He had changed his trousers, but kept on his coat. In the public square of Nissan, Pierre Lamur mingled with the villagers who were discussing the discovery of a body. It was not yet known whose corpse it was, so savagely had the face been bludgeoned. A theory gained ground: perhaps a brawl between laborers of rival guilds. Lamur offered his opinion alongside the others. Then, the marks upon his garment were noticed. In the midst of a colloquy where each man sought a culprit far from home, every glance turned toward the newcomer who had just taken part.
The victim was a wine commission agent named Pomié. Established at Nissan, in the department of Hérault, he dispatched casks to Béziers. Such traffic involved loadings, dray-carts, and journeys with which local folk were well acquainted. Lamur, also known as Doumairon, had made inquiries of a carter concerning the wine dispatched the previous day and that which was yet to leave. The chronicle places these queries at the genesis of the affair. To all appearances, they concerned mere trade; the prosecution would read into them the design of premeditation.
According to the reconstruction preserved in the chronicle, Lamur subsequently set forth with his fowling-piece and lay in wait in a vineyard bordering the highway. Vine-branches offered him concealment while keeping the road in plain view. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, Pomié arrived. The man in ambush stepped down onto the roadway and fired. The wine factor fell; he was further struck with the weapon. The violence done to his countenance would render identification arduous. The purse of coin he carried was seized, and his assailant retraced his steps toward Nissan.
The record depicts this scene as the crime charged against Lamur. He was to deny it to the end. What matters, in tracing the steps that led the authorities to indict him, is his return to the village and the apparel he wore. At his lodging, he reportedly bade his wife remove the stains from his trousers. Yet he stepped outside clad in the selfsame olive velvet coat. He who had attended to one piece of his attire left another in full view. This ordinary oversight, far more than his entrance into the square, was to isolate him among his neighbors.
Around the still-nameless dead, the first narrative had already taken shape. Guildsmen, it was murmured, were prone to clash; rivalries were known to run deep enough to explain a slaughter. This surmise bestowed a category upon the corpse before restoring its name. Lamur, by joining the knot of talkers, took part in this collective reckoning. But once his coat caught the eye, the inquiry shifted its ground: it was no longer a question of hypothetical brawls between wayfarers, but of a living man, his movements, and the visible marks upon his person.
He was arrested and brought before the examining magistrate in that very garment. The chronicle speaks of blood, though without the particulars of any forensic inquest from which its methods might be judged. It summarizes the indictment rather than transcribing the record of the trial. The garment remains, nonetheless, its central exhibit: kept upon the suspect’s body, exposed first to the villagers and then to the magistrates, it joined the square where men had gossiped to the highway where Pomié was discovered. It was no longer a piece of daily attire; it demanded an explanation.
On August 4, 1828, the Court of Assizes of Hérault sentenced Lamur to death. Upon the pronouncement of the decree, he gave vent to his dismay. He entered an appeal in cassation, but it was rejected. The execution was appointed to take place at Béziers, upon the great market square. The sentence thereby ordained a public theater, where the populace might congregate to see the law carried out. Thus the progress of the docket wound back toward the town whither the factor had dispatched his wine, albeit by another path: that of a condemned man conveyed under guard, not that of drays laden with merchandise. The chronicle now turns away from the investigation to dwell almost exclusively upon his final days.
The transfer occupied three days. Lamur traveled upon a cart, loaded with irons, ringed by gendarmes and soldiers. Country folk gathered as he passed. The chronicler lays stress upon his apparent gaiety and the cigars he smoked from time to time; such notes tell us little of his inward state. They reveal above all the contrast that the onlookers wished to note between the gravity of the transit and the traveler’s mien. The man who had cried out against his sentence no longer showed them the same despair.
He reached Béziers on October 15. He was lodged in the chapel of the gaol, where a pallet of straw had been laid out. Catching sight of the gendarme who had taken him, he charged him with having borne false witness. To the turnkey, he spoke further of perjured witnesses and of the mayor, who, he said, bore him a grudge over a satirical song. These accusations belong to his utterances as a condemned man; the record does not substantiate them. Yet they are necessary to understand his stance: he was not merely suing for clemency; he was still disputing the judicial narrative that had decreed his death.
When a clock struck, he asked at what hour they would come for him. The gendarme hesitated to reply. Lamur maintained that he knew his fate and wished to know what lay in store. Shortly thereafter, the bailiff read the warrant and the reckoning of court costs. To this sum, the prisoner added a debt he already owed to the mortgage office. He spoke then of his children, who would receive nothing. These reckonings brought another anxiety into the chapel: after his passing, the debts would endure, and those he left behind would have to subsist on what was no longer theirs.
The priest exhorted him to confess. Lamur persisted in his innocence, committing to God and to himself alone the knowledge of the truth. A reader might be tempted to seek in this phrase the token of a concealed remorse or of a calculated obstinacy. It settles no such question. A verdict had been returned; the condemned man continued to challenge it. The chronicler, convinced of his guilt, construed each refusal through that conviction. Between the pronouncement of the court and that of the prisoner, no final reconciliation closed the case.
At two o’clock, he was surrendered to the executioners. His irons were struck off, and preparations were made for departure. He jested still. He walked to the scaffold accompanied by the priest, while drums beat before the troops. Among the crowd, he recognized villagers from Nissan and saluted them. Those whom he had joined in the village square at the outset of the inquiry now encountered him again, some of them, in an entirely different gathering. This time, none sought the name of the dead man nor that of the accused. All had been proclaimed.
Lamur was executed at Béziers, having never recanted his denial in the account that has come down to us. The chronicler turns his fortitude into a final moral lesson; one may also remark the immense space accorded to this end, when the arguments that led to his condemnation are so meagerly preserved. As for Pomié, he vanished from the tale the moment the purse of coin was plucked from his pocket. There remains the olive coat: it had silenced an easy conjecture about passing strangers, then accompanied Lamur before the magistrate. A man had stepped forward to speak with his fellows; his garment had spoken before him.