CHAPTER VI

Who the assassin was and who the assassinated--Auguste Picot--Equality before the law--Last exploits of Marot--His execution.

The body was taken to the hospital, where it was exposed to view, as neither the justice of peace, the mayor, nor the chief constable recognised it. I very naturally wished to go and see by daylight the object of my fears of the night before. My mother made me promise not to say a word, for she knew that if I promised I should keep my word.

The body was sheltered under a shed and laid on a table.

It was that of a young man of fifteen or sixteen years of age. He was dressed in a poor suit of blue cotton, and a coarse shirt torn open down to his waist, leaving his chest bare.

The wound that seemed to have caused his death was a transverse cut right across the skull, and it seemed to have been made by a blunt instrument.

His feet and his hands were bare. His feet looked like those of a man used to much walking; his hands were those of a working man.

Beyond these details he was, as I have said, completely unknown in our district.

Two days passed, during which everyone held forth upon the event at leisure; then, all at once, the rumour spread abroad that the assassin had been arrested.

He was a shepherd in M. Picot's employ.

And next we saw a crowd rushing to the corner of the rue de Largny, where a man wearing a blouse, and handcuffed, was being brought in between two mounted policemen, armed with swords.

His type of face was that of a Picardy peasant of the lowest class, coarse and cunning.

He was taken to the prison, and the gate shut after him; but the crowd continued to besiege the gate in spite of its being closed. It was far too exciting an event not to bring the whole town out. The magistrate began the inquiry, and in his first examination the accused man denied everything.

But terrible proofs were brought against him. Shepherds, as is known, sleep in log huts, near their sheep-folds. The hut of the accused, during the day in which the murder had taken place, and during the night following that on which the body had been discovered, had been only a couple of hundred paces or so from the highroad.

Traces of blood had been found under a wretched mattress on the straw which covered the floor of the hut.

Besides this, the mallet with which the accused drove in the stakes of his sheep-pens was blood-stained on one side, and it appeared to have been the tool with which the deadly blow had been delivered.

In spite of all these proofs, the accused man--whose name was Marot--as we have said, completely denied the charge, and the magistrate and his clerk left without being able to get anything out of him.

But, about eleven o'clock at night, he changed his mind, called the gaoler, Sylvestre, who was also verger to the church, and begged him to send for the magistrate, as he had a confession to make.

The magistrate sent word to his clerk, and both repaired to the accused's cell.

He did not refuse to speak this time; on the contrary, he had quite a long story to relate--the upshot being a charge of murder against his master, Auguste Picot.

The man had built up a clever fabrication in the solitude of his cell, by the help of which he hoped to drag into complicity with himself a man too influential to have any dealings with him. But Marot shall tell his own tale.

On the day of the murder, a young man was walking along the highroad, looking for work, when he perceived Marot on the plain, busied over changing his flock from one place to another. The young man left the highroad and came straight to the shepherd, just when the latter was driving in his last picket.

He told his miserable story; he said he had no money to buy himself bread, he had tramped through the town without a bite, too proud to beg alms; but, seeing Marot was a working man, he had ventured to come and ask a bit of bread from a fellow-labourer.

Marot had brought out of his hut some of the small, round, thick loaves, such as farmers distribute each morning to their day-labourers, and he shared the loaf with the tramp, who sat down by him.

They both leant back against the hut and began their breakfast, when suddenly--it is Marot who tells the tale--Auguste Picot came up on horseback at full gallop, and cried out roughly to his shepherd:

"You scoundrel, do you suppose I give you my bread to have it eaten by beggars and by vagabonds?"

The stranger was on the point of replying to excuse the shepherd, when Picot--so said his accuser--urged his horse on with such brutality that the youth was obliged to raise his stick, to prevent himself being kicked underfoot by the horse. At this movement in self-defence, Picot's horse wheeled round, kicked out with his hind feet, and hit the youth in the chest with one of his hoofs.

The youth fell down unconscious.

