17 ans disparu — sa GRAND MÈRE l’a vu au marché, l’a suivi et découvert qu’il avait DEUX FAMILLES P2

17 ans disparu — sa GRAND MÈRE l’a vu au marché, l’a suivi et découvert qu’il avait DEUX FAMILLES P2

In September 1974, he married Françoise Mercier, daughter of a pharmacist from Argenton-sur-Creuse. She was 22, he was 23. Paulette had cried at the ceremony at Saint-Martial Church. “With joy,” she said. But Simone, who knew her better than anyone, had seen something else in her tears. Perhaps a premonition, or simply the awareness that something a little too perfect is always waiting to be disturbed. Françoise was a composed, organized woman who had accounting skills, a mastery that her husband admired but could not limit. She kept the household accounts with a precision he would have been unable to replicate. They settled into an apartment on Rue de la Victoire, on the second floor of a building with Bordeaux shutters. And in the early years, everything seemed to go well. Gilles worked a lot, was often absent during the week, but would come back on Friday evening with road stories and sometimes a bottle of Quincy or Menetou-Salon bought from a passing farmer. Their son Thierry naquit in January 1976. Gilles was 24 years old at the time. He disappeared 19 months later.

Friday, October 14, 1977 was an ordinary day. Gilles had left on Monday morning as usual with his beige Renault 12 station wagon and his catalogue briefcase. He had kissed Françoise in the doorway. He tapped his sleeping son twice on the forehead in his crib. Thierry was 18 months old and still slept through the night, which was a blessing for everyone. And he had gone down the stairs so lightly, something she hadn’t recognized. She hadn’t noticed that he had taken a second suitcase, not a big one. A khaki canvas travel bag that he sometimes took with him on trips lasting several days. She hadn’t seen him leave with that bag. It was only much later, while walking around the apartment, that she realized it was no longer in the closet. Gilles had not returned home on Friday evening.

She waited until 10 p.m. and then called her mother-in-law Paulette, who told her not to worry. He must have had a breakdown while renting a property to a customer who wanted to keep him for dinner. She had called the owner of Labourette, one of the suppliers for whom Gilles worked, in the morning and learned that her husband had not been to their house since Tuesday. His planned tour for the week did not correspond to the visits actually made. There was a gap of 3 days that no one could explain. The Châteauroux gendarmerie was contacted on Sunday, October 16, 48 hours after the failure to return.

Chief Brigadier Poireau, a massive man with grey moustaches who knew half the town by their first name, took notes with the methodical slowness of someone who has seen it all before. “Disturbing disappearance,” he wrote in the official report. 26-year-old man, Renault 12 vehicle registered in Indre. Profession: Sales representative, unexplained absence since Friday, October 14, 1977. Françoise answered these questions with her characteristic precision. And no, there hadn’t been an argument. No, he hadn’t seemed preoccupied. Yes, he was sometimes distant, but no more than usual. No, she was not aware of any significant debts. Yes, he drank a little. A man of his trade with meals on the go, worms accepted at clients’ homes. But that had never been a problem. She did not mention the khaki canvas travel bag. Not that she wanted to hide anything, but she hadn’t thought of it at the time. And when the idea came back to her two weeks later, she wasn’t quite sure if it was important information or a coincidence. She never reported it. That detail, a khaki canvas bag that was no longer in a cupboard, did not appear in any official report for 17 years.

In the first few weeks, the gendarmerie worked with the energy reserved for cases that still have a chance of being solved quickly. The Renault 12 was found parked in a street in Guéret in Creuse, 60 km from Châteauroux. The vehicle was locked. There was nothing unusual inside, no luggage, no sign of an altercation, no blood. Just the cold smell of tobacco and an appointment book open for the week of October 10-14, the week of the disappearance, with three visits noted for Monday and Tuesday. And the following pages, blank. The abandonment of a car in Guéret directed the reflection in several directions. Either Gilles had taken another means of transport from that town, or someone had come to pick him up there, or something had happened to him between Châteauroux and Guéret. Hotel owners, cafe owners, and farmers in the area were interviewed. A bistro owner on Old Prison Street vaguely remembered a man matching the description who came in to eat one Thursday morning and asked where the bus station was, but he couldn’t say for sure that it was him.

