The market hall of Mahéru burned in the night, and before the ashes had cooled, its former owner was already named as the incendiary. The litigations dividing him from the purchaser had fostered a conspicuous hatred; threatening words, reported by witnesses allied with his adversaries, seemed to lend the conflagration both a cause and an author. Yet, at the hour when justice commenced its inquiries, it remained to be discovered who had crossed the road to Sainte-Goburge, and what had truly been discerned through the dark.
In the night of 3 to 4 Fructidor, Year IX—which Champagnac dates to August 22, 1801—fire broke out in a covered hall within the commune of Mahéru, in the department of the Orne. It was the property of one Louée, who had acquired it from Besnou. Between the vendor and the purchaser, several lawsuits had engendered an enmity well known to the inhabitants. The earliest rumor attributed the flames to crime; the quarrel soon gave a countenance to this suspicion.
On 6 Fructidor, the justice of the peace repaired to the site to establish the offense and receive depositions. Louée stated that the fire had caught between ten and a quarter past ten o'clock, though he could not say who had set it. Three persons arriving from the environs of Soligny affirmed that, a moment earlier, they had seen a woman walking from Sainte-Goburge toward the market hall. Her apron appeared white to them; beneath it, she seemed to carry fire within a wooden shoe. Louée’s wife offered a similar declaration. In their initial words, these witnesses did not yet name the woman; the inquest would soon draw her likeness toward the wife of Besnou.
The magistrate also learned of the protracted litigations and the threats imputed to the former owner. A witness related that while passing near the village of Moulins, Besnou had pointed to the hall as his property, announcing he would see it burned, even were it to cost him a hundred livres. In the same deposition, his wife was alleged to have answered that she could do it for nothing, having already walked further by the light of the moon. These words, as set down by the deponent, lent the accusation a language wherein domestic resentment was confounded with material proof.
Other depositions were directed against the wife. Some claimed to have recognized Pierre Besnou’s wife in a figure perceived around half-past nine, walking toward Ricordane, where the hall stood. Others maintained they had encountered her in person around ten o'clock, returning toward Sainte-Goburge, clad like the woman seen before the blaze. Thus a path was traced that seemed to unite the village to the smoking ruins. Yet every stage of this route rested upon identifications hazarded in the night, while the family’s name was already compromised by an ancient enmity.
The special court declared itself competent. On 8 Brumaire, Year X, the government commissioner indicted Pierre Besnou and his wife as principals or accomplices in the arson; the pair were brought before the tribunal of Alençon. The man standing in the dock had served as a public officer and merchant. His fellow citizens had long granted him a reputation for probity, and he had only recently been deemed worthy of serving upon a jury. His counsel, Maître Duronceray, set this character against the credit of the prosecution’s witnesses, whom he described as utterly destitute of public esteem.
Counsel did not confine himself to the character of his client. He asked what interest Besnou could possibly have had in destroying a building he still hoped to recover. He had sold it to Thibaut, who had defaulted on the purchase price; Louée held it thereafter. Besnou had obtained judgments against Thibaut and was preparing proceedings to be reinstated in possession. If the law stood ready to restore the property to him, burning the hall would have destroyed the very object of his litigation and ruined his own interests. In the case presented by the defense, the motive advanced by the prosecution contradicted the very measures Besnou had undertaken.
Another pillar of the defense lay in distance. At the hour of the blaze, Besnou was returning from the fair of Guibray. Two witnesses attested that he had passed the night in the commune of Le Bourg and was still there on the morning of 4 Fructidor, nine leagues from Moulins. The alibi did not rest upon his unsupported word; witnesses affirmed they had seen him at the precise place where, according to the defense, he lay while the hall burned. The subsequent inquiries were to demonstrate that topography, interests, and hours carried as much weight as the tales of a woman glimpsed in the twilight.
Duronceray likewise reviewed the ties linking Louée, Besnou, and Thibaut. Louée had been Besnou’s tenant farmer and had left his rent unpaid. Besnou had been obliged to pursue him through the courts and secure a judgment against him upon a promissory note. Against Thibaut, he had obtained three judgments for the purchase price of the market hall. On 17 Vendémiaire, Besnou’s bailiff had appeared at Thibaut’s dwelling to distrain his chattels; on that very day, a warrant of arrest had fallen upon the father. Thibaut had reportedly displayed a brutal joy at this arrest. The persons whose testimony weighed upon the Besnous were themselves embroiled in legal disputes where their interests clashed directly with his.
There remained the allegations leveled against the wife: threatening words and the recognition of a woman near the hall. Duronceray recalled that these depositions emanated chiefly from Louée, Thibaut, Thibaut’s son, and Thibaut’s daughter—persons he characterized as avowed enemies. After ten months of hardship, the trial resulted in the acquittal of both spouses. Besnou and his wife walked forth free; the prosecution had failed to establish that either had set fire to the building.
The matter did not terminate with this judgment. Champagnac reveals that Besnou’s own son had directed the plot against his father. For several years, according to the chronicler, the young man had displayed gross ingratitude, multiplying injuries and vexatious lawsuits. He was said to have seized upon the burning of Louée’s hall to denounce his father as the culprit and to suborn witnesses. Such an assertion does not permit us to affirm that the son set the fire himself; it concerns solely the accusation fabricated against the father and the perjured testimony.
The young man reportedly came to fear the consequences of his scheme. Had his father been condemned to pay court costs and heavy damages, the liability might well have swallowed his entire patrimony. He then persuaded other witnesses to depose before the magistrates regarding new facts—which the chronicle characterizes as false, and which, even had they been true, were unnecessary to establish the father’s innocence. The public prosecutor ordered the arrest of these witnesses and of the suborner himself. A second judicial inquiry was thus opened regarding the proofs that had circulated following the trial of the spouses.
During the preliminary examination of this second docket, the younger Besnou died in prison. Champagnac records that before his death, he rendered full homage to the truth, begging forgiveness of God and of his father for the crime with which he had defiled himself. This confession, as summarized by the author, illuminates the fabrication of the charges against the Besnous; it does not, for all that, designate the incendiary of the hall. He who died was never tried at the conclusion of a public debate that the chronicle might transmit to us. The parents he had sought to ruin had obtained their acquittal.
Besnou had regained his liberty and lost his son. Upon the disputed lands, the market hall was reduced to cinders; the name of the hand that fired it remained forever absent.