing anyone, you repay so little that you don't notice it. It gives the feeling of a gentle life."

Twelve years later, Emmanuel Cartier and his wife Patricia have six bank accounts, 21 lines of credit, 15 magnetic cards, nearly 250,000 euros to repay but still the same worker's salary. When the firefighters arrived in Laversines, on August 19, 2002 around 6:45 a.m., Emmanuel Cartier was waiting for them in front of the house, at the very end of the housing estate. He is crying. He says that it is he who > killed Alicia, the little 11-year-old, the second of their five children, the one who loved to dance with him to techno and who now is barely breathing in the back room. A woman in white shakes Emmanuel. "Explain to me, I must know." Emmanuel says: "It failed. We were all supposed to die." Patricia and Emmanuel Cartier are appearing until Wednesday before the Beauvais assizes for poisoning.

A TV for each child

Between them, it had been love at first sight. He had just turned 21, she was seven years older when they met in a nightclub in 1989. Almost immediately, they had a son, Méderick. Then Alicia, Mathilde, Marine. The Cartiers live in a subsidized housing block in the Oise. The apartment looks like a candy box. Each kid has their own TV, "so there's no jealousy between them." There are three game consoles, a computer, the latest-model appliances.

• Méderick, my son used to tell me "at my friend's house, they have this. He won't come play at our house if we don't have it." We ended up buying him whatever he wanted."

The Cartiers each earn 1,300 euros a month, she as a nursing assistant, he in the metallurgy industry. So what? In the mailbox, every day, Emmanuel finds a new advertisement. He takes out a loan with Sofinco ("D raw from your money reserve as you please"), then with Finaref ("Treat yourself today"), then Cofidis ("Need money? Fast?"), then Mediatis ("Long live credit"), then Cofinoga ("Now's the time to take advantage"). If they don't respond, the Cartiers receive reminders. "Are you ill? We haven't heard from you in two months." In some financial companies, light panels display, to motivate employees, the number of loans placed by each department.

In any case, Emmanuel Cartier is a good customer. "I've always seen credit as a plus, a safety net. I felt like I had money ahead of me to meet my family's demands. Without it, you could work and eat but nothing more."

In 2000, Patricia accompanies a sister-in-law for a facade renovation at the Phénix houses in Chaumontel. "One thing led to another," she comes out with an appointment to visit a plot of land herself, between Noailles and Clermont. "A house, like my mother, that was my dream," says Patricia. In two weeks, they sign the sale agreement for 100 m2 on one level. Emmanuel thinks a new loan will never go through. At the time, they already owe more than 300,000 francs in consumer credit, blown "on everything and nothing." The builder told the Cartiers that, in any case, they had nothing to lose. So Emmanuel took his chance. "They sent us an adviser who asked for 5,000 francs to clean up our finances." He opens a new account, clears the small loans, obtains a rescheduling of part of his debts. The financing of the house just barely goes through: 603 euros a month for twenty years. Contrary to popular belief, more than 60% of loan applications are refused, but the Cartiers fit the profile of the "reassuring client": great professional and family stability, with the desire to settle down. Better than them on the criteria, there are only civil servants. Emmanuel is happy. "I told myself: these people know better than we do." Thomas, their fifth child, has just been born.

**
The salesman's spiel**

As in any new housing development, salesmen ring the doorbell. The Cartiers let themselves be convinced by a fireplace. Four years later, Emmanuel still enthusiastically repeats the salesman's spiel: "In 36 months, it would have cost us less than
the all-electric heating planned by the builder." While they were at it, Patricia chose the top of the range, with brick trim and a low wall to store the logs. Loan: 48,000 francs. Emmanuel chops the wood with an axe but Patricia fears he'll hurt himself. They buy a
chainsaw. Then the gate, the wire fencing, the lawnmower, the tiller, the hedge trimmer, the garden shed, 10 tons of material for the terrace, a steam appliance "radical against dust mites," six mattresses at the shopping center's "bedding month," the subscription to Canal Satellite, to
France-Loisirs and to a collection of lead soldiers from the Napoleonic wars. And then, "when a TV breaks down, you have to replace it."

From May 2002, Emmanuel Cartier takes out his black notebook on the 25th of each month, when the family is in bed. There, he connects to his creditors' phone servers and, all night long, calculates what he owes, plays with salary advances, deferred-debit cards, shifts one loan onto another, opens a new line, smaller and smaller. "I thought we had hit rock bottom and then, in the morning, I told myself: maybe, in the mailbox, there'll be a new one."

Keeping hope

And there always is one. Emmanuel fears only one thing: the over-indebtedness plan. "I wouldn't have been entitled to any more credit, whereas there, we always managed to recover at the last moment." In the family, no one has ever really heard the Cartiers complain about financial difficulties. In early August 2002, a sister worries. She stops by the house. Emmanuel has already brought in the wood, bought the schoolbags for the start of school. He talks about Mathilde, the third, who wants an electric scooter, and Alicia, the second, a laser radio-cassette player. They'll have them, he swears. He says: "We kept hope for a long time."

