The Dame d'Abeillan lived in country seclusion near Béziers, attended by a single domestic. On the fourth of April 1782, she was discovered dead in the narrow passage between her bed and the wall. The servant slept in the same chamber; marks of a violent death were visible upon the corpse; the magistrate instituted an inquest, and the domestic was arrested.
She was the Widow Daumas, a woman of some sixty years. Brought to examination, she declared that a mere quarter of an hour had elapsed between the moment she lay down and the clatter of a falling chamber pot; that she had thrice called out to her mistress without receiving an answer; and that, having lighted her candle, she found her lying prostrate beside the bed.
The Gazette, following here the Journal des Causes célèbres, found this deposition counterfeit and riddled with improbability. Had an assassin fallen upon the Dame d'Abeillan, the servant must surely have heard the frantic struggles of a victim wrestling against death; she would have raised the cry and roused the neighbours. Instead, she had passed the remainder of the night beside the corpse.
There were, moreover, the words she had spoken. The Widow Daumas had repeatedly muttered that her mistress caused her grievous misery, and that an inner voice urged her to strangle her. Her own sister and daughter-in-law testified that they believed her fully capable of having strangled her mistress. She herself admitted to having been more than once upon the very verge of the act.
And there were the beds. Witnesses attested that neither the mistress’s bed nor that of the servant had been unmade. The Dame d'Abeillan, it was concluded, had therefore been strangled before ever retiring—perhaps while offering her prayers at the foot of her bed; and the servant, who claimed to have lain down, had never done so at all.
The seneschal of Béziers condemned the Widow Daumas to have her right hand severed, to be hanged by the neck, her body subsequently cast into a blazing fire, and her ashes scattered to the winds. Upon appeal, the Parlement of Toulouse confirmed the sentence, remitting only the severance of the hand.
It will not escape notice that the entire case rested upon mere presumptions: no eyewitness to the crime, no confession to the deed itself. An angry sentence spoken in bitterness, two undisturbed beds, a night passed beside a dead woman. The magistrates of 1782 perceived therein plain certainty; a reader of our own day, acquainted with the trial of the hermit of Aignay, may perhaps entertain a doubt that the Gazette did not share.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1784, Parlement of Toulouse, after the Journal des Causes célèbres of Des Essarts: domestic murder.