An envelope may lie upon the floor of a wine-shop without accusing a soul. The one gathered up by Commissaire Prélat, on a January morning in 1889, bore an address that was nonetheless to send the police hastening as far as Saint-Quentin: Fulgence Géomay, corporal in the 87th Regiment of the Line. Scattered about the paper lay other letters. Near the cellar, a woman lay dead, her skull battered. Someone had ransacked the drawers, turned out the dead woman’s pockets, and drawn the shopfront shutter.
At No. 134 Boulevard Saint-Germain, the shop ought to have been open. It was this absence, this slight faltering in the habits of the quarter, that had disquieted the neighbours. They knew the shopkeeper by the sobriquet of Mère Gironde. Madame Roux was wont to complain of her trade, yet was believed to be at her ease. She kept her shop, performed trifling errands, and fostered the correspondence of lovers. Letters beneath her roof were therefore no singularity. It would have been exceedingly convenient had the murderer left his name; it would have been imprudent to resolve upon it then and there.
The neighbours’ first explanation lay ready to hand. To sweep the shop or run an errand, the shopkeeper would on occasion employ some man out of work. She had perhaps allowed her money to be seen, and one of these wretched souls had slain her. Two or three vagrants were arrested, and presently released. Destitution, which had sufficed to designate them, did not suffice to sustain their guilt.
Goron, Chief of the Sûreté, turned his eyes upon the corporal. In his memoirs, he was to confess that this name drew him, though he could not at first explain why. He dispatched an agent to verify Géomay’s presence with his regiment. Had the soldier not quitted Saint-Quentin, the scrap of paper would have lost much of its significance. The answer returned by telegraph: Géomay was upon a four-day furlough and was presently in Paris.
His mother’s lodging was expected to afford the means of overtaking him. But the woman had removed, and the detective traced her flittings across Montrouge. At her latest domicile, another surprise awaited him: she lay under lock and key for theft. Her son had come to inquire after her, learned the news, and departed. The family visit no longer explained how he spent his days.
The search shifted to the common lodging-houses. At Vanves, a corporal of the same regiment was reported. In the dead of night, Goron knocked, disturbed a man in his bed, and demanded his papers. It was a comrade of Géomay’s. He produced his papers; he had indeed journeyed to Paris with him, but he was not the man they sought. The Chief of the Sûreté was obliged to turn back. A regimental number, no more than an envelope, constituted positive proof.
Upon his return, a dispatch awaited him. Géomay had reached Saint-Quentin before the expiry of his leave. Instead of repairing directly to his barracks, he had passed the night beneath the roof of a laundress with whom he maintained a liaison. Goron took the first train. At the station, his agent and an adjutant informed him that the corporal had been arrested as he returned to quarters. He carried sixty-two francs and ten centimes. At the young woman’s lodging, a search had brought to light a reticule, a watch, a gold chain, and several trinkets he had just bestowed upon her.
The soldier appeared before his officers and the magistrates. He was neat of person, composed; his colonel commended him as an exemplary soldier. This flattering character did not explain the gifts. Questioned regarding the reticule, Géomay answered that his mother had delivered it to him with the money. Goron already knew the prison in which she was confined. This first explanation collapsed instantly.
The corporal thereupon requested that his comrades withdraw. One might have thought a confession near; he wished merely to speak of his mother without exposing her wretchedness before the other soldiers. He then substituted for the mother a woman of quality, whom he claimed to have encountered at Bois-Colombes. She had accompanied him to the playhouse and overwhelmed him with presents. He declined to name her, lest he compromise her honour. Fashionable discretion came most opportunely to the rescue of an inexplicable fortune.
Goron exhibited the envelope. Géomay acknowledged it: a friend from Le Havre had directed it to him. This time, the paper was no longer some chance correspondence preserved in a complaisant shopkeeper’s parlour. The corporal admitted that it had been intended for his own hands. He was conveyed back to Paris. His chief dread was to be seen manacled in Saint-Quentin; Goron procured for him a closed carriage. To this small consideration the police officer was later to attribute a portion of the confidence his prisoner subsequently reposed in him.
At the Morgue, confronting the corpse, Géomay still denied the deed. He then solicited a private interview. He had indeed stolen, but an unknown hand had killed. The stranger had accosted him, conducted him to the house of an aged woman of means, and then abandoned him with the cadaver. The mysterious benefactress vanished; a mysterious assassin took her place. The theft was now admitted. The murder remained charged to an absent party.
After a repast at the Sûreté, Géomay altered his tale a final time. The confession recorded by Goron set forth a solitary enterprise. Prior to his enlistment, the young man had worked for a grocer neighbouring the shop and had run errands for the shopkeeper. He knew her to be solitary. The notion of slaying her for gain had entered his mind; his return to Paris and his inability to extract coin from his mother had brought him back to the design.
He recounted having purloined a hammer from a bric-a-brac dealer, then waited until the following evening. At closing time, he entered, greeted the shopkeeper, and struck before she could return his salutation. He drew down the shutter, dragged the wounded woman toward the cellar, and renewed his blows. Thereupon, he ransacked the premises. The jewels promised to his mistress, the watch, and the money he carried away found here their origin, behind a shuttered shopfront where none had arrived to stay the crime.
Yet to quit the place suddenly became a matter of difficulty. Still according to his confession, he sat for a long time, trembling at the footsteps of passers-by heard near the shopfront. In pulling out his handkerchief, he let fall the envelope amid the scattered papers. At length he slipped out, cast the hammer into the Seine, took his supper at Les Halles, and slept at an inn. At the conclusion of his furlough, the gifts bestowed at Saint-Quentin lengthened, without his taking measure of it, the trail of his theft.
At the Assizes, his defence no longer consisted in advancing another tale. Maître Henri Robert pleaded for extenuating circumstances. He invoked his childhood, his breeding, the evil examples set before him—everything that, in his view, ought to lead the jury to distinguish between the moral culpability of the man and the sheer horror of his acts. The plea miscarried. In March, Géomay was condemned to death.
He was executed in May at La Roquette. Goron described a condemned man who dressed himself unaided, conversed with the chaplain, and petitioned that his body should not be surrendered to the Faculty of Medicine. He expressed his gratitude once more to his warders before the falling of the blade. The promise concerning his remains was faithfully observed: at the cemetery of Ivry, the delegate who had come to claim them bowed and retired.
At the close of his narrative, the police officer reserved a confession of another nature. The envelope, that single exhibit which had directed his investigations, was said to have vanished two days following the arrest, without explanation. The corporal’s full confession had rendered its loss less embarrassing. There thus remain, in an affair reputed simple, two widely different negligences: a murderer lets fall his address; his pursuers mislay the paper. Between the two, a shopkeeper lost her life, and the thread leading from her shop to her assassin hung upon a very slender reed.