Beside the dead man lay a pistol, intended to explain why he had been stabbed. In the history of Lescombat, objects were assigned their roles before justice was ever summoned to inspect them.
The slain man was an architect. The man who struck him down had lodged beneath his roof; the woman for whose sake he had quitted the house had remained behind as a wife. One might fancy the tale familiar before even learning the names: a husband, a lover, a wife eager to rid herself of the first without surrendering the second. Yet the letters attributed to the two paramours have preserved for this crime a singularity far more troubling than the triangle itself. They show—or profess to show—how a resolve is fashioned by two minds together, each urging the other to cross that distance for which neither wishes to answer alone.
The Dismissed Lodger
Marie-Catherine Taperet, born in Paris in 1728, had married Lescombat. Mongeot resided in their house as a lodger. Such proximity bore at first the appearance of an ordinary domestic arrangement: a man welcomed beneath another’s roof, present at the hours when meals are taken, when one returns home, when conjugal life does not always think to stand upon its guard.
The liaison was formed. According to the afterword published in 1910 by J. Hilss, Lescombat remained long in ignorance of it; once forewarned, he drove Mongeot out. The architect took the most immediate measure. The closed door separated their bodies and appeared to restore each person to their rightful station. It extinguished neither desire nor their correspondence.
We know this correspondence through the printed editions that turned it into a book. This distinction matters from the very outset: we are not opening an untouched case file that has lain sealed since the trial. Printers, collectors, and commentators transmitted letters they attributed to the lovers. Reading them may draw us closer to a story; it does not warrant our accepting every sentence as a confidence overheard without mediation.
In the account given by Hilss, separation resolved nothing. On the contrary, the husband’s living presence became the obstacle around which whatever remained of the liaison came to be organized. It was no longer enough to meet unbeknownst to him. He must cease to be there at all. Between these two propositions lies an abyss; the scandal of the affair is that the lovers ended by treating it merely as a difficulty to be overcome.
A Repast Before the Blow
Mongeot met with Lescombat once more. They dined in the Luxembourg, then took their leave. Shortly thereafter, the former lodger struck the architect down, leaving a pistol beside him.
The 1910 afterword recounts this scene with brevity. It offers no means to reconstruct the bill of fare, the words exchanged, or the precise moment when Lescombat might have perceived his peril. We shall not append to his death some agreeable conversation merely to lend the betrayal a sharper spice. The sole fact attested in this narrative suffices: the man expelled from the household had sat down to share a meal with the very man who had banished him; upon rising from that encounter, the host became his victim.
When arrested, Mongeot pleaded self-defense. The pistol was meant to ascribe the first menace to the deceased, and to the survivor the necessity of retaliation. The murder might thus be related in reverse: one would commence with Lescombat’s supposed gesture, presenting the fatal thrust as a consequence forced upon his adversary.
This displacement might also have shielded Catherine. A clash between two men could leave her in the position of an unfortunate wife, compromised by an intrigue, yet a stranger to the decision to kill. She was questioned, then set at liberty. For a time, it seemed the affair might remain confined within the survivor’s version.
Then the letters came to light.
What Changes Hands
Two traditions recount their discovery. According to the first, letters and rough drafts were found in Lescombat’s bedchamber; according to the second, Mongeot surrendered them himself. Hilss mentions both. To select whichever offers the finer theatrical scene would be to settle, out of a taste for romance, a matter our source leaves open.
The outcome, by contrast, stands at the very heart of the relation: the correspondence bound the crime to an earlier resolution and restored Catherine to her place among the accused. What had once served to sustain the bond between the lovers could now establish against them what each had demanded, consented to, or encouraged. The papers had not changed their hand; they had changed their readers.
Catherine, still according to this retrospective account, continued to visit Mongeot in prison, exhorting him to hold fast. Such obstinacy admits of diverse interpretations; the 1910 commentator discerns in it, above all, a formidable woman. We need not adopt his portrait to grasp the stakes. So long as their accounts remained in harmony, each could hope the other would not surrender that which bound them. A secret shared between two persons becomes a mutual frailty the moment a magistrate can demand an accounting from each apart.
On January 9, 1755, Mongeot was condemned to death and broken upon the wheel, according to the chronology furnished by Hilss. Catherine was sentenced to be hanged. Her execution was deferred on account of her pregnancy; it took place some months later, after the birth of the child.
Their history had begun in a house where a third occupant had found a place. It concluded with two capital sentences and a birth whose aftermath is not preserved for us here. It would be singularly convenient to invent for this child a destiny charged with redeeming or repeating that of its parents. That would already be a novel. The documented affair breaks off before granting us such a conclusion.
The Lovers Offered for Sale
The public, for its part, had no desire to stop. The letters circulated swiftly in slender volumes. A crime that had shattered a household was transformed into reading matter carried home to one's own hearth. Readers sought passion therein, confessions, indiscreet particulars; moral condemnation permitted them to linger over the pages without convicting themselves of unseemly curiosity.
Hilss notes that in 1761 a work of fiction still invoked the lover of the notorious Madame Lescombat. Then other causes célèbres occupied the bookstalls. The pamphlets grew worn, vanished, became rarities. In the following century, Roger de Beauvoir drew a novel from Lescombat; Charles Nisard came upon the letters in his study of popular chapbooks and reprinted several, while refusing to publish them in full. He feared, so he explained, spreading the very thoughts he claimed to condemn.
The editor of 1910, by contrast, chose to restore them to circulation as an avenue into the human heart. Between these two postures, the commerce of the case had regained its vigor. Ought one to protect the reader from such utterances, or permit him to trace through them the paths of a passion turned homicidal? Either answer provided a pretext to open the book once more.
Lescombat had not written that book. Of his existence, readers would remember chiefly that it had encumbered the lovers. Perhaps that is what must be redressed as we close their correspondence: behind the letters that attained celebrity, a man had consented to share a meal. He was no paper obstacle. He did not rise again when the printers had finished telling his story.