On December 14, 1885, at about ten o’clock in the morning, Charles Roy walked out of the Magnien home in Branges. He had entered it only moments earlier, stepping into a dwelling situated some two hundred meters from his own abode in the hamlet of Barbette. An altercation had just taken place. Roy returned to his stepfather’s house, took up a short-handled ax, and retraced his steps toward the cottage where Marie-Claudine Moreau, wife of Magnien, and her daughter Clotilde were to be found. The assize court report, published some months later, presents this sequence of events as the one set forth in the bill of indictment.
Monsieur Magnien had departed for the market in Louhans. His wife, aged forty-one, and Clotilde, sixteen, remained alone in the house. According to the prosecution, Roy came upon the two women in an alcove. He struck the mother first, then turned upon the girl as she attempted to flee. He returned presently to Madame Magnien, who was still drawing breath, and dealt her a final blow. The indictment described no protracted struggle: the violence was alleged to have been so swift that neither victim could utter a cry.
Roy bolted the door from within, drew the curtain across a window facing the street, and made his escape through another opening at the rear of the alcove, which gave out upon the open fields. In the room he left behind the bloodstained ax and an open pocketknife he had brought with him. Around four in the afternoon, returning from the market, Monsieur Magnien discovered his wife and daughter already stiff in death. In the narrative of the prosecution, the barred door, the drawn curtain, and the abandoned weapons bore witness to Roy’s passage.
The young man had once been made welcome beneath the Magniens’ roof. The indictment maintained that he had abused this domestic intimacy to form, unbeknownst to the parents, a clandestine attachment to Clotilde. On the preceding June 11, during the festival of Châteaurenaud, he had allegedly prevented her from returning home and spent the night with her under a shed belonging to his stepfather. When the parents learned of this liaison, they closed their door to him. The prosecution linked this estrangement to the insults and threats that ensued; during the proceedings, Roy disputed several utterances recalled to him by the presiding judge.
In the month of July, according to the indictment, Roy had boasted of possessing a concealed gun and of intending to slaughter the Magniens. He later ventured by night to the vicinity of the cottages of Claude Bouveret, Caillet, and Clerc, where his weapon lay hidden beneath a heap of kindling. He was said to have declared his intent to "kill everyone in the house" and to have circled the premises; the shutters were barred. In September, at the village dance in Branges, Clotilde refused to dance with him. The maiden’s father had him summoned before the justice of the peace at Louhans, where the hearing took place on October 5. Upon leaving the chamber, Roy reportedly vowed that he would wash his hands in Clotilde’s blood. The presiding magistrate would later return to this succession of threats, asking the prisoner if they were accurately reported. Roy answered that he had no recollection of them, or denied them outright. The bill of indictment dates the dance to September 21; the interrogation places it on the 19th. This discrepancy remains unresolved in the trial record.
Charles Roy stood trial at nineteen years of age. The newspaper described him clad in the homespun attire of the Bresse peasantry, his demeanor humble and apparently evincing a measure of contrition. Yet such impressions within the courtroom resolved no points of law. The jurors were bound to disentangle the prior threats, the intent formed at the moment the blows fell, and the account Roy gave of his arrival at the Magnien home. The indictment fixed his arrival around ten o’clock; in his depositions, Roy placed it near nine. The printed account leaves the divergence standing.
Before reciting this examination, the gazette averred that Roy had made "a full confession" from the moment of his arrest. The denials and lapses of memory that followed stand in sharp contrast with this initial characterization, and the chronicle does nothing to reconcile them.
Under examination, he confirmed that he had grown up at his mother’s side in winter and had been put out to service during the summers. He had lived for two years with his stepfather, who, as the presiding judge observed, had always been good to him. The two households were neighbors and had long maintained neighborly ties. Roy acknowledged that he had hoped to marry Clotilde and admitted to an intimate connection with her, dating its commencement to the month of August 1884. Touching the night passed beneath the shed, he confirmed that he had been in her company, but denied having hindered her from returning to her kin, asserting that she had freely bestowed upon him the locket he had taken.
