The tailor asked that the collar be unstitched. He had recognized the garment; to prove his claim, he pointed to a detail invisible to the magistrates: a playing card slipped between the cloth and its lining to lend stiffness to the collar. It was, he declared, a king of spades. The seam was opened. In the account published by Dr. Chartier in 1897, the card came to light, restoring to the dead an identity that years and concealment had nearly obliterated.
The vanished man was Pierre Baillet, a president of the Chambre des Comptes of Dijon. On September 6, 1638, he had announced his intention to visit his cousin, Philippe Giroux, a *président à mortier* of the Parlement of Burgundy. Giroux was due to depart the following day for Rennes, summoned thither by another judicial affair. That evening, Baillet entered Giroux’s town residence, attended by his servant Neugot, known as Baudot. Witnesses saw them arrive; no one ever saw them depart. At daybreak, Giroux quit Dijon as planned.
So conspicuous an absence could not long remain a private family concern. Baillet possessed a name, high office, kin, and adversaries; his disappearance threw into turmoil a close-knit world wherein every alliance was known to all. Rumor attributed to Giroux an intrigue with Marie, his cousin’s wife. This supposed passion provided a motive; political enmities and rival patronages furnished others. Gossip was swift to supply an explanation. It remained for the magistrates to uncover something more substantial than municipal hearsay.
An initial inquiry yielded nothing decisive. Baillet’s mother persisted in her appeals, and in March 1640, a formal judicial investigation was entrusted to the councillors Jacquot and Millière. Their position was perilous. The suspected magistrate was a member of their own bench, wielded formidable connections, and was fully capable of contesting every procedural step with consummate legal skill. Certain magistrates were obliged to take an oath of secrecy. This was no mere hunt for bodies: the Parlement was conducting an inquest into the very milieu from which its own authority and allegiances were drawn.
Giroux mounted a fierce defense. Denouncing what he termed a persecution, he assailed Saumaise de Chasans, his avowed enemy, and attacked all who contributed to the brief against him. Chartier records threats leveled against witnesses and the innkeepers who might harbor them. An ecclesiastical monitory, read from the pulpits of the parishes, commanded the faithful to disclose whatever they knew upon pain of excommunication. Poised between dread of their master and dread of the Church, servants were called to speak under conditions that bore little resemblance to free conversation.
One Éléonore Cordier drew the scrutiny of Councillor Jacquot by her testimony. She was in Giroux’s service; the court caused her to be detained in the Conciergerie, ostensibly to shield her from reprisals. The investigators were led to a trunk she had dispatched to Langres, to the house of a former mistress. Within lay weapons and a hat. The bailli Humblot recalled having seen a low-crowned hat, slashed as though by the point of a rapier—the very style habitual to Baillet. A single article of dress suddenly assumed the weight of a bridge between the missing man and the suspect’s house.
When the trunk was recovered and opened in Dijon, the hat no longer answered to the description. Humblot stood by his recollection. The judges had to choose between a lapse of memory and an underhand substitution. The inquest established, according to Chartier, that Giroux had borrowed the ordinary hat now found within the chest. The substitute accused almost as loudly as the item it was meant to supplant. To the commissioners, this alteration betrayed a deliberate design to confuse the trail; to the defense, the entire edifice remained open to challenge.
The next discovery came on April 8, 1641. Depositions, some wrung under torture, directed the magistrates to the residence of Madame du Vigny, Giroux’s godmother. Benoît Giroux, the accused’s father, accompanied them. In a small closet stood a locked salting tub. Inside were sacks, skeletal remains, and remnants of attire: a boot, shoes, a spur. The two missing men re-entered the proceedings in the least recognizable form, yet in the one form of which the law could lay firm hold.
Two surgeons examined the bones and reconstructed two male bodies. The clothing was placed before craftsmen. The tailor Deloigny recognized work he had executed for Baillet and foretold the card stitched within the collar; a cordwainer identified the shoes. The elder Giroux admitted to having arranged the transport of corpses discovered in his son’s garden. Thus the commissioners brought together human remains, customary attire, and the movements of a hidden deposit. Taken singly, each clue invited debate; joined together, they formed the chain of proof upon which the court would rest its verdict.
On May 2, 1643, Giroux appeared before sixteen magistrates, his kin having been excluded from the bench. He was denied the privilege of wearing the customary insignia of his office. The reconstructed bones were set before the court as those of Baillet and Baudot. He refused to acknowledge them, maintaining that he was the victim of malice and enemies. The interrogation mingled the double murder with various other charges, several of which must not be confused with the facts expressly sustained in the final decree. The trial also tested the mettle of depositions that were repeatedly retracted or evaded.
On May 8, the court adjudged him guilty of the double assassination, of an attempted murder upon du Magny, and of various machinations intended to suborn perjury or discredit witnesses. It pronounced his degradation from office, the sentence of the *amende honorable*, and his decapitation at the Place du Morimont. The decree further levied fines and reparations, awarded an indemnity to Neugot’s sister, and ordered the burial of the bones at the Church of Notre-Dame. In the judgment of the law, the servant thus regained a family and an identity distinct from that of the president he had attended.
Giroux was executed that same day. The account preserved by Chartier describes several mistimed blows, followed by an angry populace that threatened the executioner and had to be dispersed by force. It records as well that Giroux did not name Marie Baillet as an accomplice. His condemnation thus failed to yield the sweeping confession his adversaries had anticipated. The precise circumstances of the murder were not detailed until January 1646, in the deposition of the former servant Aubriot, known as La Valeur, who recounted on the matter of the assault the words of yet another domestic. This belated testimony could have played no part in a sentence already carried out.
The affair has often been recounted as a drama of fatal passion whose every element pointed inexorably to the scaffold. Yet it contains a far more disciplined history: two men vanish, a mother demands justice, magistrates sit in judgment on one of their peers, and inanimate objects speak through the hands of the artisans who made them. The king of spades did not say who had struck the blows. It merely declared that the coat had belonged to Baillet. Between that material certainty and the narrative certitudes of rumor, the law had been forced to hew its path.