Two weeks later, when he slips his Alterna card into an ATM, it is swallowed. The electricity bill has just been rejected by his bank. Payment incidents are the only legal reason allowing the partitions between credit companies to be broken down. In two days, the Cartiers' accounts explode. Without transition, collection reminders follow the credit offers. Threatening ultimatums are stuck on their mailbox. Clearly visible, for the neighbors. They are harassed at their workplace. There too, the terms are often the same: "Do you know that your children will spend Christmas outside?" "If you don't pay, it's them who will pay."

The Cartiers pushed back the "last day" to August 18, 2002. "It was the holidays, so we wanted the children to enjoy it a little longer." The last loans are used to buy new clothes so "the kids arrive properly dressed in the other world." On Saturday evening, they treat themselves at the fast-food restaurant to the family's favorite dish: hamburgers. From the nursing home where

she works, Patricia has brought back syringes and insulin. Only Alicia will die from it. All of the Cartiers' belongings will be sold for less than 2,000 euros at a consignment shop.

This letter and this article reminded me of two stories. The first is that of the failed suicide where one of the children is lost. I saw this unfold almost before my very eyes 25-30 years ago. I had a friend who was a lecturer at the Faculty of Letters in Aix en Provence and who had married an Englishman, who also worked there as an assistant. She was in one depression after another. One day she began a psychotherapy with an odd fellow, who moreover ended up leaving the town a few years later. At first she was very enthusiastic about him:

- Ah, it does me a world of good. I'm freeing myself....

But the profession of psychotherapist demands real skills which these people possess extremely rarely. At first the simple fact of speaking freely does the client good, who thus has the impression of making progress. His "shrink" encourages him in it. But treating someone consists in knowing how to analyse their disorder, then in making them aware of it. Most of the time psychotherapists know nothing about analysing at all. They don't know how to live either and thus live "through their clients". They assume that patient "listening" can stand in for competence. When the client loses patience it is enough to explain to him that the slowness of his progress is attributable only to his own "resistances". Incompetence then becomes a profession, a lucrative one at that. It is also the absolute record for tax concealment since the sessions ("a question of the efficacy of the cure", as everyone knows) are paid in cash, hand to hand. Often the one who believes he is behaving as a psychotherapist deludes himself about his own role. He believes himself useful. When, after long years, his client decides to slam the door of his office, he often manages to convince himself that he has cured him. He has to do so, otherwise he might realise that he has simply ... robbed him.

When, on the other side, the patient finds only emptiness, his anxiety is multiplied. Very often the psychotherapist is much more afflicted than the clients he is supposed to pull out of trouble. The disorders of some can take on unlimited proportions. Many are mentally ill people at liberty, who use their clients as outlets for their pathology. My friend's had an established reputation as a "locker-upper". After a year or two of "treatment" he would end up saying to his clients:

- I believe, in the end, that you would be more in your place in an institution, where your days would be better guarded. I can suggest a very reputable establishment...

I remember a quip from my old friend Aimé Michel:

- There are two kinds of madmen. Those who are locked up and those who manage to get others locked up.

There is some truth in that sentence.

I watched my friend grow gloomier by the day. Seeing her enthusiasm at the start, I had not dared to warn her. But she seemed so unwell that it seemed necessary to me to enlighten her. That said, when you take away someone's crutches, brutally, it is good to provide them with others, as far as possible. I knew a couple. Louis, now deceased, was a professor in the philosophy department of the faculty of Aix en Provence, where I also taught. His wife Michèle called herself a psychoanalyst. She had done an astonishingly short course of treatment. A year or two, I believe. Then she had put a plaque on her door and had begun to take on clients. I only understood much later that this activity was in her case merely the expression of her voyeurism. At the time she had taken care of a young assistant at the faculty, a somewhat shy boy. Apparently his psychotherapy with this woman seemed to have done him good. He had in particular stopped stuttering and at last seemed to take an interest in the fair sex.

Well, I suggested to my friend that she go and knock on this woman's door, which she did. A few months later came the tragedy.

There is a golden rule in these psychotherapies. One deals with one person at a time. My friend had therefore already been in treatment with this Michèle for some weeks when her husband wanted to meet the psychotherapist. The rule would have required her to refuse. A psychotherapy must be an inviolable sanctuary. Departing from this rule can present risks.

Michèle received the husband, thus committing one of the most serious professional faults in this kind of activity. This event plunged my friend into intense despair. Her parents owned a house in the Alps. She went to take refuge there with her little girl, aged five. Having the impression of having reached a complete dead end, she decided to flee into the hereafter by taking her child with her on this last journey. She took sleeping pills and made the kid take some. She came through it, her daughter did not.

