The copper was valued at fifty-eight francs and eighty centimes. The reporting commissioner demanded six years in irons. Between these two measures—that of an object and that of a human life—lay a few words from an ancient statute, and a man seated before his judges who did not deny having stolen. Liziard had confessed to the facts. One might therefore have supposed that nothing remained but to sentence him. Yet his advocate was about to initiate an argument in which every term would determine the measure of what he was made to endure.
In the courtroom we picture in Brest, a clerk takes notes while carefully preserving the margin of his sheet. He has recorded the value of the copper without hesitation. When the required sentence is pronounced, he lifts his eyes, looks upon the accused, then returns to his paper. Figures occupy very little space. It takes far longer to comprehend the years they have just demanded from a man.
Beneath the Fire Bucket
Liziard was employed as an office keeper for the convict administration, amidst the world of the hulks and the naval arsenal of Brest. He had served five years in the cavalry. At his trial, he produced honorable testimonials; the prosecution charged him with no prior misconduct in the port before that which brought him before the tribunal. This absence of past reproach made the theft no less actual. It lent, however, a certain substance to the name inscribed in the proceedings: before that day, a man had laboured there without ever being marked as a thief.
For several days, he had noticed an ingot of copper beneath one of the fire buckets—those vats intended to hold water in readiness. The journal terms this piece a pig. It lay in the courtyard of the hulks. Liziard at last purloined it. He attributed his act to the necessities of his family. We know neither the accounts of his household nor precisely what he intended to purchase; this motive is the explanation he offered, not an inspection we were permitted to make of his home.
The location of the object was to matter as much as its value. Liziard had perceived it in the space where he worked, but was he charged with its safekeeping? Did his employment suffice to render every item of property in the port a deposit placed under his responsibility? The distinction might seem narrow to one who merely saw a watchman carrying off copper. It became immense the moment a harsher classification exposed this man to six years in chains.
On the 23rd of August 1831, he appeared before the maritime tribunal. The charges were heavy, and his confession dispensed the prosecution from a lengthy demonstration. He did not claim to have received the copper from another, did not denounce an object planted in his quarters by an enemy, and sought no witness to attest that he had been elsewhere. The dispute was to turn upon what justice was entitled to deduce from this admitted fact.
The Word That Lengthened the Sentence
The reporting commissioner invoked the law of the 12th of October 1791. A first article targeted persons specially appointed to watch over the preservation of effects: those upon whom a function, a handling, or a deposit imposed a specific custody. Another extended the same penalty to several classes of personnel, among which were keepers. Liziard bore that title. For the prosecution, these provisions led inexorably to the demand for six years in irons.
The magistrate made no attempt to disguise the severity of this punishment. He maintained that the office of the judges was to apply the laws, and that they could not substitute their own sentiment for what was prescribed by statute. There remained the possibility of a petition for clemency or commutation. Yet he also called into question the right of the maritime tribunal to recommend a condemned man to mercy. At this point in the address, the chronicle notes signs of disagreement among the judges.
To support his doubt, the commissioner recalled the case of another keeper, named Hult, convicted in a separate case of theft. A recommendation had been submitted on his behalf; several months had elapsed without an answer. The silence of the administration thus entered the debate as though it were capable of construing the law. Liziard listened as they spoke of an absent man whose petition had never returned. Even the hope of favour appeared to possess its bureaux, its long delays, and its bolted doors.
Our clerk, at the back of the courtroom, seeks where to place this discussion within his notes. He had set aside one line for the requisitions and another for the defense. The shifting nods of the judges fit into neither heading. He inserts a few words between two sentences, rereads them, then holds his pen suspended. For once, what takes place before him overflows the space he had reserved for customary forms.
What Was Not in His Keeping
Maître Clérec the elder spoke for Liziard. He did not attempt to erase the theft. He asked that the court reread together the two articles upon which the requisition rested. The second spoke of the theft already defined by the first; it was therefore essential to preserve, in their application, the vital condition of that definition. The title of keeper was not enough. It was further required that the stolen object be among those specially placed under that man's surveillance, handling, or deposit.
Now, the defense maintained, Liziard was not charged with watching over the preservation of this piece of copper. The prosecution could not dissolve this boundary merely by aligning the word employed in the statute with that which designated his post. He remained guilty of theft, but not of that particular theft to which the demanded penalty was attached. Counsel pleaded for the application of another provision, relating to simple theft above a certain value.
It was a defense whose utility was not measured by the brilliance of a sudden revelation. No stranger burst into the hall to proclaim his own guilt; no hidden document came forward to overthrow the testimonies. The object remained stolen, and the man remained he who had taken it. The difference hung upon an obligation that had never been his, and which could not be fastened upon him after the fact merely to punish him more severely.
The tribunal admitted this reasoning. It acknowledged that Liziard had not been specially charged with the preservation of the copper. It sentenced him for simple theft to the pillory, to a fine of three times the value of the object, to expulsion from the arsenal, and to civic degradation. The six years in irons demanded by the prosecution were not pronounced. The judgment spared him that fate without restoring his employment, without preserving his civil rights, and without saving him from an infamous punishment.
The Arsenal Gate
The affair did not end with the first judgment. The public prosecutor petitioned for revision. What had been gained by the defense thus remained in jeopardy of being overturned. The council of revision, convening on the 30th of August, nonetheless confirmed the decision. It is at this conclusion that the judicial account published a few days later leaves off. It does not depict Liziard’s exhibition in the pillory, nor does it recount how his family lived thereafter.
The correspondent, for his part, pursued the debate. He contested the doubt expressed regarding recommendations for clemency and denounced the harshness of that justice peculiar to the ports. In his view, the absence of an answer in Hult's case might well be explained by an oversight in the government offices; it did not establish a prohibition against soliciting royal mercy. Liziard had thus brought to light, far beyond his own offense, a dispute concerning punishments and the authorities empowered to mitigate them.
One might read this debate as a mere wrangle between men of the law. Yet it required only a return to the sentence to restore its human weight. A man had invoked the needs of his kin; he was henceforth cast out from the place where he earned his bread and condemned to pay a fine. Counsel had spared him the chains demanded of him. He had not obtained that, once the sentence was passed, life might return to what it had been before the copper.
In our final scene, the clerk files his notes beside a duty roster where Liziard’s name still appears. He compares the two sheets. On the one, this man possesses an office; on the other, he must depart the arsenal forever. The clerk slips the roster back beneath the others without amending it: that is not his duty. Then he closes his register and prepares that of the morrow, wherein someone will indeed have to record who takes the keeper's place.