The pages of La Coloniale were coarse and had yellowed with time. The mites had been at work, giving their own punctuation to the dusty pages.
It did not take Anne Marie long to find the first reference to Hégésippe Bray. FOREMAN MURDERS WIFE AND DISAPPEARS.
The article was in the edition of Thursday, May 2. It took up one of the columns on the last page:
The lifeless remains of a young woman, believed to be Eloise Deschamps, of the Sainte Marthe estate, Sainte-Anne, were found last Saturday by schoolchildren. Eloise Deschamps had been hacked to death and burned. The young woman, originally from Saint Pierre in Martinique, had worked for several years for Monsieur Calais, proprietor of the Sainte Marthe estate. She was the common law wife of the first foreman, Hégésippe Bray. Bray went missing at the beginning of last week, and it would appear that he frequently quarreled with his concubine, who was considerably younger than he. The military are actively seeking the runaway, and they believe that he may be in hiding in the Pointe-Noire area where, until recently, his sister was a primary school teacher.
Anne Marie turned the pages. Under the desk, she kicked off her shoes. They were still damp.
Most of the paper was now filled with events in Europe. There was a pervading sense of optimism concerning the outcome of the war. The paper spoke of the Shining Example of Democracy while denouncing the racial policies of the Germans. There were several references to Victor Schoelcher.
ARREST OF MURDERER OF SAINTE MARTHE
The article was on the front page of the paper, and it came a week after the first reference to Hégésippe Bray.
Hégésippe Bray, foreman at the Sainte Marthe estate for the past twenty years, was arrested Saturday, May 4, in the hamlet of Bouliqui, Sainte-Anne, where he had been hiding. He is now in the maison d’arrêt in Pointe-à-Pitre, accused of the murder of his wife.
The body of Eloise Deschamps, a domestic in the employ of Monsieur Calais, was found on April 27. After a detailed examination by the Prof. Foucan at the Colonial Hospital, the officers of law were able to identify the mutilated remains as those of the young Eloise Deschamps. There was no offspring to the doomed union; a son had died at the age of two. The enquiries of the gendarmes have been much aided by other laborers of the Sainte Marthe estate who were in a position to inform the investigators of the frequent quarrels between Bray and his young companion. On several occasions, the woman was reported to have left the conjugal hearth. Indeed, it was generally believed that the girl had quit the Sainte Marthe estate for her native Martinique until she returned to Bray at the beginning of the month of April. Like the eye in the midst of the hurricane, the ill-starred couple found a brief respite in their altercations.
The last person to see the young woman alive was Roland Remblin, cowherd on the Calais estate, who claims he saw her on April 23. He accompanied her to the house. Hégésippe Bray was waiting for her and according to Remblin, he held a whip in his hand, and he assailed the woman with a kind of language too coarse for the readers of these columns. Bray, a veteran of the Great War, has the reputation of a quick temper.
The date of the trial has been set for Monday, May 20.
Anne Marie leafed through the remaining pages. More advertisements and a single, isolated paragraph showing French troops along the Maginot line. There were two Senegalese, smiling in outsize uniforms, too loose at the neck and across the shoulders.
THE COLONIES HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN THE MOTHER COUNTRY
The volume ended with the end of May. There was no further reference to Hégésippe Bray. Anne Marie got up and, holding the pages open, walked barefoot to the counter. “I’d like a photocopy.”
The man looked up. His glasses had slipped down his nose.
“Who exactly are you?”
“I work for the Ministry of Justice, and I would like a photocopy of these two articles, please. I am le juge Laveaud.”
“You’ll have to pay, you know.”
“I will ask you for a receipt, of course.”
He resembled a tired rat. What had once been intelligence in the brown eyes was now senile cunning. He took the volume and went over to the photocopying machine. “Which article?”
“The entire front page, please.”
He nodded unhappily.
Anne Marie lifted the hatch and approached the shelves, looking for the second volume to 1940. Surprisingly, it was where it should have been—on the bottom shelf, next to the first semester for 1941. She took the book and went back to her desk. Her feet sought her shoes under the desk.
There was no reference to the trial in the first weeks of June. Instead, the paper spoke solely about the tragic events in France. The optimism had vanished from the faded pages. The word defeat made its first appearance; similarly, there was no mention of the faithful role of the colonies.
The report came at the end of June. The trial had taken place on Wednesday the 26th, and the article took up most of the back page, beneath an advertisement for a dental surgeon—with the latest equipment from Paris, Berlin and Rochester, New York, including electric drills.
Anne Marie ran a finger along the title.
MURDERER CONDEMNED TO PENAL COLONY FOR SEVEN YEARS.
“One franc fifty for the photocopy,” the man said, aggrieved. Anne Marie nodded. “In a few minutes.”
The one-time foreman on the Sainte Marthe estate, Hégésippe Bray, illegitimate son of Florentine Bray of Douville, Sainte-Anne, was condemned last Friday to seven years of forced labor in the penal colony of St.-Laurent-du-Maroni in the Guyanas. This judgment follows several weeks of frenetic labor on the part of the colonial gendarmerie and the admirable juge d’instruction, M. Timoléon, despite considerable administrative difficulties arising from the situation in Europe. The avocat général was successful in obtaining the condemnation of Hégésippe Bray after two days of impassioned debate, thanks largely to the evidence of neighbors and fellow workers on the estate, several of whom were called to the stand. They testified to having heard and seen violent struggles between Bray and his young concubine.
