She had left her husband and found a door that opened to her. In the night of April 6 to 7, 1832, at Aix-en-Othe, that door protected no one: the roof of the house that had sheltered her caught fire, and the flames soon seized upon the neighbouring habitations. A woman had sought refuge at Simonnin’s hearth to escape the brutal abuse of Alexis Michaud. By daybreak, sixteen households had lost their own.
In the courtyard of one of the gutted homes, a neighbour picked up a blackened spoon. She rubbed it with her thumb, recognised a mark, and stood there, at a loss to find herself holding an object that still belonged to her, while the table upon which she had set it the evening before existed no longer. Around her, cries rang out, charred debris was hauled away, and hands groped for whatever might have withstood the heat. There was much labour to be done in this disaster, and none of it led back indoors. The woman slipped the spoon into her pocket. She had now to discover where she might spend the coming night.
Michaud was counted among the ruined. This circumstance was to lend his explanations a terrible irony: in setting fire to the roof of the man who had sheltered his wife, he believed he had shielded his own. He had put his trust in the wind.
The Roof of Refuge
A few days earlier, in the night of March 28 to 29, Pichot’s mill had burned to the ground. Water had surrounded it; water had not prevented its destruction. The countryside had cast about for a cause. Men spoke of malice, of carelessness, even of a curse, for Pichot’s misfortunes appeared to some too relentless to proceed from human hands alone. Explanations travelled far more readily than the means to verify them. Some had their suspicions, others their superstitions; all were left to gaze upon the blackened mill.
Aix-en-Othe nevertheless enjoyed revenues that the correspondent of the Gazette considered considerable. The commune had housed its fire engines beneath an arcaded edifice, yet many dwellings remained thatched with straw. The municipal monument proclaimed that thought had been given to combating the flames; the roofs offered the first stray spark precisely what was needed to put such promises to the proof. In a town, civic expenses are readily displayed to those who pass by. Precautions, however, must still serve those who sleep.
Toward ten o’clock in the evening, a flicker of light showed at the corner of Simonnin’s roof. What might have seemed an isolated lantern became the conflagration of an entire thatch. Help arrived, but the fire had already laid hold of other timber. The night no longer encompassed a single dwelling in peril: it filled with shouts rising from several thresholds, with furniture men dragged into the open, with folk who no longer knew whether they ought to carry water or carry away their goods.
The neighbour went back once as far as her threshold. She had left inside a bundle of linen, a few belongings gathered together too slowly and which she still wished to believe within reach. The heat drove her back. Another hand caught her arm; she retreated, her eyes fixed upon that bundle which was already lost to sight. Later, before the ashes, she would reprove herself for having forgotten this or that keepsake. In the press of the moment, she had simply to resign herself to staying out.
Fourteen houses were destroyed in this second fire. The isolation of the quarter confined the disaster: the flames at last ran short of matter to devour. Michaud’s wife had seen her sanctuary engulfed; other families had been swept up in a vengeance of which they were not the intended marks.
Words Amid the Witnesses
The judicial inquiry opened upon the embers. The inhabitants touched by the calamity were heard, and Michaud was summoned among them. He, too, could speak of a lost roof, like his neighbours. He was asked what he had seen, at what hour, and from which quarter the flames had first arisen; the catastrophe was to be marshalled into an orderly sequence of facts, sufficiently coherent for justice to trace it to its source.
Then it was reported what his wife had said to him while the fire raged: she had reproached him, saying he was hardly any further ahead now. This utterance, brought before the magistrate, caused all suspicions abruptly to converge. It did not, of itself, constitute legal proof of the crime. Yet to men who had just lost their dwellings, it carried all the weight of an accusation. He who stood among them, he who might have claimed an equal share of their pity, was thus the author of their ruin.
Threats erupted. Some wished to fling Michaud into the embers; others called for a rope, for stones, or for their fowling-pieces. On the very ground where they had assembled to bear witness, the crowd was beginning to pronounce and prepare its own sentence. The magistrate had before him more than a fresh deposition: he had to prevent the victims from adding an irreparable outrage to the injury they had endured.
Michaud inflicted a grave wound upon himself before their eyes. The cries took on another tone. A physician declared that all aid would prove useless; yet the surgeon Mittot intervened and dressed his wounds despite the man’s struggles. The wretch whose death they had clamoured for was transformed into a dying man whose life someone obstinately laboured to preserve. The sight of blood quieted the crowd, according to the journal’s account. It had required this additional violence to suspend that with which they threatened him.
Michaud was borne away upon a litter. The ruined householders were left with their losses, and the investigators with their questions. The surgeon had performed what lay within his art; justice could resume what the clamour had broken off.
The Wind Was to Obey
On the very next day, Michaud was in a condition to be questioned. He confessed to having fired Simonnin’s house. His wife, weary of his cruelties, had taken refuge there. This removal, which had enabled her to quit the conjugal hearth, had sufficed to mark out the dwelling upon which his wrath would fall. He could no longer enforce his presence upon the woman who had fled; he would strike at the man who had granted her asylum.
The journal recounts an evening of brooding resentment before an unshared meal and an empty bed, followed by the incendiary deed. We need not turn this solitude into an excuse. It was the consequence of the peril he had created beneath his own roof, and from which his wife had sought to withdraw. He had answered her flight by carrying that peril to the homes of others.
He claimed to have calculated the direction of the wind. A northerly breeze, he believed, would protect him. He would be able to return to his bed while Simonnin’s house was consumed. In this calculation, the neighbours scarcely seem to have counted; his own roof alone was to remain untouched. But the wind turned. The destruction came back upon the man who had thought to assign it a path. Michaud was numbered among the householders ruined by his own hand.
The memory of Pichot’s mill took on a darker complexion. Michaud had worked there as a servant; having been dismissed, he was said to have uttered threats. An earlier act of violence was likewise recalled against him. These rumours deepened the town’s disquiet, without excusing the examining magistrate from proving each separate fact. The confession concerning Simonnin did not determine the cause of the earlier fire. Yet in a community thrown into turmoil, all misfortunes easily begin to seek the selfsame author.
A Man in the Carriage
On April 8, preparations were made for Michaud’s removal. Gendarmes and national guardsmen surrounded the carriage. He had survived his self-inflicted wound; he had spoken before the law; he had yet to pass through the fury of the populace. Before his departure, an ominous murmuring reached his ears. A crowd lay in wait along his route.
The magistrate remained beside the conveyance. His presence, his exhortations, and his firmness availed to hold back those who would have seized the prisoner. He restored to them neither their houses nor their goods; he merely maintained that necessary boundary between the right to demand justice and the license to slaughter the man from whom it is required. The carriage was able to leave Aix-en-Othe. The man who had applied the torch remained alive and committed to the courts.
The dispatch, dated April 9, closes upon his committal. It does not record Michaud’s trial. In the village, the affair had already wrought a consequence that no court of assize would ever need to ratify: sixteen households were left to rebuild their lives. The neighbour found the spoon at the bottom of her pocket, in the home of the kin who sheltered her. She asked where she might lay it down. For the first time in many years, that simple, customary motion required another’s leave.