On Sunday, 25 July 1655, a mendicant entered the principal church of Vernon accompanied by a boy. Certain inhabitants believed they recognized the lost child of a widow of the town. Others did not recognize him. The likeness struck several witnesses; it did not resolve the dispute. The father maintained that the lad was his own son. The putative mother rejected him. Before the Parlement of Paris could render its judgment, this contested identification turned a passerby into a suspect, a child into a public wager, and a mother into the accused.
The affair began with an absence. Jeanne Vacherot had married Lancelot le Moine, a notary at the Châtelet of Paris, in May 1640. The couple had three sons: Pierre, Jacques, and Louis. Upon Lancelot’s death in January 1649, his will appointed Jeanne as guardian. She raised the boys in Paris. In September 1654, business summoned her to Vernon. She took the youngest, Louis, and left Pierre, aged fourteen, and Jacques, aged ten, under the care of their grandmother and a maidservant. The two elder sons ran away with the sons of a bourgeois named Coustard. Coustard’s children were brought back to their father. Pierre and Jacques did not reappear.
Upon her return, Jeanne searched for her sons. Pitaval relates that on the steps of the Hôtel-Dieu, she chanced upon a poor man with his child. She thought she discerned in the lad some features of Jacques, yet noted differences as well. She gave alms to the father and entrusted him with the distinctive marks of the missing child, entreating him to make inquiries during his travels. This first encounter bore none of the marks of a formal recognition. It left a possibility in suspense: the boy might be Jacques, or merely resemble him.
Jeanne lodged a formal complaint on 12 May 1655 regarding the disappearance of her two sons. Two months later, the mendicant returned to Vernon with the boy. The narrative names him Jean Monrouisseau; the child, Louis. In church, townsfolk who had known Jacques saw in that face the proof for which they had been waiting. The word spread swiftly. In their eyes, Jeanne was soon transformed into a cruel stepmother colluding with the beggar to keep the child estranged from his kindred.
A crowd gathered before the inn where Monrouisseau and his son were lodged. The King’s prosecutor was on the scene; the record later reproached him for failing to quell the tumult. The father was arrested. The magistrate ordered him committed to prison without prior entry in the jail register and put irons upon his feet, according to Pitaval’s account. The boy was sent to the hospital. Jeanne was summoned for a confrontation. She was led through a gauntlet of townsfolk who hurled abuse at her. In court, Monrouisseau declared himself the father; the child called Jeanne his mother. She persisted in denying that the lad was her son.
The legal knot was tied within this contradiction. An identification made in the heat of the moment seemed to vindicate the crowd; Jeanne’s denial appeared, in turn, to confirm the suspicions harbored against her. Yet the conditions of the confrontation were contested. According to the widow’s advocates, the boy might well have been prompted by those examining him. The child was not placed under oath; the records do not permit his precise age at this juncture to be determined with certainty. He was lodged at first with a kinswoman, the widow Cretté, remaining in daily contact with persons already convinced that he was Jacques. Monrouisseau maintained his identity and demanded his son. That very evening, Jeanne set out for Paris. Pitaval records that inhabitants smashed the windowpanes of her house after her departure.
The dossier grew thicker, then shifted its ground. On 29 July, an inquiry was opened upon the petition of the King’s prosecutor. A surrogate guardian, Claude le Moine, demanded an investigation into Jeanne and caused the mendicant to be described as an abductor. On 11 August, the judge granted the boy a provisional maintenance of one hundred livres. Jeanne appealed. On 12 August, the Parlement of Paris permitted her to challenge the proceedings and enjoined the parties from prosecuting the matter elsewhere. Vernon, however, fell under the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Normandy; the local magistrates did not readily acknowledge the authority of the Parisian court. Distraints were pursued against Jeanne’s tenant farmers. The quarrel of filiation thus became a dispute of jurisdiction.
In Paris, Monrouisseau and his son were interrogated by Lamoignon, then Master of Requests. The child acknowledged Monrouisseau as his father. The versions parted once more: at Vernon, the child had pointed to Jeanne; in Paris, he disavowed her. A decree of the Privy Council, dated 2 June 1656 in Pitaval’s text, finally remanded the parties before the Parlement of Paris. The Court was obliged to hear those varied accounts that local rumor had collapsed into one.
