The body of Étienne Merle was discovered in a valley on August 16, 1779, three days after the night when his wife and their maidservant, according to the depositions recorded by Champagnac, had resolved to take his life. The house had stood wide open; blood stained the bedchamber and the bed. The widow, the nine-year-old son, and the servant had spent the preceding day upon the premises; then mother and child had vanished. Élisabeth Phélut was found at her father’s home. In a few hours, a death first carried by rumor became a formal inquiry, and then the narrative of a domestic crime wherein the guilt of the adults and the coercion imposed upon the child could not be confounded.
The procureur-fiscal of the castellany of Brassac learned on August 16 that Étienne Merle, a glazier, had been murdered in his home, where his wife, his son, and the maidservant had remained behind. On the very same day, his corpse had been discovered in a valley within the jurisdiction. The officers proceeded first to the dwelling; every door stood unlatched. Marks of blood were visible in the bedchamber, about the bed, and within the bed itself. The neighbors informed them that the widow and the boy had disappeared, whilst Phélut was residing with her father; the maidservant was forthwith placed under arrest.
Two surgeons examined the body. They observed divers marks of violence, including stab wounds and a blow dealt with a blunt instrument, and subsequently concluded that Merle had died of strangulation. This finding established the manner of death reported by the inquest, yet it did not yet point out the culprits. The proceedings were remitted to the royal judge at Riom; the depositions and confessions of Charlotte Plaix, Merle’s widow, were soon to direct the investigation toward the weeks that had preceded the night of August 13 to 14.
Plaix related that she had long maintained an intrigue with a carter of the canton. She asserted, moreover, that her husband ill-treated her and had repeatedly threatened her with a knife. At Pentecost, she said, he had appeared resolved to murder her and had forced her to recite her act of contrition. She added that their son, then nine years of age, had entered unexpectedly, and that she knew not what would have befallen her had he not been there. Champagnac reports these details as the statements of the accused; they must not efface the distinction between the abuse she alleged and the deeds in which she was presently to partake.
According to the chapter, Plaix imparted her design to Élisabeth Phélut, her maid and the confidante of her amours, without speaking to her of the violences she claimed to suffer. The chronicler attributes to the young servant the idea of summoning a man who might dispatch Merle. Both women first sought out a poison. Verdigris, twice mixed into his broth, provoked vomiting without killing the glazier. Plaix next delivered tartar emetic to her servant; Phélut failed to stir in the entire dose, and this attempt proved equally abortive.
Phélut then repaired to Brioude to purchase aqua fortis. She had reportedly considered arsenic, but found no merchant willing to vend it to her. Returned to the house, she blended it with lukewarm water; Plaix, struck by the pungent stench, cast the concoction away. A second venture with a lesser quantity of aqua fortis was likewise abandoned, for the wine could not disguise the odor. The phial was left within Merle’s reach in the hope that he might drink from it himself; the chronicle does not record that this trap met with any effect. These contrivances did not compass his demise, but they demonstrate that the resolution persisted despite the miscarriage of the initial means.
There remained the son in the house. He caught wind of the plot and implored his mother not to put his father to death. He endeavored to compel Phélut to leave, threatening to warn Merle if she remained. The answer that Champagnac attributes to Plaix was a threat of abandonment: she would depart and leave the child alone with his father, who would take no care of him. The boy, terrified by this prospect, ceased his resistance. At nine years of age, he could neither quit the house nor govern what was to follow; the narrative depicts him caught fast between his mother’s word and the peril he had sought to avert.
On the night of August 13 to 14, the two women proceeded to action. According to the reported confessions, they had prepared an opening in the floorboards between the bedchamber and the room below, and had positioned a cord so as to strangle Merle in his sleep. Plaix was to give the signal to her accomplice by a cough; Phélut was to pull from the ground floor. Merle awoke, demanding what was being done to him. His wife remained at first in the bedchamber, while their son had been sent downstairs. The chronicle asserts that at one moment Plaix faltered, then descended in turn and took part in the deed. The narrative dwells upon this participation, without any need to recount its most violent particulars.
After Merle’s death, the body remained several days within the house. During the night of August 14 to 15, Benoît Virat and François Perrin, called Saint-Just, came to lend their aid in transporting it. The text states that they mounted the corpse upon a horse, intending to cast it into a mine shaft. The disturbance aroused the dogs of the neighboring dwellings; the horse broke into a gallop, and the body fell. The child was holding the bridle and was forced to let go. Phélut fled at once; Plaix and her two accomplices endeavored in vain to hoist the corpse back upon the mount before taking flight in their turn. On the morrow, Merle was discovered where he had fallen. Virat and Perrin eluded the judicial proceedings mentioned in the chapter.
Justice subsequently handed down distinct sentences. On September 1, 1781, the sénéchaussée of Riom condemned Charlotte Plaix and Élisabeth Phélut to make the amende honorable and to be hanged after undergoing the question ordinary and extraordinary. It likewise condemned Jean-Baptiste Merle to be confined for life in a house of correction. The goods of all three condemned persons were confiscated. The text thus describes, under the legal rubric of complicity, a child whom his mother had coerced into participation; the recorded decree does not treat him as a mere witness, but sentences him to perpetual imprisonment. The penalties of the adults and that of the boy were not the same.
The procureur-général lodged an appeal a minima. On January 29, 1782, the Parlement pronounced a harsher condemnation against Plaix: the amende honorable, a placard, the severance of her hand, and death by fire following the question. One must not confuse this decree, which concerned the widow Merle, with the subsequent adjudication of Phélut. The latter was definitively judged on June 20, 1782; she was condemned to the amende honorable, to be hanged, and to have her body cast into the flames. The chronicle records the penalties pronounced, but does not furnish in these pages an account of their actual execution. It specifies, on the contrary, that Virat and Saint-Just had slipped beyond the reach of the law.
The son had not merely lost his father during a night of violence: his narrative places him at the very core of the conflict, a witness to the preparations, then compelled by his mother and Phélut to obey their commands. There is no cause to make of him a willing actor simply because he was subsequently condemned by the tribunal. The decree of 1781 ordains his perpetual confinement; the chronicle provides no account of the execution or the actual duration of this sentence. In like manner, the fate of the men who had transported the body is not to be confounded with that of the two condemned women: they had fled, and at the time Champagnac wrote, had escaped the prosecution he records.
Thus the affair, constructed entirely around a house where violence was plotted and concealed, does not conclude upon a single judgment. The initial sentence fell upon mother, maid, and child alike; the appeal aggravated Plaix’s penalty, whilst Phélut received her decree several months later. The chronicler condemns the murder with great vehemence and recoils with indignation at the participation imposed upon the boy. He leaves us, too, before a distinction that the summary term of “accomplices” might easily erase: those who devised and accomplished the crime, the boy who held the bridle and had to loose his grasp when the horse bolted, and the adult confederates who remained at large do not hold the same place in this history.