The presiding judge then recalled the remarks through which the prosecution attributed to Roy a mercenary interest in the Magnien estate and a desire to prevent Clotilde from marrying another. Roy denied having sought her dishonor for such an end. He likewise disputed the threats recounted by the witnesses. When pressed concerning the fowling piece discovered near the Bouveret homestead, he admitted having retrieved it, but claimed to have returned forthwith to his comrades. He disavowed the phrase by which he was said to have threatened to slaughter the Magnien household. Regarding the incident at the dance, he confirmed that Clotilde had refused his hand, offering no answer to the inquiry regarding insults. As to the menace uttered outside the justice of the peace’s hearing, he declared he had no memory of it.
The inquiry narrowed at last to the morning of the slaying. Roy explained that he had presented himself at the Magnien cottage believing the parents were abroad. Catching sight of Madame Magnien, he had been taken aback; she had, he alleged, struck him with a fire iron. He declared that he had then lost his wits and run to fetch an ax. In the very same breath, he denied having suffered any injury from the mother and disclaimed any intention of taking the lives of the two women. When the presiding judge demanded why he had thus armed himself, he replied that he knew not what he was doing.
The court’s interrogatory then retraced the succession of blows, followed by the flight through the casement. The judge asked Roy whether he had purloined a gold watch from Clotilde’s bedchamber, followed by a pinchbeck chain, and whether he had abstracted the one franc fifty contained in the purse. Roy denied this last charge. The tally of blows is nowhere uniform: the indictment and the interrogation offer differing enumerations, and the narrative makes no attempt to reconcile them. Regarding several specific acts laid to his charge, the prisoner merely pleaded a want of recollection. The indictment, for its part, related a departure effected after the door had been bolted, with both the ax and the knife left behind in the room. At the trial, these two versions lay side by side: on the one hand, the deeds alleged by the Crown; on the other, the prisoner’s disavowals or failures of memory.
The chronicle recorded that, having scrambled through the window, Roy washed his hands in a neighboring pond before returning home. He was said to have confessed to his sister that he had done an evil deed and wished either to drown himself or give himself up. He then lay down in the hayloft; his sister observed traces of blood upon his shirt sleeves. Later that evening, he is reported to have acknowledged the crime to her. The gendarmes discovered him in that very loft. Confronted with the corpses, the gazette added, he displayed no sign of remorse. Thus the discovery of the slain, the flight, and the arrest reappeared in the proceedings not as three disconnected episodes, but as the successive links by which the prosecution sought to establish the unbroken chain of guilt.
Monsieur Wencker sustained the prosecution. Maître Giboulot set forth a differing account of the rage and alleged premeditation. According to the defense, Roy had entered weaponless into the midst of a family that had once received him with open arms; the mother, whom counsel characterized as imprudent, had fostered the intimacy between the two young people. The interdiction forbidding him from seeing Clotilde had transformed this close affection into an embittered passion. His companions had mocked him, argued the advocate, and the threats imputed to him were merely the bluster of wounded pride and wrath.
The defense insisted above all that the homicide had not been premeditated. Roy had arrived without a weapon, taking up the hatchet only after Madame Magnien had struck and menaced him with a fire poker. He was said to have rushed back in a blind, unreasoning fury. Maître Giboulot urged the jurors to discern in the youth’s return to his own hearth, his words after the deed, and his total want of precaution the unmistakable signs of an unpremeditated crime. He pleaded for extenuating circumstances, invoking the prisoner’s youth. The address went so far as to impute to the deceased Clotilde a dying wish for mercy, though the gazette records no such sentiment expressed by the girl. This plea did not erase the prior menaces recorded in the indictment, nor Roy’s depositions; it merely offered the jurors another lens through which to weigh them.
The six questions were submitted to the jury. At a quarter past seven, the panel returned an affirmative verdict on every count, tempered, however, by the admission of mitigating circumstances. Charles Roy was condemned to hard labor for life. The journal concludes with this sentence. The two deaths, the construction offered by the defense, the threats marshaled by the prosecution, and the disavowals of Roy precede the verdict, standing side by side without merging into a single voice.