The boy was alive in one gazette and dead in the other. Between these two dispatches out of Paris, he possessed neither name nor family; he had only fourteen years and the trade of running errands. The English sheets were far more in agreement concerning the fate of his assailant: Jacques François Paschal had been executed upon the Place de Grève. To recount the condemned man’s end, they found hours, garments, carriages. To find the child once more, we must make our way through their contradictions.
The affair began at a door across which a young messenger was enticed. On October 3, 1783, according to the text of the sentence translated in the Gazetteer, Paschal lured him into his room. Another journal, the Derby Mercury, places the lad at the corner of the Rue Poissonnière, where he stood waiting for commissions, and thence conducts him to a convent in Montmartre. These particulars do not carry the authority of an original surviving deposition; they belong to the narrative which a traveller claimed to bring back from his Parisian sojourn.
The Locked Door
In this latter version, the religious was said to have used the pretext of confession to isolate the child. The place and the habit were calculated to reassure one whom a proposal made in the public thoroughfare might perhaps have put on his guard. Yet nothing in the consulted records permits us to know what the boy thought as he stepped inside. We know only what subsequent narratives ascribe to him: he resisted the sexual assault, and Paschal struck him repeatedly with a knife.
The Derby Mercury pursues the story behind a locked door. The monk fails to appear at vespers; his absence leads the superior to send someone to his cell. They knock without receiving any answer. An order is given to force an entry. The lad is discovered grievously wounded, and the man they sought is no longer there. An ordinary absence from divine service thus becomes, in the newspaper’s narrative, the means of unmasking a crime its perpetrator had sought to keep shut away.
Assistance arrives. Still according to this account, the child was able to name his assailant before he expired. The police dispatched men in his pursuit; Paschal was said to have been seized the following day in the forest of Saint-Germain, clad in peasant’s garb, and thence brought back to the Grand Châtelet. This course of events lends the chase the neatness of a finished tale: a discovery, a dying declaration, a flight, a capture. It is precisely this neatness that the other sheets compel us to scrutinise.
The Gazetteer, in truth, announced that the child was not dead.
What the Sentence Dictated
Its dispatch of October 21 is distinguished by a lengthy passage presented as the translation of the French court’s judgment. It provides Paschal’s full name, the date of the crime, and the age and calling of the lad. It describes an attempted murder following his resistance. This is no mere matter of vocabulary between two journalists: the survival of the victim alters the resolution of the crime, even if it did not avert the capital conviction of its author.
The text decrees an amende honorable before the principal portal of Notre-Dame. Paschal was to be conveyed thither in a cart, in his shirt, bareheaded and barefoot, a torch in his hand and a rope about his neck. Placards were to announce the nature of his crimes. The court regulated what the crowd was to see before the condemned man even arrived; his person became the mobile scaffold of a judicial decree.
He was also required to speak. On his knees, in an intelligible voice, he had to confess the prescribed facts and beg forgiveness of God, the King, and Justice. This public declaration cannot be read as a confidence freely surrendered to posterity. The judgment had drafted the words and commanded their delivery. At the church’s threshold, the man was not merely to endure the sentence: he had to pronounce it against himself.
The language of the justice of that day conflated the suppression of sexual acts, then punished as such, with that of violence committed against a child. We shall not adopt that confusion. What brings this affair into these pages is an assault and the stabs that followed it. The existence of consensual relations between adults can offer neither explanation nor excuse for such violence.
Seven Days or Twenty
After Notre-Dame came the Place de Grève. The penalty called for the wheel, then the flames. Guyot’s legal repertory, cited in a recent academic study, preserves the date of October 10, 1783, and links both sentences. It provides a narrower footing than the sensational accounts of travellers; it does not, however, reconstruct the entirety of the interrogations, the evidence, and the deliberations that preceded the decree.
The English accounts likewise state that Paschal was executed on the 10th. Yet the Derby Mercury, while repeating that date, claims that twenty days were allowed to elapse in order to assemble executioners summoned from the provinces. If the assault took place on October 3, these twenty days cannot be compressed into the following week. The confidence with which a correspondent corrects his brethren does not suffice to render his own chronology plausible.
The Caledonian Mercury offers yet another pace: a trial in the afternoon, followed by an execution two hours later. It allows us no better means of establishing with certainty the successive stages of the procedure. We shall leave these hours to the sheets that advance them. What remains common to all relations is the public nature of the execution and its outcome: Paschal did not leave the Place de Grève alive.
The Spectacle of the Scaffold
When describing the executioner, the correspondents become lavish. They equip him with an elegant carriage, scarlet and gold, and liveried footmen; one even employs the English name of Jack Ketch to designate the Parisian headsman. This detail reminds us for whom the printed spectacle was intended. The foreign scene had to be made sufficiently recognisable to be sold to readers who were not there.
The depiction of the condemned man follows the same course. They report his countenance, his pleas, his cries. We need not prolong their display to grasp what the law intended to accomplish: it sought to make punishment a visible event, and the tormented body an answer to the horror of the crime. The gazettes carried that answer far beyond those who had stood upon the square.
All the while, the boy remained at the margins of the narrative. In one version, his dying words had enabled the capture; in the other, he survived his wounds. None of the reports consulted allows us to follow his subsequent path. To grant him a recovery, a certain death, or a family regained would not complete the affair: it would merely substitute our longing for a conclusion in place of what we do not know.
Paschal had a name upon the court judgment and in the printed sheets. The child had carried the messages of others; when he himself became the subject of a dispatch, the messengers could not agree upon his fate. It is there that this history halts, after the conviction and execution of the assailant, before a question that the spectacle had left unresolved: who continued to look after the boy?