At a quarter to eleven, amidst the stifling heat of August, the gendarmes brought Auguste-Célestin Roques before the Seine Assize Court. He took his place in the dock without apparent discomfort, cast his eyes over the assembly, and smiled; almost immediately, his two brothers came forward to clasp his hand. Their mother, Héloïse-Ange Fougeyron, widow Roques, had been found dead two months earlier in the family apartment on the Rue Saint-Jacques. The man seated upon the prisoner’s bench was her son. He vigorously denied the parricide; the indictment, which the clerk now began to read, told an entirely different tale.
The widow Roques was sixty-seven years of age. Frédéric, the eldest son, managed a paper warehouse and shared with her a four-room apartment on the third floor of a house without a concierge; Edmond, a senior master at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, visited her often. According to the indictment, both brothers behaved toward her with “as much tenderness as deference.” Auguste had likewise dwelt in the lodging before establishing himself on the Rue Mosnier with the woman Gressier, née Nantier, who lived apart from her husband. The prosecution portrayed this liaison as having aggravated his expenditures and corrupted his conduct; these judgments, however, belonged to the dossier submitted to the jury, rather than to any independent judicial finding.
Auguste had been employed in the mercantile firm of Vaissier, where Frédéric had secured him a post. He had first kept the ledgers, then the petty cash, earning two hundred francs a month, alongside a share of the profits and an annual gratuity. The indictment charged him with successive embezzlements, followed by the fresh abstraction of 3,300 francs in March 1875, bringing the total sum to upwards of 15,000 francs. These defalcations he admitted. After fleeing to Belgium with his companion, the couple returned to Paris, their funds exhausted. By the end of May, according to the prosecution, both subsisted on debts and accommodating acquaintances; watch, chain, garments, and linen had all been pawned or sold.
On June 3, according to the indictment, Auguste returned to the Rue Saint-Jacques during his mother’s absence. He had the door picked by a locksmith named Haize, took several articles of personal property, and sold them for twenty-five francs to a second-hand dealer summoned from the window. Later, from a neighboring café, he sent an envelope containing fifteen francs to the woman Gressier. Two days thereafter, he announced to her in the morning that he was going to “draw some money” and would be able to send her funds. At five o’clock, in the Brasserie du Rhin on the Place de la Sorbonne, a messenger named Blanc received from his hands a letter and one hundred and thirty francs—five twenty-franc pieces and three ten-franc pieces. The sum duly reached the Rue Mosnier; Gressier applied a portion thereof to the settlement of debts.
It was upon these one hundred and thirty francs that the prosecution concentrated a significant part of the debate. The state contended that Auguste possessed no remaining reserves upon his return from Belgium, and that the money remitted to his mistress was the fruit of a theft of approximately two hundred francs in gold coin discovered in his mother’s apartment. The defense maintained, on the contrary, that this was merely the remnant of the funds carried away to Belgium. At the second hearing, the Procureur Général laid a precise chronology before the jurors: Madame Roques had still been alive around five o’clock; the theft had preceded the murder, and the accused had returned to her dwelling at a later hour. This reconstruction, however, was the theory of the prosecution, rather than an hour established by any eyewitness to the crime.
Toward seven o’clock on June 5, Frédéric found the main door locked from within. Upon the landing stood the basket of linen deposited by the laundress, the woman Prévôts. He departed, then returned with her half an hour later: the door remained fastened, but the basket had vanished. At a quarter past eight, he returned once more, accompanied by Haize. The side door to the kitchen, locked with a single turn, was opened by means of a skeleton key. The basket was in its customary place within the kitchen. Inside the apartment, the widow Roques lay dead.
The chronicle records the observations attributed to the medical examiner: several wounds to the head, a circular mark upon the neck, and an iron bar discovered near the corpse. The indictment advanced the theory of a struggle, an attempted strangulation with a cord, and blows struck with the iron bar; the exact course of the drama, however, was recounted by no living witness. What followed, according to the depositions read before the court, transpired on the Rue Mosnier.
The woman Gressier recounted that Auguste had returned home in a state of disarray and refused her embrace. She claimed to have heard him murmur: “I am unworthy of it... mother dead... mother dead... my doing... wretch that I am!” She summoned a neighbor, the woman Robbe. According to the account of their depositions published in the Gazette, Gressier pointed to her lover, declaring that he had just killed his mother; Robbe questioned him, and Auguste, burying his face in his hands, replied that he was good, yet contemptible, he who had loved his mother so deeply. These utterances formed a cornerstone of the prosecution’s case. Roques denied them; the defense impugned the reliability of the women and their narrative.
The following morning, according to the indictment, the accused enjoined both Gressier and Robbe to preserve absolute secrecy. When Edmond arrived to bring news of the murder, Auguste allegedly feigned astonishment; having left with his brother, he reportedly returned for a brief moment to examine his trousers and brush them with water. The prosecution interpreted this movement as an attempt to efface a stain; the defense combated it alongside the other circumstantial evidence in the case. The Gazette does not provide access to the original documents or the complete depositions: it captures an assize hearing, with all its lacunae and competing voices.
On the day following the opening of the proceedings, the jurors heard the witnesses summoned by the defense. Several depicted a son who had previously been affectionate, or a mother who spoke highly of her three boys; others testified to Roques’s liaison and the ascendancy they ascribed to Gressier. A laundress stated that she had never observed any ill feeling between Auguste and his mother. The defense sought to set these recollections against the portrait painted by the prosecution. Yet these memories alone could not resolve the question of what had transpired within the apartment on June 5.
The Procureur Général subsequently developed the reasoning of the state: the recent penury, the dispatch of the one hundred and thirty francs, the discovery of the moved laundry basket, and the confessions reported from the Rue Mosnier. He acknowledged before the jurors that certain matters remained shrouded in obscurity, but argued that these uncertainties did not, in his view, diminish the essential elements of the crime. He went so far as to outline a plausible scene—an altercation following the theft, a blow, followed by further violence—yet he offered it merely as his conviction, not as an attested narrative from a witness.
Maître Dozon replied that no confession had ever been made, and that the timeline did not place Roques at his mother’s dwelling at the alleged hour. He cited the witnesses who had seen him at the Café Jules-César around six o’clock, while the laundress was ringing the bell on the Rue Saint-Jacques without receiving an answer. He likewise recalled the filial devotion attested by several witnesses and maintained that the prosecution could not substitute hypotheses for missing evidence. Roques, questioned at the conclusion of the pleadings, added nothing.
Following the summing-up by the presiding judge, the jury retired, returning after an hour and a quarter. Their declaration answered every question in the affirmative; they admitted extenuating circumstances. The Procureur Général moved for hard labor for life. When asked by the presiding judge if he had anything to say, the accused signaled that he had no observation to offer. The court pronounced the sentence.
The Gazette concludes upon a final movement: Roques took up his hat, gathered the papers lying beside him, stepped over the bench, and disappeared in the custody of the guards. The brothers who had come to press his hand could not alter the declaration of the jury; the hand of the court had fixed his penal fate. In that room on the Rue Saint-Jacques, the hours, the laundry basket, and the one hundred and thirty francs had been subjected to minute scrutiny without any witness being able to narrate the murder itself. The judicial decree, for its part, left no doubt as to the guilt determined by the jury and the punishment meted out by the law.