The soup was ready. The knife lay untouched upon the table. Returning home on the evening of 8 May 1822, Étienne Charnalet found these two modest tokens of an appointed repast, yet no one with whom to share it. His wife, Marie Gérin, had departed for Saint-Quentin to make her confession. She had been seen within the church. Between those sacred walls and the hearth where her husband awaited her, she had vanished into thin air.
Charnalet questioned the neighbours. A cousin, Joseph Charvet, accompanied by his wife, walked as far as the presbytery. Had the curé Mingrat seen Marie? He had indeed, the priest replied in substance: he had left her at the church. In the memorial he was to draw up several weeks later, the deputy mayor, Monsieur Bossan, likewise recorded that the ecclesiastic had described her as troubled in mind. This single word promised a convenient explanation for her disappearance. Even before Marie had been found, the world was already invited to ponder what harm she might have brought upon herself.
On the morrow, a husbandman named Joseph Michon noticed traces of blood upon a path leading down toward the Isère. Near a walnut tree lay a length of cord and a small clasp-knife. Michon took up the latter, hid it in a hedge, returned presently to fetch it, washed the blade, and kept it in his cottage before surrendering it into the hands of Bossan. Thus the exhibit began its career amid the irresolutions of a rustic who knew not what manner of thing he held.
It was a knife with an ebony haft, fitted with a penknife blade and a corkscrew. As Marie’s own knife had remained upon her table, inquiry had to look elsewhere. Bossan thought of the curé, though without deeming him a murderer: he fancied the priest might have forgotten his knife at her dwelling, and that she had employed it before casting herself into the torrent. Bossan himself would acknowledge as much in his memoir. Suspicion did not pursue an unswerving path; it traversed first a conjecture wherein the dead woman bore the entire burden of blame.
Marie Gérin was the wife of a labourer from the hamlet of Le Gît. She was wont to attend divine service in the neighbouring parishes and was preparing to travel to Veurey. Her last known journey belonged wholly to this unexceptional life. A religious sister, Madame de Saint-Michel, had caught sight of her in the church of Saint-Quentin. For the husband, for the kinsfolk who sought her, it remained to be discovered what had transpired following that encounter. The river as yet returned no answer; the presbytery, however, had a door.
Bossan went to wait upon Mingrat. According to his account, the curé confirmed having met Marie, spoke of a confession refused, and repeated his assertion of a troubled spirit. But on 16 May, the discovery of human remains altered the very nature of the search. Further fragments were brought to light soon after. The deputy’s memorial records the findings of the surgeons: it was no longer a question of explaining an absence by some frantic act of despair. A woman had been slain, and her body hewn asunder. The quest for a missing soul was transformed into the hunt for her murderer. The witnesses who had seen Marie that evening, the implements discovered beside the path, the answers proffered by the curé—all took on a darker complexion.
Within the presbytery, another woman had heard what she had not seen. The servant maid likewise answered to the name of Marie. In her published deposition, she related having ascended the stair to convey a request concerning an office for the dead. From behind the locked door of the cabinet, she had heard groans. Mingrat had answered her, then bade her go back below. She testified further to strange noises, to being sent abroad to deliver a journal, and, on the following morning, to finding ashes mingled with the half-burnt remnants of linen.
Her place in the affair was terrible by virtue of its very confinement. She had stood so near; she had remained outside. The sounds she described had not revealed to her the identity of the person shut in with the curé, and she had witnessed neither a struggle nor a slaughter. Yet, set beside the disappearance of Marie Gérin, these murmurs and vestiges conferred upon that closed cabinet an ominous weight which Mingrat’s early explanations could not dispel.
The knife, for its part, pursued a more patient course. The servant was familiar with her master’s pocketknife and described its particulars. When the object was laid before her, however, she could not identify it with certainty, for many such wares were abroad. A cutler of Grenoble recognised a stamp employed in his trade, though he could not identify the piece on the spot. The investigation was directed to an artisan in his employ.
This workman supplied the decisive detail. The mark represented an ermine; its die, having suffered damage, no longer impressed the creature’s left paw. He produced another piece exhibiting the selfsame flaw and declared he had sold the knife to Mingrat. Thus a tiny, mutilated beast stamped in steel converged with the rumours garnered in the village. What the servant maid had not dared swear to, an artisan affirmed by recognising the casualty of his own tool.
The curé, however, did not wait for these several declarations to be assembled. On 17 May, gendarmes visited his house, unprovided with an order of arrest. Shortly thereafter, he took his departure. Apprehended beyond the frontier by the Sardinian authorities, he was held in custody at Chambéry. French justice now possessed a man to prosecute, but he was no longer at its disposal. For Charnalet and the Gérins, that frontier would count for as much as the evidence itself.
On 9 December 1822, the Court of Assizes of the Isère tried Mingrat in absentia. The court declared him guilty of wilful murder committed with premeditation during the night of 8 to 9 May. It found him, on the other hand, not guilty of the rape that was likewise laid to his charge. The sentence of death rested upon the murder. In the formal judgment reproduced in the compendium of 1827, these two findings follow upon each other’s heels: the latter is not swallowed up in the horror of the former.
The decree directed that the sentence be executed at Grenoble, and, by reason of its being pronounced against a contumacious offender, that an extract be affixed to a post in the public square of Saint-Marcellin. This, however, brought no condemned man to the scaffold. Marie’s husband and her brother demanded his extradition; their entreaties failed to secure his surrender. The brother, who carried on the trade of steel-worker and jeweller in Paris, resolved at last to carry the matter where formal petitions had not reached: before the buyers at the fairs.
Amid his wares, he sold an account of the crime. His shingle announced: “The Shop of the Brother of the Curé Mingrat’s Victim.” The family had caused their narrative to be printed; Gérin lent it the living testimony of his presence. Beneath the name of the assassin was his sister’s memory. Every copy might depart in a purchaser’s pocket, penetrate a household, and revive the death of Marie in common talk. This notoriety provoked in turn the intervention of the police and the rigours of the law.
At Niort, in July 1826, Police Commissioner Duval seized the pamphlets. Gérin and his wife were present in the town for the fair. The authorities raised the question of the license required to exercise the trade of bookselling. Gérin’s wife, sister-in-law to the murdered woman, raised her voice in protest. The depositions diverge as to the precise words and gestures exchanged in the altercation, but a fresh prosecution was set on foot: she was summoned to answer for insults directed against the commissioner. The book and the brawl were to be judged apart.
The tribunal sentenced her to fifteen days’ imprisonment. She appealed; the public prosecutor did likewise, demanding an aggravation of the penalty. On 1 September, the Royal Court of Poitiers affirmed the sentence of fifteen days. The family had set out to vindicate the memory of a murdered woman; one of their number now stood condemned for words spoken in a quarrel with the police. Gérin denounced these proceedings as persecution. The authorities maintained that nothing was in question save the respect due to their office.
On 22 September, at Niort, came the trial concerning the books. The defence drew a line between the trade of a bookseller and the dissemination, by a man closely touched by the calamity, of a volume recording the misfortunes of his own house. The tribunal dismissed the charge against Gérin without costs. This judgment gave him the victory in the matter of the books; it erased neither the imprisonment of his wife nor the sentence passed upon Mingrat, which remained an empty decree against a fugitive. Four years after the soup had been left waiting upon the hearth, Marie’s brother had won the right to sell her story at the bar of that court. The husband, for his part, had never had anything left to wait for.