When the women returned to the house, the outer door was barred. François Madebène, whom they had expected, was nowhere to be found. Within, no one answered and no light flickered. They took shelter in the cow-house, praying and listening intently for any sound from the road. The man they encountered towards eleven o’clock was Antoine Géraud-Dumontel, the master of the house. He explained to them that François had perhaps carried off the key whilst escorting a caller, and announced his intention to climb inside through the hayloft. He bade them go sleep at the Madebène home. On the morrow, when he recounted that he had at last gained entry to the dwelling, he claimed he had been unable to unfasten the kitchen door.
This scene is recorded in the Gazette des tribunaux of 18 May 1873, which published the proceedings of the trial held on 14 May before the Court of Assizes of the Puy-de-Dôme. The journal first recites the bill of indictment, then sets down the pleadings. It occasionally weaves its own commentary into the depositions of the witnesses and the words of the accused. A line must therefore be drawn between what the jury actually accepted, what the public prosecutor imputed to Antoine, and what the journalist represented as settled fact even before narrating the trial.
The two brothers Géraud-Dumontel had dwelt together for near thirty years at Biollet. Their roof also sheltered François Madebène, a farmer’s son taken in as a child by the elder brother, François. The journal notes that Madebène laboured alongside both brothers, and that some attributed his parentage to François, though the latter had never publicly acknowledged him as his own. The family ties and Madebène’s standing under that roof proved of great weight thereafter: he was no mere transient farmhand, but a man reared upon the premises and deeply entwined in the domestic economy.
In October 1871, François Dumontel caused a will to be drawn. He divided the usufruct of his immoveable property between Antoine and Madebène, bequeathed them his chattels, and vested the bare ownership in certain nephews and nieces. That very day, he likewise conveyed to Madebène several parcels of land, framed in the instrument as a sale for valuable consideration. This distribution did not of itself establish the motive for a crime, but it furnished the backdrop to the dispute subsequently described by the Crown. Antoine maintained that the estate had been acquired out of common funds and that his just portion was due him. He instituted a suit for partition before the civil court of Riom, founding his claim upon a verbal partnership dating back, he alleged, to 1839.
The accounts of threats also derived from the preliminary examination laid before the court. According to the prosecution, Antoine spoke of a duel with pistols, threatened Madebène with an implement, and vowed he would have his life. In November 1872, Madebène was brought before the correctional court of Riom upon a complaint by Antoine for assault and battery; he was acquitted. The Gazette adds that following this affair, the two men ceased all speech with one another, until a semblance of accord was restored towards late February or early March. A maidservant, Marie Lacot, observed at that time that her master began treating Madebène with unaccustomed deference.
On the evening of 12 March, Lacot left the house between six and seven o'clock to join a vigil at the Madebène parents' home, some hundred yards distant. She left the two men in the kitchen: Madebène was preparing potatoes; Antoine was tending the fire. François did not join the women as was his custom. After more than two hours, Lacot set back towards the house in company with Marie Madebène, François’s sister, who shared her evening gatherings. The front door was locked fast; within, all was darkness. They waited in the yard.
At eleven o’clock, Antoine arrived along the track from the Berthin mill. He declared that François had likely walked out with someone and that he was without the key. He made as though to enter through a breach in the hayloft, but thrice urged the two women to depart. At length, they retired to Marie’s father’s cottage. The following morning, he informed them that he had entered the house several hours earlier, without being able to reach the kitchen. He broached the notion of a natural demise, or a possible suicide. When the Madebène family arrived, he opposed the forcing of the kitchen door before the magistrates appeared. He warned that he might be placed in an awkward posture, and strictly forbade them from climbing through the casement, asserting that they would leave compromising marks of mud upon the sill.
It was not until five o’clock in the afternoon that the deputy mayor, aided by several villagers, forced the door by making an opening level with the interior latch-hook. Madebène lay stretched before the hearth. A pistol lay close beside his body. The head wound, as described by the journal from the official findings, entered near the right ear and emerged towards the upper left part of the forehead. The nature of the injury initially suggested self-destruction. That hypothesis did not long endure: the medical examiners concluded that Madebène could not have discharged a shot into himself from that angle.
