At Dijon, on November 5, 1886, the Comtesse de Molen emerged from her advocate’s chambers alongside her grandfather, Monsieur Boiffin. Her husband stood waiting in the street, revolver in hand. He discharged two shots toward Martha. She ducked instinctively and escaped unhurt; her grandfather, leaning forward to shield her, took a bullet in the chest. At trial, Boiffin testified that following the first discharge, he had stepped forward to disarm the Count, whereupon the second shot struck him down. The Count was apprehended almost immediately. The entire affair seemed to occupy no more than a matter of seconds; yet to fathom its violence, one had to trace the history of a union that each spouse depicted as the unpardonable fault of the other.
Roger de Molen had crossed paths with justice before. In the preceding year, he had recourse to Buret & Soubry, an illicit agency offering titles and public appointments in exchange for exorbitant sums. Having previously relinquished a post as sub-prefect, he was eager to re-enter government service. The agency extracted seventeen thousand francs from him by dangling the prospect of an office, all the while knowing in secret that he would never secure it. When the conspirators were prosecuted for fraud, the Count explained that he had parted with the money out of mere curiosity, placing no actual faith in their influence. The Neue Pitaval preserved the episode as a precedent; it established no proof, however, of the criminal intent to be tried at Dijon.
In 1884, the Count married Martha Chanteaud, the daughter of a Parisian apothecary. The pledged dowry amounted to three hundred thousand francs, complemented by an annual annuity promised by the bride’s father. The Château de Turcey, situated near Dijon, was encumbered by heavy mortgages; a lucrative alliance offered the means to preserve the Count’s ancestral seat and social standing. The nuptials were celebrated with splendid pageantry. Yet a mere few weeks later, husband and wife were already living apart.
Their accounts of this ill-fated alliance diverged at every sitting of the court. The Count charged his wife with refusing the marital bed, coloring her social circle with insidious insinuations that the magistrates weighed with circumspection. Martha maintained, on the contrary, that he drank heavily, subjected her to physical abuse, and dragged her to disreputable haunts against her will. Witnesses, including her parents and domestic servants, attested to recurring scenes of brutality; friends of the Count praised his munificence and denied his insobriety. Nineteenth-century chroniclers often adopted the unvarnished rhetoric of the courtroom pleadings. The present narrative must scrupulously attribute each claim to its origin: no domestic quarrel could countenance an armed ambuscade.
Martha sought refuge beneath her parents’ roof and petitioned the civil tribunal. A provisional decree of separation was granted; the Count was ordered to pay maintenance, and judicial seals were affixed upon the château to secure her dowry rights. The Count voiced fierce indignation, lamenting that the home of his forefathers had been desecrated. Repeatedly he demanded that his wife return, but she pressed forward with her suit. Concurrently, he publicly accused her of depravity. At the criminal trial, the presiding judge noted that police inquiries into her deportment had thoroughly refuted these slanders, while several acquaintances from her circle bore witness to her unblemished honor. Although the divorce proceedings remained distinct from the prosecution for the shooting, the court could not disregard the menacing declarations he had uttered against her.
The encounter in Dijon had not been prearranged by the spouses. Martha arrived the previous day in company with Boiffin to confer with her counsel; the Count traveled thither independently to consult his own. The two legal practices sat directly across the street from one another. The innkeeper, apprised of the feud, concealed each party’s presence from the other to prevent a scandal beneath his roof. On the morning of November 5, Martha called upon her advocate. The Count observed a carriage waiting before the door, interrogated the driver, and discovered that his wife was within. He lingered upon the pavement, awaiting her descent.
According to eyewitnesses, he barred her way as she stepped into the street, demanding to know where their affairs stood. Boiffin moved to thrust him aside. The Count raised his weapon and fired two rounds. Martha threw herself down by sheer instinct; her grandfather was struck. The elderly gentleman collapsed to the ground and was conveyed in haste to the hospital. His wounds were critical; one ball remained lodged in his torso. A police constable took the Count into custody on the spot. One witness recalled hearing the prisoner declare that he had not intended to kill his wife, though the arresting officer could not corroborate the utterance. For his part, the Count maintained that he had deflected the barrel and that the second discharge had been entirely accidental.
At the assizes, he admitted lying in wait for Martha but repudiated any homicidal design. He alleged that a scornful look from his wife had incited him, that his hand had strayed to the revolver without forethought, and that he had ceased his aim. The gunsmith who inspected the firearm demolished this defense: his expert examination demonstrated that the trigger mechanism demanded deliberate, substantial pressure. Boiffin recounted that after the first bullet flew, he had lunged forward to disarm his grandson-in-law, at which moment the second shot pierced his chest. The Comtesse related the identical sequence, though she could shed no light upon the events that ensued once she fled back into the hallway of her advocate’s house.
The defense dwelt upon the Count’s despair, the domestic strife, and his abandonment by his wife. Counsel argued that the revolver had discharged contrary to the defendant’s intent and that Boiffin was the victim of a mischance. The defense further challenged several incidents described by the Chanteaud family. The advocate-general, by contrast, linked the defendant’s prior threats, his bearing of a concealed firearm, his vigil before the advocate’s doorway, and the testimony of the weapons expert. Martha’s legal representative made plain that his client had appeared in court as much to vindicate her honor against vile calumnies as to obtain civil redress. Thus, the court was called upon to judge not the domestic happiness of the marriage, but the murderous intent that accompanied the pulling of the trigger.
The jury convicted the Count of premeditated attempted murder against his wife, but acquitted him of any homicidal design against Boiffin. The jurors accorded him mitigating circumstances. The court sentenced him to ten years’ hard labor and awarded a token damages of one franc to the civil party, leaving the spouses to adjudicate their financial claims before the civil bench. Jules Grévy, President of the Republic, subsequently commuted the penalty to seven years’ solitary confinement. On April 21, 1887, the civil court granted a divorce entirely to the husband’s fault, citing violence and severe mistreatment; his accusations against Martha were formally ruled groundless.
The Count had sought in vain to wield his ancient lineage and mounting debts as instruments of absolute dominion over his wife’s existence. The verdict did not crown every deposition at the bar with the status of unquestioned truth; yet it drew an unmistakable boundary. The jury separated the lethal intent directed at Martha from the wound suffered by Boiffin, confirming the deliberate nature of the ambush despite all appeals to jealousy and accidental discharge. The marital bond was severed in a civil chamber; the shots from the revolver met their retribution in a criminal court. Between these two legal jurisdictions stood a young woman whom her husband had first sought to bend to his will, then striven to silence by disgrace, and at last lay in wait for, weapon in hand, upon an advocate’s threshold.