When Tilloy returned to his home, his wife had just bolted the door to prevent the stranger from returning. The man she claimed to have seen had no name. The husband, for his part, was presently found with a knife in his pocket, which he had taken from the table. In this affair, the assailant remained an invisible shadow, whereas the physical object and Tilloy’s sudden return offered a palpable grip for suspicion.
Tilloy had been married to Catherine for fifteen months. He worked as a farm hand in the service of Prévost, where his duties permitted him to sleep under his own roof only once a fortnight. On the eve of the drama, he had returned home because his allotted rest had come; on Sundays, he was allowed leave until the noon hour. He therefore set out before eight o’clock, eating along the way the breakfast he carried. The dwelling stood at Gombremez, in the commune of Saulty; the enclosed plot where he was to dig was separated from his cottage by a farmstead and two lanes bordered with hedges.
The narrative provided by Champagnac follows the arguments of Tilloy’s defense. While the young laborer was at work, a stranger was said to have taken advantage of his absence and the quiet of the village streets during divine service to slip into the house. He allegedly dragged Catherine into the adjoining room—which had recently been used as a cowshed—and struck her after she resisted his violent advances. The chronicle does not name this man. Wounded, Catherine succeeded in dragging herself to the door and bolting it, dreading that the stranger might return. The account adds that the intruder had seized a hatchet noticed in the room, then wrested from Catherine the pocket knife with which she had attempted to defend herself. The bolted door thus became the first obstacle Tilloy encountered upon his return.
Toward a quarter to eleven, Tilloy quitted the enclosure and returned to the house. The street door was fastened, as was that of the garden. He inquired of a neighbor woman whether his wife had gone out; she answered that she had not. At the garden window, he knocked and waited. A stir was heard within: Catherine was dragging herself toward the casement. She opened it. He beheld her covered in blood and gravely wounded. He rushed forth to summon the neighbors, crying for help; within moments, the house was thronged with village folk.
Upon the table lay a knife with a stag-horn handle. Tilloy picked it up mechanically and thrust it into his pocket. The chronicle conjectures that a neighbor woman may have picked it up from the floor and washed it; it does not say who did so. When the first magistrates arrived, Catherine declared that an unknown man had entered and wounded her in the former cowshed. She stated that he wore a white coat. To the gendarmes, she described more explicitly the assault she had resisted. Before the justice of the peace, she steadfastly maintained the same account.
This declaration did not shelter Tilloy from suspicion. It was reported to the magistrate that the husband had been found carrying his wife’s knife; two gendarmes gave evidence against him. The justice of the peace issued a warrant of arrest, and the grand jury found that there were sufficient grounds for an indictment. Catherine succumbed to her wounds shortly thereafter. The man described as an unknown intruder had not been found; the individual held in custody was the husband, returned from the field, carrying a knife whose passage to the table the defense could not fully explain. The municipal officer and his deputy had heard Catherine immediately upon their arrival; the brigadier of the gendarmerie and his men subsequently received the identical statement. When the justice of the peace repaired to her bedside, she maintained once more that an unknown man had entered and struck her down. Yet the discovery of the knife in Tilloy’s pocket and the reports of the gendarmes carried the day in the official proceedings that led to his committal.
Among the depositions for the prosecution was that of a mendicant woman named Lobel. She asserted that, having come to beg alms at Tilloy’s door on the morning of the assault, he had refused her bread. She claimed to have lingered near the house and overheard a violent quarrel involving jealousy and threats of death. The defense asked why Lobel had not appeared earlier before the justice of the peace or the director of the jury, and why she had not raised the alarm if she heard a woman screaming. Counsel also recalled that Tilloy had refused her charity: her deposition, the advocate argued, might well be an act of malice born of that refusal. These reported utterances were no less grave for being tardy; they were merely more difficult to weigh.
The trial came before the criminal court of the Pas-de-Calais, sitting at Saint-Omer. Defense counsel, Maître Duronceray, seized upon the discrepancies among the accounts and laid heavy stress upon the conduct of the victim herself, who had unswervingly designated an unknown intruder. He maintained that she had survived her injuries long enough to denounce an assailant other than her husband. The argument went so far as to assert that a guilty husband would have struck more swiftly and mortally to seal his wife’s lips forever. This conjecture belonged to the advocate’s art; it could not supply the place of positive proof regarding what had transpired within the walls.
Duronceray likewise invoked Tilloy’s character and the certificates furnished by his various masters. He depicted him as a gentle man, living on terms of affectionate understanding with his wife, whose demeanor had remained calm throughout his imprisonment. Such considerations might illuminate the prisoner’s nature, yet they could not put a name to the stranger Catherine had described. The trial thus juxtaposed indications of disparate value: neighbors who had seen nothing of the assault, two gendarmes who had held the prisoner, a beggar woman whose testimony was tainted by suspicion, and a dying woman who, to her last breath, had repeated that an intruder had struck her down. The knife furnished a visible token; the defense urged the court to consider also the circumstances under which Tilloy had taken it into his possession. That April tragedy remained suspended between a bolted door, a mortally wounded woman, a knife carried to a table, and the belated words of a mendicant. The court was left to decide whether these circumstances were sufficient to prove that Tilloy had slain his wife.
The court acquitted him and ordered his release by a decree dated the 23rd of Messidor, Year V—the 11th of July, 1797. The decision rested, according to the official report, upon the grounds that it was not established that Tilloy was convicted of having committed the homicide. The defense had presented the outcome as a complete vindication of his innocence; the decree itself, in the language recorded by the chronicle, spoke merely of a crime not proven against him. The distinction is of moment: the acquittal put an end to the judicial pursuit of Tilloy, but it did not reconstruct the assault nor reveal the identity of the man Catherine insisted she had seen.
In concluding his narrative, Champagnac concedes that the sole record at his disposal derives from the plea of the defense advocate, whose obvious interest was to palliate the charges against his client. He remarks that the bill of indictment and the address of the public prosecutor might perhaps have shed different light upon this mysterious crime. What survives in the chronicle is therefore the narrative of a defense, traversed by conflicting interests: the dying words of Catherine, the suspicions attaching to a knife, the reports of the gendarmes, the testimony of the woman Lobel, and the eloquence of Duronceray. The judgment restored Tilloy to his freedom; the name of him who crossed that threshold remained unwritten in the record.