He had given thought to the dressing of his mistress’s hair. From his prison cell, Louis Anastay requested that care be taken lest she appear dishevelled before the Court of Assizes. The crime had been confessed, the death penalty remained an imminent peril; it was still necessary to avert an unfavourable impression. In this injunction, preserved among the letters published by Raymond Hesse, the former second lieutenant does not resemble a man oblivious to his plight. He understood it well enough to continue orchestrating the figure he would cut.
On the 4th of December 1891, he had slain the Baroness Dellard in Paris, within her apartment on the Boulevard du Temple. He had hoped to lay hands upon securities. The blows struck, he had darted toward the furniture, rifling a wardrobe and a secretaire, yet failing to secure the expected plunder. The visit, devised to extricate him from pecuniary embarrassments, had yielded a corpse without enriching the culprit. The arrival of the servant Delphine Houbre interrupted his search; he wounded her grievously, then took to flight. She survived.
The Baroness was no casual stranger chosen at hazard. She had taken a kindly interest in the young officer; he knew she was to be found alone of an afternoon. This long-standing acquaintance made entry effortless and the deed the more damning. He had no need to force a portal. He had presented a face familiar to the household, suffered the welcome to unfold, and awaited the moment his visit drew to a close. According to Hesse’s narrative, he struck while the elderly lady was showing him to the door.
Money had long deserted Anastay. His earlier missives, penned to comrades, allow one to trace his downward course without the need to contrive a confession on his behalf. At Saint-Cyr, he had studied diligently, dreamed of a cousin, and willingly dispatched modest sentimental sketches of his daily life. Once clear of the Academy, he sought to maintain a station far exceeding his means. One liaison followed another, alongside promissory notes and maturity dates: he remarked himself that old debts served only to engender new ones.
To a friend, he would solicit fifty francs from the very opening lines. Thereupon, he detailed his encounter with Madeleine Gonzalès, a dancer in Lyon, the interventions of his mother with his colonel, and the alternating ruptures and renewals of the intrigue. He knew how to turn a predicament into a pleasing anecdote. This narrative facility helped, perhaps, to stave off the reckoning. Every letter brought forth some incident to justify his current plight; none sufficed to banish the creditors.
Valérie Rey entered his existence in turn. Anastay then described himself as torn between two affections, as though their coexistence sufficed to render him the victim of some romantic complication. He contemplated consolidating his obligations into a single loan. Then the notion of seizing a substantial sum at the Baroness’s residence supplanted the desired credit. He purchased two knives in Lyon and journeyed to Paris. These implements, procured prior to the venture, lent this supposed adventure of passion an altogether deliberate preparation.
The Baroness’s death initiated an inquiry that the fugitive could no longer govern by his narrative alone. Having lingered in the capital, he was arrested on the 24th of December in the Rue de Valois. He denied everything at first, then confessed before the examining magistrate Poncet, the Chief of the Sûreté Goron, and Deputy Gévelot, a relative of the deceased. The household with which he was familiar thus reclaimed its place in the proceedings: the very intimacy that had eased his ingress now rendered his denials impossible to sustain.
At Mazas, he took up the pen once more. In an epistle to Valérie, he insisted upon the constancy of his devotion and fretted chiefly over what she might have learned of his second entanglement. He disparaged Madeleine in order to vindicate himself before the other woman. The expedient was cruel, yet familiar: preserving the better portion of oneself by consigning another to the baser role. He then pictured Valérie recoiling in abhorrence, imploring her to grant him, unto the end, the solace of being beloved.
This correspondence did not betoken an absence of guilt; it manifested a struggle to govern what would endure of him in the eyes of the world. To a friend of the family, he portrayed his deed as a moment wherein passion had mastered reason. To his kindred, he preferred not to dwell upon his confessions, finding them too grievous to recount. He desired that his young cousins remain ignorant of the affair. On the 1st of January 1892, he imagined them gathered beside the hearth, reading his letter and taking pity upon him.
In this tableau, his regrets were reserved first and foremost for the sorrows of his own blood. The Baroness and the wounded servant remained outside the circle. Hesse draws from this a portrait of vanity and callousness; the letters at least bear witness to the distribution of roles. Anastay remains the suffering protagonist, his kinsmen the judges he hopes to soften, his mistresses the readers whose admiration he dreads to forfeit. The murder is no longer recounted from the apartment where a woman breathed her last, but from the cell where he himself risked the scaffold.
He composed literary works as well. He announced verses, a funeral march, and a novel he feared he might leave unfinished. At the Conciergerie, the prattle of his fellow captives unsettled him; he turned one of them—a postal clerk eager to improve his orthography—into a copyist under the pretext of dictation. This trifling subterfuge restored a semblance of lost authority. He could still marshal the labour of another, harbouring the hope that a manuscript might escape the prison walls, even if its author could not.
On the 25th and 26th of February 1892, the Court of Assizes sat in judgment upon him. Henri-Robert undertook his defence. Madeleine appeared, and the chroniclers duly noted her attire, precisely as Anastay had ordained. Yet the contrivance failed to alter the crux of the dossier: a premeditated visit, a murder committed for gain, a second woman assaulted, and subsequent admissions of guilt. Anastay himself demanded the penalty of death; the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, and capital sentence was pronounced. He was executed on the 9th of April 1892, at La Roquette.
He had wished his life to remain legible as a romance, adorned with passions, illusions, and the elegance of its concluding pages. His letters have survived, yet they no longer entirely obey his design. By way of an injunction regarding a coiffure or a projected publication, they inexorably recall the reader to that which he sought to efface: the Baroness seeing a former protégé to the door, and Delphine Houbre stepping back into a house whose trust he had just shattered.