In Jonquières, Pierre-Auguste Jean made the rounds of the cafés, paying for each drink with a twenty-franc note. A resident of Sorgues, he carried several of them, and this very abundance soon aroused suspicion. The mayor inspected the paper and pronounced the notes counterfeit. Their bearer, Pierre-Auguste Jean, was not slow to confess that he was acting on behalf of Villon and Rolland. The journalistic account places this occurrence on Sunday, the 27th of July, without specifying the year in that sentence. It reveals, however, the thread that would lead magistrates from a suspicious piece of paper to a printing press moved secretly from one dwelling to another.
Jean was by no means the sole intermediary. In the days preceding, a young boy of his kin had, according to the indictment, carried notes into neighboring communes. Villon and Rolland had fled their Avignon lodgings mere hours before justice knocked at their door on the 28th of July. That very evening, police agents arrested Léontine Bouyac, Villon’s common-law companion, just as she returned home. Her initial admissions were fragmentary. Soon, however, Coulomb spoke to the examining magistrate; Bouyac, in turn, confessed that she had concealed part of the truth. These revelations, together with judicial confrontations, swiftly brought the authorities to Raymondi and the Arnould couple.
Ten individuals stood trial before the Assize Court of Vaucluse during the hearings of the 29th, 30th, and 31st of January. Jean-Joseph-Dorothée Villon, a baker by trade, occupied the center of the prosecution’s narrative, but the manufacture and circulation implicated several members of his circle: Rolland, Raymondi, Arnould, Coulomb, the lithographer Bedel, Jean, Bouyac, as well as the wives of Raymondi and Arnould. The trades and family ties enumerated in the gazette do not suffice to fix the exact culpability of each party; the bill of indictment, the confrontations, and the witness testimonies supplied the necessary distinctions, which the jury’s verdict was ultimately to resolve.
According to the bill of indictment, Villon had conceived the scheme of printing twenty-franc notes roughly a year earlier. The account attributes to him dreams of rapid fortune and the means to indulge his tastes; such a depiction belongs to the narrative of the prosecution. He sought to learn the lithographic craft. Under the pretext of purchasing ink or paper, he frequented printeries and solicited advice from workmen, offering handsome sums to anyone who would initiate him into the mysteries of the trade. The enterprise did not spring up within an already equipped clandestine workshop: stones had to be bought, a press discovered, hauled across the countryside, tested, abandoned in failure, and taken up anew.
Villon first attempted to engrave the impression of a banknote with the assistance of Bedel and Raymondi. He was also alleged to have acted in concert with Rolland, Coulomb, Bouyac, and the Arnoulds. Bedel approached one Joseph Bexia, who refused to take part. A press was purchased for three hundred francs from Delmas, Bedel’s employer, and transported to Châteauneuf-de-Gadagne by Villon, Bedel, and Bouyac. A man named Rossignol had helped to bear the burden; once he was dismissed, Villon and Bedel attempted several impressions. They proved wholly unavailing. A few days later, the apparatus was brought back to Avignon and sold off to one Dubois for fifty francs.
Failure did not extinguish the enterprise. Armed with funds supplied by Rolland and Raymondi, Villon bought the press back for seventy francs. It was set up first on the second floor, and subsequently on the third floor of the Raymondi residence. On this occasion, the defendants reportedly gathered the requisite materials and participated in the printing. The expert from the Bank of France, commissioned to examine the notes, concluded that the impression was far from perfect. A preliminary run of one side represented a face value of twenty-one thousand francs; once both recto and verso were completed, the notes deemed sufficiently passable amounted to no more than roughly seven thousand francs. The expert noted some three hundred and fifty banknotes. These nominal sums, however, indicate neither what was spent in the undertaking nor what the accused actually realized from their circulation.
The distribution of the spoils, as set forth in the indictment, illustrates the internal arrangements of the band. Villon, his companion, Rolland, Coulomb, the Raymondis, and the Arnoulds divided the notes among themselves. A remainder of six hundred francs was left over; Raymondi took three hundred francs to recoup his advances, and Villon retained the balance. The press was subsequently sold a second time to Dubois. Thus, the very instrument of the crime passed through several hands, while the false currency was dispersed toward multiple towns and shops.