The Guéret trail led nowhere. They searched the hospitals in vain. We checked the civil registry records in the neighboring municipalities. A wanted notice was posted in several regional newspapers, The Republican Berry and the mountains in Creuse. Some readers called, some in good faith, others out of morbid curiosity, some mistaking Gilles for a neighbor, a brother-in-law, a stranger met on a train. All leads were checked. None of them were conclusive.

After 6 months, the gendarmerie classified the case as a presumed voluntary disappearance. This ranking was based on a set of elements which, taken together, paint a picture that is difficult to ignore: the absence of signs of violence, the deliberate abandonment of the vehicle in the middle of the city, the unanswered question of the travel bag that was no longer there and an element that Françoise had finally mentioned during a second interview in December 1977. Gilles had emptied the joint bank account 3 weeks before disappearing. Not entirely. He had withdrawn francs in several installments and from several different ATMs over the course of 15 days. It wasn’t a fortune. That was enough to leave. The word was never spoken in front of Paulette or Simone, but the police officers thought it. The family, a little later, began to think so too. Party.

Françoise was 25 years old, had an 18-month-old son and a husband officially listed as missing. She waited 3 years before requesting a legal separation in the district court. She was not entitled to a divorce. Gilles was alive, officially at least. But at least she was able to separate the assets and regain her administrative freedom. She returned to her parents’ home in Argenton-sur-Creuse with little Thierry and only came back to Châteauroux to visit her mother-in-law Paulette once a month on the first Sunday, but as a duty that one performs because one is a good person.

Paulette, she never left the rue du Maréchal Foch. Aged with the portrait of his son hanging in the hallway between the rotary dial telephone and the walnut coat rack. She went to mass every Sunday at Saint-Martial and she lit a candle, not for the dead. She didn’t believe her son was dead. She lit a candle for the absent, for those who are somewhere and who have chosen not to be there anymore.

Simone, on the other hand, was more pragmatic. She didn’t light a seat. She got up early, did her shopping, knitted, and kept her opinions about human nature to herself. She loved her grandson. She had never spoken ill of him. And she knew, with the dry certainty of someone who has lived through the war and seen men transformed into something else, that a disappearance without a body often has an author who wears the same face as the victim.

The years passed with that particular indifference of time when one no longer expects anything specific. Thierry grew up in Argenton. He looked like his mother: fair hair, hazel eyes, the precision in his father’s movements. He only had photos and the memories that Paulette told him about during Sunday visits. A man who floated down the stairs, who loved white wine from Berry, who looked at people as if he had all the time in the world to understand them. This portrait made Thierry suspicious, not of his father, but of those who were absent in general. He learned early on that missing people leave holes that the living try to fill with words, and that these words never really fill anything.

In 1984, 7 years after the disappearance, Paulette took steps with the Châteauroux High Court to obtain a declaratory judgment of absence. The French procedure stipulated that a person not found for more than ten years could be declared legally absent with the financial consequences that this entailed. It was Paulette’s lawyer, Maître Garnier, a discreet man with round glasses who practiced in a firm on Rue Grande, who had suggested this approach to clarify the possible succession and protect the rights of young Thierry. The procedure was long and silent. Paulette signs papers that the lawyer presents as evidence. The judge issued an order. No one raises their voice. This is not a trial. It’s a formality to erase someone who has chosen to be erased.

In 1988, the declaratory judgment of absence was pronounced. Gilles still existed legally. It would take another 10 years to register a death. But his assets were placed under provisional administration. Paulette, appointed as administrator, continued to live on rue du Maréchal Foch and to act as if Simon was aging well. She had lost a little speed on the stairs, but nothing in her eyes. And on that Tuesday morning in October 1994, his eyes did not deceive her.

She had seen Gilles from behind first, his build, the way he walked with his shoulders slightly forward, that particular sway that she had watched for 40 years as he crossed schoolyards, dining rooms, streets. Then he turned around to answer a question from the child he was carrying, and she saw the face. The brown hair had turned grey. There were wrinkles around her eyes that she didn’t recognize. But it was him, absolutely, irrevocably him.

