Fifty Francs for Georges
The mother kept that money for her sick daughter. The son, for his part, deemed it was his due. Between these two destinations for a single sum stood, on August 15, 1908, the entire Duchemin family: a woman worn thin by toil, a young girl in dire need of care, and Georges, who had arrived to demand fifty francs with that peculiar assurance of debtors who fancy themselves creditors of the affection borne toward them.
We know from the account published upon his execution that his mother wished to send Jeanne to the Pyrenees. She could not, therefore, satisfy this latest petition. The fifty francs were not available. This refusal, reasonable even in its bluntness, Georges would treat as an affront. He possessed a trade; he might well have earned his keep. Yet the butcher’s assistant worked only by fits and starts, and the establishments wherein he squandered his days yielded no wages. Whenever funds ran dry, letters reached his mother. Letters that asked, and then demanded. On that day, the demand had taken the trouble to arrive in person.
The scene unfolded on the Boulevard de Ménilmontant, in the apartment of Lalouette, a chemical manufacturer in whose service Madame Duchemin had laboured for over twenty years. She had entered domestic service following the death of her husband, a stonecutter who had vanished in Senegal in 1885. She was left with two daughters and a boy to rear. Berthe and Jeanne had commenced their apprenticeships as soon as they were able; the maternal savings, amassed through years of patient service, amounted to a few hundred francs. One grasps the full measure of a theft only when one knows of how many working days its spoils consist.
The Refusal
Georges insisted. His mother held firm. The account in Le Petit Parisien then describes an initial assault: he threw himself upon her, bore her to the ground, and gripped her throat. She managed to wrench free and call out. He then dealt her a knife blow to the throat. The journal, reporting the facts following the trial, attributed death to the severance of the carotid artery. There is no need to embellish these actions to comprehend what had just transpired: a demand for money had ended by destroying the person to whom it had been addressed.
The murderer ransacked the room, making off with two one-hundred-franc notes and several gold coins. He had demanded fifty; he took far more from the body of the woman who had denied them to him. At that moment, the case as yet contained neither guillotine, nor parliamentary debate, nor assembled throngs. It contained a dead woman in the apartment where she laboured, missing money, and a son who knew the modesty of his mother’s means all too well to plead ignorance of them.
The trail did not long lead the police through an unknown Paris. Berthe suspected her brother and directed them toward him. Georges was known to frequent the Maison-Blanche quarter; he had worked for a pork butcher in the Rue de l'Espérance, lived in the Rue Barrault, and boarded with Bréhier, a restaurant keeper at No. 211 Rue de Tolbiac. It was in this latter establishment that he was apprehended. There, he had been treating acquaintances with a generosity for which his mother, only hours earlier, had paid the reckoning.
Such a detail was well calculated to stir the indignation of witnesses. Yet one must not allow the restaurant table to eclipse the bedchamber of the crime. Above all, it demonstrated how little Georges had departed from his customary haunts. He had returned amongst those who knew him, to a place where his identity was a mystery to no one. According to Bréhier, he had contemplated hiring a horse and carriage in order to take flight. Time was denied him.
Two Ways of Looking at the Accused
Confronted with the evidence, Duchemin confessed. At the Assizes, in June 1909, his counsel, Maître Faye, endeavoured to make something heard other than sheer cupidity. He invoked the jealousy borne toward Jeanne, younger than Georges, and the preference their mother had allegedly shown her. This was to shift the debate toward familial rivalry; it was also to recall that the denial of the money had been motivated by the care intended for this sister. The jury declined to follow this line of defence. The verdict delivered Duchemin to the death penalty.
The newspaper depicts a crestfallen prisoner and records a plea for forgiveness at the close of the proceedings. It immediately challenges its sincerity. The chronicler may register such disavowal; he is under no obligation to turn it into a science of the soul. Bréhier, who had testified, retained for his former boarder a compassion scarcely shared by the reporter's other interlocutors. He wondered whether Georges was in full possession of his faculties. As proof, he pointed to a letter wherein the condemned man still demanded from him the money seized by the police, as though the fruit of the theft remained his lawful due. The restaurateur perceived an unhinged mind where others saw merely unmitigated brass.
Berthe possessed no such indulgence. Employed in a hotel on the Avenue de Versailles, she received the tidings of the denied reprieve from the journalist. She wept, then refused to pity her brother. Her mother and her sisters had repeatedly succoured him, extricated him from scrapes, and helped him mend his faults. The murder rendered this past solicitude intolerable to contemplate. Jeanne had died in the interim, after entering a sanatorium; the family chronicle of disaster now mingled several bereavements. We shall not construct from this a medical causality. It suffices to see Berthe left alone with that which her brother had destroyed, and with the name they continued to share.
A Place Beneath the Wall
His appeal in cassation rejected, Maître Faye once more petitioned Armand Fallières for clemency. The President refused. Paris, where no execution had taken place for nearly ten years, was to see the return of the guillotine. The demolition of the Grande Roquette prison had left the choice of its site in suspense; the Boulevard Arago, near La Santé, was ultimately appointed. Thus did the administration settle the geography of the scaffold while an advocate was still striving to avert its stroke.
On August 4, Deibler warned his assistants. The engine of death was inspected in the shed on the Rue de la Folie-Regnault. Order was arranged for the streets, as was the conveyance of the condemned. In his cell, if one follows the reporting of the following day, Duchemin was pursuing an entirely different sort of day: broth upon waking, the perusal of an adventure novel borrowed from the library, a stroll, a meal of rice, a game of cards with the warders. He fell asleep that evening. These pastimes tell us nothing of his inner thoughts; they merely demonstrate how closely a final day may resemble those that preceded it, so long as he who lives it does not yet know its appointed end.
At dawn on August 5, 1909, he was executed. He wore the shirt and black veil reserved for parricides; his feet were bare. The following day, Le Matin placed this attire above the illustration of the punishment. The man henceforth occupied a date in the annals of Parisian executions: the first outside La Santé. His mother, amid this sensational news, retained little else beyond her station as an assassinated mother.
Let us then return to her before closing the docket. She had laboured for over twenty years under the same roof. She had reared three children. On that August day, she was setting aside her savings for the one who stood in need of care. Such was what Georges encountered behind the refusal of fifty francs; such was what he slew along with her.
