It required a laundress to restore his name to a dead man whom Paris had gazed upon for weeks. The police held garments, physical descriptions, even a plaster bust; yet they still did not know at which door to knock. Calamar, for her part, remembered a peculiar gait and a wart upon the chin. This trifle, bound to the recollection of a living man, was to lead the magistrates to the Rue Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. It was also to force open another door—that of a woman murdered five months earlier.
On July 19, 1814, the porter at No. 7, Rue de la Grange-Batelière grew uneasy. For three days, he had caught no glimpse of Madame Vaume. A window stood permanently open; his shouts went unanswered. Mounting a ladder, he discovered inside the kitchen the body of this tenant who lived entirely alone. Jeanne-Marie Dautun, the separated wife of Doctor Vaume, was fifty-three years of age. On the eve of her disappearance, she had ordered an extra measure of milk to entertain someone at luncheon. That small domestic arrangement became, in the wake of the murder, a question without an address: whom had she been expecting?
A watch and several pieces of plate were missing. Other valuables remained untouched in the apartment. Theft, therefore, offered no immediate explanation, and the family ties yielded little more. Madame Vaume had, among her kin, two nephews: Auguste and Charles Dautun. The elder had departed for Belgium at the beginning of July. The younger, encountering Calamar—his aunt’s former servant—some time later, protested that he knew nothing of her fate. The woman who had served in that household retained the memory of those who had frequented it; she would soon cross their path again, in an affair that no one had yet connected to this one.
On November 9, a succession of discoveries throughout Paris brought another murder to light. The dismembered remains of a man had been scattered between the Seine, the Louvre, and the Champs-Élysées. They were collected; an identity was sought. The linen bore laundry marks, and the body exhibited peculiarities noted down by the physicians. The face was cast in plaster. Yet neither the public exhibition at the Morgue nor the inquiries undertaken availed to put a name to the victim. The prosecution possessed a description; it lacked someone capable of recognizing a human being within it.
Calamar had been confined by illness. When she finally heard report of a wart upon the chin and a leg that made the stranger limp, she thought at once of Auguste. She repaired to No. 79, Rue Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, where he lodged. The landlord had not seen him for a considerable time. The room remained locked. The laundress pursued her inquiries, visited the Morgue, and presently recognized upon the bust kept at the Préfecture the man she had known. The name was recovered at last: Auguste Dautun, formerly a receiver of the registry in Brussels, brother to Charles and nephew to Madame Vaume.
The door to his lodgings was forced. Traces of blood lingered in a room turned upside down. Personal effects had been carried off. On December 16, while the search was still being conducted, Charles appeared. He had come, he said, to inquire after his brother. He was conducted to the police. This visitor, arriving in quest of an absent man, was soon called upon to explain what he knew of that absence, and what had become of the missing property. As the interrogatories pressed closer, his answers shifted.
He initially implicated his cousin Girouard. In one deposition, he assigned himself the role of a mere accomplice: the murder, he claimed, had been perpetrated by others, and he had merely assisted in making away with the corpse. Later, he exonerated Girouard and took the entire crime upon his own shoulders. On December 24, he went so far as to confess to the murder of his aunt, undertaken to procure funds for the gaming tables. These confessions furnished details concerning articles pawned and the circumstances of both crimes. Yet they were not to remain his final word. Before the magistrates, Charles retracted them: he claimed he had spoken solely to save his cousin.
With every fresh declaration, Girouard’s standing in the dock shifted. Charles accused him, cleared him, then turned upon him once more; the cousin was forced to answer an adversary whose testimony altered course without ever ceasing to threaten him. The authorities, however, possessed other materials: goods sold, recorded movements, witnesses who had seen bundles of linen conveyed from one house to another. It was necessary to measure these material traces against the shifting narratives. For Girouard, the distance between what Charles asserted and what could be demonstrated was a matter of life and death.
