The mourning weeds of Louis Levalley afforded him no protection. When he was led through the streets, bound and guarded by gendarmes, the populace perceived in the crape he wore fresh proof of his villainy: this man, then, possessed the effrontery to weep for the woman he stood accused of having poisoned. A few weeks prior, he had been a young husband impatient to dwell beside her. He was now a widower whose very right to display his grief was fiercely contested. Between these two estates had fallen a family repast, ten thousand francs, and an expert post-mortem.
In the environs of Bayeux, Louis was the only son of prosperous husbandmen. Marie-Anne-Françoise Guérin likewise belonged to the rural world, yet her parents’ worldly goods weighed far less heavily in the balance of matrimonial alliances. The young folk came to love one another ere this disparity was resolved. When Marie-Anne found herself with child, it became necessary, however, to approach the families. Champagnac, who would recount the affair in 1833, portrays a diffident Louis, discomfited by the requisite overtures: the happiness he coveted suddenly demanded negotiations for which his sentiments had ill prepared him.
The young woman’s uncle, the Abbé Guérin, took it upon himself to conduct them. To facilitate the match, he pledged ten thousand francs, to which were added the two thousand brought by the father. The Levalley family accepted the alliance. Yet the abbé desired also to provide for his niece’s demise: should she pass away within the ensuing two years, the two thousand francs of the paternal portion would be restored to her father. This clause was admitted. A similar stipulation, demanded for the uncle’s ten thousand francs, was rejected. Thus, in the very midst of a pact intended to inaugurate a shared life, it was already determined what each should reclaim should that life be cut short.
The civil marriage was solemnised on the 5th of November, 1807; the nuptial benediction followed eight days later. The spouses, nevertheless, did not set up house together. The Guérins wished to keep their daughter beneath their roof until her confinement. Visits were continued, meals were shared, and Louis saw his wife without yet being permitted to keep her with him. The chronicler attributes this separation to a medical regimen they wished to conceal from him; upon this head, however, he produces no document that might reveal the parents’ true intent. It suffices to mark this singular posture: two households hemmed in the young couple, and each professed to have its reasons.
On Sunday, the 13th of December, Louis went to fetch his wife and his father-in-law to receive them at dinner. The repast comprised roast suckling pig, black pudding, and larded calf’s liver; coffee, laced with brandy, brought it to a close. In the narrative, this abundance subsequently becomes the conjectured explanation for the calamity. At the time, nothing presaged a criminal scene. When the hour of departure arrived, the elder Levalley expressed a desire to keep his daughter-in-law; Louis joined in his entreaty. Guérin refused. The young man accordingly escorted the two guests home, and they reached their house toward six or seven of the evening.
The torment manifested itself only on the following morning. Marie-Anne suffered acute pains in the stomach, rose in the hope of finding some relief, and was then seized with convulsions. Word was sent to her husband. He hastened to her side; Champagnac preserves the memory of a final embrace, amidst an affliction the bystanders were powerless to master. Two surgeons, and presently a third, intervened. Emetics and bloodletting were employed. An attempt at delivery had to be broken off on account of a haemorrhage; another operation permitted the extraction of a dead child. Marie-Anne perished likewise. The practitioners had at first suspected an attack of indigestion; their interpretation belongs to the medicine of that age and affords us today no certain diagnosis.
A few days hence, the Abbé Guérin returned to the subject of the ten thousand francs. Their payment, so he explained to Louis’s father, had left him in sore straits; he requested that at least a portion be restored to him. The chronicle does not report the precise answer returned. It observes thereafter that the two families gradually ceased all intercourse. The covenant that had joined the living survived the deceased and drove them asunder. The stipulation refused prior to the nuptials had become a sum demanded after the obsequies: the selfsame question had shifted its hour, without having found an accord.
As the thirtieth day following the demise drew near, Louis ordered a memorial service to be prepared and apprized his wife’s parents thereof. The Guérin family caused it to be countermanded, alleging the abbé’s unavailability, without consulting the widower. Ere long, an accusation of poisoning began to circulate. The husband was supplied with a motive: the retention of the ten thousand francs. It would be imprudent to convert the sequence of events into proof that the uncle had concocted this rumour; the chapter does not permit us to identify its first author with certainty. Yet the money henceforth furnished a ready-made explanation to those who sought a crime behind a sudden death.
The magistrate of public safety intervened. Two-and-forty days after the death, the body was exhumed; the stomach and other viscera were extracted, placed in an earthen vessel, and conveyed to the town hall of Asnière. A bailiff appeared at Louis’s dwelling to deliver a summons requiring his presence. Being absent at the time of this errand, the young man repaired the following day to Bayeux. On the 27th of January, 1808, he answered the magistrate’s interrogations and petitioned that as many surgeons as might be necessary be summoned at his own charge. He sought in the examination of the body the means to put an end to the slanders that overwhelmed him.
He was informed that he was being heard as a witness, not as a defendant, and that his petition could not be entertained. He returned home. Two days later, the experts announced that they had discovered in the intestines a considerable quantity of what they designated as poison: pounded glass. Their assertion caused the proceedings to veer abruptly. That which Louis had hoped to see examined in his own defence became the ground of his arrest. He had no longer before him merely convinced neighbours; there was now a formal report submitted to the magistrate, cloaked in the authority of men of science.
It was then that he traversed the streets under armed guard. The narrative depicts women gathering stones, clamours demanding his death, and the gendarmes preventing the mob from laying hands upon him. The public fury had concluded its verdict in advance of the tribunal. Upon his arrival, Louis was cast into solitary confinement for several months. The man who had been assured he was but a witness had lost his liberty; the sorrow of his widowhood was deemed, without, to be a vile pantomime. The chronicle does not reveal to us his days of captivity. There is no need to invent confidences on his part to gauge what that waiting portended.
The affair did not rest, however, upon this initial post-mortem. Baudelocque and Chaussier were consulted. Their formal opinion challenged the conclusion of poisoning and maintained that an internal ailment arising after the meal was capable of explaining the demise of this pregnant woman. Champagnac likewise summarises their argumentation concerning pounded glass in the medical parlance of his time. This archaic report must be distinguished from a complete demonstration lying beneath our eyes: the consultation itself is not transcribed here. What matters in the unfolding of the affair is that a contrary medical opinion came to shatter the certainty upon which the prosecution had rested its weight.
The Criminal Court of Caen acquitted Louis Levalley upon a unanimous declaration of the jury. The chapter records neither the date of this acquittal nor his subsequent life following his liberation. It leaves a man pronounced innocent of the accusation laid against him, yet forever bereft of his wife and the infant she had carried. The ten thousand francs had furnished a convenient motive; they had furnished no proof of murder. As for the crape the multitude had sought to tear from his brow, it stood as a reminder of what they had forgotten: ere it became a cause about which every tongue wagged with assurance, this history had been a bereavement.