Beneath piles of old furniture, inside a stone trough sealed with clay, Marguerite Bouges was found. Her son, Pierre Barrié, had told Jean and Marie-Anne that their mother had died following a carriage accident on the road to Montpellier, where a man named Cambonne was supposed to convey her to an asylum. This man remained entirely untraceable, and no record of Marguerite’s admission had ever been discovered; the gruesome find, however, was made in the family homestead at Cocural.
In September 1824, Pierre Barrié lived alone with his mother in the ancestral house. Marguerite was sixty years of age. Champagnac’s chronicle records that she suffered from mental alienation, reporting that her children deemed it necessary to place her in an asylum for her own preservation and the safety of all. Pierre, the eldest son, undertook the arrangement. His brother and sister, Jean and Marie-Anne, were then residing elsewhere in the region.
Pierre related that he had struck an agreement with Alexandre-Frédéric Cambonne, a merchant from Espalion and a landholder in Montpellier. In exchange for four hundred and forty francs, this man was to transport Marguerite to Montpellier and place her in a charitable hospice. According to Pierre’s account of her departure, his mother had resisted, compelling the gendarmes of Espalion to lend assistance. He later added that the conveyance had overturned, that his mother had fractured her skull, and that she had subsequently expired in a hospice.
The Barrié children made frequent journeys to Paris. In the course of October 1824, Pierre set out for the capital alongside Jean and Marie-Anne. In the following January, they learned from him in Paris that their mother had perished in the carriage accident that was to take her to Montpellier. Pierre likewise wrote to Cocural so that the remaining family members might assume mourning attire. Travelers who subsequently returned from Montpellier brought back no intelligence whatsoever regarding Marguerite. In May, Jean returned to the village bearing a receipt for four hundred and forty francs, signed in the name of Cambonne and furnished by Pierre. Inquiries yielded no trace of this individual, nor of Marguerite’s admission in Montpellier.
As travelers continued to return from Montpellier without news, suspicion took root in the village. It was whispered that Marguerite had never left the district. The neighbors then recalled another Pierre: no longer the dutiful son charged with escorting his mother to an asylum, but a dark, agitated man who, at the close of September, had begged them to let him sleep beneath their roof. He claimed he could not endure remaining alone in the family house, where the wind rattled the doors and whose nocturnal noises chilled him with terror.
Another circumstance drew all eyes back toward the house. Shortly before his departure for Paris, Pierre had concluded a farm lease with his uncle, reserving for himself a small closet. He had barred its entrance with a partition of timber planks, after heaping inside an accumulation of old furniture and firewood. Dr. Capoulade, of Albouze, having learned that the widow Barrié remained missing, remarked that it was in this very closet that her remains would be found. His words were reported to the magistrates. They did not point to a hiding place already searched, but to a recess that the house itself appeared to have excised.
The judicial authorities proceeded to the closet. Beneath the mound of furniture, inside the stone trough sealed with clay, they discovered the corpse. Its state of preservation still permitted an identification. Jean recognized his mother; several villagers recognized Marguerite. Marie Crassels noted the absence of the first phalanx on a finger of the left hand, lost years earlier to a felon. The woman whom the family narrative had dispatched to Montpellier was right there, in Cocural, and those who had known her could point out her undeniable marks.
Pierre was now living in Paris, on the Rue du Bac, plying his trade as a water carrier—an occupation followed by many men from his native region. The police were instructed to apprehend him and convey him to Rodez. Before the examining magistrate, he strenuously denied any part in the murder, standing firm upon his tale of Cambonne. The registers of Montpellier and Espalion bore no trace of any individual by that name; the central house of Montpellier had never admitted his mother. Interrogated regarding the contradiction between his announced death and the discovery at Cocural, he replied: “It is by a miracle!”
At the Assize Court, the presiding judge called upon him to explain the hackney coachman he claimed to have encountered in Paris. Pierre asserted that this man had introduced him to Cambonne, yet he knew neither his name nor his lodgings; neither was he acquainted with Cambonne’s origins. He acknowledged having concealed the contract from Maître Jalabert, an advocate who had nonetheless promised his good offices to secure a place for his mother in an asylum at Espalion or Rodez. He further claimed not to have accompanied her at the moment of departure, professing that it would have caused him too much grief. Several witnesses had heard tell of the gendarmes from Pierre’s own lips; before the Assizes, he maintained they were mistaken. Finally, he claimed to have learned of the demise through a missive from Montpellier, yet had forgotten the name of the signatory. When asked once more how his mother came to be discovered in the trough at Cocural, he answered that he did not know. The chronicler observes that his head dropped to his chest at every question.
Thirty-two witnesses were examined. Several recounted Dr. Capoulade’s remark; the physician took the stand to confirm having uttered it and explained the suspicious circumstances that had caught his attention. There were no eyewitnesses to the murder. The prosecution contended that the chain of gathered facts amply supplied the absence of direct testimony and dispelled any doubt as to the reality of the deed: the sham departure, the untraceable Cambonne, the hospice that had never received Marguerite, the walled closet, and the body in the trough.
Maître Grandet undertook Pierre’s defense. He had previously pleaded in the celebrated Fualdès affair; Champagnac notes that several passages of his address made a deep impression upon the audience. The jury, however, answered affirmatively to the questions of guilt. On November 17, 1826, the court sentenced Pierre Barrié to death. Upon hearing the decree, his dejection deepened; gendarmes were obliged to support him to lead him back to prison.
The Court of Cassation rejected his appeal, and the King denied his petition for clemency. On February 19, 1827, at Rodez, Pierre was drawn in a tumbril to the place of execution, barefoot, clad in a shirt, his head enveloped in a black veil. The prison chaplain sat beside him; the condemned man, mournful and broken, appeared attentive to his exhortations.
Following his conviction, he had substituted a different account for the tale of Cambonne. He now maintained that his mother had perished from a fall during a fit of dementia; that he had discovered her covered in blood, and had concealed her within the trough for fear of being accused had he summoned aid. This was the final explanation of Barrié recorded by Champagnac: he now placed the death squarely within the house at Cocural.