The door remained bolted, and behind it the cries had just ceased. Those who had hurried toward the house of Guillaume Granié had called out, demanding to be let in. They had heard a woman’s desperate appeals, followed by absolute silence. When a window finally swung open, it was not to summon aid. Granié appeared, announcing that he had just murdered his wife.
At Gaillac-Toulza, on the 5th of April, 1831, the neighbours were powerless to prevent this death. A few days later, within the gaol where the presumed murderer had been confined, another man would perish beneath his blows. Then the prisoner would turn his destructive will upon himself. These were the three deaths that the press would ultimately transform into a medical curiosity, to the extent that the prolonged agony of the last would almost overshadow the memory of the first two.
Before the House
Granié was thirty years of age. A husbandman born in this commune of the arrondissement of Muret, he was residing there when the morning’s violent altercation drew several persons before his threshold. The screams of his wife had alerted them. They demanded that the door be unbarred, insisted, and waited for any sound from within. Nothing permitted them to reach her in time.
In our evocation of that tense vigil, one of these bystanders stands slightly apart, his eyes fixed upon the upper window, while another lingers directly before the entrance. None yet knew in which chamber of the house the woman lay. The heavy timber forced everyone to rely solely upon sound; when the uproar ceased, the urgency did not vanish with it. It was precisely now that entrance ought to have been forced.
The chronicle relates that Granié displayed from the window the mutilated remains of his victim, openly boasting of his deed. Armed with an agricultural implement, he then threatened anyone who dared batter down the door. The mayor of the hamlet of Berjaud arrived with members of the National Guard. They succeeded in forcing an entry and subduing him despite his fierce resistance. The very violence he had visited upon his wife was turned against those who came to apprehend him.
During his examination, he manifested great animosity toward her and recounted the blows he had inflicted. The gazette rehearses these atrocious details, yet omits the name of the woman herself. It chronicles her slaughter with meticulous precision while leaving the reality of her life an empty void. Yet the entire tragedy began with her: with her screams, with the crowd they summoned, and with a bolted door that no one could force open in time.
A Week Later
At Muret, legal proceedings were instituted against Granié. The gaol was intended to hold him at the disposal of justice and to shield society from his ferocity. There, he shared a pallet with Jean Mespoulet, known by the sobriquet Yaya. On the 12th of April, toward five o'clock in the morning, Granié seized the heavy wooden lid of a wash-tub and struck him a fatal blow to the head.
The correspondent presumes a dispute had arisen between them, though he records neither its subject nor the words exchanged. The outcome, however, is undisputed in his account: Mespoulet died. This name abruptly shatters any reading of the case that would reduce the initial crime to an isolated outburst of domestic fury. A man imprisoned alongside Granié, in the very institution chosen to secure him, had become his second victim.
This succession of events proved utterly confounding to those charged with the prisoner's custody. It was no longer enough merely to turn a key upon him. A common household utensil had served as a lethal weapon, and the compulsory intimacy imposed upon a fellow captive had afforded the opportunity. The danger lay not merely in the hazard of an escape; it remained within the walls, threatening the men obliged to sleep by his side and those duty-bound to approach him.
On the 20th of April, Granié was transferred to the Conciergerie of Toulouse. Irons were struck upon his hands and feet. The contemporary account approves of this severity, citing the paroxysms of fury that were still dreaded. Yet an entirely different course of conduct had already commenced. For several days past, it was affirmed, Granié had obstinately refused all nourishment. The manacles might constrain his limbs, but they could do nothing to overcome this silent refusal.
Two Visits a Day
Castanet, surgeon to the prisons of Toulouse, attended him twice daily according to the report. He had before him a prisoner whose bodily health he was tasked to preserve, but who seemed determined to abandon it. The days wore on, and Granié’s emaciation became glaringly apparent. The captive remained for the most part mute—a silence that offered no reassuring answer to the physician’s inquiries.
The scene we ascribe to the surgeon is shaped by the nature of this sombre duty: he steps forward to examine the inmate, waits for him to offer his arm, and must then draw nearer still, as the heavy irons encumber every movement. He addresses him during the examination, eliciting nothing beyond a few sparse words. At the next visit, the same routine would begin anew, beside a man grown slightly feebler, under the unyielding obligation to minister to his survival.
Yet Granié retained a degree of strength of which he could still make alarming use. Toward the end of April, the press reported that he had wrenched apart the padlock securing his handcuffs. His progressive debilitation could not, therefore, permit the warders to consider his violence definitively extinguished. They watched the slow decay of a body from which a sudden, desperate blow might still emerge. Vigilance and medical care proceeded hand in hand, without the diligence of the former guaranteeing any efficacy in the latter.
He was invited to name anything that might tempt his appetite. He replied, according to the chronicle, that his keepers would tire of the contest before he did. This curt rejoinder altered the terms of the trial: it was no longer merely he who was waiting, but all those who perpetually returned to urge him to eat. The prisoner appeared to foretell their inevitable exhaustion, as though he already foresaw the futile end of all their endeavours.
What He Dreaded
On another occasion, he declared that he preferred to perish in this manner rather than regain his strength only to face the guillotine. He also harboured the conviction that a criminal conviction would strip his three children of their patrimony. This apprehension is recorded as his own belief; it does not constitute an accurate statement of legal forfeiture. Yet it formed an integral part of the reasoning by which he justified his fast to those attempting to break his resolve.
It would be facile, from this remark, to fashion him into the tragic figure of a father sacrificing his life to preserve an inheritance. The two corpses forbid any such moral indulgence. The concern he voiced for his offspring could neither expiate the butchery of his wife nor the murder of Mespoulet. It merely introduced into the case a glimpse into the prisoner's mind, a consideration with which his custodians were forced to reckon.
The journal concluded that his rational answers dispelled every suspicion of mental alienation. It displayed a confidence in this verdict far greater than any we might draw from a handful of reported utterances. In Toulouse, the dilemma remained entirely practical: the man was wasting away, and repeated entreaties failed to shake his determination. His physical collapse accelerated. On the 17th of June, he expired amidst violent convulsions. Neither chronicle records any definitive judicial verdict.
After Death
The newspaper announced a fast of sixty-three days’ duration, hailing it as an extraordinary phenomenon. A few days later, it drew a comparison with the case of a young Englishman described by a physician at the close of the preceding century. The prisoner and that obscure scholar were thus yoked together by their shared feat of endurance, though their histories had nothing else in common. The disquisition concluded with conjectures regarding the cranial conformation of both men—speculations to which no explanatory validity can now be assigned.
For Granié, the long vigil was at an end. For the kin of his victims, it concluded in quite another fashion. A man had been seized, an inquest into his crimes had begun, and immense efforts had been made to keep him alive; yet he died before the public prints could chronicle the judgment of the court. What remains is a house where neighbours once stood waiting before a barred door, a prison pallet where Mespoulet met his death, and, in Toulouse, the now futile visitations of a prison surgeon. The final death had monopolised the columns of the press; the first two had set the tragic drama in motion.