The police found the candles burning. In the cellar of a house in Clignancourt, the table stood in readiness, laid out with ink, sharpened quills, and paper; a chair had been placed against a post fitted with an iron chain. Great care had been taken to stop up the cellar vents. Nothing was to disturb the labor demanded of the visitor—not even the faint hope that his outcries might reach the garden. Yet this was not an attempt to wring the confession of a crime from him. The widow Morin meant to force him to sign promissory notes. Before ever he saw that cellar, Jean-Charles Ragouleau had received an invitation to luncheon.
Five years earlier, their paths had crossed over a house offered for sale. The Hôtel Saint-Phar, on the Boulevard Poissonnière, was being pursued under foreclosure. Both Ragouleau and the widow Morin desired to acquire it; she had carried the day, on April 3, 1806, for the sum of ninety-six thousand francs. She had secured the adjudication, but she did not possess the necessary funds. Her rival thereupon became her lender. He advanced her one hundred thousand francs in exchange for a life annuity settled upon several members of his family. With this money, a portion of the purchase price was paid and repairs were begun: the new proprietress intended to operate a furnished hotel.
The property was already heavily encumbered. It was bound to service other annuities, to reimburse certain capital sums upon the demise of the annuitants, and to yield enough to sustain this entire apparatus. The death of one beneficiary caused a considerable sum to fall due. The creditor negotiated first with the widow, then assigned his claim to Ragouleau. Ragouleau thus found himself armed with a second title, even as the installments on his own annuity arrived irregularly. A property may appear imposing to one who observes it from the boulevard; viewed from the notary’s chambers, it dwindles at times to a mere succession of claims belonging to others.
Legal proceedings resumed. After various arrangements, the hotel was conveyed to Ragouleau by an instrument dated April 18, 1811, for the sum of one hundred and sixty-five thousand francs, to which was added a further sum intended for expenses. The principal purchase price was entirely absorbed by the claims and charges; the widow ultimately received only a fraction of the incidental sum. She had bought a house, overseen its renovation, and hoped to draw her livelihood from it. She departed from it with far less money than the figures on the contract would have led one to believe. This discrepancy between the sum written and the money received was to become the pivot of all her recriminations.
She maintained that Ragouleau had frightened away prospective tenants and discouraged buyers so as to compel her to sell. The chronicle records that the judicial hearings did not substantiate these grievances, and that the agreements were found to be lawful. To her mind, however, her dispossession had a single author, and that author remained within visiting distance. She continued to treat him as an adviser: she spoke of funds to be invested, solicited his counsel, and announced her wish to purchase a country seat. The trust she displayed toward him was henceforth calculated to fashion the very occasion in which she intended to render him helpless.
Her daughter, Angélique Delaporte, lived with her. The girl was sixteen years of age at the time of the conspiracy. The mother had imparted to her her unshakable conviction that they had been robbed; the daughter was to give that conviction its written form. In this undertaking—where money, family ties, and rancor could no longer be disentangled—none can say what weighed most heavily: the desire to retrieve their loss, the wish to deliver her mother from humiliation, or the momentum of a design that two minds end by finding reasonable merely because they debate it only between themselves. The archival documents permit us to retrace their preparations; they do not yield the secret of their inward impulses.
A third woman was privy to the plot. Jonard had long been the widow’s confidante. In September, the widow informed her that an invitation would at last draw Ragouleau into the house prepared for him. Jonard resolved to warn the intended victim. Being indisposed, she had herself conveyed to his residence; he had departed for his estate in Essonne. She then dispatched a friend, the widow Petit, to carry the warning. Ragouleau returned immediately to Paris and found awaiting him at his porter’s lodge the letter inviting him to luncheon. The alarm had outrun the summons; the coincidence lent the disclosure a gravity that a quarrel between women could never have possessed.
Jonard then made her statement to the police. According to her deposition, Ragouleau was to be conducted into a cellar, bound, forced to sign promissory notes for a considerable fortune, and subsequently put to death. She described the preparations, the letters preserved to verify his handwriting, and the threats devised. This darker design would ever be contested by mother and daughter: they would admit to extortion, but never to an intent to kill. The police did not wait to see which version of events would come to pass. A fresh appointment was accepted for October 2. Ragouleau presented himself, declined the luncheon offered him, and proposed setting out directly.
Angélique engaged a carriage. At the Barrière de la Villette, police officers surrounded the conveyance and conducted the two women into the toll-house offices. The rustic excursion ended before a police commissioner. Angélique explained that they were going to inspect an estate near Montmartre; in her hand she held a handkerchief, the contents of which drew immediate attention. Within it were discovered fifteen prepared promissory notes, with the payee’s name left blank: fourteen for twenty thousand francs, one for ten thousand. There was likewise a draft specimen, three letters in Ragouleau’s hand, and an envelope containing the instructions they intended to impose upon him.
The young girl confessed to having penned the notes and the written threat. She explained that a man had robbed them without their being able to prove it, and that they sought to obtain a restitution which, in like manner, could never be proved against them. Thus the very impunity imputed to their adversary became the guiding rule of their own enterprise. The writing presented Ragouleau with a choice between his signature and his death, with a brief respite to resolve his mind. His handwriting would be compared against that of his letters. Even violence had anticipated its own undoing: it was essential that the signature, extorted under menace, should preserve the outward appearance of free consent.
The inspection of Clignancourt corroborated the greater part of the intelligence received. The apertures of the cellar had been walled up; the implements intended to hold a man fast and compel him to write were arranged in order. Two recently hired domestic servants, Lucie Jacotin and Nicolas Lefèvre, were apprehended. They stated that they had merely obeyed their mistress, who sought revenge against a man she accused of having taken her money. Conducted into the cellar, Angélique acknowledged the purpose of the chain, the cords, and the weapons. She maintained, however, that these were intended solely to terrify Ragouleau, and that no harm was to come to him.
She offered, moreover, an explanation regarding the sums. Two hundred thousand francs, she asserted, were to suffice for their restitution; the additional notes were to allow them to discard any whose penmanship bore the traces of duress. The widow began by feigning total ignorance, then conceded the extortion plot. Thereupon ensued a movement the very reverse of that which had united them against Ragouleau: each sought to assume the sole authorship of the conspiracy. Angélique cast herself as its contriver; her mother claimed full responsibility, pleading her despair. Together they had prepared the signatures of another; before the magistrates, they vied for their own confession.
At the Seine Assizes, the defense argued, among other points, that the preparations had not constituted a commencement of execution. The jury held, on the contrary, that there had been an attempted extortion interrupted only by circumstances independent of the will of the accused. On January 11, 1813, mother and daughter were condemned to twenty years of hard labor and to public exposure in the pillory. Their appeal in cassation was dismissed. The domestics—acquitted by the court’s decree notwithstanding the jury’s verdict declaring them accomplices—saw this judgment challenged by the public prosecutor: the Court of Cassation remitted their cause to the Versailles Assizes. The chronicle does not disclose their ultimate fate.
Ragouleau had thus signed none of the prepared notes. He had preserved his life, and the instruments from the cellar had passed from their table into a judicial dossier. Jonard, who had prevented the trap from closing, did not emerge with an unblemished reputation: the chronicler suspected her of self-interest, though unable here to establish all her motives. Yet one certainty endures amid these disputed intentions. Angélique had sought to make a signature wrested from a captive man resemble his free hand; the law had only to recognize her own, upon the papers concealed within her handkerchief.