To prove he had not murdered his wife, Claude Vuillaume could name the prison in which he lay, the warden who had locked him in, and the men with whom he had passed the night. One might have thought such a defence singular enough to be verified before all else. Yet it spared him neither months of detention, nor a verdict of guilty, nor the sentence of death. In this affair, the walls of a gaol proved less unyielding than the talk of a village.
Vuillaume was working as a farmhand at Bulligny, near Toul, when he married Madeleine Poirot, widow of Maurice Dally. He was twenty-two years of age; she was past forty and raising two children from her first marriage. The property she enjoyed, held in part for her children, brought to the household an ease the young man had never known. Champagnac, who related their history in 1833, drew from this disparity in years and fortune an almost inevitable explanation for their misfortunes. That judgment belongs to the chronicler. The facts he records show above all a union that turned contentious after the birth of a child between them.
Madeleine complained of her husband’s conduct and contemplated a judicial separation. He favoured a divorce, which she refused. The neighbours were well aware of their quarrels; they would remember them when the investigators came to inquire. Discord can fill many a conversation before it ever fills a judicial dossier. It supplies phrases that are repeated, intentions that are assumed, and at times an explanation one imagines already possessed when some new event occurs. Here, death was to transform the grievances of a living woman into testimony against an absent man.
On 31 January 1809, the correctional tribunal of Toul sentenced Vuillaume to three days’ imprisonment for assault. The delay for appeal having expired, he was bound to present himself to undergo his punishment. On the evening of 10 February, he quitted Bulligny and passed the night under his mother’s roof at Crésilles. The following day, accompanied by an inhabitant of the village, he made for Toul. He arrived towards ten o’clock at the small inn kept by Martin, a turnkey at the gaol, and there deposited the smock he carried upon his arm. This garment would assume its own importance in the account of his movements; it remained with the innkeeper throughout his stay behind the walls.
The day was spent in legal formalities. Vuillaume presented himself to the warden, then, accompanied by Gaudeaux, the prison clerk, went to see the bailiff charged with executing the judgment. He paid the costs, called upon his attorney, and returned to Martin’s inn. Several persons thus saw him prior to his entry into the prison, at seven o’clock on the evening of 11 February. After a supper taken with other inmates, a game of cards provoked a dispute. The warden put an end to it and ordered them back to their chambers. Vuillaume was locked up with five men in the room known as the pistole, adjoining the warden’s quarters.
He shared a bed with Jean-Baptiste Boileau; Jean-Baptiste Masson, Charles Gris, Gérard Jacquot, and Charles Maignet occupied the other two. According to the account maintained by his defence, he suffered from pains in his loins, inquired after the hour during the night, and rose before daybreak. Towards six o’clock, he knocked for the chamber to be opened. These are not the movements of an imaginary character fashioned for the needs of an enigma: they are the very circumstances that required confronting with the depositions. The entire case would revolve around that chamber, its door bolted from without, and the men who could swear to when it had been opened.
At Bulligny, meanwhile, Madeleine had spent the evening of 11 February in a neighbouring house. She returned home towards eleven o’clock with her daughter, Barbe Dally. The young girl went to bed and fell asleep without hearing any untoward noise. In the morning, she did not find her mother by her side. A search was made. A bonnet glimpsed floating in the water of a neighbouring well led to the discovery of her body. A wound upon the neck gave rise to the suspicion of murder. The physician charged with the examination considered, however, that this wound had not reached the deep-seated organs, and attributed the death to drowning. A stained knife and traces of blood were likewise noted in the house.
The original chapter bears a heading that treats suicide as an established fact. In the details provided to us, we find the medical opinion, the traces discovered, and, later, the thesis advanced by the advocate; we do not possess the complete depositions to determine the circumstances of her death for ourselves. What may be traced without filling those silences is the course of suspicion. The couple’s disputes were notorious; the husband’s presence in Toul was not yet generally known. The mayor demanded that proceedings be instituted against Vuillaume. Before the alibi had even been examined, a name had thus been fixed at the head of the accusation.
The tidings reached the prison on 12 February. Vuillaume was permitted to return home. On the road, he learned that the village was naming him as the murderer; he halted among his kin at Crésilles and did not proceed to Bulligny until the morrow, accompanied by two relatives. A guard denied him entry to his house. Presently, a gendarme arrived to take him into custody. Before the magistrate, he pleaded his night in the gaol at Toul. The preliminary examination nevertheless dragged on for the ensuing months. More than seventy witnesses were heard; many of their statements rehearsed Madeleine’s old grievances or alleged encounters upon the highway.
The most formidable depositions came from two men who had slept in the same chamber as he. Boileau, initially favourable to Vuillaume, subsequently declared that the prisoner had left the room during the night. Masson went further: according to his account, Vuillaume had never retired to bed at all, someone having unbolted the door for him between ten and eleven o’clock; he had supposedly returned only at daybreak. The two versions did not agree. Three other prisoners claimed to have heard an outer door open towards four o’clock. Such statements might support the hypothesis of an egress; they also demanded a rigorous comparison of the hours, the points of entry, and the declarations of the other occupants.
The indictment was admitted on 10 May. Vuillaume fell ill during his confinement; the record shows him being carried to an interrogation to which his fever prevented him from replying. The trial opened on 16 July before the criminal court of Nancy and lasted three days. Sixty-four witnesses for the prosecution were heard. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and the court pronounced the death penalty. A multitude of voices had carried a conviction which, in the view of his advocate, the internal contradictions ought to have precluded. The prison had initially been his alibi; it was now the place where he awaited the outcome of an appeal upon which his life depended.
His counsel, Bresson, published a legal memorial to sustain this alibi and contest the very occurrence of a murder. Champagnac attributes a decisive role in the hostile depositions to Habémont, the deputy mayor and an adversary of Vuillaume ever since a dispute regarding the property of the Dally children. He accuses him of suborning Boileau and Masson. We must leave this charge to the chronicle that reports it: it furnishes neither a judgment against the deputy mayor nor any separate proceedings for perjury. It is not necessary to pass retrospective sentence upon him to perceive the peril of an accusation nourished by shifting testimonies.
On 7 September 1809, the supreme appellate court quashed the judgment for a procedural defect and remitted the cause to Metz. This annulment did not yet constitute an acquittal: it opened the way to a new trial. That second trial concluded with a unanimous verdict from the jury in Vuillaume’s favour, and the court pronounced his discharge upon acquittal. Champagnac does not record the date. Madeleine was dead; her husband had escaped the scaffold. From those months of legal process there remains a question of terrible simplicity: how many witnesses must be heard before someone inspects a door that is sworn to have been locked?