An overturned cross, an iron sledgehammer amidst its debris, and, the following evening, an explosion that shattered windowpanes throughout the neighborhood: by these successive signs, the Gazette linked the burglary of a powder magazine to the outrage committed against the prison of Roanne. The fallen stone did not yet yield the name of a man. It merely indicated that the quarry, the Villeret road, and the munitions depot were to converge within a single inquiry.
The account of the hearing of March 24, published on April 2, 1886, opens upon an accused who states his name as Philibert Lagru, twenty and a half years of age, a baker by trade, residing at Roanne, having been born at Perrecy-les-Forges, in Saône-et-Loire. The article does not reiterate the name of the jurisdiction. It first sets forth the facts as framed by the indictment; it is within this accusatory narrative, and not within a sequence of findings that might all be deemed independently proven, that the affair assumes its shape.
On October 15, 1884, towards six o’clock in the morning, Bedouze, a quarryman, and Cartier, the foreman at the Malentras quarry, observed that an ancient stone cross had been thrown down. It had stood at the junction of the quarry lane and the road leading from Roanne to Villeret. Beside the scattered fragments, the two men came upon an iron sledgehammer which they recognized as belonging to the worksite’s powder magazine. The clue appeared modest; yet it carried both material weight and an incontrovertible origin.
Cartier pursued his inspection. The powder magazine, which he had locked with a key the previous evening at six o’clock, stood open. According to the reported indictment, the brick casing enclosing the door had been gouged with a cold chisel; the bolt had been disengaged from its keeper, and the door thereby forced. The malefactors, the chronicle continues, had carried off what remained of the foreman’s supply of dynamite, together with detonator caps and fuse.
Before departing, the perpetrators were said to have partially burned three laborers’ daybooks and inscribed threats and insults upon three leaves torn from a counterfoil register. These papers already shift the axis of the matter: the powder magazine is no longer merely a plundered depot, while the impending explosion has not yet occurred. In the interpretation later advanced by the prosecution, the writing left on the premises supplied not only a motive for the deed, but also a graphic trace that the investigation might collate with other scripts.
On October 16, towards half past ten at night, two or three cartridges of dynamite were laid upon the outer windowsill of the apartment occupied by the chief warden of the Roanne prison. A violent detonation ensued. The concussion shook the neighboring houses and shattered their glass. Within the four rooms of the chief warden’s dwelling, the havoc was considerable: the window bars were wrenched from their masonry and twisted; two iron fragments were hurled with a force emphasized by the report; the furniture of one chamber was utterly splintered and a double partition thrown to the ground. In the adjoining rooms, the furnishings were displaced and overturned.
The chief warden, Thinet, and his wife were not in the parlor where the explosion had wrought its most terrible devastation. Chance had spared them there, though without exempting the entire lodging: Thinet was struck in his bed by falling debris and flying shards of glass. His injuries, the article notes, were not grave. The Gazette offers no dramatic rescue scene, nor does it record words exchanged in the stricken household; it records the distribution of the rooms, the material ruin, and the wound, and this suffices to measure what the night had left in its wake.
The indictment connected the explosive substances employed, the menaces discovered in the magazine, a placard found slipped beneath the prison gate, and an anonymous letter addressed to the examining magistrate. According to this theory, the theft at Villeret had served merely as the preparation for the outrage that followed. The investigation was directed primarily through these various writings. The question was thus not merely who could have procured the dynamite, but how to compare anonymous texts and discover the same hand behind disparate missives.
Suspicion fell belatedly upon Lagru, whose presence in Roanne had not been brought to the attention of the authorities during the preliminary searches. The prosecution depicted him as a man without an active trade in the town and devoid of visible means of support, having arrived from Perrecy in early October, several days before the theft and the explosion. It recalled his prior convictions for diverse offenses. These formulas belong to the adverse portrait drawn by the judicial press; they are not strictly necessary to establish the links that, in the evidentiary record, bound Lagru to the affair.
It was ascertained that he had spent the evening of October 16 in the company of Paul Grand. The two men had first entered the tavern kept by the Remontel spouses around nine o’clock, departed half an hour later, and then returned precipitously at an hour closely coinciding with the explosion. The agitation and demeanor of the pair had attracted notice, according to the recorded depositions. Remontel further asserted that Grand, in Lagru’s presence, had enjoined him to declare, should questions be asked, that neither Lagru nor he had quitted the establishment throughout the entire evening.
This admonition, if faithfully reported, had the potential to transform a drinking den into a contrived alibi rather than a casual port of call. Yet the prosecution itself drew a distinction between the two men: while circumstances cast grave suspicions upon Grand, his guilt was not deemed sufficiently established to commit him for trial before the jury. He was therefore not presented as a convicted accomplice. The trial of Lagru could not absorb that which had not been sustained against his companion.
To these elements, the prosecution added the collation of handwriting. Lagru possessed, according to the text, a relatively correct hand and a signature presenting clear analogies with the anonymous writings seized in the course of the preliminary inquiry. Further examinations were conducted; the handwriting expert established, as related in the indictment, that the register leaves, the annotations upon the placard, and the letter to the magistrate were of identical origin and had all emanated from Lagru. The article portrays this expert testimony as damning evidence. Yet it must be kept in its proper place: the Gazette is reporting the prosecution’s demonstration, before setting down the denials of the accused and the verdict of the jury.
An attempted escape was likewise brought to light during the trial. Lagru was then serving a two-year sentence of imprisonment for theft—a penalty wholly distinct from the dynamite affair. The reported indictment stated that he had heated his iron bedstead rod to redness in the stove of his cell, then bored through his door in several places until he succeeded in forcing it open. A second barrier, that of the corridor, had checked his flight: the same expedient had failed to unseat its locks and padlocks. This scene is not presented as a confession; it forms part of the narrative of facts laid out by the prosecution in court.
Lagru opposed an unyielding denial to the testimony of the numerous witnesses heard. M. Mante, the public prosecutor, delivered a very brief address and demanded an affirmative verdict without extenuating circumstances. Maître Baucandy pleaded for an acquittal on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Between these two positions, the jury was called upon to answer the questions submitted; the chronicle reproduces neither the full depositions nor the internal details of their deliberation.
The verdict returned was affirmative, with the admission of extenuating circumstances. The Court sentenced Lagru to five years of solitary confinement (réclusion) and five years of local banishment (interdiction de séjour). Such was the penalty pronounced in this cause. The account closes the courtroom scene upon a parting phrase attributed to Lagru. Turning toward the spectators, he said: “Farewell, comrades.”
The Gazette had framed the entire inquiry within a chain of physical tokens: the iron near the cross, the breached door, the leaves inscribed with threats, the anonymous writings, the comings and goings at the tavern, and the handwriting analysis. The jury returned an affirmative finding and the sentence followed; the printed pages do not, for all that, surrender every voice or every motive that swayed the deliberation. They leave, above all, a final, fleeting image, abrupt after so many lines devoted to texts and scripts: a condemned man casting to the public an unexplained farewell. It is there, and not in an embellished epilogue, that the chronicle reaches its end.