On the very day the Parlement of Aix condemned Honoré Jourdan to death, the two convicted felons then in custody, Jeanne-Marie Carlon and Jacques-Gervais Bazalgeste, declared on their way to the scaffold that the jurisdictional prosecutor had taken no part whatever in the murder and had known nothing of it. The sentence struck Jourdan down; the words that cleared him were uttered that very afternoon. Yet he never heard them. For years he wandered in foreign lands while his sentence was executed in effigy and his son, still an adolescent, departed alone for Spain. Thirty years would pass before the father was brought once more before his judges, and before justice finally revoked the condemnation that had driven him into exile.
Honoré Jourdan resided in Vence, where he exercised the office of jurisdictional prosecutor. He was acquainted with Jean Vial, a baker and his neighbor, as well as with Jeanne-Marie Carlon, Vial’s wife. He willingly rendered services to the household. In early February 1753, Vial disappeared. His wife initially suggested that he had been encountered several leagues away, where he had purportedly declared his intention never to return; later, she offered other pretexts for his absence.
On March 9, children playing near a cistern discovered a body. Jourdan, in his capacity as an officer of justice, immediately requested the judge’s official inspection and accompanied him to the scene. The corpse was already decomposed and was recognized only after closer examination as that of Jean Vial. The judge did not conclude his official report on the spot. When Jourdan asked to sign it, he was informed that the instrument was not yet complete and that they were awaiting the clerk of the court.
On the journey back, an attorney representing one of the seigneurs of Vence informed Jourdan that he was about to appoint a substitute jurisdictional prosecutor. Jourdan’s frequent visits to the Vial household had aroused suspicion, he remarked, though he hastened to add that he believed him innocent. He advised him to depart with prudence and await the outcome of the proceedings in safety. Jourdan hesitated: flight might well be construed as evidence against him. Yet a knowledgeable man explained to him that, under the criminal procedures then in force, placing one’s person beyond reach might prove necessary even for an innocent man. He accordingly withdrew for a few days to Gatières, a territory subject to the King of Sardinia.
Friends soon sought him out there, warning him that his departure weighed heavily against him in the eyes of the public. Reassured by his own conscience, Jourdan returned to Vence. On the very next day, he learned that a warrant for his arrest had been issued against him before any preliminary inquiry had been conducted, and under none of the circumstances which, according to Champagnac, legally permitted such a measure without prior instruction. He retreated once more to Gatières, there to wait anew as the proceedings took their course.
None of the witnesses examined deposed directly against Jourdan. Yet the judges believed they discerned unfavorable presumptions within their statements. On May 2, 1753, the court of Vence unanimously discharged him from the prosecution. By the same judgment, Jeanne-Marie Carlon, Jacques-Gervais Bazalgeste, and Gaspard Mars were declared guilty of Vial’s murder and condemned to capital punishment; Carlon and Bazalgeste were in custody, whereas Mars had fled.
The two prisoners were transferred to Aix. On May 29, the Parlement reversed the ruling of the lower magistrates with respect to Jourdan and condemned him to death, despite the favorable submissions of the public prosecutor. Champagnac notes that the circumstantial evidence alleged against him must have been magnified, though without providing further particulars here. The decree was thus far more severe than that of Vence, even though the witnesses heard had given no testimony against the jurisdictional prosecutor.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, on the very day of the decree, the two prisoners were led out to execution, declaring that Jourdan had participated in the murder neither directly nor indirectly, that he had known nothing of it prior to the crime, and had learned nothing of it thereafter. The sentence of death was nevertheless executed in effigy against Jourdan; the Parlement merely ordered, on June 1, that the declarations of Carlon and Bazalgeste be appended to the trial record. The tidings that might have altered the condemned man’s fate never reached him. He learned only of the sentence of death.
Jourdan wandered for several years far from Vence, crushed beneath the weight of public infamy and anxiety for his children. His son, then fifteen years of age, had likewise become a fugitive. He made his way to Spain, where he entered a commercial house; his merit and diligence raised him, within a few years, among its principal partners. Yet prosperity could neither bridge the distance separating him from his father nor erase the disgrace attached to the sentence.
