The Gazette dates the discovery to November 30, 1875, at daybreak. Guilhem, then on his way to his labors, came upon Gérard Soubrier lying some two hundred meters from his dwelling, prone upon the earth. Soubrier was returning from the fair at Mur-de-Barres, driving a hog before him. He still breathed, yet his bloodied head bore a grievous wound above the nape; he was bereft of speech and motion. The beast lay beside him; his satchel, his hat, and his walking-stick were discovered in an adjoining meadow.
The ground retained numerous traces. Fresh stains of blood marked the soil. In the turf, many hurried footfalls formed, according to the report, the unmistakable prints of a struggle. On the eve, at nightfall, a witness had heard sounds of commotion in that direction, believing he caught the moment a body collapsed, followed by inarticulate cries of distress.
He was conveyed to his home, where he expired without regaining consciousness. The gazette attributes his death to the wound and to a pulmonary congestion brought on by the bitter frost of the night. The fair, the homeward path, the articles abandoned in the meadow, and the strides imprinted in the grass formed the initial elements of an affair soon carried before the assizes.
Suspicion fell upon two men: Pierre Nicolaudie, a landowner at La Bouygne and formerly a municipal adjunct, and Pierre Cilrivi, a master slater of Poulhès, in the commune of Remihac. More than two years elapsed before the assize hearings of August 6, 7, and 8, 1878, presided over by M. Duclaux, a councilor at the Court of Appeal of Riom. In the interim, a preliminary inquiry had terminated in an order of dismissal; yet following fresh proceedings, both men were summoned anew before the law. The Gazette thus announced a resumption from the outset, its headline reciting assault and battery resulting in death. The journal recorded that several circumstantial indications had initially lent weight to the suspicions, before Hard’s alibi checked the course of the investigation.
In the earliest stage of the inquiry, an alibi had halted its progress. Victorine Hard, a domestic servant in Nicolaudie’s employ, affirmed that on November 29 her master had returned home in the company of the slater before sunset, and that neither had crossed the threshold thereafter. Were she speaking the truth, the gazette reasoned, they could not have been present simultaneously at La Bouygne and at the spot where Soubrier was found. Upon the issuance of the dismissal, both men had regained their freedom. The discrepancy in the hours proved decisive in the logic of the narrative: before sunset, according to Hard, they were indoors; according to the testimony that later resurfaced, they had reached the house only after night had fully closed in.
The proceedings might well have ended there. Nicolaudie, however, brought an action for defamation against the widow Soubrier, reproaching her for having publicly ascribed to him the murder of her husband. The Gazette identifies this complaint as the act that revived public suspicions and drew fresh depositions into the preliminary inquiry. Nicolaudie publicly contested the imputation leveled against his name; his initiative transmuted that accusation into a new judicial process and restored to prominence the question that the dismissal had provisionally laid aside. It is to this resumption that the journal attaches the accounts of the witnesses subsequently examined.
Among these depositions was that of Jeanne Bastide, wife of Levin. The Gazette describes her as an eminently honorable person and recounts her words as having originated with Victorine Hard. Hard allegedly confided to her that Nicolaudie and the slater had arrived at La Bouygne only after nightfall, toward six of the clock in the evening; that they had stepped outside again shortly thereafter and leaned against the courtyard wall. According to these confidences reported by Bastide, Hard had followed them and overheard one inquire of the other: “We must go back up yonder; for should he return to life, he would denounce us…” She allegedly added: “They are in great terror lest I expose them, but breathe not a word of it.” This account passed from Hard to Bastide, and thence from Bastide to the gazette; its tenor, nonetheless, sufficed to shatter the alibi advanced at the outset of the investigation.
Another woman reportedly broached to Hard a persistent rumor: that her master had bestowed upon her at least five thousand francs to purchase her silence. Hard allegedly replied: “He gave me not so great a sum, yet well may he be grateful, for without me, he would be behind bars.” The Gazette reports that other utterances escaped her at intervals. A widespread opinion held that she possessed full knowledge of the affair, but proved reluctant to speak because her silence had been bought. The journal adds that these private confidences were corroborated by diverse elements of the inquiry; the pivotal consideration remained her own declaration.
At the bar, Hard began with denials. She delivered a formal contradiction to the witnesses who attributed those confidences to her. Hard-pressed by questioning, however, she ended by acknowledging that she had indeed uttered the words reported. She then maintained that her statements did not express the truth and were, on that account, of no value whatsoever. Thus the servant admitted the words while repudiating that which they appeared to disclose. The core of the debate had shifted: it was no longer merely a question of where the two men had spent the evening, but of determining what credit to attach to words that Hard admitted and disavowed in the very same breath. The court was yet to hear the accused, the witnesses, and the defense counsel; the report, however, offers no verdict, noting only the determination to detain Hard and postpone the remainder of the trial.
The president of the court ordered her immediate arrest, her deposition appearing to him to be perjured. This measure occurred in the very thick of the debate, at the moment when the testimony of the witness, having altered the orientation of the inquiry, became in its turn the subject of a judicial decree. Mître Oudoul and Mître Bertrand represented the two accused. Hard, who had initially been the voice removing them from the scene of the crime, found herself placed beneath the weight of a decree by her own speech. This reversal supplied no answer to the mystery of Soubrier’s death; it altered solely the standing of the woman who had brought forth the alibi, and thereafter the confession that destroyed it.
At the petition of the Public Prosecutor, M. Lesueur, the court ordered the adjournment of the case to the following session. The chronicle of August 23, 1878, thus terminates without a verdict regarding Nicolaudie and Cilrivi. Nicolaudie’s servant had first vouched for their unbroken presence at La Bouygne, then recounted words that placed them abroad after darkness had fallen. She ended by confessing she had spoken those words, while pronouncing them false. The trial was destined to resume at the subsequent assizes; in these printed sheets, the final disposition concerns the witness arrested at the bar, not the fate of the accused.