English and Foreign.
THE DE JEUFOSSE CASE
(From the Times, Doc. 22.)
The trial of Madame do Jeufosse. of her two sons, and of a gamekeeper, Crepe!, which has just been brought to a conclusion at Evreux i-= worthy of brief notice, not only from the 'romantic incidents of the case, but as presenting a striking contrast with our English system o? cnminal procedure. All the prisoners have been acquitted, upon what grounds it would be difficult to say, except that the murdered man was a disreputable sort of character, and that he had persisted in annoying the Jeufosse family. The facts of the case are so completely out of the ordinary course of those crimes which we are in the habit of seeing tried before our criminal courts, that the report of it reads more like a chapter from G-erfaut, or any other powerful melodramatic romance, than of a grave proceeding hiwhich the lives of four human beings were at stake. If we would justly appreciate the principles which led the French jury to a verdict of acquittal, we must discard all our vulgar and common-place notions derived from such books as ArcJibold's Criminal Practice and Boscoe's Criminal Evidence, and be content to take our law from the repertoire of the Porte St. Martin or of the Adelphi at their seasons of grimmest melodrama. A retired provincial family have notice that a dissolute squire in the neighbourhood is in the habit of climbing over their park wall for the purpose of paying court to the daughter of the house. Hereupon the mother desires her gamekeeper to take his gun and pick _ the fellow off. The gamekeeper follows her instructions to the letter, and shoots the intruder clown. Where he fell there he lay for an hour or two, and there he died. " Hnw say you, gentlemen of the jury, ' Guilty' or 'Not Guilty?'" "Not Guilty"-'was the well-nigh instantaneous reply. In- prosaic England we should have held that the/proper course for the head of a family to pursue/under such circumstances, would have been to give notice to the police, who would have carried off the interloping Lothario to gaol, where he would have been dealt with according to his deserts, and have been effectually restrained from annoying the family for the future. A sound beating or ' a ducking in the horsepond might, perhaps, \ have been esteemed a pardonable retaliation under : the circumstances of the case. There can, however, be no doubt that at least the lady and the gamekeeper, who in cold blood and with every circumstance of deliberation planned and carried out the murder of the intruder— blackguard as he was—would in England have been consigned to the gallows as the penalty of their crime. They manage matters differently on the other side of the channel. Whether they or we are in the right it is not for us to say; but at least the decisvehv. would appear to establish this principle, rthatf;in Prance private injury they may have r&ceived, or may fancyttiey " have ■■~~ received. A French jury will simply consider whether the measure of provocation was sufficient to justify the measure of revenge. The facts of the case are-verv simple. Madame de Jeufosse is the widow of a cavalry officer, dwelling in her own chateau, at the village of St. Aubiu-sur-GaiUon; she has two sons and a daughter, Blanche, a young lady now about nineteen j'ears of age. With the family resided a governess named Laurence Thouzery, about one year older than Mademoiselle de Jeufosse, whose welfare should have been, equally with that of her own daughter, an object of the most anxious solicitude to this very aristocratic lady. Now, in the immediate neighbourhood lived a disreputable kind of French " squireen " named Guillot —a married man—between whom and the Jeufosse family a close intimacy arose. Madame de Jeufosse soon received notice from some good-natured friends that M. Guillot amused his leisure by making love to Mademoiselle Thouzery ; but what of that ? The girl was a governess, or humble companion, who was but following her natural destiny— it was not worth while making a rupture for si j>eu de chose. When Guillot, the inconstant, however, began to cast his eyes higher, even to that lofty region in which Mademoiselle Blanche w:is enshrined, the complexion of affairs was altered, and a little bloodshed became necessary |to appease the indignation of the by-gone Jeufosse's and of their stern representative, t>he heroine of the present romance. It certainly does appear that for a ladv who was so vuinsensitive on the point of honour Madame de ! Jeufosse neglected the most ordinary measures of precaution. She knew the character of this man Guillot, she knew that his various amours were the talk of the country-sida, and that he had actually endeavoured to seduce "a young lady under 'her own roof, and yet she permitted hi mi to have free access to her daughter, to sit with her for hours at the piano, and so forth. This daughter was a young French girl, and when we use tho expression we mean nothing more than that from the system of female education which our neighbours have adopted a youn.o1 French girl nineteen years old stands in a very different position as far as self-defence is concerned from her English sister of the same atre. The natural consequence of this negli-o-Cnce followed —a connection more or less i:itini.ito arose between Mademoiselle Blanche ami ?,1. Guillot. To what length this was cirried it, is not for us to determine, and, indeed, it would be difficult to arrive at any settled conclusion on the matter from the slipshod evidence nuduced, consisting principally of the boa.-ting i and bragging of Guillot himself. There was, however, enough, and more tlum enough, to
