She was said to have been murdered, buried beneath a merchant’s floorboards, removed forever from the sight of a town that already knew whom to name as her killer. Yet, on January 13, 1784, Marie-Jeanne Thillois re-entered Ay in the company of her husband. She handed the key to her room back to the vine-dresser who had lodged her; her husband drew up an inventory of their furnishings and left a copy with the landlord. One could hardly have imagined a more mundane, more material refutation of so many extraordinary tales. The presumed dead woman was settling the particulars of her removal. And yet, the affair did not end there.
To understand this return, one must retrace the doors that had successively shut in this woman’s face. Champagnac, who relates the tale, aims to expose the perils of accusations born of rumour; yet he speaks of Marie-Jeanne with the very contempt whose consequences he proceeds to decry. Behind his injurious epithets emerges an existence that authorities, neighbours, and landlords had relentlessly driven from pillar to post. Her mother, he writes, had given her over to prostitution while she was still a child. Two men with whom she had maintained liaisons were executed in Reims. Their crimes were not those whose perpetrators would later be sought in her own disappearance.
Marie-Jeanne had married, and then remarried. To the death of her first husband adhered a suspicion that the chronicler himself records only as hearsay; no judicial decree exists to substantiate it. The second husband cast her out, together with the child of the first marriage. A woman took her in as a servant, only to dismiss her when she fell pregnant. Next came Épernay, where the police served her notice to quit. The intelligence that trailed Marie-Jeanne evidently travelled swiftly enough to close against her any place wherein she sought to settle.
On August 30, 1780, she attempted to take her own life and was rescued by two passers-by. Having returned to Ay, she lived with a septuagenarian, who eventually fell on hard times and withdrew to the home of a relative in Avenay. She went to beg him for money. Upon his refusal, a fresh attempt upon her life necessitated the intervention of the old man and the mayor. These two rescues, followed by a third later rendered by certain women of Ay, were destined to recur within the judicial narrative of her death; they belonged first to her life, to those fleeting junctures when someone had still been able to intervene.
She gave birth at the Hôtel-Dieu in Reims and returned to the old man. Complaints concerning their household prompted the mayor to order her departure under pain of banishment from the town. She took another lodging, from which the landlords in turn turned her out. Certain women then dissuaded her from another desperate act; one of them agreed to take charge of her two children. Épernay, whither Marie-Jeanne returned, expelled her a second time. Thus she ever drifted back to Ay, less by reason of any favour she found there than for want of being able to abide anywhere else.
At last she lodged with a vine-dresser, Testulat Baudouin, and formed a liaison with a dancing-master. The chronicle portrays the male visitors she received, under the pretext of washing and mending linen, as the continuation of her trade. Soon pregnant once more, she was again threatened with the loss of her roof: the fiscal procurator summoned Testulat to compel her eviction. It is to this intervention that Champagnac links her accusation against the Sieur Genet, a merchant of Ay and brother-in-law to the fiscal procurator. She attributed to him the paternity of the child she carried. The chronicler discerns in this an act of vengeance; the record offers no independent proof of such intent, nor of that paternity.
Genet had barred her from his house out of fear, according to the same narrative, that her reputation might injure his commerce. Here, then, were two refusals—the one of shelter, the other of acquaintance—around which an accusation of far greater gravity would take shape. Abandoned by the dancing-master, exposed to abuse, and destitute in the depths of winter, Marie-Jeanne spent the evening of December 19, 1783, in the house of a female acquaintance. Towards midnight, she announced an appointment and went out. She did not return to her room. Eight days elapsed without her reappearing; the assignation, of which virtually nothing was known, furnished the town with all it required to forge a certainty.
Because she had named Genet as the father of her child, it was assumed she had gone to his house. Because she did not return, it was assumed he had slain her. It was even whispered that he had buried her beneath his dwelling. Each proposition appeared to corroborate the last, though all proceeded from the very same void: no one knew where she was. Justice intervened, and an inquest commenced. A woman who in life had found it so arduous to secure a shelter became, once presumed dead, the object of a zealous solicitude that compassion had never previously assumed.
In reality, she had rejoined her husband a few leagues from Ay to attempt a reconciliation. Their return on January 13, the surrender of the key, and the inventory of their goods lent an entirely different complexion to that absence. Yet Marie-Jeanne vanished once more that very day. On February 11, her body was discovered in the Marne, half a league from Ay. She had died by drowning; but that fact revealed neither whether her demise had been voluntary, nor whether the men accused before her return had played any part therein.
The proceedings instituted at Épernay revived with fresh vigour. A monitory notice affixed at the crossroads summoned, under pain of ecclesiastical censure, all who knew anything or had heard tell of the matter to come forward and testify concerning Marie-Jeanne and Genet-Dubuisson. Sixty-one witnesses were examined. The number is imposing; it does not in itself reveal how many had actually witnessed the facts they recounted. On May 10, Genet the younger and Feutré, an apprentice in the household, were made the subjects of bodily arrest warrants. Genet the elder was summoned to appear in person. All three appealed these measures.
The father remained on the spot and underwent interrogation. The son and the apprentice, acting initially on the counsel of their friends, removed themselves; they returned once measures safeguarding them from bodily seizure allowed them to appear in person. The instruction was not pursued further by the judges of Épernay. Champagnac attributes to them a regret at having gone too far: such is his own interpretation. He underlines above all that they had set about seeking the perpetrators of a murder before they even possessed a corpse, and that the woman supposedly assassinated had thereafter reappeared before the eyes of all.
On September 11, 1784, the accused were discharged and acquitted; they obtained the right to have the judgment printed and posted throughout the town. For his part, Champagnac regards Marie-Jeanne’s prior attempts and her destitution as conclusive proof of suicide. They do not permit the reader to reconstruct those final moments, of which the record affords not a single witness. The judicial outcome remains more precise than the chronicler’s certainty: the three men were acquitted. The decree could henceforth be affixed in the very town that had posted the monitory. Between those two broadsheets lay the life of Marie-Jeanne, long repelled, and then recounted by so many voices that everyone had ended by forgetting to ascertain whether she was still among the living.