When Justin Durand presented himself at the police station around half-past midnight, he was clad only in a shirt and trousers. He was barefoot, his face haggard, with a gash marking his thumb. His master, Doctor Cassan, had just been slain, he declared; the assassin had subsequently attempted to force the door of his bedchamber and had wounded him before taking to flight. The physician’s townhouse, the loaded shotguns, and the unforced locks were soon to confound this tale. A mere eight days earlier, the sudden demise of the housekeeper had already placed this very servant at the bedside of another victim.
Doctor Cassan was seventy-five years of age. He resided in Albi, where he had long served as director of both the civil hospital and the lunatic asylum. The historical record depicts him as a devoted physician whose practice was poorly remunerated: he received modest fees for his visits, and his lands yielded little. He inhabited a town residence and also held a modest viticultural estate, La Grave, severely ravaged by phylloxera. A contested inheritance, valued at roughly twenty thousand francs, had preoccupied his mind for years.
His only son, Gustave, had succumbed to illness in December 1887, leaving behind a young widow, Émilie, four children, and substantial debts. She and her offspring had remained under the grandfather’s roof. Thus, the household brought together an elderly man who scrutinized every expenditure, a daughter-in-law without means, and a domestic establishment whose precarious equilibrium depended entirely upon this cohabitation. Philippine Siccard, an aged housekeeper, managed domestic affairs with unyielding parsimony; Justin Durand, aged twenty-five, attended to the stables and general servant’s duties. The chronicle affirms that he was on ill terms with Siccard, though he had hitherto appeared devoted to his master.
In early April 1889, acrimony flared between the doctor and his daughter-in-law. The old man reproached her for her absences from the house and imputed to her an intrigue with an army officer—allegations that stem from the retrospective account, not from any judicial ruling. Émilie later maintained that their dispute turned principally upon the maintenance of her children and the debts left behind by her late husband. She departed Albi on April 13 to join her mother in Toulouse, taking her four children with her. The doctor agreed to remit an annual allowance of 1,500 francs, but insisted upon retaining the two elder children near his person. He threatened, moreover, to convert his entire estate into a life annuity, thereby denying her any claim upon the capital.
His mistrust soon extended to the very house he inhabited. He lived in terror of being poisoned or violently set upon. He caused the door of his bedchamber to be reinforced, had the locks replaced, and kept three loaded shotguns beside his bed. He repeatedly confided to the nursing sisters at the hospital that he feared dying by his daughter-in-law’s hand. These utterances, chronicled in the text, were to weigh heavily upon the inquiry, though they established no proof that any real threat existed.
On April 30, Philippine Siccard repaired to La Grave in Durand’s company. Her evening repast—garlic soup, eggs, and potato salad—was followed by violent abdominal cramps and vomiting. Durand passed the night attending to her, brewing infusions of tea. By morning, she was dead. Doctor Cassan, profoundly shaken, is said to have declared: “Now it is my turn.” He asserted that he kept three fowling pieces ready to receive any who might seek his life. Siccard’s post-mortem examination was conducted only after the doctor’s subsequent murder. The medical experts discovered a massive quantity of arsenic within her remains, concluding that she had died of poison. The source notes that the doctor kept arsenical mixtures for the treatment of vines at La Grave, and that the chest in which they were locked had been forced open. The prosecution subsequently laid this murder at Durand’s door; the jury acquitted him of the charge.
During the night of May 8 to 9, Durand ran to the police station, asserting that an unknown intruder had broken into the residence. The barking of the dog, he claimed, had aroused him from sleep; the intruder had supposedly beaten upon his chamber door after slaying the doctor. Durand alleged that he had braced his body against the door leaf, sustaining a knife slash to his hand in the struggle. He had been unable to discern the fugitive’s features in the pitch-black street, but recollected a short, bristly beard. He led the constabulary and the neighbors directly to his master’s residence.
The doctor lay lifeless on his bedroom floor, near the bed. His skull was shattered, his throat deeply severed, and his right thumb nearly cleaved from his hand. Neither the lock nor the bolt of the bedchamber showed signs of having been forced. The shotguns remained undisturbed in their customary place; yet their percussion caps had been substituted with spent ones, rendering the weapons entirely incapable of firing. In the study, desk drawers had been rummaged through, papers strewn about, and a bloody handprint marked the furnishings. A skeleton key had been left upon the desk. Yet the gold watch, its chain, and the family jewels had been left untouched; four one-hundred-franc notes still lay inside a drawer.
A question of money arose as a conceivable motive, only to become an enigma. A few days prior to his death, Cassan had received approximately 21,000 francs from an estate settlement. He had informed Maître Frenouls, the notary, of his intention to allocate 12,000 francs toward liquidating his son’s residual debts and to invest 8,000 francs in government bonds through the tax collector. It remained impossible to determine, however, what sum was kept in the house on the night of the crime. The presence of the banknotes and jewels sat ill with the theory of a common burglary; the prosecution was to argue that the murderer had sought the funds without being able to find them.
