Francesco Arcangeli confessed to his crime because he could not endure to be convicted upon a falsehood. He had killed a man; three witnesses claimed to have seen him purchase from their shop the very cord employed against his victim. Yet he had bought it elsewhere. This error, which seemed in no way to alter his fate, threw him into a fury. He demanded that justice should at last know the truth. It was to cost him his life.
A few weeks earlier, in the first days of June 1768, nothing yet distinguished this affair from common tavern talk. At Trieste, a German traveler was awaiting a vessel. He was returning from Vienna and wished to reach Rome. He took his meals at the common table, paid his scot, and showed little eagerness to recount who he was. The man whom the servants called Giovanni bore, nevertheless, a name renowned throughout the learned world of Europe: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the man who had imparted a new ambition to the study of antique art.
Hard by his room lodged a Tuscan cook. Arcangeli had served in several households and had undergone, in Vienna, a sentence for theft. Released before the expiration of his term and subsequently banished from the Imperial dominions, he had led a precarious existence between Venice and Trieste. He sought employment, borrowed trifling sums, and knew how to proffer a service at the very moment it was required. When the German inquired of the innkeeper whether any craft was ready to set sail, Arcangeli interposed. He was acquainted with a shipmaster.
This initial intelligence did not procure the promised departure. It procured companionship. The two men walked down to the port, took coffee, met again at table, and pursued their inquiries. The vessel lacked its cargo; another would sail shortly; shortly shifted from one day to the next. Winckelmann grew impatient. Arcangeli attended him with that accommodating readiness which, far from home, so readily assumes the guise of friendship. Their adjoining chambers favored visits in which no one perceived anything amiss.
The traveler, however, preserved a certain reserve. He was loath to draw his purse before his companion and made no parade of his connections. Arcangeli one day asked him his name, alleging the innkeeper’s curiosity. Winckelmann displayed his papers. He spoke also of the honors received in Vienna: gold and silver medals, magnificent gifts of which his interlocutor remembered chiefly the value. In the account that Domenico Rossetti drew from the judicial proceedings, this discovery becomes the pivot of the drama. The assassin henceforth knew of a treasure small enough to lie within a pocket.
He saw the medals. To the patrons of the coffeehouse, he spoke of these pieces and of the money the German was bound to possess. Yet he continued to ignore the greater part of his companion’s life. A volume printed in a tongue he did not recognize, the traveler’s circumspection in matters of religion, and his dealings with the Viennese court later furnished him with contradictory suspicions. Before the magistrates, he would declare him a spy, a Lutheran, or a Jew. These conjectures belonged to his defense and to his prejudices; they in no way defined the man he had slain.
On the seventh of June, Arcangeli procured the instruments that were to turn a tavern acquaintance into premeditated murder. He nonetheless met Winckelmann at the coffeehouse, as on previous days. The scholar still spoke of his departure. On the morning of the eighth, missing his companion at their customary rendezvous, he inquired where he had gone. Arcangeli, for his part, was seeking some conveyance to the environs of Monfalcone. The terms demanded did not suit him. He returned to the inn.
Two servants successively beheld the men conversing in Winckelmann’s chamber. The colloquy appeared untroubled. The traveler spoke of Rome, of his patron Cardinal Albani, of a return now close at hand. Shortly thereafter, the sounds of a struggle reached Andrea Harthaber, who was in the room below. He ran upstairs. When he thrust open the door, Arcangeli was leaning over his neighbor. The murderer thrust him aside and fled without so much as taking his hat. The medals, the professed object of the deed, remained behind.
Winckelmann was still alive. He dragged himself downstairs in search of aid, wounded and gasping for breath. Bewilderment rendered the first witnesses clumsy: some ran for a physician, others recoiled, a maidservant was seized with panic. It was at length a manservant who loosed the cord remaining about his neck. He was carried back to his chamber. The surgeon who arrived to dress his wounds made no secret of their mortal gravity.
A judicial commission took his deposition. The man who had sought to travel without drawing notice was now obliged to make known his quality in the midst of an invaded bedchamber. He pointed out his portmanteau and his passport. To designate his assailant, there remained to him only that almost domestic phrase: the man who lodged next door. He had yet the strength to dictate a testament, appointing Albani his universal heir and providing several bequests, among them one for Harthaber. He expired in the afternoon. An interrupted journey had just become a European affair.
Arcangeli had struck out along the inland roads, received counsel on how to skirt certain towns, and exchanged part of his garments for a sailor’s habit. This confused flight brought him at last into Imperial territory. At Planina, soldiers arrested him; he carried no passport. He acknowledged the homicide during the first interrogations and was brought back to Trieste on the fifteenth of June. He had very little money left upon him. All his hoped-for gain had consisted of medals he had not carried away.
The interrogations bore principally upon the premeditation of the crime. Arcangeli attempted to depict it as an act of violence arising from a sudden quarrel. The cord, he alleged, had been found by chance, and the knife was one he habitually carried. Depositions and seized articles contradicted this version. Then arose the incident of the cord-merchants. They were several in number; their assurance seemed to bar all dispute. Arcangeli broke out in reproaches and gave the true address of the woman who had sold it. She confirmed the sale. The others indeed recognized their own wares: the retail vendor was supplied by their shop. They had transformed an inference into an absolute recollection.
In rectifying this error, the accused admitted that he had planned the attack in order to steal the medals. His advocate, Doctor Lovisoni, pleaded for a sentence of imprisonment and public labor. The court sustained the charge of premeditated murder and, on the sixteenth of July, pronounced sentence of death upon the wheel. The judgment was notified to him on the eighteenth; it was executed on the twentieth, upon the square before the inn.
The scholar and the cook had shared a few cups of coffee, errands at the harbor, and weary hours of waiting. There remained of it a famous dead man and an assassin whose name traveled down the years alongside his. There remained also, in the records consulted by Rossetti, those witnesses who were sincerely convinced they had seen what they had merely deduced. Arcangeli had wished to prove them wrong before he died. In that, at least, he had succeeded.