A few drops of blood had stained Montbailli's stocking. They came from his own arm: a physician had bled him after seeing him lose consciousness before his mother's body. But the neighbourhood possessed no physician for every retelling. As the death passed from lip to lip, the stain changed owners. It became the victim’s, then the mark of murder, and at last the detail that allowed one to speak with certainty. In that house in Saint-Omer, a son's blood was to be used to accuse him of having shed that of his mother.
The widow Montbailli managed a tobacco manufactory upon which her son and daughter-in-law also depended for their bread. The enterprise rested upon a concession from the Farmers-General. It was no estate the young people were assured of inheriting: their mother’s death threatened, on the contrary, to compromise their very livelihood. Within the household, economic authority and domestic authority belonged therefore to the same person. There they laboured, there they slept, there they quarrelled; it was difficult to abandon one of these existences without forfeiting the others.
The son was fond of plants and flowers. Champagnac attributes to him a gentle disposition, ill-suited to the confrontations of which his dwelling was the theatre. This penchant for the garden proves nothing, to be sure, in the face of a criminal charge; yet it gives the man an occupation before giving him a trial. Montbailli had his pastimes, his familiar habits, a way of filling the hours that was not yet that of a prisoner awaiting a verdict. Between his mother and his wife, he sought to preserve a hearth whose rooms the other two were no longer willing to share.
The mother bore her daughter-in-law with ill grace. The old chronicle attributes their disputes to her consumption of eau-de-vie and to her desire to remove an inconvenient witness. Abuse and threats eventually drove the young woman to her parents' home. She remained there a month. Her husband came to implore her return; she refused. A judicial decree compelled her to return to the conjugal domicile. Before uniting them upon the prisoners' dock, the courts had thus already forced these three persons to continue their cohabitation.
One easily grasps what this return must have cost the young woman: she found herself back in the very place she had sought to flee. To her husband, his wife’s presence meant that the household still held together; to her, that same presence marked the end of a sanctuary. They lived together anew without returning to where they had begun. The mother, mistress of the premises and head of the enterprise, remained at the centre of this enforced arrangement.
The daughter-in-law's return reconciled no one for long. The widow withdrew to her bedchamber, then deemed it intolerable to keep to herself in her own house. On the 26th of July 1770, she served the couple with a formal summons to quit the premises within twenty-four hours. This time, the law was to dissolve the domestic household it had helped preserve. Montbailli intervened once more. According to the chronicle, his entreaties softened his mother; she spent a moment with the young couple, and the eviction appeared averted. The peace remained fragile, but the door had not closed upon them.
On the 28th of July, at five o’clock in the morning, a female worker arrived asking for the widow. Montbailli and his wife were still abed. He arose, explained that his mother was asleep; they waited. In a house of toil, the customary hour of rising becomes in time an appointment. This one passed without a sound behind the door. At last they entered. The widow lay near her bed, fallen backward over a small chest. Her eye was injured; her countenance had altered; blood had flowed from her nose.
Champagnac describes a sudden death followed by a fall, the wound having been caused by the corner of the chest. He attributes it to what was then termed an apoplexy. Those who entered discovered, above all, a woman who answered no more. Montbailli swooned. His wife cried out for aid, the neighbours came running, a physician arrived. The mother was dead; the son was bled to restore him to his senses. It was during this ministrance, the chronicle states, that the drops reached his stocking. An act intended to succour him left upon his garments the future exhibit of an indictment.
The burial took place. The seals were affixed, the inventory drawn up. These ordinary formalities failed to dispel the unease that old resentments made so easy to rekindle. It was known that the widow had wished to cast out her children; it was known that her daughter-in-law had fled the house. What no one had witnessed took shape between these established facts. The couple, it was said, had killed to inherit. When the absence of any transmissible fortune weakened that explanation, vengeance took its place. The motive might shift without altering the conclusion.
The detail of the stocking possessed a singular power: it could be seen, or at least people claimed to have seen it. It allowed talk to leave mere impressions behind and adopt the tone of observation. The quarrels supplied the motive; the stain supplied the deed. All that was wanting was the link between them. But repetition took the place of investigation in bridging the gap. Soon, throughout Saint-Omer, men no longer asked how the widow had died. They asked why her children had not yet been arrested.
Arrested they were. Examined separately, they offered the magistrates of Saint-Omer nothing upon which to pronounce the demanded condemnation. The court ordered that inquiries be pursued for a year, while keeping the husband and wife in prison. This decree preserved their lives, but it surrendered a full year of their existence to an accusation that could not be established. Nor were they left even to that reprieve. The prosecuting magistrate petitioned the Council of Artois for a harsher sentence.
Before that tribunal, the proceedings took the path of the irreparable. The chronicle decries the absence of necessary depositions and confrontations. Both spouses were condemned to death. The wife was twenty-four years of age and pregnant: her pregnancy stayed her execution. She remained imprisoned at Arras. Her husband was conducted back to Saint-Omer. He continued to protest his innocence, even upon the place of execution. The words the chronicle attributes to him refuse the confession he was pressed to make: he would not die confirming a crime he denied having committed.
Following the execution, compassion succeeded suspicion. The narrative describes a crowd shaken to its depths, moved even to acts of veneration. This reversal could do nothing more for Montbailli. Nor could it, of itself, save the woman awaiting her fate in prison. The term of her pregnancy brought near both the birth of a child and the moment when the judges might claim its mother. Time continued to work against her, even as public opinion began to reproach itself for its former certainty.
Voltaire intervened by means of a memorial addressed to the highest ranks of the judiciary. The case was reviewed by a newly constituted council established at Arras. On the 8th of April 1772, a unanimous decree recognized the innocence of both spouses. Her advocate brought the survivor back to her native town; she recovered her liberty and a name cleared of accusation. The returning procession might have worn the air of a triumph. But missing from it was the man who had striven so hard to keep his wife by his side. She returned to her country a widow. After disputing so bitterly with others for the right to live together, they had not a single day left to share.