Some time later I had the opportunity to meet Michèle and I questioned her about this tragedy. Her reaction stunned me. I had long known a gesture that was familiar to her and that consisted in acting as if she were sending something far behind her, over her shoulder. She did it with this simple comment:

- Oh, you know. She would probably have committed suicide anyway.

And she carried on practising, without the slightest compunction.

The second story refers to a young man. This one had been raised "in cotton wool". The mother had monopolised parental authority, without being really capable of assuming it. The parents separated, then the father went bankrupt and left to live in Spain. Arthur remained alone in France. Suddenly his comfortable world collapsed. Possessing only a baccalaureate as a qualification, he found nothing to subsist on but a job as a handler in a supermarket. He had a friend in Marseille, with whom he moved in, his father having sold the large family house where he had until then been housed.

We touch here on one of the driving mechanisms of delinquency: the refusal to live through a social downfall and also the refusal to roll up one's sleeves, the lack of courage. Arthur accepted the offer of a friend who ran a video cassette rental shop. This business actually served him as a cover, because these cassettes were used to deliver bags of heroin to somewhat special customers. Arthur had always taken himself for someone else. He owned more than five hundred videos, many of which were detective films. From the policeman to the crook, the border is sometimes narrow, especially in the head of a young man of twenty-two, a gun enthusiast.

The business was interrupted after only a few months. It takes a little intelligence to make an acceptable crook. These imbeciles managed their communications with their customers from a telephone booth, quickly put under wiretap by the police. The whole gang ended up behind bars, at Les Baumettes. And that is where his mother was going to visit him. Having made inquiries, I learned that release on bail had become common practice in France and thanks to that Arthur was able to get out of prison after two months instead of three. When we went to pick him up he looked like a kitten coming out of a bathtub.

- Mom, if you only knew, it was terrible....

One might have thought that this affair would have knocked some sense into him. But not much more than that. I suggested he record his memories of the slammer on audio cassettes. With this material I could have composed a book that I would have entitled "confession of a small dealer", describing the drift of a son of a good family. Arthur would have signed the work under a false name and we would have gone fifty-fifty on the royalties. It would have given him enough to restart in life. This book could also have been useful. If he is to be believed, prison is not an exhilarating experience, far from it, and this account could have dissuaded a few young idiots from taking the risk of landing there.

It almost happened. But Arthur was cowardly. He feared, in spite of the pseudonym he could have taken and which the publisher would never have revealed, I had told him so, that the milieu he had rubbed shoulders with would take umbrage at his revelations. Indeed we had learned through him that drugs circulated freely at Les Baumettes, brought in by the prisoners' wives during visits in the visiting rooms. You have no doubt seen how interviews are carried out, in the United States: by telephone, the inmate and his visitor (or his visitress) being separated by a thick glass pane. In France things are done much more simply, and the two meet in a box. The women are searched at the entrance, but without the officers going to explore their most intimate recesses, and the trick is done. The prison administration is moreover perfectly aware of it, but considers that without it the prisons would be unmanageable.

In short, Arthur dropped the project. It took him months to resign himself to working again, always with unrewarding jobs. Speaking English well and having a certain sense of communication, he could have found a position as a maître d'hôtel, a function he had exercised as a replacement during the vacation period. But Arthur was lazy. How many times have I heard young people say:

*- Me, what I'd like to find is a cushy job, that pays well and leaves free time. *

Yeah, right.

Arthur had kept from his gilded adolescence a whole heap of impedimenta. Four tennis rackets, suits, furniture. Realism was not his strong point. Instead of housing himself modestly he took advantage of housing assistance to take an apartment located on the top floor of a modern building in Aix, with a terrace, where he could install his furniture, his bar, as well as the cabinet where he kept his precious audio cassettes. When he reached his twenty-fifth year his housing assistance disappeared and that is where begins a story that joins the one that constitutes the beginning of this page. To be able to keep paying his rent this imbecile... simply took out a loan!

The drift continued for more than a year, until I put my foot down.

- But damn it, how many loans have you taken out? How much do you owe? - I don't know.....

We ended up finding out. I paid off his debts while specifying to him that in case of a repeat he would immediately land in prison for the second time and that this time I would do nothing to get him out.

Our paths separated. The last time I saw him was through the window of my office, taking part in the systematic pillaging of my house.

From all this one must remember the enormous responsibility of the credit companies and, beyond them, that of the banks of which they are merely the relays. It is they who would deserve to be brought before a court. But consumer credit is the engine of "economic recovery". The State cannot saw off the branch it is sitting on. The novelty of our era is the appearance of a multiplicity of "small loans" which mean that people find themselves riddled with debts without noticing it. Take up again the story of that couple who tried to do away with themselves and their children. A little girl died of it. But I do not believe that the true those responsible were charged or even simply cited. As it is said in the epilogue:

*These people's belongings were sold for 2000 euros and that was that. *

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