III
Page 544. The Peytel affair.
In 1831, a young man named Sébastien-Bénoist Peytel came to Paris to try his fortunes in literature; he lived among the journalists and writers who are described in “Un Grand homme de province à Paris.” After a time he became part-proprietor of the paper called “Le Voleur,” to which Balzac himself contributed from time to time. Balzac describes him as hot-headed, gifted with great mental and physical strength, ambitious, proud, and passionate, carried away at times by the force of his own words, but good essentially. He had an eye that always looked a man in the face; and he was not tricky or deceitful.
During this time he seems to have been the friend of all the young writers and artists, especially of Gavarni. He was a lover of art, antiquities, and bric-à-brac, and having inherited some property from his father, he spent money on forming a collection.
After a while, however, his attempts at literature and journalism not satisfying him, he became a notary, first at Lyon, then at Belley, near Bourg. But before leaving Paris he married a young girl named Félicie Alcazar, described as a Creole, with a mother and four sisters but no father, and with relations who mingled in good society. M. de Lamartine was so far intimate with Peytel that he acted as father or guardian to Félicie Alcazar on the occasion of the marriage, signed the contract, and took the bride to the mayor’s office and to the church.
The marriage was not happy from the start. The wife disliked and even hated the husband, and showed it. He, on the contrary, appears to have been attached to her, and he led an irreproachable life.
One night, at eleven o’clock, as the husband and wife and their man-servant were returning from Bourg to Belley along the highroad, the wife and servant were murdered by means of a pistol-shot and a hammer belonging to the carriage. There were no witnesses to the deed, but the husband immediately gave himself up, or, as Balzac puts it, “accepted the responsibility of the homicide.”
The explanation Peytel gave, and which his friends afterwards adopted, was that he suddenly on this drive discovered criminal relations between his wife and the servant, Louis Rey, and in a moment of ungovernable fury he had killed the man with the hammer. The latter had endeavoured to escape, but he pursued him; the man then turned to shoot him, but the shot killed the wife instead.
The authorities, on the other hand, charged Peytel with murdering his wife to obtain her money, and killing the man as witness of the crime; they also brought charges against him of past dishonesty. Prejudice was strong against him in Belley because he was a stranger. “No matter how the affair took place,” said one who knew the town; “Peytel is a dead man.”
Up to this time, the matter taking place in the provinces, Peytel’s friends seem to have thought but little of it, supposing that he would certainly, under the circumstances, be acquitted. He himself felt so sure of this that he wrote to Gavarni to come and take him to Switzerland. On the contrary, he was condemned, and the condemnation roused his friends in Paris to the highest pitch. Balzac and Gavarni took up the case and studied it; Lamartine wrote the following letter to Peytel in prison:—
Paris, November 12, 1838.
Your deplorable situation fills all minds here; no one doubts that unforeseen revelations, to which time and circumstances always lead, will completely justify the details that you yourself have given, and cause pity and universal interest to take the place of the prejudices you speak of. Meantime, monsieur, I am glad to be able to assure you that those prejudices have no access to the mind of any one here, and that if you need to add other proof than your unhappiness and despair, you will find it here in the unanimous assertion of the purity of your antecedents and the irreproachability of your life.
Receive, with the expression of my sorrowful sympathy, the assurance of my distinguished sentiments.
De Lamartine.
Balzac and Gavarni went to Belley, Bourg, and Maçon, employed counsel, and brought the matter before the Court of Cassation (Appeals). Balzac wrote, and published in the “Siècle,” a long argument of the case (see Édition Définitive, vol. xxii., pp. 579-625), to which a brother-in-law of the murdered woman replied, rather weakly. Balzac rejoined in the “Presse,” prefacing his second statement with the following words to the editor:—
October 2, 1839.
“Monsieur, I am obliged to make use of the newspapers, who have published my letter on the Peytel affair, to thank collectively all those persons who have addressed congratulations to me; and to assure those who have sent me startling testimony in favour of Peytel that their declarations will be received if the Court of Cassation grants a new trial.”
The following very curious letter relating to this subject, from M. Moreau Christophe, inspector-general of prisons, to Gavarni, is worth preserving.
Paris, September 29, 1839.
My dear Monsieur Gavarni: you ask my opinion of the Peytel affair. What shall I say to you? When there is a woman, that is, love, in a crime, it is a tangle, the thread of which escapes the most clear-sighted. They think they hold the thread because they have got hold of the skein. The material of a fact does not constitute the truth of it. Why do you talk of judiciary trials [débats judiciaires]? A judiciary trial is to my eyes a legal lie. The accused lies to the lawyer, the lawyer lies to the judge, the newspapers lie to the public. How do you expect truth to come to light through that criss-cross of lies? She is just as much hidden from us at the Palais as if she were down at the bottom of her well. It is only behind the bolts, after condemnation, that truth can be found. And even then one must be very expert to find her. That was where I discovered the truth about the Laroncière affair, and several other love tangles, about which you think you know through the newspapers, whereas you know nothing at all.
That was how you yourself discovered the truth in the depths of Peytel’s dungeon. Balzac has brought startling lights out of that dungeon. But,—shall I say it?—in spite of the immense dialectic and legal talent he has just displayed in the “Siècle” in defence of your unhappy friend, I fear that under his pen truth is impregnated with an atmosphere of romance. Lawyers sometimes fade the cause they plead. Besides, it is too late. Moreover, instead of saving the man who did the act, a subsequent revelation will only the more surely lose him, when he adds to the blood of the victim after the act a stain, however just, upon her memory. That is Peytel’s case. Truth cannot save him now. A lie will kill him.
Moreau Christophe.
French legal arguments never commend themselves to the Anglo-Saxon mind; there seems to be a radical divergence of comprehension as to how truth can be got at, and Balzac’s argument is certainly not convincing. But with the events of the past year before our minds we cannot be sure that prejudice and injustice on the other side may not have justified it.
The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal, and Peytel was executed as stated in the text. A history of this case is given in “Le Notaire Assassin,” by Paul d’Orcières. Paris. 1884.