In the night of 6 November 1852, the Grimsel burned. At daybreak, Pierre Zybach, the hospitaller of the pass, learned from a servant that the establishment had been consumed by the flames and conveyed the intelligence to the local magistrate. Already, rumours darker than the ashes were abroad: missing travellers, murders upon the heights, and plundered goods. Yet the Gazette des Tribunaux observed that these vanishings formed an entirely separate affair. Letters rogatory dispatched to Italy and elsewhere would have excessively delayed the trial of the arson; the matters were therefore severed. The fate of those lost wayfarers was not to be determined at Thun.
The setting lent the conflagration its singular grandeur. The hospice stood far above the valleys, perched amidst the rocks upon the thoroughfare leading to the Valais, the Furka, and the Saint-Gotthard. Hard by, the Handeck plunged the waters of the Aare into an abyss; in the height of summer, according to the correspondent, the hospice could shelter a hundred travellers a night. It was no solitary inn, but a vital station of the pass: there one found lodging, mounts, and succour for indigent wayfarers.
The buildings had grown with the traffic of the pass: an ancient dwelling, followed by enlargements in 1826 and further additions some years thereafter. On the eve of the disaster, the compound comprised, according to the journal, three residential houses and a customs post serving as a storehouse, containing some forty chambers and a hundred beds. Their destruction raised far more than a question of insurance indemnity; it brought to the fore the dual problem of reconstruction and the tenure of the lease.
Zybach had been appointed hospitaller in 1836, following the retirement of his father-in-law on grounds of ill health. His lease, renewed in 1841 for a term of twelve years, was due to expire on 31 December 1853. Custom dictated that it should be renewed a year in advance, and several competitors were coming forward. The journal reports that, in the absence of orderly ledgers, Zybach estimated his annual receipts at fourteen thousand francs, garnered chiefly in the summer months, and computed his fortune at more than one hundred thousand francs. He deemed himself indispensable, styling himself “the Man of the Grimsel.”
These elements illuminate the alleged motive without sufficing, of themselves, to establish it. The Gazette recalls earlier lawsuits and convictions for smuggling which, it asserts, had tarnished the hospitaller’s good name. In September 1852, Zybach had reportedly offered the commission an increase in rent exceeding one thousand francs per annum, on condition of obtaining an eighteen-year lease without competition; the offer was rejected. A few weeks later, the buildings were in flames. The jury was charged with weighing the facts, not this mere coincidence of dates.
On the morning of 7 November, Zybach declared to the local authority that one of his servants had brought him word of the fire. He initially maintained that the blaze had broken out in room number 10, then tenanted by a journeyman workman who had purportedly perished in the flames. He fixed the origin of the fire at eleven o'clock on the preceding night and described an inferno so swift that virtually no furniture could be saved. The two other servants, reports the Gazette, presently contradicted this tale. Thenceforth, the inquiry ceased to be a simple assessment of loss.
When the magistrates and several notables repaired to the scene, their attention was drawn to disturbances near a dung-heap. An excavation brought to light several crates packed with furniture removed from the hospice. Within the customs house—spared by the flames by virtue of its isolation from the dwellings—further furniture was discovered, including mattresses concealed beneath the hay. Certain of the packing-cases had been fashioned from wooden panelling wrenched from the very buildings that were burned. Such concealment within the storehouse rendered the notion of a sudden, total catastrophe untenable; the goods had been placed under cover before the first wisps of smoke had arisen.
Zybach was present during these discoveries. The correspondent attributes to him urgent entreaties that the search be abandoned. He is said to have promised to claim nothing from the insurance company and to make good the damage out of his own pocket, whatever the cost might be. Thereupon, the district magistrate openly reproached him for his conduct. Shortly afterwards, Zybach threw himself into a small tarn; he was hauled from the water and given restorative care. The Gazette construes this gesture as a paroxysm of despair, yet it affords no ground for treating it as an additional confession: the admission recounted by the newspaper emerges in the narrative of the preliminary examination, wherein Zybach acknowledged having caused the hospice to be set on fire.
