The sack had drifted upon the pond long enough for the women who came to wash their linen to hesitate before approaching it. In the end, they drew it toward the bank with a pole. Within lay human limbs. They recoiled, summoned the authorities, and the village of Sainte-Marie-la-Blanche learned that a human body had been dismembered before being cast into the water.
These remains lacked a name. For several days, the inquest had nothing before it but severed parts to measure and a pond to drag. The skin bore no certain mark of violence. Four days later, other portions resurfaced in the pool: the right arm, the right leg, and the upper trunk. The lower abdomen, the heart, and the lungs were missing. The fragments offered no means of identifying the deceased woman or establishing the cause of death. Later, the physician estimated her age to be about thirty years.
On the very day of the discovery, the village priest, Jean-Baptiste Delacollonge, had departed his parish without warning his domestic servant. His absences were not unprecedented; he had occasionally been known to withdraw for several weeks. Yet this time, he did not return. The servant, Françoise Bourgeois, grew alarmed at this unexplained departure. In Sainte-Marie, the curate’s place stood empty for nearly a month.
Certain villagers then recalled a woman they had seen at the presbytery. She hailed from Lyon, and Delacollonge had presented her as his cousin. Her name was Fanny Besson, and she earned her bread as a milliner. The magistrates linked her disappearance to the remains recovered from the pond. The vanishing of this woman, combined with the curate’s protracted absence and the coming and going reported near the water, gave direction to the preliminary inquiry. These clues pointed to a probable identity; they did not yet suffice to explain how Fanny had met her death.
On September 30, 1835, Delacollonge was arrested in Lyon upon the quayside of the Rhône, at the very moment he prepared to set out for Geneva. His confessions and the evidence assembled by the examining magistrate established that the body was indeed that of Fanny, that she had died by his hand, and that he had severed and cast her remains into the pond. His flight and admissions illuminated the inquiry; they did not, however, resolve all the dilemmas of the trial.
A Hidden Bond
Fouquier’s narrative traces the matter back to 1820, when Delacollonge served as curate at Saint-Pierre in Lyon. Fanny worked in a millinery shop and had been his penitent. He had advanced her two thousand francs to establish her trade. Their liaison endured through his various changes of post. Following his resignation from the curacy of Saint-Pierre, he obtained the pardon of his superiors and was appointed to Briennon, a living he declined. Thereafter, he taught at the college of Toissey before being named to Neuville.
Upon his appointment to the parish of Sainte-Marie-la-Blanche, Delacollonge was reunited with Fanny. She resided at the presbytery under the guise of a cousin, lodging at times with another woman to dispel gossip. In the course of 1834, she spent some three months there. She was with child. Fouquier relates that she was delivered of an infant at Dijon on February 12, 1835; the child died at birth. Delacollonge had rented lodgings for her under an assumed name, incurring expenses far beyond his means.
At Sainte-Marie, the parishioners paid their priest an annual supplement of one hundred francs and a tithe of wine; the hamlet of Combertot contributed an additional two hundred francs, and the total revenues of the living were estimated at eighteen hundred francs. Notwithstanding this, the expenses occasioned by Fanny weighed heavily upon his purse. The churchwardens later advanced him “some money,” though Fouquier specifies no sum. Later still, two hundred and eighty-five francs were found missing from the sacristy drawer. Delacollonge admitted taking the sum, though the legal import of this taking and the circumstance of breaking and entering were fiercely debated at trial. To the prosecution, this debt and the cost of Fanny’s maintenance laid bare the financial vise in which he was caught. Theft, however, formed a distinct count from that of murder.
In the summer of 1835, Delacollonge summoned Fanny to the presbytery in secret. His servant alerted the mayor. On August 24, following divine service, the mayor warned the priest that he must dismiss his pretended cousin if she were indeed within the parsonage. Delacollonge denied her presence, but the mayor pressed the ill effect such news would produce throughout the parish. The prosecution beheld in this the breaking point: Fanny could not remain, and his means no longer permitted her upkeep elsewhere.
