Two neighbouring addresses—one attested by the witnesses, the other maintained by the cabman—formed the first tangled knot of the Horiot affair. The conveyance had departed the Rue des Haies with a stricken furniture merchant inside; the driver maintained that upon reaching the Rue Doudeauville, he found his cab empty. Eight days later, the passenger expired at the hospital. Between these two occurrences, the law was compelled to weigh a prior fall, wounds upon which the medical examiners could not fully agree, a bedside confrontation, and the driver’s shifting narrative.
Julien-Augustin Horiot stood trial on June 15, 1874, before the Seine Assize Court, presided over by M. Dumas. The Gazette des Tribunaux described him as a hackney coachman of some fifty years, a native of Vicq in the Haute-Marne, residing on Boulevard Soult. The headline of the court report announced an indictment for murder and robbery, coupled with a subsidiary charge of assault and battery. It was this divergence between the principal indictment and the charge ultimately retained that decided the outcome of the trial.
On March 14, Selosse had called upon the cabinetmaker Poulain in the Rue des Haies to discuss an order of furniture. They also met with Poirier, a wine merchant, and another tradesman. Poulain and several witnesses testified that Selosse had partaken very sparingly of drink. Towards seven in the evening, as he prepared to return home, he leaned against a kitchen door that had remained ajar; the door yielded, and he fell backward. He suffered a slight injury to the occiput and swooned away for a few minutes. Upon recovering his senses, he remained far too feeble to make the journey on foot.
Young Barat was dispatched to fetch a carriage from the rank on Boulevard de Picpus. Horiot, having initially refused to convey a man described to him as indisposed or intoxicated, ultimately consented. At the bar, he explained that he had been waiting for several hours and seized the opportunity to earn the fare. The presiding judge inquired whether Barat had added that the traveller was an established merchant and that he “had the purse.” Horiot denied that any such words had been uttered. Barat, for his part, affirmed that he had made clear Selosse was a furniture merchant who would pay his reckoning; he confirmed that Horiot had hailed him back after his initial refusal.
Poulain testified that Selosse had himself given the address: Rue Jean-Robert, No. 6 bis. His son reportedly repeated it to the driver, and Barat, who accompanied the traveller, confirmed having heard it. Horiot insisted, to the contrary, that he had understood “Rue Doudeauville, No. 6 bis, near the old town hall of La Chapelle.” He protested that the name of the Rue Jean-Robert had never reached his ears. Yet this very version brought him to within a stone’s throw of Selosse’s home. Under the president’s questioning, he reiterated that he would gladly have set the passenger down at his very door had he comprehended the true address.
Toward ten o'clock, police constables Brenot and Bisson came upon Selosse lying upon the pavement of Boulevard Ménilmontant, opposite the wall of the Père-Lachaise cemetery. He was bathed in blood and incapable of speech. The officers carried him to the station house, where they discovered upon his person neither money nor purse, but merely a pocketbook and a handkerchief. Horiot claimed to have discovered the absence of his fare only upon pulling up in the Rue Doudeauville. He never presented himself at the house in the Rue Jean-Robert to claim his hire.
The account he rendered to Homais, a fruiterer and wine dealer, was instantly disputed. Horiot declared to him that his fare had vanished from the carriage, complaining that he had once again been “done.” Homais remarked that both doors were shut fast; he could not conceive how a man could have made his exit. Horiot made no mention then of the passer-by who, according to his subsequent version, had supposedly closed the right-hand door on Boulevard de la Villette. He later hazarded that Selosse might have tumbled from the vehicle or fled unseen. Yet the body had been discovered on the left side of his route, whereas he alleged that the right-hand door had been opened.
The prosecution contended that this disappearance bore no hallmarks of an accidental fall. It submitted that the driver had pulled his carriage up in a desolate spot, demanded fifty francs of his fare, and upon refusal, struck him down and cast him upon the curb before rifling his pockets. The chronicle records that during his first days in hospital, Selosse periodically murmured words such as “murdering me for fifty francs.” These utterances, gathered by witnesses whenever his delirium subsided, fed the charge of robbery; yet of themselves they did not prove that any sum had in fact been purloined.
