The Townhouse on the Banks of the Loire
At Saumur, in the year 1834, the residence of General de Morell became the repository of a correspondence disowned by every post. According to the chronicle that Remy de Gourmont devoted to the affair nearly a century later, abusive and menacing notes began to appear throughout the chambers, laid upon tables or fastened against the walls. They were directed most particularly against Marie, the general’s sixteen-year-old daughter. Suspicion fell upon Émile de La Roncière, a young cavalry lieutenant who had until then been received as a frequent visitor in the house.
The handwriting of these letters appeared to mimic his own. In a separate note—penned, as Gourmont informs us, on the occasion of a duel—the lieutenant was said to have privately acknowledged himself as the author of the anonymous billets, though under the seal of secrecy. This circumstance, the full context of which the chronicle leaves incomplete, subsequently bore down upon him with the weight of an anticipated confession. The Morell family closed their doors to him. The young officer departed from Saumur; distance might well have extinguished the scandal. Instead, the letters resumed.
They proved to be far more than instruments of communication: they served at once as witnesses, as menaces, and as material exhibits, even while remaining destitute of an indisputable author. Each successive sheet added another piece to the narrative the household formed of its persecutor. There exist causes wherein the quill merely anticipates the deed; there are others in which words, by the very virtue of their missing signature, become themselves the act whose perpetrator justice must seek out.
A Night Recounted by the Prosecution
The occurrence that converted suspicion into a capital cause was assigned to the night of the 23rd of September, 1834. Marie’s parents were abroad for the evening. The young lady remained on the upper floor with her governess, Miss Allen, and several visitors. Following the departure of the guests, Miss Allen inspected the apartments, secured the corridor, and retired to rest. Marie’s bedchamber, as the bill of indictment cited by Gourmont recalls, looked out upon the Loire; an adjacent garret communicated with that of Samuel, the domestic servant.
Towards two of the clock in the morning, Marie was reportedly awakened by the shatter of breaking glass. She stated that she beheld a man entering through the window, that she recognised La Roncière despite the bonnet and cravat concealing his features, and that she heard him declare he had come to take his revenge. The maiden subsequently described a violent assault and the sudden arrival of Miss Allen, whose knocking at the door ostensibly precipitated the intruder’s flight. The assailant was said to have left a letter upon a commode before escaping once more through the casement.
Gourmont here reproduces the narrative advanced by the indictment and by Marie de Morell. The mode of ingress and the identity of the man remained yet to be established; they formed the very crucible of the debates before the assize court.
The family did not immediately lay the matter before the magistrates. A fresh threat addressed to Marie, foretelling reprisals against her kin, reportedly decided the Morells to act at last. The note was discovered just as the young lady had fallen into a swoon. On the 28th of October, La Roncière was arrested in Paris. Yet the anonymous missives did not cease. Gourmont relates that they reappeared even after his incarceration, sometimes bearing the initials “E. R.,” and were retrieved even from within the folds of Marie’s garments. To certain minds, this persistence merely confirmed the existence of accomplices; to others, it rendered the attribution of the writings to the prisoner all the more untenable. The signature thus offered no key to the enigma: it did but reiterate, upon every scrap of paper, the name already fixed upon by suspicion.
The Evidence of the Window and the Walls
The trial opened before the Court of Assizes of the Seine at the end of June 1835. Chaix d’Est-Ange appeared for La Roncière; Odilon Barrot and Berryer pleaded for the civil parties. The public flocked to witness a cause already surrendered to popular commentary, wherein the honour of the young officer and the maiden’s testimony had long since been invested with a moral gravity.
Yet the window and the walls were subjected to minute scrutiny. The architect Girard measured the bedchamber at twenty-eight feet above the pavement; the casement of the garret overhead hung fourteen feet higher still. An exterior ledge formed an angle of several feet. Girard discovered no vestige of scaling, no mark of ropes upon the roof or in Samuel’s chamber, nor any trace of blood upon the tiled floor. He refrained from pronouncing the ascent impossible: in his judgment, a deliberate, premeditated climb might well leave no such abrasions as a hurried scaling would inevitably imprint. The glazier Jorry, summoned on the 27th of September, described an aperture of three to five inches; the shards of glass lay upon the outer ledge. He deemed it exceedingly difficult to reach the fastener through such a breach. A chambermaid deposed that she had swept no fragments from the floor within. Finally, the bolt between Marie’s chamber and that of Miss Allen fitted imperfectly into its strike-plate. The public prosecutor could readily invoke the stealth of an intruder; the defense countered each element of the maiden’s account with these material anomalies.
The Letters Under Scrutiny
Another body of proof concerned the writings. Oudard, one of the experts in chirography, concluded that a letter signed by Marie de Morell and addressed to d’Estouilly was the solitary specimen among the fourteen traced without disguise. The remaining thirteen represented, in his estimation, the selfsame hand, dissembled so as to imitate the script of La Roncière. A friend of the family acknowledged the authenticity of the letter signed by Marie; this deposition served to corroborate rather than refute Oudard’s findings. The experts thus stood at the very centre of a debate that bore upon the missives themselves and the manner in which they were to be construed.
A Defense That Reverses the Charge
The defense then turned the accusation directly against the household. Counsel suggested that Marie had herself fabricated the letters and orchestrated the charges. Barrot rehearsed this thesis by enumerating, with an oratorical vehemence that Gourmont records, the monstrous deeds thereby imputed to the young lady. Within the courtroom, two irreconcilable narratives clashed: that of a menacing officer, perpetrator of a nocturnal outrage; and that of a youthful accuser who, according to the defense, had forged the letters and feigned the entire scene. Neither construction dissipated the deep shadows of uncertainty that lingered over the facts.
Barrot turned the chirographic experts to ridicule before the bench and public; Gourmont considers that the civil parties thereby effectively dismantled their authority. Chaix d’Est-Ange, for the accused, was obliged to answer two civil counsel alongside the ministry of the public prosecutor. The defense could not rest upon merely disproving the ascent: it had to proffer another origin for the missives and dismantle the coherence of the entire prosecution.
The Verdict and Its Shadow
President Férey reminded the jury that certain causes remain forever impenetrable to human sagacity, and that an abiding mystery ought to counsel prudence in those who judge. Gourmont cites these reflections only to censure the judgment that ensued. He records likewise an epistle from Marie’s father, published on the 25th of August, 1835, in L’Observateur des Tribunaux.
The jury nonetheless pronounced La Roncière guilty. The court sentenced him to ten years’ penal confinement. Gourmont imputes this outcome to the overwhelming weight of public sentiment and the prevailing notions of the epoch regarding the inviolable virtue of young maidens. His exposition remains that of a chronicler writing long after the debates had grown cold.
In the wake of the verdict, the letters abide at the core of the dossier as Gourmont delivers it to posterity. Who traced their lines, and wherefore was their counterfeit likeness received as a confession of guilt? The jury rendered its decree; the chronicle, in after years, espoused its partisan cause. At Saumur, an unsigned sheet of paper had traversed the domestic hearth, the hall of justice, and the public prints. It had not ceased to be anonymous when the court pronounced its judgment.