At Rodez, soldiers were brought into the courtroom so that a woman might speak. They were to form a human hedge between Clarisse Manson and the accused, shielding their faces from her view and reassuring her sufficiently that she might at last deliver what was expected of her. The murdered man’s son had petitioned for this guard; the presiding magistrate granted it. Yet there remained an obstacle that no muster of bayonets could surmount: Manson declared at times that she had heard everything, and at others that she knew nothing at all.
The month was August 1817. For five months, the violent death of Monsieur Fualdès had consumed the town of Rodez. The narratives drifted from domestic hearths to gaol cells, and from gaol cells to the examining magistrates’ chambers; one repeated a scrap of talk, then named the person said to have gathered it, then the one who now reported it. By patiently ascending the chain of these confidences, justice hoped to grasp the truth of an evening whose horror was already an article of common faith. Yet a tale, by mere dint of repetition, may gain in precision without gaining in truth. Upon that fragile difference, human lives were soon to hang.
On March 20, the body of this former magistrate had been discovered in the waters of the Aveyron, his throat severed by a wide and gaping wound. On the preceding evening, he had stepped out from his house and failed to return. His kin had kept vigil; by daybreak, the search for a missing man had turned into the pursuit of his assassins. He had maintained wide connections, handled delicate affairs of money, and left papers whose fate demanded explanation. Those who had frequented his company were now compelled to explain not merely where they had spent that night, but what they had said and done in the hours following his demise.
Suspicion soon hardened around the Bancal house, in the Rue des Hebdomadiers. This ill-famed tenement lodged several tenants; to have crossed its threshold did not necessarily signify a visit to the Bancals themselves. Such a distinction was of paramount moment to the accused. Yet it offered feeble resistance to the tableau that was beginning to seize the popular imagination: a gentleman lured into a kitchen, signatures extorted by force, a kitchen table transformed into an altar of slaughter, and a corpse borne away toward the river. The record published in 1827 sets forth this reconstruction from the outset as the absolute truth of the crime. The proceedings it preserves show, however, with what difficulty it was sustained, contested, and pieced together.
Among those placed under arrest were Bastide-Gramont, a landed proprietor, and Jausion, a stockbroker. Their standing in society lent the affair a singular gravity: in the eyes of the prosecution, men of established fortune had sought out accomplices among the dregs of a house of ill repute. Financial dealings with Fualdès were alleged to furnish the motive for the butchery. The defence promptly inverted the argument: if Jausion was indeed a creditor of the deceased, what interest had he in encompassing his death? The selfsame bills of exchange thus sustained two diametrically opposed conclusions. Behind the ledger entries, the son of Fualdès fought not only for retribution, but to defend his father’s memory and estate.
An eight-year-old child, Madeleine Bancal, occupied a dreadful place within the dossier. Adults came forward to report what she had allegedly told them: hidden beneath a bed, she was said to have watched the whole butchery through a hole in the curtain. Her words circulated freely within the hospice where she had been lodged. Visitors flocked thither to question her. Her purported utterances were then carried into the courtroom through the mouths of grown men. At Albi, the advocates would still contend over whether her formal examinations ought to be read aloud, and the court would refuse; yet the child’s story continued to penetrate the audience through those who swore they had heard it from her lips.
Other statements issued from men who were themselves under indictment. Bousquier admitted to having assisted in transporting the body, but maintained he had been drawn unawares into an enterprise whose true nature he had not initially suspected. Bach, likewise, was to alter his declarations. Their confessions furnished the prosecution with crucial details; they served no less to diminish the confessors’ own culpability. Counsel for the defence seized upon this double edge: he who recounts a crime in which he stands charged as an accomplice never speaks from a disinterested ground.
It was into this world of whispered confidences that Clarisse Manson was suddenly elevated to an overweening importance. The daughter of a magistrate and the mother of a young boy, she had spoken of the crime with a certain Lieutenant Clémandot. The officer gathered from her words that she had been present in the Bancal house during the murder. She denied it, admitted she had recounted an adventure, and maintained she had fabricated the whole of it. Her father intervened; the prefect subjected her to an exhaustive interrogation. A deposition was duly signed. Then the denials began anew. Each interlocutor clung jealously to the version he had obtained, and Madame Manson soon found herself surrounded by people who appeared to know far better than she what her testimony ought to be.
