She begged him to let her pass. Arsène Chevalier was on her way to work; Jean-François Julien demanded yet another answer. For days, he had accosted her along her habitual thoroughfares, continually steering their discourse back to marriage, turning her family’s refusal into a mere obstacle that one further explanation ought to dispel. On that morning of October 26, 1827, in the passage du Cheval-Rouge, near the rue Saint-Martin, the young seamstress sought neither to persuade nor to debate. She wished only to go on her way. Moments later, bleeding and wounded, she was seeking refuge in the shop of a charcoal vendor.
They had first met in Rouen, within a house that sheltered two master tailors. Julien was employed by one; Arsène, then nineteen years of age, came to sew for the other. In the evenings, he would escort her back to her mother’s lodgings in an outlying quarter. These walks fostered an attachment, followed by a proposal of marriage. She replied that she would accept him should her parents consent. Her family was then preparing to remove to Paris: it were better, she remarked, to await their establishment there before pressing his suit. Julien took this as a promise; Arsène had merely stated a condition.
From these earliest exchanges, according to the inquest recorded by Champagnac, the young man had bound his very existence to the answer he coveted. He swore that a refusal would mean his death. Arsène had not been insensible to his devotion and had confided to an acquaintance that she loved him. There is no cause to efface this initial affection to comprehend what ensued. She may well have felt it, and subsequently altered her mind. The violence of this dossier resides precisely in that passage of will which a man refused to acknowledge: words spoken at the dawn of an acquaintance do not hold in perpetual bondage the woman who uttered them.
Arsène arrived in Paris toward the middle of September. Julien followed in her wake, furnished with the papers requisite for their nuptials, and presented himself on September 30 at her mother’s door. The latter explained that she must await the return of her husband, Arsène’s stepfather, and that their intention had hitherto been not to marry their daughter for another two years. Julien answered that he could bide his time. The family soon quit their provisional lodgings for the rue Saint-Martin; Arsène found employment with a cousin, a haberdasher in the passage du Ponceau. Julien knew these addresses. He came regularly to walk with her and revived the selfsame design.
On October 12, he accosted Guilmet, the stepfather. The latter led him into the shop to ascertain Arsène’s true inclinations. She repeated that, should he find favour with her parents, she would consent to wed him. An interview was appointed for the following Sunday. In the interim, the mother and stepfather voiced their strong disapproval and persuaded her to renounce the match. To avoid a painful confrontation, the entire household went abroad on the appointed day, hoping their absence might suffice as a denial. Julien waited for their return. He had paced the quarter all day and was still lingering there that evening when Guilmet plainly told him to think of the marriage no longer.
Two days later, Julien intercepted Arsène on her way to the workshop. She confirmed that she could no longer become his wife. He seized her by the arm; she broke away with a cry. He nevertheless pursued her into the shop, heaping reproaches upon her inconstancy, branding her ungrateful and perfidious. The haberdasher was obliged to put an end to the scene. For several days, nothing more was heard of him. Yet this silence betokened no resignation. Julien had taken a chamber in the immediate vicinity, in the rue Guérin-Boisseau. He had drawn near to the places where he might encounter her unbidden.
On October 23 and 24, he approached her once more. His declarations cast upon her the sole burden of whatever might befall him: should she refuse him, she would have his death upon her conscience. Arsène attempted to soothe him by once again dangling the prospect of a two-year delay, subject to familial approval. Guilmet, approached in his turn, let fall a similarly vague possibility. Here one observes how the precautions intended to placate an importunate man may unwittingly nourish the very passion they seek to extinguish. Yet none of these equivocations constituted a warrant to pursue Arsène, much less to detain her by force.
On the 26th, Julien had himself awakened at an early hour by a fellow lodger. He repaired to the quarter of the Ponceau, waited near the passage, and stepped into the shop of a wine merchant. He had already been remarked there in preceding days, agitated and gazing out toward the street. Toward eight o’clock, Arsène appeared. He demanded to know what her stepfather had resolved. She replied that he knew it already, and asked to pass. He restrained her, inveighed against those who, he claimed, sought to sunder them, and then struck her with a knife. She endeavoured to defend herself, gained the charcoal-dealer’s shop, and cried out that help must also be brought to Julien, who had just turned the blade upon himself.
Both young people survived. He recovered with celerity; she remained long in peril of her life. The denizens of the quarter had looked upon two wounded bodies, but this outward resemblance in no way rendered their acts equivalent: Arsène had been assailed before Julien turned his weapon against his own breast. Interrogated, he admitted having struck her, while maintaining he had harboured no design upon her life. He asserted that his initial intent had merely been to wound himself before her eyes, and that his purpose had abruptly altered. He sought to restrict his assault to a single blow. Arsène’s garments, however, bore multiple rents, and her wounds bore witness to a desperate struggle.
On January 30, 1828, Julien stood before the Court of Assizes for the Seine. The inquiry turned not merely upon who had wielded the weapon, for that he conceded; it remained to qualify his intent and determine whether the act had been premeditated. His lurking in the neighbourhood, the prior purchase of the knife, and the repeated ambushes afforded the prosecution substantial matter for argument. Julien persisted in his tale of a sudden, unbidden impulse. Above all, he was brought face to face with Arsène, who had come to testify, and he discovered that she whom he had sought to bend to his will could no longer endure the mere sight of him.
On several occasions, the young woman was seized with violent paroxysms that compelled the court to suspend proceedings. She covered her eyes, screamed, and swooned away. When she was able to speak, she explained that she had renounced the marriage upon the counsel of her parents. She was required to display the wounds upon her hands and to specify the sequence of the blows. She maintained that she had been struck in the abdomen before receiving, while parrying the thrusts, the cuts upon her fingers. Julien contradicted her. For the first time, the chronicle notes, he wept, reproaching her with seeking his destruction after having wrought his misery.
The selfsame demand thus echoed through the courtroom as had echoed through the public street: Arsène was still expected to answer for the wretchedness of the man who had laid violent hands upon her. Yet her testimony owed him neither solace nor fidelity; its sole subject was what she had endured. The public prosecutor maintained the voluntary character of the attempt, but moved to set aside premeditation. The jury adopted this distinction. Julien was found guilty of attempted voluntary homicide without premeditation and sentenced to penal labour for life, together with branding. His victim was alive, yet her survival rendered the attempt no less absolute.
The chronicle concludes with the condemned man leaving the bar in silence. It does not record how Arsène resumed her labours, what paths she thenceforth chose, nor for how long the sound of Julien’s voice continued to haunt her. We leave her at the threshold where her word was at last accorded belief. She had loved, she had hesitated, she had consented to wait, and then she had refused. Beneath all the rhetoric concerning Julien’s despair, one plea remained—simpler than all the rest, and one he had held in contempt: to let her pass.