From the opposite bank of the river, the children had recognized their father. Marie-Hypolite Cauvin was making his way back toward Cabasse; he answered their cries with a whistle. Then a gunshot rang out. According to the testimony heard at the trial, they believed at first that he had just brought down a bird. Their joy thus outlived by a few moments the man for whom they waited.
The man who re-entered the village, weapon in hand, was Marc-Alphonse Maurel. Passersby asked him whether he had killed anything. He replied that the game had indeed fallen. Arrested two days later in the surrounding countryside, he did not deny having dealt the notary his death. He merely gave it another name: a duel. The entire affair would hinge upon that single word—convenient enough, in the mouth of a slayer, to transform a man gunned down into an adversary who had consented to die.
The Notary’s Refusal
In Cabasse, Maurel belonged to a family of consequence. A former naval officer, former mayor of his commune, and a landed proprietor, he held those distinctions that render a threat all the more awkward to receive: it comes from a man one knows, whom one has greeted, whose offices have long commanded respect. He was fifty-two years of age when he appeared before the Assizes of the Var in 1827.
Cauvin, some fifteen years his junior, had two children and was awaiting a third. A long-standing enmity divided the pair. Maurel claimed to have suffered insults; the trial would indeed hear, in his defense, witnesses speaking to abuse and threats originating from the notary. Yet it would also hear of Maurel’s repeated provocations, his challenges, and the words by which he had foretold what he meant to inflict upon his enemy.
Cauvin refused to fight. To those who expressed surprise that he endured such insults, a witness attributed this straightforward reason: he was the father of a family. Maurel called this cowardice. As early as September 1826, the notary had written to the King’s Prosecutor in Brignoles to seek his protection. He was searching for a way to go on living in the same countryside without conceding that every slight must be settled with a firearm.
These refusals did nothing to quench the quarrel. In the language of the provocateur, they became a fresh offense. Maurel could thenceforth reproach Cauvin for denying him the encounter he demanded. Thus the circle closed: a man was threatened; his refusal to meet the threat served as grounds to renew it.
The Road Home
On December 7, 1826, Cauvin traveled to Pignaux to register legal deeds. He was returning toward four in the afternoon along the road from Besse to Cabasse. The working day was drawing to its close; he carried his fowling piece, his game bag, and had his dog beside him. These objects would occupy the courtroom debates almost as much as the words exchanged over the preceding months.
His wife and children had caught sight of him. The river ran between them. At the report of the gun, she looked more intently toward the far bank and, according to her deposition read at the hearing, could no longer see her husband. She caught sight of Maurel heading back toward the village. What she had been able to see and hear would be contested at great length: distance, the rush of the water, and the lay of the land would become the arguments by which the accused sought to withdraw the scene from her view.
Inhabitants returning from their fields came upon the notary lying in the road. His dog remained beside him, barking and preventing anyone from drawing near. Cauvin had been struck by several projectiles. The man who was returning from registering the affairs of others would never cross his own threshold again; those he had left that morning would henceforth have their own cause to lay before the law.
Maurel vanished after returning to Cabasse. He was discovered two days later in a stone shed. He offered no resistance to his arrest. To the men who seized him, he already maintained that he had killed his man in a duel, and that he ought not to be treated as a felon. Yet the combat of which he spoke had lacked any second chosen by the two men.
A Five-Franc Coin
Before the Assizes, he explained at first that he had sent a challenge to the notary and appointed a place of meeting. Cauvin had not appeared. The presiding judge observed that this account proved precisely the absence of any duel on that occasion. Maurel then shifted to the encounter of December 7: chance alone, he insisted, had brought them together on the road; both were returning from the hunt; he had proposed settling the matter once and for all.
According to his version, a hundred-sou piece—a silver five-franc coin—had determined who should fire first. Fortune had favored him. He had fired. This small coin, invoked throughout his answers, was meant to lend death the outward appearance of a mutually agreed-upon rule: before the shot, there would have been a pact; before the murderer, two combatants subject to the selfsame hazard.
The presiding judge tested this fabrication detail by detail. Cauvin was returning from business, his gun was charged with small shot, and he carried it slung over his shoulder, according to the physical evidence set against the accused. Why had they not inspected their weapons? What distance had they taken? Why were there no witnesses? Maurel answered that they were in haste, hesitated between ten, twelve, or fifteen paces, and maintained that they had fought.
He likewise denied the value of the widow’s declaration. The water made too much noise, the distance was too great; she could not, he argued, have heard or seen what she claimed. He was no longer merely explaining his act: he was attempting to redraw the boundaries of the scene, so that it might contain none save the dead man and himself. And the dead man could give no account of the toss of the coin.
The prosecution raised further the possibility of an ambush from the brush bordering the road. Maurel vehemently rejected this conjecture. One must not bestow upon it, in hindsight, a certainty that the verdict itself withheld: the jurors would retain premeditation, but dismiss the charge of lying in wait.
Lead in the Pocketbook
The witnesses introduced into the courtroom a feud far wider than that of the two men alone. A nephew spoke of a family lawsuit and a provocation. Cousins recounted their fears and their appeals to the magistrates. Others testified to the insults hurled at the notary. Through these accounts, the claimed duel ceased to be an isolated encounter: it took its place within a habit of compelling others to answer Maurel’s challenges.
The defense, however, produced its own witnesses. One of them, Pierre Gauthier, brought forth some lead pellets that he claimed to have gathered at the scene on the day following the crime, preserving them wrapped in paper inside his pocketbook. The presiding judge asked why he had said nothing of this to the examining magistrate or to the prosecutor. Gauthier replied that he had not thought it necessary; he had spoken of it only to a child.
This paper arrived late in the day, laden with an importance its possessor claimed never to have suspected. The journal found the testimony implausible. It did not suffice to establish the version of a combat. The defense counsel nonetheless pressed the uncertainties of the case and requested a specific question be put regarding the duel. The presiding judge instructed the jurors that, should they admit its reality, Maurel would not be guilty of murder.
The verdict answered otherwise. They found him guilty of intentional homicide with premeditation, without lying in wait. The death sentence followed. The tale of the duel had failed; nor had the prosecution’s theory been accepted in all its particulars. Upon the advice of his counsel, Maurel lodged an appeal in cassation.
What He Wished to Leave Behind
On July 3, within his prison cell at Draguignan, he requested writing materials. His last will and testament spoke no longer of a chance meeting or an accepted combat. In it, he acknowledged the crime and expressed the wish that Cauvin’s children be indemnified from his estate. Being unacquainted, as he stated, with the precise condition of his fortune, he left it to the civil court of Brignoles to determine that reparation.
He likewise begged the family’s forgiveness. The declaration, subsequently reprinted by the Gazette, was intended for the public eye. We know what he desired; yet these articles record neither what sum was awarded to the children, nor what they received, nor how their mother answered. An intention voiced in a dungeon does not yet constitute the settlement of an estate, and still less a reconciliation.
On the following day, July 4, 1827, he was informed that his appeal had been dismissed. Two curates attended him. He declined the cart and walked on foot to the Place de l’Horloge, where he was put to death. The newspaper recorded his fortitude, his prayers, and the pity of the onlookers. Penitents came afterward to claim his body and bear it to the churchyard.
The former mayor had enjoyed the spiritual consolations he had requested. His demeanor in the face of death now filled the public chronicles. Yet at the outset of this history, another man had refused to hazard his own life, precisely because children were awaiting his return. They had recognized him from afar. He had answered them. Between that familiar signal and the homecoming that never came to pass, Maurel had sought to interpose the word of honor; before the jury, he had failed to make it stand.