On the twenty-eighth of December, 1873, at about a quarter past seven in the evening, along the verge of the Bois de la Jatte, Bétourné was pointing out a heap of fodder to his companion Degouy when the two men caught the sound of footsteps fleeing beneath the thicket. A poacher’s blind had been contrived beside a stack of lucerne and straw; the gamekeeper had only just recognized the post he had marked earlier that morning. Degouy darted off in pursuit of the fugitive. Bétourné, who was older, took a path familiar to him so as to cut off his retreat.
He had just crossed the wood when he found himself face-to-face with a man armed with a gun, carrying away a hare. “In the name of the law, halt!” he shouted. The only reply was a gunshot. Bétourné fell, struck in the head according to the narrative of the indictment; several pellets of lead had penetrated his left shoulder. Degouy ran toward the sound, lifted his comrade, and carried him back to Nointel. Bétourné’s eye was lost. He was sixty-six years of age.
The man had vanished before the two keepers could apprehend him. Pain and shock prevented Bétourné from naming him at that moment, though he avowed he would recognize his assailant should he ever set eyes upon him again. Degouy, having never confronted the fugitive face-to-face, could offer only a cursory description. In those first nocturnal hours, the inquiry thus possessed no name; it held only a victim, a blind, and the vestiges of unlawful hunting.
On the following day, December 29, the judicial authorities of Pontoise examined the ground. The clues were both manifold and singular. The poacher, according to the findings summarized in the Gazette, had stationed himself in the blind he had prepared beforehand; there he had brought down a hare and was bearing a muzzle-loading gun with a ramrod. Hairs were gathered from the spot where the beast had fallen, together with scraps of paper wadding. Footprints connected the hayrick, the blind, and the place of the encounter with Bétourné. They were recorded by plaster cast, detailed sketches, and a descriptive procès-verbal.
Every dimension was measured with scrupulous precision: twenty-nine and a half centimeters in length, nine centimeters in width, with a broad, depressed heel measuring seven centimeters across. The sole bore eight rows of round hobnails down its center, flat-headed nails along its outer edge, and elongated, two-pronged nails at the toe. These markings led the indictment to conclude that the wearer was an inhabitant of Beaumont. Yet they did not suffice to supply an identity. For several months, the magistrates gathered intelligence upon the known poachers of the canton, while Bétourné, recovering by slow degrees, maintained that he would ultimately identify the man who had wounded him.
In the closing days of February, the keeper named Joseph Lefèvre, known as “le Gas,” a husbandman of Beaumont. Lefèvre was placed under arrest on the third of March and brought before Bétourné, who positively identified him. The bill of indictment noted that he was recognized across three successive confrontations. The examining magistrate’s minutes recorded that the accused protested his innocence in tears and trembling. The Gazette reported this reaction as it had been set down, though such an observation alone cannot resolve its true import.
Lefèvre’s boots were seized. They appeared to replicate the marks impressed into the earth: the identical pattern of nails, the same misshapen heel, the very same two-pronged studs at the front. The investigators traced the cobbler who had affixed them. He explained the peculiar characteristics of the footwear, which the prosecution held to be sufficiently distinctive as to preclude all chance of error. The gendarmerie had impounded them as early as January 7, well before Bétourné had named Lefèvre—a circumstance that permitted the prosecution to emphasize that the seizure had preceded the denunciation. On March 11, keeper Heurtaux, who had been present during the preliminary observations, recognized these shoes and declared he would stake his head they had left the impressions observed beside the blind. Thus the prosecution bound together an imprint preserved in the soil, an object seized from the accused, and the testimony of a man who had surveyed the field the very morning after the shot was fired.
The accused advanced another explanation: he might well have crossed that same parcel of land on the preceding Sunday. The indictment dismissed the conjecture. The footprints, taken on December 29, appeared to the magistrates far too fresh to have arisen from an earlier passage; above all, the tracks traced a continuous line from the hayrick to the blind, and thence to the scene of the assault. The correspondence of the footwear, the firearm, and the paper wadding formed a formidable chain of circumstantial evidence in the eyes of the prosecution; yet every link still required proof of its author.
The gun seized at Lefèvre’s dwelling was likewise a muzzle-loader. An expert armorer examined the shot extracted from Bétourné’s wounds and concluded that the assailant’s weapon had been loaded with mixed shot, notably sizes four and six. A search of Lefèvre’s domicile brought to light shot of the selfsame calibers. The waddings recovered near the blind and at the spot where the keeper had fallen had been torn from school copybooks; the prosecution asserted that Lefèvre was in a position to possess paper of such origin. These elements did not constitute a confession, but rather a web of material affinities which the prosecution arrayed around the ambush and the shooting.
The prosecution maintained further that Lefèvre was no stranger to Bétourné. He had been surprised on several occasions upon the lands of Béjot and threatened with legal proceedings. He was said to have been seen on the day following the attack near the woods, carrying a gun and watching the movements of the magistrates. The indictment described him as a prosperous cultivator of unblemished judicial record, yet of ill repute, given to hunting in every season. Such a portrait belonged to the narrative constructed by the prosecution; it could serve neither as proof of the discharge nor as definitive identification.
The trial account offered two conflicting distances. In the initial narrative, the assailant was said to have been thirteen meters from Bétourné when he leveled his piece; in the concluding passages, the recognition was placed at fifteen meters. This discrepancy persists within the archival record. The precision of these measurements stood in stark contrast to the absence of any comprehensive report of the oral proceedings: the number of witnesses and the prosecutor’s conclusions are recorded, yet the questions raised during the cross-examinations remain unrecorded. The bill of indictment charged Lefèvre with hunting by night without license, and subsequently with an intentional and premeditated attempt to murder Bétourné, calculated to secure his flight and evade prosecution for the forestry offense.
At the assizes, Lefèvre entrenched himself in unyielding denial. Fifteen witnesses were heard for the prosecution and twenty for the defense. The journal asserted that the latter introduced no novel facts, yet it provided no particulars regarding their depositions or the addresses of counsel. Procureur Harel sustained the indictment; Maître Léopold Lachaud appeared for the defense. Following the summing-up by the presiding judge, the jury withdrew. Half an hour later, they returned with a verdict of acquittal.
The footprint, the nails, the gun, and the lead had built an indictment around a suspect named long weeks after the crime. Within half an hour of their retirement, the jurors acquitted Lefèvre. Such is the final fact preserved by the Gazette regarding the outcome of the trial; of the grounds for their decision, the chronicle records nothing.
Archival Note: Gazette des Tribunaux, issue of May 4–5, 1874, p. 432, Assize Court of Seine-et-Oise, sitting of May 1. The article summarizes the indictment and the conclusion of the proceedings without transcribing the witness depositions or the pleas of counsel. It records contradictory distances (thirteen and then fifteen meters) and offers no reasoning for the jury’s verdict of acquittal.