On March 19, 1829, Adrien Lafargue appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Hautes-Pyrénées in Tarbes, indicted for the murder of Thérèse Castagnère, the wife of Loncan. He was twenty-five years of age and earned his living as a cabinetmaker. The presiding judge’s initial inquiries concerned specific occurrences that had preceded the deed. Lafargue answered with such a profusion of detail that he paused to petition the bench to permit him to recount the entire course of his life in proper sequence. “If I am a criminal, it is through no fault of my family,” he declared, invoking the memory of his brother, from whom he claimed to have received lessons in honour and virtue.
The court heard him out. The press subsequently published his account, which commanded the fascination of a wide public; Champagnac reproduced substantial extracts, setting the prisoner’s confession beside the depositions of the witnesses heard at the bar. One must attend to both voices without confounding them: the first is that of an accused man ordering the sequence of his actions and explaining the ascendancy Thérèse allegedly held over him; the second is that of the persons who, according to the chronicle, confirmed nearly all the material facts. His depiction of her character remains his own construction, delivered after her death.
At twenty-four, by his account, he arrived in Bagnères. There he first met a woman whose name he declined to divulge, before seeking other lodgings. Along the Boulevard de la Poste, he searched for modest accommodation and entered a house where several women were assembled. Thérèse rose to answer him; her mother was away, yet she believed they might receive him. On the morrow, mother and daughter showed him a chamber where he was to be boarded and lodged. It was, he later told the court, the very room where the catastrophe was to take place.
In his narrative, the early evenings were marked by gestures that, in his eyes, took on the significance of an attachment. He described a clasped hand, a kiss, and then a conversation wherein Thérèse revealed she was married, professing to have been abandoned by her husband. Lafargue maintained that he urged her to return to him. He then related having warned her that he was betrothed in Bayonne to the daughter of a friend of his father. Their words, their pledges, and the presence of a child within the house became, in the version he offered the judges, the landmarks of an intimacy he regarded as exclusive, though known to be ephemeral.
One morning, returning to her lodging around seven o'clock laden with his tools when she did not expect him, he found the door locked; he then observed her disquiet and an apron smeared with paint. Approaching the bed, he made out the figure of a man concealed behind a curtain. He initially withdrew from the chamber; upon the stairs, he encountered the house painter employed upon the premises. Later, according to his deposition, Thérèse admitted this man had once been her lover and that she had yielded to his importunities. Lafargue’s account records his own reply: he forgave her. It records as well the vow she made to forfeit her life should she ever prove unfaithful to him again. Such words, assuming they were uttered as he related them, could nevertheless confer no lawful right over her person.
Following an altercation with Thérèse’s uncle, Lafargue quitted the house. He continued to meet her by appointment. One evening she failed to appear; the following day, he acknowledged having shoved her into the mire before wiping her clean with his handkerchief. He related, too, that she came to his workshop to ask for three francs, a sum he did not possess; after his refusal, he claimed, her manner grew cold. Eventually, she sent word that she wished to speak with him no longer.
The rupture did not arrest his advances. Lafargue stated he had warned Thérèse, through an intermediary, that she ought to avoid lingering upon her doorstep for several days, lest he “bring about a misfortune.” Passing her dwelling shortly thereafter, he observed her on the threshold among other women. Toward ten o'clock one evening, perceiving the shutter of her chamber ajar, he uttered threats against the person he believed he glimpsed at the window. He admitted to this threat, though he maintained that none stood witness to it save himself and the occupant within.
The police intervened. A commissioner summoned him before the King’s deputy prosecutor, who forbade him from seeing Thérèse or crossing her threshold, warning him that he would be kept under surveillance. This formal admonition failed to halt the sequence of events he described. The landlady of the Bonsoir inn, observing his distress, advised him to have a mass said. The chapter attributes to Lafargue a reply in which he deemed such an act powerless to soothe his torment. He remained in Thérèse’s immediate neighbourhood, solitary in his workshop by day and sleepless by night, consumed by the thought of his abandonment and by the menace he claimed he sought to avert.
By his own admission, the resolve to take her life and perish thereafter took shape during one of those nights. He resolved upon a firearm. He hired a brace of pistols from a gunsmith, purchased two charges of powder with two balls, and requested the tradesman to prime and load the weapons. He made a further attempt to secure an interview with Thérèse. He then placed the pistols in his pockets and concealed them beneath a door in the corridor of the Bonsoir inn. The maidservant who discovered them initially refused to surrender them, divining the purpose for which they were intended. Lafargue claimed he deceived her regarding the identity of the gunsmith and persuaded her that he could easily procure others. She ultimately restored the weapons to his hands.
The following day, he waited for Thérèse at the Bonsoir tavern. When she entered and refused to speak with him in private, he pursued her to her house. Her mother, who had emerged to bid him begone, stepped outside for a moment. Lafargue entered, mounted the stairs, and presented himself within the bedchamber. He admitted before the assize bench that he discharged two shots, the first missing its mark; then, perceiving an uncertainty as to Thérèse’s condition, he completed his crime with the knife he carried upon his person. He subsequently attempted to turn his hand upon himself, but both charges of his pistols had been spent. He was found insensible and regained consciousness in the infirmary.
Lafargue declared that he had hoped to succumb to his wounds. In the hospital, upon perceiving the dressings applied to his person, he attempted to tear the bandages from his arms in order to bleed to death. He stated that the attendants checked him in time. This portrayal of the accused, presenting himself as the victim of his own passion, did not diminish what he had confessed: he had uttered threats against Thérèse, procured deadly weapons, carried them upon his person, and slain the woman who refused to see him again. His own chronology revealed both the premeditation he acknowledged having harboured and the intervals during which he had reserved the possibility of renouncing it.
The witnesses confirmed nearly all the material elements of his narrative. Several deposed as to his prior good conduct, his retiring life, and his melancholy temperament. In the dock, he had spoken calmly; his voice faltered when he recounted the discharge of the first shot, after which he regained his composure. The depositions and his own testimony did not place the same issue before the jury. The prosecution maintained the charge of premeditated murder. Maître Dubois, defending Lafargue, sought to have his client declared of unsound mind at the moment of the act, submitting in evidence a manuscript composed during his imprisonment. A second advocate declared his wish to pay the prisoner the tribute of his zeal and of the sympathy he had inspired.
On March 21, following the presiding judge’s summation, the Court submitted to the jury the question of voluntary manslaughter, committed without premeditation and provoked by grave violence. The jury returned an affirmative and unanimous verdict to that question. This finding neither declared that no homicide had taken place nor amounted to Lafargue’s acquittal. It dismissed premeditation under the precise terms framed by the Court and admitted the provocation of grave violence. The decree condemned the young man to five years’ imprisonment, ten years under the surveillance of the state high police, and the costs of the prosecution.
Upon the pronouncement of the sentence, Lafargue remained impassive, bowing low after the judge’s admonition. Turning toward the townspeople of Tarbes, he declared that their tender interest had not escaped him and that they would live on in his heart. The chronicle records that applause broke out and that a crowd pressed forward in his footsteps. This public sympathy attended the verdict; it did not annul it, nor did it reduce the death of Thérèse to an enigma solved by the approval of the spectators.
The record closes upon a precise judicial decree and a street scene whose intensity the early chronicler underlines. Between the two remains the narrative of a man ordering events to suit his passion, and of witnesses confirming its outward frame; yet there remains also a woman whose voice reaches us solely through the declarations of the man who ended her life. The court pronounced a conviction for voluntary homicide, without premeditation and provoked by grave violence. The populace took the prisoner’s part; the judgment of the law retained the criminal responsibility of the act and apportioned the penalty.