General Sarrazin appeared before the Assize Court in military uniform, yet stripped of epaulets and decorations. He explained that he had laid them aside out of deference to the King. Georgina Hutchinson, for her part, had come to defend a far less brilliant title—one he had formerly bestowed upon her and now refused her: that of his wife. In a courtroom where several spouses were awaited, she alone of the three answered the call. She was to speak French without an interpreter, facing the man who insisted he had merely played at marriage with her.
On July 23, 1819, the magistrates of the Seine were called upon to resolve a precise question: had Jean Sarrazin contracted a second union while the first still subsisted? For the prosecution, the case rested upon two instruments: one executed in Leghorn in June 1799, the other in London in May 1813. Between the two had intervened armies, a desertion, a crossed frontier, and changes of regime. The general intended to turn this entire history to his advantage. Georgina required only that both documents be read.
In 1813, Sarrazin lodged beneath the same roof as the Hutchinson family. He paid court to Georgina, then wed her according to English forms. Their life together lasted seven weeks, as she was to testify before the court. She then learned that another woman already bore his name. Cécile-Charlotte Schwartz had married the general in Leghorn, and she was still living. Georgina quitted the conjugal roof and took refuge elsewhere, while steps were initiated to secure proof of that prior union.
Sarrazin wrote to her, urging her return. In the letters produced against him, he invoked their solemn vows, a wife’s proper place beside her husband, and the child she was carrying. He could appear suppliant, then menacing; protestations of devotion alternated with recriminations. These pages possessed a destiny their author had not foreseen when dispatching them: they would not bring Georgina back, but they would return to confront him before his judges.
The young woman did not merely receive these injunctions. She replied, refused an interview, and set the general’s own contradictions before him. If she were as unworthy as he alleged, why did he insist upon her return? Amid her reproaches, she maintained sufficient firmness to turn an accusation back upon the man who framed it. It was still merely a correspondence between two estranged souls; yet it was to supply the trial with something the certified extracts of the registers could never provide: the very words Sarrazin had employed to define their bond.
A daughter was born in March 1814. Georgina appealed for relief. In a letter preserved in the case file, she described the lack of bread and fuel, the unpaid rent, and labor that no longer sufficed to sustain them. Sarrazin had returned to France. Her solicitations continued without procuring for mother and child the succor they implored. In 1816, Georgina traveled to Paris to assert their rights. She had crossed the Channel; it remained for her to traverse the denials of the man she had come to seek.
He had a third union to set against her. In May 1817, before the mayor of Pennes in the department of Lot-et-Garonne, Sarrazin had married Marie Delard. She was now the only wife he acknowledged. The first ceremony, in Italy, had not been a true marriage, he claimed; the second, in England, had been mere pretense. Yet the legal acts existed. To expunge two women from his lawful life, it was no longer enough to walk out of their houses: he had to persuade the court that their papers proved nothing.
Georgina lodged a formal complaint in August 1818. Sarrazin was arrested in October and committed to La Force prison. He challenged the documents, published memoirs, and accused his complainant of dark maneuvers against him. The debate concerned far more than signatures. Could a Frenchman be prosecuted in France for a marriage contracted abroad with a foreign woman? Coffinières, Georgina’s counsel, contended that the marriage had conferred upon her a French status. The very bond by which she had been wronged must not become the instrument to bar her from the courts.
Sarrazin likewise pleaded civil death. In 1810, following his flight to England, a court-martial had condemned him to death in absentia. This past condemnation, whose lingering effects and subsequent extinction were warmly disputed, served his attempt to dispute his very capacity to marry. The third union had been excluded from the indictment on this ground. Coffinières denounced such a conclusion, confronting the general with the provisions of a royal ordinance of 1815 and his own past declarations regarding the recovery of his civil rights. Yet the trial remained that of the first two instruments, not of three marriages promiscuously condemned.
At the hearing, Sarrazin multiplied his objections. He demanded, in particular, that a substantial security for costs be exacted from Georgina, whom he persisted in treating as an alien. He recalled having formally challenged the authenticity of the certified transcripts. The court ordered the proceedings to continue. A notary, the custodian of the exemplification of the Leghorn contract, delivered the document; it was laid upon the bench, then handed to the accused. Sarrazin saw in it merely a financial arrangement, a provisional betrothal—anything save the matrimonial covenant alleged against him.
The presiding judge then confronted him with a difficulty sprung from his own pen. In one of his letters, Sarrazin had asserted that the English marriage, even if deemed valid, was nullified by the union he had previously contracted with Schwartz. Now, he disputed that first marriage. The very argument framed to repel Georgina became an embarrassing admission of the Italian union. As he sought an escape in one document, another of his own writings seemed to bar the way.
As for London, he admitted having stood before a clergyman, but dismissed the rite as a charade. His appeals for Georgina’s return were read aloud to him, with their references to vows and their invocation of marital rights. He replied by impugning the conduct of the woman who had left him. She, in turn, declared that she had departed only upon learning of the prior marriage. Such an impasse could not be resolved by the volume of their voices: the judges had to weigh documents against declarations, while the accused still sought to divert the trial toward the character of his accuser.
His military record encumbered more than merely his own defense. The president reproached him with his desertion and the intelligence he had allegedly rendered to the English. Sarrazin retorted that he had exaggerated his exploits, then invoked the secret information he had brought back to France. The former general once more filled the stage. Coffinières recalled the court to the unions actually contracted, to Georgina, and to her child. He demanded civil reparations for a woman whom Sarrazin had addressed as his wife before pretending she was a stranger to him.
Claveau, appointed ex officio to defend the prisoner, addressed the court in his turn. Sarrazin took the floor once more after him. In a written statement delivered to the jury, he maintained that he had signed no marriage certificate other than that of Marie Delard; he demanded the original Italian and English documents and contended that they were prosecuting the deserter under the guise of the bigamist. He recognized neither the facts as they were laid before him nor the impartiality of those who were to judge him.
The jury nevertheless answered in the affirmative to the question concerning the second marriage contracted before the dissolution of the first. The court sentenced Sarrazin to ten years of penal servitude, to the pillory, and to ten years of police surveillance following his term. It awarded forty thousand francs in damages to Georgina. The condemned man declared that he possessed nothing. The sum had been pronounced; yet in itself, it constituted no bread already provided for the mother and her child.
Sarrazin appealed to the Court of Cassation, denouncing afresh the sarcasms of the magistrates and a prosecution inspired by his political past. His petition was rejected; he was subsequently exposed in the pillory. Georgina had secured that the English marriage, dismissed as a farce, be upheld in a criminal conviction. The letters that had once summoned her to her husband’s side had failed to restore their life together; but they had helped prevent the man who signed them from erasing her from his own.