On the 18th of July, 1778, the fiscal procureur of Laval notified the police magistrate that Renée Richard, known as la Suhard, had deserted her dwelling, abandoning three infants committed to her custody. They were to have been conveyed to Paris, to the Foundling Hospital; instead, they were left destitute of all care. The landlord, having learned of her flight and the sale of her furnishings, saw to it that the babes received the necessary attention. The tax farmer of the county of Laval took charge of them, reserving the right to reimbursement of his charges and a recompense for his pains. One of these infants expired shortly thereafter. In the vacated house, the door had been left standing open.
The initial complaint concerned mere abandonment. Yet la Suhard had also rented a cellar, reached through a narrow passageway, and this space was to impart an entirely different gravity to the judicial inquiry. The woman who had made a livelihood of carrying infants to the hospice had left traces behind her that the neighbors had hitherto never ventured to piece together. To comprehend what came to light in that vault, one had first to understand the comings and goings of women and babes that had sustained the house.
Renée Richard was born in the parish of Chelun, in Brittany, near La Guerche. She had wed Julien Suhard, a weaver of Laval, and was subsequently left a widow. Families were wont to entrust to her those infants whose births they wished to conceal; she conveyed them to Paris, to the Enfants-Trouvés, receiving a fee for each charge. When she was able to gather several nurslings for a single journey, the revenue proved sufficient to maintain her. The undertaking had an acknowledged destination and every outward semblance of regularity: the delivery of the little ones into the keeping of the hospice.
Around this traffic, another trade had sprung up. Young women from the neighboring parishes, and at times from afar, resorted to la Suhard’s house to be brought to bed and to recover. They would subsequently leave their newborn babes in her charge to be conveyed to Paris. Champagnac relates that several might lodge under her roof at one and the same time. The delivery, the mother’s lying-in, and the dispatch of the infant succeeded one another within those walls; an arrangement intended to join families to the charity hospital placed the children under the sole governance of one woman.
La Suhard cohabited with Ambroise Portier. A weaver by trade, he was wont, when the loom offered little employment, to break stone along the high roads and play the fife at the Town Hall. He surrendered his earnings to la Suhard; the two lived together and, according to the chronicler, were frequently in liquor. Portier had previously been condemned in absentia to the galleys for life as an accomplice in another homicide; his sentence had been executed in effigy in September 1768. He had returned to Laval some years afterward without anyone seeking to molest him. Local rumor even ran that he had attempted to prevent the crime with which he had been linked. This history explains the suspicion that later attached to him; it does not demonstrate his active participation in the deeds laid to la Suhard’s charge.
In the summer of 1778, she vanished, having sold off her household goods and abandoned the three little ones entrusted to her. The magistrate repaired to the premises on the very day the complaint was lodged. On the morrow, a formal inquest was opened. Now, on the night of her flight, two neighboring women had heard movement in the lane that gave upon the cellar. There they came upon two women, one of whom bore a bulky bundle. A foul stench alarmed them. The bearers replied that the articles did not belong to la Suhard, and that the curate Le Chauve had charged them with their removal. The neighbors refused to let them proceed until the priest had been appraised of the matter.
The two women were presently identified as Renée Tellier, the widow Bourdet, and her daughter Renée Bourdet, the wife of Beaudouin. They explained that they had acted at the request of nephews and nieces of la Suhard, who had informed them that two infants had died in the dwelling and that the curate had agreed to inter them. On the preceding day, they had visited la Suhard, who at first denied having any children under her roof. Following their entreaties, she was said to have shown them a small closet containing two swaddled bodies, appearing to be about one year of age. These they had wrapped in a linen cloth.
Questioned as to whether other remains existed, la Suhard had at length led them to the cellar. The women related that she had there retrieved, with the aid of a staff, a parcel wrapped in several coverings, and added it to the first. When they besought the curate Le Chauve to proceed with the burial, he demanded that the certificates of baptism be laid before him. He feared that he was being presented, under false extracts, with children who had been dead for many days. He gave notice to the officers of justice. That night, however, a man opened a trench in the churchyard and consigned the parcel to the earth.
On the day following these first discoveries, nine baptismal certificates were found within a sealed press. They pertained to illegitimate children born in 1776, 1777, and, for the greater part, 1778; the papers gave no clue as to what had become of them. The cellar was put to the question. The physicians and the surgeon who repaired thither had the earth cleared away, along with the remains discovered near the surface, and concluded that the bones came from six bodies. A deeper excavation brought others to light, which the practitioners ascribed to six further infant corpses. These were conveyed to the churchyard together with the adjacent soil, to obviate the peril of noxious exhalations.
These mortal remains restored no names to the children. Nor did they, of themselves, reveal the cause of each demise. But they transformed the gossip of neighbors into judicial questions that demanded an answer. The fiscal procureur entered a formal accusation against la Suhard and her presumed accomplices. A warrant for bodily arrest was issued against Portier upon strong suspicion of complicity, and he was pursued alongside her. The constabulary of the maréchaussée finally came up with them at Chelun. La Suhard was discovered lying upon a litter of straw in a private house. Portier had concealed himself in the privies, whence he had to be drawn out by main force.
The depositions recounted la Suhard’s practice of harboring several infants under her roof while laying in few provisions. Neighbors deposed that they had seen the little ones enter, yet had never witnessed their departure for Paris nor their conveyance to the churchyard. They recounted that their crying grew faint after a few days. The foul odor rising from the cellar had been laid to the account of the neighboring tanneries. These recollections acquired their true significance only after the excavations; taken alone, they had not sufficed to provoke an inquest.
Two young women who had resorted thither for their confinement declared that upon quitting the house for a few hours, they had left several living infants behind, and that on their return two of them had vanished. La Suhard was said to have answered that the persons who had entrusted them had come to take them back. Another deposition maintained that she administered an infusion of poppy steeped in their gruel in order to still their crying. A woman who had lodged some three months in her house testified to having seen more than thirty children enter, and asserted that they had all perished while in la Suhard’s hands. It is this witness's statement, and not an independent medical tally, that Champagnac reports.
The same chronicle records another abandonment. A curate had committed an ailing young woman to la Suhard, delivering to her the moneys needful for her sustenance and her passage to Paris. La Suhard is said to have ill-used her, fed her insufficiently, and subsequently abandoned her near Alençon destitute of funds. The young woman begged her bread, was apprehended by the maréchaussée, and conducted to the depot at Rennes. La Suhard, therefore, did not merely take in children; she also received funds intended for the care and transport of vulnerable persons.
The chronicle states that she confessed to the greater part of the facts alleged. Subjected to the question, pressed as far as eight wedges, she maintained throughout her interrogatories that she had had no accomplice. This distinction is of moment regarding Portier: he had been arrested as a suspect, but the chronicle records no judicial decree against him at the close of la Suhard’s trial. Her confessions, therefore, do not warrant transforming the man who lived beneath her roof into an established co-perpetrator.
By a decree of the 29th of April, 1779, Renée Richard, known as la Suhard, was sentenced to be burned alive and her ashes scattered to the winds. The sentence was carried out on the 22nd of May following. The judgment brought the proceedings against her to an end, yet the place could restore neither the vanished children nor those whose bones had been recovered. The baptismal papers attested that they had been entrusted; the depositions attested that they had been looked for; the excavations yielded only fragments devoid of a certain identity.