On Sunday evening, Joséphine Perrin and Charles-Alexandre Brunaux sat together at the theatre. They had spent the entire day in each other’s company, and onlookers observed them in a private box, where Brunaux took her hands and pressed his lips to them. By daybreak, they lay in the same bedchamber on the Rue d’Étretat. Rising from bed, he woke her under the pretext of setting out to hunt. She stepped toward the doorway to hold up a light for his path; he discharged his weapon point-blank into her head. Within a few fleeting hours, the tender reconciliation seemingly witnessed upon a public stage had turned into the final act of a liaison long troubled by domestic brawls overheard by their neighbors.
The Gazette dates its chronicle from the assize proceedings of 17 May. It records that Brunaux, a commercial clerk in Le Havre, was twenty-three years of age. At the bar, he appeared as a pale, despondent young man, plainly attired, sporting a thick blond moustache. His baptismal names were Charles-Alexandre. The victim, Joséphine Perrin, earned her bread as a shop hand, supporting a young child entirely upon her modest wages.
She had once stood on the verge of marrying Brunaux. Yet she hesitated, the chronicle observes, fearing that the man might make life intolerable for her child. Their union was already plagued by fierce jealousy and outbursts of violence. Those living nearby frequently caught the sounds of tumult and shattering crockery; one witness remembered seeing Brunaux strike Joséphine upon the common staircase. These details were no retroactive embellishments woven after the tragedy: they were introduced directly into the courtroom by those whose daily lives bordered the couple’s lodgings.
In December 1872, according to the indictment, a proposed marriage collapsed, resulting in an open rupture. Brunaux surrendered himself to several days of debauchery before the lovers were drawn together once more. The truce, however, proved short-lived. On 18 January, he caught sight of Joséphine at a public ball, leaning upon the arm of another man. The encounter stung his pride. Bitter reproaches and grievances ensued, and the following evening failed to dissipate his smoldering resentment.
On Sunday, 19 January, the couple ventured out together to the Théâtre de l’Ambigu. When the curtain fell, Brunaux escorted Joséphine back to his quarters, where she shared his bed. The account notes that their reconciliation appeared unreserved. At dawn, Brunaux rose. A stiff gale had been blowing for two days; he insisted he meant to go fowling. His double-barrelled shotgun was charged with two cartridges. Awakening Joséphine, he asked her to light his way down the stairs. She rose and took several paces across the floorboards. As she neared the threshold where he stood waiting, he fired.
The discharge struck her head at point-blank range. The prosecutor’s brief describes death as instantaneous, and Brunaux’s flight as immediate: casting down the weapon, he fled the scene. That very evening, the authorities apprehended him at Saint-Aubin-Routot. The savagery of the deed was appalling, yet the preliminary inquiry looked well beyond the fatal blast. It sought to determine whether the shot was the sudden conclusion of an unexpected quarrel, or the methodical execution of a premeditated design.
During the proceedings, the presiding judge ordered a floor plan of the bedchamber distributed among the jurors, the crown prosecutor, and the defense. This diagram noted the precise posture of the corpse at the moment of its discovery. The prosecution portrayed her lying almost naked before the bed. The rendering provided the jury with a measurable space to scrutinize, its distances and thresholds laid bare; yet it could not reconcile the conflicting testimonies that were to follow.
Brunaux admitted having pulled the trigger, but vigorously rejected the charge of premeditation. He claimed that, upon rising, he perceived his gun was loaded. He asked Joséphine who had done so; she denied all knowledge. He professed to have believed she harbored an intent against his life. He then asserted that he noticed cords tied to the trigger-guard, demanded what they meant, and, flying into a fury when she refused to answer, discharged the weapon. He maintained that the deed was an uncontrollable impulse, a mechanical reflex wrought by lingering intoxication.
The presiding judge’s interrogatory laid bare the weaknesses of this defense. Had Brunaux genuinely believed Joséphine capable of taking his life, why had he rested peacefully beside her throughout the night? If he truly intended to hunt, why was he shod in neither his heavy boots nor bearing his game-bag? On that raw, blustery morning, he wore only light dress boots. Such inquiries formed no isolated proof, yet they starkly contrasted his excuses with the reality of his attire and movements.
