The shoes had been left behind upon the scene. Affixed to these shoes were buckles of red copper; a cobbler recognized them. Thus was compromised an enterprise that had demanded visits, precautions, accomplices, and whose proceeds were to have been divided far from the ransacked dwelling. In affairs of brigandage, men willingly take the woods for a fortress. The most peaceful of trades sometimes preserves a better memory than the forest.
The man to whom this clue led was named Pieter Joseph De Meyere. A broom-maker by trade, he belonged to the band which posterity would come to group under the name of Baekelandt. Several of his kinsmen figured alongside him in the proceedings. The attacks upon isolated farmsteads had yielded the thieves money, clothing, and negotiable chattels: enough to entice associates, yet little enough that a detail as mundane as a pair of shoes should assume, before the law, a disproportionate gravity.
Baekelandt and his companion, Isabella Van Maele, were apprehended in the early days of 1801. The man whose name was destined to swallow up all the others did not keep their secrets. He pointed out his accomplices; his disclosures aided in their capture. The solidarity of nights spent in plunder could not withstand the walls of a prison.
Their associations were far less formal than their romantic depiction would suggest half a century later. Bands gathered and dissolved at will. They would break into the homes of the inhabitants, bind them fast, and rummage for their possessions; the term “binders” described this particular manner of theft. Catharina Desmet, at Pittem, perished from the violence of her confinement. This death does not render each of the accused a murderer: the prosecution addressed varying degrees of participation in a sequence of crimes.
French law, however, permitted the penalty of death for robberies accompanied by certain aggravating circumstances. The outcome, therefore, did not hang solely upon the number of slain victims. Between the man who had bound the victims, the one who had lent aid, and the one alleged to be a mere associate, the court was called upon to draw a capital distinction.
At the trial of August 1803, the defense advocates assailed this very boundary. Louis Joret challenged a finding of the jury that declared complicity without defining its nature. Christophe Isidore Jullien contended that the statute invoked was aimed solely at the primary perpetrators. The public prosecutor countered that the text reached all who were guilty—a far broader category. The tribunal embraced this interpretation; the Court of Cassation did not overturn the verdict.
On August 20, twenty-four of the accused were condemned to death. On November 2, the bailiff Vandermeulen surrendered them into the hands of the executioner. When the punishments were accomplished, he inquired whether anyone came forward to claim the bodies. No one appeared. This final summons, arriving too late to preserve a single life, served only to sever the condemned forever from the town gathered round about them.
The Gazette de Brugge imparts to this day its singular gravity. It sets forth their names in print. Baekelandt heads the roll; there follow Simpelaere, the Busschaerts, the Cloets, the Danneels, the Verplanckes; then come the De Meyers, Colbert, Vormezeele, and the rest. The column does not merely assemble the silhouettes of an anonymous crew. It unfolds, with the cold precision of a parish register, twenty-four distinct identities promised to the selfsame instrument. Barbara Theresia Bruneel, Isabella Van Maele, and Francisca Ameye appear among them.
It is three-quarters past one o'clock. The journal recounts the ministrations of the clergy, the contrite demeanour of the condemned, the vast concourse of people arrived from the surrounding country. The houses and streets bordering the square are thronged. The windows thus offer a vantage; the inhabitants of neighboring lanes possess that which the traveler has journeyed far to behold. The sheer immensity of the multitude alters nothing of the solitude that encloses those whose names have been committed to type.
Three other women appear in the same report. These do not mount beneath the blade. Condemned to sixteen years’ imprisonment, they endure six hours of public exposure upon the pillory. This distinction occupies a mere few lines, yet it encompasses sixteen years of human life. Amidst an announcement so laden with mortality, a careless reading might confound them with the slaughter; the Gazette, for its part, carefully discriminates between the penalties. Sentence by sentence, the printed lines discharge their office: decapitating some upon the page, consigning the others to prolonged captivity.
Then the gazette passes on.
It provides intelligence of financial markets. It announces the theatrical bill. For the morrow, the players will present Euphrosine et Coradin, ou le Tyran corrigé par l’amour, preceded by La Servante maîtresse. The vocabulary of diversion follows upon that of the scaffold without the printer having need to change worlds. A single page suffices for both. In Bruges, the Republican calendar designates the following day the 11th of Brumaire; the playbill promises music.
Yet it would take far more than a theatrical placard to supplant those four-and-twenty names in the public memory. Victor Huys would undertake the task, long afterward, with all the liberties of the novelist. Beneath his pen, the woods would become a sovereign realm; the band would receive the coherence demanded of a fireside tale. His Baekelandt would even stay an assault before an occurrence to which the captain of thieves himself must bow.
In this literary rendition, the men draw near a farmhouse. Scouts reconnoiter the approaches; a farmhand presents an obstacle whom they contemplate doing away with. They slip inside, conceal themselves, and return to report. Everything promises the customary sequence of a house surprised: doors forced, inhabitants subdued, the plunder carried off. But, behind a windowpane, another assembly has formed.
The young man of the farm lies dying. A priest attends his bedside. The family surrounds the bed; the last rites proceed while the thieves peer in secret. These men had come to impose their own darkness, only to discover a darkness far more profound. In Huys’s telling, death outstrips the premeditated crime. The captain renounces the raid. The band draws back, momentarily disarmed by the spectacle before their eyes.
This noble impulse belongs entirely to the book. It does not unmake the fate of Catharina Desmet; it bears no testimony on behalf of the men at the bar. It demonstrates how legend can restore to a brigand, within a single scene, that power of moral choice which the dry catalog of a judicial sentence no longer records. The reader beholds the window, anticipates the blow, receives the reprieve. The machinery of narrative has just accomplished what the machine at Bruges could never do: it has stopped.
The Gazette endures alongside the romance. In one of its columns, twenty-four names; in the novel, a spared house. And amidst all the relics this affair has bequeathed to the imagination, the shoes with the red copper buckles retain their stubborn, quiet reality: before the legendary chieftain, there were living men whom other men could recognize.
