Beauvais

Beauvais becomes the setting for the trial of Joseph Coquereux and for the narrator’s most painful reassessment of the events surrounding the murder of a young girl. In the assize court, the accused’s unassuming appearance and plain account stand against the audience’s demand for his death; afterward, the narrator connects the case to an earlier encounter on the road and to help he failed to offer.

The Trial in Beauvais

The narrator travels to Beauvais to follow what newspapers call the Coquereux case. Although Coquereux has confessed, the narrator remains unsure that he is guilty. His doubts reflect a general distrust of judicial procedure and of judges and jurors confronting a human life as a problem to be decided. They are also sustained by the pity Dingo had shown the impoverished man and by the depth of Coquereux’s misery.

At the assize court, Coquereux appears much as the narrator remembers him from the road and from the steps of the town hall at Montbiron: modest and without any evident effort to compose a courtroom persona. He seems a little less thin and less ashen than before, and has shaved, apparently out of decency and politeness. The narrator notices the candor of his voice and the restraint of his gestures as Coquereux recounts traveling toward Compiègne with his furniture in a cart, after finding year-round work at a tileworks. He describes a hard day, oppressive heat, and exhaustion on reaching Montbiron.

Judgment and Public Reaction

Coquereux is sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. The punishment comes amid protests from an audience that wants him put to death, making the courtroom a scene of tension between public fury and the sentence actually imposed. Beauvais thus marks not only the formal judgment of the case but also the narrator’s encounter with a legal process he already approaches with deep suspicion.

The Narrator’s Belated Remorse

Leaving the assize court, the narrator reflects bitterly on his own part in the chain of events. When he had met Coquereux on the road, he could have given the poor, exhausted traveler some money. He now believes that even this small assistance might have enabled Coquereux to find shelter somewhere other than the Radicets’ home, thereby perhaps preventing both the crime and the young girl’s death.

The narrator’s regret is explicitly retrospective: he recognizes the possible consequence of an ordinary act of generosity only after the trial has ended. Beauvais is therefore more than the location of a verdict. It is where legal judgment sends him back to an earlier encounter and makes the omission of help feel consequential, even though he cannot know whether the alternative he imagines would truly have prevented the tragedy.