The office door remained bolted. Throughout the rest of the house, shouts echoed, footsteps hurried, and a search was mounted for the man who had just wounded Anne Bachelier; her husband, however, did not appear. The gendarmes knocked. They received only a few indistinct words in reply and were obliged to await the intervention of the deputy mayor before the door was unbarred. That wooden door would weigh almost as heavily as the victim's wounds in the trial to come: the couple’s mutual hatred had long been common knowledge, and the notary’s protracted silence seemed to furnish this longstanding discord with a terrible explanation.
Jean-Charles Burat-Dubois practiced his profession in Saint-Gaultier, in the department of Indre. His matrimonial history had followed convoluted paths that his neighbors had little difficulty recounting. He and Anne Bachelier had divorced following the introduction of divorce into French law; he had remarried, obtained the dissolution of that second union, and subsequently wed his first wife once more. They had thus returned to each other without ever recovering domestic peace. The law had permitted them to unmake and remake their household; it had not endowed them with the art of enduring it.
Their grievances had long since crossed the domestic threshold. Burat-Dubois had petitioned both the mayor and the imperial prosecutor to secure his wife's arrest. She, for her part, declared that she feared for her life. She had already spoken of a nocturnal attempt upon her person, committed beneath her own roof, by two men, one of whom she believed to be François Patural. This day-laborer bore an unsavory reputation throughout the district. The chapter that Champagnac later devoted to the affair records these mutual recriminations; it provides no means to adjudicate each of these earlier accusations independently. Yet they were vividly present in every mind when the night of December 28, 1807, arrived.
Toward eleven o'clock, Anne Bachelier, who had been in bed for some time, heard a disturbance at her bedchamber door. She arose and opened it. The man who seized her was, she swore, that very same Patural whom she had previously denounced. The struggle was violent enough to leave her wounded in the throat, face, and fingers. Nevertheless, she succeeded in thrusting her adversary back into the kitchen and locking him inside. The victim had not waited to be rescued; she had turned the layout of her own home against her assailant.
Her screams drew servants and neighbors to the scene. Yet the kitchen was empty when they moved to apprehend the intruder. An iron bar on the window had been broken; toward the garden, near a balustrade, searchers discovered a handkerchief, a shoe, and linen wrappings stained from a foot injury. These modest articles furnished a far firmer trail than the gossip traded regarding the marriage. Someone had fled, and he had left behind a portion of the gear that enabled him to walk.
It was at this juncture that the husband’s absence became a case within the case. Anne reported that they had called out to him in vain. Burat-Dubois slept in his office; he opened the door only upon the formal summons of the deputy mayor. A singular explanation was attributed to him: having heard the commotion, he had reportedly feared compromising himself by intervening, so notorious was his estrangement from his wife. The chronicler preserves this statement as reported speech. It is essential to leave it in that status: a phrase remembered by witnesses, and not a confession written by his own hand.
Come morning, the gendarmes discovered Patural harbored beneath the rafters of a nearby stable. The notary’s son accompanied the patrol. To the young man’s challenge, the prisoner replied by accusing the father: it was the notary, he claimed, who had let him into the house. The search for a solitary assailant was instantly transformed into a hunt for the instigator. For the son, present at the capture, the captive did not point toward a stranger; in his fall, he dragged down the man whose name the young man bore.
Patural’s initial explanation, however, was far less definitive than it would later become. Before the justice of the peace, he recounted having arrived at Burat-Dubois’s house around six in the evening, having shared a drink with him, and having been concealed in a cabinet so that the women of the household would not see him. Witnesses had observed the two men conversing in a hemp field earlier that day. The notary acknowledged the encounter, but attributed it to certain labor he wished to commission. He denied having any knowledge of Patural’s entry into his house. Thus, an interview admitted by both parties took on entirely divergent meanings depending on who told the tale.
At first, Patural maintained that the notary had confided no criminal scheme to him. To hear him tell it, his only instruction had been to await a favorable moment to depart unseen. He also alleged that Anne had rushed at him, that he had struck no blow, and that she might well have injured herself. Finally, he claimed to have left through the courtyard door. The broken window bar and the discarded linens offered stubborn resistance to this latter assertion: inanimate objects could not answer questions, but they precluded the acceptance of every convenient excuse.
Then the prisoner announced fresh revelations. He now formally accused Burat-Dubois of having promised him one hundred écus to strangle his wife. The examining magistrate noted that the prisoner appeared near-intoxicated; Patural insisted he was fully conscious of the gravity of his words. On the following day, he repeated them, adding that wine had been given to him to stiffen his resolve. This new deposition finally supplied the premeditated design and the price that had been missing from his previous accounts. It supplied them, however, through the mouth of the very man who had previously denied the existence of any criminal command.
The courts were left to choose what credit to grant these shifting narratives. The household’s poisoned reputation, the conversation in the hemp field, the belatedly opened door, and the laborer's accusation formed a formidable body of circumstantial guilt against the husband. On June 19, 1808, the criminal court of Indre sentenced Burat-Dubois to death. Patural was acquitted. Such is the startling outcome recorded in the annals: the man whom Anne had identified as her physical assailant escaped punishment, while the husband was condemned for the unseen role attributed to him behind the attack.
The notary appealed to the Court of Cassation and obtained the annulment of his conviction. He was retried before the court at Tours. The chronicle summarizes Patural’s procedural fate somewhat unclearly; it is, on the other hand, explicit on one crucial point: Burat-Dubois appeared alone at the retrial. His defense counsel steered the debate back to what legally required proof. A conjugal quarrel was not a contract to murder. Even the precise nature of the assault, presented as an attempted assassination, required examination before one could look for an instigator.
Counsel also reconstructed his client’s evening. According to the defense recorded by Champagnac, the notary had received the bailiff Beauduit, had subsequently visited Beauduit's home, and had played with his children. Before retiring, he had reportedly looked in on Anne's bedchamber, banked her fire as was his custom, and bid her good evening. These mundane acts read no deeper into his conscience than his delay in answering his door. They did, however, introduce into the record an alternate sequence of facts—one that the presumption of premeditated murder could no longer comfortably assimilate.
On December 18, 1808, the jury returned a unanimous verdict: an assault committed with intent to kill had not been established. Burat-Dubois was acquitted. Champagnac concluded from this that Patural had come merely to steal, and had exploited the spouses' bitter enmity to fabricate his accusation. This remains the chronicler’s deduction, distinct from the legal verdict of the jurors. The record permits neither the definitive reconstruction of a theft nor any certainty as to what became of the marriage thereafter. Anne had been wounded; her husband had been condemned, and subsequently cleared. Between these established facts remained the vast gulf that the first court had rashly believed it could leap: the divide that separates an unhappy home from a commissioned assassination.