On the evening of 12 June 1857, Émile Guillot made his way into the park of Jeufosse bearing a sealed missive. He slipped it between two stones at the foot of a fir tree. A gamekeeper lay concealed beneath a hedge. Guillot continued along the path toward the château; as he turned behind a screen of yews, the keeper halted him with a cry and fired. Eight grains of lead struck him. His agony was to last three quarters of an hour. A letter deposited, a gunshot in the dark, and words uttered in the throes of death were soon to set a charge of premeditated murder against a plea of lawful defence of the estate.
The domain belonged to the Delaniepce family, whose widow, née Élisabeth de Beauvais, was known by the name of Madame de Jeufosse. Her husband, a former cavalry officer, had died some ten years before. She resided there with her sons, Ernest and Albert, aged twenty-four and twenty-two respectively, and her daughter Blanche, who was not yet nineteen. The two young men had established themselves in Paris, where reckless speculations upon the Bourse had severely impaired their fortunes; Ernest had been placed under judicial curatorship. The Norman manor was thus at once an ancestral seat, a sanctuary, and the background to pressing pecuniary anxieties.
The Guillot family resided at Aubevoye, at the château of Gaillon. Émile, married for a decade, was a father of young children. The compilation portrays him as a man of wealth, open-handed toward his companions, but whose loose speech and gallant inclinations drew frequent censure upon him. His amorous conduct, upon which the witnesses offered conflicting views, was to become one of the most bitterly debated themes of the trial.
The two households had been drawn together through reciprocal visits, dinners, and shooting parties. Albert and Ernest occasionally borrowed funds from Guillot. In 1856, according to a private journal kept at the time and cited during the proceedings, they met on more than one hundred occasions. Such intimacy rendered the subsequent rupture all the more conspicuous. In 1856, Madame de Jeufosse engaged Laurence Thouzery, then about twenty years of age, as governess and companion to Blanche. The chronicle relates that Guillot initially courted Laurence, before turning his attentions, from the summer onward, toward Blanche herself. Laurence had entered the household specifically to attend upon the young girl and guide her conduct.
Blanche’s humour darkened; she would withdraw from the table after meals and wander alone through the grounds. Laurence reportedly confided her suspicions to Madame de Jeufosse. In January 1857, all intercourse between the two families was severed. Guillot bore this estrangement with ill grace. Witnesses observed him prowling about the estate, sounding the hunting horn in the adjoining woods, or drawing near the boundaries at dusk. He was accused of trespassing within the park after nightfall. The Jeufosse family maintained that he was bent on obtaining an interview with Blanche. Guillot, for his part, denied many of the declarations attributed to him.
The feud soon manifested itself in letters, billets, and open confrontations. The compilation records various remarks let fall by Guillot regarding Laurence and Blanche, threats which the prosecution claimed to have established, and the efforts of mutual acquaintances to avert an encounter. In the spring, Ernest de Jeufosse and other gentlemen reportedly warned Guillot never to set foot in the park again. A sharp altercation ensued; threats of a duel and talk of bloodshed were recalled by witnesses. The prosecution marshalled these incidents into a single motive: the implacable resentment of a mother and her sons toward the man they held responsible for an affront to their family honour.
As June drew near, Crépel, the domain’s gamekeeper, was thrust into the centre of the drama. Familiar with every avenue and hidden approach, he acted strictly under the orders of the household. According to the indictment, Madame de Jeufosse had urged him to keep watch over Guillot, pointing out footprints and reproaching him for failing to defend the property with sufficient vigilance. Laurence, too, was said to have spoken of the ‘wild beasts’ he ought to bring down. The record states that Crépel spent several nights lying in wait, at times accompanied or exhorted by Madame de Jeufosse herself. The defence was later to reply that keeping watch over an estate was no evidence of a command to kill.
The scene of 12 June unfolded entirely around the clandestine missive. Guillot crept into the park and laid the folded paper at the foot of the pine. Crépel, crouched beneath a low hedge, commanded a view of the path. According to the judicial narrative, he kept silent while Guillot deposited the note. The intruder then advanced toward the house before turning back behind a row of yews. Crépel challenged him and fired at an estimated range of twenty-seven metres. The defence was to plead the sudden discovery of a nocturnal trespasser and a shot fired without deliberate aim; the prosecution insisted upon an unarmed man struck down while walking away.
