At the Maison du Bois, the clock face stopped precisely at midnight. Auguste Dobert maintained he had entered when the hands marked ten o’clock; the bill of indictment, for its part, set the crime in the night of March 8 to 9, whilst the lad confessed to the deeds for that of the 7th. These reckonings do not converge. At trial, they remained side by side, amidst the confessions of a youthful farmhand, the words of those who had employed him, and the memory of a man who had once offered him succour.
On June 3, 1873, before the Court of Assizes of the Sarthe, Dobert was nineteen years of age. A farm servant residing at Chamandière, in the commune of Vion, he stood trial for the murder of Jean-Baptiste Moreau, whom the court record also calls Poirier, at the Maison du Bois, in the commune of Le Pé. The Gazette describes him as fair-haired, of ordinary stature, and of decent bearing; he answered the presiding judge directly, even when questioned upon past threats and upon the infirmity that, he claimed, had prevented him from freely using one hand. These threats, according to the recorded interrogatory, dated back some three months. The president also inquired why the execution of the deed had been so long delayed; Dobert pleaded the malady of his hand. The Gazette preserves these particulars merely as questions put at the hearing and an explanation tendered by the prisoner: it elucidates neither the circumstances of each menace nor the nature of the injury. For the court, the threats thus preceded the crime related by Dobert himself; the unfolding of the proceedings was now to confront these past utterances with the testimony of his masters.
He admitted to having presented himself at the door armed with a two-pronged pitchfork. Moreau appeared; Dobert struck him, resting the fork against his own hip. Struck in the face and temple, the man fell, crying out, according to the gazette: “Must I die thus!” Dobert dragged him to the foot of a cow-house. He stated he had paused to catch his breath before carrying the wounded man to a ditch. The head remained above the surface; he then took a three-pronged fork and struck the body anew so as to force it beneath the water.
The prosecution then traced the marks he was alleged to have left within the house and its outbuildings. A wooden pallet was said to have been used to collect blood, with which the stable door was smeared; a hat belonging to Moreau had been carried thither. Following the crime, Dobert returned into the dwelling. He ransacked a wardrobe and the bed, finding nothing, then caught sight of a pair of trousers and discovered within a pocket a purse containing five francs. The amount of the theft recorded in the indictment was seventy francs. Dobert persisted in his declarations and refused to explain what had become of the money.
His return brought the clock back to the heart of the dossier: he had stopped it at midnight, whereas he claimed to have entered two hours earlier. Another sum emerged from the deposition of Moreau’s brother: one hundred and sixty francs, in six banknotes, which his brother had reportedly secreted in a grain measure in the attic. The sum named in the indictment, the five francs from the purse, and the notes mentioned by the brother do not denote the same object. The journal records them in the course of the trial without relating that they were ever recovered together, nor establishing their precise connection.
The initial discovery had occurred on March 10. A maréchal-des-logis of the gendarmerie came upon Moreau in a muddy ditch, beneath a heap of thorns and potato haulms. A small dog had drawn attention to the spot; the Gazette adds that without it, searchers might have sought in vain for a considerable time. The same officer, entrusted with the preliminary inquiry, confirmed the incriminating facts. The physician noted six wounds to the head, each capable of having caused almost instantaneous death. An empty stomach led him to estimate that Moreau had survived five or six hours after his last meal, though the record does not specify the hour at which it had been taken.
Ere the trial brought these voices together, Dobert had endeavoured to direct suspicion towards a former comrade whom he wished, it was said, to punish. He subsequently retracted this accusation. The printed page does not name the man, nor does it detail the circumstances of this first narrative; yet the shift remained present in the proceedings, at the moment when the prisoner complained that certain witnesses sought to “do for him.” The presiding judge reminded him that he was at liberty to reply to their statements and offer his defence, but that he must first hear them out.
It was then that Dobert’s past association with Moreau assumed a particular significance. The brother explained that the deceased had sheltered the young man several times when he was out of work. Having taken him in so often, Moreau had reportedly told him: “Thou art an idler.” To the witness’s mind, this rebuke had nurtured the prisoner’s enmity; it remains his own explanation, not a motive demonstrated by the record. In the same deposition, he spoke of the banknotes hidden in the attic. Thus the man who had succoured Dobert became, through the brother’s account, the one whose reproach had severed the charity received from the alleged threat.
The prisoner’s former employers provided another measure of his character. All acknowledged his honesty; they deemed him, however, headstrong, observing that he “often played the fox”—a phrase the newspaper explains by his habit of roaming the roads and showing little obedience. They likewise confirmed threatening words uttered against Moreau. His portrait could not, therefore, be reduced to an unblemished reputation nor to an accusation alone: the very men who praised his probity reported that which weighed against him.
Dallière knew the other side of this accusation. Dobert had denounced him as an accomplice, and he had been arrested following this implication. Called to the stand, Dallière exhibited no animosity. He stated that their acquaintance had been slight and that he scarcely knew the young man. The account thus passes from a retracted accusation to a named witness, without explicitly stating whether this former comrade was indeed Dallière. He who appeared before the court confined himself to declaring that he knew little of Dobert.
The court record marks a final pause before the verdict: the witnesses concluded their depositions at one o’clock; following an announced adjournment of a quarter of an hour, the proceedings resumed, according to the report, at five-and-thirty minutes past one. Morry, the Procureur de la République, maintained the accusation, and Maître Heinon presented the defence. The jury returned an affirmative answer to all questions, while according extenuating circumstances. Dobert was sentenced to hard labour for life.
There remain, in this hearing, several manners of measuring the same man: the confessions he made, the honesty his masters granted him, the threats they confirmed, Moreau’s former aid, and the resentment his brother attributed to the rebuke of “idler.” The hours and the sums can no more be melted into a single account. The court pronounced its sentence; the printed record preserves the components of the debate without reconciling all their discords.
Documentary note: Gazette des Tribunaux, Saturday, June 7, 1873, printed p. 541, hearing of June 3 before the Court of Assizes of the Sarthe, “Murder and Aggravated Larceny.” Transcription confined to the first column, from the heading of the court to the verdict and sentence; adjacent columns and articles excluded. The two dates of the crime remain attributed respectively to the indictment and to Dobert’s confessions.