“The Court of Assizes is no counterfeiter’s workshop,” the presiding judge remarked, checking Charles-Auguste Bécardy as he repeatedly begged leave to forge a banknote under the very eyes of the jury. On April 14, 1874, Bécardy took his place in the dock, already under sentence of contumacy from Bordeaux for the manufacture and uttering of counterfeit notes. The Gazette des Tribunaux described his confident smile and the manifest pride he took in his own craft; while in prison, it was said, he occupied himself by transcribing the procedural writs served upon him. His counsel produced the impression of a seal of the Paris Court of Appeal, struck upon an envelope with an exactitude that the journal deemed capable of deceiving the most practiced eye.
Surrounding him in the dock were four co-defendants: Louis Van Baer, a Dutch engraver established in Mulhouse; François-Alphonse Feffer, an itinerant musician; Marie Witt, a singer and Feffer’s companion; and Léon-François Bouteillé, a pastry-cook’s boy from the Tarn. The proceedings sought to untangle a confederacy that, according to the indictment read at the bar, had in 1873 circulated spurious twenty-franc notes of the Bank of France throughout France, Switzerland, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, and Italy.
The dossier led the investigators back to the preceding autumn. In Paris, at the lodging house kept by the widow Ledoux on the Rue de Bercy, the police arrested Feffer and Marie Witt. Concealed beneath the woman’s petticoats were four copper plates readied for printing. Further seizures followed elsewhere: after the band’s departure, their Basel workshop yielded a press, a porphyry stone for grinding colours, printer’s inks, reams of paper, and trial proofs; apparatus used in the fabrication of the notes was likewise seized at Huningue and Belfort. The French, German, and Swiss authorities had acted in close concert. The initial admissions wrung from Feffer and Witt led to the remaining arrests; Bouteillé was delivered to the French authorities at Mulhouse, and Van Baer was duly extradited.
Bécardy, for his part, had fled his previous sentence. Under the assumed name of Casimir Dagès, he had taken refuge in Mulhouse. The indictment cast him as the master-spirit of the new enterprise. There he was said to have fallen in with Feffer and Witt, and subsequently with Bouteillé and Van Baer, the latter being an engraver skilled enough to prepare the plates. In Basel, the five confederates reportedly purchased a lithographic press and established a workshop in a secluded quarter. The prosecution assigned the parts: Bécardy drew upon the stone, Feffer ground the pigments, Bouteillé ran the errands, and Witt passed the counterfeit paper. Journeys across Switzerland, Germany, and Italy were purportedly sustained by the proceeds of these emissions.
The material exhibits lent tangible weight to the charge. At Van Baer’s domicile in Mulhouse, searchers discovered, hidden beneath a plank at the bottom of a wardrobe, an unengraved copper plate and sheets of paper identical to those found in Feffer’s baggage. In a chest of drawers lay an authentic twenty-franc note, evidently serving as a model, beside a counterfeit bill half-impressed. In the courtroom, the tipstaff opened a wooden chest set beside a violin to display the sealed exhibits; the chronicle does not specify their exact nature. The defense might well debate who had engraved the plates or into whose custody they belonged, but the seized implements could not be explained away as mere hearsay.
The presiding magistrate interrogated Bécardy first. The prisoner conceded his prior condemnation at Bordeaux, but vehemently protested against the prosecution’s narrative. Feffer, he insisted, had enticed him into the scheme and used his father-in-law to extort funds. He claimed he had agreed to produce only an initial parcel of notes, after which he departed to seek honest employment in Saint-Louis to escape Feffer’s importunities. Yet, as the magistrate noted in his questioning, Bécardy had borrowed one hundred francs from his father-in-law and ordered the purchase of a press; the prosecution interpreted this return to Basel as a deliberate resumption of the enterprise.
Bécardy did not deny having worked upon the notes, yet he reduced his part to one of pure duress. He claimed he had manufactured five hundred francs under mortal fear, remaining perpetually under his associate’s sway. To this defense, the president opposed the array of implements, the constant wanderings, and the quantity of paper emitted. He detailed the method ascribed to the group: Marie Witt would enter a shop, purchase some trifling item, and tender a note; Feffer waited outside to collect the good coin received in change, whereupon she proceeded to another boutique. If challenged, she was primed to claim she had received the bill from a gentleman who had shown her gallantry. Bécardy denied having uttered notes himself, replying that he was a frugal traveller. Thus the jury was presented with two irreconcilable portraits: a conspiracy directed by his hand, as the court maintained, or the desperate toil wrung from a fugitive terrified of denunciation.
