When the police overtook Victor-Alphonse Daumas-Dupin in Milan, he was living beyond the Alps, far from the threshold where two tavern-keepers had met their deaths. At the Croix-Verte, an isolated cabaret in the commune of Attainville, Prudhomme and Marie Duru had remained alone with two men on the night of January 24, 1829. On the morrow, Marie’s father arrived to retrieve a hat; finding the doors barred, he had them forced and discovered the bodies within. The affair was to bring Daumas before two courts of assize, as his initial conviction was annulled upon a procedural flaw. Yet the drama did not terminate with the convict’s execution: the accomplice long presumed dead was to reappear in Valence, under another garb and beneath another name.
Prudhomme and Marie Duru kept the cabaret of the Croix-Verte. They were newly wed; he was twenty-five years of age, she barely sixteen. On January 24, 1829, two men who were to lodge for the night remained behind with them. The following day, Marie’s father, a plasterer from Mont-Sonil, came to collect a hat left by one of his sons-in-law. The doors were secured. They had to be battered down. Duru discovered his daughter and her husband lying dead beside the stove. The furniture had been ransacked; money, a watch, and an entire suit of black clothes had vanished. Champagnac depicts the full horror of the scene, yet the narrative may confine itself to the immediate consequence of that discovery: a father crossed the threshold of the house where his daughter had dwelt, and summoned justice into its rooms.
Suspicion fixed upon Daumas-Dupin and Jean-Baptiste Robert, known as Saint-Clair. Both men were escaped galley-slaves. One had taken the road to Milan; the other eluded all pursuit. The police learned that money was being remitted to Milan under four separate aliases. They caused a transfer intended for one of these names to be withheld for four days and dispatched an agent to the city. When Daumas-Dupin presented himself to claim the funds, the agent asserted that he was the rightful recipient. Daumas denounced him as an impostor; the officer returned the accusation. Both were taken into custody. The policeman’s identity was promptly verified and he was released; Daumas, for his part, was conducted back to France.
Before the Seine Court of Assizes, on October 31, the prisoner did not deny the facts set forth during the trial. He sought instead to cast the entire guilt upon Saint-Clair: the latter, he claimed, had perpetrated everything, while he himself had grown incensed against his accomplice and wished to destroy him in turn. He maintained that Saint-Clair had carried off the plunder, leaving him merely a hunting jacket and a hat as a disguise. The elder Duru was summoned to the witness-stand. Entering the hall and beholding the exhibits, he initially averted his gaze from the prisoner’s dock. His testimony conjured once more before the jury the shuttered house, the two grown children he had found within, and the inventory of the missing effects.
Daumas-Dupin subsequently addressed the court in a written defense. The first tribunal pronounced him guilty and handed down the penalty of death. He lodged an appeal in cassation. On November 17, a formal defect caused the verdict to be annulled, and the proceedings were remanded to the Seine-et-Oise Court of Assizes at Versailles. This was no acquittal, but an order for a new trial with a fresh panel of jurors. The arguments commenced anew in a different courtroom, where the accused delivered a second address. He declared himself resigned to the verdict of the jury, begging them merely to remember that no division of goods awaited him—only the grave.
After an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury returned affirmative answers to the questions of homicide, premeditation, and theft submitted to them. Daumas heard the decree without displaying any outward emotion. On December 3, 1829, he was executed in Paris. Champagnac records that he preserved his silence throughout the preparations, displayed the presence of mind to steady the cart’s ladder, and, at the foot of the scaffold, prayed God to preserve his soul before surrendering himself to the headsman. He offered no explicit confession of the crime; when pressed upon the subject, he asked only that it not be mentioned and that the past be forgotten.
As for Saint-Clair, the prosecution seemed to have reached an impasse, leaving no course but continued search. The authorities traced his wanderings through Piedmont, Switzerland, and Germany, and thence to the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Official dispatches announced that he had enlisted in a regiment and fallen in combat against brigands. This news appeared to seal the fugitive’s fate; yet it did not prevent his wanderings from continuing. The chronicler treats this as an assumed demise, soon to be belied by a man who would reappear upon French soil.
The second episode unfolded in Valence, in the year 1830. On an autumn day, a substantial company sat at the table d’hôte of the town’s principal hotel. The conversation turned toward Lavater and the tenets of phrenology. A gentleman in black maintained that thoughts and passions leave their indelible imprint upon the countenance, and that these tokens, combined with the conformation of the cranium, permit one to divine an individual’s true dispositions. He boasted that he had never been mistaken. Several diners invited him to furnish proof of his skill; he indulged the company, and the gathering seemed convinced.
A traveler who had hitherto preserved absolute silence refused to yield. He declared that thoughts were not to be deciphered upon a man’s visage and challenged the gentleman in black to reveal his true identity. The latter hesitated, then replied that, were his science infallible, he stood in the presence of one of the earth’s greatest miscreants—a murderer. A hush of tension seized the room. The stranger rose in a fury. At that very juncture, the innkeeper burst in to announce the theft of silverware in a neighboring village and the arrival of the officers of justice, who were seeking the suspect.
All eyes turned toward the traveler. His wrath, the chronicler relates, vanished into stone when his trunk was searched and the stolen plate was discovered inside. He was placed under arrest. After several days of silence, he made a full confession. The traveler was Robert Saint-Clair, the accomplice of Daumas-Dupin. The text offers no account of a subsequent appearance in court or the ultimate judicial fate of the captive; it records only that the man whom official dispatches had declared dead had resurfaced under an assumed identity, to be unmasked at last through an investigation into an entirely separate theft.
The juxtaposition of these two episodes is singular: in the first assize court, Daumas had cast all the blame upon Saint-Clair; in the inn at Valence, the latter was finally unmasked, yet not by the pronouncement of the man in black. It was the silverware discovered in his coffer that stripped away the disguise. The system of countenances, debated at table as a science capable of laying bare a human soul, had furnished nothing more than an accusation flung in anger. The decisive proof came from elsewhere—from stolen wares that could be placed in the hands of the law.
Justice had punished Daumas-Dupin for the crimes of the Croix-Verte after two trials, the first quashed and the second ending beneath the blade. Saint-Clair’s fate was not merged with that judgment: the chronicle recounts merely his arrest in Valence and his confession after several days, leaving the penalty unrecorded. Between a death proclaimed by military dispatches and a return certified by witnesses, his flight reminds us that an official dossier may bring pursuit to an untimely and erroneous close. At Valence, he was not uncovered by the portrait an observer claimed to read upon his brow, but by the stolen goods concealed within his chest.