At eleven o’clock, the galleries of the Seine-et-Marne Court of Assizes are thronged. The magistrates take their seats; at the bar of the defence, Maître Barboux waits. Léon Degand, twenty-five years of age, a journeyman saddler, buries his face in his handkerchief. His brown greatcoat catches the public eye: it is the very garment he wore on the day Rosa Biziot disappeared into the canal. He denies everything. At the close of the debates, the jury returns a verdict of guilty. The court sentences him to penal servitude for life. Yet, as he is led from the hall, he cries out once more: “I am innocent!”
The account published a week after the hearing recounts a case wherein the witnesses saw neither the initial blow nor the final breath. A stroll, scattered detonations, a struggle glimpsed from afar, and a man stooping in the water must somehow be pieced together. The gazette immediately offers its own reading of the facts, but the defence will challenge the very gaps in this evidentiary chain.
A Fractured Liaison
Degand worked in Paris as a saddler. In 1868, he met Rosa Biziot; an intimate liaison was formed between them. For two or three years, according to the summary of the indictment, nothing betrayed any discord. Towards the close of 1871, matters soured, yet the preliminary judicial inquiry failed to determine what truly transpired between them. The press advanced several conjectures: had Degand suspected Rosa of infidelity? Had he sought to leave her? Did Rosa refuse to part from the man who provided for her? The chronicle inclines toward this latter possibility, though without setting it down as an established certainty.
A witness deposed that Degand had repeatedly voiced a wish to rid himself of his mistress. The press account quotes these words; the prosecution discerned in them the herald of a premeditated crime. It would be easy, after the tragedy, to view it as a maturely fashioned scheme. The text itself states that the design of the crime took root in the early days of January 1872. This remained the thesis expounded by the prosecution before the jurors, not a confession wrung from Degand.
On January 8, he invited Rosa to accompany him to Lagny. He claimed he wished to visit a friend, Kindel, who occasionally went there for a musical soiree. The pair departed together and passed the night in the town. At the hearing, Degand affirmed that she had accompanied him. He maintained that he had expected to find Kindel at Lagny and had failed to meet him. The presiding judge confronted him with a simple fact: Kindel resided in Paris, a mere five minutes from Degand’s own lodgings. The accused asserted that he had called at Kindel’s home without finding him. The purpose of this excursion remained at the very heart of the examination, for the motive Degand assigned to it convinced neither the prosecution nor the public prosecutor.
The following morning, the couple took the towpath alongside the Ourcq canal. The spot described by the journal is sunken between two steep embankments. The prosecution maintained that Degand had brought along his revolver and that, after a first shot, Rosa had scrambled up the bank. He was said to have overtaken her, cast her down, and fired five more times. The chronicle then asserts that he dragged her into the water and held her under. These details belong to the accusatory narrative summarized before the court; no witness was ever presented as having seen the entire scene.
What the Witnesses Beheld
The boatman was called first. He stated he had seen no one pass save Degand and his mistress. He recalled that the man spoke harshly to Rosa: “Come this way,” before they turned toward the canal. His testimony precedes the violence and lends the morning walk a direction that, in retrospect, assumes a darker meaning.
Desvoges heard three or four gunshots. Some hundred paces away, he caught sight of a man grappling with a woman and throwing her to the ground. The man wore a brown greatcoat, resembling the one Degand wore at the bar. He did not describe the fatal shot, nor did he see the body cast into the water. Marguerite Honoré heard piercing shrieks; her first thought was of murder or ravishment. Hearing two gunshots, she ran toward the spot. When she reached it, the woman was no longer in sight. The man was in the canal, seemingly holding someone under the surface.
Degand told her that the assassin had made off to the opposite bank and that he had leapt into the canal to rescue Rosa. Honoré gave no credence to the tale. She stated she had seen no one flee. Her son deposed to the same effect; two other witnesses likewise declared they had witnessed the struggle. They claimed to have reached the scene in less than two minutes, and they gave no credit to Degand’s explanation. The direct testimony was thus brief, fragmented, yet convergent upon one essential point: the man left standing in the water was the very one they had seen struggling with Rosa.
