On Monday, 19 November 1883, the shop of Albert, a furniture dealer in the Rue de Madame, near the Rue de Vaugirard, remained shuttered. His neighbours grew uneasy. His nephew, who lived in the Rue de Sèvres, was summoned; a locksmith forced the door. Albert lay upon the floor, lifeless and cold, a newspaper clutched firmly in his hand. Yet it was known that he could not read. His cap, which he never took off, had been cast behind a chest of drawers. The physician called to the scene, however, observed no signs of violence. He attributed the death to the chest ailment of which the merchant had long complained.
Money and jewellery were missing, but the deceased’s daughter, his sole heir, resided in England. The official seals were affixed without anyone discovering that goods had disappeared. The newspaper left in the dead man’s hand and the cap cast aside remained details without an immediate answer. Nothing in that initial examination transformed these clues into an accusation.
A year and a half later, the Cour d’assises of the Seine heard the case under an unequivocal heading: “Murder and Robbery. Four Accused.” Alphonse Blum and François Thomas answered for numerous thefts and for the murder of Albert; Léon Cornu and the woman Lançon were prosecuted as receivers of stolen goods. Thomas had formerly worked in the merchant’s employ. The court report of 28 May 1885 placed the affair within a far broader series: more than fifty burglaries in under a year, forty-four of which were said to involve aggravating circumstances warranting the assizes. The journal listed the Parisian districts in which the two men were alleged to have operated, without detailing each individual theft. The indictment ascribed a method to them: targeting upper-floor chambers while the domestic servants were away, forcing doors or opening them with false keys, searching for money and jewels, and then moving their operations from one quarter to another. It was an accusatory portrait of a practice, not a comprehensive ledger of the fifty thefts.
Blum had been arrested on 9 July 1884, caught, according to the indictment, as he attempted to break into the lodgings of a Madame Lelong. Thomas had fled and was arrested only later, in connection with another matter. He was said to have assumed the alias of Lafleur. It was while in custody that he disclosed the burglaries committed with Blum. This testimony was not received as sufficient on its own: the report records that the investigators verified the details furnished and that several stolen articles were recovered from persons to whom they had allegedly been entrusted or sold. The same article cautioned that both men had wavered in their statements: after naming certain accomplices, they had retracted their accusations. It thus evinced a twofold prudence, even amidst its charged prose: while confessions might guide the inquiry, their accuracy had to be tested against the formal complaints and the recovered property. The chronicle does not provide the case file of this verification; it presents only the conclusion as framed by the prosecution.
The prosecution depicted the woman Lançon, a secondhand dealer on the Avenue du Maine, as a regular conduit for disposing of the stolen goods. She disputed having engaged in anything other than honest transactions. The investigators, according to the press, reproached her with the absence of ledger entries, the frequency of her purchases, their abnormally low prices, and the broken jewellery brought to her stall. Cornu, a prompter in a small theatre, was alleged to have held items on deposit merely as a favour to his friends. He too protested his good faith. These assessments belonged to the prosecution’s narrative; they do not, of themselves, reveal what each party truly knew at the moment the goods changed hands.
The indictment then traced the long series of burglaries back to the modest shop in the Rue de Madame. According to Thomas, Albert had been strangled by himself and Blum. The text dated their visit to an evening in November 1883, around eight o’clock, just as the merchant was finishing closing his shop. They were said to have asked to purchase a piece of furniture. Albert allegedly let them inside, lamp in hand, leading them to the rear of the premises.
The account of the confession attributed the initial act to Blum: he was said to have slipped a neckerchief around the old man’s throat. Albert fell, bringing down the lamp, which went out. The two men then searched for matches; Thomas stated that Albert was still gasping and that Blum tightened his grip on his throat until he died. They allegedly ransacked the furniture, taking a gold watch, a red purse containing roughly one hundred francs, a silver chain, and other items. Then they placed a newspaper into the victim’s hand and pulled the door shut behind them. In this version, the very object that had initially averted suspicion became a prop designed to simulate a natural death.
The red purse, antique and crafted by Albert’s daughter, was found at Cornu’s lodgings among articles that Thomas and Blum had brought there. The report also laid emphasis on the watch: a neighbour had seen the merchant set his watch the day before his death; the workmen had received their wages shortly before the crime and observed that their employer still possessed about a hundred francs. The disappearance of these items did not rest solely upon Thomas’s tale. Yet these clues established the robbery far more directly than they did the homicidal act.
Before the presiding judge, Blum and Thomas admitted to the various burglaries identified in the preliminary investigation. Regarding the death of Albert, however, they denied any involvement. Their version at the assizes was that Albert, who was very old, was so terrified at the sight of their entry that he died suddenly. The two men thus acknowledged a significant share of the charges while repudiating the capital accusation. The report does not supply the depositions of the witnesses nor the particulars of the answers given to the jury’s questions.
On 28 May, the hearing adjourned just as the examination of the seventy announced witnesses was beginning. The continuation of their depositions does not appear in the pages preserved here. The report published on 31 May summarised the conclusion of the session of 30 May: the advocate general, Bernard, pressed the prosecution’s case and demanded a pitiless verdict against Blum and Thomas from the jury. Their counsel, Roger-Baron and Drivon, sought to have the charge of murder set aside. Quignard and Magnin pleaded for the acquittal of the woman Lançon and Cornu; the newspaper did not summarise their arguments.
After two hours of deliberation, the jurors answered the questions in the affirmative, save for that concerning premeditation in the case of Blum and Thomas. Extenuating circumstances were granted to Cornu. The Court sentenced Blum and Thomas to death, Lançon to five years of hard labour and ten years of police surveillance, and Cornu to five years’ imprisonment. The Gazette does not record the execution of Blum and Thomas; these two reports do not permit one to determine what followed.
Between the newspaper placed in Albert’s hand and the watch that had vanished, the objects told opposing tales: the one seemed an arranged tableau, the other pointed squarely to theft. The examination of seventy witnesses was announced, but their voices remain absent from these two newspaper excerpts. What remains in print is far narrower: the confessions attributed to Thomas, the denial of both prisoners at the assizes, a recovered purse, and the verdict of the jury, with its clear boundary regarding premeditation. The final word of the trial did not erase the contradictions of that first night; it merely settled the punishment that justice pronounced against the four accused.