“’Tis my papa Mano,” the child replied.
The presiding judge had just brought him face to face with the accused. In the Gironde Court of Assizes, the boy was called upon to relate what he had witnessed, while the man he addressed as his father stood but a few paces away. The contemporary gazette does not state the lad’s age with certainty; it records, above all, his answers. This confrontation, in the middle of March 1873, summoned before the jury the memory of that night when five members of Manau’s household had been slaughtered at Tastous: his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his wife, and two children. The trial was drawing to its close, yet the prosecution had still to submit the boy’s recollections, the seized garments, and the marks of blood to the crucible of cross-examination.
The record preserved today begins in media res, during the proceedings, rather than at the genesis of the affair. It refers back to prior issues of the Gazette des Tribunaux covering the sittings of 10 to 13 March. Those investigative particulars absent from the reports of 14, 15, and 16 March cannot, therefore, be reconstituted here. What these pages lay bare is the final phase of the hearings, with its formal accusations, its vehement denials, and the eventual verdict.
Bernard’s deposition commenced with plain, everyday things: a bedchamber, clothes, an oak chest, and a mill. He stated that his father had entered the room, trousers in hand, laying them down first near the mill and then upon the chest, before shaking him awake in his bed. His father was then said to have shaken his little brother, asking: “Mano, art thou sleeping?” The mother screamed, according to the child; the others cried out as well, save for the youngest sisters. The journal does not weave these utterances into a seamless chronicle of the night: it preserves them in fragments, exactly as they were delivered at the bar.
The presiding judge inquired whether the boy was merely repeating words whispered to him by others. He answered that neither Catherine Beyris, nor the mayor, nor his schoolfellows had prompted him in the least. Manau protested that he had been denied the right to examine his son during the preliminary investigation, yet declared he had no observations to put forward. The child, stationed at his side, reaffirmed his answers. The court reporter observed that Manau remained outwardly calm, though colour rose in his cheeks. When shown the pickaxe, the child recognised it as the implement commonly employed to grub up tree-stumps.
Counsel for the defence sought next to probe the young witness’s recollection. Why had he risen from his bed? To fetch books by the mill, he answered. How could he have distinguished the room in the dead of night? A tallow candle, resting upon his grandmother’s chest, had cast light across the chamber. The judge presented him with a floor plan; the child pointed out the furniture without error, according to the reporter, adding that he had previously seen an illustration of the bedchamber in an illustrated weekly. This circumstance—which might equally substantiate the precision of his memory or warrant its suspicion—was left to the debate of the court. The confrontation lasted nearly an hour and a half, amidst the murmurs of a gallery described as trembling with emotion.
The prosecution did not rest upon this testimony alone. The earlier sessions, as recapitulated in the remainder of the report, had brought forward neighbours, acquaintances, and intimates to whom Manau’s relatives were said to have unburdened their hearts. Several recalled that the mother-in-law complained bitterly of her son-in-law’s late hours, his reckless spending, his debts, and his threats. One woman recounted having heard her weep; another witness remembered that she feared to bolt the door before his return. These were reported statements, sometimes conveyed at second hand, and their probative weight was sharply contested during the hearing.
Manau denied all uttering of threats. He readily acknowledged a weakness for wine, the tavern, and the gaming table, yet disputed the gravity of the grievances laid against him. He replied to one witness that he had desired to separate from his family, not to slaughter them. Other witnesses depicted a man beset by debt, who haunted the inns and failed to account for monies entrusted to his care; yet others had known him, in earlier days, as an orderly clerk or an industrious servant. The portraits presented were far from uniform. The court heard concrete facts, but also the retrospective judgements formed by the village folk in the wake of the butchery.
The question of the timeline remained no less fiercely disputed. Villagers reported having heard a solitary cry in the night or at the break of dawn on 10 April. The expert, Dr Lafargue, explained that the state of digestion of the victims suggested they had taken their meal several hours before death, though the nature of the fare might have hastened the process. Considering the disposition of the bodies, the night attire, and the lantern discovered overturned upon the floor, he favoured an hour close to daybreak; the prosecution maintained as equally probable an earlier hour, around eleven o’clock at night. The physician declined to pronounce decisively, concluding that both hypotheses could be reconciled with the physical findings.
The physical exhibits were then laid before the experts and the jury. The lantern appeared bent at its latch; Manau maintained it had not been so beforehand and had belonged to the homestead time out of mind. The pickaxe, the smock, the necktie, and the blue trousers were produced. Charred scraps of linen had likewise been recovered from the hearth ashes. These exhibits did not carry equal weight: the Crown discerned in them the hallmarks of a butchery and a hasty cleansing; the defence demanded to know precisely when they had been examined and whether they might admit of an innocent construction.
Dr Lafargue described some fifteen stains of human blood upon the smock. Certain of these, he observed, might have arisen from physical contact with Manau’s dying wife; conversely, he judged that a mark upon the floorboards had been projected in a spray rather than smeared by contact. M. Robineau, the chemist, likewise attested to the presence of human blood upon the pickaxe, the smock, the necktie, a pocket handkerchief, and the bedchamber walls. Upon the blue trousers, he had observed spots, yet could not affirm that they were of human origin: the condition of the cloth and the faintness of the traces precluded any certain determination. Manau reminded the court that he had worn the necktie for only a few days, and that his son had previously made use of it.
These trousers had already provoked much witness testimony. Several villagers swore to having seen Manau clad in a blue pair on 8 or 9 April; some claimed to recognise the garment laid before them, while others could not vouchsafe that it was the very same. Manau challenged their identification, accusing the witnesses of having retroactively fashioned their memories once the magistrates had spoken of the garment. One witness remembered it as patched at the knee; another recalled it as clean and unpatched. The scope of this controversy remained strictly circumscribed: while it might place such a garment upon the prisoner’s back, the chemical assays failed to prove that the faint stains upon the cloth were human blood.
On 14 March, the courtroom was so thronged that, according to the correspondent, upwards of two thousand people crowded the precincts of the courthouse. The presiding judge announced that the matter must be concluded before the night was out. The examination of the exhibits proceeded, and Manau was confronted with the medical conclusions. He disputed the stains, the state of the lantern, and the condition of his apparel. Counsel for the defence suggested, in particular, that certain marks upon the smock might have been left when the prisoner embraced his wife. A further medical report, submitted by Dr Boussin, was presented by the defence as far more favourable to the accused than the findings of Lafargue and Robineau; the press account does not transcribe this counter-report in full. The Advocate General declared that, in the event of an irreconcilable variance, he would abide by the conclusions of the expert summoned from Paris.
At three in the morning, the sitting was suspended. Maître de Brezets then resumed the floor for the defence, his address lasting three hours. The presiding judge summed up the arguments, and the jury retired at midnight. They returned after an hour and a quarter. Their answers to all counts were in the affirmative, by majority vote. The jury likewise granted, by a majority, the benefit of extenuating circumstances. Manau was sentenced to hard labour for life.
The extant journalistic record does not allow one to transform this verdict into absolute certainty regarding every detail of that bloody night. It hands down the deposition of a child, tavern gossip, family quarrels, medical testimonies whose conclusions diverged, and a finding of guilt rendered by a provincial jury. The most haunting tableau remains that of the young boy standing before his father; the most tangible, that of the blue trousers and the smock, which the men of science scrutinised without ever attributing all their stains to the same blood. In the hall of justice, the jury delivered its decree. The surviving pages break off at the moment sentence was passed, withholding the complete transcript of the trial and leaving unresolved those very doubts that the experts themselves had left unanswered.