Simone Aubert was not a woman to lose her composure. She picked up her shopping bag and followed him at a distance, as she had learned to do in life without running, without attracting attention, looking at the feet rather than the back of the neck so as not to be noticed. Gilles crossed the market square, walked along the covered market hall, and turned into the street that led towards the Saint-Christophe district. He walked without hesitation. He knew his way. He entered a bakery on Boulevard de la Châtre. Simone stopped in front of the florist’s shop window across the street and waited. He came out 4 minutes later with a traditional baguette and a bag of croissants. The child in her arms reached out towards the bag. Gilles gave him a croissant, laughing at something the child had told you. Simone noted the bakery’s address in his head. She watched which direction he was heading back. She did not call out to him. She hadn’t yet decided what to do with what she had just seen, but she knew she wasn’t dreaming. She went back to Rue des Acacias, put her shopping bag on the kitchen table and sat down. Not to cry. Simone was no longer crying. He had been lacking water for a long time for that. She sat down to reflect, but to weigh things up, to decide what was right.

She waited two days. On Thursday, she returned to the Saint-Christophe district and did what she had always known how to do. She observed. Not in a suspicious way. An old woman with a checkered bag in a district of Châteauroux attracts no attention. She sat down on the bench in Gambetta Square at the corner of the street and waited. At 8:20 a.m., Gilles left a building at number 11, rue du Puits Neuf. He was wearing a grey suit jacket and a satchel. A woman appeared in the doorway to tell him something. A woman in her forties, brunette, with an apron tied at her waist. He kissed her quickly on the mouth with the nonchalance of a couple who have been doing this for years and don’t really think about it anymore. Even then he turned left towards the city centre. Simone remained seated on his bench for another 10 minutes. A woman, a child, a street that Gilles knew perfectly, a building from which he emerged in a suit with a satchel, not like someone who is just passing through, but like someone who lives there.

She went home and called her daughter, Paulette’s shop. Simone could hear the sewing machine in the background. Paulette was still sewing, even at 60, even with fingers that were starting to shrink. There was a silence when Simone spoke, then another silence. Then Paulette said, “I’m coming.” She arrived that same evening with a quarter of Châteauroux. She had never learned to drive. They spent the night talking and drinking tilia at Simone’s kitchen table. But in the morning, they had decided on one thing: she wouldn’t go to the police station until she was sure, until she had something solid in her hands herself. The reason for this caution was simple and painful to state. They were afraid of making a mistake. They were afraid that the man was a distant cousin, an unknown half-brother, someone whom time and memory had transformed into a likeness. They were also afraid of what would happen if they were right.

The following Saturday, they both returned to the Saint-Christophe district. Paulette kept a safe distance away. Simone approached and, at ten meters from the man who was coming out of number 11 with the child in the stroller, this time at 10 meters from that face which had aged 17 years but which remained the same face, Paulette stopped and leaned against the wall. She spoke very softly in such a low voice that Simone had to tilt his head to hear: “That’s him.” He didn’t see them. He did not turn around. He continued pushing the stroller towards the bakery on Boulevard de la Châtre and the brown-haired woman in the apron. She no longer had her apron on Saturday. She was wearing a burgundy coat. He walked beside him holding another bag and said something to her that made her laugh. And she rested her shoulder against his for a second and they continued walking. There was something unbearable about that image. Not because she was ugly, she wasn’t ugly because she was ordinary.

It was Simone who decided what would happen next. She was 78 years old. She had lived through the occupation and the mourning of her husband and 50 years of weekly market, and she no longer had the time or the inclination to put off things that deserved to be done. She made an appointment with the chief brigadier of the gendarmerie in Châteauroux on Monday morning. The policeman he received was no longer called Poireau. He had been retired since 1989. He was a chief warrant officer named Tessier, in his forties, with a precise way of noting what was said to him without interrupting. He listened to Simone Aubert write about what she had seen. Note the address of number 11, rue du Puits Neuf. Note the description of the man. Noted the original date of disappearance, October 14, 1977, and took the file number that Paulette had carried in her handbag for years folded in a craft envelope.

What Simone didn’t know yet, what no one in the family knew, was that she wasn’t the only one who had seen something four days before she made an appointment with the police. A man had presented himself at the office of the SRPJ in Bourges, the regional judicial police service, with information that had not yet been linked to any case file. This man’s name was Rémy Blanchard. He was an accountant and had worked for 6 years with a man he knew as Gérard Mayard, agricultural equipment representative, married, father of two children, residing on rue du Puits Neuf in Châteauroux. Rémy Blanchard had found by chance in a professional magazine dating from 1978, a photo accompanying an article on the profession of sales representative. In this photo, among other faces, he recognized his former colleague Gérard Mayard. Except that the caption under the photo identified him as Gilles de Châteauroux, who had disappeared since 1977. Rémy Blanchard had kept this issue of the magazine. He had first leafed through it in 1989 without really paying attention. Then he had found it again during a move in 1994. And something, a cold certainty, the kind of certainty one would have preferred not to have, had driven him to travel to Bourges.

