The farm rent did not amount to forty francs. It was enough to bring kinsmen before a justice of the peace; it was soon to prove enough, in an indictment, to account for an assassination. Between the two proceedings, an old man was slain upon a road, a witness failed to recognise the killer, and an ancient feud offered that singular ease with which a grudge may serve in place of a face. Joseph Fabiani very nearly paid with his head for the distinction between what was known and what was deemed plausible.
Jean Fabiani, the parish priest of Aregno, was seventy-eight years of age. On the 15th of May 1810, he was due to meet members of his family at the house of Delarosa, the cantonal justice of the peace. A settlement concluded in 1792 had composed his disputes with his cousin Dominico; after the latter’s death, a difficulty remained with his sons, Joseph and Guerino. It concerned the manner of paying the revenue from a plot of land. They had agreed to come to an understanding. The old contract called for an explanation, not a fresh lawsuit.
Joseph charged Guerino with representing him. Moretti, their maternal uncle, was to take part in the conciliation. In the version related by Champagnac, Joseph departed before daybreak to burn charcoal at La Paratella; his brother presented himself at the magistrate’s house towards ten o’clock. The priest did not arrive. A young girl came to announce that he had died from a fall from his horse, near Algajola. Guerino went out to apprise his uncle, then returned to Lavatoggio. To this initial report of an accident there soon succeeded intelligence of a far graver nature.
Negretti, the dead man’s nephew, had accompanied him. He recounted that a man concealed behind a wall had fired upon the old priest, then stepped forward some a dozen paces away. The man wore a mask. He had made a threatening gesture towards him before making off. Negretti described the colour of his coat, but declared that he had not recognised him. A presence, a garment, a threat: the testimony afforded these particulars. It did not yet afford a name that the deponent could maintain as a positive identification.
Yet names were not long in coming. Joseph became the presumed perpetrator of the murder, and Guerino his accomplice. Delarosa wrote to the sub-prefect of Calvi, Ginbeca, even before—according to the chronicle—proceeding to view the body. He invoked public opinion and announced representations to the military command to effect the arrest of the two brothers. He supposed them to be harboured by relations or friends. In this missive, Joseph was already no longer sought merely for interrogation: he was set forth as the man who had fired the shot.
Champagnac’s account, published long after the events, warmly espouses the cause of the accused. It denounces the family ties that bound Negretti to the justice of the peace and the sub-prefect, discerning in their actions a concerted prosecution. What he reproduces of the official instruments demonstrates, at all events, a direction chosen at a very early hour: the investigators cast their nets around the Fabianis. The question was no longer solely to discover what man had lain in wait for the priest. It had become that of assembling whatever might attach the two brothers to that man.
The house was surrounded by the gendarmerie in the night. Joseph and Guerino fled. A few days later, Joseph was arrested at his dwelling, to which he had returned; Guerino remained absent. To the prosecution, this flight confirmed their suspicions. To the chronicler who took up his defence, Joseph’s return revealed, on the contrary, an easy conscience. A single journey might thus sustain two opposing narratives. Yet neither the fear inspired by the gendarmes nor the return to one’s hearth could, of themselves, name the author of a gunshot.
The physical articles recovered were intended to supply this defect. Two balls had been extracted from the body. A snuffbox and a scrap of paper were likewise joined to the proceedings; the paper had been found two days after the murder, some fifty paces from the spot. Delarosa regarded it as a fragment of the mask. The snuffbox, it was surmised, had fallen from the killer’s pocket. A draft of a summons attributed to the priest was also produced, calculated to lend the family dispute the substance of an active menace.
The magistrate’s instructions bore also upon former utterances and the reputation of the brothers. The witnesses were to relate what they had heard said. Yet a rumour repeated by many mouths might produce the impression of manifold origins, though no one had seen anything more. Joseph was obliged to answer not only for his day at La Paratella, but for a common report that appeared to precede him wherever the examining magistrate sought him out.
The little box assumed considerable prominence. Witnesses declared that Joseph possessed one like it, or that this very one belonged to him. In a letter of the 25th of May, the justice of the peace commended a witness whom he expected to identify even the tobacco. This detail was doubtless intended to seem decisive; above all, it offers the measure of the hopes reposed in physical objects. A commonplace box had almost become a signature. It remained to be seen whether such recognition would endure before the court, where resemblances are debated in the presence of the man they accuse.
Joseph petitioned for the recusal of certain Bastia magistrates whom he alleged to be related by blood or marriage to his accusers. His petition was dismissed. The only one of the two brothers present, he had to answer an edifice of proof that marshalled the pecuniary dispute, their flight, the collected exhibits, and even the dispositions ascribed to their father. A witness attributed to Dominico an old design of killing the priest: the sons, it was urged, had inherited this purpose. In this dispute over farm rent, the prosecution thus set in circulation a legacy of hatred which the defence vigorously disputed.
Joseph set up a precise alibi. Several witnesses affirmed having seen him, on the morning of the murder, at La Paratella, distant, according to the account, some seven leagues from the scene of the crime. Jean Petrucci reported, for his part, that Negretti had mentioned another man whom the assassin had brought to mind. The direct witness therefore failed to supply the identification that had been wanting from the outset; his statements rather widened the distance between the suspect and the figure glimpsed upon the road.
The snuffbox likewise sustained the debate poorly. No one, Champagnac relates, could then positively identify it as belonging to the accused. Joseph produced another, which witnesses swore they had known him to carry for a year past. As for a nocturnal assault laid to the two brothers by Jean-François Vincentelli, the defence contended that he confounded both persons and dates: the quarrel went back to a time prior to the settlement of 1792 and concerned their father. Two parish priests attested to the good relations that had ensued. The past, summoned as evidence, proved far less compliant to order than had been hoped.
On the 30th of December 1810, the special court nonetheless condemned Joseph to death. It acquitted Guerino, tried in his absence. The brothers were thus not overtaken by the same sentence, despite the common indictment. Champagnac describes the emotion of the courtroom at the punishment visited upon the former. For Joseph, it was no longer a question of urging one narrative over another before those judges: he had to obtain an order enabling a new jurisdiction to rehear the cause. A man’s life now hung upon the legal grounds capable of procuring this second examination.
On the 14th of March 1811, the supreme court quashed the judgment for violation of legal forms and remanded the cause to Ajaccio, before the special court of the Liamone. This annulment designated no other killer; it rendered a new trial possible. On the 7th of June, Joseph Fabiani was unanimously acquitted, upon the conclusions of the public prosecutor. The chronicle closes upon this decree. Jean Fabiani had been murdered; his surviving cousin had been condemned, then cleared. Between the dead man and the man delivered from the scaffold, there remained a mask to which justice had affixed no face.