The nephew knocked once more. Behind the door, nothing stirred. He had left his uncle that morning, abed in the lodgings they shared on the Rue de Charenton; he returned at nightfall and could not gain entrance. An absence might be explained, as might a heavy slumber. Yet the hours slipped by, and this locked door compelled him to invent ever less reassuring reasons.
He spent the night with neighbours. On the morrow, anxiety drove him to alert a friend of his uncle, and subsequently the commissaire de police. When they entered the room, Bérard was dead. Someone had pulled the bedclothes over him, concealing his head beneath the bedding. Inside the apartment, the trunk had been forced; the money and the jewels were gone.
The room had not been deserted by its tenant. It had been quitted only after he was slain and plundered.
Monsieur François
The time was July 1856. The account of the discovery and the inquest appears in the Gazette des tribunaux at the moment of François Richeux’s trial the following year. It is recorded there in the brutal vocabulary and with the prejudices of the era, particularly when touching upon the intimate lives of the victims. One may follow the clues without embracing such verdicts: a consensual relationship neither explains nor excuses the murder of one who had opened his door.
Bérard was acquainted with a man known as François, residing on the Rue de la Roquette. An individual who visited the premises, followed by his wife, directed inquiries toward that address. The commissaire hastened thither without delay. François was in truth Richeux, a former cook, roughly forty years of age.
The search transformed mere suspicion into a tangible sequence of objects. A kitchen knife was seized. The officers observed Richeux surreptitiously slipping a box from between the bedsheets and confiscated it; it contained a watch and several pieces of jewellery. The serial number of the watch and the watchmaker’s mark allowed it to be traced directly to Bérard. Securities in the victim’s name were discovered on Richeux’s person, including a note for three hundred francs and papers pertaining to government annuities.
A name might easily be denied. It proved far more difficult to explain why so many belongings of the murdered man were assembled in the dwelling of one who professed to know nothing.
The Settlement
Richeux confessed to the murder of Bérard. According to the admissions recounted at the hearing, he had brought the knife, struck the victim down, and subsequently washed both the weapon and his hands. He burned his bloodstained shirt and donned one belonging to Bérard. Thereupon, he rifled through the furniture, gathered what he could carry away, and pulled the door shut behind him.
He returned home to dine with members of his family. That afternoon, he took the train to Corbeil and settled a debt of two hundred francs with a man who had been threatening him with legal proceedings. This sum, presented as the pressing need that had precipitated the crime, imparted a terrible disproportion to the affair: a life extinguished, a chamber pillaged, and a creditor satisfied.
The creditor, examined as a witness, had previously regarded Richeux as an upright man. He had even entrusted his house to his care during an absence. One might smile at such trust were it not the ordinary fabric of social life: no one conducts a criminal investigation before lending money to an acquaintance. The witness had believed in a man; he was now confronted with a murderer. Between the two, the gestures and the tone of voice had not necessarily altered.
Yet Corbeil brought another history to the surface. Five years earlier, a grocer had been slain there under circumstances that the new inquiry rendered suddenly far less isolated.
The First Friend
Jaunet had been murdered during the night of December 8 to 9, 1851. He had been found upon his bed; his house had been ransacked, his money and jewels carried off. Traces of blood were visible even upon the places where the killer had searched for his plunder. The investigation had pursued several avenues without success.
Richeux had known Jaunet well. Neighbours had seen him in his company at the shop counter, occasionally late into the night. The grocer considered him a friend. Near the scene of the crime, witnesses had observed details that were insufficient, on their own, to establish guilt: knives entrusted to a man to be sharpened, a lingering presence in the shop, a light glimpsed without the bearer’s countenance being discernible.
After the murder, Richeux had settled in Paris. The years rolled on. An affair left without resolution never vanishes entirely; it merely loses the voices that sustain it, as witnesses grow weary and objects change hands. The murder of Bérard restored to Jaunet’s death a currency that time seemed to have stripped away.
Pawn tickets from the Mont-de-Piété, discovered in Richeux’s lodgings, led directly to pledged jewels. A relative of Jaunet identified several ornamental pins; a watchmaker recognised a watch. Thus did the second dead man deliver the belongings of the first into the hands of justice.
The Man Named Félix
Concerning Jaunet, Richeux adopted a different defence. He admitted to a share in the deeds but named a certain Félix as the author of the murder. He himself had supposedly done no more than keep watch and accept a sum of money. The magistrates sought to give substance to this individual; the prosecution maintained that he was merely a phantom invented to divide a responsibility that the evidence laid squarely upon Richeux.
At trial, the divergence between the two dossiers remained considerable. The recent murder had yielded up its material evidence almost immediately; that of 1851 demanded identifications after the passage of several years, fragile recollections, and the collation of circumstances. The prosecution could not evade this difficulty merely by repeating that the crimes were alike. The knives, the jewels, the bonds with the victims, and the successive declarations of the accused had to be weighed together.
Richeux was convicted of both murders. The Gazette compared him to Lacenaire and scrutinized his physiognomy for the outward signs of a visible depravity. Such a manner of reading a countenance reassures those who wish to believe they would have recognised the danger. It adds nothing to the objects seized or the deeds established.
A Witness from Russia
On April 6, 1857, François Richeux was guillotined in Paris. Among the spectators stood Leo Tolstoy. The presence of the author was to confer upon this execution a singular posterity: his reflections upon judicial death would be far more widely read than the trial transcripts concerning Jaunet and Bérard.
One must preserve both histories without allowing either to efface the other. Tolstoy was shaken to his core by what he beheld; yet the victims were no less dead, and their assassin had not ceased to have acted simply because the spectacle of his punishment inspired a revulsion against taking life. A conscience might well be unsettled without a crime being absolved.
The door on the Rue de Charenton had swung open at last. That of Corbeil, closed for five years upon an enigma, had opened in its turn. At the threshold of both, justice encountered the very same man. The names of Jaunet and Bérard deserve to endure beside his: they were living beings before becoming the two murders to which an author’s Parisian morning is sometimes reduced.