On the night of 24 December 1861, Théophile Auphan stepped out from his farmhouse of La Bastide-Neuve, at Gordes, lantern in hand. A gunshot felled him in the yard. Carried to his bed, he expired after half an hour’s agony, before either the physician or the priest summoned to his side could reach him. In the Gazette’s account, this death was no isolated catastrophe: it came at the close of long months during which the sick man had steadily declined, while those around him observed his symptoms, mixed his remedies, and kept their appointments.
The journal printed the bill of indictment and the proceedings before the Vaucluse Court of Assizes at Carpentras. It named as the accused Fortunée Béridot, the widow Auphan, and François Denante, a married man and father of a family. When the hearing opened on 1 May, Denante appeared first, guarded by gendarmes; Fortunée followed, her face concealed within her muff. The correspondent recorded the gestures and attire visible to the courtroom, yet these surface details formed no proof. The substance of the case shifted from the crowded hall to the seized letters, the medicines, and the competing narratives submitted to the jurors.
According to the prosecution, Fortunée had married Auphan against her family’s wishes; the couple lived first at Gordes, then at the Bastide-Neuve farm. The same indictment presented Denante as a former friend of Auphan, established in the neighbouring hamlet of Fontblanche. It placed the beginning of their intimacy in the preceding winter, recounting several encounters at fairs, markets, and the farm itself. Two witnesses, it alleged, had seen them together in a carriage, while a third had observed them near the house, exchanging a concerted sign. This narrative of unlawful intimacy and its secret tokens belonged to the bill read aloud at the trial; it was not a scene reconstructed independently by the narrator.
The seized letters furnished the prosecution with its most striking exhibit. The Gazette cited extensive fragments attributed to Fortunée, who addressed Denante as “my good husband” and voiced her hope of marrying him. The tender tone did not soften those passages where the correspondence touched upon Auphan’s sickness, the unsuccessful attempts, and the dread of discovery. The indictment maintained that both lovers sought to rid themselves of their lawful spouses in order to wed. The journal affirmed that more than twenty notes, scribbled in pencil, traced their schemes and their assays. A distinction must be drawn between these texts, reproduced or abridged by the newspaper, and the voice of the chronicler, who glossed them with pronounced severity.
According to the prosecution, Denante procured the substances while Fortunée administered them to her husband in his food and drink. Phosphorus was allegedly first given in an infusion; the Gazette also reported that a piece of paste containing the substance was folded into an omelette. In a separate attempt, a compound presented as a specific for whitening the teeth was introduced into his broth. Auphan was said to have felt a grittiness, refusing to eat; according to the report, the soup was cast to the dog. Opium followed, prepared in solution. The letters, as quoted by the Gazette, bore witness to these trials and their failures. Yet Auphan’s health deteriorated nonetheless: abdominal and throat pains, vomiting, and growing debility. The physicians consulted were unable, according to the report, to determine the origin of the affliction.
The farm became a place of nursing as well as of concealment. When physicians asked to inspect the sick man’s dejections, the journal reported that Fortunée caused them to disappear. After Auphan vomited, Dr Peyron reportedly advised preserving the matter spilled upon the floor. According to his testimony as summarized by the paper, Fortunée cast ashes over it. The prosecution contended that remedies were compounded and administered without the patient’s knowledge. Several witnesses allegedly saw Denante’s own wife vomit after partaking of certain draughts. This latter detail, noted in the account, demonstrates how heavily the case rested upon scattered signs and upon the construction that physicians and jurors might place upon them.
When the poisons failed to produce the desired death, the prosecution alleged that the lovers turned to a firearm. Denante purchased a gun at Cavaillon and, according to his own admissions at the bar, shattered mule-bells to cast balls; Fortunée was said to have furnished the powder from her husband’s flask. The plan concerted for 24 December provided that Denante should wait outside the gate while Auphan went to the stable. When evening fell, Denante gave a signal; Fortunée stepped into the courtyard, approached the portal, asked if he was ready, and bade him take heart. Such was the sequence set down in the bill of indictment and rehearsed by the press, rather than a chain of gestures witnessed by any single observer.
In his examination, Denante acknowledged having waited near the farm and having fired upon Auphan as he emerged with his lantern. The Gazette reported that he confirmed the essential material circumstances and admitted the earlier attempts at poisoning. He denied, however, any pecuniary motive, declaring that he owed Auphan nothing and had signed no note of hand to his profit. He attributed his descent into crime to Fortunée’s ascendancy over him. During the night following the assassination, the gendarmes had placed him under surveillance. According to their depositions, he believed himself lost when the alibi he expected from the postilion collapsed; he attempted to do himself an injury, and finally confessed that he had fired the shot.
The proceedings then turned to the scrutiny of objects and handwriting. Experts examined the pencilled letters; the surveyor and the graphologist cited by the journal attributed them to Fortunée. The magistrates had directed searches for the weapon and the remnants of chemical products at Denante’s dwelling. Dr Appy examined the corpse on the day following the crime. The apothecary Colignon, of Apt, analyzed the viscera in search of poison, but discovered none. The newspaper reported that he explained this absence by the victim’s repeated vomiting and the lapse of time. A professor of medicine from Montpellier and a professor of chemistry from the Faculty of Sciences reportedly approved his method and his findings. Medical proof, therefore, consisted not in the recovery of an intact residue, but in a chain of reasoning laid before the jury.
The gendarmes described the demeanor of the accused following the murder. They testified that Denante had at first appeared composed, spoken of his alibi, and ultimately incriminated himself. Gendarme Grandordi recounted what Denante had told him of Fortunée’s earlier proposals: to fling Auphan into a well, to cast him into the Fountain of Vaucluse, to crush him beneath a carriage, or to stifle him. These projects were reported to the officer by the prisoner; they were not offered as matters observed by the gendarme himself. Grandordi also related what Denante told him of an encounter with Fortunée: she had supposedly kissed him and urged him not to miss his mark. These statements derived from published judicial depositions; they were not newly fashioned into dramatic dialogue.
Fortunée denied any criminal intimacy and rejected the accusations levelled against her. The chronicle notes that she had remained silent and reserved under the preliminary interrogatories, then records her answers at the hearing. The letters, their attribution, and the depositions were brought against her denials. The trial thus weighed two forms of evidence: on the one hand, Denante’s reported confessions, the correspondence, and the gendarmes’ observations; on the other, Fortunée’s contestations and the reserve demanded by material and medical indices. The journal made no secret of its moral judgment. In chronicling the trial, that voice must remain apparent without being confounded with the verdict of the jury.
The issue of 5–6 May recorded that after the closing speeches and the charges of counsel, the jury returned an affirmative verdict on the guilt of both accused, while admitting extenuating circumstances. The court condemned Fortunée Béridot and François Denante to penal servitude for life. The sentence concludes the report; it does not elevate every hypothesis formed during the inquest into scientific certainty. At La Bastide-Neuve, the report of a gun had shattered Christmas Eve. At Carpentras, three days of hearings had marshalled around that sudden noise a dossier of letters, symptoms, a firearm, and sworn depositions. The verdict belonged to the jurors; the traces that went before it remain those that a newspaper of the time chose to preserve.