Two Watches and an Umbrella
An antique watch with broad Roman numerals, another suspended from a black cord, two brooches, a cameo, gold coins, banknotes: the examining magistrate of Béthune had drawn up an inventory. It was to be circulated among jewellers, watchmakers, money-changers—anyone before whom an object might suddenly reappear without betraying whence it came. Behind every line, three slaughtered souls waited for some inert thing to speak on their behalf.
The warrant bears the date of 30 January 1906. It concerns Violaines, where the Lecocq couple and their daughter were murdered during the night of the nineteenth to the twentieth. The killers had left the house with plunder so varied as to demand the scrutiny of several trades in its pursuit. Money is soon spent; gold is melted down; but a cameo preserves a countenance, and a medal may bear an inscription. Justice relies on these stubborn, minute resistances of matter.
Umbrellas likewise appear upon the list. One possesses a yellow handle and a white-metal pommel; the other, older, is fashioned with whalebone ribs. The proximity of these humble articles to bank drafts affords the exact measure of the theft: the intruders seized whatever could be carried away. The house abandoned to their rummaging was no mere coffer. It contained the daily existence of those they had just put to death.
At the foot of the sheet, another detail was calculated to arrest the eye: one of the miscreants appeared to have a deformed right foot. The magistrate set down approximate dimensions, promised further particulars should they arise, and requested that in the event of an arrest he be apprised by telegraph. Thus the investigation advanced, suspended between a scrupulously described watch and a still-uncertain footprint.
The Net Closes
This triple murder formed part of a prolonged series of robberies and incursions committed across northern France and Belgium. Abel Pollet, his brother Auguste, and their confederates formed a band whose personnel fluctuated according to each foray. At Locon, an assault upon the Lenglemetz household had already cost the master of the house his life. Village names gradually converged within the compass of a single judicial dossier.
The decisive intelligence came from their own hearth. Auguste Platteel reported to the gendarmerie certain remarks attributed to his sister Julienne, the wife of Abel. The arrests of May 1906 were followed by confessions. Two years later, twenty-seven prisoners were brought to the bar in the mass trial of the band.
These successive stages, established by the records, conceal an arduous labour far less brilliant than the sudden unmasking of a culprit. It was necessary to apportion the deeds, verify individual complicity, and distinguish the hand that struck the blow from the one that merely received a stolen trinket. The circular of search reveals the initial movement of the inquiry: to depart from the house of the dead, to trace what had been carried forth, and to summon the testimony of any soul who might have watched it pass.
The kin of the Lecocq family had pledged a reward. Two hundred and fifty francs were offered to whomsoever should furnish information leading to an arrest; an equal bounty was reserved for the officer who effected it. In this twin covenant lay both the anguish of a bereaved family and the precariousness of an inquiry. The sum was fixed; the names were not yet known.
Sentences Unlike One Another
In June 1908, the verdicts were returned. The account published by Le Littoral aligns them with the austere brevity peculiar to the minutes of the court. Abel and Auguste Pollet, Théophile Deroo, and Vromant were condemned to death. Then followed the lesser dispositions: four years’ imprisonment for one, five years’ solitary confinement for another, penal servitude, acquittals.
The reader who sought only the four notorious names would overlook an essential truth of the proceedings. The preliminary investigation had herded the accused together; the verdict rent them apart. Julienne Platteel, Abel’s wife, received five years’ solitary confinement; Céline Pollet, the wife of Leclerc, twenty years of hard labour. Three persons were acquitted. A common lineage, a shared patronymic, or proximity to a bandit chief did not, therefore, mechanically dictate an identical doom.
The newspaper column extended well beyond the four capital sentences. For those whose names followed, their punishment began precisely when the gaze of the public was prone to wander. They had years yet to live with an affair that popular memory would soon reduce to the fate of four men upon the scaffold.
That fate still hung upon the plea for clemency. The condemned men remained at Béthune. The interval allowed them the faint hope of commutation; it also afforded the town leisure to contemplate their execution. When the presidential refusal became final, the machinery of public retribution was set in motion.
A Town Awaits the Dawn
The press reports of January 1909 describe an arrival that bore a disquieting resemblance to that of a guest awaited for a carnival. Anatole Deibler, arriving to carry out the executions, was shadowed, stared upon, and saluted. Spectators poured into Béthune by the railway; taverns and host首相ries filled to overflowing. Ladders and benches were dragged into the square to command a better view.
Within the prison walls, the four men were yet to be officially apprised that their reprieves had been denied. Outside, the multitude was already well aware of the purpose of their vigil. This disparity lent the night a singular cruelty: an entire town watched over a piece of intelligence that had not yet been spoken into the cells for which it was ordained.
The guillotine had to be erected, a cordon drawn, the onlookers held at bay. The authorities dreaded the surging of the crowd. Soldiers guarded the passage of the condemned, as though the law, having pronounced their doom, was still obliged to defend its captives against those who had assembled to applaud their end.
On 11 January, Deroo was brought out first, then Vromant, then Auguste Pollet, and finally Abel. A few minutes sufficed for the four executions. The newspapers agree upon the sequence of events and the clamour of the mob; they diverge when they profess to record their final utterances or to measure the exact fortitude of each man. Death already possessed its competing versions, hawked to readers alongside the review of the spectacle.
Observers who were otherwise partisans of capital punishment recoiled in disgust at what they witnessed around the scaffold. The debate no longer concerned the culprits alone. The ladders, the taprooms kept open through the night, the huzzas directed at the headsman had revealed another countenance of the affair: that of a society which demanded justice, yet came to make a holiday of its performance.
What Abides in the Inventory
When the onlookers dispersed, the four condemned men were dead. The house at Violaines had recovered neither its masters nor the quiet routine of their days. The name of Pollet would endure in gazettes and chronicles; the Lecocq family, for their part, remained preserved upon that circular addressed to shopkeepers, wherein the magistrate had sought to afford the silence of mute things a chance to break.
A medal noted therein bore the inscription of a prize. A cameo portrayed the likeness of a woman. These particulars did not explain the butchery; they served merely to recall that before the tragedy there had been purchases, distinctions, fond attachments—an entire human existence that was never intended to conclude inside a magistrate’s file. The mob had counted four executions upon the pavement. The very first line of the inquiry, however, had begun by seeking what three dead souls had left behind.