According to the article, Zybach justified the arson by the dilapidated state of the buildings: they stood in need of rebuilding, he pleaded, and the insurance indemnity would have helped defray the charges, to the ultimate benefit of the canton. He believed himself the sole candidate capable of rebuilding at his own expense. The correspondent, for his part, concluded from the judicial inquiry that the true design was to defraud the underwriters and drive away his rivals. He reproduces neither verbatim interrogatories nor accounting ledgers; this motive reaches us solely through his summary.
The investigation culminated in the arrest of Zybach and three of his servants. At the opening of the Oberland Assizes, convened at Thun on Friday, 13 May 1853, the public gallery was thronged. Four men stood at the bar: Pierre Zybach, aged sixty-two; Henri Blatter, known as “the Emperor,” aged fifty; Caspard Abplanalp, aged forty-six; and Henri Abplanalp, aged forty-five. The journal depicts them through its own lens—at times harsh and marked by class prejudice—describing the two Abplanalps as dull of intellect. Such assessments must be left to the chronicler: they form no part of the proof of conspiracy, nor of the verdict.
According to the report, Zybach referred the court to his depositions during the preliminary examination rather than answering in detail. He is said to have expressed contrition, lamented having dragged the other three into his ruin, and implored mercy for his family; these citations in the journal do not constitute a stenographic record. The correspondent reports that he initially offered seven hundred and fifty francs to Caspard Abplanalp, his servant of fifteen years and his debtor. The latter declined and directed him to his brother-in-law, Blatter, to whom a like sum was allegedly promised. Henri Abplanalp was subsequently drawn in; the Gazette mentions a figure of one thousand five hundred and ten francs in the event of success, without further specifying its distribution.
The Gazette recounts Blatter’s purchase of brimstone and bottles of gas, followed by the order to await a favourable wind. On the night settled upon during the pleadings, the three servants drank wine; Blatter thrust a candle into an aperture in the floorboards, while the two Abplanalps, according to the prosecution, carried out a few trifles of little value to save appearances. This was not a scene witnessed by the correspondent, but the judicial reconstruction which he transmits.
Blatter pleaded that he had yielded to the promised reward, believing he would do little injury to a proprietor wealthy enough to rebuild. The two Abplanalps offered similar excuses. The public prosecutor saw in this the subornation of three men by their master, who had thereby betrayed the trust of the entire region. Counsel for the defence did not contest the gravity of the crime; he invoked Zybach’s pride, his deep attachment to the Grimsel, and his dread of leaving the hospice with his family. He pleaded for extenuating circumstances, citing his client's repentance and his offer of restitution.
The proceedings commenced at eight o'clock in the morning and concluded towards two in the afternoon, when the jury retired. A quarter of an hour later, they returned a verdict finding Zybach guilty of having incited the arson through promises of reward, as the intellectual author; Blatter and the two Abplanalps were found guilty as the material perpetrators. The jury found no extenuating circumstances in favour of Zybach, but admitted them for the other three. This distinction formed the hinge of the trial: the man who had not laid hands to the torch was condemned as he who had conceived and commanded the enterprise; those who had executed his design received separate measure.
The prosecution demanded capital punishment for Zybach and twenty years of hard labour for each of his three confederates. The court, applying Articles 189 and 206 of the Helvetic Penal Code, sentenced Zybach to death. Yet it immediately announced that it would avail itself of Article 458 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to recommend him to the Grand Council, to the end that his sentence be commuted to hard labour. Blatter and Caspard Abplanalp each received twelve years of hard labour; Henri Abplanalp, eleven years. The four men were furthermore condemned, jointly and severally, to pay the costs of the prosecution. The article notes that the Grand Council was yet to deliver its ruling towards the end of May: the dispatch records the judicial recommendation, not its final issue.
Thus the sitting reached its close, while the ultimate decision remained beyond the courtroom walls. The jury distinguished him who had promised and plotted from those who had applied the match; the Gazette left the question of commutation to the wisdom of the Grand Council. For Zybach’s family and the communes of the Grimsel, the verdict was not yet the final word. As for the vanished travellers, their cause remained apart, unresolved in the columns of this chronicle.