It was three fifty-centime pieces that lent meaning to the pockets of Adolphe Parisot. In them had been found cigars, ten candles, scraps of charcuterie wrapped in assorted papers, and nine francs in small change. Nothing in this assortment resembled the hoard of an accomplished criminal. Yet the coins were counterfeit. And the young locksmith, gathered up senseless from a pavement on the Rue de Charonne, would have to explain how so much petty merchandise came to accompany his evening.
We are on the third of March, 1877. Constables conducted to the station-house a man whom the report describes as dead drunk. He was not apprehended upon leaving a clandestine workshop, nor was he taken unawares before an engine for coining money. The discovery began with an inventory. To the objects drawn from his pockets was joined a question: whence came these scattered purchases, these wrappers from diverse shops, this medley of provisions, illumination, and tobacco? The three bad coins altered the very nature of what lay before the officers’ eyes.
The prosecution was to reconstruct a tour of local shops. By paying for trifling purchases with a fifty-centime piece, Parisot had received genuine coin in change. Every expense thereby converted a portion of his base metal into universally accepted silver. The gazette furnishes neither the names of the tradesmen nor the catalogue of his transactions; it sets forth only the deduction to which the seized articles led. The candles and cigars were not merely the provisions of an untidy youth. They had become the material evidence of a traffic in which the customer derived his profit from the change returned to his hand.
On the morrow, the inquiry reached his lodging, at No. 134, Rue de Turenne. There he had avowed a wholly different trade: clasps for travelling-bags. Such an explanation befitted a locksmith plying his craft at home. Yet, according to the indictment, his absences, the irregularity of his pursuits, and his frequent bouts of drunkenness had already drawn notice. The search lent this chamber a less avowable character. Beneath garments and rubbish lay eighteen tools, among them files, chisels, and compasses. Two dies intended for the stamping of fifty-centime pieces were brought to light.
The inventory did not end with the implements. Forty-three counterfeit coins, thirteen cigars, and no fewer than seventy candles were discovered there. To the ten candles in his pockets thus answered an altogether more copious reserve. The gazette ascribed these goods to the uttering of his spurious coin. This correlation formed the material core of the brief: the tools accounted for the fabrication; the false coin explained the purchases; the purchases, the genuine specie found upon his person. What on the previous night had appeared a curious pocketful now assumed the proportions of a sustained enterprise.
Parisot attempted at first to conceal his name and dwelling. In the end, he made a full confession. The narrative of his manufacture revealed an artisan applying the motions of his calling to deceive those who earned theirs by honest means. He had not engraved his dies with a burin; he had worked the metal by displacement, using the methods of the chaser. The report dwells upon the patience of this labour. It contrasted sharply with the unfavourable portrait the prosecution drew of his service under former masters.
The locksmith’s hammer did duty for a coining-press. The impressions remained crude; Parisot sought to lend them the semblance of worn pieces, and subsequently a silvered sheen. It was not enough merely to imitate a coin: one had to account for its defects by a visible history, that of ordinary wear. A piece too rough might awaken suspicion; a piece that seemed to have passed through many hands offered an excuse for that very imperfection. Such, at least, is what his explanations in the report allow us to understand. The deception relied as much upon the hurried glance of the shopkeeper as upon the dexterity of the coiner.
A stamper had cut out for him approximately three hundred blanks, ostensibly intended for buttons. This external order furnished the investigation with an element outside the garret. It did not prove that three hundred false coins had been spent—the journal advances no such total. It showed the store of materials Parisot had commanded. The diversity of the impressions recovered also led the prosecution to impute to him a third die and earlier trials upon other metals. The two dies seized were not necessarily the inception of his undertaking.
Who was this manufacturer of half-francs? Born in Paris on the eighteenth of January, 1859, Adolphe was eighteen years of age when the matter came before the assizes. In 1875, following a sentence of eight days’ imprisonment for complicity in theft, pronounced at Meaux, he had quitted his family, who were established in the Seine-et-Marne. He had come to seek employment in the capital and had been engaged by several masters. The prosecution represented him as unskilful, indolent, and unpunctual at the bench, observing that he could earn no more than three francs and fifty centimes a day. This portrait was drawn from the charges, and was not an impartial measure of his life.
There remained, nonetheless, an opposition between two manners of work. In the workshops of his masters, the irregularity with which the young man was reproached; in his garret, the patience required by his dies. Clandestine manufacture had not discarded the trade: it had subverted it. The selfsame tools could serve a piece of work sold openly, or yield an object which its maker had to pass off as something else. Clasps, buttons, coin of the realm: at every turn, a professed occupation served to mask the one laid bare by the search.
On the twentieth of June, before the Seine Assize Court presided over by M. Sevestre, Parisot renewed his confession. The gazette describes him on this occasion as unassuming. He threw himself upon the mercy of the court. The prosecution was represented by the Advocate General Onfroy de Bréville; Maître Georges Petit appeared for the defence. The report does not record their speeches. It gives only the outcome: guilty with extenuating circumstances, five years’ solitary confinement, and exemption from police surveillance upon the expiration of his term. It was neither the eight days of his first judgment, nor a sentence to penal servitude.
The narrative concludes upon this decree, without an account of his confinement or of what became of Adolphe thereafter. It had opened with a youth found upon a pavement and three small coins. Between these two junctures, justice had tracked the traces of a workshop through purchases of a few centimes. Parisot had not merely counterfeited metal. He had sought to profit from that commonplace gesture whereby a tradesman receives a coin, takes it for good, and counts out the change.