The bill of indictment set forth a further chain of circumstantial evidence. Brunaux had repeatedly uttered threats against Joséphine’s life. While he had disposed of the remainder of his sporting kit, he had stubbornly refused to part with his gun. Crucially, the two cords lashed to the triggers appeared fitted to fabricate the semblance of a suicide. In the eyes of the public prosecutor, this circumstance transformed the fowling piece: it was no longer merely the instrument of slaughter, but the apparatus of a calculated ruse contrived to mislead the earliest investigators. Brunaux disclaimed any such contrivance. He insisted the cords had merely sparked their altercation, and that he had never plotted his mistress’s demise.
Police Commissioner Magoulès described the initial discovery. Alerted that a man had ended his life in a room on the Rue d’Étretat, he understood upon crossing the threshold that the dead body was that of a woman. The firearm lay a short distance from the corpse, one barrel still cocked and charged. The disposition of the weapon did not correspond to what he had observed in cases of self-destruction where the trigger was engaged with the foot. He took note of Joséphine’s scattered garments and, further off, a man’s sodden hat and boots. Dr. Lecadre performed the post-mortem examination. He concluded that the blast had been discharged at point-blank range, ascending obliquely from below toward the inner corner of the right eye. While he conjectured that the victim must have leaned against the wall, he conceded that suicide remained physically possible, and homicide equally so. He wavered; the judge reminded him that he had previously described the staged suicide as having been “admirably and skillfully prepared.”
Magoulès dismissed the suicide hypothesis on the strength of the gun’s position; Lecadre, however, refused to rule out either possibility. The court record thus presents a striking contrast between police observation, medical uncertainty, and the unyielding conviction of the indictment. It fell to the prosecution to establish criminal intent by other means: the firearm, the cords, the antecedent menaces, and the prisoner’s demeanor before and after the fatal shot. Police Commissioner Vallin testified regarding Brunaux’s antecedents. His conduct, he reported, had been orderly before the war; yet upon coming into an inheritance of 28,000 francs, he had abandoned himself to dissipation. He had previously cohabited with another mistress, whom he had once struck across the forehead with a bottle; Joséphine, likewise, had bitterly complained of his brutality.
Allain, a grocer on the Rue d’Étretat, had encountered the accused on the eve of the tragedy. Brunaux confessed to him that he had crossed paths with Joséphine at the dance hall and felt deeply humiliated. On the morning following the murder, several witnesses observed him in a public house. Within hours of the fatal shot, he was seen sipping a cordial and inviting companions to a game of dice. Having lost his wager, he repaired to his uncle’s house, whiling away the rest of the day. The callous indifference ascribed to him by these onlookers fortified the prosecution’s theory, though it remained an external perception rather than a true window into his soul.
The public prosecutor dwelt upon Joséphine’s gentle industry, setting it against the habits of violence and debauchery he attributed to the prisoner. He argued that the cords were the unmistakable signature of premeditation, and the events of January the unfolding of a calculated scheme. His closing address intertwined physical clues with stern moralizing against strong drink and moral decay; the jury was left to disentangle this soaring rhetoric from the concrete questions placed before them.
Maître Homais did not dispute the fatal shot. He exhorted the jury not to mistake for certainty that which the state presented as premeditation. He invoked his client’s intoxication, his absinthe-clouded senses, his youth, his honorable service during the war, and the upright reputation of his brothers. He argued that the cords alone were insufficient to prove a conspiracy and stressed that the accused had never once alluded to suicide during his examinations. He pleaded for extenuating circumstances.
The jury returned an affirmative finding upon both willful homicide and premeditation. They likewise granted the benefit of extenuating circumstances. The Court accordingly sentenced Brunaux to hard labor for life. The verdict thus embraced neither the plea of accidental discharge nor that of an unpremeditated fit of passion; it settled upon an enduring penalty that took full account of the mitigating factors recognized by the panel.
Only one evening prior, witnesses at the playhouse had observed Brunaux tenderly taking and kissing Joséphine’s hands. At dawn in the bedchamber, the cords secured to the trigger became the subject of an explanation Brunaux denied and an interpretation he fiercely contested. The physician described a wound consistent with murder, yet could not exclude self-slaughter; the witnesses spoke of domestic blows, light city boots, and games of dice. The jury resolved the question of premeditation. What endures from this archival chronicle is no mystery unraveled by a solitary clue, but an accumulation of gestures, conflicting narratives, and unresolved doubts that together persuaded the Court of Assizes.