Fresh evidence came from the eldest son. Pierre le Moine returned to his mother after years of wandering. He recounted that he and Jacques had quitted Paris, thereafter begging their bread near Saint-Waast. A gentleman, Montaud, gave them shelter for a dozen days. Jacques fell sick and died, according to Pierre’s account. The chronicle cites certificates of burial produced in support of his story; one was said to be signed by the curate, by Montaud, by local inhabitants, and by Brothers of Charity. Pierre stated that he had subsequently fled, living as a vagabond before returning to Paris. To Jeanne, this return accounted for Jacques’s disappearance without making Monrouisseau’s son her own.
At the hearing, the pleadings placed proofs of diverse nature into competition. Jeanne’s counsel relied upon her parents’ marriage contract, Jacques’s baptismal certificate, Lancelot’s will, and the certificates purporting to establish the boy’s death near Saint-Waast. He emphasized that the mendicant and his son were recognized by several witnesses as father and child, and that Jeanne had never claimed the boy as hers. Monrouisseau’s advocate presented the selfsame elements as muniments of an unbroken filiation: his son’s baptismal record, his own history, the child’s interrogatories, and the constancy of his demand. He recounted the imprisonment without formal entry in the jail book and challenged the manner in which the Vernon inquest had been conducted.
The witnesses from Vernon did not speak with one voice. Maidservants, neighbors, kinsfolk, tenant farmers, and artisans claimed to recognize Jacques; some invoked his likeness, others a scar or memories of the household. Other depositions, among them that of the widow Cretté, failed to recognize the child or recalled Jeanne’s tender affection for her sons. The scar became a token of dispute, for the witnesses could not agree on the time when the wound had been received. The child had been present during several depositions, nourishing the fear that he had overheard the adults’ responses. The pleadings thus offered no single visage capable of settling all doubt: they contested the evidentiary worth of each recognition.
The Lieutenant General of Vernon, Louis Mordant, defended his conduct. He affirmed that he was absent when the affair began, maintaining that several magistrates had concurred in the disputed decisions. The King’s prosecutor likewise defended himself. The suspicion raised against the magistrates was that they sought vengeance against Jeanne, who had allegedly refused to sell them an estate. Pitaval records these accusations, but also their denials, along with the argument that the proceedings arose from hasty conviction rather than a proven conspiracy.
The Procureur Général of the Parlement, Bignon, weighed both possibilities. Monrouisseau’s legal titles and the reiterated words of the child might well establish his paternity; Jeanne’s legal instruments and the certificates produced concerning Jacques weighed in the opposite scale, without dissipating every doubt. On the other hand, twenty-one witnesses from Vernon maintained that the lad was Jacques, yet their recollections, their interests, and their proximity to the magistrates were subjected to scrutiny. The crowd, so confident on that first Sunday, was no independent proof of what it had initially believed.
The Parlement of Paris delivered its decree on the Thursday of Passion Week in 1659, under the presidency of Lamoignon. According to Pitaval, the court annulled the appeals, ordered Monrouisseau released and his entry in the jail book expunged; Louis was commanded to acknowledge and obey him as his father, while the provision consigned was restored to Jeanne. Pitaval concludes that the titles and possession of the mendicant, supported by written proof—"albeit imperfect"—of Jacques’s death, prevailed over the contrary depositions. The decree did not, in the text that has reached us, transmute those private certificates into indisputable certainty.
At Vernon, several recognitions had at first seemed to close the matter; other voices were already disputing them. Before the Parlement, they did not suffice to overthrow Monrouisseau’s titles. The operative terms of the decree do not describe a physical transfer of the lad; they enjoin Louis to recognize Monrouisseau and obey him as his father. As for Jacques, Pierre’s account and two private certificates were admitted in support, yet their date, their phrasing, and even the place of interment remained disputed. Pitaval himself characterizes this proof as "literal, albeit imperfect." The chapter thus does not permit us to affirm where Jacques lies, nor even to convert the entire narrative of his death into established fact. It leaves, at the close of the proceedings, an unambiguous decree and a family history that remains anything but clear.