On the ninth of January 1783, at eleven o’clock at night, in a house in Chazelles, in the province of Forez, a pistol shot loaded with two balls killed the Sieur Morel de la Combe, juge-châtelain of Lavieu, in his bed. He had slept in this first-floor bedchamber only since the eve, by reason of repairs being carried out in his house. His bed stood in an alcove; that of his wife was separated from it by a space of scarcely two feet, and a single curtain enclosed them both.
Dame Morel was asleep. Awakened by the report, she beheld in that very instant the blood-stained body of her husband. She cried out for help; already the murderer was gone. She had remained untouched. The hand that fired thus knew, to within two feet in the dark, which of the two beds it sought.
It must be acknowledged that provincial justice, whenever a crime strikes terror into a countryside, flies first to the nearest hand. On the very next day, they arrested Pierre Barou, a joiner, who had worked upon the repairs of the house and was consequently acquainted with its ins and outs; then they troubled another Barou, Benoît, an innkeeper in Chazelles. The suspicions were vague; yet a man who has held the key to a chamber is ever, in the eyes of the crowd, the one who unlocked it.
It was then that a woman appeared in the affair whom the Gazette does not name. She bore a grudge against the parish curé, the Sieur Mosnier, on account of a failed marriage of which, one surmises, he had been either the obstacle or the witness. She went before the magistrates to declare that it was the curé who had prompted the crime in the joiner. He was not accused of having fired the shot; he was accused, which is viler still, of having whispered it.
The bailiwick of Montbrison issued a warrant for the curé’s bodily arrest, and a priest whose entire life had been beyond reproach, esteemed by his superiors and beloved of his parishioners, was conducted to the prisons of Montbrison as the instigator of an assassination.
He appealed to the Tournelle of the Parlement of Paris, and his advocate drew up on his behalf a memorial whose opening pages the Gazette saw fit to quote, so far did they seem to transcend the cause itself. The advocate did not plead merely for his client. He observed that for this curé, a single enemy had sufficed to see him denounced and imprisoned; and he asked how many men of the world, having to contend with jealous passions and active enmities, ought not to tremble at the ease with which one may slander or even destroy them. He added this reflection, which every magistrate ought to keep ever before his eyes: that the truly guilty often turn such denunciations—which they have sometimes themselves instigated—to their own account, the better to elude pursuit.
On the eighteenth of March 1784, a decree ordered that the curé be provisionally restored to liberty.
And here the Gazette leaves off. It does not tell what became of the two Barous; it does not say what became of the informant; above all, it does not reveal who, on a night in January, entered a bedchamber occupied only since the previous evening and chose without hesitation, between two beds separated by two feet, that of the judge. Who knew that the juge-châtelain had changed chambers? The workmen, no doubt. The household, certainly. And perhaps yet someone else, of whom the justice of Montbrison never dreamed, engrossed as it was in attending to an angry woman.
Thus has remained open, for two centuries and a half, the affair of Chazelles, wherein one saw a joiner arrested because he had labored in the house, and a priest imprisoned because he possessed an enemy.
Source: Gazette des tribunaux, Vol. XXI, 1786, Criminal Tournelle of the Parlement of Paris, indictment for premeditated assassination. The digitized text reads “Chamelles” and “Mord,” two OCR errors.