Bray’s defense was bizarre, to say the least, and clearly put his lawyer, Maître Gillon, to some difficulty. Bray admitted to having killed his woman. The weapon, he said, was her magic potion! Despite frequent laughter from the public benches, obliging the president to call for silence more than once, Bray forcefully maintained that the woman was a she-devil inhabited by evil spirits who delighted in tormenting him. Speaking solely in vernacular, he went on to state that Eloise Deschamps frequently changed her appearance. At nights, he maintained, she would travel the countryside of the Grande-Terre in the form of a bird or a dog. Bray admitted that in her womanly state she frequently mocked him for his lack of amatory ardor. Furthermore, he believed that his companion had been pregnant at the time of death.
This last assertion, however, was soon conclusively dismissed by the science of Dr. Foucan, who was called to the stand.
According to Bray, after a particularly vehement altercation between Eloise Deschamps and himself, the young woman had left home. The woman led him to believe that she was carrying the unborn child of another man. She stayed away for several weeks, returning to Sainte Marthe in April. Although there was a reconciliation between Bray and her, Mlle. Deschamps continued to practice her black arts, Hégésippe Bray stated. One day, while she was working in the house of Monsieur Calais, Bray returned early to his own abode where he found two vials belonging to the woman. Each vial contained a sluggish liquid. Following the advice of a Voodoo doctor, Bray carefully decanted the liquid, exchanging the contents of the two bottles, each of which was marked with hieroglyphics beyond his understanding. The following Tuesday night, Hégésippe Bray was awoken from his sleep, and leaving the house, he found his companion lying in the grass. He said that she had been burned. After a few words of Voodoo prayer that Bray failed to comprehend, the poor woman breathed her last. Overcome by remorse and fear, Bray cut up the corpse and then hid it. Hindered from accomplishing this grisly task by the dawn, he carried the remains to L’Étang Diable where they were later found by schoolchildren.
Called to the witness stand, Prof. Foucan acknowledged that the cadaver had been subjected to burning. He said it had been sprinkled with paraffin. But as to the cause of death, he was equally adamant. Eloise Deschamps had been poisoned, probably with oleander.
The court was not inclined to believe Bray’s tale of black magic and witchcraft. Indeed, Maître Gillon for the defense merely tried to show that the foreman was a man who had made the mistake of sharing his bed with a headstrong and beautiful woman much younger than himself and whose appetite for excitement clearly outstripped his own. His head had been turned by her beauty; then his anger and jealousy had been aroused by her willful behavior. In his simplicity, he had attributed her headstrong nature to a form of witchcraft.
The fees of Maître Gillon, who once again astounded the court with the range and depth of his eloquence, were most generously met by Monsieur Calais. Despite his advanced age and the difficulty he had in walking, Monsieur Calais stepped onto the stand and, in his firm, well-educated voice, spoke in eulogistic terms of the merits of Bray, who, the court was told, had been Monsieur Calais’ right hand man for more than twenty years and who, in his youth, had fought valiantly at Verdun.
It was most certainly this testimony, given by a man loved by both friends and employees, which saved Bray from that most dreadful of chastisements, the guillotine. Throughout the trial, Bray remained calm, speaking only when told to and stating that it had never been his intention to harm the poor woman.
On hearing his sentence, Bray remained unmoved, but there was evident satisfaction among the many people who had come to follow the trial. The uxoricide Bray would appear to have been a harsh man and a demanding foreman, placing his master’s interest before all else. Let us hope that his evident merits and loyalty will be put to good use during the seven years of sojourn at St.-Laurent and that it is as a reformed and wiser man that he will return to his native Guadeloupe.
“One franc fifty.”
“Of course.” Anne Marie reached for her handbag. “But I’ll need another photocopy.”
“Then you’ll have to pay me first.
“I have no intention of not paying you.”
Like the claw of a scavenging bird, his fingers took the ten-franc coin that Anne Marie held out. “Sometimes I think you people are worse than the locals. No manners. There are no manners anymore.”
“Can you give me a copy of this page, please?”
“No respect anymore.”
Anne Marie stood up and slipped her feet into the damp shoes.
“And,” the man continued, “I can tell you, mademoiselle, that the volume would have been in its right place if that man friend of Madame Cléopatre hadn’t taken it.” He clicked his tongue. “They’re all the same—and all of a sudden, everybody’s wanting to read La Coloniale. And so they have to come here and pester me.”
“Who wanted to read it?”
“No respect.” He turned away. “Because they think that I’m an old man.”
Anne Marie caught him by the arm. “Please tell me who wanted to read it.”
He looked at her over the glasses.
“Who’s been reading the old newspapers?”
“You think I don’t know?” He was silent for a moment, then he reached out and touched the volume that was grimy with dust. “The Calais murder—you think I don’t realize what you’re all interested in?”
“Who?”
“He teaches at the university in Pointe-à-Pitre.”
“University?”
“He forgot his keys. Always playing with them and then he left them behind.” The wet lips trembled. “He telephoned from the university. A strange name—like the canals.”
“Canals? You mean Suez-Panama?”