After a month of separation, Bancelin presented himself at his sister-in-law’s dwelling in Sainte-Menehould, demanding to see Marie-Élisabeth. She came down. He sought to prevail upon her to return to Les Islettes; she refused, and he withdrew. A moment later, he reappeared in the back-shop. Marie-Élisabeth had resumed her knitting beside her sister, who was stitching a gown and conversing with a traveling merchant seated by the window. Bancelin strode forward with long paces and renewed his demand that she return home. “It shall not be today,” she replied. A detonation rang out; she fell to the floor, crying that she was slain.
It was the second day of September, 1826, at Sainte-Menehould. The wound, situated at the nape and lower portion of the neck, was initially pronounced not to be mortal in its nature. The physicians later reported that it had become so; Marie-Élisabeth lingered in agony for six weeks before succumbing. In the intervening time, the man who had fired upon her was called upon to explain why he had arrived, armed, at the house of the woman who had fled his domestic hearth.
Jean-Baptiste-Auguste Bancelin was thirty-nine years of age. A proprietor and timber merchant of Sainte-Menehould, he belonged to a family of established repute in commerce. He had wed Marie-Élisabeth Salmon, who likewise hailed from an esteemed lineage. The chronicle affirms that he loved her; yet it recounts in the same breath his brutality and violent outbursts, which had grown so frequent that his wife could no longer remain beneath his roof. Neither the affection ascribed to him nor the despair attributed to her departure could efface the blows that had driven her to flight.
In the month of July, Bancelin had conceived a desire to open an inn. His wife pointed out the attendant difficulties with measured prudence. He flew into a fury, hurled a bottle at her head, then seized her by the hair, dragged her into a closet, and threw her to the floor. She told him that she would leave him, for she could endure life with him no longer. In the midst of this scene, she implored him to spare her life, if not for her own sake, then at least for that of her children. A neighbor woman, hearing her cries, ran to the scene; she arrived at the very moment Bancelin was about to strike his wife with an iron gun barrel he had been using as a hearth-bellows.
That very night, Marie-Élisabeth took flight. Taking one of her young children with her, she journeyed from Les Islettes to Sainte-Menehould, where one of her sisters resided. The chronicle does not reveal where the other children remained during this flight. What it does record is that the separation lasted a month, and that Bancelin failed utterly to secure his wife’s return. She had found sanctuary in another house; her husband’s entreaties could not dispel the dread he inspired in her.
On the first of September, Bancelin departed for Verdun. He sought first to procure arsenic, but without success. He thereupon entered a gunsmith’s shop and purchased a pistol. He inquired whether the weapon was capable of killing a dog at four paces, and shortly returned to buy a second. Upon reaching home, he tested both firearms himself.
On the following morning, before setting out for Sainte-Menehould, he consigned his papers to the flames. He draped his violin in black crepe and covered a round table with one of his wife’s black gowns. He also took two bottles of white wine. When later he spoke of this journey to the magistrates, he represented it as an attempt at reconciliation. These preparations, recorded in detail by the chronicle, had already been completed when he presented himself at his sister-in-law’s door.
Following the discharge of the weapon, Bancelin fled the scene and cast himself into the river. The water was shallow; he was drawn out and conducted to a hall in the Hôtel-de-Ville, where the examining magistrate interrogated him shortly thereafter.
Bancelin was brought into a hall of the Hôtel-de-Ville and examined by the magistrate. He declared that he had purchased two pistols, the one charged with two buckshot pellets for his wife, the other with three for himself. He claimed to have placed them in separate pockets lest he confuse the two. According to this initial explanation, he had not crossed the threshold with a fixed intention to slay: the deed was to depend upon the reception his wife accorded him. Her refusal to return had driven him to despair, he said, and he fired. Thereafter, he had sought to turn the second weapon upon himself; the pistol had misfired, and he had thrown himself into the water.
At the Assize Court of Reims, during the December session, his language altered. He now maintained that he had harbored no design to kill Marie-Élisabeth: he had arrived with money, furniture, and effects for her use, desiring merely to share a collation with her. The discharge, he now insisted, was purely accidental, occurring as he cocked the pistol intended for his own person. He invoked the proofs of his enduring affection and wept copiously. These conflicting accounts placed a stark question before the jury: had the firearm been discharged deliberately against his wife?
The framing of the verdict rendered the proceedings far more intricate than a simple determination of guilt. The jury was called upon to state whether Bancelin had willfully committed a homicide by firing at point-blank range upon Marie-Élisabeth, and further, whether he had formed beforehand the design to make an attempt upon her person. The Crown did not regard premeditation as sufficiently established under the question as framed. The public prosecutor requested that willful homicide and premeditation be consolidated into a single interrogatory.
The court declined to alter the questions submitted to the jurors. To both, the jury returned an affirmative answer. Nevertheless, following the reading of their declaration, the King’s Prosecutor revisited his conclusions. He argued that an answer affirming a prior design of an assault upon the person did not specify that this assault was necessarily intended to produce death. Such an intention might indeed be inferred from the relation between the two questions, but an inference could not suffice to warrant capital punishment. He thereupon moved for a sentence of hard labor for life.
The debate turned, therefore, not merely upon what Bancelin had done, but upon the legal import of the findings entered before the verdict. The first question explicitly named a willful homicide committed by a pistol shot fired at point-blank range. The second inquired whether the accused had formed beforehand the design to commit an attempt upon the person of his wife, without specifying the nature of that attempt. The prosecution observed that an intended violation of the person might, within the very terms of the finding, fall short of a design to murder. Yet it was precisely the premeditation of murder that determined the penalty.
The prosecutor accordingly invoked Articles 95 and 104 of the Penal Code and moved for hard labor for life. He did not withdraw the charge of willful homicide; he contested that the jury’s response was legally sufficient to establish a prior design to kill. The court, following deliberation, rejected this construction. It ruled that the affirmative answers to both questions left room for no uncertainty, and pronounced the sentence of death. Thus, a divergence over a few words in the verdict separated the penalty demanded by the prosecution from that which the court deemed it its duty to impose.
When the presiding judge informed him that he had three clear days in which to lodge an appeal in cassation, Bancelin replied in an altered voice: “Farewell, my poor children!” He nonetheless filed his petition in cassation and sought the royal mercy. The jurors recommended him to the clemency of the King. Following the six weeks during which Marie-Élisabeth had struggled against her mortal wound, the trial drew to a close upon these legal remedies and that parting cry addressed to his children.