Guillot’s servant, Gros, had accompanied him as far as the boundary wall and remained waiting outside. He heard the warning shout, the detonation, and then a cry for help. Hesitating at first to enter, he ran along the masonry searching for a gate. When at last he reached his master’s side, Guillot was writhing in the dust, covered in blood. Gros testified that his master named Crépel, declared that he was a dead man, and charged him to bid his wife and children a last farewell. This dying declaration became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case.
Gros knocked loudly at the kitchen doors and raised the alarm among the servants. The narrative dwells upon the long delay before anyone came forth with water. Guillot expired after some three quarters of an hour. Crépel, meanwhile, had repaired to Madame de Jeufosse’s private apartments. She asked him whether he had fired and whether his shot had told; he replied that he could not tell, for the night was too dark. The letter was subsequently retrieved by order of the mistress of the house. The prosecution interpreted these acts as the tokens of a concerted design; the defence rejected any such construction.
Toward four o’clock in the morning, Dr Kuhn and the local magistrates arrived on the scene. The corpse still lay where Guillot had fallen. Albert de Jeufosse spoke of Crépel as a faithful dependent and demanded why he was being taken into custody. Madame de Jeufosse appeared unmoved, according to the chronicler’s account. As the gendarmes led the gamekeeper away, she urged him to keep up his courage. To this, Crépel is reported to have replied that he had only done as he was bidden, that he had been assured he had nothing to fear, and that both the imperial prosecutor and the examining magistrate had been consulted beforehand. This startling utterance was to prove one of the great cruxes of the trial.
The compilation assigns these assizes to Rouen on 25 September 1857. In this particulars it is corrected by the contemporary press: the Gazette des Tribunaux of 18 December 1857 reports the hearing held on the preceding day before the Court of Assizes of the Eure, sitting at Évreux. The account of that day depicts proceedings followed by an immense concourse of spectators; it does not, of itself, permit the reconstruction of every stage of the debates. The four principal defendants were Crépel, Madame de Jeufosse, and her two sons, Ernest and Albert. The Crown framed the charge as a premeditated murder, executed by the keeper at the instigation of the family. The defence vigorously contested any prior design, striving to present the shot as an instantaneous reaction to an unlawful nocturnal intrusion. Counsel debated at length the character of Guillot and the honour of Mademoiselle Blanche. The president of the court was repeatedly compelled to warn the public that emotional outbursts must not supersede the dispassionate examination of the facts.
The defence offered for Crépel rested upon his lengthy service, his devotion to the family, and the peril he believed himself to face in the darkness of the grounds. His advocate invoked the legal provisions governing justifiable self-defence, arguing that he had discharged his piece into the night without homicidal intent. The Advocate General retorted that Guillot was no violent felon surprised in the act of burglary: he was known to the keeper, had merely left a letter, and was moving away when shot down. He dismissed the notion that an injured family honour could ever confer a licence to kill. The pivotal question remained whether Crépel had acted upon his own impulse in the misguided defence of the estate, or whether he had executed a command deliberately devised by the Jeufosse family.
The closing speeches lingered heavily upon Guillot’s relations with Blanche and Laurence. The civil parties defended the memory of the deceased and demanded redress for his widow and orphans; counsel for the Jeufosse family dwelt upon the outrages committed against their domestic honour and Guillot’s unbridled conduct. The presiding judge was obliged to remind the gallery that applause and partisan demonstrations had no place within a court of justice. Beneath this public ferment lay a single, narrow question of law: had the four accused participated in a premeditated murder?
After a deliberation of half an hour, the jury returned a negative answer to every question in respect of all the defendants. The president pronounced their acquittal and ordered their immediate discharge. The widow Guillot and her children had claimed one hundred thousand francs in civil damages. The court dismissed their petition and condemned them in costs. The judgment brought all criminal proceedings to an end; no other hand was ever charged with the deed. In his concluding remarks, the German compiler expressed his astonishment at the acquittal, intimating that a German jury might have reached a different conclusion. That opinion remains that of the chronicler alone; the verdict of the court was absolute.