When the mayor of La Palud and the rural constable arrived at the farm, Rémy Danvers was in an open field. He was working, or feigning to work well enough that the surrounding landscape preserved its customary composure. His masters? Departed for Pierrelatte. The reply had been prepared with the aid of a genuine detail: Monsieur and Madame Donat had indeed contemplated removing thither to live. It was sufficient, thought the murderer, merely to advance this departure on the calendar. The neighbours were acquainted with the design; the lie would thus borrow the reassuring cadence of an event already foretold. Yet the two men who had come to question him knew what an onlooker had glimpsed at the farmstead. They were no longer inquiring merely after the whereabouts of the Donats.
The affair unfolded at the turn of January and February 1908, in the department of Vaucluse. Danvers had been in the husbandmen’s employ since May 1907. Over the course of several months, their common life under the same roof appears to have afforded the couple no pressing reason to discharge him. The sensationalist press would later censure them severely for their credulity: they ought to have investigated his antecedents, verified his identity, harboured mistrust. Such retrospective ease deserves to be dismissed. The victims were under no obligation to foresee their own murder. They had engaged a man to labour, and had observed, day after day, the execution of his duties.
One must imagine what such a duration represents within an isolated farmstead, without inventing the hearthside talk of a household whose private memories are lost to us. The farmhand knows the hours, the points of entry, the domestic habits of the proprietors; he overhears their intentions, witnesses their preparations, and occasionally learns of the presence of a sum of money. Such proximity is indispensable to rural labour. Under the Donats’ roof, it furnished Danvers with the very materials for his enterprise. According to the contemporary account in L’Œil de la police, he learned towards the close of January that his employers had assembled a sum of money, and resolved forthwith to slay them in order to possess himself of it.
During the night of the 31st of January to the 1st of February, he made use of a fowling-piece. The master of the house was struck down first, then the mistress. We possess no judicial transcript here by which to reconstruct each posture within the room, nor each movement between the two discharges. The illustrated gazette offers a dramatic tableau; yet its engraving remains an artist’s journalistic rendering, not an image captured from the life. The core of the accusation, however, stands out clearly: an employee, two masters slain by gunshot, a premeditated theft, and thereafter the attempt to cloak these deaths under the semblance of a journey.
Concealment demanded arduous physical toil. Danvers bound the corpses, thrust them into two sacks, and prepared their removal. His intention, the chronicle reports, was to cast them into the waters of the Rhône. The river was to consummate what the tale of Pierrelatte had begun: to put the persons far away and render their absence entirely plausible. It is not without significance that the falsehood seized upon an authentic design. An utterly unanticipated departure would have provoked immediate queries; this one might easily sustain itself for a time upon prior conversations. Thus did the victims’ own lives, even unto their most ordinary intentions, supply the very means contrived to efface them.
Yet someone surprised these preparations. The caption accompanying the contemporary engraving mentions an unwitting witness, a threat, and then the resolution to go and warn the mayor. The identity of this individual and the precise particulars of the discovery are insufficiently established in the records consulted to warrant further embellishment. We know the consequence of that intervention: the mayor proceeded to the farmstead accompanied by the rural constable. This most simple errand brought the entire scheme to ruin. Before the forensic experts, before the assize debates and the sensational headlines, there was a solitary soul who refused to keep to themselves what their eyes had beheld.
Danvers, interrogated in the furrowed field, clung stubbornly to his tale of a journey. The presence of the corpses and the warning received rendered it utterly untenable. He was taken into custody. The affair passed thenceforth from neighbourhood gossip into the formal machinery of criminal procedure. The announced departure, the final days of the Donats, the money that had excited cupidity, the weapon, and the preparations for transport constituted a body of evidence which justice was bound to scrutinise. The popular accounts pass swiftly over this preliminary inquiry, eager to reach the scaffold. We shall not fill their silences with fabricated interrogatories, nor with a confession penned merely to satisfy narrative design.
The Assize Court of Vaucluse pronounced sentence of death. The press depicted the young man as having been dedicated to villainy from his cradle, pointing notably to the penal record of his father. Such reasoning transformed a family lineage into an explanation, sparing observers the effort of comprehending a singular act. The prior convictions imputed to Danvers, his service in the military, and his wanderings certainly had their rightful place in the case file; the guilt of a parent, however, proved nothing against the son. For the purposes of our chronicle, the deeds charged against him at the farmstead suffice to impart full gravity to the case, without encumbering it with theories of hereditary criminality.
The execution was appointed for the 26th of January 1909, at Carpentras. In the interim, the affair had transformed into an eagerly anticipated spectacle. The proximity of the carnival season lent the event a morbid colour that the broadsheets exploited with alacrity: youths in masquerade costume congregated near the gaol, dirges were intoned in the streets, and the rabble clamoured for a view. L’Œil de la police recounts that vigil with dialogues and dramatic flourishes that it would be rash to accept as an exact transcript. A dispatch subsequently published in the Auckland Star confirms, nonetheless, the gathering of the throng, the vociferous protests, and the extraordinary precautions taken about the prison precincts.
The guillotine was erected upon the Place d’Inguimbert. The military cordoned off the approaches, and the area accessible to the public was severely restricted. The crowd protested against this obstruction of their view. There lies in that outcry a singular brutality which descriptions of the condemned must not obscure: for a portion of the onlookers, a public execution was deemed a spectacle to which every man held an inherent right. The Donats had been butchered in an isolated farmhouse; months later, their end served as the pretext for a night during which men jostled for standing room to watch another human being die.
Accounts diverge concerning the fortitude displayed by Danvers at the supreme moment. One narrative insists upon his recovered courage; another dwells upon the difficulty experienced in dragging him to the instrument of death. We shall preserve this discrepancy rather than select the more convenient posture. A man sent to the scaffold may be depicted in a thousand contradictory fashions by those who observe him for a few fleeting seconds. On that bitter January morning, the sentence was carried out. The agony of the victims was rendered no clearer thereby, nor did the solemn deliberations of the magistrates partake of the drunken choruses of the preceding night.
What remains most striking in the entire affair is perhaps the reply given that day in the open field. Danvers had counted upon a plausible absence, upon a journey that anyone might readily credit, upon the span of time required before mere unease could ripen into formal search. The witness had shattered that expectation. Thanks to the word carried to the mayor, the Donats were not abandoned to the lying fable of their departure. The master had never left, nor had the mistress; it had been necessary only to seek them out where their servant claimed to be peacefully continuing his daily toil.