Before daybreak, Jacques Verdure called out for Rose to send her to early Mass. The silence led him to believe she had already departed. He pushed aside a pane of glass to admit a glimmer of light, stepped into the small chamber adjoining the kitchen, and then went outside without stockings, clad merely in a jacket. In the cesspit, he caught sight of his daughter lying upon her side, still fully dressed, one leg bare. He asked her if she were unwell. She did not answer. He drew near, placed his hand beneath her armpit, and his fingers encountered a wound.
The scene is recorded by Champagnac, who openly takes the father’s part. Prior to this discovery, he depicts a household in which Rose, twenty-one years of age, had governed domestic life since the death of her mother, Marie-Madeleine Graindel, following her final confinement. Six children were left behind. Jacques Verdure had married Marie-Madeleine in 1755; the author portrays them as a devoted couple and the father as a man of blameless character. Yet Rose’s duties were laborious and plain: clothing and watching over the younger ones, with no shield against misfortune.
The youngest child was but six weeks old when her mother died. Her head was soon covered with scabs; she scratched herself until the blood came, and the family used cloths to wipe her. This affliction would later explain a bloodstained cap found within the house: the children stated that Marguerite used it while tending to the infant. The judge, Champagnac writes, credited their explanation to the point of omitting an examination of the child. The linen possessed a domestic history, bound up with the nursing of the newborn.
A few days before Rose’s death, her sisters had observed the frequent visits of Antoine Lefret, a journeyman miller, and his clandestine conversations with her. Her father questioned her regarding an alteration he believed he perceived; Rose denied his suspicions. Following the murder, her kin declared that she might have been with child, though they subsequently clarified that they had harboured nothing more than a doubt. This is not an established fact, but a familial misgiving revived in the wake of the disaster.
Rose had also related that a week before her death, on the 7th of October, a musket shot had been attempted through an opening in the small chamber where she was working. The shot was said to have missed; she claimed to have smelt the powder and dropped what she was holding. The chronicle records this warning within the family’s memory, without proving its connection to the murder.
Jacques set out for the market at Oudeville and purchased three bushels of wheat. He returned toward four o’clock with his two boys, whom he had met in the woods gathering fuel for the oven. Rose was washing near the door. The father ate, then stopped up holes in the house with earth. His daughter went to carry firewood to her aged grandmother. These humble tasks make up the day whose hours would subsequently become the subject of dispute.
After sunset, Verdure announced he was going to the mill to have the wheat ground. Rose was expected home. He found Lefret there, ate soup with him, and drank cider. Blondel, a day-labourer, and Quesnet, a shoemaker, joined them. At the mill, Verdure took up Lefret’s fiddle and played. He noticed two muskets: one belonged to the miller, the other to Renoult, to whom Lefret returned it two days after Rose’s death. The father saw them in the very room where he had just been playing.
Toward midnight, he left the mill and returned home. Three daughters were by the hearth; two boys were asleep. Rose was mending a stocking and was to wash her little sister’s kerchief. She passed into the chamber overlooking the courtyard. Jacques took the youngest child beside him, fearing an accident, and then fell asleep, worn out with fatigue. Champagnac does not say what the children may have heard. He records that Nicolas Néel, stepping out before his door around one o'clock, heard a musket shot coming from the eastern side of the Verdure house, followed by a plaintive cry.
Before dawn, the father arose to send Rose to Mass. The door between the kitchen and the small chamber stood open. He thought at first that his daughter had set out early, until he found her in the pits. His first impulse was to believe in a sudden death; he returned indoors to break the news with caution, so as to spare the other children the shock. Then, attempting to lift her, he felt the wound. He left the body, summoned his neighbour Pierre Ruette to watch over the little ones, ran to the presbytery to notify the parish priest, and hastened back to his family. The nature of the discovery had changed: it was no longer a deceased child, but a homicide that demanded explanation.
The neighbours crowded about the corpse. Some were astonished that a gunshot so near at hand had awakened no one; others imagined that Rose had been slain elsewhere and carried there afterward. According to the account, tracks were sought but none were found. Néel located the sound in the pit. These initial versions formed a rumour in search of a face.
Lefret appeared among the onlookers. According to Champagnac, he entered, embraced Verdure, and said that he pitied the father above all, deprived now of Rose’s support. Outside, a female neighbour asked him whether the father might have killed her unwittingly. Lefret answered that none other than Verdure had done it. A few days later, he was said to have repeated that the father, having returned from the mill, was the only one who could be the assassin. The chronicle attributes these words to him; they do not suffice to establish the murderer’s identity.
On the 16th of October, the judge arrived accompanied by the fiscal prosecutor, the court clerk, and a sworn surgeon. He recorded gunshot wounds and discovered a flattened ball within the body. The formal inquest, according to Champagnac, noted neither musket, powder, shot, nor traces of blood within the house. The constabulary discovered no further clues. Nevertheless, following an inquiry, a warrant of bodily arrest was issued against Verdure; his son and his two elder daughters were likewise served with personal summonses to appear.
The chronicle accuses Catherine Hamel, the wife of Bouillon—a former neighbour with whom the Verdures had been in conflict—of having fostered suspicion and swayed the youngest boy. She is said to have asked the six-year-old child whether his father had killed his sister, promising him bread and an egg if he would say so. The little boy subsequently repeated versions that the magistrates deemed contradictory. This scene and the motive imputed to Bouillon’s wife stem from Champagnac’s narrative, which is hostile to this woman. They also demonstrate the vulnerability of a destitute child, whose words were bandied about while the adults searched for a culprit.
The decree against Jacques was dated the 9th of November 1780, yet he remained in his home until his arrest on the 24th. Lefret took to flight. Imprisonment broke the household: the youngest child died shortly thereafter. The one next in age wandered the canton for two years begging for bread; according to Champagnac, he was made to repeat the accusation before being fed. The lower magistrates ultimately entrusted him to his father in prison. The remaining three children were forced to seek domestic service. Destitution turned bread into a condition of compliance, and the father’s confinement into the scattering of his offspring.
The preliminary investigation lasted five years, culminating first in an order for further inquiry of three months’ duration. The procureur général appealed *a minima*, obtained warrants of bodily arrest against the three children, and caused a canonical monitory to be published. The indications pointing toward Lefret—his words, the muskets at the mill, the lead purchased prior to the murder, his flight—had led to no immediate measures, according to Champagnac. The lead ball, he asserts, was hammered rather than cast in a mould. These details fed suspicion without establishing the identity of the assassin.
At length, the public prosecutor obtained a warrant against Lefret. Champagnac sees in this the arrest of the man who had set the rumours against Verdure in motion, writing that he was perhaps the true perpetrator of the homicide. The Parlement of Rouen pronounced judgment on the 31st of July 1787: Lefret was condemned to be broken upon the wheel, after having been subjected to the question to reveal his accomplices. By the same decree, Verdure and his children were reserved to the convict’s dying declaration upon the scaffold; Jacques and his eldest son were to remain in prison, whilst the three other children were provisionally set at liberty.
The family petitioned the King’s Council. It is at this juncture that the known outcome of the chapter breaks off. Champagnac, convinced of their innocence, expresses the hope that the judges of review would distinguish Lefret from the slandered family; this hope is not a judicial decree. Jacques and his eldest son remain in detention in the last state described, while three children have been provisionally released. The reader is given no final judgment. The family carried their appeal forward, and the chronicle falls silent before revealing what the Council determined.