Two separate reports, in the same week, pointing to the same man. The coincidence was remarkable and the investigators knew it immediately. Chief Warrant Officer Tessier passed on the description of Simone Aubert to the gendarmerie captain who headed the brigade, who then contacted the SRPJ in Bourges in the morning. However, the two pieces of information crossed paths in less than 48 hours. It was unambiguously the same individual. A man living on rue du Puits Neuf in Châteauroux known by two different names with two different families.

The discreet surveillance of number 11 began on Wednesday. What investigators discovered over the next 10 days by cross-referencing records, consulting civil status records and through initial interviews with neighbors, he was drawing a picture whose internal coherence was as disturbing as its content. The man who lived on rue du Puits Neuf had been calling himself Gérard Mayard since at least 1978. He was a sales representative for irrigation equipment for an agricultural cooperative in Indre. He had married in a second marriage, or rather bigamously, since his marriage to Françoise Mercier had never been dissolved, a certain Véronique Charpentier, a bank employee, in 1981 at the town hall of the 8th arrondissement of Bordeaux. He had two children with her, Lucas, born in 1983 and Amandine, born in 1988. The little boy that Simone had seen at the market with a baguette and croissants was Lucas, 11 years old.

How did he obtain false documents? The issue was the focus of part of the investigation. The answer, partially reconstructed later, lay in a combination of circumstances that would not have worked in a different era. In 1977, civil status records were not computerized. Connections between municipalities were slow and imperfect. A sufficiently methodical man who knew the margins of the system itself could use the identity of a person who died as a child whose birth certificate existed in the municipal archives but whose death certificate had not always been transmitted to the correct department. The method was known to the police. It had been used during the war by the resistance and by others since. Gilles Aubert had borrowed the name of Gérard Mayard, a child who died at the age of 4 in 1955 in a town in Creuse. He had built a new identity based on this birth certificate and, with the necessary patience, obtained a civil status extract, then a family record book, then a driver’s license. The procedure had taken several months. He had planned his disappearance long before putting the car in Guéret.

The investigators sought to understand why what they found did not resemble what the films show. No gambling debt, no jealous lover, no criminal threat, nothing so dramatic, nothing so simple. What they found was something more ordinary, and at the same time more difficult to name. The first thing Gilles said during his custody, on Thursday, November 3, 1994, he was arrested at his home, rue du Puits Neuf, late in the morning, in the presence of Véronique who did not immediately understand what was happening. The first thing he said after refusing to speak for two hours would inevitably happen: “No, I didn’t do anything. No, you’re mistaken.” Just that one sentence spoken towards the tabletop and not towards the investigators, like a recitation learned long before. He asked for a lawyer. Maître Breton, a criminal lawyer from Châteauroux, arrived in the afternoon.

The custody period was extended. Gilles spoke the next morning with Maître Breton beside him after a night that the gendarmes later described as silent. He hadn’t slept, had asked for water twice and hadn’t said anything. What he said was both less and more than anyone expected. He said he left because he was scared. Afraid of what? That was where words became insufficient. Not afraid of external danger, not afraid of the police or a creditor, afraid of what he was becoming. Fear of continuing. He had looked back on his life in October 1977: his wife, his 18-month-old son, his apartment on rue de la Victoire. These agricultural equipment catalogues were on his route week after week, and he had felt something closing inside him, like a door that one no longer has the strength to open. He didn’t say that he didn’t love Françoise. He said he no longer recognized himself in the man he was becoming with her. He didn’t say he didn’t want his son. He said that he had had the false certainty, perhaps he recognized it, that he would harm this child by staying, that a clear absence was better than an amputated presence. The investigator who transcribed these statements made a note in the margin in handwriting that was not intended for the official file: “The man seems sincere. That does not make him any less guilty.”

But the effect for which Gilles Aubert was criticized was clear. Bigamy, the French penal code punished bigamy with one year of imprisonment and a fine of 24,000 francs. Impersonation of a deceased person and several related offences linked to the fraudulent obtaining of official documents. The investigating judge of the Châteauroux High Court, Judge Isabelle Fort, was seized of the case in November 1994. The investigation lasted 16 months.

