In Nevers, within a residence that also quartered gendarmes, a child’s hunger first became a ground for suspicion. Anne le Fiot was the daughter of a notary, Pierre le Fiot, and Marie Dufour, his second wife. Born into a household described by Champagnac as respectable, she had initially been put out to a wet nurse, then taken in by her maternal grandmother. In 1757, her father brought her home. The account does not record the particulars of every passing year; it depicts, however, a child who steadily languished, whose condition seemed to cry out for pity.
The family was not alone beneath that roof. Gendarmes, billeted on the first floor by official obligation, resided there alongside their duties and daily routines. The women of the household, according to the chronicle, were well acquainted with Anne’s insatiable appetite and her bodily infirmity. Whenever articles went missing from the pantry or the soldiers’ kitchen, the blame was cast upon her. This habitual imputation prepared the way for the gravest injustice: rather than investigating the theft, the household found it simpler to punish the child deemed capable of having committed it.
On May 20, 1767, a more significant larceny alarmed the woman Piat. She was herself, as was discovered some days later, the true culprit. Yet she denounced Anne and herself seized the supposed offender, locking her in a garden closet. Madame le Fiot, apprised of the accusation, hastened to the scene and commanded that her daughter be bound to an old bedstead. The chronicle underlines a circumstance entirely overlooked by the domestic order: the child had not been heard in her own defense.
Left alone, Anne snapped her bonds. She forced an opening through the gable of the party wall, eight or nine feet high, and clambered down by clinging to the crumbling mortar joints. Reaching the garden, she made her way to the cellar stairs, where she sought refuge. In the narrative, this was not yet the cellar which local rumor would later transform into a sepulcher; it was a sanctuary where the child hoped to escape further blows. The woman Piat discovered her there and dragged her back into the house.
This time, Anne was bound in the garret to an upright timber of the roof. She once more succeeded in slipping her restraints and hid within a large chest. Returning to the attic and finding her gone from the post where she had left her, the woman Piat summoned assistance. The father and mother searched for their daughter and discovered her in her hiding place. One of them reportedly remarked, “You are quite well off there,” before wedging a ladder between the chest and its lid and piling old window casements atop it. This act, as recounted in the chronicle, transformed a fleeting place of concealment into a prison held shut by the dead weight of discarded timber.
A few days later, the theft was traced to Piat, who was turned out of the house. The offense imputed to Anne collapsed; yet the bindings, the confinement, and the hunting down of the child remained. Her condition deteriorated. She had long borne the marks of a frailty that the rigors of the household had done nothing to alleviate; soon, the outward signs of her malady grew increasingly visible. Madame le Fiot was obliged to depart for the farm at Lurcy to oversee the harvest. She took her youngest daughter with her, leaving the elder girl behind in the house, a prey to the illness that was draining her strength.
On July 23, Anne’s death was announced. The woman Jacob was called in to lay out the corpse; the parish was notified, and on the following evening, the funeral procession and burial were performed in accordance with custom. Yet the public rites did not quiet the wagging tongues. Almost the moment the demise was known, a rumor spread that the child had been shut away in a cellar, there to perish of want and privation. The household that had sought to stifle accusations found itself entirely encompassed by them.
The woman Jacob had observed a wound upon the hock of the corpse. These details fed the formal complaint lodged on July 26 against Pierre and Marie le Fiot. In it, the public prosecutor set forth allegations of a death in the cellar, suspicions attaching to the father’s silence, and earlier instances of ill-treatment. It was asserted that Anne had been locked up, bound, had escaped, and had then been kept beneath the chest for several days without food or drink before being carried down to the cellar where she purportedly expired. These assertions gathered disparate scenes into a single damning narrative: the cords, the escape over the wall, the garret, the chest, and finally the cellar where the child was said to have succumbed. The prosecutor did not content himself with the murmurs abroad in the town; he demanded the opening of a judicial inquiry, the exhumation of the body, and its examination by men of science.
Leave to inform was granted; the body was disinterred and delivered to medical men for examination. Fourteen witnesses were heard. A warrant for the arrest of Pierre le Fiot was issued, and he was conducted to prison on July 27; his wife took to flight. On August 4, a supplementary complaint alleged further acts of cruelty. Seven new witnesses were examined; depositions were recorded, confrontations held, and the final interrogation lasted six hours, according to the chronicle.
The definitive judgment of May 10, 1768, sentenced Pierre le Fiot to perpetual banishment. This sentence became the opening salvo of a fresh contest over the measure of retribution. The fiscal procurator of Nevers appealed, deeming the penalty far too lenient in light of the facts; the father appealed as well, demanding to be acquitted and granted leave to prosecute those he held responsible for the accusation. Both appeals intersected before the same court: one demanding greater severity, the other rejecting the judgment that had struck him down. On July 28, the Parlement annulled the initial sentence. It ordered that Pierre be exposed in the pillory for three consecutive days, bearing an inscription designating him an inhuman and unnatural father toward his daughter; on the final day, he was to be scourged, branded on both shoulders, and sent to the galleys for life, his property confiscated to the Crown.
Marie Dufour, absent from the court, was sentenced to perpetual banishment from the jurisdiction of the Parlement. The decree ordered that this sentence be executed in effigy against her, accompanied by confiscation and a fine. Sickness, the duress inflicted before the theft was even investigated, the discovery of Piat’s guilt, the death, and the subsequent depositions: such was the sequence that brought this household before the courts. The inquiry heard witnesses, ordered an exhumation, and resulted in two successive rulings, the second increasing the father’s punishment and condemning the absconded mother. The witnesses had found their voice before the magistrates; Anne herself had never been granted a hearing when the crime was laid at her door.
Anne had sought in turn a breach in a wall, shelter beside a flight of stairs, and the darkness of a chest. She was not fleeing justice, but the domestic retribution that preceded it; she had gone unheard when accused. After her death, the trial gave voice to the witnesses, and the judges visited upon her parents the harsh sentences of their era. Yet no decree exists that can restore to the child those days when the door was barred against her. In a house where an actual theft was seized upon to condemn an ailing child, the unmasking of the true culprit could undo nothing of what had already been done.