The poisoner Antoine-François Derues, who was executed in 1777, was another criminal who aroused huge public interest, both at the time and long afterwards.
In her study of the case, the historian Annie Duprat observes that the trial and conviction of Derues were carried with unusual tenacity and speed. The inquiry began on 30 April 1777 and the final verdict of the Parlement of Paris was delivered on 5th May. This suggests concern on the part of the magistrates: there were already signs of lack of public confidence in the police and judiciary, and the beginnings of disaffection with the cruelties of "spectacular capital punishment". Although Derues's guilt was never really called into question, there was still some danger that he might become a popular hero, as he himself maintained, "another Calas". There was also an undercurrent of class resentment against his aristocratic victims. More importantly, people were disconcerted by Derues's dignified courage and his protestations of innocence even in extremis which seemed to call into doubt the rationale of the traditional inquisitorial system.
The following is summarised from the account by the lawyer and journalist Georges Claretie, published in 1906, on the basis of the extensive dossier of the case preserved in the Archives Nationales. Viewed over a gulf of almost two-and-a-half centuries, Desrues's personality and motivation remain as enigmatic as ever.
Who was Derues?
The most striking aspect of Antoine-François Derues - preserved for us in a multitude of engravings and witness statements - was his unusual physical appearance. He was a slight
little man, with delicate pointy features
and an extreme palour. Portraits show a receding hairline, large furtive
eyes and a thin mouth. Claims that he had been born a hermaphrodite are almost
certainly a fantasy, but, as events proved, he was able to don a dress and impersonate a woman with credibility. He is almost always
portrayed in his dressing gown, decorated with large flowers, with his head
enveloped in a white cotton bonnet resembling a turban. Hostile source emphasised his
ferocious feline qualities, but the portraits show a frail, vulnerable and oddly sympathetic individual. He seems to possess a mobile, nervous
intelligence – it is not the face of a ruthless murderer, though possibly that of a fraudster and fantasist.
In Georges Claretie's view, Desrues was not the pathological monster of contemporary accounts, but a phenomenon born of an age of social climbing: "a petit bourgeois of Paris, riddled with debt, who wanted to play the grand seigneur, have a castle and lands in the country without paying, and who, to arrive at his goal, was forced to become a criminal" (p.6)
.
At the time
of the crime Derues, who was in his early thirties, lived with his wife, two children and a maidservant, in a ground-floor apartment in the rue
Beaubourg. He styled himself a “former
businessman” though in reality he had, until recently, run a grocery shop in the rue Saint-Victoire. His pretensions to gentility went further: he signed himself Derues de Cyrano de Bury and claimed to own a fief near
Candeville in the Beauvoisis. Moreover,
he let it be believed that his wife was Marie-Louise de Nicolai,a member of the great family of the President
of the Cour des Comptes. All these noble
titles were a complete fabrication.
Engravings
sometimes show the furnishings the apartment; the dining room has a high ceiling, elegant
mouldings and a large mirror over the chimney. It is modestly though tastefully
decorated with a porcelain vase and Chinese paper pictures - a typical bourgeois
interior. Details from the sale after Derues's death confirm this impression (p.10)
 |
Portrait of Marie-Louise Nicolais (1745-92), wife of Derues
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8410031w.item
Mme Derues was eventually condemned to be flogged and branded, then imprisoned in perpetuity. She survived for thirteen years in la Salpétrière only to be killed in the prison massacres on 4th Septembe 1792. |
Mme Derues was a strong, pleasant-looking young "woman of the people". They seemed to have been a loving couple. Her degree of complicity in her husband's affairs
was difficult to assess, but in the course of the trial she was to display great loyalty - and a high degree of native
cunning - in his defence.
Derues was
well liked in the quartier for his simplicity, modesty and good humour. He entertained often, and was known for his cordial welcome and amusing company. He also enjoyed a reputation for piety: he went
to mass regularly, wore a scapular, and had many religious social connections; one of his
sisters was a nun.
Little is
known for certain about Derues's early childhood.
He was born in Chartres in 1744, of "honest parents": his father
was an ironmonger, corn merchant and sometime innkeeper. Derues was the oldest of four children, with two sisters and a brother who owned a cabaret. According to the later accounts, he was orphaned at three,
brought up by relatives then entrusted to the frères des Écoles
Chrétiennes. There are lurid tales of his early viciousness, none of which can be verified. He was subsequently apprenticed to a grocer and came to work in
Paris. In 1767 he was taken on by his master's
widowed sister-in-law who in February 1770 ceded to him the lease
of her shop in the rue Saint-Victoire: at twenty-five, Derues became became a fully qualified marchand-épicier droguiste (hence his facility with poisons).
