The first time Joseph-Auguste Colombé returned to Pignicourt, he found his wife alone with the children. He struck her twice with a stick, then went away. A few minutes later, he came back. A heavy stone barred the door. He shoved against it; his body forced its way through only in part, his head and right side wedged into the opening. Inside the house, his wife cast a rope around his neck. The daughters arrived at the noise. Each would later say she had pulled upon this cord, though not for the same reason.
This scene of 17 January 1873 came before the Assize Court of the Aisne in several guises. The indictment presented one; the widow and her daughters defended others throughout the interrogatories and depositions. In the end, the jury pronounced the widow Colombé guilty with extenuating circumstances. The Court sentenced her to ten years of hard labour. Between the door and the verdict, however, lay a broken household, a husband returned to take his wife unawares, and children thrust by the trial into the very midst of an adult tragedy.
The hearing of 8 May opened at half past ten. The gendarmes led a woman to the prisoner’s dock. Against her breast she held an infant in swaddling clothes, born during her detention. Geneviève Crevaux, widow Colombé, was a day labourer in Pignicourt. She stood accused of having wilfully slain her husband.
They had married in 1855. The bill of indictment depicted a household gradually coming undone: he, a skilled wheelwright, gave himself over to drunkenness and debauchery; she was portrayed as violent and of loose morals. These were the accusatory terms of the chronicle, not characterisations that may be accepted as independently established facts. After the squandering of an estate valued at some fifteen thousand francs, the spouses separated at the beginning of 1871. Colombé left Pignicourt to work in Soissons and subsequently in Reims; his wife remained in the village with the children.
In the autumn of 1871, according to the prosecution, she took up residence with Lamotte and maintained an intimate liaison with him. In December 1872, Colombé learned that she was with child. He called upon the mayor to discuss a judicial separation and gathered the requisite documents. This did not yet constitute, in the judicial record, a formal petition lodged with the court: the report merely stated that he had manifested the intention to do so.
On 17 January, he returned to Pignicourt with a design clearly named by the prosecution: to catch his wife in flagrant adultery. He presented himself around seven o’clock in the morning. Yet, according to the indictment, she lay abed alone with the children. He flew into a rage, dealt her two blows with a stick, and withdrew. He came back a few minutes later. The stone his wife had placed against the door barred his entrance. Through the opening, he forced passage for his head and part of his body.
The indictment then described the actions of each party. Colombé held his wife by the hair with one hand; in the other, he carried an iron tool, a beet puller. She slipped a cord around his neck and pulled it tight with both hands. Batilde and Augustine, drawn by the clamour, in turn seized the rope. Batilde claimed not to have known it was wound about her father’s neck. When their mother shouted at them to get away, they ceased. Shortly thereafter, the widow went out to alert the mayor. The latter found Colombé stretched out within the house, the rope still about his neck.
The post-mortem examination provided the trial with a medical certainty far clearer than the recollections of the fray. The physician noted circular marks around the neck left by a constricting ligature. He attributed the death to asphyxiation by strangulation. He also observed ecchymoses upon Colombé’s face, arms, hands, and knees, as well as faint signs of a struggle upon his wife’s face and hair. These findings confirmed that a violent encounter had taken place; of themselves, they did not decide who had struck first, nor with what design the rope had been drawn taut.
The widow acknowledged having caused the death, but maintained she had acted in self-defence. She recounted that her husband, after the two blows with the stick that morning, had threatened her with death and walked away. He had then returned armed with a stick or an implement. She stated that she had cast a loom cord around his neck to escape his violence. She affirmed that, in the struggle, she herself was nearly strangled, that both of them fell, and that her daughters had not known what they were doing when they pulled. In her version, the rope had wound itself about his neck, and she had caused her husband’s death unintentionally while struggling to free herself.
The presiding judge also questioned her regarding the child she held. She declared that it was her husband’s. The widow explained that her husband had commanded her to follow him and had threatened her: “one of the two had to perish.” She also disputed the statement attributed to Augustine before the mayor—“Papa wanted to kill Maman. We strangled him”—and denied any intention of slaying her husband.
The daughters were not on trial at this hearing; yet their words were both decisive and harrowing. Batilde, the younger witness, was not sworn because she was a minor and the daughter of the accused. The press noted that she had been arrested at the outset of the judicial inquiry and subsequently discharged from prosecution. She testified that her father had struck her mother with a broom handle. When he returned, he was holding a beet puller. She managed to wrench it from him. She admitted having pulled upon the rope for five minutes, but stated she did not know it was around her father’s neck. Questioned as to what she knew at the moment he succumbed, she offered no reply. She added thereafter that her little brother had wished to strike their father with a pickaxe that lay nearby.
Augustine, who was nearly fifteen years of age according to the article, confirmed her father’s presence on 17 January. She attributed to him the threat: “I must have your life, or you shall have mine.” She likewise admitted having pulled upon the rope, but explained that her intention was to shut the door. The bill of indictment did not assign to her this same motive: it stated that the girls had pulled together on the cord hanging alongside their father’s body, Batilde being unaware that it could strangle him. The divergence between these phrasings cannot be smoothed away. The children were ensnared in a struggle where the door, their father’s body, and the cord occupied the very same ground; the hearing subsequently transformed their recollections into legal evidence.
The chronicle mentioned other witnesses, but dismissed their depositions as being “devoid of interest.” The prosecution vigorously pressed the charges; the defence was mounted by Maître Pinson. The presiding judge summed up the arguments, though the newspaper preserved neither the particulars of his summary nor an extended account of the pleadings.
The verdict was affirmative, admitting extenuating circumstances. The Court sentenced the widow Colombé to ten years of hard labour. The judgment affirmed her guilt; it did not efface the elements that the journal had set side by side: the two blows of the stick, Colombé’s return, his body wedged into the doorway, the iron tool, the rope, and the two young daughters pulling upon it. Nor did it grant access to the inner truth of the children. Their words were heard in a trial that sat in judgment upon their mother, and had already made of them the witnesses to their father’s death.
That morning, a door held barely ajar separated the house from the world outside. The stone formed an obstacle; the rope became by turns a means of defence, an instrument of death, and an object pulled by two adolescent girls. The newspaper account does not allow this scene to be composed into an orderly tableau: the prosecution, the widow, and the daughters each attached a different meaning to the selfsame act. The courts were compelled to resolve the question of guilt. For the reader, there remains a family whose every narrative knots itself at that single threshold, around a door that a man sought to force and his wife fought to hold closed.