Near the Pillory of Paris, on the 16th of June 1768, two small boys happened to walk past the shop of the widow Desneux. One of them caught her eye. She called him over and plied him with questions; his answers revealed nothing, yet the timbre of his voice confirmed an impression that had at first been uncertain. It was, she believed, her godson, the son of her niece Noiseu, who had vanished nearly two years before. She caught him up in her arms and cried aloud, “I have found my godson!” Around her, the women of the shop gathered. Then Desneux recalled a scar upon the child’s left thigh, and turning back his clothing, found the mark in the very place she had expected.
The token appeared decisive. The little boy’s companion stated that his own name was Bouville, and that the child was lodged with his father. A messenger was dispatched to fetch the man; the lad returned accompanied by his mother. She explained that a washerwoman named Girandal had boarded the boy with the Bouvilles six weeks earlier, giving strict instructions that he was never to be permitted outside. This brief outing, she insisted, was his very first. The mother, Catherine Noiseu, was summoned; she came running, recognized her son, and pointed out the scar in her turn, only to be told that it had already been discovered. The mother’s joy, as chronicled by Champagnac, was that of a long, agonized vigil that had finally recovered a living face.
Since the 13th of August 1766, Jean-François Noiseu and Catherine-Anne Daunery had sought their youngest child in vain. A journeyman mason, Noiseu toiled relentlessly to sustain a large household. Fifteen children had been born of their union, of whom five then survived. François-Michel, the youngest, had been born on the 22nd of December 1762 and baptized at the parish church of Saint-Jean-en-Grève. Placed with a wet nurse in Normandy, he had returned home at sixteen months. A malignant fever had soon afterward seized him, during which Sister Jollin had bled his right arm. Later still, a tumor on his left thigh had been lanced and dressed out of charity by the surgeon Fromont. It healed within six weeks, but left behind a conspicuous scar.
On the day he vanished, René, aged twelve, and Marie, aged ten, had obtained permission to take their little brother for a walk. They made their way to the Quai de l’Infante and halted before a troupe of mountebanks. The press of spectators obstructed their view; they jostled their way through the throng, but François could not follow. The elder siblings, enthralled by the performance, did not perceive at once that he was no longer at their side. When they turned round, he was gone. They searched among the stalls, where a vendor informed them that he had seen a woman snatch a small boy from the crowd and carry him away toward the Pont-Neuf.
The two children ran all the way to the bridge, and at length returned home without their brother. Their mother asked where he was; their weeping preceded any explanation. She set out in her turn toward the Quai de l’Infante and the Pont-Neuf, beseeching passersby and retracing her steps over and over again. On the morrow, the parents had the drums beaten through the streets, had the child’s disappearance announced from the pulpit during the parish sermon, and posted broadsides at the doors of the principal churches. They also petitioned the commander of the watch to arrest any vagrants found in company with a child resembling theirs.
Nothing brought him back. Catherine Noiseu wandered the quarters of the city, pleading with everyone she met for news of her boy; her grief, says the chronicle, threatened to unhinge her reason. For nearly two years, the child’s name and the mark upon his thigh remained in the house like the enduring ciphers of an absence. Then, one evening, a godmother’s recognition appeared to span that cruel distance. The neighbors looked on as a mother recovered her son, and the women were conducted straightaway before the police commissioner, Percheron.
The woman Girandal soon arrived as well. She sought to reclaim the boy, asserting that she had cared for him for two years without her husband’s knowledge. The woman Bouville had stated that he had been placed in her keeping six weeks before—two successive periods that outlined the stages of his custody as the women described it. Voices rose and tempers flared; the watch escorted the disputing parties into the commissioner’s presence. Percheron summoned the elder Noiseu. The mason recognized the boy and cited the scar; he demanded that Girandal’s husband appear, but she refused to produce him. Upon the facts laid before him, the commissioner provisionally restored the lad to the Noiseu family, subject to their producing him whenever justice should require.
