There exist trials wherein justice seeks a culprit; there are others wherein the true culprit appears, first and foremost, to seek a trial. At Artemare, an ancient land dispute provided the prime motive, the death of a tenant farmer furnished the pretext, and legal procedure, rather than arresting vengeance, lent it its very forms. In the opening days of this ordeal, Maître Gonod, an advocate before the Parlement, possessed no defence save the memory of a decree that had restored to his family a portion of its patrimony.
For twenty years, the Sieur Cy...... had enjoyed possession of a tract of the fief of Artemare. A decree of the Parlement de Dijon, handed down on the 17th of August 1750, reinstated Gonod in this estate of his forefathers. Property did not merely change hands: it altered the relationship between the two men. Champagnac recounts that an enduring hatred was conceived against him who had obtained justice, and that this rancour awaited merely an occasion to drape itself in the mantle of public duty.
That occasion presented itself on the night of the 7th of October 1768. Toward nine o’clock in the evening, Cy...... was repairing to the house of Garin, situated a quarter of a league from the chateau. Joseph Gojoz-Vellaz, his farmer, walked before him bearing a lantern. In the middle of the avenue, a musket shot rang out, grievously wounding the servant in the arm. Both men reached Garin’s dwelling. In their initial account, neither named Gonod; indeed, they acknowledged that they had been unable to see the person who fired. Gojoz-Vellaz returned to his home in Artemare. His condition worsened; conveyed on the 10th of October to the hospital at Belley, he died there on the 23rd.
On the morrow of the attack, Cy...... had set on foot searches that failed to discover the perpetrator. What he then required, according to the chronicler, was less a clue than a name. That of Gonod offered itself to his mind—the name of his adversary in the dispute over the fief. Cy...... drew up two complaints: in his own, he designated the advocate merely as an inhabitant of Artemare; in that which he framed under the name of his farmer, he denounced him outright as an assassin. The initial petitions were laid before the judge of Valromey. The fiscal procurator delivered his conclusions, whilst public opinion, far from subscribing to the accusation, appeared not to substantiate it in the least.
It was at this juncture that the Sieur Bon......, assessor to the Maréchaussée at Belley, intervened. A kinsman of his, then being prosecuted by Cy...... for theft, fell under suspicion of having committed the murder. Champagnac attributes to the magistrate a proposal of the utmost gravity: to direct the proceedings against Gonod and leave his own kinsman unmolested, provided Cy...... consented thereto. The latter agreed. Justice had not yet established the identity of the marksman; yet the plausible culprit was already dismissed in favour of the enemy whom hatred had chosen.
The Maréchaussée lacked jurisdiction over such a crime. Moreover, Gojoz-Vellaz had expired before these fresh measures were undertaken. On the 28th of October, Cy...... went to Vouglans to confer with the procureur Ro...... of the bailliage of Belley. According to the chronicle, Cy...... drafted and signed his own complaint; whereupon Ro...... fabricated another in the name of the deceased man, whom he had never seen and for whom he held no power of attorney. To the misgivings of his accomplice, Cy...... reportedly replied that he remained master of the date. These two instruments enabled Bon...... to issue an antedated ordinance bearing the date of the 10th of October; the petitions themselves were not deposited at the greffe until the 13th of November.
On the following day, Bon...... received a commission to subpoena seven witnesses. The record of the proceeding reveals him acting concurrently as the director of the inquest and an active participant in the accusation. Most of the witnesses were domestic servants or retainers of Cy......; the latter had handed his valet, Guillaume Sevoz, an écu of six livres so that the men might drink before giving testimony. Even so, the King’s procurator deemed the evidence insufficient to issue a warrant against Gonod: he required a fuller investigation, accompanied by a monitory letter. Bon...... waited neither for this measure nor for further proofs. Upon a loose sheet detached from the dossier, he penned in his own hand, under date of the 4th of December, a warrant for the bodily arrest of a well-known, domiciled gentleman.
