At five o’clock in the morning, a street sweeper noticed smoke pouring from a window on the Rue de Monceau. Within the private residence, the concierge succeeded in extinguishing an incipient blaze. Cans of petrol, a discarded lantern, and jimmied furniture bore witness to a nocturnal intrusion; the jewels had vanished, yet the cash had all but escaped the thieves’ clutches. In the memoirs of Marie-François Goron, fire was not the sole peril to emerge from this burglary: one of the wanted men would ultimately plunge his blade into the police brigadier sent to apprehend him.
The mansion belonged to Madame Herbelin, who resided there alongside her niece, the painter Madeleine Lemaire. Goron estimated the stolen jewels at some fifteen thousand francs, whereas the burglars were said to have uncovered a mere sixty francs in coin. This modest sum stems from the account Duval later gave to the investigator; the valuation of the purloined goods remains the one furnished by Goron. The discrepancy alone delineates their miscalculation: the intruders had broken into an ostensibly opulent house, only to find themselves deprived of the liquid fortune they had anticipated.
The jewels, however, could travel. A jeweller on the Rue Tronchet presented himself to the Sûreté after being offered a crescent-shaped medallion and remnants of brooches matching descriptions circulated by the Office Azur—an agency tasked with dispatching notices of lost or stolen valuables to the trade. The vendor was promptly taken into custody. These trinkets led detectives to two other men, Didier and Houchard, who claimed to have received them from a certain Duval, an acquaintance met at a political club known as the Panthère des Batignolles. They maintained he had presented the jewels as items found in the street. These, however, were merely the self-serving declarations of accused men, not incontrovertible proof of their complicity in the break-in.
The police sought Duval to no avail. On the 17th of October, Police Commissioner Taylor conducted a search at the lodgings of one of the arrested men on the Rue Legendre. A boy arrived, asking for the mistress of the house to step downstairs. Taylor motioned to Rossignol, who followed close behind her in company with Pelletier. At the foot of the stairwell, they caught sight of a man walking away at a brisk pace, without quite breaking into a run.
“Why, that is Duval!” the woman cried.
Rossignol overtook the passer-by, informing him that the Chief of the Sûreté wished to speak with him. According to Goron’s account, Duval instantly raised his arm and struck him twice with a poniard. Though wounded, the officer fell, dragging his assailant down by the arm. The blows continued unabated during the struggle. Rossignol managed to disarm Duval only by biting into his hand; Pelletier seized the man in a bear hug, after which two peace officers arrived to lend their support. The brigadier was conveyed to a nearby pharmacy, where a physician recorded eight separate wounds. One, to the left side of the neck, might well have proved fatal had four layers of clothing not cushioned the impact of the blade.
The burglary docket had suddenly assumed a far graver aspect. The man sought for purloined jewels had struck down an officer of the peace, leaving him on the brink of death. Yet Goron recounts that the Sûreté initially viewed Duval merely as an ordinary felon, rather than the exponent of a political doctrine. Three days after the arrest, Taylor presented Goron with a letter dispatched from Mazas Prison to the examining magistrate, Judge Atthalin. Dated the 21st of October 1886, it cast the assault in a light far removed from the police’s interpretation.
Duval protested the mention of “attempted murder” inscribed upon his committal sheet, maintaining he had acted in legitimate self-defence. He did not deny having struck Rossignol; rather, he justified the act through his anarchist convictions, asserting that the officer had pounced upon him “in the name of the law.” The phrase belongs to Duval, as reproduced by Goron. It in no way converts the affray into an act of lawful self-defence; it merely illuminates how the prisoner sought to have his actions construed.
The letter astonished Goron. He had heard his colleagues dismiss anarchism as a fashionable affectation among ruffians, reducing Duval to a common thief turned assassin. He himself did not wholly subscribe to that view. Beneath the incendiary rhetoric, he believed he recognized the cadence of revolutionary notions he had previously heard voiced by comrades. His recollection is retrospective: he records his thoughts of the moment while investing the episode with an overarching significance that he links, after the fact, to the anarchist violence of the ensuing decade.
