In the house where she had served for eight years, Marie was the daughter of the masters. She was granted a place at their table; she was denied their name. Her father, on his deathbed, bequeathed her six hundred livres as he would have done to a common domestic. Her mother gave her in marriage as though she were merely a goddaughter. It took the resurfacing of an old letter among the physician’s papers for this young woman at last to grasp what none of these household arrangements was willing to admit: she belonged by blood to the family that employed her.
Joachim Cognot practiced medicine. In 1589, already advanced in years, he married Marie Nassier, then twenty-nine, at Bar-sur-Seine. Several children were born of their union; Claude alone survived among the first. In 1597, Cognot departed for Fontenay-le-Comte. His wife rejoined him two years later and brought into the world a daughter, Marie. Her birth following a seven-month pregnancy aroused the husband’s suspicions. The child was nonetheless baptized under the names of both her parents. The chronicle offers no proof of another paternity: it recounts only a suspicion that the father made the guiding principle of his conduct.
In 1601, Cognot came to Paris with his wife and the infant girl. He had Marie carried in a porter’s basket to the Faubourg Saint-Marceau and entrusted her to the wife of a locksmith. He agreed upon a nursing allowance, paid the first month, gave the child’s baptismal name, and concealed her surname. The arrangement began as an ordinary transaction between a man seeking a foster nurse and a woman who agreed to serve as one. The silence surrounding the family name was to allow the physician to walk away, leaving the woman with no simple recourse to claim what was owed her.
Champagnac accuses the mother of acquiescing to this abandonment out of favoritism for her son Claude. He relates that she returned to see the child nearly a year later, without revealing her identity, and never repeated her visit. His reading of maternal sentiment is severe. The actions he recounts suffice to show what befell Marie: payments ceased, the locksmith’s wife no longer knew where to turn, and her own modest resources did not allow her to keep the child indefinitely. She placed her in the Hôpital de la Trinité.
Claude died in his turn. The parents, now bereft of the son they had reared, did not recall their daughter. They made a mutual deed of gift of all their worldly goods to one another. Meanwhile, Cognot’s career prospered. Queen Marguerite took him into her service, and he amassed a substantial fortune. The chronicle contrasts this ascent with Marie’s lot: the man who had ceased paying her foster allowance had by no means remained destitute. She grew up far removed from him, sharing neither the physician’s name nor his affluence.
It was the locksmith’s wife who gathered up the threads. She had taken Marie out of the hospital to place her in the service of a master scrivener. One day, some fourteen years after the child’s arrival, she went to visit a basketmaker’s wife in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. A gentleman passed by; she believed she recognized the man who had entrusted the infant to her care. Her companion was able to name him: it was Cognot, physician to the Charité, who resided close at hand. This chance encounter at last provided an address for a debt that had remained so long without an accessible debtor.
The locksmith’s wife then devised a means to have him summoned to the Convent of the Cordelières to attend a sick nun. She waited for him at the gates, demanding that he take back the girl and pay for her past maintenance. Cognot shifted the roles: the man who had carried the basket, he alleged, had been the true father; he himself had merely accompanied him. Learning that Marie lay ill at the scrivener’s house, he nonetheless went to visit her twice. When the locksmith’s wife returned to the couple’s residence to demand her money, the physician instructed her to bring the young woman along.
The mother inquired what Marie might earn in a year. The question already framed her as a prospective servant. The locksmith’s wife rejected this shifting of ground: she had not come to hire out a maidservant, but to return to these adults the child they had given into her hands. Failing to obtain payment, she served Cognot with a summons before the Bailiff of Saint-Germain. The physician preferred a settlement. He agreed to pay four hundred livres and take Marie into his service, while having it set down in writing that he was not her father. He presented this accord as an act of charity devised to avoid a lawsuit.
Marie thus entered the household. The agreement partly satisfied the debt for her childhood sustenance; it perpetuated the falsehood regarding her birth. For eight years, the young woman served her parents and ate at their table. She was given the name Marie Croissant. When Joachim died in 1625, at the age of eighty-six according to the chronicle, his will preserved this menial identity and bequeathed her six hundred livres. The widow continued the pretense by marrying her off as her goddaughter to a man of respectable condition.
Then came the letter. Marie was going through the deceased man’s papers alongside her mother when she discovered a letter written by the latter, speaking of their “little Marie” and the garments she was preparing for her. The young woman wished to keep the document. Her mother snatched it back. Champagnac recounts a scene of desperate entreaty: Marie allegedly begged only for the acknowledgment of her birth, going so far as to vow never to speak of it to a soul. Her mother, according to the narrative, countered with the passage of time and her own honour, which compelled her to persist in the repudiation. The silence of the past served as justification for silence in the present.
The widow remarried, taking as her husband a former royal assessor from Reims, a man devoid of fortune but burdened with several children. Marie renewed her entreaties, to no avail. It was no longer merely a matter of being permitted to utter the name of mother: Joachim’s estate threatened to pass entirely to another family, while his daughter remained confined to the menial station that had been contrivance-built for her. She laid the matter before the Bailiff of Saint-Germain. The courts were forced to adjudicate what the parents had treated as an affair of domestic convenience.
The bailiff ordered Dame Cognot to recognize Marie as her lawful daughter and to accord her her rightful share of the late husband’s estate. The Parlement of Paris affirmed the decree. Champagnac gives neither the date of this final ruling nor the precise evidentiary debates heard at the bar; he preserves only its outcome. Marie recovered her name and her rights. The locksmith’s wife had once pursued the physician for an unpaid foster allowance. The daughter had in turn been forced to sue the widow to cease being a stranger under her own roof. Two petitions for justice had thus dismantled, one after the other, the successive guises of a single abandonment.