On the night of February 18, 1770, the Chevalier de Fornel departed Lagerie to sup and lodge at Sainte-Colombe. Reminded of the gathering darkness and foul weather, he replied that he would return at an early hour the following day, and set forth on horseback. At dawn, a domestic in the service of the Sieur Barraud came to inform his wife that her husband had been assassinated. His body had been discovered lying in a ditch, beside the road connecting Sainte-Colombe to La Rochefoucauld.
This intelligence reached a household where the father’s death was soon to be forged into an accusation against his wife and daughter. The parish priest arrived accompanied by Barraud, an advocate, and two carpenters. Madame de Fornel declared before them her resolve to uncover the perpetrators of the crime and pursue their punishment. The curate and Barraud cautioned her that a criminal suit might consume more than her modest estate; she and her daughter risked being reduced to penury. They counseled her to place the matter in the hands of the local seigneurial court, which would proceed at the expense of the Duchess of La Rochefoucauld. Overcome by these considerations, the widow resigned herself to silence and declined to view the bloodstained body of her husband.
Nothing in the Chevalier’s hitherto untroubled existence foretold the imputations that would follow. He had served in Martinique under the orders of M. de Longueville, had married there in 1743, and had returned to France in 1765 at the solicitation of his family. He had an only daughter, Madelaine-Aimée. At Lagerie, a fief he had purchased within the parish of Sainte-Colombe, he had lived three years alongside his wife and child. His revenue was modest yet sufficient for his needs; he had his lands cultivated and divided his leisure hours between his kin and a small circle of neighbors.
On the day of the murder, the Chevalier had heard mass at Sainte-Colombe, then dined at Barraud’s table with his daughter and the priest. After the meal, he sent Madelaine-Aimée back on foot to keep her mother company. He attended vespers, accepted Barraud’s invitation to dine again on the morrow, and mounted his horse toward half-past three. Passing through a hamlet to hire day laborers, he then returned to Lagerie. He made a round of his farm and gave directions for the following day’s labors. It was then, as night fell, that he resolved to ride back to Sainte-Colombe to sup and spend the night.
The magistrates repaired to the place where the body had been discovered and drew up their procès-verbal. The procureur fiscal filed a formal complaint on March 5 and obtained leave to take depositions. Fourteen witnesses were examined in the first instance. On March 17, a warrant for physical arrest was issued against Madame de Fornel, her daughter, their sharecropper Bernard Chaput, his son Louis, and the carpenter Boisnarbaud. The inquest subsequently broadened to encompass eighty-four witnesses. The mother was interrogated eight times, the daughter thirteen.
By sentence of May 29, 1772, the preparatory question under torture was ordered against Madame de Fornel, her daughter, their servant Pierre Bordat, their tenant Bernard Chaput, his son Louis, and his daughter Anne. François Chaput, having fled, was condemned in contumacy to be broken upon the wheel. This adjudication brought the full weight of judicial violence to bear upon several members of the family and their household. Madame de Fornel lodged an appeal, and the judgment was brought before the Parlement of Paris.
To substantiate suspicion, the prosecution had seized upon an ordinary domestic circumstance. On the eve of the murder, Madame de Fornel had ordered two ducks and two turkeys slaughtered for the Carnival feasts of the coming week. The ducks’ heads had been severed upon a chopping block near the courtyard gate; the turkeys had been bled upon the same spot. The next morning, blood was observed in the yard. From this confluence of beast’s blood shed for a festive table and stains noted after the crime, an indictment was framed against the mistresses of the house.
Other conjectures moved in the same direction. It was alleged that two musket shots had been discharged at the manor gate without provoking any alarm from mother or daughter. Because water had been spilled upon the dining-room floor, it was imagined that the Chevalier’s body had been carried within, dispatched on the spot, and the floor scrubbed clean of blood. It was further asserted that the daughter had witnessed this scene and offered her own knife to end the life of her father, who still drew breath. Yet the corpse had been discovered in a roadside ditch, and no blood was found upon that spot nor upon his garments. Blood had been seen; complicity was inferred. Between observation and accusation, all distinction had vanished.
Rumor soon added a still darker charge: Madame de Fornel was alleged to have permitted her daughter to bathe her hands in her father’s blood. It was monstrous to attribute so unnatural an intent to a seventeen-year-old girl who cherished her father and was cherished by him, and more monstrous still to pretend that she had sought her mother’s leave to do so. Two witnesses further testified that Périgord, the Chevalier’s valet, had boasted of having fired the first shot; according to the words ascribed to him, he and an accomplice had dragged Fornel into a room where a conspirator, a carpenter, cleft his skull with an axe. Other voices went so far as to claim that the daughter herself had fired the weapons. Champagnac dismissed these accounts as mere hearsay and suspected the curate of Sainte-Colombe of having sown them abroad.
Another motive presented itself to serious inquiry. The Chevalier was devoted to hunting and angling; he rigorously prosecuted poachers and preserved his woodlands against peasants who sought to hunt, fish, or cut timber. This unyielding severity had earned him bitter enemies throughout the countryside. Champagnac deemed it more than probable that the assassins were to be found among these peasants or poachers. Longstanding enmity lent plausibility to this lead, yet it provided no definitive name for the killers.
It was against the decree of provisional torture that Madame de Fornel appealed. The question ordained by the court was intended to extort the truth from the accused; yet it had the power to shatter the body without enlightening the magistrate. While some endured the agony in silence, others, desperate to stay the torment, confessed whatever was suggested to them and compromised innocent lives. What faith could be placed in declarations wrenched by torment, when they might testify far less to guilt than to human frailty?
The appeal was heard by the Parlement of Paris. By decree of February 1, 1773, the sentence of the judges of La Rochefoucauld was overturned: all the accused were discharged from the accusation, and the striking of their names from the prison registers was formally ordered. The proceedings against the mother, daughter, and fellow defendants came to an end; the actual murderers of the Chevalier remain unnamed in the record. The blood observed in a courtyard, the water spilled upon a floor, and the rancor directed against a family had formed an edifice of suspicion. A superior tribunal swept it aside. De Fornel lay dead, yet conjecture could not supply the place of proof.