Upon a printed copy of the judicial decree, an unknown hand had penned an invitation. A recipient was cordially bidden to attend the funeral cortege and the breaking of Nivet’s bones, couched in the punctilious style of a burial notice and seasoned with a jest regarding some purported kinship. The hand that traced these lines had played no part in framing the sentence; it had merely found the decree diverting enough to turn it into an act of social civility. Beneath this handwritten ink, the printed broadsheet announced ninety-nine accused persons and five men condemned to the wheel.
The principal among them was named Philippe Nivet. The courts knew him under a multiplicity of aliases: Fanfaron, Le Roux, Marchand, Gramont, Cousis, Dumoulin. These identities were no picturesque collection; they bore witness to the singular difficulty of hunting a man who moved incessantly between provincial towns, post-roads, and lodgings where he was received under ever-shifting appellations. For the magistrates, collating these names was already a manner of assembling the facts. An itinerant stranger thus became the very same man a neighbor had encountered leagues away.
In late August 1728, an Amiens merchant named David and his wife were returning from the Guibray fair. They were robbed and murdered near Rouen. The decree was to fix the double assassination upon the high road, a mere quarter-league from the city gates. Such proximity is striking: their journey had spanned vast distances, stages, and mercantile transactions, yet death lay in wait almost at the threshold of a bustling town. The highway of commerce offered highwaymen precisely what they sought: travelers weighed down with the proceeds of their trade.
The pursuit was directed by officers whose names are preserved in the records of the Archives Nationales: Bazin, lieutenant of the short-robe company, and Pons and Bataille, officers of the watch. They tracked the three suspects through Rouen and Saint-Germain-en-Laye all the way to Paris. On September 5, a carriage-renter in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré provided the decisive clue; the arrest was effected beneath his roof. The very journeys that had enabled the suspects to flee had also compelled them to encounter souls capable of recalling their passage.
The affair did not close with this double murder; the proceedings widened steadily. Letters patent issued in September 1728, followed by those of April 1729, circumscribed the labor of the special commissioners; interrogations, formal re-examinations, and confrontations brought together prisoners, witnesses, and fugitives. Conseiller Lambelin conducted the examinations, while Rolland presided over the confrontations. Within the assembled dossiers, Nivet ceased to be merely the fugitive pursued in the wake of the fair; he became the focal point of crimes committed across multiple provinces.
The decree of May 30, 1729, held him, Baremont, and Mancion guilty of the murders of Master and Mistress David. To Nivet’s charge, it added the slaying of a baker in the forest of Moulineaux, of Chesnet between Rouen and Port-Saint-Ouen, and of the widow Mottelet and her two children at La Croix-Saint-Ouen. In Paris, it declared him likewise convicted of the murder of the goldsmith Ménard in the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, and of Bollot in the Rue Coquillière. The geography of the condemnation stretched from lonely highways to city dwellings, denying even urban centers the privilege of sanctuary.
A string of sacrilegious burglaries expanded this map further still: the Invalides, Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, Saint-Christophe in Paris, Saint-Louis in Versailles, and Saint-Godard in Rouen. The decree bound these church break-ins to other robberies committed by day and by night. Waystations, private residences, and sanctuaries emerged as parts of a single fabric, for the wanderings of these men and the trafficking of stolen goods linked together what each victim had initially suffered as an isolated misfortune.
Yet not all the accused bore the same measure of guilt or answered to identical charges. Blaise Beauvoir, known as Troncy or Dupuis, stood condemned for certain distinct slayings, among them that of the haberdasher Herpin near Orléans. Guillaume Taupin, alias Ambroise or Laurent Lacroix, was declared an accomplice in several robberies and in the murder of Bollot. Thus, the five capital sentences did not reduce ninety-nine varied responsibilities to a single mold. Behind the collective designation of the gang, the decree carefully apportioned individual acts, even while binding them within a solitary prosecution.
The long catalogue of the remaining defendants evokes the specter of a subterranean city. Here one encounters women designated only by their marriage or a sobriquet, a goldsmith and his wife, a former tavern-keeper, a mercer, and men distinguished solely by a trade, a parish, or a cast of countenance. Several names remain incomplete. The clerk distinguishes one Dupont from another, a François from little François; he even records sundry individuals whose identity remains that of an unknown passerby. Justice possessed networks of association and descriptions long before it commanded certain names.
A number of them lay in the cells of the Conciergerie. Others had fled; two were already dead. This divergence of circumstance mattered deeply to those awaiting judgment. To be named in the proceedings did not mean that one’s fate was sealed. The court ordered that certain inquiries proceed, while staying judgment for numerous accused until after the execution of the five condemned men. This stay was no act of clemency. The death of the principals was to be preceded by a final attempt to wrest from them further names and confessions concerning the rest.
Nivet and his four companions were accordingly sentenced to the question ordinary and extraordinary prior to their execution. Torture followed the pronouncement of death, devised specifically to compel them to name their accomplices. The remaining prisoners thus had cause to dread the dying utterances of men who could no longer save their own skins. Under this judicial machinery, the body of the condemned man remained an instrument of interrogation until the very moment it was surrendered to public execution.
The decree commanded the wheel upon the Place de Grève and disposed of their worldly goods: confiscation where local custom permitted, the levy of a fine, and the continuation of proceedings against the others. Justice struck at the flesh, yet it did not overlook what the dead left behind. Philippe Nivet was executed on May 31, 1729. The public scaffold brought a spectacular end to his career; the court files, however, remained wide open around those who had lent him a room, an alias, a helping hand, or an outlet for his plunder, according to what the inquest might yet establish.
The copy transformed into an invitation has preserved both faces of this catastrophe. In the printed text, magistrates assign to each soul their name, their crimes, and their punishment. Above it, a sardonic jest summons an acquaintance to the spectacle. Between the two inks, the Davids had departed the fair never to return home, the widow Mottelet and her children had vanished from their village, and the accused still waited in dread for what the dying might confess. The name of Fanfaron promised the legend of a brigand; the yellowed paper preserves no less faithfully the crowd that could smile as it read of his ruin.