Coulomb uttered notes across several localities, most notably in Tarascon, where Rolland stood guard outside while he entered the shops. They later handed fifty francs over to Villon as his share of the converted funds. The wives of Raymondi and Arnould attempted to pass notes in Nîmes; three shopkeepers scrutinized the paper, and the refusal of the third sent the women hurrying back to Avignon. Arnould’s wife reportedly passed others within the city, occasionally employing an unsuspecting third party. Near Montfavet, she bade a fifteen-year-old girl buy bread with a twenty-franc note, enjoining her strictly not to name the person who had given it to her. Several shopkeepers testified to having received counterfeit notes directly from the Arnould couple.
The scheme extended even to the Avignon railway station. Arnould admitted to having asked a traveler to change a twenty-franc note; the traveler refused, deeming it counterfeit. In Sorgues, Villon and Rolland entrusted notes to Jean and his young son, directing them to exchange the currency in surrounding villages. Jean’s arrest abruptly shattered this network. Upon learning of it, Coulomb and Rolland, according to the prosecution, hastened to cast into the Rhône the lithographic stones used for the printing. Dredging operations failed to recover them. A number of banknotes were impounded, but many remained unaccounted for; certain defendants asserted that these had been burned or buried in the earth.
The preliminary investigation did not assign an identical degree of culpability to all. Villon did not deny the acts laid to his charge, but endeavored to cast the heaviest responsibility upon the Raymondis, whom he branded the true instigators of the conspiracy. Rolland denied active participation, while conceding several material circumstances brought to light by the inquiries. Jean maintained that he was entirely ignorant of the illicit origin of the notes; Villon and Rolland claimed, to the contrary, that he was fully aware of their spurious nature and that a bounty of fifty francs had been promised him. The chronicle notes that at the moment of his arrest he hastily swallowed a piece of paper—an act interpreted by the reporter as an attempt to destroy incriminating notes. Bedel rejected all charges. The Arnould couple persisted in their denials; the account also notes that a magistrate overheard Raymondi urging Arnould to confess. These allegations emanate from the preliminary inquiry and the accusations of co-defendants; they are not all to be received as independent judicial findings.
Nearly seventy witnesses were heard. Alfred Soubet, an official of the Bank of France, delivered an exposition on the manufacture of banknotes; the journal observes that while the technical details of his deposition were withheld from publication, the Court and jury followed them with great attentiveness. The first two days were occupied with witness testimony, and the third with argument. The prosecution was conducted by Deputy Procureur Chamontain; the defense succeeded in submitting the question of legal excuse by reason of disclosures made during the proceedings. The jury admitted this statutory mitigation in favor of Coulomb, but rejected it for Bouyac.
Following deliberation, Bedel and Jean were acquitted. Coulomb was granted judicial absolution, while being placed under police surveillance for the remainder of his life. Villon and Raymondi were sentenced to hard labor for life; Rolland and Arnould to twelve years of hard labor. The wives of Raymondi and Arnould each received seven years of solitary confinement, and Bouyac five years. The jury had accorded extenuating circumstances to several of the convicted parties, but withheld them from Villon and Raymondi. The documentary source does not record every question put to the jury; it preserves, nonetheless, a clear distinction between the mechanical apparatus of the crime, the network of agents who sought to pass the notes, and the ultimate penalties decreed by the law.
Documentary Note: Gazette des Tribunaux, no. 14599, 9 April 1874, p. 342, report of the hearings of 29–31 January. The date of the opening episode is rendered in the original article as “Sunday 27 July last”; the text elsewhere mentions occurrences in July 1873 without resolving every chronological ambiguity. Individual roles, charges, and reported statements are attributed to the source; the final verdict and sentences are distinguished from preliminary suspicions and the mutual recriminations of co-defendants.