When the bedchamber was entered, a cord encircled the neck of Dame Dabeillan. The widow Daumas, her servant, had severed it and was crying out for aid. The door was shut; a chair, wedged against it, stood within the room. On the following day, the magistrate ordered an examination of the body and decreed the provisional detention of the domestic. Within days, the inquiry shifted from the demise of an elderly woman to a formal accusation of murder. Yet no eyewitness had witnessed the scene.
Dame Dabeillan resided in Alignan, within the jurisdiction of the castellany of Pézenas. The chronicle accords her no Christian name. Her sole domestic was the widow Daumas, who slept in her chamber, hard by her bed; a chair stood between the two couches. This unremarkable arrangement would become the fulcrum of the inquest: it accounted as readily for the daily intimacy of the two women as for the manner in which the court would seek to reconstruct that night.
On April 4, 1782, the mistress was found dead in the ruelle beside her bed. Daumas ran forth in search of assistance. On the 5th, toward two of the afternoon, the procureur-fiscal notified the judge, who repaired to the dwelling accompanied by a physician and a surgeon. He first received the servant’s narration, then caused the corpse to be examined in his presence. The official record noted a cord about the neck and the deep imprint it had left behind, according to the practitioners cited by Champagnac. The judge ordered the burial and an inquiry into the attendant circumstances; Daumas was remanded in custody.
As early as the 6th, she was interrogated. On the morrow, eleven witnesses deposed, whereupon a warrant of arrest was issued. The deceased woman’s son, Dabeillan, petitioned to join the suit as a civil party. He hoped to unearth incriminating evidence in a press where the domestic kept her belongings. On April 24, it was opened before a commissioner. Among her effects lay a bundle of old trimmings tied with a small cord; the seals were affixed to the property. Four days later, on April 28, the package was unsealed, and ropemakers compared the twine with two other samples that the servant had previously surrendered to the judge.
The dilemma lay not merely in discerning how the lady had died, but whether she could have laid violent hands upon herself. Champagnac’s account maintains this to be impossible: she would have required a point of suspension or leverage, and the posture of the body conformed, in his judgment, to neither condition. Daumas had severed the cord around the neck upon discovering her mistress. The difficulty raised by the chronicler was of another sort: no superfluous end of rope remained, and no one had observed who had cut it away. To counter this objection, the chronicler cited the instance of another prisoner who had strangled himself within his cell by bracing against his knees. Such a parallel, and the mechanical conjectures that attend it, belong to his own advocacy; the presiding magistrates were bound to resolve the matter upon the depositions and instruments placed before them.
The chair braced against the door appeared more damning. Daumas had declared that she had placed it there herself before retiring; upon rising shortly thereafter to summon aid, she reportedly found it in the selfsame position. Champagnac’s narrative treats this initial statement as an admission that precluded both the ingress and egress of any outside assailant. At a later stage, the servant reportedly stated that she could no longer recall the exact position of the chair, so profound had been her distress. The chronicler discerns in this vacillation an overwhelming presumption of guilt. Several depositions, he writes, corroborated Daumas’s first account regarding the chair, whereas her subsequent hesitation failed to convince the bench. Yet no third party had beheld the scene, and the words recorded in the chapter reach us filtered through a narrative intent on vindicating a foregone conclusion.
Two scratches were subsequently observed upon her visage. Daumas explained that she had stumbled near a woodpile when her candle was snuffed out as she ran to fetch aid. Witnesses visited the spot she indicated; they discovered no logs whatever. From this, Champagnac infers that the abrasions were sustained during a struggle with her mistress. Here again, his relation converts a disputed circumstance into definitive proof, though the inquest as he reports it reveals no witness to any struggle.
The domestic maintained that roughly a quarter or half an hour had elapsed between the moment she lay down and the moment she arose. She had heard a chamber pot fall, had called out to her mistress thrice, then lit a candle and discovered the lady lying in the ruelle of the bed. She swore she had not slept during that interval. The chronicle lays great emphasis on the fact that neither bed was in the least disarranged; it concludes that the lady had been strangled prior to retiring, while kneeling at prayer beside her bed. This image remains an inference of the narrator, not the testimony of an eyewitness to the deed.
Other remarks elicited at the trial weighed heavily against the accused. Witnesses recalled words spoken in anger against the mistress, and one reported that, eight days earlier, she had confessed to feeling tempted to smother her before commending her soul to her guardian angel. Daumas’s own sister and stepdaughter reportedly declared that they deemed her capable of such a crime. Champagnac marshals these declarations as so many damning indictments. He adds that an outside assailant, in sparing the servant, would have left behind a perilous witness, and would in all likelihood have dispatched her as well. This line of reasoning is the chronicler’s own. Yet it adduces neither a confession from the servant nor any witness who saw the murder accomplished.
Sentence was pronounced on June 28, 1782. The seneschal of Béziers condemned Daumas to have her right hand severed, to be hanged, and then burned, her ashes scattered to the winds. The court of first instance held that the collected presumptions established the murder and designated the assassin. The sentence was not affirmed in its entirety: upon appeal, the Parlement of Toulouse sustained the remainder of the penalty while remitting the amputation of the hand. The mutilation was thus expunged from the decree, yet the gallows and the pyre remained. The ruling altered the punishment without overturning the judicial finding of guilt. This distinction is of consequence: the appellate court mitigated the sentence, yet the record discloses no further debate touching upon the evidence.
The chronicle concludes with the execution. The widow Daumas underwent the ultimate punishment without confessing to the crime. Her final silence can be construed neither as a withheld confession nor as proof of innocence; it indicates solely that Champagnac records no admission. The narrative depicts no aid rendered to the mistress after her discovery, no direct witness, no parting words between the two women. It fastens exclusively upon the circumstances and the reasoning through which the magistrates arrived at their decree.
It fell to them to decipher a barred chamber, a chair, and a severed cord. In the eyes of the chronicler, these items formed an inescapable syllogism: the portal could not have been breached by an intruder, the knot could not have been severed by the deceased, and the scratches were the indelible marks of a struggle. Daumas’s defense, as he relates it, failed to dispel these presumptions. Yet the absence of an eyewitness remains at the very heart of the case, and the facts reach us through a telling that resolutely asserts what the magistrates concluded. The sentence is recorded; the direct proof, however, remains unknown.