Before seven o’clock, the milkwoman rang several times in the Rue des Grenets. She had come to deliver the milk as was her custom; no one answered her summons. She alerted the neighbours. The garden gates and window shutters were fastened, and not a sound issued from the house. When a ladder was reared against the street wall, a second ladder was descried in the courtyard. The street door was presently forced open; within a bedchamber, the two women, the widow Aillet and Louise Goussard, were discovered dead at the foot of their beds.
The day was Sunday, the 22nd of June, 1823, at Chartres. The widow Aillet was upwards of eighty years of age; her servant, about fifty-eight. They dwelt alone in a house situated between courtyard and garden, hard by the cloister of Saint-Aignan. Their beds stood in the selfsame room. A night-lamp was still burning. One armchair was stained with blood, another shattered; the commode had been forced and a drawer carried away. Two adjoining cabinets had been entered. Yet the silver-chest appeared untouched, as did the locked coffer wherein were found twelve thousand four hundred and twenty-five francs, the two hundred francs upon a small table, and even thirty-six francs left in plain sight.
What was missing soon came to light: two gold watches that had hung from the chimneypiece. From one, the steel chain had been wrenched away; the other, a repeating watch, bore a gold chain, a small key, and a seal. The blood-stained cleaver found in a cabinet was the property of the widow Aillet. The weapon that had struck Goussard down was never recovered. The layout of the house, the differing instruments, and the two victims pointed to at least two assailants; a third man might well have kept watch in the street. As for the path of flight, the ladders and fresh marks of damage upon the exterior cornice drew the eye toward the coping of the wall. Since the garden casements remained bolted from within, this egress appeared the most probable.
A witness had heard, about one o’clock, a loud cry, followed by the bell being pulled with violence, and two further cries. Toward half past one, he heard several persons hasten past beneath his windows. Another witness saw four men running toward the Saint-Michel gate, clad in blue smocks and hobnailed shoes. These observations yielded no names as yet. Nevertheless, they fixed in the dead of night the tumult of a house whose dwellers would never again answer in the morning.
For a time, the examining magistrate knew not where to turn. Suspicion fell upon André-François Bouin, known as Lapalette, a day-porter without regular employment, notorious for his brutal temper and already convicted of theft. The authorities first apprehended Curot, the woman with whom he cohabited. She related that Lapalette had gone out on the Saturday evening and returned only at six o’clock on Sunday morning. When pressed further, she spoke of a day and a night spent with him by Fréon prior to their joint departure. Her tale shifted; it nevertheless guided the investigators to Charles-Philippe-Toussaint Fréon.
Fréon, a wigmaker and perfumer, had quitted his domicile in early June following a quarrel with his wife, according to his own account. He had departed for Paris well-nigh penniless. On the 18th of June, before setting out again, he announced to Cornut that he would return to Chartres on Sunday or Monday, or else he would be dead, and that he would bring back money and a gold watch. He likewise declared that he carried a knife purchased on the Quai de la Ferraille, which he would turn against himself should his quest for money come to naught. Ten days before the crime, he had abandoned his hearth; on the 19th of June, he reached Saint-Piat, thence making his way to Chartres under cover of darkness, fearful of being recognised.
The chronicle also recorded an older deposition, that of Basin. In 1813, Fréon had allegedly proposed that they conspire to murder Monsieur and Madame Aillet and their maidservant, and rob them thereafter. He was said to have laid before him the means they might employ. Basin declared that he had rejected the proposal with indignation; Fréon had supposedly persisted, appointing a meeting to discuss the matter whilst angling. This testimony carried back ten years before the murders a design levelled against the very same inhabitants.
Fréon first knocked at Lapalette’s lodging, fled upon hearing the voice of a lodger, roved the streets, and reappeared about three in the morning. No sooner were the two men met than they sallied forth again. On the morrow, they spent the day in an alehouse at Morancez, where they claimed to have encountered one another by chance whilst fishing. Lapalette confided to a witness that he would soon want for nothing and would have a tale to tell him if he proved a “good fellow.” Fréon, for his part, spoke of a shop goodwill to be purchased for eight hundred francs and promised thirty francs to his companion, whilst Curot parted with two chairs that they might subsist.
