On August 17, 1875, Eugène Thiercelin grew alarmed at having seen nothing of his father-in-law, Pierre Beaudenuit, who lived alone, since catching sight of him on Friday, August 13, between twelve and two o'clock. He peered first through the window, then stepped into the bedchamber: the old man lay stretched upon the floor amidst pools of blood. A small overturned chair, a pair of trousers draped over it, traces upon the beds and the boards, and lastly a forced drawer: the authorities found the unmistakable marks of a struggle alongside those of a robbery. Beaudenuit’s bearer securities had vanished.
The victim was eighty-two years of age. He dwelt at La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, where his habits were known to all. He went to bed at dusk, shunned artificial light, and took a modest, cold collation in the evening. A door rarely secured, a key lost a few days prior, and an inner bolt were mentioned by a witness: these particulars lent the access to the house an importance of its own. On Saturday, August 14, he had bought salad greens and onions, accepted a cucumber, and paid his daughter-in-law ten centimes for that modest gift. The account in the Gazette of October 28 opens with the prosecution’s case: Beaudenuit supposedly returned home around half past seven on August 14; the condition of the food in his stomach led the physician to place his death between half past nine and half past ten o'clock. During the proceedings, however, a divergent medical estimate would be given. This discrepancy remains unresolved in the surviving columns of the press.
The magistrates found the furniture ransacked. Two French rente certificates, ten Ottoman bonds, and eight Roman Railway bonds, all made out to the bearer, had been carried off. The very next day, two of these certificates surfaced at Saint-Péravy under an assumed name. The baker who bought them heard the seller style himself Alexandre Fouquet; other tradesmen heard him invoke the bounty of a generous aunt. Inquiries soon pointed toward Alexandre Pitou, a vine-dresser and quarryman who lived as Beaudenuit’s neighbor. He had fled the district, reached Paris, and then crossed into Spain. Apprehended at Hendaye upon presenting himself at the post office to claim a letter, he was brought back to stand before the Loiret Assize Court.
Five persons stood in the dock: Pitou; his daughter Alexandrine, aged sixteen; his wife, Madeleine Soubrillard; and two Parisian kinsfolk, Adèle-Suzanne Meunier, known as the wife Karger, and Louis-Isidore Meunier. The bill of indictment placed the robbery at the heart of the matter and imputed the murder to Pitou, portraying his daughter as the instrument who had secured entry to the house and to the valuables. These contentions were the prosecution’s own. The proceedings soon laid bare how crucially the hour and the day of Alexandrine’s return had become the battleground of irreconcilable testimonies.
Pitou contended at first that his daughter had brought the securities home on the Friday. He maintained he had gone to fetch her near Beaudenuit’s dwelling, where she occasionally worked, and denied having set foot in the old man’s house on the Saturday. The Godefroid sisters, Aline and Honorine, had initially spoken of the Friday; when pressed on their recollections and confronted with the working days of their sister Claire, they later conceded they had been mistaken. They assigned the encounter to the Saturday evening. Aline stated she had seen Pitou pass by around ten o'clock, surprised to meet him abroad so late, and had asked where he was bound. He replied that he was looking for his daughter. Honorine corroborated this exchange. Neither sister, however, saw what he might have been carrying, nor did they witness his return.
Auguste Deparday, who was smoking in his vineyard, recounted having later seen father and daughter returning at a brisk pace from the direction of Beaudenuit’s house. He could state no certain hour: his clock ran slow, and he relied merely on the sequence of his chores. The Godefroid girls, on the contrary, had seen Pitou set out alone. These depositions did not, therefore, describe a single scene, but two distinct moments that the prosecution sought to link together. Alexandrine denied that they had occurred on the Saturday; yet her father ended by conceding that he had indeed gone to fetch her that evening and that she had brought the papers home. He added that she had not shown them to him, before admitting that an agreement had been reached to secrete them away.
The examination of the girl failed to dispel the contradiction. She declared that Beaudenuit had given her one hundred francs three weeks before his death, followed by the promise of ten thousand francs, on condition that she breathe not a word of it to her parents. She insisted she had gone on the Friday to make the old man’s bed, but had not entered his house on the Saturday: the door was shut fast and no light showed within, she said. Her father, having reverted to the Saturday, contradicted her; her mother, siding with the daughter, held firm to the Friday. The mother denied knowing the origin of the securities, while acknowledging that she had concealed them upon her husband’s bidding.
The events of Sunday, August 15, further entangled Pitou’s reckoning of his time. His daughter accounted for his absence by stating that he had set out to visit an ailing brother at Ormes; a woman present at the midday meal related that he returned only around two o'clock in the morning, complaining of fatigue. The matter of the bread became another link in this chronological chain: the prosecution pointed out that the family had bought bread from the baker, whereas Pitou’s wife maintained she had fired her own oven. This detail did not, of itself, establish a crime, but it undermined the explanations offered regarding the family’s comings and goings after Beaudenuit had disappeared.
The household linen was likewise disputed. Pitou’s wife admitted having washed a pair of trousers and a smock belonging to her husband, and having patched a piece of the latter on August 18. She denied having seen any blood thereon. The public prosecutor suggested that the bread oven might have served to consume clothing, among which figured a pair of missing trousers; the Gazette records this assertion as an argument of the prosecution.
The interrogations brought forward another piece of physical evidence. The handle of a flail, a wooden tool belonging to Pitou, had been retrieved from Beaudenuit’s well. The accused asserted that it had been stolen from him two days prior and that he had ordered another to be fitted. Jean-Jacques Pitet, a harness-maker, confirmed that he had hafted the tool, and that after the parish feast Pitou had come to complain of the old one's disappearance and to bespeak a replacement. Dr. d’Olier deemed that the blows could have been dealt with the wooden staff exhibited in court, though he could not affirm that it still bore traces of blood. He opined that Beaudenuit had been struck while in bed, had subsequently staggered up and crossed the room, and that death had resulted from hemorrhage. No single wound, taken in isolation, was necessarily fatal. The time of death he gave at the trial, deduced from the condition of the body and the stomach, placed it on Sunday evening—in stark contradiction to the chronology set forth in the indictment.
Following the disappearance of the certificates, Pitou’s transactions took their own erratic course. He offered them to several innkeepers and to a notary’s clerk, altering the tale of their origin with every telling: first an aunt from Le Mans, then a wealthy widowed aunt possessed of houses. At Saint-Péravy, he parted with two of them for two hundred and eighty francs under the name of Fouquet, though their listed value on the Bourse stood considerably higher. He then proceeded to Paris, where further securities were negotiated through the agency of his cousins. In the dock, he explained his flight into Spain by his dread of being troubled on account of the papers, but steadfastly denied being the murderer. The accounts given by Karger, Meunier, and Pitou’s wife diverged concerning the delivery and disposal of the bonds; each sought to minimize or shift their own measure of complicity.
At the closing session, Advocate General Bayeux marshaled these circumstances to argue that Pitou had murdered Beaudenuit to rob him, and that his daughter had opened the way to the crime. He pressed the contradictions, the sales, the flight, and the flail handle. Against Karger and Meunier, he urged the charge of receiving stolen goods. The defense replied with five separate pleas. The jury then deliberated for three hours. They acquitted Karger and Louis Meunier; they found Pitou, Alexandrine, and the mother guilty, with extenuating circumstances. The court sentenced Pitou to hard labor for life, his daughter to twenty years of hard labor, and his wife to three years’ imprisonment.
The court adjourned at one o'clock in the morning.