A New Year’s Day call was mounting the staircase with excessive clamour. At the top of that stair, in the Campisiano lodgings, no invited guests were expected. Gaspard Matraccia arrived accompanied by Lucrèce, the eldest daughter of the house, and two compatriots encountered during an afternoon stroll. His intention was to show them the chamber destined for his future household. Achille Campisiano appeared at the door and made it plain that the intrusion was unwelcome. A few moments later, his mother and his sister Diane lay dead; he himself, wounded, would survive to recount how a dispute upon a threshold had laid waste to an entire family.
The tragedy took place in Marseilles on January 1, 1857. In tracing its earliest stages, we possess notably a report of the trial reprinted the following spring by the Newfoundland Telegraph. The distance of publication must not mislead: the journal transmitted a contemporary relation of the proceedings before the Assize Court of Aix. It preserved, too, their flaws—the theatrical flourishes, the moral judgments passed upon the conduct of women, and that propensity to lend an Italian origin the hue of inherent criminality. One must pierce through this period idiom to recover the living persons: a watchmaker, his wife, their children, a man admitted into their intimacy, and then a rupture that no one proved able to contain.
Campisiano had lived in Marseilles with his family for several years. Matraccia, whom they had known previously, renewed acquaintance with them. He earned his bread in exhibitions of skill and acrobatics; the press described him as a rope-dancer. An attachment formed between him and Lucrèce. The young woman quitted the paternal roof to follow him, then returned in December. A marriage was contemplated, and Matraccia was received beneath the parents’ roof pending this formal regularisation. The arrangement, in appearance, ought to have appeased the discord. Instead, it gathered beneath a single ceiling persons whose mutual grievances were far from extinguished.
The mother reproached Matraccia for what had transpired; Diane supported her mother. The court report describes repeated altercations and records a threat of death uttered on December 31. This circumstance carried weight far beyond the mere violence of words. At the trial, an antecedent threat could transform the interpretation of the following day’s assault: the prosecution saw therein not merely a sudden fury, but a design openly announced. It was the duty of oral testimony to establish what had been spoken, to whom, and under what conditions. The chronicler, for his part, must refrain from converting these reported utterances into a secret design whose every progression he presumes to know.
On the morrow, Matraccia and Lucrèce spent some time in a public establishment, then went out walking. It was then that they met the two men invited to view the bedchamber. One perceives what such a gesture might portend: for the visitor, perhaps the ostentatious display of a position acquired; for the occupants, the sudden thrust of a familiarity forced upon them. Neither supposition amounts to sworn deposition. The decisive fact, in the relation of the hearings, remains the refusal voiced by Achille when the party arrived. An altercation ensued, and Matraccia drew a dagger.
Achille was struck. His cries brought his mother and Diane, who sought to tear him from his assailant’s grasp. Matraccia turned upon them and dealt them mortal blows. Thus the judicial file preserves a circumstance that the morbid allure of the criminal too often effaces: the two women did not enter upon that scene to pursue an abstract quarrel; they intervened to succour a wounded son and brother. Their deaths followed hard upon that motion of mercy. Matraccia then fled down the staircase. He was pursued and apprehended. Achille’s wounds, at first deemed perilous, proved not to be fatal.
The authorities were not long obliged to search for an unknown culprit. The business of the inquiry was to fix the course of a scene witnessed by several members of the same household, and to extricate, from the midst of their affliction, those facts that sustained the indictment. The closeness of the witnesses did not render them mute or negligible; it rendered the proceedings harrowing. They knew the man seated before them. Lucrèce had projected her life with him. Achille bore upon his flesh the consequences of the assault. The father was called upon to recount the violent end of his wife and daughter before the very man to whom his hearth had been opened.
The trial occupied two days at Aix. The journal relates that Matraccia interrupted Lucrèce as she described the murder and disputed her testimony. She answered him by designating him as the slayer of her mother and sister. We need not reproduce their exchange syllable for syllable to comprehend its violence: the woman who had shared his bed and board came forward publicly to sustain the accusation, while he strove to overthrow her word. On several occasions, the court was forced to hear religious invocations mingled with frantic denials. Faith became a voucher summoned by each party to its aid, though powerless to supplant the examination of material facts.
The father’s deposition broke down beneath his emotion. According to the published account, it was necessary to carry him from the hall after a swoon. Achille, exasperated by the prisoner’s interruptions, seized a chair and would have hurled himself upon him; he was restrained, then conducted from the chamber. These occurrences are not romantic fictions appended to enliven the trial. They are scenes reported by the press of the day, subject to the caution warranted by its penchant for the sensational. Above all, they demonstrate the difficulty of confining raw grief within the forms of law. The youngest sister called to testify, Rosine, aged twelve according to that same relation, recounted in her turn what she had beheld.
On February 13, 1857, the Court of Assizes of the Bouches-du-Rhône condemned Matraccia to death. His petition in cassation was dismissed on March 5; the Gazette des tribunaux made mention of it in its bulletin of the following day. An appeal for executive clemency proved no more successful. On March 21, at Marseilles, officers came to fetch him at daybreak. The Abbé Richaud ministered to him and translated the reading of the sentence into Italian. The condemned man requested the presence of a compatriot and that of a parrot to which he was devoted. These requests were granted.
The cage was borne as far as the scaffold upon the Place Saint-Michel. This singular detail has traversed the historical narratives with far greater facility than the names of Diane and her mother. It immediately arrests the eye, promises a sentimental enigma, and appears to introduce an unexpected tenderness into the life of the condemned. Yet it permits us to infer neither the hidden benevolence of the man nor the falsity of his affection. A human being may love an animal and commit a slaughter; the contradiction demands no resolution through a well-turned phrase.
Matraccia was executed that morning. History might conclude upon his farewells, as so many accounts pause upon the gesture that supplies their dramatic close. Yet one must descend once more the staircase of the first of January, and return to those who remained upon its landing. Achille had survived, Lucrèce had testified, Rosine had spoken of her mother. No picturesque circumstance of the execution could stand in stead of the two who were missing. It is with them that the chronicle, opened by a holiday call, must be brought to its end.