The young man did not forget their misfortunes. When he formed the design of returning to France, he could not endure the thought of doing so without his father, who remained banished under the weight of an ignominious decree. A correspondent to whom he wrote informed him that the true authors of the crime had attested to Jourdan’s innocence. Upon hearing this, the chronicle recounts, he abandoned his affairs and set out to find his father. He implored him to present himself once more before his judges. The old man placed himself entirely in his hands; his son sustained his steps and conducted him back to France.
Jourdan voluntarily surrendered himself as a prisoner. While he waited in his cell, his son undertook the task of securing the recognition of his innocence. A fresh inquiry re-examined the facts and the relations that had preceded the murder. Carlon had been known for her taste for finery and expense; her husband, also a baker, indulged in disorderly habits and neglected his trade, to the point of being unable to meet their domestic expenditures. Mars, a baker like Vial, and Bazalgeste, a man of no profession, frequented their house. The quarrels between the spouses were connected, according to the dossier summarized by Champagnac, to Carlon’s intimacy with these two men.
Jourdan’s customary presence in the baker’s home had a commonplace explanation: he lent him money to purchase flour; Vial was also his tenant and owed him several terms of rent. Vial regarded him as a benefactor and a friend. Conversely, he had repeatedly shown his displeasure at seeing Mars and Bazalgeste beneath his roof. Their presence and his wife’s liaisons had provoked bitter disputes. These circumstances cast a clear light upon the frequent visits which the first trial had deemed suspicious, without elevating Jourdan’s familiarity into proof of guilt.
The new inquiry located the conspiracy elsewhere. It had been hatched, according to the records, at the house of Mars on February 6, following a supper at which Jourdan was not present and had no reason to be. Carlon had solicited Mars and Bazalgeste to kill her husband; for some time, she had appeared to abandon the design, and the two accomplices had concealed it from Jourdan, fearing he might warn Vial. On the evening of the supper, Carlon proposed going to steal cabbages from a neighbor’s patch and, drawing the two men aside, once more urged them to assassinate her husband. Mars refused; Bazalgeste declared that they must rid the woman of her trouble.
They proceeded toward the chapel of Notre-Dame de Larrat. There, according to the recorded judicial narrative, Bazalgeste struck Vial the first blow with a knife, bringing him down; Mars inflicted further wounds, and the two men then carried the body to the neighboring cistern. Carlon and Bazalgeste had attested that Jourdan had taken no part in the deed; Mars, who had taken refuge in the dominions of the King of Sardinia, had likewise deposed to the same effect. This was no longer a matter of fresh conjecture regarding Jourdan’s presence, but the solemn depositions of the very persons who had acknowledged their own guilt and described the exact circumstances of the murder.
The Parlement of Provence discharged Honoré Jourdan of the accusation by a decree of May 29, 1782. Two days later, on May 31, a second decree authorized him to have the first printed and posted throughout the province. After thirty years of infamy, exile, and wretchedness, he was permitted to return to his homeland and, as Champagnac concludes, recover the esteem of his fellow citizens before his death. The narrative does not record the ultimate judicial fate of Mars, who remained an exile abroad; it carefully distinguishes Jourdan’s exoneration from the original condemnation of the other accused.
On that same day in May 1753, the Parlement had rendered its decree and the condemned had delivered testimony that directly contradicted its effect upon Jourdan. Their declaration was annexed to the files, yet it prevented neither his execution in effigy nor his long exile. That delay weighed upon an entire family: a father compelled to wander, a fifteen-year-old son driven to seek his fortune in Spain, only to return years later and guide his father back into court. The decree of 1782 could not restore the lost years; yet it restored to Jourdan the right to walk his native streets under his own name, cleared of an accusation from which the two condemned felons themselves had declared him blameless on the very day of their sentence.