The trial opened on February 23, 1815. Two men stood before the court, but their jeopardy was not equal. Charles answered for both willful murders and the thefts. Girouard stood indicted for complicity in the death of Auguste. They had known each other from childhood; their kinship, their companions, and their chronic pecuniary distress occupied much of the proceedings. The prosecution laid great stress upon Girouard’s past, his military insubordinations, and his domestic misconduct. All of this darkened the portrait. It remained to be seen what that portrait proved regarding the murder itself.
A woman named Madame Leblond had observed a man laden with a bundle pause upon the steps of a church. The circumstance closely resembled a detail supplied by Charles in an earlier statement. Yet, when questioned before the court, she failed to recognize the prisoner at the bar. The episode fueled the debate without supplying the positive identification one might have hoped to draw from it. The case advanced in this fashion: through partial alignments, sudden resistances, and testimonies that refused to bend in a single direction.
The surgeon Dupuytren delivered his observations upon the body of Auguste. The absence of defensive wounds upon the hands led him to conjecture the intervention of several assailants: the victim’s hands might well have been held while the blows were struck. He advanced this reasoning with explicit scientific caution. In his closing speech, however, the Advocate General Girodet invested it with the force of absolute certainty, casting Girouard as that second assailant. Between the two statements, a mere hypothesis had assumed an assurance that the physician had expressly withheld.
The testimony of the woman Garnier recalled the court to the less eloquent gestures of daily life. Employed in Charles’s service, she recounted his return with an armful of linen on November 10 or 11. She had watched him peruse stamped legal papers, then commit them to the flames. He had ordered her to unpick the initials A. D. from the linen and replace them with C. D. Under the point of her needle, Auguste had been transformed into Charles. She testified also to the arrival of Girouard, seeking refuge after his wife had abandoned him. On several utterances that Charles attributed to his cousin, she contradicted the accuser’s word.
Girouard did not emerge from the trial cleared of all violent tendencies. His wife testified to his threats and to the abject misery in which he kept her. Yet she did not come forward to attest to a murder of which she had any knowledge. Hearing her enabled the court to separate what she had actually suffered from what others had inferred from her distress. The distinction was of sovereign importance for a man whose personal vices seemed perpetually summoned to supply the place of missing evidence.
Maître Bexon, his advocate, fastened his argument upon a single key and a few days in November. Charles maintained that Girouard had handed him the key to his brother’s lodgings on the 14th. Yet, the advocate insisted, furniture and personal effects had already been removed on the 10th, 11th, and 12th. How could a late delivery of the key explain the access Charles had manifestly enjoyed days before? The defense set this timeline against the accusation Charles obstinately maintained. A key might unlock an apartment; it did not, in Bexon’s reasoning, close the case against Girouard.
The defense of Charles was far more precarious. Maître Dumolard urged the jury to weigh the retractions against the confessions, and not to confound proof of theft with proof of murder. Until the closing of the debates, his client denied having slain his brother. The exhortations of the presiding judge failed to elicit the final confession the courtroom awaited. The jurors retired, bearing with them these contradictory utterances and the weight of the evidence presented.
They returned at three o'clock in the morning. Girouard was acquitted of complicity in the murder and of the theft. The president ordered his discharge, subject to any other cause of detention, and accompanied the order with a stern lecture upon his moral character. Even when delivered from the capital charge, the man was compelled to hear that a better life would have shielded him from suspicion. The court record depicts him swooning, supported by guards as he left the bar. Charles, on the other hand, was found guilty of both premeditated murders and both thefts. The court condemned him to death.
He lodged an appeal in cassation on February 27; it was dismissed. On March 29, 1815, Charles Dautun was executed. According to the contemporary account of his last moments, he still persisted in asserting that Girouard had given him the key. The trial had severed their fates; his final accusation was an attempt to bind them together once more. It could not undo the acquittal. At the outset of this affair, a woman had recognized a living man behind a physical description. At its close, the jurors were compelled to distinguish between two prisoners whom so many words had conspired to confound.