When the parcel was unfastened on May 31, 1776, a detonation shook the workshop of François Meunier. The glazier had deferred to the following morning the task of unbinding the box received the previous day; he suffered wounds to his hands and face, but survived the attempt. The commissionaire who had delivered it made it possible to trace the parcel to the locksmith Nicolas Philippot. Arrested, Nérau, known as Saint-Jean, denounced the man who had engaged his services. Following this deposition, he was found dead in his prison cell. The chronicler suspects poisoning, though no recorded evidence confirms such a cause. The magistrate’s inquiry had yet to distinguish among the presumed artificer, the porter, Meunier’s wife, and a domestic servant implicated in their correspondence.
Philippot was a locksmith in Orléans, reputed skillful in his trade, and an acquaintance of François Meunier, a glazier of the same city. Meunier had in time grown suspicious of the locksmith’s frequent calls and requested that he cease visiting his house. The visits ended, yet Champagnac relates that relations between Philippot and Élisabeth Breton, Meunier’s wife, were secretly maintained through their domestic, Marie-Madeleine Froc, who acted as go-between. The husband, according to the chronicle, harbored no suspicion of this exchange.
One day in May 1776, Nérau, known as Saint-Jean, presented himself at Meunier’s shop with a box that he claimed contained prints to be framed. The glazier knew the party from whom, according to the porter, the consignment came, but declined to receive it without a letter of advice, out of respect for customary practice. On Thursday, May 30, Nérau returned with the same box, this time accompanied by a letter confirming both sender and commission. Meunier accepted the parcel and resolved to open it on the morrow.
Upon unbarring the shop on May 31, he forced the lid. The explosion wounded him and threw the neighborhood into consternation. The townspeople ran thither and found the glazier half-swooning. Upon examining the box, an armed mechanism was discovered; the discharge sped toward the street without striking anyone. The two balls flew toward the thoroughfare without harming a passerby; the chronicle mentions no other casualty. Meunier delivered the box and the missive into the hands of justice and declared that Nérau had been the bearer.
Apprehended and examined, Nérau declared that Philippot had entrusted him with the parcel destined for Meunier, together with the letter the glazier had demanded. The locksmith had cautioned him by no means to name him. Nérau added that upon his return he had rendered an account of his errand to Philippot, who had paid him his wage and offered him a glass of wine. This deposition afforded the magistrate a direct link between the parcel and the locksmith’s workshop.
Nérau was subsequently found dead in his prison. Champagnac writes that it was presumed—not without cause, in his judgment—that the glass of wine offered by Philippot had contained poison. He suggests that the porter’s death might have severed the tie between the fatal engine and its sender. Yet the narrative records neither post-mortem examination nor medical certificate confirming poison; the motive imputed to Philippot remains an inference of the chronicler. Nérau’s words, entered into the record before his demise, had already named the locksmith.
The moment she learned that the porter was in the hands of justice, Élisabeth Breton took flight. Philippot likewise attempted to elude the search. He contemplated crossing into England, then remained in France. He returned to Orléans to gather a few effects and implements before repairing to Paris. In an inn on the Rue de Touraine, he lived for some two months under the name of the Chevalier d’Albret, passing himself off as an officer of the Conti regiment. The ordinary was well attended; his genteel appearance, Champagnac observes, assisted him in sustaining the character of an officer. Nothing at the inn seemed to betray the fugitive from Orléans, while the description dispatched from the city where Meunier had been injured enabled the police to prepare his capture.
One evening, after an excursion to the Saint-Ovide fair, he returned near midnight. Police officers surrounded him upon the threshold of the hostelry; a commissary of police had been lying in wait for two hours with armed assistance. Philippot sought to flee, but the officers perceived that he answered the description sent from Orléans and laid hands upon him. A search conducted in his presence brought to light charcoal, clay coin-molds, and rough-cast lead blanks. These objects fed another branch of the proceedings; the chapter does not present them as evidence of the outrage committed against Meunier.
Philippot was conducted to the Grand Châtelet and thence transferred to the prisons of Orléans. The judicial investigation also encompassed Meunier’s wife, suspected of complicity, and Marie-Madeleine Froc, who had conveyed the letters and messages between her and the locksmith. The standing of the two women before the law was by no means identical: Froc was ultimately discharged from all complaints and accusations, whereas the case concerning Meunier’s wife remained open following Philippot’s sentence.
On January 11, 1777, the court declared the contumacy against Élisabeth Breton duly established and condemned Philippot for having sought to compass Meunier’s death by means of the infernal engine. The sentence, confirmed on February 25, pronounced capital punishment. Put to the question, Philippot made no confession and protested his innocence. Champagnac’s account states that the sight of the instruments of torture appeared to daunt him; it attributes to him an exclamation upon the love of women, the precise terms of which the chronicler does not preserve. Philippot was executed upon the Place du Martroy at Orléans on February 28, 1777.
Froc, for her part, was cleared of the charges and set at liberty. The court pronounced no definitive decree of guilt against Meunier’s wife at that time. Following Philippot’s execution, it ordered a broader inquiry—a plus ample informé. Champagnac himself concedes that she may well have taken no part in the attempt; he deems it probable that the locksmith did not entrust his design to her, even while censuring her conduct and her flight. These moral strictures belong to the author alone. The judicial disposition recorded is far more circumspect: a prosecution kept open for further light, not a conviction of Meunier’s wife as an accomplice.
The affair leaves behind varying degrees of certitude. The explosion wounded Meunier; the investigation traced the engine to Philippot through Nérau’s deposition; Philippot was condemned for the outrage and suffered death. The porter’s death in his cell was regarded by the chronicler as a suspected poisoning, yet the chapter provides no medical confirmation for the conclusion. As for Meunier’s wife, her flight nourished suspicion without the court ever determining her fate; the interlocutory order left the case pending. Froc, whose office as go-between was established by the chronicle, was discharged.
It is tempting, in the wake of an explosion, a midnight capture, and a scaffold, to bind every figure of the narrative into a single web of guilt. The judicial process did not do so. Philippot was condemned; Froc was cleared; Breton remained under examination, with no definitive judgment on record. The porter expired in prison under circumstances that Champagnac interprets without proof visible to the reader. The affair thus concludes not with an exhaustive resolution, but with divided fates: justice punished the craftsman it deemed convicted, liberated a messenger, and left the question of the wife’s complicity unanswered.