The most famous case of all is one of the most recent, and made the reputation of M. Macé, the well-known chief of the French detective police. Here a suspicious parcel had been found in a well in the centre of an apartment house. A second parcel was presently recovered, with identical contents. Both parcels were tied up in black glazed calico, the ends of both were knotted in a peculiar way, and both were stitched with black cotton. These facts threw suspicion upon some journeyman tailor. It was soon discovered that an inmate of the apartment house, who was a working sempstress, received the visits of a tailor, who brought her work. Attention was thus directed to this man Voirbo. His antecedents were investigated, and it was found that an aged man, a miser with means, often in Voirbo’s company, had disappeared. The crowning point in this case was the cleverness shown by M. Macé in discovering that the dismemberment had taken place in Voirbo’s own rooms. The tiled floor in the living room sloped in one direction, and M. Macé, readily judging that if a body had been disposed of in the room, the blood would have flowed that way, at once emptied a decanter upon the floor. The running water led him to a spot under which, when laid bare, a quantity of dark matter, proved later to be dry human blood, was disinterred. Voirbo was challenged with the crime, and confessed, but before execution committed suicide.
Crimes of the character indicated above are numerous enough in the criminal annals of France, but they by no means constitute the whole of her calendar of crime; and in the next chapter we pass on to others not less fearsome.
CHAPTER VI
CELEBRATED CASES
Parricide—Benoit and his mother—Donon Cadot—Combinations for crime—Soufflard and Le Sage—The mysterious case of Madame Lafarge—A strange story—The Duc de Choiseul-Praslin kills his wife in the faubourg St. Honoré—Evidence clearly against him—Poisons himself and escapes justice—Suspected in Paris that special favor was shown him on account of his rank—Failure of justice in this case one of the supposed causes of the French Revolution of 1848.
The crime of parricide was so little conceivable in ancient law that no mention of it appears in the early codes. Six centuries of civilisation elapsed before the Roman law-makers devised a special penalty for the child who slew his parent. The guilty offspring was sewn up in a leather sack, and drowned in the sea; in this it was the custom later to enclose a dog, a cock, a viper and a monkey. The case of Benoit, quoted below, was by no means isolated. At the trial of Edward Donon Cadot in 1844, the public prosecutor admitted that there had been ninety-five parricides in France in the course of ten years. Only a short time before had the special penalty inflicted in addition to death, that of mutilation by striking off the offending hand, been suppressed.
The causes that have inspired this horrible offence are in all cases generally the same; either the impatient heirs, weary of waiting for their inheritance, have hastened the departure of the obstacle, or they have resented the duties imposed on them by the prolonged existence of an aged and useless parent. These reasons have too often weighed in France, especially with the peasant class, at once avaricious and greedy, and the most hideous stories of the savage cruelty of children towards their parents are to be found in French criminal records; and this even in quite recent times.
A singularly savage instance of matricide is on record; that of Frederick Benoit, who murdered his mother at Vouziers, in 1832, and committed a certain murder at Versailles, for which he suffered death in Paris. This Benoit was the third son of the Justice of the Peace at Vouziers. The father was in the habit of visiting a mill he owned at some little distance, and passing the night there. Madame Benoit, when left alone, was always a prey to apprehension, for they kept a considerable sum in cash in the wardrobe, near her bedroom. This fact was known to young Benoit. One night, when the judge was absent, an alarm of robbers was raised, and several neighbors rushed in. Frederick met them on the threshold with the news that the thieves had escaped by the window, but he begged some one to rouse his mother at once. On entering her room she was found lying dead upon her bed, with her throat cut from ear to ear. Death must have been instantaneous, but her head was enveloped in a woollen petticoat, undoubtedly to stifle her cries.
Circumstance did not support the theory that thieves had broken into the house. All the windows had been securely closed at bedtime. The shutters could be opened only from within. Besides there were no signs of muddy footmarks brought in from outside, where it was raining hard. Nor, last of all, was the existence of the money in the cupboard, 6,000 francs in gold, known to any one outside the family circle. The inquiry seemed naturally limited, therefore, to the persons actually occupying the house that night,—Frederick Benoit and a young girl, a cousin, who served as domestic. As the boy was barely twenty and the girl not seventeen, the police could not bring themselves to suspect them. Several arrests were made, but guilt could not be fixed upon any one. Then all at once the second murder was committed by Benoit, who killed a youthful companion, with whom he was on the most intimate terms. They had occupied a room together in a small hotel at Versailles. At midday Benoit had gone out, but no sign was made by the other. In the evening, about 7 o’clock, the servants went up and found the door locked from the outside. They entered by another door, and discovered the body of the second young man with his throat cut. “Precisely as my mother was killed,” remarked Benoit, when subsequently arrested, and brought into the presence of the body at the Morgue.
Witnesses now appeared, who had heard the deceased declare that his life was in danger from Frederick Benoit. “I know what he has done, and he will certainly kill me some day to save his own skin.” Benoit was accordingly arrested. A search in his lodgings in Paris revealed a razor case, from which the razor had been removed, and a quantity of gold inserted, wrapped up as rouleaux in fragments of the Constitutionnel newspaper, to which his father, the judge, was a subscriber. Further incriminating evidence now came from the last confession of the girl Louise Feucher, his cousin, to the effect that she had been his accomplice in the murder of Madame Benoit. She had fled from the house in Vouziers to Paris, and fallen into bad ways, which had led to her imprisonment in Les Magdelonnettes, where she entered the hospital, and died.