They dragged the ponds of Nerbonne in search of his corpse. Yet Louis de La Pivardière was alive—capable of signing before a notary, presenting himself to a magistrate, and making himself known throughout the neighborhood. Even this did not suffice. His wife remained under the shadow of a capital charge, the Prior of Miseray was about to be cast into irons, and he himself hesitated to appear: to rescue the others from an imaginary murder, he must expose his neck to the penalty of his own bigamy.
In 1687, he had married the Dame de Chauvelin, widow of Menou de Billy. She brought five children from her first marriage and the estate of Nerbonne, yielding an income of approximately one thousand livres. The household soon lost its domestic peace. Summoned to service in 1689, La Pivardière obtained a lieutenancy in the Sainte-Hermine dragoons three years later. Military distance afforded him a degree of liberty of which he made an intensely private use.
At Nerbonne, the Prior of Miseray, neighbor and domestic chaplain to the chateau, frequently visited the mistress of the house. These calls set tongues wagging. A gallant liaison was suspected, then whispered about. Champagnac presents these reports as idle slander; yet they were to supply the future inquest with a ready-made accomplice. Before anyone had conceived of a murder, society had already fashioned the guilty pair upon whom it might be cast.
As for La Pivardière, he was on his travels. At Auxerre, he encountered a young woman whose father, a bailiff and tavernkeeper, had recently died. He concealed his prior marriage from her. She consented to wed him only in lawful matrimony; he indulged her sense of propriety by contracting a second union. He also assumed the bailiff’s office vacated by her father. In town, he went by the name of Du Bouchet—another title he bore—and provincial routine closed over the missing nobleman.
Four children were born of this second bed, the chronicle relates. The second wife knew nothing of the first. The husband maintained this ignorance by periodic absences: he would announce that he was off to collect rents from his tenants, return to Nerbonne, and then bring back to Auxerre the sums extracted from his lawful wife. To the latter, he spoke of rejoining his regiment. His two households thus subsisted upon two opposing explanations of the selfsame journey.
At Nerbonne, the money was meant to speed a departure; at Auxerre, it appeared to confirm the comfortable means of the new husband. The same purse reassured one woman of her marriage after having permitted the other to rid herself of her spouse.
This contrivance functioned for several years. Then, the Dame de Nerbonne caught wind of the second marriage. Upon one of her husband’s returns, a gathering was taking place at the chateau. She received him coldly. Once the guests had departed, an altercation erupted: she taxed him with this other union; he denied it flatly. A maidservant subsequently came to warn him that he risked arrest should he spend the night beneath that roof.
The warning had its effect. Before dawn, La Pivardière set out on foot. His mount was lame; he left it in the stable. He likewise abandoned his pistols and his cloak, which would only have encumbered him along the way. These objects left behind were soon to tell an entirely different tale from that of his flight. A man returned home, vanished into the night without his horse or his personal effects: to the neighborhood, it seemed obvious that he was no longer among the living.
The rumor of an assassination spread rapidly. The King’s prosecutor at Châtillon-sur-Indre lodged a formal complaint. Champagnac attributes to this officer a private enmity against the Prior of Miseray; such rancor forms part of his explanation for the relentless prosecution that ensued. The depositions collected soon lent terrifying precision to the suspicion.
Neighbors declared they had heard a gunshot. Two maidservants recounted a murder. One accused her mistress of having admitted two of the Prior’s valets into the bedchamber; the other swore she had arrived just as they were dispatching her master. La Pivardière’s nine-year-old daughter testified that she had heard her father’s voice crying upon God for mercy. None of these declarations produced a body; their convergence, however, was enough to place several lives in mortal peril.
The Dame de Nerbonne went into hiding to escape arrest. She knew not where to find her husband, nor could she produce him in her own defense. In Paris, she petitioned for the cause to be removed to another jurisdiction. On September 18, 1697, the Vacation Chamber transferred the proceedings to the court at Romorantin. Meanwhile, she continued to search for the living man whose death she was accused of having procured.
The inquiries finally reached Auxerre. La Pivardière, learning that emissaries had arrived from his first wife, took to his heels once more. He was apprehended at Flavigny. There, he discovered that they were not merely pursuing an unfaithful husband: his wife stood accused of his murder. The second spouse, upon discovering the deceit, nevertheless urged him to hasten to the rescue of the first. This intervention was to weigh more heavily in the scales than all the subterfuges by which he had hitherto shielded himself.
He caused an instrument certifying his existence to be drawn up before a notary, which he signed. He presented himself before the magistrate at Romorantin. The judge accompanied him to the environs of Nerbonne, where he was recognized. Confronted with their former master, the two maidservants—who had at first shouted imposture—ended by acknowledging La Pivardière. The tale of murder now found itself face to face with the very man it claimed had been put to death.
Champagnac records a striking scene: the magistrate of Châtillon, busy dragging the ponds for the corpse, is said to have seen emerge upon the bank the very man he was seeking in the depths of the water. This apparition, related as a humiliation for the prosecutor, did not arrest the wheels of justice. The cause was brought before the Parlement, and the Prior of Miseray was cast into prison, his feet laden with irons.
La Pivardière engaged advocates to defend his wife and launched attacks against the magistrates of Châtillon. Yet he shrank from appearing in person before that bar. The impossible charge of his murder was all too likely to be supplanted by the far less imaginary crime of bigamy. After fifteen hearings, a decree of July 23, 1698, ordered his arrest and remitted the investigation to the Lieutenant Criminel of Chartres.
The second wife stepped forward once more. She journeyed to solicit from Louis XIV a safe-conduct for the man who had wronged her. The King granted one for the space of three months. Shielded by this instrument, La Pivardière surrendered himself as a prisoner at the Fort-l’Évêque and lodged an appeal against the latest decree. The Prior was set at liberty; on July 22, 1699, the appeal was sustained, and La Pivardière likewise obtained his discharge.
One had yet to wait until June 14, 1701, for the final decree. All proceedings were quashed, and the accused were dismissed without day. One of the maidservants was condemned as a false witness to make the amende honorable, to be branded, and to suffer perpetual banishment from the jurisdiction of the Parlement. The other had perished in prison during the instruction. The trial of a murder that had never occurred had thus devoured years of liberty, and failed to restore all those it had immured.
La Pivardière did not permanently resume his place at the side of either wife. According to the sequel related by Champagnac, he obtained command of a brigade and was slain by smugglers some time later. His first wife also died; the second remarried and long outlived the affair. The ghost had at last found a genuine grave, far from the pond where his corpse had once been sought. He left behind him two women who had been forced to labor to keep him alive before the law, when he had for so long kept his true life hidden from both.