The shop boy knew that his mistress had not boarded the train. He had waited upon the platform for the express purpose of seeing Madame Boyer off; neither she nor Vitalis had ever appeared. In the morning, when the latter related with easy assurance that he had escorted her to the station, the lad did not contradict him. He had just understood that a jest might serve to mask a matter far too grave for laughter.
Léon Vitalis had promised to play a trick upon his mistress: to let her board the train for Montpellier, then slip away before it departed. The young assistant, sufficiently versed in the household quarrels to find the scheme amusing, had wished to witness the spectacle. That needless errand was now transformed into testimony. The murderer had provided himself with a witness to his falsehood under the belief that he was fashioning an accomplice to his merriment.
The Mother, the Daughter, and the Bookseller
Three years earlier, in 1874, the death of M. Boyer had left in Montpellier a widow, an adolescent daughter, and an ample fortune. The former merchant had devised the greater part of his estate to Marie, his daughter; his wife was to administer the revenues until the heiress came of age. Léon Vitalis, a young bookseller’s clerk who had become Madame Boyer’s lover, already inhabited this domestic circle under the convenient guise of a helpful relative.
The account left by H. B. Irving, drawn from a judicial pamphlet and contemporary trial reports, weighs heavily upon the character of the two women. He perceives in the mother a wanton, in the daughter an egotist, and draws from their beauty or their religious observances conclusions that nothing compels us to adopt. The facts suffice to lay bare the drama: a mother possessed money, a daughter was soon to inherit it, and a man coveted successively, and then concurrently, the favors and the resources of both.
Madame Boyer removed Marie from her convent school. She financed the business of Vitalis, who dealt in second-hand books and dabbled in moneylending. Then she grew aware of the interest he was bestowing upon her daughter. Sent to Lyon to pursue her education, the girl maintained a clandestine correspondence with him. Upon her return, the rivalry was no longer a mere suspicion; it had crept into their meals, their absences, their manners of speaking, and their silences.
A young girl is ill-prepared to become her mother’s rival. A mother affords herself no protection by turning her daughter into a witness to her own intimacy. As for Vitalis, his interest lay in having each woman attribute her misery to the other.
Two Shops for Three Persons
In January 1876, several bearer securities vanished from Madame Boyer’s possession. She lodged a complaint with the authorities, only to withdraw it shortly thereafter. Later, she reproached Vitalis with living off that very sum. Trust had thus already been fractured, yet no separation ensued. He departed for a time to Paris; mother and daughter alike lamented his absence, and this shared expectation preserved a bond that jealousy ought to have undone.
In the autumn, the two women established themselves in Marseille. Madame Boyer purchased two adjoining shops on the Rue de la République: a cheese shop for herself, a millinery shop for Marie. Behind the storefronts, a parlour, a kitchen, and a dark room linked the passages of their days; beneath the kitchen lay a cellar. The premises that were meant to secure their independence were destined to confine the three protagonists within an inescapable proximity.
Vitalis joined them at the beginning of 1877. He obtained a power of attorney to manage their affairs and sell off the businesses, which were yielding less than had been hoped. To Marie, he held out the prospect of a flight together. Yet he failed to find a purchaser at an adequate price, and Madame Boyer, recovering from an illness, resolved to turn him out. At one stroke he was losing his mistress, his command over the money, and the means of carrying off the daughter.
The resolve to kill arose from this impasse. The early chronicle relates that Marie hesitated before agreeing to the plan proposed by Vitalis. It would be idle to mistake that hesitation for innocence: she had thereafter several opportunities to cry out, to unlatch the doors, to arrest what was in preparation. Subjection may explain a relationship; it does not annul an act.
The Last Day Granted
On March 19, 1877, Madame Boyer left the house to attend Mass. She had served notice upon Vitalis that she would not find him there upon her return. When she came back, he was still present. The shop boy was sent away under the pretext of a family discussion. That phrase, so commonplace as to arouse no suspicion, rendered silence possible.
Vitalis assaulted Madame Boyer in the parlour. She cried aloud to her daughter. Marie did not come to her aid: she shuttered the shops and lent her hand to the murder. We shall not recount the struggle; it is enough to record that the victim resisted, that the slayer required assistance, and that such assistance was rendered him by the very one upon whom the dying woman called.
The body was concealed in the cellar. Upon the boy’s return, Vitalis invented the journey to Montpellier and the prank at the station. The two lovers now had the night before them; what they lacked was the earth they meant to dig. Beneath the cellar floor, bedrock barred the burial. The house itself materially refused the secret they sought to commit to it.
They then undertook to convey the remains outside. The port was too frequented; on the following day, they bore two parcels away in a handcart. A customs officer questioned them as they passed. Vitalis spoke of luggage. Terrified by the encounter, they ultimately abandoned their burden in a roadside ditch, covering it over with stones and sand.
The Watchful Shop
The shop boy, ever since his vigil at the station, had kept a watchful eye upon the house. He caught sight of the nocturnal departure with the cart. A neighbour woman, too, had observed circumstances that troubled her mind. They compared what they knew and repaired together to the police commissary. It was no longer idle neighborhood curiosity: several independent facts converged upon the selfsame absence.
Just as the commissary was promising an inquiry, word reached him that the parcels had been discovered. He summoned the boy once more, who recognized his mistress by her garments. The measures taken to render the corpse unrecognizable had failed to obliterate all that an employee might know of a person beheld every day.
Vitalis and Marie were arrested as they were making ready their flight. They maintained at first that Madame Boyer had departed of her own accord, but soon confessed before the examining magistrate, M. Proal. The falsehood of the train, the carriage of the parcels, the recovery of the body, and the admissions now formed a narrative whose order they could no longer command.
Two Sentences
The trial opened at Aix in early July 1877. The sway exercised by Vitalis over Marie still appeared formidable enough that he was removed from the courtroom during a portion of her interrogation. The jury granted the young woman extenuating circumstances: she was sentenced to hard labour for life. Vitalis received the sentence of death and was executed on August 17. Irving records that Marie was released in 1892, following a period of penal servitude deemed exemplary.
The disparity of the penalties does not re-establish a simple division between an instigator and a manipulated victim. It denotes the manner in which the court distinguished their responsibilities. Madame Boyer, for her part, never returned to the two shops. The inheritance that had rendered her daughter desirable in the eyes of Vitalis opened to the girl none of the doors that had been promised.
At the outset, each had sought to command a future: the mother by keeping her lover, the lover by governing the fortune, the daughter by fleeing with him. In the end, there remained an empty seat upon a train and a boy who had gone thither to laugh. The crime had failed to vanish because someone had waited for a woman who could no longer come.