Picot then, seeing he had become an unintentional murderer, decided to become one in intention: he turned an accident he was anxious to hide into a crime. He looked round him, he saw on the ground the mallet with which Marot had just been driving in the pickets of his fold, and then (please understand thoroughly that this version is not mine, but the accused's) he dealt him a violent blow on the back of his head, finishing off the wretched tramp, who had only fainted before.

Death was almost instantaneous.

Then he offered all sort of bribes to the shepherd if he would help him to conceal the crime.

The shepherd had been weak enough to be touched by his master's entreaties: he consented to conceal the body in his hut.

Hence the blood-stains on the straw and mattress.

When evening came, Picot returned to the hut to take the dead body, under cover of darkness, to the windmill, of which he possessed the key.

The two accomplices intended to go in, shut the door upon themselves and the body, dig a pit and there bury the unfortunate tramp.

But, as they were crossing the road, they were alarmed by the sound of a horse coming at full gallop; they let the body fall out of their hands, and both ran off to hide themselves.

They returned ten minutes later; but the waggoner with his cart appeared on the top of the hill of Vauriennes, and they were obliged again to abandon their ghastly work.

The waggoner had taken up the corpse and had carried it, as we have seen, to Villers-Cotterets. All hope of hiding the crime had gone, and all their thoughts had to be given to attending to their own safety.

Marot had been captured and had at first attempted to deny the charge; but, on reflection, he preferred to confess his passive part in the crime than to risk his life by a complete denial of all complicity in it.

We shall soon see that the fable was sufficiently skilfully conceived to necessitate the arrest of Picot, even if it did not carry conviction to the judge's mind.

So, when morning came, everybody heard of the shepherd's accusation and of his master's arrest.

The news made a great stir: Picot was not liked; he was a rich and good-looking young fellow, strong in physique, haughty in his manner--all qualities and defects which are fatal to popularity in a small town.

As a matter of fact, Picot had never done an injury to anyone. But, alas! at the first news of the misfortune that had befallen him, half the town sided against him.

The Picot family were cursed with ill luck, and the Almighty made them pay very dear for the wealth He bestowed upon them.

Four years previously Stanislas Picot, it will be remembered, was killed when out shooting. Two years before, the farm had been burnt down, and now to-day the eldest son was accused of murder.

The inquiry was actively pursued, and it was decided that a visit should be paid on the following day to the spot where the murder had taken place: the Government prosecutor had arrived from Soissons.

I shall always recollect the terrible effect the sight of that procession made upon me, as it crossed the great square. The town authorities marched at its head, with the representative of the king; next came Picot between two rows of police, some before, others behind him; then the shepherd between two more rows of police placed in the same way; after these the whole town either followed the procession or stood at their doors and windows.

They all walked fast, for it rained. People talked of equality in the eye of the law, and the justices had thought to carry out this precept by placing the two men on foot each exactly the same, with an equal number of police to guard them.

But they had forgotten the different impression this would make on two such different natures, the one belonging to the head and the other to the foot of the social ladder.

Most assuredly the man at the top of the scale suffered all the tortures of the situation.

The other man was almost triumphant; he had by a few words dragged down to the same level as himself a man who had been far higher in the social scale only a week before, a man whose bread he had eaten, whose paid servant he was, and before whom he never spoke save cap in hand.

So a debased light of exultant satisfaction radiated from the man's low countenance.

Besides, he had the sympathies of the men of his own class, who looked upon him as a victim, and even of some enviously disposed people of higher ranks in life.

Picot's expression was quite unmoved, although one could realise the fury, shame, and pride that were raging tumultuously in that massive frame.

No! Justice was not evenly dealt out to these two men, in the very fact of their being treated alike.

Next day there was another ceremony quite as lugubrious--they proceeded to exhume the body.

Most discussion took place over the bruised wound in the youth's chest. The shepherd contended that it had been caused by the horse's kick. Picot retorted that if it had been bruised by a kick from a horse and from one leg only, violent enough to make him faint away, the marks of the shoe would be imprinted on the chest, which, although bruised, was more probably marked by the clogs of the shepherd than by the horse's shoe. They were both sent to the prison at Soissons, and at the end of a month Picot was given his liberty on the grounds of there being insufficient evidence against him.

