At Versailles, in the spring of 1871, three municipal clerks brought back from Paris a sum of money that the city treasury had not yet learned to expect. They came from Les Halles, where they had collected the market dues owed by the factors. According to the record presented before the Court of Assizes, Hellé and Jacquelin handed over to Chasteau 120,520 francs and 80 centimes; Chaulin had accompanied them. The first two clerks asked for a receipt. Chasteau refused them one. In a city where government offices had been hastily displaced and public services thoroughly disrupted, this missing slip of paper was to become, four years later, the pivot of a bitter contest in which each party claimed to know the true fate of the municipal purse.
The administration had withdrawn to Versailles, where its agents endeavoured to maintain the operations of the municipal treasury. Yet historical events show little regard for office hours or the orderly keeping of ledgers. Chasteau, then serving as chief cashier, had quit Paris alongside his superior, M. Noyon. The clerks continued to gather what octroi duties they could; they transported these public monies in a carpetbag. Whenever circumstance allowed, they likewise recovered arrears owed at Les Halles. For these latter receipts, however, the ordinary returns of the municipal collectors could furnish no reliable check: the central bureaux that compiled them lay in utter disarray.
The first sum debated before the Assizes predated this retreat. In the latter half of November 1870, the Prefect of the Seine, Jules Ferry, was apprised of a deficit of 200,000 francs in the municipal vaults. He summoned Noyon, who forthwith questioned Chasteau. The cashier answered initially that the alleged deficit was mere slander; at three o’clock, upon an audit of the cash, the books appeared in balance. Noyon departed reassured. He subsequently learned that Chasteau had borrowed 200,000 francs from another cashier, M. Poisson, and that this borrowed coin had been quietly placed into the till.
The record of the trial sets two contrary narratives of this transaction against one another. To the prosecution, the audit had been contrived solely to mask the shortfall; the borrowed banknotes had temporarily stopped the gap, whereupon Chasteau had implored Noyon’s mercy and secured his silence by pledging to make whole the missing funds. Witnesses placed this restitution within the days immediately following. Chasteau, for his part, maintained that he had simply removed his own caution-money to his domicile to shelter it from civil unrest, returning it as soon as he was bid to do so. Noyon denied ever having advised this “displacement.” Between Poisson’s timely loan, the successive interrogations, and the explanations tendered to the Prefect, the matter could scarcely be reduced to a prudent precaution without first deciding which man’s word deserved credit.
A few months later, the carpetbag laden with the dues of Les Halles raised a still more perplexing question. The prosecution fixed the collection at 120,520 francs and 80 centimes, received between the 11th and the 28th of March 1871. Chasteau failed to enter it into his receipt-book. He nevertheless recorded among his disbursements the salaries paid to Hellé and Jacquelin, which were drawn from these very funds, and later contended that he had delivered the entire balance to Noyon. The latter swore he had never laid hands upon the sum. When the municipal services returned to Paris and the financial registers were reconstituted, no ledger bore any trace of the money.
Some time later, whilst changing his lodgings, Jacquelin chanced upon an old memorandum detailing the factors’ receipts. He noticed that they were nowhere accounted for in the official books. According to the prosecution’s case, Jacquelin confronted Chasteau, who referred him to Noyon for an explanation. Chasteau subsequently produced an iron dispatch-box, asserting that the notes had been preserved within it and subsequently deposited at the Bank of France. The Crown vigorously disputed this purported deposit: the bank clerks could not confirm the presence of any such banknotes, and the circumstances alleged were wholly incompatible with the regulations of the establishment. Noyon, on his side, maintained his denial of ever having received the funds. In January 1875, following her husband’s arrest, Madame Chasteau surrendered 43,000 francs in banknotes to Police Commissioner Macé. This sum, too, became the subject of fierce debate: the prosecution saw in it a belated and partial restitution of embezzled monies; the defence insisted it was private capital preserved within the family.
