The phial had already served to condemn Étienne Pacot before the jurors of Lons-le-Saulnier concluded that it was not even established that a poisoning had ever taken place. Between these two judgments, the abbé endured three judicial examinations, two protracted confinements in solitary cells, a sentence of death, and an appeal whose supporting papers were willfully withheld. When the final jury pronounced his acquittal, they did so in the prisoner’s absence. The law restored his liberty; it restored neither his worldly goods nor the years during which suspition had consumed his life.
Pacot was a priest and a landowner at Bourberain, in the Côte-d’Or. The Revolution had compelled him to abandon his parish; he had accordingly retired to his estates. A man named Prétot subsequently came to settle within the commune. The memorial Pacot later committed to print depicts their acquaintance at first as that of a host received without mistrust, before proceeding to recount thefts committed within his dwelling and two attempts upon his person. On the first occasion, Prétot was alleged to have discharged a firearm through the window; Nicolas Miel, who accompanied him, later gave an account of the deed to the authorities. The second occurred along the Bèze road, on the 7th Nivôse, Year VII: a pistol shot was fired at Pacot. The jury held that Prétot had harboured no intention to take his life; he was sentenced merely to one month of imprisonment and a fine of twenty-five francs.
The affair that brought about Pacot’s arrest had its origin in half a bottle of liquor. On the 7th Germinal, Year IX, Prétot related to two of Pacot’s tenant farmers that his wife and he had partaken of half the contents of a vessel forwarded to him two days earlier as a sample of wine. Two health officers were halted within the commune and summoned to taste the remainder. The one deemed the cordial sweet, remarking only a slight heat after some interval; the other pronounced it corrosive. The chronicle records no visible alteration in Prétot’s physical condition. He did not immediately inform the mayor, whose dwelling was separated from his own merely by a party wall, nor did he repair to the justice of the peace, who was his friend.
Prétot proceeded on foot to Dijon, returning subsequently to Bourberain before lodging a complaint on the morrow. He then declared himself ignorant of the perpetrator’s identity. Within four-and-twenty hours, he withdrew his complaint. Shortly thereafter, rumorous tongues pointed toward Pacot; Prétot in turn professed to have suspected him from the outset, affirming he possessed no other foe. According to the abbé’s memorial, the woman alleged to have witnessed Prétot’s bouts of vomiting was induced to swear to them during her interrogation, though she had observed no such symptoms. Thus did the narrative of poison and the initial charge take shape through piecemeal contrivance, rather than by virtue of an immediate complaint supported by medical inspection.
Pacot was placed under arrest. Prétot presented himself with a musket to accompany the constabulary. Louise Poinsot, the abbé’s serving-maid, was apprehended alongside him. A search conducted by two gendarmes discovered no arsenic; two days later, the justice of the peace renewed the search, accompanied by the accuser’s brother-in-law as witness. The latter had abandoned his flock to go out to meet the magistrate. The memorial subsequently attributes to this man the confession of having received from Prétot a paper cornet of white powder, intended to be secretly planted within Pacot’s house.
There remained the dregs of a medicinal lemonade containing salts of sorrel. Rather than summon a sworn expert at the outset, the justice of the peace caused a chick to swallow the draught and shut the creature within a closed soup tureen. The maidservant lifted the lid before the fowl was smothered. In Pacot’s relation, the incident demonstrates how a clumsy trial might well have been mistaken for proof of poison. The abbé and Louise were held in solitary confinement: ninety days for him, while the examining magistrate laboured to prove that his servant had conveyed the bottle to Prétot.
Certain children asserted that they had caught sight of a girl carrying a flagon. They recognized articles of dress resembling those worn by Louise, yet their recollection of her features remained doubtful: one believed he could identify her, whilst the others had not looked with sufficient care. During the examinations, the memorial relates, great pressure was brought to bear upon Louise, and it was suggested that a confession implicating her master would spare her own neck. The foreman of the jury was said to have told her that her master’s guilt was established and that she would perish with him; four men subsequently entered her cell, promising that the prison gates would be thrown open if she would but confirm what the court professed already to know. Louise refused to utter the expected accusation.
