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Updated: June 5, 2025
MY DEAR BRIEFLESS, Two months since, when the act of accusation first appeared, containing the sum of the charges against Sebastian Peytel, all Paris was in a fervor on the subject. The man's trial speedily followed, and kept for three days the public interest wound up to a painful point.
These objections are absurd. Why need a man have change of linen? If he had taken none for the journey, why should he want any for the escape? Why need he drive two carriages? He might have driven both into the river, and Mrs. Peytel in one. Why is he to go to the douane, and thrust himself into the very jaws of danger? Are there not a thousand ways for a man to pass a frontier?
He received this fatal news with a great deal of calmness, and showed himself to be no more affected than he had been on the trial. 'I am ready; but I wish they had given me four-and-twenty hours' notice, were all the words he used. "The Greffier now retired, leaving Peytel alone with the cure, who did not thenceforth quit him. Peytel breakfasted at ten o'clock.
"Monsieur Peytel had lately taken into his service a man named Louis Rey. Rey was a foundling, and had passed many years in a regiment a school, gentlemen, where much besides bravery, alas! is taught; nay, where the spirit which familiarizes one with notions of battle and death, I fear, may familiarize one with ideas, too, of murder.
Rey knows that his master has a brace, thinks that he has hit the wrong person, and, as Peytel fires on him, runs away. Peytel follows, hammer in hand; as he comes up with the fugitive, he deals him a blow on the back of the head, and Rey falls his face to the ground. Is there anything unnatural in this story? anything so monstrously unnatural, that is, that it might not be true?
At the end of October, 1838, Madame Peytel quitted that town, with her husband, and their servant Louis Rey, in order to pass a few days at Macon: at midnight, the inhabitants of Belley were suddenly awakened by the arrival of Monsieur Peytel, by his cries, and by the signs which he exhibited of the most lively agitation: he implored the succors of all the physicians in the town; knocked violently at their doors; rung at the bells of their houses with a sort of frenzy, and announced that his wife, stretched out, and dying, in his carriage, had just been shot, on the Lyons road, by his domestic, whose life Peytel himself had taken.
All these personages are brought into play in the Procureur's drama; the villagers come in with their chorus; the old lieutenant of gendarmes with his suspicions; Rey's frankness and gayety, the romantic circumstances of his birth, his gallantry and fidelity, are all introduced, in order to form a contrast with Peytel, and to call down the jury's indignation against the latter.
He is a curiosity-merchant at Lyons; and, though he cannot affirm that Peytel was the person who bought this pistol of him, he perfectly recognizes Peytel as having been a frequent customer at his shop! * This sentence is taken from another part of the "Acte d'accusation." "No, we may fearlessly affirm that Louis Rey was not guilty of the crime which Peytel lays to his charge.
"In the exercise of his honorable profession, in which, to succeed, a man must not only have high talents, but undoubted probity, and, gentlemen, Monsieur Peytel DID succeed DID inspire respect and confidence, as you, his neighbors, well know; in the exercise, I say, of his high calling, Monsieur Peytel, towards the end of October last, had occasion to make a journey in the neighborhood, and visit some of his many clients.
About two months after his marriage, PEYTEL PRESSED HIS WIFE TO MAKE HER WILL. He had made his, he said, leaving everything to her, in case of his death: after some parley, the poor thing consented.* This is a cruel suspicion against him; and Mr. Substitute has no need to enlarge upon it.
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