He returned to his people; but the blow had been violent enough to spoil his future life. He had been proud before, but now he became misanthropic; he shut himself up on his property at home, avoided all assemblies of young people of his own age, and ended by marrying the daughter of a policeman, who had been his mistress for some time.

Doubtless--as there is compensation in the end for all unmerited misfortune--Providence had led him by dark paths into simpler and happier ways. He had one real joy,--perhaps the deepest joy of this world,--his father and his poor mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died near him at an extreme old age.

The shepherd was sentenced to twelve or fifteen years' imprisonment, I think, for _having stolen the clothes found on a dead man._

A strange sentence, which established the fact that a crime had been committed without pointing out a culprit!

And here are some further details that I received after the trial.

The young man whom I found assassinated on the 13th September 1816 was called Félix-Adolphe-Joseph Billaudet; he was the son of François-Xavier-Léger Billaudet, court-crier to the _tribunal de première instance_ in the arrondissement of Strasbourg; he was born at Strasbourg on the 1st April 1801, and was therefore, at the time of his death, fifteen years, six months, and twelve days old.

He was servant to M. Maréchal, forest inspector at Vervins, and had a passport upon him, at the time of his assassination, for Paris, signed at Vervins, 8th September 1816.

Probably the father and the mother of the poor lad are now dead, and I am perhaps the only person in the world who still remembers him, in thus going back to the days of my youth.

When Marot came out of prison, he returned to the country, and at first settled as a butcher in the village of Vivières. Then it seems things went badly with him, and he went to a little hamlet called Chelles, situated two or three leagues from Villers-Cotterets.

Some time after this change of residence, his wife died under mysterious and strange circumstances. While she was drawing water from a well, she leant against the pulley support, which broke; she was precipitated thirty feet deep into the well, where she was drowned.

Her death was regarded at the time as an accident.

Some time after that death, the body of a young carter was found buried only one or two feet deep, between Vivières and Chelles; he appeared to have been murdered by a pistol-shot, fired point blank in his back.

Some inquiry was set up, but no assassin or assassins could be traced.

Finally, some time after, Marot himself went before the magistrate to make a declaration concerning a new event that had just happened. A young glass-painter, who had come to ask hospitality of him, lacking the money needed for a stay at the inn (a request to which he had generously acceded), had died during the night of an attack of colic in the barn, where he had been given a truss of straw to lie on.

The young painter was duly buried.

Some days after, Marot's fowls were found dead in neighbouring yards and gardens.

They seemed to have been poisoned.

These facts were put together, and suspicions began to be aroused.

Marot was arrested. His own child gave evidence against him, and brought about his conviction.

The young painter had been poisoned by some soup into which Marot had put arsenic.

The young man complained that the soup had a queer taste; Marot's son took a spoonful, tasted it, and agreed with the painter.

"The soup," Marot replied, "tastes queer because it is made of pig's head. As for you, you greedy boy," he added, addressing this remark particularly to his son, "eat your own soup, and let this boy eat his--each dog has his platter."

But the taste of the soup was so acrid that the young painter left half of it. The rest was thrown on the dungheap; the fowls ate it, and, driven by pain, they scattered to right and left, their death revealing the fact of the poisoning.

The charges brought against Marot were this time too strong for him to deny them.

And, seeing there was no hope of salvation from the consequences of his latest crime, he confessed all the others.

He confessed that he had killed Billaudet, to steal some six or eight francs there were on him.

He confessed he had filed the screw that held the pulley, so that his wife, who was about to add to his family, should be flung into the well, wherein she was killed, either by the fall or by drowning.

He confessed he had shot the young carter whose body had been found between Chelles and Vivières point blank with a pistol, in order to rob him of thirty francs he had just received.

Finally, he confessed he had poisoned the young glass-painter, by putting arsenic in his plate, in order to steal twelve francs from him.

Marot was condemned to death, and executed at Beauvais in 1828 or 1829.