The letter promised a situation. Marie Bigot was leaving home, she informed her parents, to enter the service of people who had at last consented to engage her. In the letter, she declared she was over fifteen years of age; she hoped to remain long in this new employment. To her explanations she added reproaches: at home, all she did was ill done, and they would perhaps fare better without her. Then she embraced her parents. In these few lines, the rupture preserved the outward forms of a departure for honest toil.
On the 26th of September 1875, the spouses Bigot, brickmakers residing at No. 167 Rue de Vanves, discovered that their daughter had vanished. They applied to the police. Two or three days later, Marie was found in the company of Jean Jouve, a labourer in her father’s employ. The announced situation was no position of service: according to the court report, the girl had lodged with this man in furnished rooms. Jouve was arrested. On the 9th of December, before the Seine Assizes, the paper left for the parents was to encounter quite another reckoning of years.
Marie was fifteen years old. Jouve was thirty-five. Born at Issy on the 5th of April 1840, he too was a brickmaker and dwelt at No. 138 Rue de Vanves. He had worked on several occasions for Bigot, most recently from the month of July onward. Between the two households, the tie was therefore not merely one of neighbourhood: the prisoner at the bar had been the workman of the girl’s father. The newspaper presents him from the outset in an unfavourable light, extending even to the description of his countenance and his gaze. These features belong to the chronicle-writer’s portrait; they do not reveal what the jurors perceived, nor what they thought of him.
The bill of indictment, reproduced in the Gazette, maintained that Jouve had pursued Marie with his attentions for several months, had conducted her to furnished lodgings in Grenelle and Ivry, and hoped to compel her parents to consent to their marriage. The spouses Bigot had persisted in their complaint and their refusal. The charge retained was the abduction of a minor: the indictment stated explicitly that Marie had followed Jouve of her own free will, whilst reminding the court that she was under sixteen years of age and he over twenty-one. Under this indictment, her voluntary departure did not efface the disparity of their ages.
President Vaney commenced the interrogation by setting two portraits in opposition. A man examined during the preliminary inquiry had described Bigot as an excellent workman and a good father of a family. Jouve, according to the same deposition, laboured well enough when he did labour, but frequently grew tipsy. The President recalled to him several prior convictions: a fortnight’s imprisonment in 1862, twenty days and then six months in 1867, and one month in 1875. The newspaper report connects these penalties to assault, rebellion, and insulting public officers. The prisoner’s past thus entered the debates before Marie had even uttered a word.
Vaney charged Jouve with having exploited the girl’s petty tribulations under the paternal roof. Jouve denied it. It was she, he maintained, who had sought him out; she wished to go, and the departure had been agreed upon between them. As to marriage, he even affirmed that he had pointed out to her that he was too old, before yielding to her entreaties. The President refused to follow him. He reminded the accused that, in the case before them, neither fraud nor violence was requisite to constitute the offence, since the girl had not reached sixteen years. The Gazette reports this judicial explanation; it does not provide a complete transcription of the debate upon the statute cited in the indictment.
Another inquiry turned back upon the letter: had Marie believed herself at liberty to quit her parents because she was fifteen years of age? The President suspected Jouve of having imparted to her this erroneous notion. The prisoner denied it once more. The magistrate’s certitude and the man’s denial stand side by side in the report. The chronicle adduces no prior conversation that might, of itself, resolve who had taught what to Marie.
The father then stepped forward to testify. He had reared seven children “by the sweat of my brow,” he said, in a trade that had its own miseries. Questioned as to his severity, he answered that he held his children strictly, but had never beaten them. He had immediately taken measures to recover Marie, and would never have consented to bestow her upon Jouve. The younger sister related that she had seen the workman kiss Marie in the house. On the day of the departure, she had overheard them speaking in low tones; according to her deposition, he was appointing a rendezvous and urging Marie to take twenty francs for their lodging.
Then Marie-Françoise Bigot was called. The Gazette remarks upon her composure and attributes to her an appearance older than her fifteen years. Yet the age reiterated at the hearing remained fifteen, whatever the chronicle-writer’s impressions may have been. She kept the accounts in her father’s business. She described him as difficult, particularly when he had taken drink, though adding that she had no grave reproach to level against him. Had he ever laid hands upon her? She answered in the negative. The President thereupon observed that her father had merely required work and good conduct. This appraisal is that of the magistrate, within the printed dialogue.
The answers that followed could not all be made to fit the version suggested by the questions. Had Jouve promised her marriage? Yes. Had he subsequently proposed to take her away? She replied that they had decided together. Had she departed at his bidding? She stated that it was rather she who had wished it, and that an initial flight had even been contemplated a fortnight earlier. As to the warning regarding their difference in years of which Jouve availed himself, she disputed it. She had never spoken of their marriage to her parents: she knew they would refuse on account of his antecedents. Her replies thus bore out certain of Jouve’s assertions whilst contradicting others.
The flight occurred on the evening of the 26th of September, according to her account. Jouve went forth first; she joined him half an hour later. She then spoke to him of the letter left for her parents. Concerning the twenty francs, she contradicted her younger sister: no one had asked her to carry away the money, she asserted, and that sum belonged to her, having not been purloined from the workmen’s wages. She conceded, however, that it had served to pay for their nights in the furnished rooms. A material detail thus reconciled the opposing narratives in the midst of their discord, without resolving of itself the question of who took the initiative in their flight.
Marie added that Jouve had spoken to her of the risk of prosecution for the abduction of a minor, but had assured her that all would be arranged and that they would marry. He claimed to have verified her consent once more at their rendezvous in the Rue Vercingétorix. Interrogated regarding this little admonition, she replied that she had no recollection of it. Another workman, Bourdelier, had overheard a meeting being arranged for the 26th of September. The Gazette gives two different street numbers in these depositions, 204 and then 104; they do not permit one to fix a certain address here.
Advocate-General Manuel sustained the prosecution; Maître Canot presented the defence. The journal does not summarize their pleadings. Jouve was found guilty, with the benefit of extenuating circumstances, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The report records neither the specific grounds for the jury’s clemency, nor Marie’s subsequent life after the trial. It leaves behind a letter that promised a situation, an adolescent girl heard in the midst of adults who interpreted her departure, and a sentence pronounced against a man of thirty-five. The promise of marriage had not effaced those twenty years of difference.