One hundred and fifty-three witnesses recognised her as the Marquise de Douhault. They had been formally interrogated; they had looked upon her face, heard the cadence of her voice, and matched their own recollections against hers. And yet, this woman could not recover her name. Against her stood the memory of a dead woman whose survivor she claimed to be, the record of a prisoner whose double she refused to remain, and a mass of official documents endowed, before the magistrates, with an authority that her living presence could not overturn.
The Champignelles affair, as recounted by Arthur Griffiths in his historical miscellany devoted to police and crime, opens before a barred gate. In October 1791, a lady clad in mourning presented herself before the ancestral château, demanding entry into what she termed her own home. The concierge replied that the Marquise de Douhault had been dead these three years, and that her brother had left strict orders. She raised her veil. The gate remained shut.
On the morrow, she was discovered in the village church, praying beside the tomb of the man she claimed as her father. Several parishioners were struck by her resemblance to the deceased noblewoman; others questioned the maidservant who accompanied her. The visitor’s answer never wavered: she was indeed the Marquise, though her brother refused to acknowledge her. The inhabitants were subsequently summoned by beat of drum to pronounce upon her identity. Griffiths numbers ninety-six who came forward, among them soldiers, officers, and members of the municipality. She recalled family particulars and intimate circumstances that her listeners found entirely persuasive.
These public recognitions afforded her the means to lay her claim before the courts of law. She demanded her rightful portion of the Champignelles estate, together with the revenues of which she alleged she had been deprived during her absence. The contest thus assumed a formidable aspect: to restore her possessions, the law had first to restore her very existence; to deny them, it became necessary to explain who this woman was, whom so many souls swore they knew.
Her narrative, set forth in the memorials prepared for her defence, had its origin in a domestic quarrel. Following the father’s demise, the son had supposedly prevailed upon his mother to surrender her rights in the family estates in exchange for an annuity—a sum he subsequently neglected to pay. The Marquise likewise accused him of having obtained her signature upon a blank sheet of paper. The mother, reduced to pledging her jewels, had called upon her daughter for aid. The latter had espoused her cause, threatened her brother with litigation, and resolved to repair to Paris to join forces with her.
The traveller claimed to have departed on the day after Christmas in 1787. At Orléans, she accepted the hospitality of acquaintances. On the 15th of January following, prior to resuming her journey, she went out in a carriage; a lady of her acquaintance allegedly offered her a pinch of snuff. She remembered a violent pain in the head, a heavy stupor, and then nothingness. When her senses returned, she was confined within the walls of the Salpêtrière. There, she was not called Douhault, but Buirette.
She related how she had protested, demanded her liberty, and sought to alert her kin. After seventeen months, an appeal addressed to the Duchesse de Polignac had at last procured her release, on the 13th of July 1789. But her brother cast her off, an uncle failed to recognise her, and she was informed that her mother was no longer of this world. She claimed to have found protectors at Versailles, and subsequently men of law willing to espouse her cause at the cost of crushing financial engagements. Such was the claimant’s version: a family that had caused her to disappear, and had then procured her death certificate in order to seize upon her inheritance.
The brother offered a wholly contrary narrative. He began by accusing the visitor of seeking to carry the château by storm with an armed band of three hundred men. Above all, he maintained that she was none other than Anne Buirette, a former inmate of the Salpêtrière. According to the documents produced against her, this Buirette had turned to her own profit a royal bounty intended to redeem pledges left at the Mont-de-Piété: passing herself off as a person attached to the Court, she had gathered up pawn-tickets and embezzled the funds destined for their redemption. In place of a persecuted heiress, the defence thus presented to the judges the portrait of a seasoned swindler.
One date weighed heavily in the balance: the 3rd of January 1786. The claimant had stated this as the day of her committal to the Salpêtrière. Yet it was incontrovertibly established that the Marquise had lived freely upon her own lands throughout 1786 and 1787. How could it be maintained that they were one and the same person? To this difficulty were added ill-spelt letters and a confusion regarding the Christian names of the Marquis. Opposing counsel contrasted these blunders with the refined education of the true lady, who had been known as an accomplished musician, cultured, and mistress of several tongues.
They produced, moreover, sworn attestations concerning the Marquise’s last illness, the administration of the last sacraments, and her solemn interment. A whole sequence of public acts surrounded that demise: physicians, relatives, the local municipality, the public mourning of the family. It seemed improbable that a death attested in so many ways could have been an invention. Yet when the claimant’s advocates examined the record, the edifice appeared less secure. They observed that the death certificate itself had not been produced in original form, and that the illiterate letters were mere copies, not the originals.
Nor did the physical examination of the body resolve the debate. It had been asserted that the Marquise had blue eyes and walked with a limp, whereas the visitor was said to possess dark eyes and an even gait. The latter demonstrated that she did limp, and that her eyes were indeed blue. She exhibited, furthermore, a scar that she attributed to a sword-thrust received long ago from her husband. The civil tribunal of Saint-Fargeau nevertheless declined to recognise her identity, relying principally upon the date of her entry into the Salpêtrière.
The appeals dragged on. After years of litigation, the cause was remitted to Bourges with three distinct questions: Was the Marquise truly dead? Was the claimant Anne Buirette? And, if she were not, could she be the Marquise? The very date of the alleged decease dissolved upon scrutiny: some named the 17th of January 1788, others the 18th, and others still the 19th. The circumstances of the death were likewise disputed. The depositions of the witnesses upon the question of identity were utterly at variance. Eighteen recognised her as Buirette; fourteen found no resemblance whatever, among them Buirette’s own husband. Out of two hundred and twenty-four persons examined touching the Marquise, one hundred and fifty-three declared on oath that they recognised her.
Handwriting experts were called to compare the scripts. They set the Marquise’s letters, written prior to her supposed demise, against those of the claimant; they also denounced certain documents attributed to her as forgeries. She finally explained the discrepancy of the 1786 date as a lapse of memory. The court at Bourges nevertheless confirmed the judgment against her. The myriad testimonies and expert opinions had multiplied the grounds for doubt without securing for her the recognition she sought.
Griffiths records that in the course of subsequent hearings, under the Consulate and the Empire, she succeeded in establishing that she was not Anne Buirette. Yet this did not suffice to prove that she was Douhault. The chronicler leaves the mystery unresolved. His account concludes upon a final prohibition: when she died, the authorities reportedly refused to allow any name to be chiseled upon her headstone. The gate of the château had been closed against her; and even the slab destined to cover her bones was forbidden to declare who she had been.