The condemned man had one final debt to settle, and it was not to his judges. In the hours that separated him from the scaffold, Asselineau asked that his coat and trousers be returned to Morel, the tailor of the Rue Montorgueil. He had purchased them before his arrest without paying. Now, he wished to spare an artisan a loss he might scarcely be able to bear.
A few weeks earlier, he had been arrested dressed in another man’s clothes. That man’s name was Baptiste Brouet. He had opened his door to him; Asselineau had killed him, then carried off his linen, his clothes, and his money. Between these two tales of apparel unfolded an affair in which the murderer would command nearly all the light, while his dead friend had only a handful of witnesses left to recall who he had been.
The Prosperous Affairs of a Trusted Shopman
Asselineau had come to Paris from the Nièvre. At the hearing of March 26, 1827, he stated his age: twenty-one years. He worked for wine merchants, and those who had employed him acknowledged his diligence, his frugality, and a conduct that had long earned their trust. Nothing in this initial portrait yet resembled the figure the curious came to gaze upon in the prisoner’s dock.
The Gazette des tribunaux would subsequently recount his youth from a memoir he had composed upon his own life. One must credit this history to its author: it was also the explanation that a condemned man wished to leave behind of himself. In it, he told of meeting Storer, frequenting the Café Gravet on the Boulevard Montmartre, learning to gamble, and, above all, learning to win. His initial temptation was not, therefore, a loss that one obstinately strives to repair, but a success whose repetition seemed entirely reasonable to expect.
He sent money to his father, invested a portion, and even ceased gambling for three months. A sojourn with his family appeared to confirm this return to an orderly existence. Then he reappeared at the café. Winnings returned before losses; from the café, Storer led him to No. 9 in the Palais-Royal. The gambler had changed his haunt without relinquishing his singular hope: to leave with more than he had brought.
Soon, his wages no longer sufficed. He forged promissory notes, negotiated them, won enough once more to believe the ruin mendable, and then lost anew what he had just acquired. He confessed certain forgeries to his creditors and came to terms with them. Fresh employment with Hyvelin offered him another respite. But the forged notes began to circulate again. He now commanded two fortunes: that which his paper promised to others, and that which he awaited from the gaming tables. Neither belonged to him.
At Baptiste’s Lodgings
On February 21, he spent the afternoon and evening at Brouet’s lodgings on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Brouet, like himself, was employed in the wine trade. Before the Assize Court, witnesses would speak favorably of his character; his brother would come to add his voice to theirs. Behind the name of a victim stood a man whose uprightness several persons had experienced in the ordinary course of life.
Asselineau proposed going out. Brouet, according to the account he gave the court, declined, alleging in particular his worn shoes. His visitor was better dressed; his affairs, however, were infinitely worse. He remained in the shop. A witness, Laurent, observed him reading a history of France and heard him singing. None of this offered any glimpse of intent; this was precisely the difficulty justice would encounter in attempting to trace visible actions back to the design that had preceded them.
The accused would admit to having confided his plight to Brouet: the forgeries, the police, the imminent peril of arrest. He asserted that the idea of seizing his friend’s passport had come to him then, so that he might flee the country. While they were drinking brandy, he shot him. This murder he did not deny. Yet he maintained that he had not prepared it, and that he had possessed no prior intent to rob.
The pocketbook, the clothes, the linen, and the money carried away stood before this latter assertion like so many questions to which a general confession gave no answer. Asselineau pleaded the distraction and terror under which he had labored. He had closed the door upon another man’s life; he was now attempting to disentangle, within his own crime, what he had willed from what he claimed to have done without prior design.
On February 24, the police arrested him at a wine merchant’s where he had returned to pay for an order. His movements on the previous day had aroused suspicion. The officers found Brouet’s jewelry upon his person, and in his room, the dead man’s account books. He was still wearing his victim’s black coat and trousers. This time, that which had lent him the appearance of an easy gentleman bound him materially to the man he had slain. He confessed to the theft and the murder; the question of what he had premeditated remained open until the trial.
