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:—