At the initial stage, the grand jury declared unanimously that there were no grounds for prosecuting Pacot. Louise, however, was committed for trial on account of contradictions discerned within her depositions. Then a question of age arose: one of the jurors participating in that first deliberation had not attained thirty years. The government commissioner demanded the annulment of the proceedings. Five months after their pronouncement, the criminal court of Dijon quashed the rulings, notwithstanding that no party had appealed the finding favourable to Pacot within the lawful term. A fresh investigation was instituted against him.
On the 1st Nivôse, Year X, the gendarmes arrested the abbé once more at nine of the clock in the evening, seizing his private papers, which, according to his memorial, were never restored to him. On this occasion, he endured one hundred and three days of solitary confinement. A third inquiry joined Pacot and Louise with another female domestic. All three were remanded to the court of assizes after an indicting jury had been reconstituted under contested conditions. One juror later recounted that he had been summoned merely to replace an absentee, but that all had already been settled and he had only to affix his signature; another declared that the magistrates had instructed the jurors to take no part in the decision.
Twelve special jurors were to decide Pacot’s fate; five were wanting. The memorial maintains that they were replaced without a drawing of lots, by arbitrary appointment. A witness for the prosecution, a court clerk from the first examination, deposed that he had heard Louise state she had carried the bottle without knowing its contents. Louise retorted that he had himself repeatedly told her such an admission would suffice to secure her release. The clerk held his peace. Yet Pacot heard the sentence of death pronounced against him. The two serving-women were acquitted. The criminal verdict and the irregularities of which the abbé complained thus converged at the most perilous juncture: in a capital sentence against which he possessed scarcely any means of seeking review.
He had three days remaining in which to lodge an appeal in cassation. Confined to his cell, Pacot was unable to convey his petition to the bench. His elder brother, newly returned from exile, succeeded in penetrating his dungeon and providing him with the means to petition. Forty days elapsed before the trial papers were dispatched to the supreme court. In the interim, the rigours of his confinement and Pacot’s failing health had grown worse. Louise sold to her brother the meagre goods she possessed and set out on foot for Paris. She sought an audience with the Minister of Justice, Count Abrial, who promised her he would order the transmission of the documents.
Pacot addressed a letter to the government commissioner to inquire why the files had still not been dispatched. That very day he received a memorandum stating that they had been forwarded ten days earlier. Yet Abrial did not receive them until the 3rd Thermidor, two days following the date of the letter. The Court of Cassation ultimately quashed the capital conviction on the ground that the jurors had not been chosen by lot. Seventeen days passed before this ruling was communicated to Pacot; thirty more before his transfer to Lons-le-Saulnier.
The new jury arrived at a unanimous verdict: Pacot was not guilty, and it was not established that any poisoning had even occurred. Prétot maintained that he had absorbed a heavy dose and had suffered only from colic and vomiting. In open court, Pacot’s counsel confronted him with the contents of the phial, daring him to swallow a fourth part of what remained. Prétot remained silent. The chronicler presents this moment as the utter collapse of the prosecution; the verdict itself was an acquittal pronounced in Pacot’s absence. He was thus precluded from moving for damages against his accuser during that same sitting.
Imprisonment had likewise laid waste the abbé’s worldly estate. To satisfy the costs of the initial proceedings, his lands had been put up for sale. The memorial records that one of Pacot’s own judges purchased one of the parcels. He subsequently sought restitution on behalf of his family, protesting that he acted not for himself, being by then past fourscore years of age. In 1817, when he brought forth his petitions, the magistrates condemned him as a slanderer. The tract he subsequently published in conjunction with the advocate Dupin asserted his innocence anew, inquiring why society retained the power to prosecute without ever repairing the grievous injury wrought by its own errors.
At Saint-Sulpice, Pacot would still dwell upon this question with the writer L. Hubert, the author of a tale devoted to the vindicated accused. The two men debated the limits of indemnification: how might one reckon the price of days spent in a dungeon, ruined health, shattered fortunes, and the dishonour cast upon a family? Hubert set forth the arguments of public policy that rendered compensation difficult; Pacot returned ever to his own experience—that of a man condemned to the scaffold for a poisoning that the final jury did not even deem to have occurred. Champagnac observes that this thought henceforth held absolute sway over the mind of the abbé, who had been placed in an asylum. His memorial had not merely preserved the sequence of decrees; it bore the question to which, from the hour of his release until his death, he never ceased to demand an answer.