The slip of paper was exceedingly brief, penned in Italian, and Guglielmo Tasso had requested it merely to compare the statements of two young villagers. Lieutenant-Colonel Abatucci placed it in his hand. This memorandum summarized information that Domenico and Antonio had brought to him separately regarding Sanvito Lanfranchi. The commandant could not yet foresee that these voices would falter and shift repeatedly, nor that he himself would soon stand accused of having dictated their every word.
Corsica had only recently passed under the dominion of the French Crown. Champagnac’s account depicts an island where blood feuds and the raids of mountain bandits perpetually terrified the populace. The provincial regiment had been established to restore public tranquility. Abatucci, as lieutenant-colonel, held command over the region "beyond the mountains" and took up his residence in the pieve of Talavo. His mission, as set forth by the chronicler, was strictly military: to pursue armed outlaws, discover their mountain lairs, and suppress outbreaks of violence.
The Biaggi brothers had lately murdered Francisco-Antonio Lanfranchi. Their cousin Sanvito, who worked a modest mill at Guittera, was notorious for his dealings with them and had been expressly named as an accomplice by one of the assassins. Longstanding grievances, firearms rumored to be concealed beneath his roof, and dark whispers of vengeance formed a sinister portrait, yet one composed entirely of suspicions. Abatucci ordered him conveyed to the citadel of Ajaccio as a precautionary measure of police, and immediately apprised his superior, the Maréchal-de-Camp de Beaumanoir. He went so far as to suggest resting content with this confinement, should it suffice to avert further peril.
In his reply of March 14, 1778, Beaumanoir directed that the magistrates examine Sanvito’s past conduct, intimating that he might well be joined to the prosecution of the Biaggi brothers. He instructed Abatucci to furnish all pertinent intelligence and to provide the names of witnesses who could attest to the counsel Sanvito had allegedly given the murderers. The King’s prosecutor at Ajaccio likewise charged the lieutenant-colonel with gathering information. Thus, the very officer who had placed Sanvito under arrest found himself commanded to assemble the evidence against him.
Abatucci turned to the curé of Cozza, a neighboring parish to Guittera, requesting precise facts and the names of those capable of testifying under oath. His inquiry was to remain strictly confidential, says Champagnac. Before any answer could arrive, Sanvito broke out of the citadel alongside fellow prisoners, forced two locks, scaled the perimeter wall, and reached the shore. He was promptly recaptured and returned to close confinement. When the curé’s intelligence finally reached Abatucci, it proved unusable for immediate action; the chronicler leaves its precise contents unrevealed.
One morning, Domenico presented himself at the commandant’s quarters. Laid low with fever for several days, Abatucci initially refused the visitor, but relented upon learning that the youth bore vital disclosures. Domenico spoke at length of Sanvito’s conduct and announced that Antonio would also call upon him that very day. Antonio duly arrived in the afternoon and, according to the chronicle, related substantially the same account. The one was employed at Sanvito’s mill; the other lived on familiar terms with the men of the village. These ties seemed to lend weight to their disclosures, though they remained informal revelations rather than depositions sworn in a court of law.
Abatucci kept their accounts by him, waiting until his health permitted him to lay them before Beaumanoir and the King’s prosecutor. Three or four days later, Guglielmo Tasso, a soldier of the regiment and a native of Guittera, inquired of him whether he had seen Domenico and Antonio, and what matters they had disclosed. The lieutenant-colonel expressed astonishment that a private soldier should interrogate his commanding officer concerning an affair outside his province. Guglielmo explained that he knew both youths well and merely wished to ascertain whether their statements to the commandant agreed with what they had told him.
A second document must be distinguished from the brief note entrusted to Guglielmo. As his health improved, Abatucci drew up a personal summary of the information gathered, lest any detail escape his memory. Prior to his committing it to paper, Sanvito had been escorted once more to the citadel, and the younger Biaggi brother, captured with weapons in hand, had been condemned to death. In his last testament, this outlaw declared that Sanvito had furnished his brother with a pistol and supplied the two fugitives while on the run. Abatucci forwarded his memorandum to the King’s prosecutor, leaving that magistrate to proceed according to his own judgment.
