THE JEUFOSSE TRIAL. (From the Times, December 22.)

Daily Southern Cross, Volume XV, Issue 1135, 14 May 1858, Page 4

THE JEUFOSSE TRIAL. (From the Times, December 22.)

The trial of Madame de Jeufosse, of her two sons, and of her gamekeeper, Crepel, which has just been brought to a conclusion at Evreux, is worthy of brief notice, not I only from the lomantic incidents of the case, but as presenting a sti iking contrast with our English system of criminal procedure. All the prisoners have been acquittod, upon what grounds it would be difficult to say, except that the murdered man was a disreputable sort of character, and that he had perished in annoying the Jpufosse 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 criniiual courts that the report of it reads more like a chapter from Gerfaut or any other powerful melodramatic romnnoe, than of a grave proceeding in which 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 disregard all our vulgar and common-place notions deri red from such books as ' Archibold's Criminal Practice* and Roscoe's Criminal Evidence, 1 and be content to take our law from the repertoire of the Porte St. .Martin or of the Adelphi, at their sessions of grimmest melodrama. A letired provincial family have notice that a dissolute squire in the neighbourhood is in the habit of climbing ovei their paik wall for the purpose of paying court to the daughter of thejiouse. 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 iutiuder down. Where he fell there he lay for an hour or two and theie he died. " How 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 Live carried off the interloping Lothario to jail, where he would have been dealt with accoiding to his deserts, and have been effec f ually 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 diflciently on the other side of the Channel. Whether they or we are in the right it is not for us io say : but at least the decision would appear to establish this principle, that in France private peisons are justified in exacting revenge for any injury the\ may have received, or may fancy they have received. A French juiy will simply consider whether the measuie of provocation was suilicient to justify the measure of .levenge. The facts of the case aie very simple. Madame de Jeufosse is the wido»v of a cavalry officer, dwelling in her own chateau at the village of St. Aubin-sur-Galilon ; she has two sons and a daughter, Blanche, a young lady now about 19 years of age. With the family resided a governess, named Laurencs Thouzary, about one year older than Mademoiselle de Jeufosse, whose welfaie should have been, equally with that of her own daugnter, an object of the most anxious solicitude to this veiy aristocratic lady. Now, in the immediate neighbouihood lived a disreputable kind of "squiieen '' named Guillot — a married man — between whom and the Jeufosse family a close in'imacy arose. Madame de Jeufosse soon received notice from some good natred friends that M. Guillot amused his leisure hours by making love to Madamoiselle Thouzeiy; but what of that ? The girl was a governess, or humble companion, who was but following her natural destiny — it was not woith while making a rupture for si peu de chose. When Guillot, the inconstant, however, began to cast his eyes higher, even to that lofty region in which Mademoiselle Blanche was enshrined, the complexion of aflaiis was altered, and a little bloodshed became necessary to appease the indignation of the bygone Jeufosses and of their stern Tepiesentative, the heroine of the present romance. It certainly does appear that for a lady who was so very sensitive on the point of honour Madame de Jeufosse neglected the most ordinary measures of precaution. She knew the character of this man Guillot, she tnew that his various amours were the talk of the country-side, and that he had actually endeavoured to seduce a young lady under her own roof, and yet she permitted him 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 the expression we mean nothing more than that from the system of female education which our neighbours have adopted, a young French girl 19 yens old stands in a very different position as far as self-defence is concerned from her English sister of the same age. The natural consequence of this negligence followed — a connection more or less intimate arose between Mademoiselle Blanche and M. Guillot. To what length this was carried it is not for us to determine, and, indeed, it would be difficult to ahive at any settled conclusion on the matter from the slipshod evidence adduced, consisting principally of the boasting and bragging of Guillot himself. There was, however, enough, and more than enough, to justify the solicitude of a mother, and to kindle feelings of a yet more violent kind in the breasts of the young lady's brothers. Had either of these two young men soundly thrashed M. Guillot— had they called him out and shot him in the open field, divines and lawyers must necessarily have disapproved such a course, bat the judgment of the world could scarcely have been one oi unqualified con demnation. They did nothing of the kind, but left the chief part in the drama to their mother— a lady who seemd to have been cast in the Medea or Lady Macbeth mould. She called for her gamekeeper, Crepel ; she adjured him to defend the honour ot the Jeufosse family even by slaying. " You do not watch well enough !" said the Lady of Jeufosse. " You do not remember the promise you made to my husband. You do not support the honour of his name and that of my children. You must put an end to the scandal of these visits at any cost !" After this •' sublime allocution " Madame de Jeufosse is said to have added, " Fea? 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 even if death ensue we Bhall not be disquieted.', Crepel, who is a man of a practical turn of mind, hereupon carefully loaded his double barrelled gun, and proceeded to act on counsel's opinion. Now, we are far from saying that the provocation given by this wretched fellow Guillot did not justify any reasonable measures of retaliation. The limits of revenge, however must be fixed somwhere, and it has boen 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 Guillot, accompanied by his servant, Gros, arrived at the enclosures 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 shrubs twenty six yards distant. Beiore 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 I" took deliberate aim. and gave Guillot the contents of the barrel. Although what had passed was well known in the chateau from the report of Creptl 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 attemdted to justify, and' in the attempt he succcded to the satisfaction of a French jury. The two principle arguments emplos r ed were as follows :— lt was said that by a particular article in the French Code a person who trespasses on an enclosure at night docs so at his own peril, and if he be slain in the course of his trespass so much the worse for him ; but it is not murder. Whether 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 JBerryer urged that, according to law, any husband, whe 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 d fortiori case, Madame de Jeufosse was fully justified in planning and carrying out the assassination of Guillot in retaliation for his offence. We should have doubted if this were law anywhere out of Corsica; but it seems that universal France is prepared to adopt the practice upon such paints of the most vindicatire 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. Berryer would, no doubt, cxeuse the husband who, in the madness of the moment, struck the guilty pait where he found them and as he found them ; but wae to him if he but went downstairs, deliberately loaded a revolver, and returned to execute vengence in his own way ! But here was a case in which the plan was laid days and weeks beforehand — the gamekeeper waited for his victim, as a sportsman 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 methods of procedure are totally different upon such points.