In September 1772 he married Marie-Louis Nicolais, daughter of a former petty
officer in the artillery, now a saddler, from Melun. His wife’s association
with the Nicolai family was pure fantasy – the final “s” is actually scratched out from her name in a
copy of the marriage certificate preserved in the Archives. She did, however, stand to inherit through her mother’s second
marriage the substantial sum of 250,000
livres from a certain sieur Despeignes-Duplessis. The
inheritance, though certainly existant, took a long time to be settled; indeed it was still outstanding at the time of the Revolution. Nonetheless it became a valuable source of credit for Derues . Despeignes-Duplessis had died in a fire under suspicious circumstances, but no evidence was ever uncovered to implicate Derues in his demise.
Georges Claretie devotes a
whole chapter to Derues’s labyrintine financial dealings, which involved a complex web
of borrowing and money lending. Some of his clients were important people - he received the likes of the duc Béthune-Sully and the marquis de Fleury - but neighbours also observed more dubious visitors: clerks,
baliffs, minor court officials. His life, remarks Claretie, was a
continual battle to maintain an illusion of gentility, to stave off his creditors and keep the authorities at bay (p.11). By 1775 Desrues's financial affairs were in a state of crisis, but, it would seem, nonetheless, that he had become increasingly
preoccupied with idea of securing a property to validate his claim to nobility.
A crime unfolds
An estate in the country
The fatal die was cast when, in 1775, when Derues made the acquaintance of sieur Étienne de Saint-Faust de Lamotte, a provincial noble who owned the estate of Buisson-Souef in Villeneuve-le-Roi in Bourgogne. In the May of that year Lamotte had given power of attorney to his wife to come to Paris and negotiate the
sale of the property. The legal transaction was placed in the hands a
procureur at the Châtelet named Jolly - in all probability it was he who had put the two parties in contact. The Lamottes were
taken in by Derues’s spurious noble credentials and, after one or two
interviews were delighted with their prospective purchaser. The sale was speedily
agreed. A bill of exchange was drawn up whereby Derues agreed to pay 130,000 livres for the estate, with a first instalment of 12,000 livres due on the completion of the sale, no later than the first of June, 1776. As a gesture of good
faith, Derues gave Mme. de Lamotte a bill for 4,200 livres to fall due on
April 1, 1776.In order to stall for time, Derues now went with his maidservant and small daughter on an extended visit to Villeneuve-le-Roi, where his host found him "agreeable, complaisant, aimable, bouffon". Meanwhile in Paris Derues's wife struggled throughout the summer to placate her husband's many creditors.
 |
The Château de Buisson Souef, Villeneuve-en-Yonne in a postcard from 1920.
The Château still stands today |
A poisoning
The crisis finally arrived in December 1776 when Mme de Lamotte arrived in the capital to complete the sale. To keep any control over the situation
obliged to offer her lodgings with him.
He even hired a coach to meet her. To make room for her his associate Bertin was obliged to leave the apartment,and Derues's own son and his daughter of four were dispatched to stay in
Montrouge with relatives of the maidservant. Mme de Lamotte's own son, a boy in his teens, was installed nearby in a pension and school run by a certain Donon in the rue de l'Homme-Arme.
Desrues now planned to pull off an ambitious fraud by using a fictitious loan to buy the property and persuade Mme de Lamotte to sign the necessary receipt. He would then need only to fabricate a story that she had absconded with the money. But how was she to be removed from the scene? His guest was happily ensconced and settled into an agreeable round of social visits and entertainments, but soon began to suffer from sickness. The young Lamotte too was out
of sorts - he complained to his friends of dizziness, cramps and digestive
troubles. By end of January, the season of carnival, Madame had taken a definite turn for the worse. She complained continually of fatigue. Both mother and son were obliged to rush to the garde-robe during mealtimes. On 30 January she vomited almost continually. The
next day it had been arranged for Mme Derues and the servant, Jeanne Barque, to
visit the children in Montrouge. Jeanne Barque later testified that at dawn she brought Mme de Lamotte a bowl of broth and a medicine
prepared under instruction from Derues. Some time later she came back to find her seemingly asleep, snoring loudly. She was alarmed but Derues insisted that at all costs Madame was not to be woken. Mme Desrues appeared strangely agitated, and later instructed the servant to go to Montrouge alone, since she was obliged to help her husband take care of the sick woman. In the evening admission
to the chamber was refused to Bertin; the young Lamotte was apparently taken to the door and glimpsed his mother sleeping. Bertin reported that during
the evening meal Desrues got up several times to "attend" Madame in the garde-robe,
an event accompanied by a horrendous stench. He would return in a good mood. The couple spent the
night in the cabinet next to the sickroom, but early in the morning Derues sent his wife out on
a errand. Madame de Lamotte, it would seem, had succumbed to poison in the night.
