The executioner had received his order. Others retained the leisure of an opinion.
On March 24, 1825, the judicial authorities informed the Sansons that they were to execute, on the following afternoon, Louis-Auguste Papavoine. In their memoirs, amidst a succession of names, dates, and public squares, this affair interrupts the ledger. The narrative lengthens. The man charged with concluding the proceedings feels the necessity of returning to what began them; and one soon senses that he writes not merely to explain how the condemned man died.
He wished to understand why it had been decided that he must die.
An Encounter Without a Past
A few months prior, on October 10, 1824, two children had been murdered in the Bois de Vincennes before their mother’s eyes. They were five and six years of age. Their murderer, a cloth merchant in his forties, was named Papavoine. The children belonged to the Gerbod family. Between this man and this household, the inquest failed to uncover any tie that might have lent the crime a familiar explanation.
Herein lay a formidable difficulty. A man who strikes down his enemy leaves a quarrel in his wake; he who steals may leave a trace of coin. Here, investigators searched for a common past and found only a chance encounter. The dossier could establish who had slain, without illuminating what had transpired within the murderer’s mind.
For the mother, this absence of motive diminished nothing. Two children had perished in the course of an afternoon stroll, and all subsequent interpretations would leave that primary catastrophe untouched. Yet for those who sat in judgment, it opened a question that unanimous indignation could not resolve. Ought one to regard the inexplicable as the mark of a deeper depravity, or as the symptom of a diseased mind?
The Sanson chronicle maintains that a prolonged and meticulous investigation revealed no prior relation between the victims and the accused. It does not furnish, in the pages devoted to the case, the particulars of every search. Let us refrain from introducing a providential police officer, a tavern whisper, or an object forgotten beneath a tree. The absence lingering within the account is precisely not a void for us to fill: it is the very crux of the trial.
What He Could Confess
Papavoine appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Seine. According to the memoirs, he first attempted to deny his guilt, then admitted the facts. This confession might have simplified the entire proceedings: the murderer ceased to dispute his deed with the prosecution. Yet it rendered the matter all the more intricate, for the man who acknowledged having killed claimed to have acted in fever and delirium.
This explanation could be construed in two opposing fashions. To the prosecution, it might appear a tardy recourse, embraced when denial grew impossible. To the defense, it could finally assign proper weight to the incomprehensible nature of the deed. The selfsame phrase shifted in value according to the trust accorded to the man who uttered it.
Maitre Paillet undertook Papavoine’s defense. The Sansons’ narrative evokes an acquaintance with his family and insists upon the advocate’s eloquence. One must not transform this retrospective praise into a victory forfeited in advance by a truth now deemed certain. We possess no clinical examination permitting us, two centuries later, to diagnose the accused. We know, however, what his defense staked its hopes upon: the possibility that the material author of a murder was not responsible for his act under the ordinary conditions of reason.
This compelled the jurors to look beyond the result alone. Yet the result carried a dreadful weight: two dead children and their surviving mother. To demand an examination of the state of mind of him who had slain them might seem to misplace compassion toward the very man who had rendered it necessary. Yet it was a matter of judgment, not an impossible restitution of the victims.
The Word of the Verdict
On February 26, 1825, Papavoine was condemned to death. The jurors upheld both his criminal responsibility and premeditation.
This final finding grates particularly upon the memorialist. How, he asks in substance, can one reconcile prior deliberation with the utter absence of any relation between the assassin and the children he chanced upon? His question reflects his dissent; it does not demonstrate, in itself, the impossibility of premeditation directed toward strangers. Yet it reveals the fissure that persisted after the hearing. The verdict had established a legal designation. It had not extinguished the doubts of those who read the same crime otherwise.
Papavoine’s family petitioned for royal clemency. The appeal failed; the plea for pardon met with no greater success. While all avenues of redress were exhausted, the condemned man remained within prison walls. Then came the order of March 24, marked by a finality of which the courtroom debates had been devoid: the following day, in the afternoon.
For those who executed the decree, no hypothesis remained to be weighed. An appointed hour had to become an event.
The Shortest Path
In the Sansons’ account, Papavoine traverses his final moments with an apathy that astonishes. Here again, the witness’s gaze cannot serve as a reading of the soul. What the executioner takes for indifference might be called by many names; it suffices for us to record the demeanor he describes, without presuming across the distance of time to determine its meaning.
Father Montès alone appeared to command the condemned man’s attention. Upon the road, Papavoine twice inquired whether much of the way remained. The motion of the carriage, drawing each instant nearer to its close, prompted this almost ordinary question: how much longer? It proved far more disquieting than any grand declaration prepared for the scaffold.
Upon their arrival, still according to these memoirs published long after the events, Papavoine spoke of the children to the priest. He no longer presented illness merely as an explanation for his own misfortune; he voiced remorse for their death. The text attributes to this conversation a precision that we cannot independently verify. Its significance lies less in the certainty of every word than in the narrator’s choice: it is to the victims that he returns the condemned man before the final prayer.
Papavoine was guillotined on March 25, 1825.
The ledger could resume. Other names would follow, other orders, and other departures. Yet the Sansons do not close this affair as they closed those that came before. The memorialist returns to the lingering disagreements surrounding madness, to other trials, to more lenient judgments. He takes sides, with all the partiality of a memory transformed into an argument.
And his conclusion upends the roles. Of all the parts played on that day, the one the public deemed the most terrifying was not, in his eyes, the heaviest to bear. He preferred having been the man who executed Papavoine to being one of those who had decreed his death.