Giroux had counted the letters before stepping away from the sorting table. He had walked over to the counter to dispatch several packets; upon his return, two folded missives had vanished. Alexandre Marie still lingered beside him and Castou. On the following morning, Giroux chanced upon him near the Central Post Office on the Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. He demanded the missing letters and denounced him as a thief. The man stammered out excuses, slipped away, and was seen no more. In the judicial report of August 31, 1874, this modest tally formed the closing stroke of an indictment that spanned several years and encompassed postal orders dispatched from across the length and breadth of France.
The postal administration had first raised the alarm over these embezzlements in 1873. Money orders entrusted to the post had failed to reach the soldiers to whom they were addressed. Certain covers had been intercepted prior to delivery; upon the vouchers themselves, the names of senders and recipients had been scoured away and supplanted by fictitious identities. The envelopes tendered at the wickets bore superscriptions scrupulously aligned with these falsified orders. Thus did the funds follow the assumed name straight to the counter, where they might be pocketed by the very hand that had performed the substitution.
The earliest traces linked by the prosecution to Marie reached back to the close of the war. On February 18, 1871, four money orders were purportedly encashed in Paris at the Boulevard de Strasbourg branch, upon presentation by the post corporal of the Colbert field hospital, bearing the signature “Mûrie.” A sergeant named Marie then served among the orderlies of that ambulance. The orders had been remitted to servicemen, most of whom were then convalescing in hospital wards. This concentration directed the gaze of the investigators toward the institutions through which their correspondence had to pass before reaching their hands.
Military justice was the first to seize upon the case. On December 9, 1873, Marie appeared before the Second Council of War of Paris on the charge of forgery, and was acquitted. The scope of that judgment was circumscribed by the acts then under review: the military tribunal could take cognizance only of forgeries committed prior to March 21, 1871, the date of Marie’s discharge from the service. The proceedings of 1874 therefore opened upon another category of offenses, brought to light after that demarcation, and subsequently upon money orders of still later date. It did not transform the military acquittal into a retroactive condemnation. Yet the reported embezzlements had by no means ceased. According to the prosecution’s case before the Court of Assizes, certain thefts had persisted throughout March, April, and May of 1871; others had resurfaced after a lull of nearly ten months, in February, March, and April of 1872.
For the initial period, the bill of indictment reckoned sixty-two orders abstracted between March 21 and May 1, 1871. These had been addressed to six soldiers of the armies of Paris and Versailles: Caillon, Delaire, Julien, Merlan, Durand, and Trouillard. The forger was alleged to have effaced their names along with those of the senders, appending thereafter the false signature matching the substituted recipient. Three orders were said to have been collected in Paris, one in Saint-Denis, and the remainder in Charenton. Marie maintained that he had been in Ivry during the insurrection of the Commune. The prosecution countered this assertion by pointing to his habitual presence at the Colbert ambulance and at other hospitals where he had formerly served; it further noted a stay of four or five days in the barracks on Avenue Rapp. Lastly, the crown invoked the profound disorganization of the administrative bureaus after March 18: letters, it argued, were delivered to the first comer, without so much as demanding a signature. The court gazette records these contentions without detailing any independent corroboration of his alibi.
The following year offered a more rigorously itemized body of evidence. Thirty-five money orders, amounting to a total sum of 444 francs, had been issued from diverse corners of the country and addressed to hospital orderlies or soldiers stationed at Saint-Martin Hospital in Paris. The concierges of the fictitious domiciles testified that they had no knowledge of the persons named upon the drafts. Chemical analysis identified Eau de Javel as the reagent employed to wash out the ink of the postal clerks; Marie’s occupation as an ornamental painter was cited by the prosecution as the source of his familiarity with such preparations. The handwriting expert likewise ascribed the altered endorsements to his hand. These elements formed a coherent chain of presumption, yet it remained for the jury to determine whether they sufficed to compel conviction.
The chronicle also detailed the opportunities of access to the post. During the first six months of 1872, Giroux and Castou served as post corporals—the former at Saint-Martin Hospital, the latter at the infirmary depot on the Rue des Récollets. Both repaired each morning to the Central Post Office to collect the mail intended for the men under their charge. Marie had known Giroux during his own military service; he renewed their acquaintance toward the end of January and soon began accompanying him, along with Castou, into the postal rooms of the Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.
According to the testimony, Marie explained to Giroux and Castou that he lived with a market woman from Les Halles; he lingered by their side, he said, merely to pass the time until she had finished her morning trade. The indictment placed these visits at two or three times a week throughout February, March, and April. It alleged that he stood by during the sorting, noted the names of the soldiers inscribed upon the covers, and seized upon the distraction of the corporals to purloin letters and gazettes. To the prosecution, this sustained familiarity provided the necessary occasion; it did not, in and of itself, designate him as the author of every abstraction. Neither Giroux nor Castou harbored any mistrust; they left him unhindered beside the bundles as they worked. In time, the soldiers at Saint-Martin began to clamor for the remittances promised by their families. Their absence awakened Giroux’s misgivings, and he began to count his parcels with greater vigilance.
On the day when two letters were found wanting, Castou urged Giroux to challenge Marie. On the morrow, hard by the Central Post Office, the confrontation was brief. Giroux demanded the two missives; Marie responded only with incoherent excuses and took to his heels. The gazette adds that he was never seen there again, and that from that hour all misappropriation ceased. This sequence afforded the prosecution its most lucid incident: an article counted, a disappearance established, a direct accusation, and flight. Yet it could not of itself supply the place of an exhaustive examination of the earlier money orders, nor could it silence the denials of the accused.
At the bar, Marie maintained his innocence. The gazette recalled an earlier correctional conviction at Bayeux in 1858, for a theft that had cost him fifteen months’ imprisonment; such a past, however, was inadequate to substantiate the forgeries tried in 1874. Advocate General Onfroy de Bréville sustained the accusation, while Maître Paul Godin appeared for the defense. The contemporaneous report records neither the tenor of the pleadings nor the precise responses of the jury to the questions submitted. It notes only that the verdict was affirmative upon every count, with the allowance of mitigating circumstances. The newspaper does not identify those extenuating grounds, nor does it allow them to be linked to any particular facet of the charge.
The court sentenced Alexandre Marie to four years’ imprisonment and a fine of one hundred francs. The affair had begun with modest sums scattered across the soldiers’ correspondence; it reached its conclusion in the punishment meted out to a single prisoner. Between those two points, justice had tracked scoured names, fictitious beneficiaries, and the letters that convalescent men had awaited in vain. Giroux, for his part, had seen those two folded sheets lying before his eyes before stepping away from the counter. When he returned, the count was no longer whole.