These two earlier episodes had left behind only mutilated registers and contradictory recollections. The third charge, by contrast, was legibly inscribed upon counterfoils, bond-scrip, and personal memorandum-books discovered within Chasteau’s own office. It concerned the municipal loan of 1871. Subscribers had initially been issued provisional scrip. Following the lotteries, certain of these certificates entitled their holders to redemption or lottery prizes; a bond already amortised was therefore never to be exchanged for a definitive debenture. Yet during the conversion process organised in late 1872, the bonds were traded like-for-like, without any signature-register. Simple docket-cards were supposed to flag those numbers that had been drawn.
This administrative shortcut invited error. Such mistakes as were detected were corrected on the spot; yet the general audit undertaken in January 1873 disclosed that a considerable number of amortised bonds had been converted precisely as though they were still unredeemed. The official report laid before the jury enumerated 172 bonds thus compromised, distinguishing whole debentures from fractions. It fell upon the head of the bond department to notify his superiors forthwith and to trace the rightful holders by means of the allotment-slips upon which their names and addresses were inscribed.
According to the prosecution, Chasteau pursued an altogether different course. He was alleged to have abstracted the compromised bonds from the bundles, seized the corresponding allotment-slips, and presented himself at the city treasury to draw the redemptions and lottery premiums under the guise of an agent acting for the depositors. These encashments succeeded one another from October to December 1873, reaching, by the tally submitted to the jury, the sum of 80,898 francs and 85 centimes. Lest the department discover an actual deficit in its paper, Chasteau was said to have purchased unexchanged provisional scrip on the open market and paid the installments required to fully pay them up. The court’s financial expert deducted 46,144 francs and 14 centimes from the gross sums received, calculating that 34,754 francs and 71 centimes remained owing to the depositors. These numbered forty-two in all; the judicial chronicle records that but a single depositor, the stockbroker Laurent, ever received an unsolicited payment, amounting to 140 francs and 28 centimes.
The defence did not dispute the irregularity of the method, but rejected any suggestion of criminal enrichment. Chasteau, his counsel urged, had merely instituted on his own initiative a reorganisation he deemed indispensable, having received no precise instructions from above. He had intended to identify the rightful owners once the general liquidation was concluded and the improperly exchanged bonds replaced. His own name stood openly upon the payment slips, counsel emphasised; he had operated under no concealment. The notebooks discovered in his cabinet contained, by his account, the individual reckonings of each depositor. To this the prosecution retorted that these private notes had never served to alert a single soul, and that the monies had been restored in negligible measure only.
There remained the delicate matter of his personal expenditure. Chasteau attributed his estate at Maisons-Laffitte and his comfortable annuity to his father; the defence likewise pointed to the caution-money held by the City, his wife’s dowry, and family assistance. The Crown contrasted the maintenance of his household and his lavish style of living with the missing public funds, while the defence brought forward stockbrokers who testified that Chasteau had never speculated upon the Bourse. Thus, throughout the trial, the balance-sheets were never entirely divorced from questions of character: on the one hand lay the written debits and seized papers; on the other, the accused man’s protestations of honor and the long-standing confidence his superiors had reposed in him.
On the 20th of December 1874, the Prefect of the Seine was informed of fresh malversations. An administrative inquiry led to Chasteau’s arrest, followed by searches that brought to light a mass of debentures, transfer-slips, and private ledgers. The examining magistrate collated these documents with those transactions that the treasury had left without adequate record. At the Assizes, Advocate-General Chevrier prosecuted for the State; Maître Allou countered this indictment with the cashier’s own explanations and the restitutions he claimed to have effected. The jury answered all questions in the affirmative, while according him the benefit of extenuating circumstances. The Court sentenced Chasteau to ten years’ solitary confinement and a fine of 40,000 francs.
In the final analysis, the three charges remained distinct in their nature. The 200,000 francs had been restored following a clandestine loan from Poisson; the market revenues of Les Halles remained an irresolvable dispute between missing registers, an iron box, and conflicting oaths; while the municipal loan left in its wake a paper trail of counterfoils, substituted scrip, and a ledger-balance that the Crown’s experts awarded to defrauded depositors. The Court pronounced judgment in accordance with the jury’s verdict. Yet it was in the ink and paper of the ledgers themselves that the tragedy had taken shape: a refused receipt, an omitted credit, a substituted bond—so many blank lines wherein the State was left to search for what was gone.