Philibert Léonardi, a kinsman of the murdered man, lodged a formal denunciation. Abatucci thereupon considered that the royal prosecutor had assumed complete control of the case, and that his own duties were at an end. Ten witnesses were summoned and examined. Seven held firm to their testimony, according to Champagnac. Antonio, however, recanted, asserting that Guglielmo had coerced him into his initial deposition; Domenico wavered and yielded in his turn when confronted. Guglielmo alone maintained the truth of what he had spoken.
On August 19, 1778, the judge of Ajaccio discharged Sanvito and ordered his release from custody. In reporting the sentence of six years in the galleys, Champagnac writes "Guglielmo and Tasso," whereas he had hitherto referred to the soldier as Guglielmo Tasso—a phrasing that leaves the true identity or number of the condemned ambiguous, and permits no certainty as to whether two individuals were intended. The same judgment declared Domenico a perjurer, sentencing him to the pillory, while Antonio was ordered to stand by and witness the punishments. Upon appeal, the Conseil Supérieur of Corsica on September 22 ordered a fuller investigation, remanding Sanvito, the two witnesses, and Guglielmo to prison.
The reopening of the inquiry was entrusted to Conseillers Massessi and Baudoin. Champagnac portrays Massessi as a personal enemy of Abatucci, said to have held the officer responsible for the violent death of his son during revolutionary disturbances—a partisan judgment of the chronicler regarding the magistrate. During this renewed examination, Antonio and Domenico, having already recanted once, altered their accounts yet again. This time, they laid the blame squarely upon Abatucci, swearing he had threatened them into testifying against Sanvito and had dictated a false declaration to them in a private chamber, which Guglielmo had signed.
The accusation now rested upon a narrative that the two youths had repeatedly revised. A warrant was issued against Abatucci, who was subjected to three days of grueling interrogation. He answered that Domenico and Antonio had approached him independently, unattended by witnesses or military escort, to deliver their intelligence; he denied ever commanding them to perjure themselves, just as he denied charging Guglielmo with their subornation. Confronted with the youths, he demanded why they had made no mention of these alleged threats during their earlier examinations. They replied that no one had ever inquired what Abatucci had said to them.
On June 5, 1779, the Conseil Supérieur condemned Abatucci, by a majority of six votes to four, to nine years in the galleys, the brand of infamy, and a fine of two hundred livres. Guglielmo was likewise sentenced to nine years, Domenico to three years, and Antonio to three years’ banishment from the jurisdiction of Ajaccio alongside a monetary fine. Sanvito, though laden with grave accusations, was fully cleared at the behest of the public prosecutor. Witnesses who had deposed against him were also visited with severe penalties, although, according to Champagnac, no formal complaint for perjury had ever been lodged against them.
For Abatucci, this decree transformed a legitimate military inquiry into the felony of subornation. Champagnac portrays him at the reading of the sentence, preserving an unyielding countenance and placing his trust in royal justice. He refused to bow to the decree. His vindication was to prove a long and arduous ordeal, henceforth hanging upon the lips of the very men who had so often shifted their oaths.
Vindication was slow in coming. Antonio and Domenico ultimately recanted upon their deathbeds, declaring that Abatucci had never solicited their testimony, and that they had accused the lieutenant-colonel solely at the instigation of the curé of Guittera. A fresh inquiry was instituted before the Sénéchaussée of Aix. On July 17, 1786, the Parlement of Provence confirmed the judgment condemning the curé, who had fled, to public penance and death, to be executed in effigy. He was thus not physically put to death in the history recorded by Champagnac.
By this same decree, Abatucci was fully rehabilitated and shortly thereafter reinstated in his rank of lieutenant-colonel. The years of his disgrace were counted toward his military service. He had set out merely to assemble intelligence against a man suspected of bloody complicity; the wavering versions of witnesses, their successive recantations, and two written memoranda intended to preserve their words had turned the entire weight of the prosecution upon his own head. One document, brief and entrusted to Guglielmo, had been meant to test the consistency of testimonies; the other, prepared for the magistrates, was the commandant’s personal aide-mémoire. In this chronicle, the paper itself does not contain the whole crime: it was the shifting of human speech, and the manner in which the law pursued it, that led Abatucci from the duties of an investigator to the ignominy of condemnation, and at last to the restoration of his honor.