More than two years upon the galleys were required before the man condemned under the name of Guillaume Babilot was at last restored to that of Remy Baronet. Prior to his departure with the chain-gang, he had been dragged before the magistrate, branded with a red-hot iron, and cast into prison as a forger and despoiler of estates; following the decree of August 26, 1778, these dishonourable designations were struck down by the Parlement of Paris, which discharged him of all complaints and convictions laid to his charge. Between these two extremities lay a contested inheritance, a purported paternal recognition, and a criminal proceeding that had stubbornly refused to hear the witnesses named by the accused.
Remy Baronet was born in 1717 at Saint-Hilaire-le-Petit, in the diocese of Reims, the son of a husbandman. In 1742, having acquired no trade and being past the age to begin an apprenticeship, he entered domestic service. For twenty-two years, he laboured under various masters across diverse towns and hamlets. This prolonged absence kept him far removed from his family’s affairs until 1764, when he learned that his sister of the full blood, Françoise, the widow of Quentin Lamort, had obtained a judgment placing her in possession of the estate devolving from their mother’s succession.
Remy Aubert, the husband of his uterine sister Nicole Carnot, sought him out at Saint-Thibaut. The two men settled Baronet’s rightful portion, and the latter conveyed his hereditary rights to his brother-in-law for the sum of five hundred livres. Aubert served formal notice of the contract upon the widow Lamort; she refused to execute it, maintaining that the vendor was not her brother at all, but an impostor who had usurped his name. The contract stripped her of the enjoyment of property she had grown accustomed to treating as her own during Remy’s long absence; the identity of the vendor thus became the vital pivot upon which the entire lawsuit turned.
To cut short all dispute, Aubert urged Baronet to return to the village and have himself acknowledged by his kinsfolk. On Sunday, June 17, 1764, Remy presented himself at the parish church of Saint-Hilaire. Several inhabitants recognised him at once; six of them caused their declarations to be formally recorded by the local notary. The judge, seized of this instrument of notoriety, ordered the execution of the conveyance and dismissed the widow’s claims.
This adjudication, however, did not extinguish the feud. The widow Lamort lodged an appeal before the bailiwick of Reims and initiated a plea of forgery against the contract. The chronicler Champagnac asserts that she sought to pass Remy off as the son of a vine-dresser from Avaux-le-Château, one François Babilot, whose son Guillaume had been missing for several years. According to the chronicler, she entered into an understanding with the parish priest Roland, a kinsman of her late husband, and arranged to have Baronet invited to the parsonage. Baronet repaired thither without mistrust, accompanied by Aubert.
Scarcely had he arrived when the elder François Babilot entered, attended by several persons. He looked upon Baronet and declared that he recognised him as his son. Remy instantly denied it: he knew nothing of this man and was in no wise his child. Babilot then alleged a birthmark which Guillaume was said to bear upon his thigh. Baronet bared his legs; they were examined, and the promised mark was nowhere to be seen. This circumstance ought to have halted the pretended recognition in its tracks. Instead, witnesses went forth into the village repeating that the father had acknowledged his son, while entirely omitting the physical examination that gave the lie to their tale.
Babilot subsequently wished to retract his assertion, but his wife, according to the chronicle, dissuaded him. The claim had already spread and found ears all too willing to credit it. The widow Lamort persisted: the man who had signed the deed of sale under the name of Remy Baronet was none other than Guillaume Babilot, returned from a prolonged absence to usurp the heir’s identity. On March 18, 1769, the bailiwick annulled the conveyance, forbade Baronet to bear that name, and issued a warrant for his arrest.
Remy appealed the sentence and was conveyed to the prisons of Reims. In November, he escaped during a general prison-break orchestrated by other captives. Taking refuge at Aubert’s house, he was apprehended anew, and in 1770 was stricken with scurvy. The magistrate ordered his transfer to the Conciergerie. On May 5, a decree admitted his appeal against the extraordinary proceedings of the bailiwick. He languished for more than a year in the Conciergerie before being remanded to the original magistrates for the further instruction of the case. Returned to the gaol of Reims, he escaped a second time, fled once more to Aubert’s dwelling, and was taken into custody yet again.
