A Note for One Hundred and Twenty Francs
The director of the discount office at Pontoise held before him a promissory note for no more than one hundred and twenty francs. On November 29, 1851, a man named Duchemin presented it for discounting; it appeared to have been drawn by the contractor Fontenay-Godet to the order of Édouard Lullier, a stone-sawyer. Something aroused the director’s mistrust. He had the paper shown to the man whose signature it bore. Fontenay-Godet had never signed it.
The affair might have remained within the ordinary bounds of a prosecution for forgery. A workman had traded upon his master’s credit; a third party had accepted the note; routine verification had halted its circulation. Yet another bill, bearing this time the name of the elder Mayant, had already raised a similar difficulty. As its maturity drew near, a friend of Lullier had offered to take it back and pay it off. The office had retained it. Mayant, when consulted, likewise disowned the signature.
Two disavowals opened the same door. Soon other notes came to light, scattered among merchants and artisans. The amounts were modest: they had inspired less suspicion than a considerable bond would have done. Lullier had discovered a method of levying upon public trust in small sums.
A search of his lodgings yielded three drafted bills, virgin stamped paper, and trials of handwriting. Brought before the magistrate, he admitted the forgeries. Then, through halting words which the judge pressed him to clarify, another matter declared itself. He had killed his wife. Her body lay inside a cask, in a cellar to which he could furnish the address.
Hortense Wished to Depart
Hortense Lefèvre had married Lullier three years earlier. Following the birth of their child, she had gone to work in Paris as a wet-nurse, with her husband’s consent. A recent widower required someone to suckle his infant; she had entered his service for forty francs a month. Here was honest work, a wage, and a sojourn whose terms had been mutually agreed upon.
Lullier visited her. He came to suspect her employer and demanded that she return to Pontoise before her term had expired. The judicial record notes his jealousy; it adduces no proof of any liaison. In the tale he would subsequently recount to the magistrates, the husband transformed this suspicion into the vindication of his conduct. Hortense, for her part, could no longer give her version.
On the morning of November 5, 1850, according to his deposition, she had packed her trunk to return to Paris. He opposed her and made threats. He maintained that she persisted in her resolve; whereupon he seized her by the throat and throttled her. This narrative presented the quarrel as the immediate impulse preceding the murder. Yet another of his declarations was to compromise him far more: he confessed to having harboured thoughts of killing his wife for months.
Hortense’s desire to depart stands thus at the heart of the affair, but solely from the lips of the man who prevented her going. There remained of her in the deposition the trunk, the Parisian service, the broken engagement. All these elements traced the outline of a life seeking to unfold elsewhere. Lullier had brought it to an end in their bedchamber.
The Cask Crosses the Square
For two days, he kept the corpse in his house. He then procured an empty cask, removed one of its heads, and enclosed Hortense within, having first stripped her of her garments. Having resecured the vessel, he wheeled it by barrow to a cellar where he was accustomed to store his tools.
The journey obliged him to pass through the tollgate and cross a public square flanked by shops and dwellings. No one opened the cask. What a labourer transported might draw an idle glance without eliciting an inquiry. The commonplace vessel and the gestures of daily toil had sufficed to let the crime pass unnoticed.
He then gave out the explanation he required: his wife had returned to Paris and refused to come back. Since she had already resided there, the tale possessed an instant plausibility. Her departure had a precedent; her silence could be imputed to the estrangement. For more than a year, no inquiry into her disappearance arose to contradict the husband.
The body, however, remained in a vault adjoining the cellar, beside another cask. Lullier had secured access to it with a padlock. From that moment, any alteration to the building threatened to become his undoing. He was not merely compelled to conceal a past act: he had to preserve the very arrangement of the premises that hid it.
The Prisoner of His Cellar
When the key was demanded of him, he devised pretexts to withhold it. A locksmith forced the cellar door; masonry works were contemplated. Lullier refused to surrender the vault, offered to pay rent for it, and took a small room directly above. He claimed to have mislaid the key, all the while repairing from within the partition wall that divided the two spaces.
On market days, tradesmen occupied the courtyard and the cellar. He lingered in the vicinity. The most ordinary movement of people became a surveillance he had to endure: a visitor might draw near, a landlord resolve to inspect the premises, an artisan demand the space needful for his craft. To every legitimate use of the building he replied with some fresh precaution.
He attempted to excavate the earth to bury the body, but desisted on account of the noise. Then he observed the worn treads of the staircase. He offered to turn them over free of charge, intending, according to the prosecution, to turn the repair to account by shifting his cache. He who had allowed his own trade to decline now proffered his labour without wages. This apparent generosity had a subterranean design.
Meanwhile, his expenditures and the forged notes multiplied the number of persons with whom he must reckon. The record depicts him frequenting taverns, absenting himself from the quarry, and ill-treating his young child, who was eventually taken in by the maternal grandmother. The cellar seemed to remain shut; the rest of his existence opened onto endless occasions for complaint, indebtedness, and scrutiny.
What the Cord Disclosed
Following his directions, the cask was removed from the vault and conveyed to the hospice. Two physicians opened it in his presence. Lullier identified the body of Hortense. The post-mortem examination confirmed strangulation, but it brought to light an element he had failed to mention: a slender cord encircled the neck three times.
Interrogated upon this omission, he maintained that he had first throttled his wife with his hands, then tied the cord about her neck to ensure she would not revive. The physicians were unable to determine with certainty the precise sequence of these acts. Their finding did not entirely resolve the chronology; it nevertheless compelled the accused to amend a confession that had presented itself as complete.
At the trial of May 26, 1852, before the Assize Court of Seine-et-Oise, Lullier renewed his admissions and once more pleaded jealousy. The jury returned a verdict of guilty; he was sentenced to death. The man whose invented signature had set the law in motion was now judged for a disappearance of which no promissory note had ever made mention.
The Return to Pontoise
In the night of July 13 to 14, he was informed that his execution was at hand. He departed Versailles in a cellular carriage, attended by a chaplain. At Saint-Germain, the convoy halted; he was given wine. Then the journey resumed through the forest toward Pontoise, where he arrived before broad daylight.
The gazette recounts his prayers and his composure. Such demeanour belongs to the narrative of his final hours; it tells us nothing of what Hortense endured in hers. After a brief confinement at the gaol, a tumbril conveyed him to the Place Notre-Dame. He was executed on July 14, 1852.
He had once traversed the streets of Pontoise with a cask that no one had opened. This time, the authorities knew well the contents of the carriage and the spot where it would halt. Between those two journeys lay the vigilance of a discount-office director, an interrogation, and a cellar unsealed at last. The murder had waited a year; the first man to disturb its secret had sought only to verify a signature.