Suspicion fell initially upon Émilie Cassan. Local rumor proclaimed her guilt, and she was placed under arrest in Toulouse two days after the crime. Yet the physical evidence failed to place her inside the dwelling. A bloody footprint upon the threshold matched that of a man’s bare foot. Beneath the straw in the stable, an axe stained with human blood was unearthed, and inside the living quarters investigators found an antique dagger belonging to the doctor. The disabled firearms betrayed premeditated tampering that could only be attributed to someone intimately familiar with the layout of the house.
Durand’s wound swiftly drew the scrutiny of the investigators. The doctor had sustained severe defensive injuries to his hands; his domestic servant claimed to have grappled with the intruder. The police questioned whether Durand’s laceration might not have resulted from a struggle over the weapon itself. The exhumation of Siccard injected a second case into the selfsame inquiry: the arsenic identified in her viscera pointed, according to the forensic experts, to criminal poisoning. The forced chest, Durand’s solitary vigil at the dying housekeeper’s side, and his failure to summon medical aid provided substantial fuel for the prosecution. Yet this cluster of suspicions did not foreshadow what the verdict on her death would ultimately be.
Durand at length admitted that the man with the short beard was a pure fabrication. He then accused Émilie of having been his mistress and of having solicited him to murder her father-in-law. He asserted that she had accompanied him into the residence disguised in male attire and had struck Cassan with the dagger. Yet Émilie had remained in Toulouse throughout that night. The historical account charts her movements minute by minute from May 8 to 10: an audience with a priest, a visit to the municipal pawnshop, consultations with Maître Mercadier and another advocate, dinner at her residence, followed by piano music overheard by a neighbor. Her housemaid testified to having helped her into bed and brought her morning chocolate the following day. The dossier thereby dismantled the allegation of her nocturnal presence in Albi.
Durand did not rest upon this tale. He subsequently asserted that Émilie had orchestrated the enterprise from Toulouse, fixing the precise date in order to secure her own alibi. Later still, he named the former notary Mercadier as his accomplice, before returning once more to the tale of an unknown intruder whom he had merely admitted into the house. At the trial, he maintained his innocence under oath, contending that Émilie had wished to compass her father-in-law’s death, but that he had refused to execute her will. His successive depositions directly contradicted one another; no evidence was ever adduced to establish the liaison he alleged. Élodie Rieunier, a former housemaid in the widow’s service, stated that she had never detected the slightest intimacy between Durand and her mistress. She conceded, however, that Durand had been her own lover.
The assize trial opened at Albi on November 11, 1889. One hundred and fifty witnesses were summoned to the bar. The widow entered a civil action to vindicate her honour and that of her children. The presiding judge interrogated Durand at length concerning his confessions, the two deaths, and the accusations against Émilie. The latter took the stand in turn: she acknowledged her bitter disputes with her father-in-law, but strenuously denied having conspired against his life or engaged in an illicit connection with the man-servant. She conceded having spent an evening in the company of an officer and declined to furnish details regarding that relationship; this, however, did not make her a participant in the murder.
Doctors Bouffac and Guy presented their forensic conclusions regarding Cassan’s injuries. The latter physician reproduced a mark upon his own forearm identical to the wound borne by Durand, demonstrating how it could naturally have been inflicted by a fingernail in the course of a desperate struggle. The court subsequently relocated to the scene of the crime to inspect the premises. Durand, held under escort, retraced the path he claimed the intruder had traversed. This visit stirred intense popular passion throughout Albi; the assembled mob hurled insults at Émilie, requiring the gendarmes to shield her person. The witnesses differed in their recollections of the domestic relations between the widow and the doctor, but none corroborated the clandestine assignations asserted by Durand.
The Advocate General demanded the capital penalty, laying stress upon the shifting confessions and the physical evidence. Counsel for the civil plaintiff denounced the calumnies directed against Émilie. The defense, while refraining from openly accusing her, emphasized that neither the theft nor the underlying motive had been conclusively established, that the number of perpetrators remained uncertain, and that the benefit of the doubt belonged to the accused. After an hour of deliberation, the jury acquitted Durand of the death of Philippine Siccard. They found him guilty of the murder of Doctor Cassan and of aggravated theft, without extenuating circumstances. The presiding judge pronounced the sentence of death.
The chronicle records that Durand continued to protest his innocence, while concluding that the judgment was just. This concluding appraisal reflects the personal voice of the Pitaval compiler, as do the highly colored portraits drawn of the participants. The legal adjudication, for its part, drew a sharp distinction between the two fatalities: Siccard’s poisoning was not laid to Durand’s account by the jury, whereas Cassan’s murder and the aggravated theft were firmly established. As for Émilie, arrested beneath the weight of public clamor and subsequently released once her alibi was verified, she left the courtroom unconvicted. At the heart of the case, the shotguns were loaded yet rendered harmless, the money had vanished without its sum ever being determined with certainty, and the servant had repeatedly rewritten his testimony. The court determined Durand’s criminal guilt for the murder; it refused to convert his recriminations against the widow into truth.