The Count of Horn entered the magistrate’s chambers to lodge a complaint, declaring that an attempt had been made upon his life. He came straight from a tavern where a man had, in truth, just received several dagger thrusts. Between these two facts, he hoped to interpose his title, his noble bearing, and a few prompt words, calculated to decide who should be deemed the victim and who the assassin. The magistrate received him with the deference due to his quality. Presently, however, other persons arrived who had witnessed the scene far more closely, and who harboured no reason to share in such regard.
The account left by the advocate Edmond Barbier preserves this singular expedient: the effort to transform a flight into the formal laying of a complaint. Horn had quitted the chamber by the window; the clamour of the tavern and the men pursuing him burst into the magistrate’s presence hard upon his heels. Rank had opened the door. It could not prevent it from closing fast upon the count, now turned prisoner.
A Fortune in a Pocketbook
Paris then lived to the frantic rhythm of the paper changing hands about the Rue Quincampoix. Bills, notes, and debentures permitted immense wealth to be carried about in a mere pocketbook. The relation between weight and value had become wondrously simplified for the dealers; it had become no less simplified for those who sought to despoil them. There was no longer any need to carry off an iron chest: a solitary man could bear upon his person both the temptation and the spoil.
Antoine-Joseph de Horn belonged to a noble house of the Low Countries whose kinship reached into sovereign dynasties. His brother allowed him a substantial pension. Barbier recounts his losses at play and places him at the Hôtel de Flandres, in the Rue Dauphine, within that Paris where money seemed to circulate swiftly enough to repair every imprudence. Yet a loss remains a loss, even in a city that speaks of new-made fortunes from dawn to dusk.
Two companions joined him in the criminal design. One, named de Mille or de Milly according to various relations, was to be taken with him; the other eluded immediate pursuit. The early chronicles assign them the role of evil counsellors. This convenient distribution—wherein the well-born youth is said to have been driven to crime by base associates—detracts nothing from what those same records subsequently relate of his active hand. The count was not one to linger upon the threshold of the chamber.
The three men approached a stockbroker who held valuable papers on behalf of several clients. An advantageous transaction might be concluded between them, they urged; it was merely necessary to withdraw from the turmoil of the street to come to terms. The tavern offered a private room and the ordinary appearance of a commercial interview. The broker was not asked to venture into some secluded den: he was merely invited to treat away from the din.
On March 22, 1720, this invitation drew him into the vicinity of Quincampoix, to the Impasse de Venise. Barbier places the chamber on the second floor. The victim carried that which might well fix the interest of his interlocutors; once seated, he no longer had the eyes and movement of the street to protect him. The door that shut off the negotiators now sundered a man from those who might have come to his aid.
Horn, according to Barbier’s narrative, wrapped a napkin about the man’s head while dagger thrusts were rained upon him. The chronicle records ten blows; no inventory of the wounds is required to discern the intent. The design was to reduce a man to silence long enough to seize his papers. But he cried out. In a house where guests were continually received, that cry destroyed the secrecy the three men had sought to preserve.
Two of the accomplices made for the door, while Horn threw himself from the window. The projecting timbers of the adjoining houses enabled him, according to Barbier, to descend without breaking his neck. His freedom was of short duration. In the chambers of Magistrate Regnard, in the Rue Saint-Martin, he sought once more to assert the authority of his own narrative; but men arriving from the tavern denounced him as the felon to be seized. The magistrate altered his demeanor toward him. The gentleman’s complaint no longer shielded him against the accusation of the witnesses.
Those Who Pleaded for Time
The arrest of Horn and de Milly carried the affair far beyond the walls of the tavern. The family bestirred itself. Kinfolk, personages of consequence, names commanding immediate audience presented themselves before the Regent and his mother. They brought neither the vanished pocketbook nor any alternative explanation for the cries that had been heard; they brought the formidable weight of those alliances that bound one great house to so many others.
Against these entreaties, John Law stood in defence of a credit of a different order. The murder threatened the confidence of the dealers. If a broker could be lured into a room, butchered, and despoiled by a man whose high birth might deliver him from punishment, the most promising paper would no longer suffice to reassure those who bore it. Law demanded an exemplary sentence. The crime had brought about a brutal collision between the honour of a lineage and the security of a financial system.
The trial was swift; this very speed became a field of battle. With Easter approaching, to gain a few days might open the way to fresh intercessions. The competence of the court was challenged. Barbier, ever attentive to points of procedure, notes that an advocate proposed to carry the dispute before the Grand Council. Judicial delay offered the family a resource that the material facts of the crime could never provide.
The Crown replied by granting the councillors of the Châtelet a special commission to judge without appeal. The procedural obstacle was thus swept away by a command from above. Horn and de Milly were condemned to be broken alive upon the wheel on the Place de Grève. Almost no interval remained between the sentence and its execution; the entreaties thereupon shifted their aim.
It was now petitioned that the count be beheaded. This change in the request lays bare the social order with a stark clarity that the rhetoric of honour at times obscures. The family was no longer contesting merely the death of their kinsman; they sought to preserve the distinction of his punishment. The wheel was deemed infamous. Barbier records that they even pleaded the consequences such infamy would visit upon the women of their house and their eligibility for certain noble chapters.
The body of the condemned man had thus become the ground upon which they sought to rescue a privilege. It was not enough to die: one had still to die according to one’s station. Court memoirs diverge regarding the Regent’s hesitations and the intercessions that might have wrested a reprieve from him. The outcome, however, remains unaltered: the commutation demanded was not granted.
The Common Scaffold
On March 26, Horn and de Milly were executed on the Place de Grève. The count’s birth procured him no separate scaffold, such as had been claimed on his behalf. The man who had sought to enter a magistrate’s presence in the guise of an injured gentleman died publicly beside his accomplice, condemned for a sordid murder of gain.
It would be too simple to perceive in that single day the dawn of an equal justice. The proceedings had been traversed by private influence, by an extraordinary ordinance on jurisdiction, and by the state’s resolve to safeguard confidence in the financial markets. What renders the episode so revealing is precisely the confluence of these forces: all were at work, and none, in the end, had saved Horn.
Following the murder, assemblies in the Rue Quincampoix were forbidden. Barbier describes the watch holding both ends of the thoroughfare and the ordinances directed against masterless men. The city had answered a blood-stained chamber with a police sweep across the public realm. The courtiers retired to their mansions; the negotiators sought other quarters for their traffic. The broker himself could begin anew nowhere.
Of his murderer, memory has preserved chiefly a title and a scaffold. Yet there remains, at the outset of this ruin, a narrower scene: a magistrate listening to a complainant, then watching those enter who denounce him. For a few passing moments, two conflicting versions of the same affair occupied the selfsame chamber. The count had staked all upon the version his name might render credible. This time, the men who came behind him were heard.