ziers until after these declarations of his son, said that in fact he had counted his money before his departure, and had withdrawn fifteen hundred francs which he carried with him, but he did not think that any one could have known it, as he retired to a back chamber to count the money.
In the presence of the facts already stated, it was necessary to suppose that the authors of this double crime had a perfect knowledge of the house itself as well as of the habits of its inmates. The difficulty, not to say impossibility, of admitting that the guilty ones could have succeeded in opening the shutter from without; that they could, through the narrow opening made in the pane of glass, have thrown back the fastening of the window; that they could have entered and forced the lock of the box without being heard either by Frédéric, or by Madame Benoit, or her niece, who slept so near her; and, finally, if the robbers were strangers, the utter lack of apparent interest to commit a murder,—all these facts seemed of a nature to direct the suspicions of the magistrates upon the two persons who were alone in the house with Madame Benoit on that fatal night, and who had given such unsatisfactory and conflicting accounts of the crime, and of their own conduct both before and after its commission.
However, Frédéric and his cousin escaped the suspicions of the authorities. The magistrates of Vouziers knew Frédéric only as a young man of excellent reputation, and it never entered their minds that this boy, hardly eighteen years old, could be guilty of robbery executed by the aid of the crime of parricide. The same was true of Louise Feucher. A young girl of seventeen, living in her aunt's family, where she was treated like a daughter; suspect her of being accessory to such a crime? It was impossible!
A wooden hook, found a few feet from the open window, and with which it was believed it was possible that one might have opened the shutter, confirmed the idea that the assassins came from without. The authorities therefore made no search in Benoit's house for vestiges of the crime and the instrument which had served for its commission. It was, perhaps, for want of this precaution that the guilty ones owed their long impunity.
M. Benoit had three sons, the oldest of whom was a young man of unblemished reputation. Suspicions rested at first upon the second son, Auguste, who had been sent from home by his parents on account of his misconduct, and who at the time of the crime was living at Rheims. But investigations which were immediately made established a perfect alibi for this young man.
The investigation was thrown completely off the trail; all hope of discovering the guilty ones was renounced, and their security from punishment appeared assured, when suddenly it seemed as if the murderer had delivered himself up to justice by one of those inexplicable imprudences which show the hand of Providence in human affairs.
On the 6th of January, 1830, an anonymous letter was found upon the same window by which the murderer must have entered, addressed to the juge de paix, M. Benoit, in which he, as well as an advocate in Vouziers, and one Labauve, a butcher, were threatened with the same fate that had befallen Madame Benoit. This letter was placed in the hands of the procureur du roi, and was recognized as being in the hand writing of Labauve himself.
It was then recalled that anonymous letters of the same character had more than once been circulated in Vouziers, and that their appearance had always coincided with some case lost or won by Labauve. Labauve, however, in spite of all his eccentricities, had always been considered an honest, worthy man.
The anonymous letter of the 6th of January set justice on a new track. Labauve was immediately arrested. Upon the instances of the procureur-général of Metz, a new investigation into the murder of Ma-
