According to the bill of indictment, a trunk of camphor wood had perished in the flames, sundry crates had shifted dwellings, and two costly hats had found their way onto an alien brow. At the hearing, mention was also made of dresses bestowed as gifts and cut down into garments for a child. On the 28th of April, 1874, at the Seine Court of Assizes, the law summoned three individuals to account for this clandestine circulation of property. Anna Finsterer was a lady’s maid; François-Thomas Denis and Jeanne Feutry were concierges. The indictment had joined them; the verdict was to part them.
The affair had begun in the shadow of a far more celebrated name. One Marcariantz, a swindler whose fashionable connections and penchant for diamonds the *Gazette* had recently recalled, was under judicial examination. On the 15th of December, 1873, a search warrant executed in connection with those proceedings led investigators to the room occupied by Finsterer and her husband in the mansion of the Count of Luzarraga, in the Rue de Presbourg. The officers had come seeking the traces of an embezzlement; what they uncovered, according to the indictment, was an abundant household amassed through domestic larceny.
The inventory ran from silverware to lace, from bronzes to trinkets, and from fine linen to wearing apparel. It might almost have sufficed to furnish an entire establishment, provided one refrained from inquiring to whom each piece belonged. Twelve silver place-settings, three beakers, ivory-handled knives, caskets, and medallions: the count identified the greater part of the effects. Other articles were seized in rented rooms in the Rue de Galilée, the Rue des Charbonniers, and the Rue de Tilsitt. The modest household possessed several addresses.
Anna Finsterer had entered the count’s service in 1867. During the proceedings, the presiding judge recalled an absence of six months on the part of her master: she had enjoyed sole access to a private apartment, admitted by a key entrusted to her once a week by the mistress of the house. Confidence had thus taken on a material form—a regular entrée into chambers where the owners did not account for every single trinket. Finsterer admitted the appropriations. When asked what purpose she meant all these goods to serve, her reply was of a singular modesty: she wished merely to set up her own modest household.
The judge pursued his enumeration. Following the watches and rings came a silver goblet, a Leghorn straw hat, and a host of other effects. The count had also rented a depository for certain of his purchases; thither Finsterer had gone in company with the other domestics. The narrative of the prosecution laid bare the opportunities and means of access, while the examination unceasingly pressed the selfsame question: how had a servant-woman succeeded in transferring so vast an array of property from her master’s home into her own?
Her husband no longer sat in the dock. The preliminary investigation had ensnared him as well, but death had claimed him before the trial. His widow insisted that he had remained entirely ignorant of the thefts. Against this defence, the bill of indictment set the goods accumulated in their shared bedchamber, the rents he had allegedly discharged, and the count’s two Panama hats which he had openly worn. It was even asserted that he had laid claim to these hats at the time of the seizure. The judicial gazette preserves these allegations; it records no sentence passed upon the deceased at this bar.
Yet the case file contained an asset that the prosecution could not so readily class among the stolen goods. Bearer securities, representing a value of some sixty thousand francs, had been discovered in the couple’s possession. Finsterer had declared them to be the fruit of her late husband’s labours, their joint economies, and fortunate speculations upon the Bourse. On this point, the indictment conceded that nothing disproved the assertion. Amid an inventory so deeply compromising, this reservation deserves to remain visible: the suspicion that encloses a room does not, by itself, reveal the true provenance of all it contains.
As for the household effects, other identifications reached further into the past. In 1866, prior to entering Luzarraga’s employ, the maid had served General Pedro Rojas of Venezuela. Sundry disappearances had aroused suspicion at that time. Among the seizures of 1873, her former master identified a pillowslip and two napkins bearing his monogram. Finsterer confessed to taking them, yet denied the other larcenies laid to her charge. The embroidered linen had retained its rightful owner far more faithfully than these successive houses had retained their servant.
It remained to determine what the concierges had known and done. In the Rue de Galilée, Denis and Feutry had received Finsterer’s trunks beneath their roof. According to the prosecution, the maid, once apprehended, had exhorted them to conceal the crates. Before the police commissary, they were alleged to have denied that she rented a room in their house, to have broken open certain containers, burned the camphor-wood trunk, and conveyed the remainder to a friend’s dwelling in the Rue des Charbonniers, representing them as parcels destined for the railway. Such was the narrative advanced by the prosecution; their presence before the court did not suffice to transform it into a verdict of guilty.
Denis explained that he had known nothing, at first, of the extent of the maid’s wealth or its origin. He admitted having been alerted by the commissary, and spoke of their subsequent consternation. The judge was little inclined to accept this explanation, remarking that an honest man would have surrendered the goods forthwith. Denis denied having concealed the trunks in order to harbour stolen property. In this exchange, actions were weighed against intent: fear, the desire to shield effects from a search, and knowing complicity in theft were not interchangeable propositions.
Jeanne Feutry was called upon to account for the dresses she had received. Finsterer had reportedly told her they were intended for poor acquaintances; Feutry had kept them to fashion clothes for her daughter. She did not deny the gift. She denied knowing that all the donor possessed was stolen. As for the removal of the trunks, a porter confirmed that he had required the aid of an assistant and a handcart. The eight francs paid for the errand, debated at length before the court, were thus susceptible of an ordinary explanation, rather than serving as the indisputable wage of complicity.
The presiding magistrate asked why she had declared that no property lay within her lodge. Her reply appeared at first irrelevant to the inquiry: she was not married. She then explained that she had wished to avoid being summoned as a witness and forced to state her surname, her Christian names, “and all the rest.” The press report leaves this explanation in all its embarrassed awkwardness. It depicts a woman terrified of having her private condition laid bare; it allows neither the invention of a fuller confession nor the presumption to decide, in the jurors’ stead, the weight of such an apprehension.
The interrogations had dwelt at length upon the private conduct of the accused. Regarding Feutry, the judge produced unfavourable reports, citing neighbours who were said to have rejoiced at her arrest. A witness for the defence, however, offered a starkly different reputation. Chantepie, the proprietor of the building where the two concierges were employed, had known them through the siege of Paris and the Commune. By his account, they had preserved valuable property and prevented pillage at the hands of the insurgents. He had conducted his own inquiries in the neighbourhood, pronounced them well-regarded, and declared himself ready to reinstate them should they be set at liberty.
The same doorway, the same keepers, two portraits. To some, these concierges had abetted the concealment of plunder. To Chantepie, they were individuals who had protected an estate under the most trying circumstances. A soldier named Klein likewise bore favourable testimony concerning Denis. These testimonies did not, by their mere existence, confer universal innocence; they compelled the reader, however, not to mistake the confidence of a prosecutor’s examination for the unanimous truth of the facts.
General Rojas, though regularly subpoenaed, failed to appear. The public prosecutor moved for a penalty on account of his absence, and the court fined him one hundred francs. Then came the closing address of the prosecution, the three pleas for the defence, and the judge’s summary. The jurors returned an affirmative verdict regarding Finsterer, and a negative one regarding Denis and Feutry. The two concierges were acquitted. The lady’s maid was sentenced to ten years’ solitary confinement.
The newspaper does not reveal the inward reasons for this distinction. One cannot impute the acquittal to a single witness, a child’s frock, or the porter’s eight francs. One may, however, observe what the trial leaves behind: confessed thefts, an inventory dispersed across multiple lodgings, an abused trust, and two individuals whom the prosecution failed to convict. The illustrious name of Marcariantz had heralded a fashionable drama. In the end, the decisive scene belonged to a key, a few gifts of clothing, and trunks whose presence each was called upon to explain.