At the court of assizes of Finistère, the prosecution had produced an indictment so voluminous that the report in the Gazette des Tribunaux declined to offer even a summary. From this act of accusation, the journal retained two figures that measured entirely different things: seventy-five distinct charges and one hundred and seventy-eight questions prepared for the jury. The former enumerated the alleged offenses; the latter, the queries the jurors were bound to answer. Yet at the conclusion of prolonged and frequently adjourned proceedings, a negative verdict was to be delivered in mere words: Bellamy was acquitted.
The proceedings commenced on May 19, 1885, and were to endure until the 29th. Bellamy appeared in court following roughly seventeen months of preventive detention. He was still a practicing notary at the hour of his arrest. The chronicle portrays him as a former mayor, a member of the general council, sixty-four years of age, and the father of a numerous family. It nowhere mentions his Christian name. This absence of personal detail stands in stark contrast to the sheer volume of the case file: deeds, ledgers, interrogatories, depositions, and the disputes of expert accountants formed a body of material the journal judged too vast to reproduce.
The indictment charged the notary with five counts of forgery of authentic public acts, two counts of forgery of private instruments, and sixty-eight counts of breach of trust. According to the report, it detailed the entrustment of funds or negotiable instruments destined for specific employments: mortgage investments, property purchases, estate sales, the settlement of successions, and other business transactions. The prosecution maintained that sums had been compromised or dissipated, and that chronic disorder in the bookkeeping had permitted this state of affairs to persist. These assertions were the contentions of the public ministry; they constituted no finding of guilt, and the outcome of the trial was to demonstrate the distinction.
A native of Bordeaux, Bellamy had resided in Brest for many years. The journal states that he had earned the esteem and confidence of a substantial clientele, notably comprising naval officers, civil servants of the admiralty, and their families. In Finistère, the proceedings brought forward persons who had entrusted capital to his hands, witnesses who spoke of delays or losses, and others who continued to hold the notary in unswerving trust. The contrast did not resolve into a simple division between accusers and defenders: certain witnesses for the prosecution themselves voiced a continuing belief in his probity, whereas other depositions were enlivened by the bitter recollection of unrecovered funds.
The accounting audits did not reduce this contradiction to any certain figure. The chronicle recounts that the experts had assessed one of the highest creditor accounts at 186,000 francs. M. Guillard, whose account was thus brought into question, contested what he regarded as an exaggeration erroneous in every respect. He declared that he harbored no anxiety whatever regarding his full reimbursement. According to the newspaper, this confidence was mirrored in other depositions. The same report adds that the expert examination could determine the disparity between assets and liabilities only by rough approximation: the figures afforded a scale to the debates, not an exhaustive explanation of each transaction.
Guillard appeared for the defense. He stated that he had known Bellamy for thirty-four or thirty-five years and had always held him in the highest regard. He deemed him utterly incapable of knowingly causing injury to a client, and still less of appropriating the property of another. This testimony did not resolve each separate charge; rather, it served as a reminder that the bonds of trust accumulated over decades around a notarial office carried their own weight in the courtroom. Senator Le Guen, an advocate at the Brest bar for thirty years, voiced a similar conviction. He portrayed the accused as a man who had won trust and goodwill through his personal qualities, while observing that an overburdened practice might well have proved detrimental to his own private interests.
As the hearings advanced, the entrusted sums, their intended allocations, and the ledgers to which they pertained recurred constantly in the examinations. Certain witnesses recounted sums handed over under explicit conditions of investment; others remained persuaded that Bellamy would eventually repay them. The chronicle reveals this line of fracture without turning it into a universal rule. Some deponents grew impassioned or exasperated when recounting the losses and lawsuits they had suffered; others bore witness to an enduring goodwill toward the notary, particularly on the part of persons of modest means. Such appraisals could not supplant documentary evidence or the audit of transactions, but they formed an integral part of the evidence under deliberation.
The proceedings were also marked by an incident concerning a juror. At the outset of the debates, a witness asserted that he had been accosted and insulted the previous evening by one of the jurors on account of his upcoming testimony. The offensive words having been confirmed and the parties heard, the court ordered the challenged juror to be replaced by an alternate. The journal does not recount this episode as evidence against Bellamy; rather, it demonstrates how vulnerable an extensive judicial inquiry could remain to the demands of procedural regularity and the friction engendered within the hall.
The defense was confronted with a two-fold task: to examine one by one the counts detailed in the indictment, and to answer the closing address of the public ministry. Me de Chabre, of the Quimper bar, devoted himself to a methodical study of the elements of the case, from the most minute to the most consequential. Me Demange, of the Paris bar, then answered the arguments of the prosecution. The Gazette records that his reasoning was met with applause, which the presiding judge instantly suppressed. The presence of Bellamy’s three sons upon the prisoner's bench, duly observed by the journalist, lent a poignant family air to these proceedings, though the chronicle records no word from them.
The charges of forgery formed a particular nexus. Following the arguments, the defense maintained that these accusations, having received no substantial development from the prosecution, ought to be regarded as definitively abandoned. The chronicle does not record any formal surrender of the charges; it simply sets forth the position of counsel and the brief exchanges occasioned by the point. At the same time, the prosecution contended that the alleged failures of administration and fraudulent conversions had been able to proceed behind the appearances of substantial wealth and public trust. The distinction between a contested charge, an argument left undeveloped, and a verdict thus remains essential: the article does not furnish the detailed answers of the jury.
After eight hearings, the floor was surrendered to Advocate General Lombard. He retraced the preliminary stages of the affair and the written instruction, then marshaled the facts he proposed to advance as proof of Bellamy’s dishonesty. His address dwelt upon the complaints submitted to the public prosecutor’s office, the accused man's financial distress, and the difficulty of reconciling such a predicament with the honorable reputation he had enjoyed. He concluded that any indulgence granted to a notary risked exacerbating public mistrust toward the entire profession. Such was the argument of the prosecution as recorded by the newspaper; the chronicle does not adopt it as the conclusion of the court.
The defense answered the charges point by point, then returned to dismantle the prosecution’s closing speech. The exchanges were sufficiently brisk for the report to note the animation of the hall and the interpellations between counsel. Toward eight o’clock in the evening, following prolonged deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom. The chronicle links the anxiety of the assembly to the great length and multiplicity of the responses as they were read aloud. Yet it reproduces neither the sequence of answers nor the private reasoning of each juror. It records the outcome, and the outcome alone: the verdict was negative.
The moment the acquittal and the order for immediate release were pronounced, Bellamy’s three sons rushed toward him in tears. Deputy Camescasse, formerly Prefect of Police, stepped forward in turn to the prisoners’ dock to restore to him the insignia of the Legion of Honor, which the accused had laid aside throughout the ordeal. The journal observes that Bellamy had not been stripped of his decoration, but had abstained from wearing it out of propriety. Upon his departure, a vast crowd parted to form a lane and escorted the acquitted man into the street. After one hundred and seventy-eight questions, the printed press retained only this final tableau: weeping sons, a restored decoration, and a man walking forth from the palace of justice a free citizen.