By the time Marie-Joseph Chassagnette appeared alone before the Puy-de-Dôme Court of Assizes, his account of his brother’s death had already shifted twice. He had initially spoken of a shot fired in self-defence; later, he had alleged suicide. Between these two recitals, a body had been disinterred from an earthen mound, and his mother, committed alongside him to the bar of justice, had died before the trial could open.
The session of 27 May opened with the calling of the accused, a young man of twenty-seven, whose mild and agreeable countenance, according to the Gazette, prepossessed the court in his favour. His mother, Marie Vacquand, widow Chassagnette, was no longer there to be heard by the jurors. She had passed away a few days earlier in an asylum for the alienated at Clermont. The gazette suggested that remorse, or perhaps the mortal dread of capital punishment, had unhinged her reason; such, at least, was the chronicler’s conjecture. A judicial order had severed the indictments, leaving only the younger son upon the prisoner’s bench.
The bill of indictment set the scene in the village of Cluzel, within the commune of Saint-Maurice. The mother dwelt there with three children: Joseph, the eldest, aged thirty; Marie-Joseph; and their sister, a girl of sixteen. The Gazette portrayed Joseph as a simpleton of unsound mind, yet universally deemed harmless; he worked but little and remained a burden upon his household. The journal likewise recounted the privations he was made to endure, and the acts of violence visited upon him by his brother. The mother, according to the cited witnesses, made no secret of her aversion, frequently declaring that Joseph’s death would be no great loss. She was even said to have remarked to Marie-Joseph: “If you were to kill him, we should at last be rid of him!”
Yet these words stood in stark opposition to other utterances attributed to the son. Marie-Joseph had remarked to one witness that he must needs leave his brother if the latter remained, so intolerable had life become; to others, he had announced his intention of quitting the country, adding that his mother might well play him some foul turn. He was thus depicted both as subservient to her will and as a man capable of menacing Joseph. The report did not resolve this contradiction, leaving it at the very heart of the affair.
On 28 January, the gendarmerie of Pionsat learned that Joseph had been missing for several days. The gendarmes questioned Marie-Joseph at Cluzel without initially eliciting any precise information. That very evening, however, he presented himself at their barracks and declared that, on 18 January, towards half-past four in the afternoon, he had been working with his brother in the meadow of Les Trémouilles while their mother was tending the sheep. According to this initial narrative, Joseph had struck their mother, then turned upon him, felled him to the earth, and seized him by the throat. Marie-Joseph claimed that he had thereupon discharged a pistol in self-defence, the ball striking his brother in the mouth. He expressed remorse, while laying the instigation of the deed at his mother’s door, and related how he had buried the body in the meadow with her assistance.
Marie Vacquand gave a wholly different version. She placed the event at midday, rather than at half-past four; her son, she asserted, had been struck with a shovel. The weapon, she said, had discharged accidentally during the scuffle. The two accounts were thus at complete variance regarding the hour, the nature of the assault, and the intention behind the shot. There remained, moreover, the need to explain why the corpse had been concealed underground, while the family had circulated the rumour of a robbery and flight.
The judicial inquiry failed to corroborate the portrait of a violent brother advanced by the two accused. Several witnesses had seen Joseph labouring peacefully beside Marie-Joseph on the day of his death; the younger brother had made him dig the very trench into which his remains were subsequently lowered. Nor had the mother been tending the flock; that task had been entrusted to her daughter. A witness, the girl Salpointe, testified that she had heard Marie Vacquand shouting in the direction of Les Trémouilles: “Go on, kill him then, and we shall hear no more of it!” The chronicler concluded that the post-mortem examination had utterly demolished the system of defence set up by mother and son.
The body had been discovered in an earthen mound, some fifty centimetres beneath the soil. It bore no outward signs of violence, and the lips remained intact; yet four teeth had been shattered by the muzzle of the weapon. The discharge had taken place within the mouth; the gums were neither bruised nor blackened by powder, and two small wounds marked the palate, one of which penetrated through to the cranium. The report drew a precise inference from these findings: the barrel had been forcibly thrust between the lips. It noted, moreover, that the musket carried afield by Marie-Joseph had been recovered at his dwelling; the only pistol in his possession was broken and unserviceable.
To account for the disappearance, mother and son had broken open the chest wherein Marie-Joseph kept his savings, contriving the semblance of a theft imputed to Joseph. This staged burglary cast the dead brother in the role of a thief and was intended to avert suspicion from the clandestine burial. Yet, in the days following the crime, the younger brother could not always dissemble his disquietude. A few days later, when asked by a witness why he appeared so downcast, he was said to have answered: “It is my mother who has brought me into this evil pass; I have good cause to be sorrowful.” Then, during the final interrogation of the preliminary examination, he contended that Joseph had taken his own life with a musket. The Gazette reported that his mother contradicted this explanation, and that both the investigation and the nature of the wounds gave it the lie; the secret burial, too, rendered the hypothesis of suicide scarcely tenable.
At the trial, Marie-Joseph abandoned this latter version and returned to his original account, substituting, however, a musket for the pistol. He maintained that there had been provocation, whether arising from blows struck against his mother or from the threats he claimed to have endured. The presiding judge confronted him with the utter improbability of such a defence. The justice of the peace of Pionsat laid before the jurors the plan of the locality and the initial findings; Dr Aguilhon, for his part, diverged from the prosecution’s theory regarding the weapon. In his judgment, four shattered teeth—two above and two below—corresponded to the passage of a single-shot pistol; a musket barrel would inevitably have broken far more. Maître Breschard delivered the speech for the defence, after which the president summed up the proceedings.
The jury refused to admit any legal excuse and dismissed the questions of premeditation and provocation. They found Marie-Joseph guilty of intentional homicide, with extenuating circumstances. The Court sentenced him to twelve years of penal servitude, exempt from police surveillance. This adjudication did not pass judgment upon Marie Vacquand: having died before the trial, she was neither heard by the jury nor condemned by their verdict. In that household where the mother’s voice had been depicted as an incitement to bloodshed, the responsibility of the younger son alone was settled by the law.