Cy......, for his part, spread the rumour that Gonod had been recognised by the flash of the musket. Against this assertion, the chronicle sets the fleeting instant of a nocturnal detonation: how could a sudden flash have revealed the countenance of a marksman? On the 18th of December, armed with a gun and escorted by horsemen, Cy...... appeared outside the church of Yon whilst Gonod was attending Mass. He did not attempt to arrest him then; he ostentatiously searched for him amongst the congregation. According to Champagnac, he hoped to terrify his opponent, drive him to flight, and subsequently have him tried in contumacy. Gonod did not flee.
On the 22nd and 24th of December, the advocate caused formal notice to be served upon the King’s procurator, upon Cy......, and upon the heirs of Gojoz-Vellaz. He denounced the outrage committed against his honour, contested the jurisdiction of the Maréchaussée, and declared his appeal against the warrant. The notice reached Bon......; the King’s procurator was never apprised of it. The prosecution appeared to halt, yet this respite was merely a suspension. On the 5th of February following, five mounted constables of the Maréchaussée arrived to seize Gonod in his own home, before his family, and compelled him to march on foot to the prison of Belley.
The prisoner requested a copy of the warrant so that he might learn the cause of his detention. It was denied him. He protested the illegality of the proceedings and demanded proofs; his representations never reached those who had the authority to hear them. A renewed summons addressed to the King’s procurator, wherein he exposed the incompetence of the officers and demanded that the monitory letter be published in the omitted parishes, was likewise intercepted and suppressed by Bon...... The judge entered the prison cell and threatened Gonod should he persist in defending himself; the turnkey’s wife received strict orders to admit neither bailiffs, relatives, nor friends.
These locked doors wrought consequences that no judicial decree could ever mend. Gonod’s father, an aged man crushed by the horror of seeing his son condemned to the scaffold, died of grief, according to the chronicler. Gonod, already broken by captivity and prostrated by this bereavement, fell gravely ill. All visitors were forbidden him. Champagnac relates that his persecutors rejoiced to see him languish, one of them even wagering upon his impending death. The family pleaded that he be conveyed under guard to the hospital at his own expense; Bon...... refused, reproaching the prisoner for having lodged a complaint against him before the Chief Magistrate.
A kinsman addressed a memorial to the Chief Magistrate of the realm. An order was promptly issued requiring the entire dossier to be transmitted to Paris, whereupon the question of jurisdiction was at last adjudicated. On the 11th of May 1769, the court of Bourg remitted the case to the jurisdiction of Valromey, the seat within whose bounds the crime had been committed. The principal witnesses were examined in their turn. Guillaume Sevoz and Claude Gojoz-Vellaz were convicted of perjury and committed to prison. On the 19th of August, the court of Valromey discharged Gonod of the accusation; the two false witnesses were sentenced to distinct penalties—branding and the galleys for Sevoz, banishment for Gojoz-Vellaz, alongside fines and damages assessed against each.
An appeal a minima by the public prosecutor subsequently brought the cause before the Parlement de Dijon. On the 6th of May 1770, Gonod was definitively discharged of the accusation and restored to his liberty, with leave to prosecute the false witnesses. The investigation opened at his instance brought to light the conduct imputed to Cy......, Bon......, and Ro......; warrants for their bodily arrest were decreed. On the 19th of July 1771, the public prosecutor demanded the death penalty against the perjured witnesses, corporal punishment against the three instigators, and damages for the benefit of Gonod. The Parlement did not grant this full measure of triumph: it dismissed the charges against the three principal instigators without day, and mitigated the penalties imposed upon the earlier convicts.
The advocate thus regained his freedom and the judicial recognition of his innocence, yet the final decree could not restore what the initial arrest had stripped away. His father was dead; months of incarceration and sickness had graven deep furrows upon his constitution; and the judgment of 1771 left the principal architects of the plot unpunished, despite the requisitions of the Crown. The pivot of this entire machination had been an altered date, followed by an accusation to which men had lent the binding force of a lawful decree. At Artemare, justice had first to unravel a false chronology before it could restore a man to his name.