The family’s joy was short-lived. The widow Labrie presently presented herself before the Lieutenant General of Police, claiming the selfsame boy as her own son. The magistrate remitted the parties to the civil tribunals. On the 4th of July 1768, Charlotte Marchand, widow of Jean-Pierre Labrie, entered an action against the Noiseus demanding the restitution of the child. From that moment, the single scar that had appeared to end the Noiseus’ long ordeal was no longer sufficient: the court was compelled to hear two rival tales of motherhood, the divergent courses of two infant lives, and the testimonies of those who had held the boy in their care.
The initial judgment of the Châtelet, rendered on the 30th of September after extensive pleadings and printed briefs, provisionally confirmed the child’s custody to the Noiseu family. The mother had reason to hope that her long misery had drawn to a close. Yet on the 22nd of March 1769, a second judgment reversed the first, ordering that the boy be surrendered forthwith to the widow Labrie. The Noiseu parents swooned upon hearing the decree, according to the chronicle; on recovering their senses, they resolved to appeal to the Parlement of Paris, lodging their petition the very next day.
The anatomical marks, hitherto concentrated upon a single scar, now became the subject of sharp dispute. The widow Labrie had declared that her child had short, splayed feet, with the toes adjoining the great toe webbed together; the boy in the Noiseus’ care bore no such deformity. Her son had twice suffered from smallpox; the young Noiseu had never contracted it. The Noiseu child bore the mark of a lancet on his right arm from the bleeding performed during his childhood fever, whereas the Labrie infant had never undergone phlebotomy. These differences, which the chronicler characterizes as striking, forced the court to weigh the broader bodily evidence against the identical wound that had first convinced Desneux and the Noiseu parents.
The widow Labrie’s history carried the boy’s origins back to Boissette, near Melun. Left destitute by the death of her husband, who had likewise been a mason, she had retreated to her kinfolk with her two children. The younger, born on the 30th of May 1762 after his father’s demise, had been baptized Marie-Germain. While still in his cradle, he had developed a tumor on his left thigh; an abscess had formed, subsequently healed, and left behind its own lasting scar. In Paris, the two bodily marks, each presumed to be unique, proved to be virtually identical.
In March 1768, the widow Labrie had come to Paris with her son to lodge with Girandal, a washerman married to one of her aunts. Securing a position tending a sick person at Pantin, she left the boy in that household. Her own mother subsequently took him to Melun, but he could not remain there. On the 26th of April, he was brought back to Paris; on the 1st of May, the woman Girandal boarded him with Bouville, where he was meant to stay until November. It was there that he was seen wandering near the Pillory, where chance cast across his path the godmother of another lost child.
During the hearings, the widow Labrie dissolved into tears, and several onlookers remarked upon the boy’s striking resemblance to her. The Noiseus, for their part, had recognized in him the features, the voice, and the scar of the son they had lost. Champagnac observes that both women displayed an equal measure of good faith and maternal tenderness. It was not the case of a lawful mother confronting a kidnapper: the legal briefs brought to light two real bereavements and a single child, whose place was fiercely contested among adults deeply attached to him.
On the 19th of February 1770, the Parlement confirmed the decree awarding the boy to the widow Labrie. The judgment definitively settled the legal custody of the child; it did not restore to the Noiseu family the son they had lost in 1766. The scar, which had rekindled their extinguished hopes, belonged equally to Labrie’s boy. The chronicler honors the poignant affection of both women, yet cannot unite the destinies of two different children into one; nor does he preserve the detailed judicial reasoning of the high court.
Thus may a recognition be entirely sincere, yet wholly mistaken. A godmother had sought a mark she knew by heart; a mother had recognized in a young face the son whose name she had cried out for two agonizing years; another had reclaimed the child she had been forced to leave behind in Paris when departing for Pantin. At the conclusion of the pleadings, the boy was restored to the widow Labrie. For the Noiseu family, there remained only the open wound that had begun that afternoon on the quay, and no court decree could ever undo the fatal moment when René and Marie had pushed forward toward the mountebanks, leaving their little brother behind.