On Saturday evening, Fréon announced that he was expecting the proceeds from a sale of effects. Yet he never went to the supposed agent. At ten o’clock, he stepped out with Lapalette, who had sent Curot to bed and turned the key upon her. Fréon wore the hobnailed shoes and was wrapped in Lapalette’s smock. The two men subsequently gave divergent accounts of their movements. Fréon asserted that he had gone in search of his mistress, then met Lapalette before taking the Paris road. Lapalette claimed he had waited at the Tertre Saint-François, that they had proceeded to Lucé, and had parted company at the Bois d’Oisême. Both denied having passed near the cloister of Saint-Aignan.
Yet toward half past ten, witnesses had observed two men answering to the prisoners’ attire within that very cloister, adjacent to the Aillet residence. Three recognised Lapalette; one perceived him passing at eleven o’clock from the cloister toward the Rue des Grenets. It was during that night of the 21st to the 22nd of June that the two women were slain. At that same juncture, Fréon abruptly parted from Lapalette and took the Paris road on foot. He reached Ablis, then Rambouillet, where he represented himself as having arrived far earlier than was the fact, before boarding the diligence.
On the 23rd, he presented himself at Cornut’s with an antique gold repeating watch and its chain. He claimed to have obtained three hundred francs from his father; yet he had not set foot in his family home for a considerable time. The following day, the watchmaker Lejeune identified him as the man who had bartered two antique watches for a new timepiece and eighty francs. The trinkets and movement recovered answered to the watches of the widow Aillet; the watchmaker who had kept them in repair identified them. Fréon denied the transaction, maintaining that he had bought a pinchbeck watch in the street for eighteen francs. Yet the witnesses and jewellers knew him again; he himself had displayed to a friend a watch which he boasted of having exchanged for two others.
On the 27th, the watch was pledged at the Mont-de-Piété, whence Fréon fetched one hundred and twenty francs. Lapalette, arriving in Paris on the 25th, spent money lavishly and was apprehended on the 29th with one hundred and ninety francs in his possession. He explained that he had sold his furniture and effects, kept some savings, and received forty francs from Fréon; Curot maintained he had possessed no money whatever. Within his straw mattress were discovered two parchment masks. Lapalette claimed they dated from bygone carnivals and that Curot had concealed them; she swore she had never set eyes upon them. Champagnac relates that these masks were suspected of having served as disguises, though their employment remained a mere conjecture of the prosecution.
Curot had been suspected of keeping watch. The evidence was not deemed sufficient to commit her for trial: on the 1st of August, the court discharged her from the proceedings and confirmed the warrant of arrest against Fréon and Lapalette. The two men stood trial in August before the Court of Assizes of Eure-et-Loir, their defence being entrusted to counsel assigned ex officio. After three days of hearings, during which the identification by the watchmaker told heavily against Fréon, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and both were sentenced to death.
They lodged an appeal in cassation. Fréon was thereupon seized with violent fits of vomiting; Champagnac depicts this episode as an attempt at self-poisoning. He repeatedly assured his counsel that he would never be executed. When the appeal was rejected and the day of execution appointed, the condemned men barricaded themselves within their cell. The execution was perforce postponed. Lapalette then made disclosures touching alleged accomplices; fresh investigations proved them to be fabrications, according to Champagnac. Fréon and Lapalette were executed in due course, though the chronicle assigns no precise date to the event.
In his closing address, the public prosecutor paid tribute to Goussard, who, in his words, had waged a long struggle to preserve her mistress’s life. The two missing watches and the wrenched chain had conducted the inquiry from the chimneypiece to the shops of Paris; the deposition of Basin, recalling the proposal made to him by Fréon in 1813, cast the shadow of suspicion upon one of the accused back into a far more distant past.