The renewed inquest did not open the contradictory hearing Baronet implored, according to the account. The magistrates contented themselves with re-examining and confronting the witnesses already heard. He petitioned for supplementary inquiries and named the persons he wished to produce; his pleas were summarily rejected. On October 29, 1773, the bailiwick delivered its final judgment: under the name of Guillaume Babilot, he was pronounced a forger and despoiler of estates. He was condemned to make the *amende honorable*, stripped to his shirt, a halter about his neck, a torch in his hands, and bearing an inscription; to be branded by the executioner; and to be conveyed to the galleys for life.
A petition for clemency renewed his plea for an expanded investigation, but it went unheeded. On January 14, 1774, the sentence was confirmed, and Baronet, loaded with irons, was returned to the dungeons of Reims. When the day of execution arrived, he was delivered to the headsman, led into the midst of the populace, and compelled to declare that he had maliciously discarded the name of Babilot to usurp that of Baronet. He was commanded to crave pardon of God, the King, and Justice. The chronicle records that he refused these final words, since they required him to confess to an imposture he utterly denied.
The executioner drove the glowing brand down to the very bone, according to Champagnac. Baronet was returned to his cell, branded and stripped of his civil status, then delivered into the custody of the captain of the chain-gang, the Sieur Prevots. The latter conducted him to Paris and deposited him at the Tour Saint-Bernard under the judicial identity of Guillaume Babilot. A sister of the true Guillaume, Laurence, who was in domestic service in Paris, learned of his confinement there. She repaired to the tower and was confronted with the man whom the legal instruments designated as her brother.
The gaoler, his wife, and several guests witnessed the encounter. Questioned as to the bond between himself and Laurence, Baronet replied that he did not know the woman. She, in turn, declared that she had never laid eyes upon this man, that he bore no resemblance whatever to Guillaume, and that whereas her brother was well-proportioned, the prisoner was a hunchback. She concluded that an innocent man had been condemned and that the sentence was utter madness. At that juncture, the judicial machinery had stripped him of his very name; yet the sister of the man whose identity he was accused of having stolen refused to see in him her kin.
Baronet was nevertheless dragged to the galleys. For more than two years, he endured the brutal toil and wretchedness of the convicts. Persons convinced of his innocence carried his grievances to the highest authorities; the review of the proceedings was committed to the Parlement of Paris. He was uncoupled from the chain and conducted back to the Conciergerie. The account records his tears of joy and his rekindled hope of vindication: he was at last to be heard by a high court empowered to rehear the cause.
By its decree of August 26, 1778, the Parlement discharged him of all complaints and accusations brought against him, as well as of the sentences pronounced by the bailiwick of Reims under the name of Guillaume Babilot. The high court restored to him his name and his civil rights. This adjudication publicly reaffirmed the true identity that the notarial deed of 1764 and the six villagers of Saint-Hilaire had already attested, but which the lower tribunal had blotted out. The narrative does not recount every detail of the review nor the subsequent fate of the other actors; it demonstrates solely the judicial conclusion of Baronet’s ordeal.
An inheritance of five hundred livres had thus dragged a man from a Champagne village through the dungeons of Reims, the cells of the Conciergerie, and the horrors of the galleys. He had stood in the dock accused of stealing another’s name, while the paternal acknowledgment brought against him rested upon an absent birthmark and upon village gossip stripped of its most decisive detail. The neighbours who had known Baronet, the witnesses who had attended the physical examination, and Laurence, who saw no brother in his features, formed so many voices that the original judges had refused to hear. Only after the burning iron and years in chains did the law restore to Remy Baronet that which it had first wrested away: his own name.