Her tale, when she chose to affirm it, was that of a chance passer-by seeking refuge in an open house, thrust into a dark closet, and terrified by muffled thuds and groans. A man, she said, had subsequently helped her escape. Who? She would not name him. The questions pressed her to reveal a countenance; she offered only the darkness, her confusion, and her terror. Her swoons added to the theatrical emotion of the hearings, yet they supplied no answers. Jausion’s counsel demanded precise statements: how was one to answer an accusation that every spectator claimed to decipher in a silence?
The first trial concluded at Rodez in September with five capital convictions. On October 9, the Court of Cassation quashed the judgment on a procedural flaw. The proceedings had to be begun afresh. This return before a jury did not restore the prisoners to liberty; it opened a new confrontation. Moreover, Madame Manson, who had appeared before as a witness, had in the interim been indicted as an accomplice. At Albi, where the new trial opened on March 25, 1818, she found herself seated upon the same bench as the very men against whom she had once been shielded.
Once more she recounted the closet, the shrieks, the flight from the house. This time, she pointed to Bastide as the man who had sought to slit her throat. Conversely, she would not confirm having recognized Jausion. The magistrates pressed her: was it not he who had preserved her life? Could gratitude warrant her keeping his name secret? An explanation began to take shape around her silence, though she herself never plainly endorsed it. Manson reminded the court that she was now an accused woman, that she had her own defence to maintain, and that her complicity remained to be proven. She was being urged to deliver up names; she had also to save her own.
A single detail illuminates the difficulty of the whole case. She described the blood pouring into a tub. Questioned as to how she knew this, she replied that she had heard groans which led her to believe someone’s throat was being cut. Between an impression of the senses and the conclusion drawn from it, a wide gulf remains. Yet in an audience already held captive by the narrative, that gulf was easily traversed. Her advocate fought to obtain her acquittal; counsel for the other prisoners sought to prevent her endless variations from being construed systematically against their clients.
The prosecution, however, did not rest upon her testimony alone. One Théron swore he had seen the procession carrying the body pass in the night and had recognized several men. Bastide denied that any such observation was possible in the darkness. The widow Bancal abandoned her initial denials and admitted that Fualdès had indeed been brought to her house; Bach brought forward a fresh version which placed him on the scene far earlier. Each accused, defended, and revised. Bastide denounced depositions copied slavishly one from another. Jausion continued to deny everything. It fell to the jurors to weigh the credit of these voices, and not merely their number.
At the close of the proceedings, in May 1818, Madame Manson was unanimously declared not guilty and set at liberty. Bastide and Jausion were found guilty of premeditated murder and robbery with housebreaking. The court pronounced five death sentences: against them, Colard, Bach, and the widow Bancal. Anne Benoît was sentenced to hard labour for life; Missonnier, cleared of the murder and complicity therein, but convicted of assisting in casting the corpse into the river, received two years' imprisonment. The judgment thus severed destinies which the indictment had bound together.
Following the rejection of their appeal, Bastide, Jausion, and Colard were executed on June 3. The compendium depicts them still protesting their innocence on the threshold of the scaffold. Bach and the widow Bancal did not follow them that day: they were retained to give testimony in a further proceeding. Three subsequent defendants—Vence, Constans, and Bessières-Veinac—were later acquitted. Certain depositions had implicated them; others had sustained their alibis.
Manson had walked out of prison. Three men were dead. Others had escaped the scaffold. Even the 1827 compendium, though utterly convinced of the guilt of the condemned, concludes by acknowledging that the affair retained its darkness. The hedge of soldiers had been but a fleeting moment in this protracted drama. It had concealed faces to bring forth a truth; it could not prevent the spoken word, once loosed into the world, from assuming in every mind a different and irremediable shape.