The letter bore the signature of Reine Orcel. That very detail ought to have brought reassurance: the young woman had found new lodgings, she was departing with the man she loved, and her acquaintances had only to pack her belongings so that she might have them collected. Yet Sophie Douillet had parted from her only the evening before, and Reine had asked her to call for her that coming Sunday so they might attend Mass together. Between so ordinary an appointment and so sudden a departure, something rang false. The letter purported to explain an absence; in truth, it would set in motion the search for a missing woman.
Reine had left her family in early November 1826, under the pretext of entering domestic service in Grenoble. She was with child by Joseph Vincendon, a distant kinsman who had promised her his hand. A twenty-six-year-old schoolmaster in Beaucroissant, he had pleaded the exigencies of his professional advancement as a reason for delay. Through Sophie’s good offices, Reine had been lodged with Madame Morel, a midwife. She thus found herself far removed from her kin, who knew nothing of her condition, in a city where only two women shared her secret and were there to hear her speak of the future.
Prior to her departure, she had gathered together some three hundred francs. Vincendon had induced her to entrust this sum to him, promising to remit funds as her needs arose. For Reine, this money represented a reserve set aside for the unborn child; to grasp her plight, one must hold these two circumstances together: her estrangement from home and the surrender of her savings. She wrote frequently to the schoolmaster, urging him to come. Sophie and the midwife listened to her plans, her anxieties on his behalf, and her hopes for a deferred union. The chronicler of 1833 harshly condemns her credulity; we may rather perceive what it cost her to lean upon a promise whose fulfillment was ever postponed at another’s whim.
On December 21, Vincendon announced in Beaucroissant that he was going for a walk toward Rives, but instead made his way to Grenoble. He arrived at Sophie’s dwelling around five in the afternoon and asked to be conducted to Reine. He claimed he was obliged to depart that very evening by the diligence. Sophie found him pale and preoccupied. These impressions were recorded only after the disappearance; taken alone, they do not disclose what he was plotting. He waited outside while she went upstairs to apprise her friend. All three subsequently went to sup at a tavern in the Place des Cordeliers, near the banks of the Isère.
During the meal, Vincendon inquired whether a sentry was still posted on a neighbouring quay. Sophie could not tell him. Later, as they walked toward the midwife’s lodgings, he advised her to return to her own suburb before the city gates were shut. It was not yet eight o’clock; the gates closed at nine. She had ample time, but deemed it tactful to leave the two young people to themselves. It was at this juncture that Reine spoke to her of Sunday Mass. Thereafter, no directly witnessed word of hers survives for the chronicle to transmit.
The following morning, an unknown man delivered to Sophie the letter bearing Reine’s name. He declined any gratuity, stating he had already been paid. No date appeared upon the paper. It stated that Reine had been invited to stay with friends where she would incur no expense; Sophie was instructed to take eight francs from her chest of drawers and gather her effects. Yet upon inspecting the room, the women found that matters did not tally with the directions in the letter. The source does not detail every discrepancy observed: it would be idle to invent a forced drawer or a missing trinket. This divergence, coupled with so unheralded a departure, sufficed to prevent the two women from resting easy.
The midwife wrote to Vincendon, warning him that he must provide news of Reine, who had been left alone in his company, failing which she would denounce him to the authorities. This missive was dropped in Beaucroissant, picked up by children, and shown about the village. The schoolmaster maintained that an errant pupil had fabricated it, an explanation that even had to account for the postmark upon the cover. While this correspondence was being passed from hand to hand in the village, Sophie set out for Plau, where Reine’s relatives resided. There she encountered Vincendon and demanded an account of what had transpired.
He recounted an assault upon the stone bridge of Grenoble: four ruffians, he claimed, had robbed them, whereupon Reine had been hurled into the Isère. Yet he begged Sophie to tell the family that she was well. The peril he described and the tidings he wished conveyed stood in blatant contradiction. He spoke also of paying the midwife, of having Reine’s effects retrieved, and of fleeing abroad. Sophie refused to follow his lead. She went straight to the parents and disclosed all. The secret of the pregnancy, which had kept the young woman apart from her own flesh and blood, no longer shielded the man who had promised to wed her.
In the days that followed, Vincendon offered yet other versions of the event. To a neighbour, he portrayed himself merely as the intermediary for a cousin, charged with delivering money to a young woman whom that kinsman had seduced. On this occasion, the assailants were reduced to three. He admitted to having taken the diligence under an assumed name. It was not merely the number of footpads that shifted: his own station receded, transforming him from the awaited lover into an unfortunate messenger. These successive tales, gathered from disparate witnesses, were to weigh far more heavily against him than any passing impressions of his pallor or his tears.
He went into hiding, then took the place of a young conscript called to the colours, one Jean Caillat. Furnished with the recruit’s marching orders, he was dispatched toward a regiment garrisoned at Dunkirk. However, his certificate of qualification for primary instruction was discovered upon his person, laying bare his true identity. The credential of his trade, which he had preserved amidst his change of name, prevented him from vanishing beneath another man’s uniform. Apprehended, he was escorted back to Grenoble. The chronicle relates that fellow prisoners at Tournus received from him confessions of murder; we shall not treat this as an established scene, for we possess only this secondhand narrative.
Meanwhile, on February 25, 1827, the body was discovered upon the shingle of the Isère. Its condition precluded any facile recognition of the features. Sophie, the midwife, and her husband hesitated at first, then identified the garments Reine had worn on the night of her disappearance. This identification is the one recorded by the source, founded entirely upon the recovered clothing. The garments that the forged letter had sought to have gathered up had been intended to divert suspicion; those the dead woman still wore now carried the witnesses back to their final parting.
Before the Court of Assizes of the Isère, during the first fortnight of July 1827, Vincendon abandoned the tale of the unknown footpads. He now contended that Reine had cast herself into the river because he refused to promise an early marriage. The presiding judge inquired why he had raised no cry for help and why he had hitherto advanced so different an explanation. Vincendon also confessed to having written the letter signed Reine Orcel. That confession did not, in itself, reconstruct every physical act of the crime; it did, however, definitively strip the departed woman of the words by which he had claimed to announce her journey.
After three days of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict finding Vincendon guilty of murder, without premeditation. This distinction must be preserved, even though both the prosecution and the chronicler perceived in several circumstances the marks of a calculated design. The court sentenced him to penal servitude for life, rather than the penalty of death. The narrative subsequently notes the public branding of the condemned man. It could restore to Reine neither the marriage, the savings, nor the future she had anticipated; yet it stripped away one final usurpation. The letter was not hers. In an affair wherein others had spoken so copiously in her stead, justice had at least established that truth.