Véronique Charpentier took everything on Friday, November 4th through Maître Breton, who visited her at the request of his client. She was 42 years old, had two children and a husband she believed to be named Gérard for 13 years. She listened to Maître Breton without interrupting him, asked three specific questions concerning her own legal status, but also the status of her children and the steps to take to annul a marriage contracted under a false identity. Then she walked the lawyer to the door and locked it behind him. His neighbors said it was good that they didn’t hear him cry that night. They simply heard the silence that was where there had once been the noise of a family. Lucas, who was 11 years old, and Amandine, who was six. Something was definitely broken before we knew what it was. Do you understand what I’m telling you? They learned the truth, each in their own way, at different times, with the words their mother chose to give them in the weeks that followed. It took Lucas a long time to understand. Amandine, being younger, only really understood later when the words had time to mean something.

Françoise Mercier, in Argenton-sur-Creuse, was also informed by the gendarmerie on November 4th. She was 42 years old too. She had rebuilt her life, a partner since 1985, a job as an accounting secretary in a notary’s office, a house with a garden. Thierry, his son, was 18 years old and that year was entering his first year at a high school in Argenton. When the policewoman told her that her missing husband had just been found in Châteauroux with a second family, she remained silent for a long moment then asked, “Thierry, does he know?” The policewoman said “No.” Françoise said, “I’ll talk to him myself.” She politely asked if the policewoman could step out for a moment.

Thierry Aubert learned that evening that his father was alive, that he had ten years of silence behind him and an 11-year-old half-brother and a 6-year-old half-sister whom he did not know, that he had grown up with the portrait of a man in his grandmother’s hallway and that this man had eaten croissants at the market in Châteauroux for years, 20 kilometers away, under another name. Thierry didn’t tell anyone what he felt that night. It wasn’t anger, not exactly. It was something colder and more lasting than anger, a reorganization. Like when you realize that a map you had always believed to be accurate represents a geography that never existed.

Paulette Aubert received the news from her mother Simone on the evening of November 3, the very day of the arrest. She sat down in the living room armchair, the one that had been there since 1962 and had seen 40 years of good and bad news go by. And she remained there for a long time without speaking. Then she asked, “Is he alright?” Simone was seventy years old. She had seen men die in the war and women wait for returns that never came, and children grow up to be adults with faces that were no longer recognizable. She looked at her daughter and said with the particular precision of old women who have nothing left to lose by being honest: “Paulette is in good health. That doesn’t mean he’s doing well.”

Judge Fort’s investigation was meticulous. She summoned Gilles Aubert 13 times between November 1994 and March 1996. She heard Françoise Mercier, Véronique Charpentier, Paulette Aubert, Simone Aubert, Rémy Blanchard, but also several neighbors and colleagues from parallel currency schemes and the gendarmerie officer who had dealt with the disappearance in 1977. What emerged from these 16 months of investigation did not resemble an ordinary crime. There was no victim in the usual sense. No one was physically injured. No money was stolen in large quantities, and no threats were made against anyone. What there was, however, was something more difficult to quantify: 17 years of absence inflicted on a woman and a child and on a mother and a grandmother; 13 years of lies inflicted on a second wife and two children born under a legality that was not legal.

Judge Fort was a woman renowned for her rigor and for her ability to distinguish the effect of feelings in the writing of her orders. She noted in her summary report that the offences were established with certainty, that the moral damage was real and documented and that the explanations provided by the accused, if they were sincere in their formulation, did not constitute a legal justification for these acts. She also noted, in a formulation less common for a magistrate of her temperament, that the case illustrated a form of violence that left no visible trace and yet was as real as that which does.

Gilles Aubert was referred to the criminal court of Châteauroux. The offenses in question fall under the category of misdemeanors, not felonies. The assize court was not competent. In April 1996, the hearing lasted for days. He pleaded guilty to all charges. He was sentenced to ten months’ imprisonment with a suspended sentence, a fine and civil damages paid to Françoise Mercier and her two sons, Thierry and indirectly Lucas and Amandine, whose legal situation was subsequently regularized. He did not serve a prison sentence.

Many people in Châteauroux and Argenton found the sentence light. The law in this case did not have a specific category for this type of prolonged voluntary disappearance. Bigamy was punishable, identity theft was punishable. But the act of fading away, of deciding one day that you no longer exist for those who loved you, has no name in the 1996 French penal code. Perhaps