Under examination, Degand insisted upon the presence of an unknown man dressed in black. By his account, this stranger fired first, struck the weapon from his hand, wounded him in the wrist, and robbed him of his watch and pocketbook containing three hundred francs. The stranger allegedly killed Rosa and cast her corpse into the water before escaping by swimming across. This tale was reiterated throughout the judicial inquiry and during the trial. Public Prosecutor Voisin dismissed it as a pure fable: no one had seen this third man, and the bystanders had distinguished only two figures.
Two anonymous letters, addressed to the President of the Republic and to Degand’s father, were attributed to this supposed stranger. Yet, before the examining magistrate, Degand admitted having penned them himself. He held his peace when the presiding judge reminded him that he had himself conceded his tale was incomprehensible. For the prosecution, these letters were no external evidence confirming the existence of an assailant; on the contrary, they were an extension of the falsehood fabricated by the accused.
The articles left behind upon the bank became another link in the chain of reasoning. Rosa’s travelling bag, hat, and umbrella were said to have been neatly arranged side by side. The prosecution saw in this proof that no sudden intruder had surprised the pair. The defence replied that no one had seen the deed accomplished, that Degand’s attire bore no trace of blood, that Desvoges could not have reliably distinguished the colour of the coat from a distance of a hundred metres, and that the pistol discovered on the ground was never proven to belong to the prisoner. Maître Barboux thus reminded the court that the witnesses had seen only the moments preceding or following the act, never the act itself.
A Defence Before the Jury
Prosecutor Voisin dwelt upon the sheer implausibility of the mysterious stranger and upon the journey to Lagny. He depicted Degand as the sole author of the crime, whose journey could only be explained by the premeditation of murder. He addressed himself likewise to the prisoner’s kin: his father was an honourable merchant, his brother a worthy artisan, and his sister a Sister of Charity in Paris. This emphasis upon family dishonour belonged to the prosecutor’s rhetorical arsenal; it did not prove the crime, yet it demonstrated how the jurors were invited to weigh Degand’s silence against the unblemished name of his family.
Maître Barboux did not pretend the charges were trivial. He demanded that their very gravity call for the most rigorous standard of proof. The anonymous letters, he argued, might well be the clumsy manoeuvre of an innocent man as much as of a guilty one. No one had witnessed the murder. The coat could not be identified with certainty from such a distance; blood was absent from his garments; the weapon found at the scene had not been formally traced to his client. The defence maintained that the prisoner’s account was not so impossible as the prosecution asserted, and besought the jury not to substitute mere impression for tangible proof.
The presiding judge summed up the debates. The jurors answered the question of guilt in the affirmative, while granting the benefit of extenuating circumstances. The court sentenced Degand to penal servitude for life. The penalty was not the scaffold, yet it banished him for the remainder of his days from the freedom he claimed. He shouted his proclamation of innocence as he was escorted from the hall.
On the following morning, Prosecutor Voisin proceeded to the house of detention to interrogate him anew. The journal then reported a dramatic reversal: Degand confessed in tears. He reportedly explained that he had hesitated to speak out of regard for his parents, seeking to save himself to spare them the disgrace. This post-verdict confession must not be confused with the jurors’ decision, which had been rendered the previous evening solely on the basis of the trial proceedings. The chronicle provides no official transcript of this examination; it reports only the words of Voisin and the confession attributed to Degand.
The prisoner immediately lodged an appeal in cassation. By the canal bank, no one had witnessed the entire scene; in court, prosecution and defence had ascribed contradictory meanings to the selfsame fragments. A boatman had seen the couple walk away in a direction chosen by Degand. Witnesses had heard shots, seen a struggle, and then found the young saddler standing in the water. The man in black, for his part, had left behind neither witness nor trace, save for the letters Degand admitted to having written. The jury rendered its verdict; the trial chronicle preserves as well the doubt that the defence had sought to keep alive between those two observed moments.