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"Dazzling beauty, spousal abuse, passionate love, wanton covetousness, lust, conspiracy, poison, murder, vengeance: what an engaging surprise to discover that one of America's foremost scholars of early modern European society, James R. Farr, is also a beguiling storyteller. A riveting drama, his book is at the same time a masterful analysis of emotion and affect, rites and rituals, elite formation and reproduction, family and lineage strategies, gender construction, the discourse and practice of the law, political culture, relations of domination and subordination, the tensions between center and periphery, and the myriad ways in which power worked in seventeenth-century France."--Steven Laurence Kaplan, author of "The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1775"

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A Tale of Two Murders

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.................................................................................ixList of Principal Characters............................................................xiiiPrologue: Looking Back..................................................................11 Tales of Two Murders.................................................................32 Passion and the Beautiful Cousin.....................................................143 The Trial Opens: Jean-Baptiste Lantin's Investigation, 1639-1640.....................284 A Hat, a Rapier, a Knife, and a Dagger...............................................405 The House of Giroux..................................................................546 Prison...............................................................................697 Poison...............................................................................868 Jailbreak............................................................................979 A "Minister of Vengeance"............................................................10910 Rape?...............................................................................12211 Attack, Counterattack...............................................................13612 The King of Spades..................................................................15013 Life or Death? The Day of Reckoning Draws Near......................................161Epilogue................................................................................181Analytical Essay: The Paradoxes of Power, Law, and Justice..............................195Notes...................................................................................205A Note on Sources.......................................................................209Index...................................................................................219

Chapter One

Historians try to determine what happened in the past. Drawing upon evidence left to us, we try to get the story straight, for there lies historical "truth." This book is about two alleged murders in 1638 in Dijon, France. Much of the evidence used to write the narrative is drawn from the criminal trial that occurred between 1639 and 1643 to identify the culprit or culprits and to prove his, her, or their guilt. Hundreds of documents were produced-depositions of witnesses, interrogations of the accused, legal briefs of interested parties, and so on-each with a story to tell pertaining to the alleged murders. Often these documents, like any story, would have a narrative, a plot, a claim to credibility. What challenges the historian's obligation to get the story straight, however, is the palpable dishonesty of many of these documents, a large number of which flatly contradict one another. Many people, in other words, were obviously lying. The historian's task, much like the judges' of the time, is to determine what happened, but as historians we must go further and answer why-why did the judges reach the decision they did, and why does it matter to us in the twenty-first century? What follows in these pages is an attempt to accomplish these tasks-to get the story straight as much as is possible, and to explain why doing so matters.

Let us begin with a narrative about the alleged murders pieced together from a variety of sources, notably some depositions of witnesses called by the prosecuting authorities. Several witnesses said this: around 8 in the evening on Monday, 6 September 1638, the servant Suzanne Odinelle opened the front door to admit a visitor to her master's impressive, multistory stone mansion in Dijon. This was the home of the nobleman Philippe Giroux. The visitor was Giroux's first cousin on his mother's side, a fellow nobleman named Pierre Baillet. Accompanied by his valet, Philibert Neugot, Baillet was escorted into the house-and to his death, for Baillet and his valet were never seen alive again.

Despite the close relation of host and guest, we hear from witnesses that this was no friendly visit; Baillet and Neugot came well armed. Baillet wore two daggers sheathed to the belt that also held a rapier swinging from his waist. Neugot carried two daggers and two swords. This was peculiar attire for a social visit, and Baillet was no soldier. He was a presiding judge, a prsident, at the royal financial court, the Chambre des Comptes, seated in Dijon, Burgundy's capital. Baillet possessed an office and a title, along with the social rank and the honor that came with them and placed him near the summit of society. His cousin Philippe Giroux was even more exalted, owning the office of presiding judge at the royal judicial court of Burgundy, the Parlement.

Baillet had been invited to his cousin's house, according to other witnesses, to patch up differences between them. They had a powerful incentive to do so, because family solidarity formed the base of power in this hierarchical age, and the "House of Giroux," as we will see, was unquestionably an increasingly powerful one. Though blood ties were what bound society, those between Baillet and Giroux were being sorely tested. Many people suspected-and told the court-that Baillet's wife Marie, a beautiful woman from the esteemed and powerful noble family of Fyot, was Giroux's mistress.

Perhaps jealousy and stained honor prompted Baillet to finger Giroux as the culprit in a political scandal that had erupted two years previously. In the mid-1630s France and its royal dynasty the Bourbons were deeply involved in the Thirty Years' War, squaring off against their historic enemy, the house of Habsburg. The Habsburgs' possessions spanned Europe, engulfing in their dominion the kingdom of Spain (which included much of the Americas), Sicily and the southern half of Italy, part of the Low Countries (present-day Belgium), and the German Holy Roman Empire. Part of the territory that came with the Empire was the County of Burgundy (today the Franche-Comt), just to the east of the French province and former Duchy of Burgundy. This meant that Dijon was very much a frontier town, scarcely twenty miles from the border, and as the war between Habsburg and Bourbon heated up, French Burgundy and Dijon were put on a war footing.

The governor of the province of Burgundy, Henri II de Bourbon, the prince of Cond, was entrusted with the military campaigns against the imperial Habsburg forces in the area. After a bungled siege of the town of Dle in 1636, about thirty miles southeast of Dijon, Cond was reminded of his military debacle by some unnamed person who smeared the prince's name and military prowess by printing and then plastering scores of one-page broadsides on the walls lining the public streets and market squares of Dijon. Cond, incensed at such effrontery, was allegedly informed by Baillet that the author of these infamous sheets was Philippe Giroux. Giroux of course denied this, and was certain that Baillet had been the source of the libel. Cond found Giroux's guilt impossible to believe: Giroux had been one of the prince's closest, hand-picked clients. In fact, as we will see in chapter 5 when we examine the House of Giroux, the rise to wealth, power, and influence of the Giroux clan owed largely to the favor of this prince of the blood, King Louis XIII's first cousin and second in line to the throne.

Giroux's patron-client bond...