The blood was still fresh upon Rivière’s coat. The corpse of a missing advocate had only just been drawn from a pond, and now, amidst the magistrate’s interrogatories, a drop or two seemed to promise the name of the assassin. Rivière explained that he had recently bled two horses. The beasts were brought forth; the instruments, still stained with blood, were produced. The magistrate appeared satisfied. The explanation had thus withstood the test. Yet it would not prevent both father and son Rivière from forfeiting their liberty, nor spare the life of the elder man.
The advocate’s name was Pain. Having retired from Rouen to the countryside, he had retained a bedchamber in a tenant farm of his own, which he leased to a man named Mauger. He did not occupy some isolated lodge where persons might come and go unbeknownst to the household; his chamber lay within the main corps de logis of the farmer. The servants of the house witnessed his every arrival and departure. His familiarity with Mauger was such that the latter’s daughter attended to his domestic needs. Pain, the chronicle assures us, never spent a night away from home. His absence could not fail to be observed.
In the opening days of August 1766, he vanished. Mauger and his kin declared that they had heard him go out during the night of the 8th to the 9th, before daybreak. Since that hour, they had seen him no more. Champagnac’s account likewise records their statements regarding noises heard within the chamber—a circumstance that astonished the chronicler, as no one was said to have ascended the stair. This reproach already reveals the author’s bias. He would have preferred the magistrates to subject the close occupants of the house to closer questioning; yet such a desire does not suffice to designate a murderer from among their number.
The body was recovered from a pond some distance away, an earthen pot filled with sand tied about the neck. The officers of the law conducted the formal view of the corpse on the 18th of August. The physicians and surgeons concluded that an assassination had taken place: their report recorded severe violence inflicted upon the genital organs, followed by strangulation, establishing that the immersion in water had occurred only after death. Such was the account of Pain’s fate rendered by the examination. It did not declare whose hand had tightened about his neck, nor who had conveyed his remains to the water’s edge.
Suspicion fell upon his uncle and his first cousin, the two Rivières. Champagnac depicts them as deeply attached to the deceased and attributes the accusation to the malice of their enemies. His indignation is absolute; the facts he relates serve chiefly to measure what evidence was brought against the two men. At the time of the crime, the son was at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, more than twenty leagues away. The father was an aged man. In the chronicler’s view, this distance established an alibi for the former, whilst the infirmity of the latter rendered it impossible that he could have executed such an outrage alone. These are the arguments of the defence, not the findings of an inquest that had discovered another culprit.
During the inquest over the body, the judge interrogated the son concerning Pain’s enemies and the authors of the murder. Rivière replied that he knew nothing of them, and would have denounced them had he possessed any knowledge. It was at this juncture that the blood upon his coat was observed. The horses and the fleams provided an immediate explanation. A pair of shoes was also discovered at his residence, which were compared to footprints found near the woods adjoining the pond. Champagnac vigorously contests the probative weight of such a resemblance: shoes of identical shape and measure may leave similar impressions. In his narrative, the comparison served to nourish suspicion far more than it identified a man.
The judge is said to have declared to several persons that the Rivières were innocent, the victims of enemies bent upon their ruin. Nevertheless, the criminal lieutenant of Bayeux opened a formal inquiry. On the 30th of August, twelve days after the viewing of the corpse, a warrant for the bodily apprehension of father and son was decreed. Between an answer deemed convincing and an arrest, there had been no decisive discovery recorded in the chronicle of the kind a reader might anticipate.
The father surrendered himself as a prisoner. Seven months elapsed without his being confronted with a single witness. His son, advised by friends, had retired to Caen; there he was arrested three months later, by order of the King, and conveyed to the prison of Bicêtre. Four months afterwards, the father joined him in that place of confinement. There he perished. Champagnac attributes his end to destitution and sorrow, recording that he protested his innocence unto his final breath. The judicial file now counted one more dead man, yet remained without an answer to the advocate’s murder.
For the son, detention dragged on for nine long years. He clamoured for judges, demanding the opportunity to prove his innocence. The chronicle accuses certain of his kinsmen, spurred by avarice, of having obstructed his petitions. It offers no particulars of their machinations; it would be easy to fill this silence with secret missives and corrupt bargains among adversaries. The surviving account presents rather the stark reality of his condition: a man immured, whose sole prayer was to be brought to trial. The delay was not a sentence pronounced after solemn debate; yet it devoured his years no less completely.
A memorial at last reached the Chancellor of France. In September 1775, Rivière obtained his transfer to the prisons of Bayeux. This change of gaols finally cleared the path to the trial he had so long solicited. Following the preliminary examination, the bailliage dismissed the case against him and restored him to liberty on the 1st of July 1776. Nearly ten years separated the blood noticed upon his coat from this decree. His father could no longer profit by it. For the son, justice restored his present freedom; it could give back neither the life of his family nor the lost years spent begging for a hearing.
At the close of his chapter, Champagnac returns to Mauger. He deems the indications that might have pointed toward the tenant farmer far more pressing than those retained against the Rivières, whilst protesting that he does not wish to accuse persons who may well be innocent. These two assertions must be held together. The farmer did not become the assassin merely because the accusation against Pain’s kinsmen collapsed. The true culprit remains unknown in this chronicle. It is this which lends the affair its particular grimness: the son at last recovered his freedom, but the violent death of Master Pain remained without an author. A stained coat and a pair of shoes had seemed to offer a clue; in truth, they had merely conducted two men to the gates of a prison.