He wished to bestow his ring, only to be told it was no longer his to give. Mere minutes earlier, de Forges had been crossing Paris toward the Place de Grève with an assurance that struck onlookers with wonder; now, before the young woman he had asked to see once more, his eyes welled with tears. He held out to her the diamond he wore upon his finger. Yet his worldly goods had been confiscated. The condemned man was free to address his dying words to whomsoever he pleased; regarding the jewel, the law had already made its dispositions.
This encounter took place at the Hôtel de Ville on the 5th of October, 1784, bringing to a close an affair that had begun in a bloody attempt at prison-breaking. Three inmates of the Conciergerie had sought to compel their warders to unbar the gates. There had been a fatality, several wounded, and ultimately a surrender. The felons now being led to the scaffold had not merely attempted to deliver their persons from custody: they had raised weapons against those charged with their keeping. The scene of the ring, moving though Champagnac’s account may make it appear, could not efface the memory of the first man who had fallen dead before the gate.
De Forges and Desaignes were two young men whose families, the chronicler assures us, had watched carefully over their education. He presents them from the outset as governed by a lust for pleasure and averse to honest toil; such is the moral portrait in which he envelops their deeds, with that facile habit peculiar to the annals of crime of discovering, in earliest childhood, whatever the final catastrophe appears to explain. Their parents obtained none of the fruits they had anticipated. Both men entered the army, where their conduct earned them disciplinary punishments and, subsequently, incarceration at the Abbaye prison. The record mentions an initial act of mutiny, without detailing the attendant circumstances.
Transferred to the Conciergerie, they awaited judgment upon their fate. They resolved to make their exit before sentence could be pronounced. In this account, neither the hand that procured their weapons nor the channel through which they entered is known: they had at their disposal pistols, powder, and ball. This silence leaves the question of their supply wholly unanswered, yet the preparation itself is recounted without hesitation. Two armed men appearing insufficient to overpower the turnkeys, they sought out a third companion among those who shared their confinement.
This was a soldier, whose name nowhere appears in the chronicle. The text attributes to him the hope of speedily regaining his liberty and records that he promised to follow their commands. Of this man, little is known beyond his designated place: privy to the design, wounded in its execution, and afterward conveyed half-dying alongside the other two. He remains nameless even in the narration of an affair wherein memory has preserved, by contrast, the diamond of de Forges and the comeliness observers were said to have found in him. The remembrance of a trial does not always distribute its particulars with an even hand.
On the 28th of September, at nine of the clock in the evening, the three prisoners presented themselves before the turnkeys, weapons in hand, demanding that the prison gates be opened. The warders refused to yield. They advanced to disarm the men, and the confrontation degenerated into a general melee, during which one turnkey was killed by a pistol-shot, while another was grievously wounded. The soldier likewise sustained a gunshot wound fired by one of his own companions. The text permits no definitive attribution of each shot to either de Forges or Desaignes; nor does it provide the names of the warders.
The escape had miscarried. The prisoners retreated to their chamber and prepared to offer resistance. To subdue them, a fire pump was brought up and a jet of water directed inside. They surrendered shortly thereafter, were loaded with irons, and placed beyond any possibility of renewing their attempt. To the longed-for egress succeeded a narrower confinement, and to the judgment they had sought to anticipate was now added this violence committed during their detention. The wheels of justice turned with swiftness: only three days separated the breakout from the initial sentence.
On the 1st of October, 1784, the Bailiwick of the Palais condemned them to be broken alive upon the wheel in the Place de Grève. The appeal was heard by the Chambre des Vacations, which confirmed the sentence on the 4th of October. On the following day, the three men were brought forth from the Conciergerie. Crowds thronged the streets through which their cart was to pass. Champagnac contrasts the utter consternation of Desaignes with the composure of de Forges; beside them, the soldier suffered from his wound and appeared near death. This contrast of demeanor was to occupy a prominent place in the narrative, as though each man were required, beyond merely dying, to display to the multitude the fashion in which he could resign himself to his fate.
De Forges, nevertheless, shuddered upon catching sight of the instruments of torture. He then stepped down from the cart with the others and entered the Hôtel de Ville. Following the interrogations, several persons were summoned at the request of the condemned. Among them was the young woman he had asked to see once more. The chronicle provides neither her name nor the precise nature of their bond; the affection it records does not warrant styling her, for the dramatic convenience of the tale, either wife or betrothed. De Forges begged her forgiveness for the sorrow he had caused her, declaring how bitter it would have been to die without beholding her once again.
Then came the proffer of the ring. His hands were bound; he raised them to present the jewel to the weeping woman. He pressed the gift, but was confronted with the confiscation of his estate. The object remained upon his finger, yet he no longer retained the right to dispose of it. This refusal provoked a sudden burst of fury directed at Desaignes: de Forges reviled him for having led him to his ruin and for having prevented him, after their plot had failed, from putting an end to his own life to escape the scaffold. He sought a culprit at his side. Yet such recriminations from a condemned man do not, of themselves, establish a demonstrated apportionment of guilt for the crime.
He then recovered his countenance and requested leave to depart. Passing a final time before the young woman, he spoke to her of his father and of his kinsfolk, whom she knew, and pressed his bound hands to his breast. Champagnac represents this farewell as the moment in which filial devotion at last pierced the young man's outward bravado. At the threshold of the chamber, de Forges turned once more toward Desaignes: he reproached him for having taught him how to live ill, and professed that he would now show him how to die. He then descended from the Hôtel de Ville and mounted the scaffold alone, where he stripped off his own garments.
The chronicle proceeds to describe the tears and resistance of Desaignes, passing moral condemnation upon him even for his terror. He was carried to his punishment. The soldier, mentioned alongside the three men in the account of their conveyance, is accorded no distinct final scene. The rings and the striking speeches have seized the chronicler's eye; the remaining names are wanting. Of the affair there remain also one turnkey slain, another wounded, and that heavy gate which three men had thought to open by leveling pistols. Not one of them ever passed through it a free man.