At a quarter past eleven in the morning, across the plains of Écuisses, Gendarmes Demortière and Didier caught sight of a huntsman making for the cover of the Bois-Brûlé. They gave chase. Demortière skirted the edge of the timber while Didier struck into a path within; just as the former prepared to plunge beneath the trees, a gunshot rang out. Demortière fell. The bill of indictment relied upon no eyewitness who had seen the marksman take aim. Rather, it sought to converge the traces left after the discharge, the actions ascribed to a man before and after his hunt, and fifteen gathered scraps of torn paper.
The case came before the Assize Court of Saône-et-Loire on 31 March and 1 April 1873. The prisoner at the bar, Pierre Marchandieau, was sixty-three years of age and resided at Écuisses, where he earned his bread as a day-labourer. He stood accused of the death of Demortière, a gendarme of the Montchanin-les-Mines brigade. The prosecution placed the tragedy on 12 January, during a patrol mounted to suppress poaching. The accused was an admitted poacher; the gendarmerie had been deployed for the express purpose of curbing such trespasses. Yet the identity of the huntsman glimpsed upon the heath could not be inferred from this coincidence alone.
According to the indictment read at trial, Didier stood roughly eighteen metres from Demortière. The text noted that his eyesight was failing; he caught only the fleeting shadow of a poacher vanishing into the thicket. The wound proved mortal, and the contemporary report stated that the post-mortem examination placed the shot at point-blank range. The same instrument maintained that the trajectory indicated Demortière had never seen his slayer. These findings of the preliminary inquiry afforded no visual identification of Marchandieau.
The initial arrest fell upon another man. Two hours after the deed, the gendarmes apprehended Desmurs, a huckster from Montchanin. The prosecution recorded that his manner was uneasy, that he had sought to evade observation, had fled upon sighting the constabulary, and had secreted his piece in an adjoining house. He admitted to poaching without a licence. Footprints discovered near the wood likewise appeared to incriminate him. The dossier itself, however, demonstrated why these circumstances proved insufficient: Desmurs hunted with lead birdshot, not with the cast-iron pellets extracted from the fatal wound, and a witness placed him more than two kilometres from the coppice at the hour of the shot. Desmurs was set at liberty; the magistrates then turned their eyes upon Marchandieau.
The turning point emerged from a scrap blackened by powder, discovered within Demortière’s wound. The inquiry described it as a piece of printed wad. Further searches at the scene yielded fifteen paper fragments which, when pieced together, partially reconstituted a statute-labour assessment slip issued by the mayoralty of Écuisses. The surname Marchandieau, the initial of his Christian name, and the name of the commune remained legible upon them. The indictment argued that no two men of that name existed in the district and that the document could have belonged to none other than the prisoner. It also noted his seventeen-year-old son, only to dismiss him: the youth, according to the Crown, did not hunt and was absent from the region on 12 January.
A search was conducted at Marchandieau’s cottage. The gendarmes uncovered a hunting gun, an army-issue musket, and a considerable store of military munitions. Marchandieau initially stated that he hunted but rarely and had not crossed his threshold on the day of the crime; his wife corroborated that he had remained indoors and claimed they kept no dog. The prosecution asserted that these statements were flatly contradicted by depositions. The prisoner ultimately confessed that he poached habitually, had recently brought down a wild boar, and had spent the entire morning of 12 January afield.
Regarding his itinerary, the accounts clashed irreconcilably. Marchandieau maintained that after walking toward Écuisses, he had retraced his steps and lingered near his dwelling. The indictment contended that witnesses had seen him depart in the direction of the Bois-Brûlé, but that none had witnessed his return. It added that he did not report to his shift at the Longpendu mine until two o’clock in the afternoon, having remained unseen about his home prior to that hour. It was the prosecution that fashioned this interval into an unexplained void; the gazette offered no alternative, comprehensive reconstitution of his morning hours.
