The hat had remained behind in the bedchamber, alongside the hammer. The person who had abandoned them had fled; she who could recount the onslaught was still alive. On November 30, 1807, when the police commissioner climbed to the third floor of a house in the Rue du Pot-de-Fer, he found the widow Marye wounded and a surgeon busily dressing her injuries. This survivor was about to attach a name to the outrage. Later, two dead men would be joined to the dossier. The jury, however, would not return the same answer for all three affairs.
The Woman Who Opened the Window
For roughly two years, the widow had been acquainted with Manette Bouhourt, who also went by the name of Auguste and plied the trade of peruke-maker. Marye described her as customarily attired in male clothing. That very morning, she had arrived in a frock coat and round hat while her hostess still lay abed. According to the injured woman’s declaration, the visitor sat down, then suddenly threw herself upon her with a hammer. A struggle ensued; Marye managed to reach a window and cry out for help.
Her flight left two articles behind in the room, but also a narrative that the assailant might well dispute. Marye believed an attempt had been made to rob her. Yet she spoke of an intention inferred from the fury of the assault, not of a theft she had witnessed being consummated. The authorities possessed her testimony, her bodily injuries, the hammer, and the hat. This case already differed from those the police would subsequently reopen: here, the victim was no corpse discovered after days of silence. She was able to point to the creature who had crossed her threshold and declare what had taken place.
Bouhourt was not apprehended until January 18, 1808. Champagnac’s compendium relates that she had found refuge with a certain woman named Doisy, an acquaintance formed in prison; it does not trace every day of her flight. Brought before the examiners, she admitted to an altercation with Marye, but altered its origin entirely. She alleged the widow’s jealousy, followed by reproaches and foul abuse. She claimed to have administered a slap before being seized by the hair and thrown to the ground. The hammer, she insisted, had merely lain within arm’s reach amidst the scuffle.
Two Versions Around a Hammer
In the prisoner’s defense, the blow thus proceeded from an improvised brawl. In Marye’s deposition, the attack had been abrupt and the weapon already grasped in the visitor’s hand. This was no trifling variance of detail: it touched upon the contrivance of the act and the design to take life. Bouhourt spoke further of an intimate liaison and grievances of the heart. These assertions belonged strictly to her own version of events. They warranted neither transforming Marye into the certain author of her own misfortune, nor treating the accused’s male attire as a presumption of guilt.
The inquiry further established that Bouhourt had taken shelter in a second-floor corridor instead of making an immediate exit into the street. Blood was observed there, including the bloody imprint of a hand upon the wall. Such a mark might well trace a flight; it could not, of itself, narrate the genesis of the quarrel. The examining magistrate was bound to weigh these elements without confounding the physical reality of violence with the self-serving explanation proffered by the hand that struck. Yet even as this assault was being sifted, two older tragedies came to rest heavily upon the same prisoner.
The first concerned Gabriel-Pierre Boyssou, a former parish priest and seminary professor, discovered dead in his lodgings after the Christmas festivities of 1805. He possessed modest savings and had contemplated purchasing a small property near Vincennes. Neighbors had observed in his company a young man whom he introduced as his nephew—a visitor who, it was remarked, took care never to show his face. Then Boyssou ceased to be seen abroad. When his prolonged absence alarmed the landlord, the commissary of police and a locksmith had to be summoned.
The Nephew Unearthed from Memory
Boyssou lay dead upon his bed. The physician ascribed the wounds to a blunt instrument, such as a heavy hammer. Effects had vanished, the bureau had been forced open, and the coin bags lay empty. The absence of any forced entry at the doors suggested a killer welcomed into the house. This deduction pointed naturally to the ostensible nephew. It did not, however, establish his true identity or his individual movements. The investigation opened following Bouhourt’s arrest sought to transform this nameless visitor into a known personage.
Witnesses then claimed to recognize in her the young man glimpsed at Boyssou’s lodgings, notwithstanding the two years that had elapsed. Moreover, in various pawnshops where she pledged her chattels, articles were recovered that had issued from the deceased priest’s apartment. Bouhourt conceded having deposited them, but insisted she had received them from a paramour named Duplaidois. Champagnac dismissed this man as a phantom of her fancy. His chronicle, published in 1833, leaves scant room for doubt; the jurors, nevertheless, retained some. The contested provenance of the pledges had to be adjudicated by law, not resolved by the peremptory tone of a chronicler.
The other murder was that of Antoine-François Prévost, who resided in the Rue Hyacinthe. He had been seen in a coffeehouse with a young man in a frock coat on the final evening he ever appeared in public. Thereafter, his chamber fell into absolute silence. A foul stench at length alarmed the neighbors; his mother requested that an inspection be made. By means of a ladder, someone peered through the casement and caught sight of the corpse. The chamber was double-locked from without, with no inner bolt drawn.
Three Affairs Upon the Same Bench
A bloodstained hatchet lay in the room. The surgeons deemed it consistent with the fatal wounds. Several individuals recognized Bouhourt as Prévost’s companion; one such identification even rested upon the timbre of her voice. She denied ever having known him, ever having entered his lodgings, or ever having been seen at his side. In this dossier, therefore, she offered no explanation for an article acknowledged to have passed through her hands, as with Boyssou, nor for an admitted struggle, as with Marye. Against the witnesses she set an absolute denial.
At first glance, the parallels might have seemed damning: a familiar visitor, a weapon left at the scene, blows rained upon the head, a flight, and subsequent identifications. Yet a family resemblance between several crimes could not supply the place of positive proof in each. The prosecution offered a single figure who ostensibly explained everything; the defense had to reply separately to a living survivor, to pawned goods, and to the hazy recollections of a neighborhood. The three indictments occupied the same bench, yet they commanded unequal means of conviction.
Following the pleadings of the public prosecutor and the appointed advocate, the jury deliberated for five hours. Their verdict was unanimous regarding the outrage upon the widow Marye: they affirmed the intent to murder and willful premeditation. As to the assassinations of Boyssou and Prévost, they declared Bouhourt not convicted. Capital punishment was thus pronounced for the assault upon the woman who survived, and not upon a finding of guilt in the two murders. The appeal in cassation was dismissed; the compendium records that the sentence was carried out, without specifying the precise date.
Champagnac concludes by virtually censuring this judicial division. He evokes the passions of the public, assigns to Bouhourt’s morals a sweeping explanation, and recounts the two deaths as though the verdict of the jury had parted nothing. Such certitude belongs to his printed volume. The judicial outcome remains far more precise, and far more unsettling than the portrait of a monster known from the outset: a premeditated assault was upheld, two assassinations were not. Marye had opened her window and lived to bear witness. Boyssou and Prévost had remained behind locked doors; their names could not be appended to a death warrant merely to round out a tale.