Lesurques had come merely to accompany a friend. He had no appointment with an accuser, nor any reason to fear the few minutes he would spend in a magistrate’s office. His companion had come to reclaim papers seized in the course of an inquiry; once the formalities were concluded, they would take their leave. Two women were waiting there as well. They looked upon the men who entered and believed they recognised murderers.
From this encounter—in which no one had taken care to separate those who were to identify from those who were to be shown to them—arose a sentence of death. Yet the celebrated affair of the Lyons mail does not rest entirely upon an unhappy accident of fate. For a face to lead a man to the scaffold, there must follow depositions, confrontations, a tribunal; the objections must yield one after the other, or appear to yield. It is this protracted transformation of suspicion into certainty that began in the office of Daubanton.
On 27 April 1796, the Lyons mail coach was ambushed on the road near Lieusaint. The courier and the postilion were slaughtered. The highwaymen made off with coin and millions in assignats destined for the Army of Italy: two lives extinguished, a considerable treasure stolen, and public authority struck down in one of the most ordinary exercises of its power, the passage of a carriage. The road had borne the assassins; it was now compelled to yield their traces.
Inquiries were made of those who had served, crossed paths with, or observed the travellers. Men had halted at inns, had asked for what a horseman requires, and had left behind them impressions of face and dress. These recollections were precious. They were also fragile, for the patron for whom one pours a drink does not announce that, a few days hence, one will be summoned to answer for his countenance before a magistrate. Memory had laboured without knowing that it would be asked to serve as proof.
A scent led to Couriol, arrested at Château-Thierry with effects originating from the theft. Around him, the net of the investigation drew in other persons. Guénot, who had been released, had left papers in the hands of the law. He returned to fetch them with Lesurques, his compatriot from Douai. Thus, one of the least suspicious acts in the entire affair—presenting oneself voluntarily in an office where one’s name is known—suddenly assumed the complexion of criminal recklessness.
The two witnesses recognised the visitors. There Lesurques’s freedom came to an end.
He had in his favour an established station, a family, and connections capable of attesting to his conduct. This might explain the astonishment of his circle; it did not suffice to answer the accusation. An esteemed man might rob, and the court was under no obligation to confuse a fair reputation with material impossibility. The defence was therefore obliged to abandon the reassuring ground of customary habits for the far narrower terrain of the timetable: where was Lesurques while the mail was being attacked? Who had seen him? At what precise hour?
Witnesses placed him in Paris. Among them, the jeweller Legrand possessed a ledger that was to lend his memory the authority of a written date. The paper seemed to offer what the spoken word alone could not guarantee. Then an alteration in the date was detected. Legrand fell under suspicion of perjury, and that which was meant to sustain the alibi began to crush it.
This erasure had a significance far exceeding the small space it occupied upon the page. The other attestations did not physically vanish; they changed colour. If one of his defenders had doctored his book, why should not the rest have doctored their memories? Henceforth, suspicion could feed upon the very aids brought to the accused. He was no longer reproached merely with having been recognised upon the highway; one glimpsed around him a concerted effort to efface his passage.
At the trial in August, the testimonies thus collided without annulling one another. Some affirmed they had seen Lesurques in Paris, others along the route of the robbers. One name, however, cut through this contradiction: Dubosc. Madeleine Bréban, connected with Couriol, maintained that a confusion had been committed. The man they sought was not the man who stood in the dock; another resembled him, and was said to have worn a fair wig.
The resemblance offered an explanation for the whole. It could rescue the witnesses from falsehood without delivering Lesurques to the crime: they had recognised a face, but assigned that face to the wrong person. It did not, however, constitute a demonstration in itself. It was necessary to find this other man, to establish his presence, to examine his relations with the band. The court was judging the prisoners before it, whereas this hypothesis demanded an inquiry still open.
On 5 August 1796, Lesurques, Couriol, and Bernard were condemned to death. Other defendants escaped capital punishment; Guénot was acquitted. The companion who had come to reclaim his papers was to live. He who had accompanied him remained in prison.
Then Couriol assumed a singular place in the history. He no longer sought merely to defend himself: he affirmed his own guilt and the innocence of Lesurques. His declarations, reiterated prior to the execution and reported even in the accounts of the final journey, designated those whom he claimed to be the true participants. A condemned man may lie; the confession of his own guilt does not automatically transform every subsequent word into truth. Yet it becomes difficult to hear a man consent to his own condemnation while combatting that of his neighbour, and then dismiss that protest as an idle noise without consequence.
Lesurques was executed on 3 October 1796. Couriol died on the same day. Justice had concluded its first trial; it had not exhausted the affair.
Dubosc was run to ground and tried some years later. His conviction gave to Lesurques’s defenders the living man who had been wanting in the initial proceedings. It was no longer merely a name cast into a courtroom: another prisoner had appeared for the very same crime. From that moment, the family pursued an undertaking whose duration sufficiently measures the resistance it encountered. It was no longer a question of saving a father, but of obtaining that his children might bear his name without the sentence appended to it.
The law did not grant them the victory the public expected. To recognise a new culprit was not, in the eyes of the law, sufficient to exclude a former accomplice. Revision demanded more than a persuasive tale of a double. The affair contributed to the debates that reshaped the law in 1867; nevertheless, the family’s petition failed before the Court of Cassation in 1868. Lesurques became, in the collective memory, the face of judicial error, without ever obtaining the rehabilitation that would have closed his file.
This discrepancy is the final disquietude of the history. One may recount the erasure, the identifications, the protests of Couriol, and the belated arrival of Dubosc; one must not add to them a verdict of innocence that was never delivered. Two men had waited in an office. One had come to reclaim his passport. The other believed he was merely keeping him company. More than seventy years later, a family was still waiting for justice to decide what that morning had truly proved.