Upon his return from the well, the curate’s hand was bleeding. The gendarmerie brigadier observed it, whereupon Father Bruneau explained that he had grazed himself whilst searching for his parish priest. It might well have been the wound of a man who had sought to succour another. It might also become, in an inquest already thick with suspicion, the vestige of an earlier violence. Between these two readings, a single hour was to assume a terrible gravity: at what precise moment had Bruneau descended?
On the 3rd of January, 1894, the body of Father Fricot was discovered in the presbytery well at Entrammes. He had vanished the previous day. His curate shared his roof, alongside their housekeeper. Pivert, the blacksmith, gave the alarm to the authorities and assisted in the initial proceedings. According to the deposition he would later deliver before the Assize Court, Bruneau rebuked him for his haste in spreading the tidings; thereupon, the curate had himself lowered into the shaft to attempt the recovery of the remains. From that morning onward, every movement he made was scrutinised twice over.
The post-mortem examination established that Father Fricot had suffered grievous violence. Dr Dupré ascribed death to a fractured skull, rather than to prolonged immersion. Abrasions upon the hands and feet, into which small pebbles had become embedded, led him to surmise that the priest had endeavoured to clamber back up by bracing himself against the masonry. Firewood logs had been cast into the depths. The body did not offer the simple tale of an accidental fall, and the articles recovered thenceforth constituted the pieces of a crime.
Blood manifested itself in other places as well. Gallereau, the chemist, detected stains upon handkerchiefs and napkins belonging to the accused, as well as across the keyboard of the presbytery harmonium. The physician noted fresh abrasions upon Bruneau’s hands. The prosecution drew these observations together; to them, the curate opposed the searches undertaken around the well-mouth. The rescue attempted in the wake of the discovery thus threatened to supply the explanation for the very marks that singled him out as a suspect.
Pivert reported that the curate had initially assigned his injury to around three o’clock. The housekeeper affirmed, on the contrary, that no search had yet been mounted at that hour: the exploration had followed Bruneau’s return from the Abbey of Port-du-Salut, whither he had gone to request a replacement for the celebration of Mass. Before the magistrates, the accused replied that he had never intended to specify a precise hour. Three o’clock or six o’clock: the discrepancy he presented as a mere approximation became, in the eyes of his adversaries, a damning contradiction.
Around the deceased, talk turned once more to money. Father Fricot had fallen victim to a theft that had plunged him into embarrassment; he had solicited the aid of Father Landais, a friend of long standing. Before the Assizes, the latter depicted a meticulous man who kept his accounts in a daybook. Following his death, neither this register nor a sum of money known to have been recently in his keeping could be found. Yet, when the presiding judge inquired whether Father Fricot had ever designated Bruneau as the thief, his answer was in the negative.
Other witnesses recalled more equivocal utterances. Father Fricot was said to have asserted that he knew the man who had despoiled him, only to refuse to name him. A landowner recounted that Bruneau had contradicted his superior following a declaration of this nature, observing in substance that if he truly knew the thief, he would have betaken himself to the gendarmerie. The interrupted confidences of the dead man and the retorts of the living now passed from casual discourse into sworn testimony. That which had been withheld out of discretion, or through uncertainty, now weighed heavy with significance.
The suspicions directed against Bruneau soon outgrew the precincts of the presbytery. Scrutiny fell upon his disbursements, his unexplained absences, and the petty larcenies imputed to him since his youth. At the hearing of the 9th of July, the presiding judge contrasted the modesty of his ecclesiastical revenues with the sums he was alleged to have squandered. The accused replied that he had assisted his family and could fully account for the provenance of his funds. Inquiries into his priestly conduct mingled with those intended to establish a charge of murder. For the accused, no province of his existence remained sheltered from suspicion.
He was further reproached with the murder of the widow Bourdais, a florist from Laval slain the preceding year. Dr Accolas described her wounds, the knife recovered at the scene, and the traces left within her bedchamber. Yet the clinical precision of a medical report did not, of itself, identify the murderer. This second indictment weighed down the proceedings even before each element had found its rightful place. Bruneau stood at the nexus of an accumulation of crimes and disorders whose strands his judges were called upon to disentangle.
A belated deposition lent further weight to the prosecution’s dossier. In April, Sister Louise Bouvier attributed remarks to the curate to the effect that the logs had been cast down upon the corpse to make a suicide pass for a crime. The historian Jean-François Tanguy observes that this religious had already undergone interrogation on several occasions without ever mentioning such words. The belatedness of the recollection rendered the testimony questionable; it did not prevent the magistrates from discerning in it an additional argument.
The trial unfolded at Laval from the 9th to the 12th of July. L’Écho saumurois described the bloodstained garments, the heavy logs, and the keyboard of the harmonium arrayed before the court. Confronted with these exhibits, Bruneau replied laconically, conferring in whispers with his counsel, Maître Dominique. The gazette claimed to read violence in the very cast of his features. This assured physiognomy also betrayed the impatience of those who wished the prisoner’s countenance already to resemble the anticipated verdict.
On the 12th of July, following the summing-up and the address for the defence, the sentence of death was pronounced. The defence pursued its appeals. In late August, Maître Dominique was received by President Casimir-Perier; according to the dispatch published in L’Écho saumurois, he laid great stress upon the absence of premeditation. Rumours of a commutation circulated, only to be promptly contradicted. The warrant of execution reached the public prosecutor’s office. The journalists awaited the advocate’s return at the railway terminus; the preparations themselves admitted of no further delay.
On the morning of the 30th of August, Bruneau delivered a letter wherein he acknowledged transgressions against chastity, but steadfastly denied the crimes laid to his charge. He heard Mass, received Holy Communion, and was thereafter conducted to the scaffold. The press chronicled the shouts and plaudits of the multitude. His death brought a judicial close to the affair; it did not, in retrospect, transmute every suspicion into evidence.
Much later, Jacques Leconte reopened the dossier and maintained the innocence of the condemned man. This retrospective inquiry feeds lingering contestation; it must not, however, be confounded with a judicial rehabilitation pronounced by a court of law. The affair thus retains its twin obligations: never to forget Father Fricot, slain under his own roof, and never to permit the ill repute of an accused man to perform, of itself, the work that belongs solely to proof.