The son was to call for his father on Thursday morning. Together they were to travel to Tours, where several matters of business awaited them: a signature to be affixed, money to be received, a marriage contract to be heard. The son did not come. In the dead of night, at Rochecave, the father had been murdered in his bedchamber, and the woman betrothed to him, wounded at his side, had just named his assassin. She accused the very man whose arrival had been expected. Before his garments had even been examined, young Pettangue entered the case through this single absence.
The crime had been committed during the night of the 10th to the 11th of April, 1811, at Azay-sur-Cher. Near the dead man, searchers found a bloodstained marc-cutter—an implement in ordinary domestic use on the premises—and another similar tool, lacking its handle. Marie-Anne Brosse had sustained several wounds, but would survive. The investigators reconstructed a possible path of ingress through the winepress, the cellar, a flight of stairs, and the corridor. No sentinel had been posted at every doorway; the authorities were seeking the path the murderers might have taken. In a house well known to its occupants, familiarity with the premises was to weigh almost as heavily as physical traces.
Marie-Anne related that two men had entered. According to her account, the elder Pettangue had recognized his son and pleaded for mercy, both for himself and for his companion. The first intruder had struck him down, and then both assailants had turned upon her when she attempted to succour the wounded man. She claimed to have recognized the son by the moonlight and by his voice. She described a blue smock, boots, and a broad-brimmed hat. The narrative possessed the terrible precision of those scenes wherein a victim appears to have uttered, with his own lips, the name of the man to be seized. Yet this dying declaration reached the courts only through the lips of the survivor.
The father had been a widower since 1806. An infirmity occasionally brought on nocturnal seizures, and Marie-Anne, a woman of some thirty years, had entered his household to attend to him. She had gained a place that the only son bore with ill grace. Quarrels had broken out. Matters of affection had become entwined with pecuniary interests, as they so readily do in families where each member believes he is defending the other against an alien influence, all the while calculating what he stands to lose. The father was selling property; the son had caused legal encumbrances to be registered with the mortgage office, preventing him from freely receiving the proceeds of the sale.
For a recent transaction, the lifting of these encumbrances had to be obtained. The son had promised it without ever granting it. On the 24th of March, Marie-Anne had written to him, demanding that he honor his word and evoking an alliance that might prejudice his interests and those of his children. The impending nuptials were thus no mere detail appended to the tragedy after the fact. On Sunday, April 7, the banns had been published in the parish. In Tours, inside a café, remarks had been made in the son’s presence concerning his father and his future stepmother. The examining magistrate gathered these potential humiliations just as he gathered the unpaid debts: each might serve to construct a motive.
The days preceding the homicide were retraced with painstaking care. The son had met with Pierre Rousseau, a turner, at the Chêne-Pendu tavern on the road from Tours to Cormery. There was talk of an interview in the stable, of a bottle shared with a third man, of departures and returns. Pettangue had subsequently gone to sleep at his father’s house. On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, he had found the chamber door bolted from within and remarked upon this novel precaution. It was opened to him. The inquiry noted that he might have observed the slide bolt; an act altogether innocent, save when one searches through the gestures of the eve to find the preparations for the ensuing night.
He had remained for the midday meal, gone down into the cellar to fetch wine, and renewed his promise to return on the morrow. It was observed that he had tarried long below. Had he displaced the timbers reinforcing a doorway? Such an assumption lent criminal intent to a mere span of time. Since he knew the house, he had the means to facilitate entry; since he had lingered there, it was easy to imagine that he had done so. Yet between these two possibilities, a proof remained to be found. An investigation enters a perilous circle when every circumstance derives its meaning solely from the guilt it is presumed to establish.
The missed appointment on Thursday appeared graver still. Pettangue stood to gain from the journey: his father was to hand over one thousand francs to satisfy urgent debts. He was also to attend the reading of the marriage contract before the notary. Why had he not appeared, and why had he sent no word? Apprehended around five o'clock that evening at Montlouis, where he had been seen during the day, he declared himself ignorant of his father’s death. The tidings had already spread throughout the district. His ignorance seemed suspicious; yet it remained to be demonstrated precisely what he had learned, and at what hour.
The inquiries yielded results far less simple than the prosecution might have wished. The blue smock seized was found at the home of a cousin, not at the accused’s residence. Members of his own household affirmed that they had seen him at home on Wednesday evening and had been called upon during the night; they subsequently altered the hours they had stated. These variations provided ample ground for debate, yet afforded no justification for discarding them entirely to the advantage of one side or the other. Rousseau, who had likewise been indicted, initially evaded arrest. Pettangue thus stood alone before the Court of Assizes at Tours, burdened with a murder whose patricidal nature seemed to render all his past grievances infinitely more sinister.
The defense was compelled to return to the point of origin: had Marie-Anne truly recognized the assailant who struck her? Counsel for the defense attacked her character and her past convictions with a ferocity whose prejudices the contemporary chronicle readily adopted. Yet this unflattering portrait was not sufficient to resolve the issue. A wounded woman does not forfeit her right to be believed merely because an advocate can cast mud upon her past; but her affirmations, like those of any witness, must withstand the test of confrontation. It was here that the prosecution encountered difficulties far more substantive than the vituperation heaped upon the surviving woman.
Marie-Anne had recounted misgivings which the elder Pettangue was alleged to have confided to a magistrate regarding his son. The magistrate formally denied that any such conversation had taken place. She had wavered as to the hour of the crime; moreover, after her initial accusation, she had let fall remarks expressing regret at having named the young man, saying she could not bring herself to believe him guilty. Finally, witnesses admitted that the threats imputed to the son had been suggested to them by Marie-Anne herself. The apparent weight of the prosecution’s case had derived from a chorus of voices; it was now revealed that several had drawn from the very same source.
There remained the alibi. Champagnac records that the defense established it satisfactorily and provided plausible explanations regarding the encounters with Rousseau, though the full details of this demonstration were not preserved in his chronicle. The advocate also advanced alternative hypotheses: Marie-Anne’s own interest, or the enemies the father had made in years past. The deceased had served upon a military commission during the Revolution and had acquired national properties; longstanding resentments had dogged his steps. These avenues broadened the horizon of the investigation. They did not prove Marie-Anne guilty, nor did they identify any specific political adversary. To dismantle an accusation is not necessarily to discover the name of the assassin.
On the 12th of December, 1811, the jury declared that the younger Pettangue was neither the perpetrator nor the accomplice of the crime. He was acquitted. Rousseau, arrested and tried at a later date, was likewise judged innocent, according to the account. The death of the father remained without a known author in the pages that have come down to us; the wounds of Marie-Anne remained equally real. As for the son, he walked away from the courtroom with his innocence legally acknowledged, and bearing a bereavement that men had sought to transform into his motive. The Thursday he had failed to appear had very nearly defined the whole course of his life. It had taken months to restore to him the right not to have to explain everything.