A Packed Courtroom
On March 26, fifty-seven witnesses had been summoned. Their subpoenas served the curious as passports into the courtroom: the papers passed from hand to hand, and the ushers could not succeed in reserving seats for those who actually had evidence to give. The public had devised its first stratagem even before the proceedings commenced.
Asselineau turned his back on this vulgar curiosity, keeping his eyes upon the court. He answered questions, acknowledging the forged notes and the pistol shot. The contest centered upon premeditation. Why had he purchased weapons? Why had he sent Laurent away on an errand? Who had closed the shutters? Was the candle still burning at the moment of the murder? Every detail of that evening became a piece that the prosecution and the defense sought to arrange in a different order.
He conceded having sent the witness away, but assigned a commonplace reason: Laurent was hindering them from dining. He denied having closed the shutters. He maintained that the light had not been extinguished, despite depositions to the contrary. He claimed to have confessed all; the court sought to discover what this professed candor might still leave in shadow.
Another man found himself obliged to defend his conduct without being the accused on trial. Sunboef, a commission agent established at No. 9 Palais-Royal, had been gravely compromised in the indictment. He explained the advances and transactions he had granted Asselineau. The latter confirmed his statements, and the gazette acknowledged that they appeared to satisfy the court. A respectable bearing and steady assurance had inspired the tradesman’s confidence. They did not make him an accomplice.
What the Jury Excluded
Advocate General Vaufreland refused to allow the passion for gambling to serve as an extenuation for murder. Defense counsel Gechter, by contrast, denounced the gaming houses wherein such passion was fostered and sustained, petitioning the jury that, if they could not save his client by their verdict, they might at least endorse a plea for executive clemency. The courtroom thus heard two pleadings that set out from the very same gaming tables to arrive at entirely different responsibilities.
At eight o’clock in the evening, the jury returned. They had answered affirmatively to the charges laid before them, with a single exception: premeditation. On that head, the jurors rejected the prosecution’s case.
This did not spare his life. Murder accompanied by robbery still entailed, under the application of Article 304 reported by the Gazette, the penalty of death. The court condemned him to die. The distinction secured remained inscribed in the verdict; it altered nothing of the convict’s ultimate destination.
The Final Suit
At Bicêtre, the gazette portrayed him occupied in writing, capable of games and feats of dexterity, speaking of his crime with emotion. It attributed to him a sincere repentance. These observations and this appraisal are not one and the same: one might watch a prisoner play, hear him speak, without ever truly discerning what transpired within his soul. Asselineau also exhorted another condemned man, Buisson, to confess. That man’s history was distinct from his own; their proximity in prison did not make them confederates.
In May, the waiting came to an end. An usher arrived to announce the rejection of his appeal and conveyed him toward Paris. Upon arrival at the Palais de Justice, a curious throng surrounded the carriage; the prisoner stepped down with an abruptness that startled those pressing forward for a glimpse of him. The Gazette next depicts him beside his confessor, refusing sustenance and drafting the brief note intended for his tailor.
He requested that Morel recover the unpaid garments. This belated scruple deserves its place, but not the whole place. One does not restore a friend as one returns a suit of clothes; and the delicacy of a dying gesture detracts nothing from what Brouet had lost.
When the hour came for the executioner’s preparations, Asselineau took off his coat himself and sat down. The journal, which had insisted upon his fortitude, noted a shudder as the shears passed close to his neck. Then the tumbril bore him to the Place de Grève. There, he was executed.
The crowd, in the Gazette’s account, pitied the young man and cursed the gaming houses. The chronicler carried this indignation to the very doors of the legislators. In proportion as the condemned man became the emblem of a public scourge, Baptiste risked vanishing a second time, obscured behind the moral drawn from his death. Yet his brother had stood before the Assizes. He had not come to explain the losses of a gambler. He had come to speak of the man who had opened his door to him.