Bouchet returned to the workbenches with an assurance destined to be short-lived. He was going to raise an uproar, he announced; Granet had promised him he would not strike. In the workshop of the Riom central prison, that promise still permitted the illusion that one could smash the lamps, refuse to work, defy the guards, and yet draw the line before bloodshed. Granet was the alias of Barthélemy Cellier. He had a cobbler’s paring knife within arm's reach.
On March 1, 1866, the discontent had begun over pairs of shoes. Work deemed defective had been docked from the prisoners’ earnings. During the afternoon recreation, several convicts had urged one another to protest; when work resumed, the unrest persisted. Martelon, one of the most turbulent, was locked in a cell. Bouchet was brought before the director, then sent back to the workshop. Nothing was yet beyond repair, but the punishment of one man provided the others with yet another reason to revolt.
According to the bill of indictment reprinted in the Gazette des tribunaux, Cellier showed his tool to Bouchet and declared he would strike anyone who tried to lead him away. Bouchet appeared intimidated at first. Following a brief exchange with Cellier, however, he sprang into motion, smashed the oil lamps, and branded as cowards any who continued to work. The collective protest had just found its gesture. Cellier promised to protect the mutineers should any wardens appear.
Principal Warden Lauriat arrived alongside his colleague Souvestre. Cellier turned first upon the latter, whom he loathed; an inmate interposed himself. That obstacle deflected his violence toward Lauriat. Between these two men lay a recent grievance: several days earlier, the warden had denied Cellier access to the infirmary, where a prisoner named Juge was confined. The prosecution linked this errand to an intimacy between the two convicts, which it condemned in the contemptuous language of the period.
Such phrasing appended a supposed infamy to the dossier of a murder. The relationship itself, however, constituted neither the weapon nor the proof of the crime. What mattered in the unfolding of events was the refusal opposed to Cellier and the fury he harbored because of it. In the midst of the chaos, he found himself face to face with the man who had thwarted his will. The workshop brawl offered him an occasion to settle an entirely different score.
He seized two paring knives from his workbench, stepped toward Lauriat, and struck him in the chest. According to the prosecution’s account, the warden was still attempting to placate him. Another inmate, Garnier, who had stepped forward to thwart the assault, received a blow in his turn. He staggered a few paces and collapsed. Lauriat expired shortly thereafter. A man tasked with guarding the prison and an inmate who had intervened had just fallen in the very same workshop, under the very same fury.
The tumult did not subside at once. Cellier continued to utter threats, seeking out other men against whom he nursed grudges; he had to be overpowered. The promise made to Bouchet had lost all meaning. The shoes rejected from the ledger, which had incensed the prisoners merely hours before, now belonged to an entirely different realm of concerns. No one spoke of labor any longer. Two deaths were about to carry the prison’s disorder into an Assize Court.
Cellier was twenty-four years of age. His judicial record already enumerated eleven convictions for theft, vagrancy, acts of violence, and attempted escape. Before the magistrates, this past arrived ahead of him, like an exhaustive indictment from which he could retract not a single word. On May 17, at Riom, Advocate General Massin led the prosecution; Honoré Roux defended the prisoner. Two premeditated homicides were laid to his charge. The court sentenced him to death without mitigating circumstances.
The condemned man’s demeanor struck those who chronicled it. He reportedly rose, tipped his cap, and thanked both the presiding judge and the bench. Such an attitude disquieted the customary narrative of retribution: one anticipated a collapse, a prayer, or a burst of rage; one received a bow. The press would fixate upon this composure to the point of granting it foremost place in the affair. The convict’s name would circulate forever tethered to his smile.
A letter addressed to the prison physician, however, casts this serenity in a less comfortable light. In this missive, published after his death, Cellier claimed he was not so guilty as people believed, without excusing what he had done. Above all, he professed to fear a lifetime in a cell far more than death. His spelling errors were preserved in print, as though their clumsiness were of a piece with the man being exhibited. Through them, his meaning remained entirely lucid: what he dreaded was an endless existence with no way out.
On June 16, around three o’clock in the morning, he was awakened to be informed that his appeal and petition for clemency had both been rejected. L’Écho roannais, drawing from the Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme, reported that he believed he still had a dozen days remaining. He nonetheless received the news without agitation. The chaplain stayed by his side; he was brought coffee, then wine. He then paced the corridor while smoking. To the wardens watching him, the murderer of their colleague remained an astonishingly docile convict.
Upon leaving the prison, he thanked them. Between the prison chaplain and the parish priest of Le Marthuret, he walked toward the scaffold. Contemporary accounts dwell upon his firm stride and upon the cigarette whose impropriety was held against him. They record his farewells, his embraces, and his gestures before the crucifix. At every instant, onlookers scrutinized his body for some sign that might explain his soul; his final demeanor became a testament that every observer felt entitled to interpret.
Following his death, an author examining the penitentiary system seized upon his case. He drew a parallel between the double murder and a fresh assault that occurred in the same central prison several months later, then cited the letter to extol the formidable deterrent of solitary confinement. Thus did the very same history serve two opposing arguments: the death penalty did not avert every crime, yet the solitary cell instilled sufficient terror to appear the more potent threat.
Cellier was no longer there to answer this appropriation of his fear. Nor could Lauriat and Garnier reclaim their rightful place in a chronicle eclipsed by the final gestures of their killer. Yet one must return to them to bring the case to its close: before the smile observed upon a public square in Riom, there had been a promise not to strike, a warden stepping forward into the workshop, and a convict who had tried to keep him from dying.