_Page_ 544. _The Peytel affair_.
In 1831, a young man named Sébastien-Bénoist Peytel came to Paris to
try his fortunes in literature; he lived among the journalists and
writers who are described in "Un Grand homme de province à Paris."
After a time he became part-proprietor of the paper called "Le
Voleur," to which Balzac himself contributed from time to time. Balzac
describes him as hot-headed, gifted with great mental and physical
strength, ambitious, proud, and passionate, carried away at times by
the force of his own words, but good essentially. He had an eye that
always looked a man in the face; and he was not tricky or deceitful.
During this time he seems to have been the friend of all the young
writers and artists, especially of Gavarni. He was a lover of art,
antiquities, and bric-à-brac, and having inherited some property from
his father, he spent money on forming a collection.
After a while, however, his attempts at literature and journalism not
satisfying him, he became a notary, first at Lyon, then at Belley, near
Bourg. But before leaving Paris he married a young girl named Félicie
Alcazar, described as a Creole, with a mother and four sisters but no
father, and with relations who mingled in good society. M. de Lamartine
was so far intimate with Peytel that he acted as father or guardian to
Félicie Alcazar on the occasion of the marriage, signed the contract,
and took the bride to the mayor's office and to the church.
The marriage was not happy from the start. The wife disliked and even
hated the husband, and showed it. He, on the contrary, appears to have
been attached to her, and he led an irreproachable life.
One night, at eleven o'clock, as the husband and wife and their
man-servant were returning from Bourg to Belley along the highroad, the
wife and servant were murdered by means of a pistol-shot and a hammer
belonging to the carriage. There were no witnesses to the deed, but the
husband immediately gave himself up, or, as Balzac puts it, "accepted
the responsibility of the homicide."
The explanation Peytel gave, and which his friends afterwards adopted,
was that he suddenly on this drive discovered criminal relations
between his wife and the servant, Louis Rey, and in a moment of
ungovernable fury he had killed the man with the hammer. The latter had
endeavoured to escape, but he pursued him; the man then turned to shoot
him, but the shot killed the wife instead.
The authorities, on the other hand, charged Peytel with murdering his
wife to obtain her money, and killing the man as witness of the crime;
they also brought charges against him of past dishonesty. Prejudice was
strong against him in Belley because he was a stranger. "No matter how
the affair took place," said one who knew the town; "Peytel is a dead
man."
Up to this time, the matter taking place in the provinces, Peytel's
friends seem to have thought but little of it, supposing that he
would certainly, under the circumstances, be acquitted. He himself
felt so sure of this that he wrote to Gavarni to come and take him to
Switzerland. On the contrary, he was condemned, and the condemnation
roused his friends in Paris to the highest pitch. Balzac and Gavarni
took up the case and studied it; Lamartine wrote the following letter
to Peytel in prison:--
PARIS, November 12, 1838.
Your deplorable situation fills all minds here; no one
doubts that unforeseen revelations, to which time and
circumstances always lead, will completely justify the
details that you yourself have given, and cause pity and
universal interest to take the place of the prejudices
you speak of. Meantime, monsieur, I am glad to be able to
assure you that those prejudices have no access to the
mind of any one here, and that if you need to add other
proof than your unhappiness and despair, you will find
it here in the unanimous assertion of the purity of your
antecedents and the irreproachability of your life.
Receive, with the expression of my sorrowful sympathy,
the assurance of my distinguished sentiments.