Van Baer’s complicity remained warmly contested. He acknowledged his trade as an engraver and his acquaintance with Bécardy in Basel, but denied having touched the plates. The magistrate observed that characteristic lines were absent from the work and that expert testimony attributed their execution to a professional hand. He confronted the Dutchman with the depositions of Bécardy, Feffer, and Witt, as well as the articles found beneath his roof. Van Baer retorted that Bécardy might well have left the parcel in his lodgings without his knowledge. At the hearing, Bécardy admitted he might have left certain notes with his companion, while denying having made the confidences imputed to him. The parcel thus became the pivot of a material dispute: an object discovered in a bedchamber, each man seeking to fasten it upon the other.
Feffer maintained that, by the time he consented to assist Bécardy, the latter had already compromised him by forcing him to exchange bad paper. He admitted receiving twenty notes from Bécardy to utter in Colmar, for which service he was paid thirty francs; he insisted that the copper plates found upon Marie Witt had merely been entrusted to his care, denying he had manufactured them. He swore he had entered the chamber where Bécardy laboured no more than three times. At Geneva, by his account, a quarrel arose between Bécardy and Bouteillé touching the division of funds. On the morrow, each demanded a pledge: Bécardy seized Bouteillé’s passport, while Bouteillé took twelve notes, returning them only upon receipt of one hundred francs. Feffer thus offered an account designed to diminish his own guilt, while entangling Bécardy as the prime mover of the forgery.
Marie Witt confirmed that Feffer and Bouteillé worked in concert with Bécardy, adding that she had acted as interpreter during the purchase of the press in Basel. She stated that the band had journeyed toward Italy with designs on Spain: their purpose had been to forge Spanish currency and use the profit to establish a theatrical troupe. Bécardy dismissed this ambition as an idle fairy tale. Witt placed their parting in Lucerne, when their funds were exhausted; she noted that Bécardy was obliged to solicit a loan from his brother-in-law. At Huningue, her sister, who was employed as a domestic in the household of the justice of the peace, had allegedly warned her that the gendarmerie was upon their heels. When the Paris lodgings were searched, it was Witt who bore the plates beneath her skirts. The court recalled her previous conviction for theft at Schlestadt; the accusation, however, rested principally upon the copper plates and the forged paper she was accused of having uttered.
Bouteillé recounted that he had met Bécardy in Mulhouse whilst hawking pastries through the thoroughfares. He asserted that he had at first refused to advance money for a press. Bécardy, he alleged, then showed him a slip of paper bearing numerals resembling those of twenty-franc notes, promising that he would incur no danger and that another agent would manage the uttering. Bouteillé ultimately consulted a lithographer, supposing Bécardy could operate through photolithography and hoping for a handsome reward. He admitted helping purchase the press in Basel, but maintained he had furnished nothing more than paper and a little powdered soap to dry the damp sheets. He denied taking any hand in the actual printing. Nevertheless, he recounted that once the apparatus was assembled, Bécardy produced eighteen notes: Bouteillé received ten and Witt eight; he admitted piercing them with pins to lend them the rumpled aspect of paper long in circulation. The president confronted these admissions with the depositions of the co-accused.
Following the examination of the prisoners and the hearing of several witnesses, the proceedings were adjourned until the following morning for the closing addresses and the arguments of counsel. The issue of the Gazette des Tribunaux for April 17 records the denouement: the advocate-general pressed the indictment, five advocates addressed the jury for the defense, and the jurors returned a verdict of guilty against all five prisoners. They accorded extenuating circumstances to Van Baer and Marie Witt. Bécardy, Feffer, and Bouteillé were condemned to hard labour for life; Van Baer to fifteen years of the same penalty; and Marie Witt to five years’ solitary confinement. The Gazette records no individual grounds for these verdicts; it leaves side by side the silent testimony of the seized presses and the discordant voices of those who gathered around them.