Goron had Duval brought to his office prior to his formal examination by the magistrate. He depicts him as a man of thirty-six, haggard and worn, who complained that the police had caused him to lose his livelihood by inquiring into his ties with the Panthère des Batignolles. This grievance forms part of Duval’s narrative as reported by Goron; the text adduces no independent documents to substantiate it.
The recorded colloquy sets two definitions of theft in opposition. For Duval, the wealth of the rich was the fruit of exploitation, justifying a “restitution” on behalf of the people. He professed to have intended the money for his comrades to finance the revolution. Goron cut him short, recalling him to the facts: he had broken into an occupied home by night. The prisoner then proffered the name of Turquais, an anarchist with whom he claimed to have orchestrated the burglary.
According to this version, Turquais had scaled a gas lamp, entered the private residence, and unlatched a ground-floor window. The two men had broken open the furniture, only to discover scarce cash alongside the jewelry. The petrol can had allegedly inspired Turquais to set the place ablaze; Duval claimed to have opposed the measure lest it jeopardize their retreat. This account amounts to a confession recorded by Goron outside the courtroom and published in a volume that appeared in 1897. The chapter offers no means of confirming the reality of Turquais, whose very identity grew exceedingly doubtful.
On the 12th of January 1887, Goron attended the trial before the Seine Assize Court, presided over by Judge Onfroy de Bréville. The following day’s Gazette des tribunaux corroborates the essence of the judicial drama: questioned regarding the burglary and the arson, Duval claimed the act as an ideological deed. The journal also published the deposition of Rossignol. The brigadier stated that on the 17th of October, he had asked Duval to accompany him because the Chief of the Sûreté desired words with him; Duval had immediately lunged forward, striking him repeatedly. Rossignol added that he did not believe the gesture toward his face had been intended to do him grievous harm. This nuance offered by the wounded officer contrasts with the unabated ferocity of Goron’s depiction, yet it does nothing to erase the reality of the stab wounds.
The proceedings were tumultuous. Duval answered inquiries with disquisitions on exploitation and the coming revolution; the presiding judge repeatedly admonished him to adhere strictly to the facts. On the second day, when the defendant sought to read a prepared written defence and the president forbade it, cries erupted from the spectators. Guards of Paris were summoned into the chamber with fixed bayonets to restore order. This tumult is recounted by Goron and similarly recorded in the press of the 13th of January.
The adjudication itself left no room for ambiguity. The Gazette reported that Didier and Houchard were acquitted. The jury returned a verdict of guilty against Duval on the charges presented, save for that concerning the intent to cause death; the verdict likewise rejected any mitigating circumstances. The court duly sentenced him to capital punishment. Thus, the trial failed to establish the criminal complicity of the two men who had disposed of the jewelry, nor did it declare that Duval had possessed a homicidal intent toward Rossignol. It nevertheless condemned him for the statutory crimes upheld by the jury.
Goron adds that Duval was never executed. He attributes to President Jules Grévy and the Board of Pardons the decision to spare the life of a man whose victim had survived. The Gazette of the 13th of January ceases its reportage with the pronouncement of the death sentence, containing no record of the later commutation; this point must therefore rest upon the retrospective testimony of Goron until independent official documentation is brought to light. This reservation detracts nothing from the dramatic force of the verdict: it merely demarcates what the press established from what the memoirist subsequently asserted.
In Goron’s recollection, Duval stood less as the agent of a conspiracy than as the embodiment of an ideology confronting criminal justice from the prisoners’ dock. Writing from the vantage of 1897, he may well have exaggerated the foundational nature of this trial; history remains independent of such claims. The case enables us to follow a nocturnal burglary, jewels identified by public circular, a bloody apprehension, and a jury that absolved two codefendants while condemning the principal actor. Between the manifesto Duval imagined himself delivering and the narrow questions put to the jurors, each party seemed to be trying an entirely different crime. Yet Rossignol, eight times wounded and still living, stood at the unyielding center of both narratives.