There was ample cause to draw a smile from any man of law in the heading of the document: its authors had conflated the Legislative Committee and the Court of Cassation as though they formed a single, indivisible authority. Yet this administrative confusion had not prevented the parchment from opening a prison door. The turnkey had recognized the outward guise of an official warrant before weighing its legal probability. Sébastien Boitel walked free; those who had fashioned his liberty were soon to surrender their own.
Among their number stood César Herbaux, a former sergeant-major of Vandamme’s chasseurs. The judicial sentence transcribed in the Memoirs of Vidocq records his age as twenty. He possessed a perilous craft within prison walls: the art of lending a sheet of paper the commanding aspect of a decree that a gaoler was bound to obey. In a house of detention, one may breach the ramparts, pick the locks, or dupe those charged with turning the key. Herbaux had chosen this third path, wherein the quill stood in place of the chisel and the crowbar.
A Warrant for Boitel
Boitel was held in the Tour Pierre, at Lille. The forgery that secured his release bore a Parisian date, the signatures of high magistrates, and a countersignature purporting to issue from the deputy Talot. The paper had thus been furnished with every trapping requisite to trace an administrative course: a sovereign power had decreed, a representative of the people had transmitted, and the warden had merely to comply.
When the magistrates retraced this paper trail, the supposed decrees were nowhere to be found. Neither the order nor the countersignature possessed the slightest authenticity. The very title of the act betrayed an utter ignorance of the machinery of state. The counterfeiters had caught the official idiom well enough to produce an immediate effect, yet understood the institutions too poorly to withstand judicial scrutiny.
The concierge, Brice Coquelle, pointed to Eugène Stofflet as the bearer of the missive. Stofflet had been accustomed to visit Herbaux, lingering in his company and conferring likewise with Boitel. Stofflet strenuously denied having delivered any such order. The moment the document ceased to be an instrument of deliverance and became evidence of a felony, each man sought to diminish his part in its contrivance. The journey of the parchment resolved into an unbroken chain of disavowals.
Boitel confessed to having promised twelve louis d’or for his liberation, having already disbursed seven. He implicated both Herbaux and Vidocq in the bargain. The balance was to be paid in full provided he was suffered to remain undisturbed at home. He had not, therefore, awaited some providential acquittal; by his own admission, freedom had been bartered between felons before reaching the gaoler under official seals.
Herbaux pursued a different line of defence. He conceded having penned the text, yet asserted it was done without signatures, in response to a vainglorious wager laid by Vidocq. The sheet, he claimed, had been left lying upon a table, whereupon Vidocq had seized upon it. In this telling, the script had been nothing more than an idle exercise, and its fraudulent employment had supervened only through the design of another. The admission of the hand was thus tempered by an effort to divorce it from any criminal intent.
The Seal Beneath the Pallet
The inquest did not confine itself to the handwriting alone. A copper seal, shorn of its handle, was discovered beneath the foot of a bed in a dungeon at Douai. Its impression answered precisely to the stamp upon the fabricated release. Vidocq had tenanted that very cell; the object thus became a cornerstone of the case against him.
Vidocq disclaimed all ownership. He maintained that during a turnkey’s search, the warders had mistaken his attempt to secrete a small file for an effort to conceal the incriminating seal. In his Memoirs, this incident forms part of the elaborate demonstration he constructs to assert his innocence of the forgery. The judicial record he transcribes, however, dryly sets forth the suspicions, the depositions, and the material congruences upon which the prosecution rested.
Herbaux stands at the crossroads of these two narratives. In the one, he acknowledges his hand upon the pen, yet disclaims the design of all that ensued. In the other—that of Vidocq turned chronicler of his own legend—he appears as the knave who ruined an innocent comrade by shifting the burden of guilt upon him. Their interests were directly opposed, and Vidocq’s eventual renown would grant him a privilege forever denied to Herbaux: that of publishing his own testament, glossing it with self-serving explanations, and answering accusations long after his fellows lay in their graves.
The criminal court of the department of the Nord tried the cause at Douai. The forgery was found proven; Herbaux and Vidocq were convicted of having executed it with felonious intent. Boitel, Stofflet, and Grouard were acquitted of the charges laid against them. This divergence of fates long fed Vidocq’s bitter resentment: the man who had profited by the escape regained his unencumbered freedom, while two men were marched away to the galleys.
By the decree of the 7th Nivôse, Year V, Herbaux and Vidocq were sentenced to eight years in irons, preceded by six hours of public exposure on the pillory. Their names, callings, and the cause of their condemnation were ordered posted above their heads as they stood fastened to the post. A counterfeit line of script had unlocked an iron gate; another script, that of the criminal court, was now to make their disgrace visible to the gathered populace.
News of a Son
Herbaux emerges once more in the Memoirs, upon the occasion of a later, capital affair. In company with Armand Saint-Léger, a former mariner hailing from Bayonne, he had been condemned for the murder of a gentlewoman residing in the Place Dauphine. Vidocq recounts the stratagem employed to gain admittance to her dwelling: the two men had presented themselves under the pretext of bearing tidings of her son, whom they claimed to have encountered in the armies of the Republic.
This deceit struck at an expectation far more tender and defenceless than that of a turnkey perusing a release. A mother was longing for some word of an absent child. The visitors had no need of forged seals to win an audience; it was enough that they offered themselves as the bearers of that long-awaited intelligence. Vidocq’s narrative provides neither the details of the inquest nor the arguments of counsel that led to their condemnation. It preserves only that threshold crossed through cruel deception, and the names of the two doomed men.
Vidocq learned of their impending execution on hearing the street criers hawking the sentence through the streets of Paris. He hastened to the Palais de Justice and waited for the tumbril to pass. He relates that Herbaux was the first to appear, and that their eyes met. That exchange of glances, like the sentiments that accompany it in the volume, belongs entirely to the narrator’s recollection; it yields no further confession from the condemned man.
Herbaux and Saint-Léger were drawn to the Place de Grève and put to death. Vidocq adds that he learned from hearsay that at Bicêtre Herbaux had expressed remorse for having caused an innocent man to be condemned in his stead. Such second-hand testimony serves the memorialist’s vindication far too neatly to be accepted as established historical truth. It remains words reported by the very man who stood in need of them.
Of César Herbaux, two doorways thus endure in the historical record: that of the Tour Pierre, unbolted by a forged release, and that of a house in the Place Dauphine, unlatched to phantom tidings. Between the two lay a sentence of the court, the clank of the chain-gang, and an interval of recovered liberty whose precise circumstances are lost to us. His final exit demanded no deceit. The judgment was authentic, and the executioner’s cart was waiting.