The five horses had brought the dead man home.
On the morning of 18 July 1869, inhabitants of Baisieux caught sight of a heavy cart halted beneath a carriage gate. The team was there, the conveyance likewise; missing only was the motion of the man who ought to have climbed down, unharnessed the beasts, and accounted for his delay. When onlookers drew near, they discovered Alfred Boulaut thrown backward into the bed of the wagon. An oat sack, upon which he appeared to have fashioned a seat, still lay wedged between his legs. He had not stepped down from his carriage to die: it had rolled on without him.
Boulaut was a farmer. He was returning from the market at Arras, whither he had conveyed a load of barley. Eager to take to the road again, he had accepted an advance of seven hundred francs rather than wait for the grain-measuring to conclude. This very ordinary impatience lent his final journey two circumstances that the inquiry would seize upon: the hour of his departure was known, and he carried coin with him.
His evening could be traced by stages. He had taken supper at Bucquoy, traversed Puisieux, taken up a man into his cart, and subsequently set him down at the hamlet of Serres. Later, at Mailly, an innkeeper had seen the team pass by without discerning any driver. Between these testimonies lay the moment of the murder. The horses had pressed on, bearing behind them the fruit of a crime whose commission none of the witnesses examined claimed to have witnessed.
An examination of the body revealed a gunshot discharged at very close range, from behind. The physician extracted lead shot; the market money had vanished, as had Boulaut’s customary purse. In a pocket turned almost inside out remained only a small coin. This plundering accounted for the motive the prosecution would assign to the act. Yet whoever had taken such pains to carry off the valuables had left behind in the cart an article of an entirely different sort: an old snuffbox of black horn.
It was worn, elongated, devoid of value. That was precisely why it could speak. A purse may be stolen; a jewel may be pawned; an ordinary snuffbox passes daily from pocket to hand, and at times from one hand to that of a neighbour offered a pinch. It attaches to a habit. The gendarmes therefore sought not its worth, but the man in whose grasp it had been seen.
Charles-Augustin Carpentier, known as Apollinaire, dwelt in Serres. A hosier, married, thirty-two years of age, he took snuff willingly. His reputation in the district was poor; the trial would reveal, however, that he bore no prior convictions. The investigators went to his dwelling. Bidden to produce what money he possessed, he drew silver coins from his straw mattress and declared he had nothing more.
Yet there was the waistcoat.
Hanging near the bed, this garment held two purses and a packet of lead shot. Carpentier maintained he had not put it on for a year. One of the purses, fashioned from grey skin with a brass clasp, was recognized by Boulaut’s son and by a servant woman who had handed it to the farmer before his departure. The link was no longer merely that of a smoker’s habit: an article taken from the victim was found under the suspect’s roof.
The snuffbox elicited an initial explanation. Carpentier had indeed possessed one, he said, but it was broken, and a child had tossed it into the coal; it had burned. Yet a neighbour woman recalled the pinch of snuff he had offered her on the very eve of the crime. The tale of the destroyed article could not withstand so recent a gesture. As for the waistcoat allegedly forsaken for a year, the observations gathered placed it regularly upon its owner’s shoulders.
His initial account of his movements that evening held up no better. The persons in whose houses he claimed to have stayed did not confirm his presence. Others had encountered him upon the road. Carpentier then sought an egress through the whole body of proof: if he could no longer explain away the snuffbox, the purse, and the shot in isolation, he would assign to their assembly a single cause. Other men had committed the crime and compelled him to appear party to it.
He declared that he had gone out in search of wool. On his return, having heard detonations, he was supposedly accosted by brigands. These ruffians had dragged him toward the cart and forced him to climb aboard to retrieve a forgotten hat. His snuffbox, he said, must have slipped out during this business. The unknown assailants had then thrust upon him, against his will, the purse and the shot discovered in his lodgings.
The explanation possessed the virtue of encompassing everything; it suffered from the defect of attributing to the assassins a most singular concern for distributing the material evidence. At the hearing, the presiding judge underlined this unlooked-for generosity. Titters greeted certain passages. Carpentier persisted, adding particulars, amending others. As he spoke, his contrivance grew ever longer, without rendering any less conspicuous the predicament it was meant to resolve.
The trial took place before the Assize Court of Pas-de-Calais in September. The chamber was full; a bench gave way beneath the weight of the spectators. Outside, the market crowd sought to force an entry, and the uproar compelled the public prosecutor to suspend his address. The curious had to be cleared from the environs of the courthouse. On that day, those who had come to buy and sell jostled to watch the judgment of the man accused of slaying a farmer on his return from market.
Prosecutor Bastien drew the force of his discourse from this very affinity. The roads were no longer safe, he explained; husbandmen now banded together to travel in company and lend one another aid. He called upon the jurors to answer the district’s dread with an exemplary sentence. Individual proof thus took on a collective mission: punishing Carpentier was to shield the travellers of tomorrow.
Maître Poillion contested premeditation and pleaded for mitigating circumstances. He recalled the infinite circumspection demanded by the penalty of death. While his defender spoke, Carpentier wept. The denials with which he had sought to ward off the crime no longer sheltered him from the question that had become paramount: even if pronounced guilty, could he yet escape the scaffold?
On 11 September, the jury granted him no mitigating circumstances. The Court pronounced sentence of death and designated Arras as the place of execution. His petition for clemency failed. Transferred from Saint-Omer, Carpentier spent his final night in the company of the chaplains; the gazette that recounted those hours depicts him solicitous of his wife and children, for whom he begged assistance. On 21 October 1869, he was executed upon the Grand-Place in Arras.
The affair had begun with the silent return of a carriage. It concluded before an assembled multitude, beneath the gazes that a scaffold never failed to draw. Between those two gatherings, justice had tracked modest things: a snuffbox, a waistcoat, a purse. Boulaut had regarded them less than he had his horses, and counted them less than his coin. After his death, it was these very articles that restored to the journey its final companion.