For twelve days, the notary’s house was subjected to an unsparing search. Four men dug into the earth, moved timber and masonry, and probed every quarter for the corpse that village gossip had already buried several times over. By some accounts, Barbe Didiot had been poisoned; by others, struck down with a blade. The tales lacked but a single element: the dead woman herself. Beneath the hay, her garments had indeed been found. Yet Nicolas Sillet had maintained for years that they lay there, and no one had yet explained why a woman who had departed of her own free will was bound to return and fetch them.
Sillet exercised the office of royal notary at Montfaucon, in Champagne. He owned parcels of land farmed by Jean Didiot and his wife, Catherine Melinet. The household was poor, living on advances of money he granted them. In 1771, Didiot purchased a horse for two hundred and fifty livres; his wife and their daughter of full age bound themselves alongside him to discharge the debt. Sillet subsequently satisfied the vendor, thereby becoming their creditor for that sum over and above earlier arrears. The two families were intertwined through labor, loans, and mutual services long before their names were joined in a criminal indictment.
Barbe tended the cattle and assisted in the fields. In 1766, she had declared a pregnancy, naming as the father Jean Sillet, the notary’s brother. A daughter was born of the union. The reproaches of her parents and the gibes she encountered made her life in the village an onerous trial. She spoke often of Paris, where she hoped to find employment and a better station. In July 1774, at thirty-two years of age, she resolved to depart. This choice neither extinguished her obligations nor smoothed the hardships of the journey; yet it allowed her, at the very least, to leave behind those who incessantly reduced her existence to that single fault.
She applied to acquaintances to watch over the effects she could not carry away. None would accept the charge. She was familiar, however, with an outbuilding belonging to Sillet, comprising a barn and a stable, whither she went daily to tend the beasts. The key lay concealed within a hole in the masonry. During the night of the twenty-first to the twenty-second of July, she carried her bundles thither and hid them in various corners beneath the mound of hay. These possessions remained beside her former life, leaving her to advance more lightly toward her new one.
On the morrow, she informed the notary and bound him to secrecy. He endeavored to persuade her to remain by her parents, and then advised her at least to leave her belongings under their roof. She answered that the goods were hers, purchased with her own coin, and would rest more securely in his barn; moreover, they might serve as surety for what she and her family owed him. Sillet did not stay her hand. The bundles remained where she had left them, glimpsed from time to time by those who came to draw or store hay. He asked only that they be set in order without unnecessary disturbance.
Upon the road to Paris, at Lizy near Vouziers, a well-attired woman from Montfaucon was questioned as to her journey. She stated that she sought employment and wished to put distance between herself and parents with whom she was ill-pleased. This report pointed squarely to a voluntary departure. Yet back in the village, her absence was swiftly filled with darker chronicles. Barbe’s silence left every tongue free to assign her a fate. Soon, ignorance became an invitation to explain, and the most alarming conjectures held far greater sway than the modest intelligence of her travels.
In 1775, Sillet undertook repairs upon the outbuilding, which was threatening ruin, as well as a neighboring portion of the house. When the work was done, he offered drink to the laborers. It was forthwith whispered that he had made them drunk to purchase their silence regarding a corpse uncovered in the cellar. His own replies to inquiries concerning Barbe were turned against him. He did not know where she lived; he hoped she was at ease; he jested about the fine and elegant return she had once promised herself. The discretion of a man sworn to secrecy became, in the eyes of his neighbors, the cloaked language of a graver guilt.
A first formal complaint was lodged on November 28, 1775. Thirty-six witnesses were examined. The following year, Sillet was compelled to answer charges regarding Barbe’s departure, a pregnancy presumed to have existed at that hour, and the custody of her worldly effects. Two other persons were troubled by the court merely because a headdress belonging to the vanished woman had been worn by the wife of one of them. Everyday objects circulated henceforward as incriminating clues. What Barbe had abandoned so as not to encumber her journey was converted into an engine of suspicion against those who had remained.
In October 1780, further repairs brought the bundles once more to the fore. Laborers uncovered them beneath the hay and offered Sillet their silence if he made it worth their while. He bade them mind their work. Thereupon, they made their discovery public without delay. An inventory was drawn up, and the magistrate ordered that the house be searched for a corpse. Sillet submitted to the search. At the close of twelve days, the officers declared they had found nothing. The house had been broken open on every side; yet the prosecution did not relent.
Sillet had been cast into prison at Montfaucon during this renewed phase of the proceedings, and was subsequently transferred to Reims. He now stood accused of concealment of goods, seduction, murder, poisoning, and the subornation of witnesses. Conflicting allegations seemed capable of compounding without ever refuting one another. His advocate brought the debate back to the primary question: where was the murder for which an author was already being designated? The disappearance was unquestioned, the effects were present; yet neither circumstance proved that Barbe was dead. Moreover, the defense held a piece of news of an entirely different weight than the idle gossip bred of a round of drinks offered to workmen.
Jeanne Le Fèvre, the wife of a cordwainer named Honosse, had met Barbe in Paris in August 1775. She had asked her what she was doing there. Barbe had answered that she had come to remain and had no desire ever to return to the provinces. She offered no further explanations. This encounter had taken place more than a year after her departure from Montfaucon. The woman whom some asserted to be buried in a cellar had thus appeared in the flesh before an acquaintance in a street of the capital, resolved to keep the reasons for her new existence to herself.
On October 18, 1783, the Parlement of Paris decreed that the preliminary investigation should proceed at Reims within a delay of three months, but ordered the provisional release of Sillet, who was to remain at the disposal of the bench. Shortly thereafter, the judges pronounced his acquittal. Barbe’s parents had figured only as witnesses and had entered no civil action against him. The debt, the clothing, the masonry work, and the silence had failed, in the end, to produce the crime that had been forced upon them. A notary was cleared of criminal suspicion; the woman whose name had haunted him remained far from the village.
She was not seen to reappear in the courtroom to resolve every riddle in person. She lived only in the deposition of Jeanne, in her deliberate choice to abide in Paris, and in the bundles entrusted six years before the final excavations. Later accounts attributed to her an unhappy fate under an assumed name, without ever furnishing proof. What Barbe had truly given to understand was far simpler: she had no wish to return. Sillet had preserved her belongings until such time as she might claim them; the village had mistaken this vigil for the concealment of a violent death, never imagining that it might merely be the consequence of a life chosen elsewhere.