He was afraid of being beaten, yet he resolved to speak all the same. Standing before the magistrates, one of Marie Lebon’s grandchildren declared that he would tell the truth, whatever the cost might be. The Journal du Lot recorded this childish resolution in the midst of its report on a trial in which four adults sought to explain how an old woman had burned in a hearth. The accused commanded an abundance of words: accident, misfortune, superstition. The child had seen hands.
Marie Lebon had laboured for long years in the service of a winegrower. From this toil she had preserved a modest hoard of savings—seven or eight hundred francs, according to the judicial narrative of November 1886. It was hardly a fortune capable of overturning a province; it was quite enough to transform the gaze of a family. Grown old and infirm, she had come to lodge with her daughter Georgette and her son-in-law Sylvain Thomas, at the farmstead of Le Luneau, near Selles-Saint-Denis. The woman who brought this sum now required that someone care for her.
At the trial, the prosecution promptly outlined a scheme of naked self-interest. The Thomases, it was alleged, had wished to secure the savings without shouldering the burden of the woman who had amassed them. An attempt to have her admitted to the asylum at Blois had come to nothing. Thus she remained within the house, with her infirmities, her feebleness, and that hoard of coin spoken of in her presence as though she had already ceased to be its mistress. The press embraced this explanation with absolute assurance; the advocates for the defence would set against it the lingering power of local beliefs.
For another tale was abroad, of which Marie Lebon was likewise the victim. She was whispered to possess the power of casting spells. The hardships of the farm, its blights and its reverses, thereby assumed a convenient face: that of the aged kinswoman harboured beneath their roof. The historical notice of the Lanturelus recalls this reputation and the couple’s recourse to a man who claimed to undo hexes. To those who sought the author of their woes, he was said to have pointed to Georgette’s mother. An accusation devoid of proof suddenly provided an answer to every misfortune.
On the 29th of July, 1886, Sylvain went in search of Marie’s two sons, Alexandre and Alexis Lebon. Their arrival brought no order to the dwelling. According to the contemporary gazettes, their sister had already thrust their mother toward the flames; the marks of this initial violence were plain to see. The men might have delivered her from these blows. Instead, a quarrel arose over the savings she was reputed to possess. The woman whose coin was thus disputed lay there, recumbent, within earshot of their voices.
Toward evening, Georgette offered her a drink. Marie refused. The journal of 1886 suspected poison, though its presence was never established; such a suspicion is scarcely necessary to comprehend what followed. The old woman’s refusal was followed by her immolation. Her sons and her son-in-law bore her into the hearth, and there she was held fast. The flames were no accident of the fireside: several members of her family joined together to compass her death.
The children had hidden behind the bed. That narrow refuge, which partly screened them from the eyes of the grown people, did not prevent them from seeing. They made out those who thrust their grandmother forward, her who tended the flames, and they heard the cries grow faint. Their testimony was destined precisely to demolish the tale of an unfortunate fall before which the adults had allegedly stood helpless. One of the lines of defence reported by the press was to have done no more than look on; it restored neither innocence to their gaze nor life to the woman.
When the affair came before the law, the crime did not have to be reconstructed from a cold, deserted hearth. Witnesses had survived within the very chamber. They were bound to the accused by the closest ties of blood, depended upon them for their bread, and were yet called upon to describe their deeds. That dependence lends full weight to the dread of being beaten. The words of the young witness sprang from no courage learned in books; they gave voice to the immediate price he believed he must pay for refusing to lie.
At the Loir-et-Cher Assizes, in November, the four accused stood reunited as they had been within the farmhouse. But this reunion served a very different end. It was no longer a matter of convincing one another that the old woman was the wellspring of their misfortunes; each was required to answer, individually, for their share in the deed. The kinship that had facilitated collective action forbade the melting of their several responsibilities into a single family name.
The public prosecutor demanded death for all four. The advocates appealed above all to the sway of superstition in Sologne. Behind that plea lay a formidable question: how far might a shared belief impair the judgment of those who take a life? To acknowledge the existence of such belief did not compel one to believe in sorcery. And to concede that terror had contributed to the crime did nothing to efface the physical acts required to execute it.
The verdict divided the accused. According to the Journal du Lot of the 25th of November, Georgette and Sylvain Thomas were condemned to death, Alexandre Lebon to hard labour for life, and Alexis to twenty years of the same penalty. The two brothers thus received unequal sentences. The court had recognized distinctions where the prosecution had demanded that all four lives be forfeited together. In later accounts that reduced the affair to a few lines, this distinction would often be smoothed away; yet for the man whose punishment had an appointed end, it represented the entire measure of the future.
On the 24th of January, 1887, the Thomases were executed upon the Place d’Armes in Romorantin. The multitude assembled to watch the end of the pair whose crime had travelled from gazette to gazette. For the populace, that morning offered a visible resolution. For the children, justice had now carried away the parents after the parents had slain the grandmother. None of those severed bonds could be restored by the orderly consummation of the scaffold.
In this affair, the word witch had travelled a long road. It had passed from rumour to suspicion, from suspicion to an explanation of misfortune, and from that explanation into violence. Yet at the end of that road lay neither secret power nor vanquished curse: there lay only Marie Lebon, an aged woman whose savings and infirmity ought never to have mattered more to anyone than her life.