Beside the body of the widow Barberis lay an inventory of furnishings. Six sheets penned in her son-in-law’s own hand: the beds, the effects, every appointment destined to lend value to a furnished house. The document had arrived upon an errand of money. By morning, it had become an exhibit in an affair of murder. Louis Lomont could well explain why he had carried it thither; it would prove far more arduous to reconcile the hour of his visit with the recollections of the other dwellers beneath that roof.
The widow Barberis plied the trades of lodging-house keeper and herbalist in the Rue de Verneuil. One of her daughters had married Lomont. After abiding with her for a time, the couple had acquired, circa 1809, the business of the Hôtel de Russie in the Rue Tiquetonne. To effect this purchase, Lomont had borrowed eight thousand francs, his mother-in-law standing as surety. Repayment fell due on July 15, 1812. Yet the house was foundering and the term approached. A debt possessed an appointed date; the prospects of satisfying it possessed one no longer.
The mother-in-law had consented to seek a purchaser. She demanded an inventory of the hotel’s chattel, so that these inquiries might advance. Champagnac supposes that she perhaps contemplated purchasing it herself; nothing in the text elevates this conjecture to a resolve. At all events, she meant to obtain the promised paper. The inventory was thus no sheet dropped by chance in a kinswoman’s parlor. It belonged to the formal steps required to meet an imminent obligation and to relieve a guarantor quite as much as a debtor.
On the eve of the discovery, Louise Barberis, the other daughter, returned at about ten o’clock in the evening. Her mother inquired whether she had fetched the inventory from her brother-in-law’s. She had not. It was agreed that she would attend to it on the morrow. Louise went up to her bed on the third floor, attended by the servant Esther Cassaude. The latter descended thereafter to take supper with another maid. When both women retired, the widow remained below, purposing to bolt the entry. These ordinary motions would soon form the fabric of the inquest’s depositions.
Toward half past eleven, Louise was awakened by heavy blows. She cried aloud; neighbors hurried to her aid and found her chamber door standing open, without mark of forced entry. She had not glimpsed her assailant. Despite her wounds, she went down to her mother, who slept upon the ground floor, and discovered her grievously hurt in the back shop. An apothecary-surgeon was summoned; the police commissioner arrived. The widow expired shortly thereafter. Louise, for her part, was to survive her injuries. The investigation thus held a victim capable of testifying, yet powerless to name the hand that had struck her down.
Neither weapon nor apparent theft was uncovered. On the other hand, the six sheets lay upon a table near the dead woman. Suspicion settled upon Lomont: his visit could be established, his financial embarrassments were known, and the removal of both mother-in-law and sister-in-law would leave his wife sole heir. Such was the motive tendered by the prosecution. The compulsion to discharge a debt and the prospect of an inheritance lent coherence to the double outrage; they did not as yet constitute proof of its author.
At early dawn, Esther was dispatched to fetch Lomont, under strict injunction not to disclose what had transpired. The chronicle attaches grave weight to his perturbation, his inquiries, and those questions he refrained from asking. He presently returned alongside his wife. Interrogated regarding his evening, he conceded having brought the inventory of furnishings, yet maintained he had arrived toward ten o’clock, tarried but a few moments, and regained his domicile by eleven. Arranged in this manner, the hours enabled him to acknowledge the visit without placing himself within the house at the moment of the assault.
The declarations gathered dismantled this contrivance. At ten o’clock, the widow was still awaiting the inventory, since Louise had been obliged to promise to fetch it. The maids, who had retired later, declared they had not seen Lomont. Other evidence situated his return to the Rue Tiquetonne between midnight and one o’clock. His wife, after having initially confirmed the hour of eleven, stated that he had not returned until half past twelve. She described him as pale, ailing, and sleepless. Herself at first suspected, she was restored to liberty, no charge being ultimately retained against her.
The alteration of this deposition bore upon two persons at once. For the husband, it stripped away the prop of the hour he had set forth. For the wife, it compelled the magistrates to detach her initial answer from the complicity in the crime they had contemplated. Her discharge did not render the inheritance any less central to the alleged motive; it forbade converting that presumed benefit into evidence of her own guilt.
The inquiry scrutinized his garments. Stains were visible upon the frock coat, the trousers, and a shoe he had worn that night. The experts consulted declared them to be blood. A mark upon the interior of the garment appeared to have been washed; the lining exhibited a rent. Lomont tendered sundry explanations, invoking notably a former application of leeches. The instruction countered that this remedy dated back to the winter and that he was then abed, without this coat. The marks did not whisper a victim’s name, but his accounting failed to tie them to the circumstance alleged.
The instrument was still wanting. The wounds directed the surgeons toward an object at once edged and blunt, consistent with a hatchet. Lomont admitted to having possessed one; the house searches had failed to recover it. Two letters addressed to his mother were intercepted. He adjured her therein to affirm that she had carried the tool to the country several months prior. In a dossier wherein the hour of a visit already required contentious debate, it became necessary to verify as well the history of an absent object.
The search shifted toward the Seine, since Lomont claimed to have crossed the Pont des Tuileries upon quitting his mother-in-law. Divers dredged to no avail. The cesspool of the victim’s house was likewise emptied, in vain. At length, on August 15, the hatchet was discovered within a stoneware water cistern in Lomont’s kitchen. He acknowledged it. The account of his confrontation with the object dwells upon a telltale reaction: when informed that it had been discovered in water, he sought to implicate the water carrier before the vessel had even been designated to him.
This utterance was held against him. Physical inspection supplied further particulars: the tool had been honed and fitted with a recent haft; the surgeons judged it capable of inflicting the wounds described. The analysis of matter gathered from the hatchet and the cistern indicated an animal substance akin to blood. It did not constitute individual identification. The prosecution aligned these observations with the garments, the inventory, the disputed hours, and the missives to his mother. The force it ascribed to them arose from their convergence.
Lomont appeared before the Seine Assize Court, defended by Maître Maugeret. Champagnac commends the advocate’s skill without preserving the details of his pleading; he portrays the charges as crushing. His narrative is that of a persuaded chronicler, not an impartial record of every intervention. The jury pronounced the accused guilty, and on October 12, 1812, the court condemned him to death. The chapter concludes upon this sentence and recounts nothing of his execution. Louise had survived; her mother was dead. The six sheets brought to prepare the sale of an inn had henceforth found their place among the exhibits that had conducted a man to the scaffold.