What is known of the evening of August 24 rests in part upon the account given by Delacollonge to the investigators. He related that after the warning, he and Fanny resolved that she should depart at ten o’clock for Beaune, and thence to Chalon. They took supper and waited in the back room. The bedding rested upon a door set across four chairs; a sudden movement broke it down. The servant was asleep and knew nothing of this intended departure.
Delacollonge stated that they spoke of their sorrows, and that he asked her whether he would cause her pain if he tightened his grip upon her neck. He claimed to have pressed harder than he had intended; Fanny raised her hands, cried out in distress, and collapsed when he loosened his hold. He placed her upon a chair. Seeing that she scarce breathed, he gave her absolution, then assured himself of her death. He maintained that he had never intended to kill her. The prosecution, on the contrary, interpreted the circumstances, the chosen hour, and the subsequent concealment as clear marks of premeditated murder.
The following day, according to his own admissions, Delacollonge dismembered the corpse within the presbytery. He declared he had acted thus to avert the scandal of a dead woman in his house and to shield Fanny’s honor. He wrapped the remains in a sack and cast them into the pond before abandoning the village. During a subsequent inspection of the parsonage, Doctor Molin discovered various intestinal portions, the heart, the lungs, and the aorta within the cesspit. Portions of the abdomen, the liver, the uterus, and the organs of generation were missing. Advanced putrefaction prevented any definitive assessment. The cranium was not opened: Molin cited the hazards arising from decomposition; later, Doctors Salle and Rateleau opined that an examination of the brain might have yielded valuable insight. No single sign from the anatomical post-mortem examination proved strangulation or asphyxiation on its own.
The Proceedings
The trial opened before the Côte-d’Or Assize Court at Dijon on March 1, 1836. Fouquier recounts the hearings in a narrative wherein the most appalling material facts stand alongside sharp debate as to what transpired at the precise moment of death. He underscores the throng that packed the courtroom and the contrast between the hostile parishioners and the witnesses from Lyon who came forward for the defense.
The two physicians summoned regarding Fanny did not entirely agree. The available signs did not unequivocally demonstrate strangulation. Certain medical testimonies suggested a fainting fit or a seizure linked to Fanny’s frail health; others concluded that pressure upon the neck had produced or hastened her death. The defense leaned upon the absence of contusions and the seizures from which Fanny was said to have suffered. The prosecution emphasized that Delacollonge had himself confessed to constricting her throat, and that the corpse had been concealed rather than summon help.
The indictment was a construct of the prosecution, not a neutral chronicle. It ascribed to the priest a deliberate design formed following the mayor’s admonition, dwelling upon his preparations. In court, defense counsel argued for an accidental death followed by concealment born of the terror of disgrace. Fouquier records the pleas in the dramatic rhetoric of his era; their arguments must be attributed solely to the advocates who uttered them.
The trial drew so great a crowd that the public gallery could not contain it. Witnesses spoke of the liaison between Delacollonge and Fanny, her presence at the presbytery, the priest’s flight, the garments recovered, and the churchwardens’ drawer. A locksmith confirmed the mechanism by which the drawer might have been forced. Delacollonge contested the breaking, but did not deny the removal of the two hundred and eighty-five francs.
In his summing-up, President Simerey declared that an acquittal following such solemn debates would amount to “granting impunity”; Fouquier records no instruction regarding reasonable doubt. The jury returned an affirmative verdict as to voluntary homicide, but rejected premeditation. They likewise found him guilty of theft with breaking and entering; mitigating circumstances were granted on this latter count alone. The court condemned Delacollonge to hard labor for life and to the pillory, though Fouquier omits the duration of this public exposure. The verdict fixed the guilt found by the jurors; it could not transform every detail of Fanny’s final agony into medical certainty.
The printed record had begun with a sack in a pond and an unknown identity. It concluded before a high court, with a verdict that severed the taking of life from the question of unlawful entry. In the interim, Fanny Besson had been termed in turn cousin, penitent, mistress, and victim. The law restored her name, yet the voice that reaches us remains that of magistrates, witnesses, and chroniclers. Fouquier, writing in 1859, framed the trial within a moral homily that must not be confounded with the judicial decree. Fanny offered no direct testimony in the report. The few words attributed to her—particularly regarding a departure or dying together—are reported solely through Delacollonge’s version of events; they constitute no independent witness of her own.