When Sébastien-Benoît Peytel brought his wife home to Belley, he called for physicians with an insistence that the law would soon turn against him. He shouted, beat upon doors, and demanded aid. Félicité Alcazar lay lifeless in the carriage. She was pronounced dead; yet he still insisted that further practitioners be summoned. In the narrative the prosecution was soon to construct, this agitation would not be read as the despair of a horrified husband. It would become an overly deliberate performance—the first misstep of an actor in crime.
Another body had been left behind on the road, near the bridge of Andert: that of Louis Rey, the manservant. Peytel freely admitted to having slain him with blows from a hammer. He maintained that Rey had first fired upon his wife in an attempt to rob him. Thus, the sole survivor brought forth at once a death he confessed, a death he laid upon the deceased, and an account that no living soul could verify from beginning to end. The affair commenced under this terrible inequality: two of the three travellers would speak no more.
The Return from Mâcon
The couple and their servant were returning from a sojourn in Mâcon. Peytel practiced as a notary in Belley after having frequented Parisian literary circles. He had married Félicité only a few months prior. The journey was undertaken with two carriages, one of which conveyed their effects under the charge of Rey. In late October 1838, they had departed Mâcon, passed through Bourg, and halted at Pont-d'Ain; on the first of November, they took to the road once more toward Belley.
According to Peytel, the petty vexations of the journey had foreshadowed the servant's treachery: an unwillingness to carry the money into a bedchamber, sullen silences, and ill grace in the face of the rain. He was carrying seven thousand five hundred francs. This sum, by his account, was what had resolved Rey to fall upon him. As the inquiry progressed, each post-stage became a scene to be revisited, every innkeeper a potential repository of some fleeting sign the travellers had left behind without a thought.
Beyond the bridge of Andert, the notary recounted, a gunshot rang out. His wife sat beside him in the carriage; he fired toward a man whom he recognised as his servant, then gave chase. He explained that he had struck Rey with the hammer he carried until the man was dead. When he subsequently sought Félicité, he found her in a flooded meadow near the watercourse. He ultimately secured the assistance of two men, the Thannets, father and son, to lift her back into the carriage and make for Belley.
The Thannets could testify to the cries for help and the conveyance of the body. They had not witnessed the initial shot. This boundary divided the verifiable portion of the return from the drama that had preceded it. Everything that had transpired beforehand rested solely upon Peytel's word, the wounds, the objects retrieved, and the manner in which these elements were made to cohere.
Félicité's Fortune
The magistrates examined the bodies, the weapons, and the ground. They sought likewise another motive than the theft of the seven thousand five hundred francs. The marriage afforded them one. Félicité possessed property; the financial arrangements of the household, the sums her husband had disposed of, and the testament she had executed in his favour engaged the close attention of the examining magistrate. An unhappy union, an inheritance in prospect, a vanished wife: the prosecution had found the thread that linked the hearth to the high road.
This was no trifling objection. The will conferred upon the survivor an advantage that death transformed into reality. Yet instruments of notary and coin had not been present at the scene near Andert. To pass from an interest in slaying to the proof of murder, there remained a chasm to be bridged which moral characterisations could not abolish. Nevertheless, marital correspondence and recollections of domestic discord were charged with explaining nearly everything.
The reputations of the two men were likewise pitted against one another. The witnesses encountered along the route did not necessarily describe the dark and rebellious Rey depicted by his master. Several had found him obliging or converse. His military past, his former masters, and those who had known him were summoned to defend his memory. Conversely, Peytel's literary and financial background fed suspicions of ambition, extravagance, and doubtful probity. The dead man and the living were gradually endowed with temperaments so sharply contrasted that the drama seemed already cast before the assizes had even opened.
What the President Held to Be Impossible
At the trial, the interrogation returned persistently to the physical movements of the men. How had Peytel overtaken a robust servant who had set off ahead of him? Why would Rey have fled straight along the road rather than into the cover of the woods? How could he have managed at once a horseman's cloak, a whip, and a pistol? These questions converted the dark highway into an arena for geometric demonstration. The survivor was required to retrace precisely a race whose strides he claimed never to have counted.
The medical debate was graver still. The range of the shot, the trajectory of the wounds, and the capacity of Félicité to speak after being struck were contested at length. Peytel maintained that his wife had addressed intelligible words to him; the medical findings marshalled against him appeared to preclude this possibility. He pleaded that contrary professional opinions be heard. His defence foundered upon this peril: any lapse of memory was liable to be deemed an untruth, and any apparent untruth proof of a double murder.
The jury pronounced him guilty. The sentence of death was handed down on the thirtieth of August, 1839. In Paris, Balzac took up his defence with vehemence. He had known Peytel and considered that the preliminary investigation had culled only what was damning, while neglecting those verifications that might have aided him. In his letter published in September, he challenged in particular the use of past accounting disputes to fabricate the likeness of a grasping man. An alleged irregularity in a notarial practice, he insisted, did not suffice to account for two corpses.
The English novelist Thackeray likewise directed his gaze upon the affair. He did not simply share Balzac's conviction of the man's innocence; he denounced the manner in which conjectures were advanced as established impossibilities, and how the narrative of the prosecution played upon the sentiments of the public. Thus, two men of letters intervened in a trial wherein each camp accused the other of weaving a romance.
The appeal in cassation failed; the royal pardon did not arrive. On the twenty-eighth of October, Peytel was executed at Bourg. The contemporary account cited by Thackeray depicts him choosing to walk unaided toward the scaffold. This final demeanour was observed with the same appetite for interpretation as his first cries in Belley. It was possible, it seemed, to read a man down to the cadence of his step; it was another matter entirely to return to the road of Andert, into the darkness of that night, and compel the two dead to speak.