The trunk
It was now essential to dispose of the body. The doorman to the building had
received orders to admit no-one and Derues himself had removed the bell from the
door. Nonetheless he had to move quickly.
The wife of a shopkeeper in the
rue des Bourdonnais, testified that she had visited Desrues at about eleven o’clock in quest of some money he owed her. The apartment had been in disarray and Desrues had not at first replied to her knock. When he finally appeared, in his habitual flowery dressing gown and
white cotton bonnet, he looked even paler than usual and his hands trembled.
The disorder of the room surprised her. She
was then taken into the kitchen where there were two trunks; at first she feared Derues himself was about to abscond, but he explained that they belonged to a
lady who had been staying with him, who was about to leave, accompanied by his wife.
Desrues himself later admitted – with some reticences - how
he went about his gruesome task. He had already, several days earlier, bought a massive leather trunk from a second-hand dealer in the
rue Saint-Antoine, and had lined it with hay to prevent the body moving
around. Now, after a moment overcome by nausea,
he opened the curtains of the bed and tried to lift the repulsive corpse. When it proved too heavy, he dragged the trunk up and
used the bedcovers to roll the body in.
He then fastened the trunk securely. The doorman, Louis Petit, saw him talk to
the local commissionnaire, who later came with two men and a little cart to
take the the trunk away. They went in the direction of the Louvre. Desrues now encountered his wife. She testified that her husband requested her to ask a friend Mme Mouchy to look after the trunk, after which they
returned to their lodgings together. Mme Derues took on trust Desrue's
explanation that the trunk belonged to Mme la Motte who was cured and already
on her way to Versailles. Desrue
confirmed this story to Bertin, who came to dinner that evening, and to the
Lamotte boy who was also present.
According to Bertin the dinner was a convivial occasion.
 |
Engraving from a series produced by Esnauts et Rapilly, rue St-Jacques.
Derues, having poisoned Mme de Lamotte, puts her body in a trunk, 1st February 1777, and leaves it with a gentleman at the Louvre in order to have it transported later to be buried in a cellar in the rue de la Mortellerie
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8410035j/f18.item |
The Cellar
In order to
secure a permanent hiding place for the body, Derues rented a cellar in
the rue de la Mortellerie, an unfrequented alley near the Hôtel de Ville,
running parallel to the Seine. The owner, Mme Mason, a widow in
her sixties, later described her new tenant as "little man
with a pale complexion and piercing eyes, dressed in a fine lilac redingole,
with a walking can and hat trimmed with gold lace". Using the name Doucoudray, Derues claimed that he
needed the cellar in order to store Spanish wine.
Three or
four days later, several passersby saw the little man accompany a cart
loaded up with a substantial wine barrel and a huge bale of grey cloth. One witness followed him to the rue de la
Mortellerie, where he solicited the aid of a river porter and a charbonnier to
unpack the load. One of the men, struggling with the heavy grey bale,
noticed that it concealed a packing case made of wooden planks.
It would
have been imprudent to leave the body above ground, exposed to the damp of the
cellar. Derues engaged an unemployed mason to
dig a hole five-feet long on the pretext of storing wine. Desrues was seen by several other witnesses
in the vicinity. An inhabitant of
Mme Mason's house called Rogeot was woken in the night by noises from the cellar and went to investigate, but found nothing. Mme de Lamotte was
now buried beneath four feet of earth.
The trunk was packed with china and sent to Buisson-Souef on the coche
d'eau.