The room preserved further details which the prosecution deemed incriminating. The hearth fire had been banked. In a dish of potatoes, the deputy mayor perceived blood mingled with debris. Antoine at first insisted there was none, then ventured that Madebène might have bled from the nose. He sought to remove the platter; the deputy mayor ordered it guarded. During the night, Antoine urged the watchers set over the furniture to throw out the potatoes to avoid a "mess," as the journal reports. This conduct was held out as an endeavour to efface clues, yet its true significance belongs to judicial interpretation, which the reader must separate from material facts.
The inquiry also tested the door. The magistrates succeeded in causing the interior hook to drop into place from without by deftly maneuvering the door leaves. This experiment demonstrated that one could exit without a key, casting grave doubt upon the tale of the visitor. Antoine then feigned that a stranger had hidden in the house and escaped by the hayloft stairs. The investigators, according to the report, found not the slightest trace of this unknown party. Hard pressed on this point, Antoine at last confessed that he had fired the shot.
At the bar, he offered his own version of the tragedy. Madebène, he claimed, had reviled him and spat in his face. Whilst the younger man went to fetch a frying pan, Antoine took a brace of loaded pistols from a drawer, laid one down by the mantelpiece, and fired when Madebène stepped back toward the hearth. The journal notes that he wept as he described the shot, declaring he had been overcome by wrath. He protested that he had not premeditated the deed. The bill of indictment, conversely, maintained that the design had been formed long beforehand. These two versions stood at irreconcilable odds upon a vital matter: was the fatal stroke the fruit of a calculated scheme, or the flash of sudden fury?
The president’s interrogatory then turned upon the property, Madebène’s relationship with the brothers, the suit for partition, and the precise moment of the discharge. Antoine denied any hatred and disputed the threats, though he conceded having once challenged Madebène to a duel. He insisted the will had caused him no vexation, then maintained that the lands conveyed to Madebène had been purchased with their joint funds. He claimed to have leaned down to seize the pistol without quitting his seat, yet admitted, after searching questions, that he had risen to fire. Touching the vanished visitor, he confessed he had fabricated the presence of another man to shift suspicion from himself.
The report does not preserve the verbatim testimony of every witness. It records only that those heard substantiated the allegations of the indictment. The Advocate General called for an exemplary punishment while not opposing the grant of mitigating circumstances. Counsel for the defence, Maître Lachaud, delivered his plea; the presiding judge then summed up the arguments. These were the final steps recorded by the Gazette before the verdict was delivered.
The jury returned an affirmative finding as to voluntary homicide, rejected premeditation, and admitted mitigating circumstances. The decree of the court, preserved in the Departmental Archives of the Puy-de-Dôme under shelfmark U 10303 and transcribed in an official dossier, confirms that the homicide of François Madebène was upheld, and that Antoine Géraud-Dumontel was sentenced to ten years' solitary confinement. At seventy-four years of age, he was spared the hard labour ordinarily decreed by the penal code for murder; a statute of 1854 commuted such sentences to solitary confinement for convicts aged sixty years and upward. The decree further condemned him to pay the costs of prosecution.
Before the verdict was returned, the journal denounced the prisoner as covetous, rancorous, and vindictive, presenting premeditation as an indubitable certainty. The jury did not follow this lead. The distinction is of the utmost importance: Antoine was found guilty of having willingly slain Madebène, yet prior design remained unproven in the eyes of the jury. The barred door, the fallen latch, and the dish of potatoes supported the charge; the verdict, however, drew the strict line between voluntary homicide and assassination. The trial erased neither the contested distribution of the estate nor the deep discord of a house where two brothers had dwelt together for so long. It permits us only to record that which the judges decreed: a homicide, mitigating circumstances, and ten years behind prison walls.