On July 12, 1773, on the eve of the day appointed for his execution, Yves le Cun asked for his reporting judge; he was as yet unaware of the judgment pronounced against him. A countermand stayed the execution. On the following day, he entered an appeal, declaring that Louis Coden had not been at the mill. In the month of August, he reiterated this exoneration and named other persons, among them the Lescop sisters. These successive disclosures prolonged an investigation wherein every new name dragged fresh accused into its snare.
The affair had begun six months earlier, on January 16, within a Breton mill. The chronicle presents six men and one woman as the authors of the robbery. The depositions of Joseph Hubedas, the miller of Castel-Pic, of his wife, and of two maidservants directly describe five men who had forced their way inside, together with a woman who was making up the stolen goods into bundles. The witnesses from the mill had not ventured outside during the robbery; the sixth man, stationed near the door according to the servants, remained unidentified.
Hubedas recognized Yves le Cun as the man who had seized him by the collar, broken open the cupboards, and carried off the money. His wife and the two servants counted five men and one woman within the mill. The maids recounted that they had hidden in the house upon realizing they were dealing with robbers; from their concealment, they heard the blows of the axe and the crash of the shattered cupboards. When they attempted to return, an unknown man, posted near the door and armed with a musket or a cudgel, barred their passage. They could attach his figure to no known countenance.
The discrepancy between six men and five, which the depositions readily accounted for by the presence of a lookout, did not deter the magistrate from multiplying the number of the accused. Ten persons were condemned to death; seven were executed. For Louis Coden, apprehended alongside le Cun, the earliest rulings took a brutal and sudden turn. He protested his innocence and petitioned that an inquiry be conducted through the diligence of the procureur-fiscal, by reason of his slender means. On June 28, his petition was rejected; he and le Cun were sentenced to branding, the chain, and perpetual servitude in the galleys. On July 7, the sentence was amended: both were condemned to the gallows, and the judge of Guingamp was charged with carrying out the execution.
The two men were led, laden with irons, before their judges. For the second time, Coden underwent the humiliation of the stool of repentance. Fellow prisoners warned the jailer that Coden was guiltless. The jailer thought he might urge le Cun to speak by having it put to him that, were he condemned, his duty was to reveal the truth. Yet le Cun still knew nothing of the judgment rendered against him; he feared that in clearing Coden, he might uncover his own crime. With the reporting judge absent, the presiding magistrate himself initially refused to admit that Coden could be less culpable than his companion. Three witnesses, he declared, had deposed against them de visu; the condemned were merely seeking to prolong their days.
The countermand nonetheless prevailed over this prejudice. On July 13, le Cun declared that Coden was not present at the mill when the robbery was committed. On August 2, he repeated this exoneration and designated other persons, among them Marie and Élisabeth Lescop. Confrontations were held with Yves le Cam, Philippe Perrot, and Jacques Maillard; a new inquiry was opened. The proceedings culminated in capital sentences against le Cun, Maillard, and Philippe le Piven, while Pierre le Cam and Philippe Perrot were condemned in absentia. The two sisters were likewise entangled in the wake of the condemned man’s revelations.
The sentence of November 24 was confirmed on December 13. Le Cun’s body was to be exposed at the place where the robbery had been committed; the appeal of Maillard and le Piven would be adjudicated after his execution. A final narrative, a species of dying testament that might have elucidated their several roles, was perhaps expected of the convict. He offered none. Maillard was put to the torture. Barely withdrawn from the flames, he was confronted with le Piven and maintained that he had been one of the men who entered the mill. He also admitted that he had stood alone at the door. Following this confession, he was executed and his body exposed upon the scene of the crime; on the following day, sentence of death was pronounced against le Piven.
Further arrests took place in March 1774, on the occasion of a fair at Le Faouët. A letter from the provost-general directed the apprehension of haberdashers suspected of having robbed the church of Notre-Dame de Guingamp; among the persons seized as potential associates of these thieves were Philippe Perrot, Jean le Gonidec, and Marie and Élisabeth Lescop. The judicial machinery bound them to the robbery at the mill. On June 6, all four were declared accomplices in the Castel-Pic affair and condemned to be hanged. The sentence was confirmed on June 30.
Yet the documents of the case, as Champagnac relates them, did not establish that the sisters had borne any share in the robbery. As the execution drew near, word ran through the gathered populace: Perrot and le Gonidec had sought to exonerate the two young women in their dying declarations. Both had entreated the commissioner to receive their depositions following their confessions. Several bystanders, moved by their insistence and their tone of truth, had supported this plea; the commissioner had refused to yield. The multitude knew that the condemned men pronounced the sisters strangers to the crime, yet could do nothing to hinder the course of the sentence.
The memory of Coden, who had languished for near six months in irons after an iniquitous conviction, lent this obstinacy a singular resonance. Men had already witnessed how far a sentence might wander from the mark before testimony came to rectify it; on this occasion, the words proffered to justice were stayed at the very threshold of the court. Consternation sat upon the faces of the spectators. Three convicts were executed: le Gonidec, Perrot, and Marie Lescop. Élisabeth waited in her turn, frozen with dread, while the executioner had just dispatched the others.
He stopped. Champagnac relates that he was moved at the sight of this young woman, whom everything led him to believe innocent. He stepped forward and advised her to declare herself with child, which by law would suspend the execution. Élisabeth, seized with terror, could not bring herself to avail of this expedient. The executioner thereupon spoke loud enough to be heard, directing the priests and the bailiffs that she must address herself to them. These men approached; apprised by him of the alleged pregnancy, they caused her to be conducted back to prison. The stratagem was not yet an acquittal, but it stayed the fatal hour.
Persons moved by her plight brought her grievances before the King’s Council of State. The Council remanded the revision of the case to the Parliament of Brittany. In her petition of August 17, 1776, Élisabeth demanded that the dying testaments of le Gonidec and Perrot be at last received; she denounced the refusal of the reporting magistrate, who had declined to record them when the two condemned men pleaded to exonerate the sisters.
The re-examination of the case culminated, on July 15, 1777, in a solemn decree: Élisabeth Lescop was declared innocent, and the condemnation pronounced against her was utterly quashed. The chronicle presents this decision as the tardy triumph of innocence, yet the phrase must not obscure the scene that had preceded it: Marie had already perished upon the gibbet, while her sister was spared only through the improvised reprieve of an executioner. Justice rectified a sentence; it could not restore life to those who had already suffered the penalty.
An essential truth of these records resides in the chasm between the voices of men and the hearing they receive. At the mill, the witnesses could describe the five men who forced an entrance and the woman who bundled up the spoils; of the man who kept watch at the door, they knew nothing beyond a shadow. Le Cun, for his part, exonerated Coden, then appended further names; two condemned felons, at the gates of death, pleaded that their declarations in favour of the sisters be heard. The law welcomed certain belated words as indictments, yet initially turned away those that might have stayed the hand of death. It required that a multitude bear witness to the spectacle, that one woman be dragged to the foot of the scaffold and another die upon it, before a decree at last restored to Élisabeth Lescop her recognized innocence.