The mortgage certificate was intended to unlock a credit facility of fifty thousand francs. In Geneva, the banker Keller awaited an authentic notarial act and formal proof that the real property tendered as security was free of all encumbrances. In Romorantin, the official land registers attested to quite the contrary. Between these two points, a name had been altered: that of Jules Plessard’s father had been erased and replaced by the Christian names of his son. The forgery resolved nothing. It arrested the transfer of funds, aroused the suspicions of the registrar of mortgages, and brought back before the Court of Assizes of Loir-et-Cher an entangled history of debts, manufactured bills, and partnerships that had never fulfilled their promises.
The trial took place from the 16th to the 18th of May 1873. Five individuals were indicted, though only three appeared in the dock: Jules-Ernest-Honoré Plessard, Samuel Isaac, and Fauvereau. The spouses Marteau, formerly shopkeepers in Vierzon, had fled and were tried in absentia. The distinction is of the essence: the proceedings brought together defendants present in court and those in flight, and the official chronicle does not assimilate the sentences pronounced against the absentees into an adversarial hearing conducted at the bar.
Plessard was a miller at Châtres and the mayor of the commune. The indictment and the press depicted him as a man of property whose signature commanded unhesitating confidence. In 1862, he let a house to Marteau, who proved irregular in the discharge of his rent. According to the account set forth in the judicial report, the tenant soon proposed to assist his landlord in commercial ventures held out as brilliant. The promised partnership was not founded upon profits; it began with the liquidation of Marteau’s existing debts.
To satisfy a claim of six thousand francs, Plessard affixed his signature to commercial paper. He subsequently guaranteed further engagements, one of which amounted to twelve thousand francs. Little by little, the landlord became a provider of funds. Discharging the liabilities that encumbered his associate, he pledged his own assets and exhausted the credit his signature had hitherto commanded. The report does not supply a full accounting of this connection; it charts its downward slope: Plessard ran into debt to sustain Marteau, only to find himself left alone before an accumulation of liabilities.
It was in this desperate posture that, according to Plessard’s statements reported in the press, Marteau explained to him that negotiable instruments might be manufactured under fictitious names or by imitating signatures. It would suffice, this counsel added, to take up the bills at maturity to avert any complaint. The judicial inquiry identified seventy forged notes drawn between 1869 and the beginning of 1871. This figure conveys the magnitude of the scheme, yet the mechanism remained that of credit artificially sustained through obligations whose ostensible drawers did not exist or had never given their consent.
Plessard at length demanded a reckoning from Marteau. By his account, the latter threatened to expose the manufactured bills if he pursued the recovery of a debt already reduced to near-nothingness. The chronicle records this explanation without presenting it as an established fact corroborated by independent documentation. It illuminates the coercion Plessard claimed to have suffered; it does not expunge his own culpability, since he subsequently admitted to the commercial forgeries. Utterly ruined, he turned to other intermediaries.
An advertisement offering credit placed him in communication with an alleged director named Seris. The judicial record states that Seris was in truth Fauvereau, operating under his wife’s maiden name. Fauvereau did not deliver the promised capital; instead, he furnished promissory notes subscribed by men who sold their signatures at rates ranging from two to five francs. That resource was soon exhausted. Fauvereau then introduced Plessard to Isaac, who raised the prospect of establishing a credit bank in Paris.
The scheme appeared to answer two necessities. Thirty thousand francs were to form the bank’s operating capital; another thirty thousand were intended to float Plessard once more. The total sum cited in the narrative fluctuated between fifty and sixty thousand francs. A Geneva banker, Keller, was approached to provide the funds. He imposed a condition customary in such transactions: the mortgage was to attach to unencumbered real property, and an official certificate was required to substantiate the claim. Yet the properties of Plessard the younger were already heavily mortgaged, whereas those of his father were, according to the report, entirely free from recorded charges.
On the 5th of July 1872, an application was made to the mortgage registry for a certificate concerning the real estate of Plessard the elder. The instrument delivered the following day bore the Christian names Jacques-Philippe-Honoré. The son was named Jules-Ernest-Honoré. The proximity of the names permitted the fatal alteration: substituting “Jules” for “Jacques” and “Ernest” for “Philippe.” The certificate then appeared to describe the real estate of the son, whereas it pertained solely to that of the father. On the 10th of August, a notary near the French frontier drew up the instrument whereby Keller bound himself to advance fifty thousand francs upon the faith of this negative certificate.
Yet the banker withheld the funds. Fearing that fresh encumbrances might have intervened since the delivery of the certificate, he directed that the deed and the memorial be submitted to the registrar of mortgages at Romorantin. This verification shattered the substitution. The registrar recognized the falsification of a document issued by his own office and lodged a formal denunciation. The loan fell through; the matter passed into the hands of the examining magistrate and thence to the assizes.
The degrees of responsibility were not confounded. The report states that Plessard confessed to the extensive commercial forgeries, attributing their original instigation to Marteau. Regarding the mortgage certificate, it recorded that Plessard had performed the erasures with his own hand, Fauvereau being fully cognizant of the act and undertaking the subsequent negotiation of the document. Isaac’s position stood apart: the prosecution failed to demonstrate that he was privy to the fabrication of the certificate, the chronicle observing that the allegation rested merely upon an insinuation by Fauvereau. A financial conception, an introduction, and guilty knowledge of a forgery are not one and the same.
The newspaper added that the victims of the earlier wave of forgeries were almost entirely satisfied, owing chiefly to the sacrifices made by the Plessard family. This restitution did not undo the reality of the falsified instruments; it situated the case, however, within an economy of indebtedness wherein liabilities involved living victims, partial recoveries, and losses that could not be reduced to a solitary ledger figure.
After three protracted sittings, the jury delivered its verdict late on Sunday evening. Plessard was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, having been granted the benefit of extenuating circumstances. Fauvereau received five years of penal servitude, without extenuating circumstances. Samuel Isaac was acquitted. The spouses Marteau, having failed to surrender to justice, were condemned in absentia: fifteen years of penal servitude for the husband, and seven years for his wife. These penalties were by no means interchangeable: they marked out four distinct endings for different roles and procedural conditions.
The certificate had been devised to reassure a lender regarding Plessard’s title. By altering the Christian names, it summoned the father behind the figure of the son and converted the public registers into a snare for those who sought to exploit them. The court visited punishment upon several of the confederates, yet acquitted Isaac for want of proof that he had any knowledge of the altered deed. The chain of liabilities explains how Plessard came to seek desperate credit; it does not suffice, of itself, to define the measure of each man’s guilt.
Documentary Note: Contemporary report of the proceedings before the Court of Assizes of Loir-et-Cher, sittings of 16–18 May 1873, published in the Gazette des tribunaux of 29 May, printed pages 508–509. The newspaper text employs several OCR variants of the name Fauvereau/Favereau; the form in the title and the predominant spelling have been retained without attempting to reconcile every individual occurrence. The antisemitic and physical caricatures found in the source have been omitted. The explanations attributed to Plessard and the insinuations of Fauvereau are presented strictly as such; the verdicts are recorded separately.