The house was burning; what had been salvaged from it would soon prove far more compromising than what had been lost. Furniture safely sheltered, cows lying placidly in an orchard, a cellar grate carefully stopped: after that night of ruin, such matters would be scrutinised with an attention they had never before received. The prudence of one household took on, in the eyes of others, the grim aspect of premeditation. In Coullemont, where twenty-nine dwellings had just been reduced to nothing, rescuing one’s own property now demanded an explanation.
A woman, whom we place among the ruined villagers without borrowing the name of any witness, turns an iron key over in her palm. Out of mere habit, she had locked her door upon fleeing the house; she no longer knows why she kept the key. Before her stands a solitary section of wall, which she recognises more readily than she would her own reflection. Farther along, neighbours are murmuring of the Camus family’s furniture. Ceasing her search for a place to set down what she holds, she draws closer to listen.
What Had Been Saved
In the night between the 8th and 9th of August 1831, toward one o’clock in the morning, fire broke out in Coullemont, in the Pas-de-Calais. The judicial chronicle places its first flare above the dwelling of Jean Delaporte. A terrible roar tore the village from its sleep; the flames spread with such rapidity as to reduce twenty-nine homesteads to ashes in less than two hours. The gazette estimated the losses at ninety-seven thousand francs. That figure lent a measure to the disaster; it did not say where the families would lay their heads on the morrow.
Louis Camus had directed the first suspicions toward Delaporte. The accusation recoiled upon its author. Soon, it was in the Camus homestead that men sought suspicious movements, precautions taken too well, an uncanny head start on catastrophe that seemed to betray foreknowledge of its course. The inhabitants did not confine themselves to words: the chronicle records insults and acts of violence aimed directly at Camus. The fury of the populace was already fully underway when the magistrates set about gathering their evidence.
It was recounted that a neighbour had run to alert the household, expecting to find them asleep, only to discover them fully dressed before the blaze. Their furniture had been largely carried to safety. Their cattle rested quietly in the orchard. The cellar vent had been carefully obstructed. The investigators were forced to heed what these details signified to those who had fled empty-handed: the Camus family had known before anyone else; they had enjoyed the very hours denied to their neighbours.
Yet an object does not bear upon its face the hour at which it was moved. One had to reconstruct fleeting gestures through the memories of folk torn violently from their beds, consumed with rescuing their own kin or combating the flames. The prosecution maintained that the preparations observed could never have been accomplished after the alarm was raised. A recumbent cow thus became an argument of elapsed time; an intact chest of drawers, an indictment against its owners. Nothing remained innocent in the way men looked upon that house.
Words That Did Not Burn
Other things had outlived the flames: old rancours. In October 1830, following correctional proceedings for the abduction of a minor, Camus had, according to the prosecution, uttered threats against several persons who had testified against him. He had nevertheless been acquitted on appeal. The words attributed to him had been alarming enough to warrant the organisation of night patrols the following spring. Among those ruined by the summer conflagration were former witnesses; before their shattered homes, those ancient threats regained a formidable power.
To alleged vengeance was added the question of money. The Camus house, valued at roughly one thousand francs by the account, had been insured for double that amount. The public prosecutor was thus able to join both motives in a single construction: to sacrifice one’s own roof in order to deprive one’s enemies of theirs, and subsequently collect the indemnity. This reasoning endowed the calamity with the cold clarity of a calculation. It set forth the motive proposed by the prosecution; it did not, for all that, lay bare the accused man’s mind to those who listened.
A child’s words also entered the dossier. Witnesses reported that an eight-year-old grandson of Camus had spoken to them of violence inflicted by his uncles upon their father, on account of the fire. The child was said to have declared that his grandfather had set fire to his own house. We do not see the boy, candle in hand, surprising a criminal act: neither of the contemporary articles recounts any such thing. We merely hear adults repeating what a child was supposed to have told them. Between the act under indictment and the bar of the court stood several intervening voices.
In our imagined village, the woman with the key encounters her neighbour before a wall still standing. She repeats a tale she has just overheard; he asks from whom she had it. She turns toward the lane, looks for a figure no longer there, then gives a name. The neighbour nods gravely. They return to their labour. The exchange lasted but a moment; yet it was of the kind that lingers long after those who spoke it have passed on.
Husband and Wife Before the Jury
The assize hearing of 15 December brought the Camus couple before the court. Husband and wife had shared a roof, a night, and the very actions described by the witnesses; their presence side by side was an open invitation to mistake common life for complicity. It fell nevertheless to the jurors to judge each one separately. Whatever fault was imputed to the hearth was not sufficient to obliterate the distinction between two souls.
Maître Boubert contested the charges. He insisted particularly upon what the journal terms the absence of the corpus delicti, and urged the court to look with distrust upon testimonies inflamed by personal ruin. The grief of the victims was entirely understandable; it did not exempt justice from examining their accusations. In a cause where so many certainties rested upon the meaning assigned to everyday gestures, this defence struck at the fragile link between what had been seen and what had been inferred.
The jurors retired. Their verdict sundered the couple: the wife was acquitted, Louis Camus pronounced guilty. The sentence of death was handed down at midnight. The report published three months later underscores how narrowly the votes had been divided. The verdict had severed the knot; it had not dispelled the agony of judgment. As for the wife, she walked from the courtroom a free woman. To assign her, in our narrative, some lingering reserve of guilt would be to impose upon her a second sentence that the jury had refused to pass.
What Noon Would Bear Away
Following the rejection of his appeals in cassation and for executive clemency, Camus was conducted to Saint-Pol to meet his death on 5 March 1832. The chronicle of that final day shows him consumed with concern for his family, beseeching the King’s prosecutor to afford them protection. It also mentions a confession made in prison, but merely as a reported rumour. It is no written confession preserved for posterity. The condemned man, as the correspondent portrays him, dwelled above all upon the unrelenting animosity he attributed to the witnesses.
That last morning had its meals, its visits, its ordinary motions rendered agonizingly difficult. Camus had to be helped to raise his cup. He prayed; he looked upon those who stood about him. As the hour of noon drew near, time was no longer reckoned in days won or lost before a tribunal. There remained only the passage to the square, the steps of the scaffold, the crowd. The gazette attributes to him, at the very last, a final thought for his kin. Then the execution took place.
The correspondent asserts that an assembly of several thousand spectators witnessed the punishment. He relates, moreover, that once the corpse had been removed, masked revellers came to dance near the scaffold, mingling the licence of carnival with the death that had just been consummated there. This scene reaches us only through his scandalised prose. It requires no invented laughter, no imagined song, nor any reconstructed faces to achieve its effect: the public square was once again thrown open to the world, while a family was left behind to bear the name of the executed man.
At Coullemont, our woman with the key halts one evening before a new door. The timber still smells of the carpenter’s shop. Out of distraction, she tries her old key, perceives her mistake, and feels in her pocket for the other. Behind her, someone is speaking of the Camus family. She recognises the voice without turning round. The lock yields at last; she steps inside and sets both keys upon the table, side by side.