Monsieur Tiquet was still alive, and this circumstance ought to have been the best news of the evening. Yet it became the threshold of a trial that would lead his wife to the scaffold. He had been struck down in the street; neighbours had rushed forth at the sound of firearms; the magistrate had survived his wounds. It remained to be discovered who had wished to make a corpse of him, and why his earliest suspicion drew him straight back to his own hearth.
In the Paris of 1699, the Tiquet marriage had long ceased to be that brilliant alliance promised by their fortunes and appearances. Angélique-Nicole Carlier had brought money, wit, and a beauty of which chroniclers would speak with an insistence almost as great as of the crime itself. Claude Tiquet had brought his standing as a councillor to the Parlement. Each, to read the old accounts, had discerned in the other a promise that life under the same roof had made it its business to belie.
What Is Divided and What Remains
There were children, expenses, and creditors; there was also a judicial separation of property, which might preserve an estate without dissolving the wedlock. The spouses lived beneath the same roof, but their house had ceased to be an abode of trust. The chronicle published by Champagnac in 1833 portrays them sequestered in their respective apartments, reducing their encounters to the dinner table. This image, drawn from a late narrative, nonetheless measures the domestic drama: one can be near enough to keep watch over a person, yet too far away to speak to them.
The name of Montgeorge, a captain in the Guards, ran through their quarrels. Ancient authors saw in him the dashing lover opposed to the wearisome husband; their certainty regarding the desires of each warrants greater reserve than their dates. It would be convenient to draw the crime from a single passion, as one draws a thread from a cloth. The affair also brought into play money, power within the household, the role of domestic servants, and the ease with which a confidence may be forged into a weapon.
An initial plot had been entrusted, according to the prosecution, to Auguste Cattelain and the house porter. Money had allegedly been given or promised them to assassinate the magistrate. The scheme came to nothing. For a time, the secret lingered among men whom success would have enriched and whom failure rendered perilous to the woman who had sought their aid.
The Door and the Key
In this household, the porter was not merely a servant charged with opening the gate. He knew who arrived, who waited, who was to be admitted without a sound. The councillor, suspecting him of abetting meetings he abhorred, cast him out. The chronicles relate that he thenceforth kept the key himself. Such precaution resembles a victory; above all, it reveals the state of a household where one imagines security can be regained by carrying the lock upon one's person.
Other attempts figure in the narratives, notably a poisoned broth that a valet was said to have dropped intentionally. The episode is dramatic; we retain it in its proper station as a reported tradition, without ascribing to it the weight of an exhibit we have ourselves examined. It behoves us not to embellish a criminal docket simply because a handsome scene presents itself to hand.
Then came the ambush of 1699. Blows and shots were rained upon the councillor; he refused, according to the chronicle, to be carried back to his own residence, demanding instead to be conveyed to the house of neighbours. One easily imagines what this refusal must have meant to the servants gathered at the door: the house where the wounded man ought to have been tended became, in his eyes, the very seat of danger. That interpretation is ours; the gesture is that which the narratives have handed down.
A Secret Three Years Old
The husband's suspicion alone was not sufficient to establish his wife's guilt. Cattelain then came forward to declare that she had paid him, several years prior, to orchestrate a murder. Thus the inquiry opened into a recent assault resurrected an ancient design. A failed crime, which its perpetrators had perhaps hoped would vanish with the passage of time, regained a judicial existence from the mouth of one of the confederates.
The accused did not take flight. The chroniclers explain this resolve by her composure or her powers of seduction; they profess to know with singular ease what passes through the minds of the women they condemn. It suffices here to observe that she remained and faced the prosecution. Her presence was no proof of innocence, any more than her beauty was proof of cunning.
The decisive point is often lost in abridgements: according to Champagnac's account, the evidence did not suffice to convict her of participation in the latest attack; the capital sentence rested upon the earlier machination. The affair, therefore, is not merely that of a woman arrested after her husband was wounded. It is that of an older criminal intent, denounced by an accomplice, which the law deemed punishable by death.
The Husband Pleads for Clemency
By June, the sentence was pronounced. Madame Tiquet was to be beheaded, her porter hanged. Cattelain was condemned to the galleys. Responsibilities, ranks, and penalties were distributed far differently than in the house where their destinies had been intertwined.
The councillor, accompanied by his children, petitioned for his wife's pardon. It is one of the most arresting reversals in the affair: the man who had declared his life threatened by her now sought to avert her death. One may discern in this compassion, thought for the children, refusal of a public disgrace, or several tangled motives. We shall not choose among them to fashion him a heart of glass. He undertook this appeal; it did not attain the hoped-for result.
Around this singular case there arose a far vaster discourse concerning the security of husbands and the disorders of women. The punishment was turned into an example. The moment justice pretends to reassure an entire class of persons through the death of a single individual, the docket changes its nature: the accused must answer for her own deed and for all the terrors deposited upon it.
What the Crowd Carried Away
Madame Tiquet was executed on the Place de Grève in June 1699. The accounts dwell upon her bearing, upon the dreadful bungling of the beheading, and upon the emotion of the onlookers. They ascribe to her words, gestures of repentance, and a composure that fascinated the very souls who had demanded her punishment. We have no need to rehearse these final utterances to measure the violence of such an end.
A funeral oration, moral treatises, and street ballads soon prolonged the affair. The condemned woman became by turns an exemplary sinner, a tragic beauty, a warning directed at wives. The magistrate had survived; the children had their lives to lead; the porter had lost his. But the public memory seized above all upon the countenance of Madame Tiquet, as though that beauty, so much discussed, could explain what money, marriage, and the courts of law had left unresolved.
In the end, it was no door that closed upon the secret of the Tiquets. It was books that were opened, and each reader sought within them the moral he had brought along.