The Wreck of the Medusa by Jonathan Miles

Author:Jonathan Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2007-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Fualdès Affair and the Love Affair

On March 20,1817, a body was found in the waters of the Aveyron River in southern France. It was soon identified as being that of Antoine-Bernardin Fualdès, a magistrate and criminal prosecutor from Rodez who had served the revolution and the empire and who had come out of retirement during the Hundred Days. On the previous evening, Fualdès had left his house with a substantial IOU tucked in the pocket of his frock coat and was on his way to redeem the debt. He was followed into a rough part of Rodez where, at about eight p.m., he was ambushed at the corner of the rue Hebdomadiers, gagged with a handkerchief, and bundled off into a gambling den aptly named the Crooked House, a notorious haunt of smugglers and prostitutes. After the assassins had forced their hostage to sign letters of exchange for the IOU, Fualdès was stretched out on a table. Sawing with a blunt knife, his murderer opened a transversal section across his neck from the right to the left carotid arteries. Posted by the assassins at the corner of the street outside, hurdy-gurdy players ground out their eerie melodies, obliterating the screams of the victim. The murderer smeared the body of the ex-magistrate with a little of the blood he had let while the rest dripped steadily into a bucket. When full, this was given to a pig to drink. The animal, having gorged himself, subsequently died. At around ten o’clock in the evening, the bloody body of the hapless Fualdès was placed on two poles, wrapped in a sheet, covered with wool, tied, and then carried to the river by four individuals who dumped the corpse into the Aveyron and hence, they thought, into oblivion.

That is the gist of the official account of the crime as presented by the public prosecutor in Rodez. Despite lengthy trials, and an eventual verdict, the truth behind the murder of Antoine-Bernardin Fualdès has, until recently, remained an enigma. Certainly, it had all the ingredients of a very murky mystery: the roughness of the isolated, in-ward-looking town of Rodez, which was torn by the furious political quarrels that had afflicted France over the previous decades; the probability that the murder was the work of an avenging ultra-royalist gang; the rumors, lies, and faked convictions; above all, the barbarity of the crime itself, made to seem even more vicious by the official verdict that the murder was carried out by men who were among the victim’s best friends.1 It was also obvious from the start that the authorities in Paris, anxious about their judicial hold on the volatile south, took a special interest in the case.

After hearing hundreds of witnesses, confessions, and denials, a verdict was returned in early September, which was annulled by the appeals court in Montpellier a month later. A retrial opened in the spring of 1818, one year after the crime had been committed. By that time the Fualdès affair had become a media sensation with reporters from the large Parisian papers in attendance.

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