The cast-iron shot furnished another link in the chain of reasoning. Marchandieau initially declared he had not discharged his weapon on 12 January. He subsequently admitted to purchasing, on 19 January, half a pound of cast-iron shot, the metal he employed for his game. According to the indictment, the shot seized at his lodging and that found inside the confiscated piece corresponded precisely to that measure. The prosecution deduced that he must have fired prior to the purchase and had sought to mislead the investigating magistrate. Thus did the bill of indictment align the inventory of munitions with the prisoner’s shifting statements. The defence vigorously contested these inferences, though the court reporter failed to record their detailed refutation at each stage of the calculation.
The condition of the fowling piece was next adduced as proof of concealment. The weapon surrendered to justice on 23 January had, according to the prosecution, been freshly loaded; it lacked a percussion cap, and its nipple had been newly filed. The Crown argued that the file had been used to efface the soot of a recent discharge. The indictment further cited the nature of the wadding retrieved from the barrels as evidence of deliberate precautions to destroy incriminating traces. Here again, these were the conclusions of the preliminary examination as reproduced by the press, not a confession wrung from Marchandieau.
The prisoner’s attire and hound completed the circle. On the very day of the murder, Didier had set down a description of the poacher. A witness who claimed to have spoken with Marchandieau on the morning of the tragedy described garments which the prosecution deemed identical. It asserted that the trousers and cap were positively identified, whereas Marchandieau was alleged to have discarded his smock without revealing its hiding place. Another witness stated he had seen a man burst from the wood, followed by a hound whose stature and colour he described. Three days following the crime, Marchandieau’s wife led their dog to Le Creusot; brought before the witness, the animal was identified as the beast seen near the coppice. The public prosecutor elevated this to a crucial piece of evidence. Yet while the witness identified the dog, the record nowhere attributed to him an identification of its master.
Lastly, the prosecution linked to the scene of the crime a scrap of newsprint dusted with grains of snuff. The indictment claimed that Marchandieau kept his percussion caps in his snuffbox and his tobacco in folded paper, and that identical packets had been seized under his roof. It further insisted that the statute-labour assessment slips found in the wadding were jealously guarded in the couple’s cottage and had never passed into third hands. Thus the scrap of paper, the musket, the dog, the missing hours, and the poacher’s smock were woven into a single fabric of demonstration. It was upon this accumulation of circumstantial proofs that the Crown called upon the jurors to recognise the hunted trespasser.
Twenty-five witnesses took the stand for the prosecution; two appeared for the prisoner. Advocate General Fremiet presented his moral and material certitude to the court and called upon the jury to convict without mercy. Counsel for the defence opened with a tribute to Demortière and the constabulary, before dismantling the charges and exposing what the reporter’s brief summary termed their utter fragility. The journal omitted the specifics of these rebuttals, revealing a stark asymmetry: the indictment unfurled over several columns, while the speech for the prisoner was dismissed in a handful of lines.
The verdict severed the homicide from the forestry offence. Marchandieau was acquitted of all charges touching the death of Demortière. For the illicit hunting trespass, he was condemned to a fine of twenty-five francs and cast in all costs of the prosecution. The acquittal did not point to another marksman, nor did it resolve the riddle of the torn tax assessment. It signified merely that the jury declined to condemn Marchandieau for murder, notwithstanding the vehement assurances of the Crown; the penalty for poaching rested upon a distinct statutory footing.
When the court rose late on the night of 1 April, knots of spectators lingered outside the Palais de Justice, debating the outcome. In the legal chronicle, the prosecution had sought to make of the fifteen fragments a fatal bridge between the thicket and a solitary man. The jury rejected that capital conclusion, while penalising the trespass. The patched-together sheet remained at the heart of the judicial narrative, yet it failed to yield a scaffold.
Archival Note: This narrative is based on the report of the hearings of 31 March and 1 April 1873, published in the Gazette des tribunaux of 5 April, printed pages 328–329. The article predominantly reproduces the bill of indictment; its assertions regarding the paper, weapon, hound, clothing, and timetable are therefore attributed to the preliminary inquiry or the public prosecutor. The summary of the defence is brief. The OCR transcription contains recognition errors and textual gaps; the fragments of the document are described as a partial reconstruction.