The injuries formed the nexus of a debate far less straightforward than the journal’s title implied. Dr. Blandet, who examined Selosse on the morrow, noted numerous contusions about the face and head, a fractured rib, and marks upon the back and hands. In his judgment, such trauma could scarcely be accounted for by a mere fall from the carriage. Selosse succumbed on March 22. At the autopsy, Doctors Tardieu and Laugier established an extensive fracture of the cranial base, cerebral contusions, and suppurative meningoencephalitis, the dire consequence of the fracture.
At the trial, Dr. Laugier introduced a capital distinction. He deemed that the lesions upon the back, the scalp wound, and the skull fracture itself might well accord with a violent fall backward. Conversely, he found it difficult not to perceive in the profusion of facial wounds, the ecchymoses on the neck, and the marks upon the right hand the unmistakable traces of blows; these injuries, he specified, had not caused death. Dr. Blandet declined to believe that one and the same fall could simultaneously strike the occiput and the sacral region. The physicians thus concurred as to the mortal cause, but their deliberations left open the precise manner in which the totality of the wounds had been inflicted.
At the hospital, Selosse was initially unable to answer inquiries. His wife, Félicité-Rosalie, related that he had departed home on the morning of March 14 carrying very little money, it being his custom never to carry large sums. When she saw him again, he gasped in broken fragments: “Driver! driver! thrown…” Fellow patients and hospital attendants recounted similar phrases. Police Commissioner Baron declared that on March 19, during a confrontation, Selosse first recognised him, then identified Horiot, answering that the latter had struck him. The dying man added: “If it is not thee, so much the better for thee”—a phrasing whose sense remained ambiguous, yet which the prosecution seized upon as a positive identification.
Horiot contested this confrontation. He declared that the commissioner had framed the questions and supplied the answers all at once; other witnesses present testified to hearing Selosse answer distinctly. Horiot likewise maintained that he had failed to hear the patient’s words on account of his hard hearing. Upon his arrest, he admitted to having conveyed the passenger, whom he branded a “scoundrel,” but denied having laid a finger upon him. A warder testified that following the confrontation Horiot had flown into a rage, declaring that he would slit his own throat that very evening; the prisoner gave a different version of the words, denying that they constituted any confession.
Testimony regarding Horiot’s past conduct was likewise laid before the court. Former masters described him as brutal, menacing, or frequently under the influence of drink; other depositions were less damaging, and one former employer did not corroborate that Horiot had mentioned the vanished fare that evening. An anonymous letter alleged that Selosse had been injured on the premises of the furniture dealers, who supposedly sought to shield Poirier. The presiding judge observed that the judicial inquiry had reduced this theory to its proper, negligible proportions. These character references and hypotheses were admitted into the debates; they were not to be confounded with the clinical findings of the physicians nor the utterances attributed to the victim.
Following the examination of the witnesses, the presiding judge announced that the subsidiary question of assault and battery resulting in death without intent to murder would be submitted to the jury. The Advocate General pressed the indictment under this narrowed qualification; Maître Jules Fabre addressed the court for the defence. After a quarter of an hour’s deliberation, the jury answered the principal counts of murder and robbery in the negative, returning an affirmative verdict solely upon the subsidiary charge. The court sentenced Horiot to seven years’ penal servitude.
Such was the outcome chronicled by the Gazette: not a judicial affirmation of murder and robbery as framed by the indictment, but a conviction for acts of violence occasioning death without the intent to kill. The fracture of the cranium had slain Selosse; whether it had been sustained by a fall or by blows remained forever contested. The victim’s parting words and the contusions upon his face weighed heavily in the balance of the debates, yet the jury rejected the gravest classifications. It is this very distinction that must be preserved, for therein lies the true measure of the verdict.
Documentary note: Contemporary account of the session of June 15, 1874, published in the Gazette des Tribunaux of June 15–16, pp. 571–573. The charges of robbery and willful murder are attributed to the prosecution; medical findings, the utterances of Selosse, and the denials of Horiot are recorded from witness testimony. The jury dismissed the primary counts and retained exclusively the subsidiary charge of fatal violence without intent to cause death.