A trip to Versailles
It was now
necessary to silence the son. For the
moment the boy was satisfied with the story that his mother had gone to
Versailles to buy him an office, and would soon be sending for him. On the week of the Mardi Gras holiday
he spent several days with the Derues. At his pension he complained to Mme Donon, of sickness ,and was
taken with violent stomach pains, though he later recovered enough to go on an
outing to the foire Saint-Germain. Derues now announced that he had at last
heard from the mother and that he was to
accompany the boy to rejoin her in Versailles. He personally went to the
kitchen and prepared the boy a cup of hot chocolate. Again he became ill, although Mme Derues took him
out to see the Carnival masques and he again rallied.
The
following day, Ash Wednesday, Derues administered yet more chocolate to the
boy, then left early with him. The gatekeeper saw them depart and an odd-job-man called Juppin took their luggage as far as
the rue Saint-Martin, where they boarded the coach for
Versailles.
The conductor
recalled two pale travellers who
descended at the auberge Fleur de Lys in the avenue de Sceaux in Versailles.
The boy had vomited throughout the journey and was unsteady on his feet. The innkeeper, fearing smallpox, refused to
put them up but directed them instead to some modest lodgings in the rue de
l'Orangerie, which were owned by a cooper named Pecquet and his wife. A price was agreed and
a camp bed installed in the room for the boy, whom Desrue claimed was his
nephew. He gave his name as Beaupré, from Commercy. Pecquet recalled that the
boy seemed ill, the uncle solicitous.
The next day Derues sent Mme Pequet to buy various ingredients for a
purgative medicine. The woman was
horrified at the state of the child but her offers to call a doctor were
refused. By the Saturday, the nephew was pronounced to be better. However, in the night a loud noise awoke Pecquet
who found the sick boy on his bed, almost fainted away. His eyes were closed, he could not speak, and
he was racked by a horrible rattling snore which recalled the sound Jeanne
Barque had heard his mother make on her deathbed. A priest was called for. By the time the abbé Manin, from the nearby
parish of Saint-Louis had arrived, the young man was already dead. His uncle knelt by the bed, reciting the
prayer for the dead, with great tears rolling down his cheeks. It was now eleven in the evening.
The next
day, Sunday, Pequet helped the traveller to wrap the body in a shroud. The death was registered at the parish of
Saint-Louis, where Derues gave the boy’s
name as Louis-Antoine Beaupré. Pecquet
went as far as the cemetery where the supposed uncle, in tears, left the cure six livres to say masses for his nephew's soul; a few
prayers were recited, a few handfuls of earth thrown and that was the end of it. The same day Derues returned to Paris.
That evening, at dinner with Mme Derues and Bertin, Derues was in fine form; he even broke
into song over dessert. He declared that he had finally clinched the purchase of Buisson-Souef. Moreover, Madame Lamotte and her son were
unlikely to return from Versailles, where, he hinted, she had an amorous
liaison. There were many unanswered
questions, but neither his wife nor Bertin seem to have asked them.
In the
following days Derues happily put about the news of his new estate. Lamotte received a series of reassuring
letters from Mme Derues but rapidly became frantic that he had not heard from
his wife. Even a visit from Desrues to Villeneuve failed to reassure him. Denon, the owner of the pension where the boy had
lodged, was also fobbed off. Desrues had the spurious deed of sale drawn up. Now, however, came upon an unforeseen hitch, since neither the procurateur Jolly nor Lamotte himself would act without sight of the power of attorney and assurances that Madame had personally handed it over.
In Lyon
On the
morning of 5th March Derues was witnessed departing in a cabriolet de poste. That evening he stayed at an inn in
Montargis and, two days later, on the evening of the 7th, he was in Lyon at the
hotel Blanc, rue de l'Arsenal, where he signed the register "M.Desportes,
de Paris." The next morning he left early, instructing the innkeeper to
allow a woman whom he was expecting up to his room. Some hours later a
shopkeeper recalled a "very pale" individual, who went by the name of
Chavannes and bought two women's dresses; one white with lilac and green
stripes, and the other in black silk, total cost 288 livres. An errand
boy accompanied him back to the hotel Blanc with his parcel.
That same day, 8th March 1777, Antoine Pourra, conseiller du roi and notary, received a visit at home, from a veiled woman, for whom he drew up a power of attourney document. She was dressed in a black silk robe, with her face almost concealed by her hood. Monsieur Pourra was struck by her Parisian accent, though not apparently by her masculinity.
Reference:
Georges Claretie, Derues l’empoisonneur, une cause célèbre au xviiie siècle, Paris, Fasquelle, (1906)
https://archive.org/details/derueslempoison00clargoog
[to be continued]
