The door was locked, and the key was gone. Madame Vitte was descending from her bedchamber to join her husband; she found herself halted, within her own house, by a lock whose every vagary was familiar to her. From the far side came dull blows and low groans. She had attempted to light a candle, had failed, and had abandoned her boots. The only remaining passage lay through the garden. That detour may well have preserved her life; it did not prevent her from encountering a man rushing toward her with raised sabre.
A few hours earlier, on the second of November 1866, the Vittes had thought only of shuttering their wine shop in Champerret. Two soldiers had taken drink there, then departed. They returned almost immediately: one claimed to be indisposed and begged for a bed. Vitte wished to oblige them. His wife objected that no bed remained available; he insisted, and she consented to yield a mattress from their own marriage bed. A camp cot was set up in the drinking room.
Jean-Antoine Ciosi and Jean-Baptiste Agostini wore the uniform of the voltigeurs of the Imperial Guard. Both Corsicans, former tillers of the soil, they had seen service in the Crimean and Italian campaigns before re-enlisting. They belonged to those regiments whose mere attire was deemed sufficient to reassure any passer-by. That evening, their presence did not cause the innkeeper the slightest hesitation in remaining beside them. He was still awaiting a lodger, the mason Boramier, who came in past midnight. Madame Vitte let him in, shook her husband awake where he dozed at the counter, then retired upstairs once more.
Toward three o’clock, the noise summoned her down. In the counter room, the armed soldier reached her; she raised her arms to shield her head and sustained the blow. Her brother Renault, running down at her cries, was in his turn struck down from behind. Their nightshirts, their bare feet, their haste to bring aid had afforded them no protection. Together with the Vittes’ son, they gained the grated door to the garden. A gasworks labourer helped them slip beneath the fastened section.
Madame Lefebvre and Morland then made their way into the house. Vitte still leaned against the wall between two tables; Boramier lay prostrate before him. The innkeeper recognized his neighbour. She asked him whether there had been a quarrel, some dispute over reckoning. According to her deposition, he replied that he had been sleeping, and that the two soldiers had fallen to striking, the one upon him, the other upon Boramier. These were indications gathered in the midst of rescue, before such accounts had taken on the length and assurance of judicial explanations.
The soldiers had returned to their garrison. They had left behind them effects, bloody traces, and above all, living witnesses. Boramier expired at the Beaujon Hospital on the sixteenth of November. Vitte survived, but lost an eye. His wife and Renault recovered from their wounds. The twelve-year-old son would recount to the judges how he had led his mother, drenched in blood, to a neighbouring house, and then returned to his father, whom he had believed dead.
Ciosi did not deny having struck Boramier. He sought, however, to ascribe to his blows an origin far different from that suggested by the wounded. A few months earlier, he claimed, three men had set upon him on the Boulevard Bineau; in the mason’s voice, he professed to have recognized one of his assailants. A dispute over the art of boxing had allegedly turned sour, Boramier had purportedly seized him by the throat, and the soldier had laid hands upon his sabre. In this version, the violence became a retaliatory strike born of a past assault.
Yet the wounds did not support this tale. Their angle and direction led both the physician and the prosecution to place the slayer behind a sleeping man, rather than face-to-face with an antagonist leaning over him. No one had heard the prolonged altercation of which Ciosi spoke. The neighbours, who had clearly distinguished the shrieks of Madame Vitte, had perceived no quarrel beforehand. The house had remained entirely silent until the blows fell.
Regarding the events that followed, the two soldiers parted company still more decisively. Ciosi accused Agostini of having struck down the innkeeper; for his own part, he confessed to having attacked the figure who came from behind the counter, because a passage had to be hewn out. Agostini contended, on the contrary, that he had awakened only to the carnage wrought by his comrade. Terror, he claimed, had prevented him from intervening; he had fled before the assault upon Renault. He likewise attributed to Ciosi the initial falsehoods he had uttered to the authorities.
The magistrates retraced every step. The locked door, the garden path, the interval between the woman’s screams and those of her brother were no mere backdrop: they provided a measure against which to test what Agostini claimed to have had time to perform. Young Vitte testified to having seen both soldiers take flight. Stains of blood had been found upon their weapons. Each prisoner offered a sequence of actions that diminished his own guilt while casting a heavier pall upon the other.
One question nevertheless resisted explanation: why had that night turned to butchery? A creditor had come to demand money of Vitte in the course of the evening; the innkeeper had offered two hundred francs, and the settlement had been deferred to the morrow. The prosecution believed the soldiers had overheard the exchange. Yet theft was not established. Boramier’s watch, at first thought to have been taken, was discovered within his trousers. The motive remained obscure, even at the close of the proceedings.
On the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of December, before the Paris Council of War, the advocates for the defence seized upon this very obscurity and upon the military record of the accused. Counsel for Ciosi contested premeditation; counsel for Agostini maintained that an unfortunate presence beside the slayer was not enough to make a second murderer. Before the judges retired to deliberate, Agostini once more implored his comrade to acknowledge his innocence. Ciosi maintained that both had acted in concert.
The council condemned them both to death, apportioning their guilt: to Ciosi, the murder of Boramier and the assault upon Madame Vitte; to Agostini, the attempted murder of Vitte and the attack upon Renault. On the twenty-first of January 1867, they were shot at the Vincennes polygon. The *Gazette* describes the troops drawn up upon the snow, the curious spectators perched in the trees, and the regiments defiling past the corpses. The army had reclaimed, in order to put them to death, the very men it had once decorated.
As for the Vittes, they could not bring the affair to a close merely by quitting an execution ground. In 1869, they claimed fifty thousand francs in damages from the Minister of War. The civil tribunal declared itself without jurisdiction: their suit engaged the liability of the State and fell within the province of the administrative courts. They were condemned to bear the costs. After having opened their house to the soldiers, lent them their mattress, and survived their sabres, they discovered that it still remained for them to knock upon the proper door.