I J5 !l5r 1 t: he solicitude of a mother, and to kinj file feeling* o f a yet more violent kind m t , je I breasts of _ the young lady's brothers. Had I either of these two young gentlemen soundly : thm*bed M. Qmllot, had they called him out j and .shot him m the open field/divines and lawI yer.-s must necessarily have disapproved Mich a j course but the judgment of the world muld j scarcely have been one of unqualified condem- ! "'itioiK Ihey did nothing of the kind, but left j the chief part in the drama to their mother— | a 1.-idy who seems to have been cast in the |Me lea or Lady Macbeth mould. She called | for her gamekeeper Crepel; she adjured him to | <Jeli-nd the honour of the Jeutbsse family even j l>l *Uyinp- " Yon do not watch well enough ! " I said the Lady of Jeufosse. "You do not rel member the promise you made to my husband. I i on do not support the honour of his name and ! that of my children. You must put an end to tiie scandal of these visits at any- cost!" After this "sublime allocution"" Madame tie Jeufosse is said to have added " I'ear nothing ! The Procureur imperial and the examining magistrate have both told me that we can fire on those who act as this man does,_and that «ven if death ensue we shall not be disquieted." Crepel, who is a man of a practical turn of mind, hereupon carefully loaued ms double-barrelled gnu and proceeded to act on council's opinion. Now, we are far from saying that the provocation given by this wretched fellow Guillot did not justify any reasonable measure of retalia- | tion. The limits of revenge, however, must be faxed somewhere, and it has bepn generally understood that deliberate assassination is somewhat too rigorous a policy, no matter what the provocation may have been. On the 12th of June, however, about 10.30 p.m., Emile Guil lot, accompanied by his servant, Gros, arrived at the enclosure of the park of Jeufosse. He entered, the park alone, and approached a tree. At the bottom of this tree were two bricks, and between these bricks Guillot placed a letter, and was then making the best of his way to a clump of scrubs 26 yards distant. Before he reached the covert Crepel, who had been watching his proceedings from behind a fir-tree, started from his ambush, and calling out, " Halt! you 'are dead!" took deliberate aim, and gave Gui'llot the contents of the barrel. Although what had passed was well known in the chateau from the report of Crepel himself, who proceeded to inform his mistress of what he had done, and from the alarm which Gros, the servant, raised, when he had ascertained his master's condition, Madame de Jeufosse and her people let the poor wretch lie where he had fallen, and where he expired about half an hour after he had received ! his death wound. Such was the act which M. Berryer, the counsel for the prisoners, attempted to justify, and in the attempt he succeeded to the satisfaction of a French jury. The two principal arguments employed were as follows: —Ifc was said tlt-ati by a particular article i^ ±i«~French Code a person who trespasses on an en-i-clpiiir^aLjii^iOpes so at his mm TjeriLs*" 1"" iie oe siam int/W uumo^m-nfircrespTfes so much the ■w-or«o__for.hini-;. but ifc is not mui-doiCrwj, father this be French law or not we will not pretend to say, but we feel very sure of the opinion ; which our English Crown lawyers would entertain upon such a doctrine. Again, M. Berryer urged that, according to law, any husband who detected his wife in criminal intercourse with her paramour might slay them both on the spot. " The law would have regard to the natural play of human passion upon such enormous provocation : but can it be said that the honour of her daughter is less dear to a mother than the honour of his wife—than his own honour—to a husband?" This being so, and, according to M. Berryer's way of putting it, it was almost an a fortiori case, Madame de Jeufosse was fully justified in planning and carrying out the assa sination of Guillot in retaliation for his offence. We should hare doubted if this were law any where out of Corsica; but it seems that universal France is prepared to adopt the practice upon such points of the most vindictive of her departments, if we may judge from the recent verdict of the Evreux jury. Among us —but, then, we are cold, prosaic Englishmen, negligent of the point of honour—the provocation supposed by M. Bevryer. would, no doubt, excuse the husband who, in the madness of the moment, struck the guilty pair where he found them and as he found them ; but woe to him if he but went downstairs, deliberately loaded a revolver, and returned to execute vengeance in his own way ! But here was a case in which the plan was laid days and weeks beforehand— tht> gamekeeper waited for his victim, as a sp iitsinan waits in the dusk of the evening for a wild duck—and slew him in cold blood. It is quite clear that the French and the English m thods of procedure are totally different upon such points.
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Lyttelton Times, Volume IX, Issue 570, 21 April 1858, Page 3
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1,854English and Foreign. Lyttelton Times, Volume IX, Issue 570, 21 April 1858, Page 3
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