An anonymous letter promised death to a farmer-general should three hundred and sixty louis fail to be deposited near a ferry-landing by the Invalides. It specified the spot, a mark made in chalk, and the absolute futility of any surveillance. The police mounted that very surveillance; yet presently it was not the author of the menace, but a man who had never set eyes upon the recipient—or so he protested—who was carted off to prison. The affair of Joseph Garnier begins at the designated post and concludes without the writer’s name ever being brought to light.
On the 11th of October 1773, towards six o’clock in the evening, Mazière received the missive. It was couched in the plural, like the manifesto of a resolute band, demanded the gold coin, and warned that no guard on earth would preserve him should he refuse to pay. Mazière delivered it into the hands of the police. Officers, headed by an exempt, were posted about the mooring-post to which was secured the cable of the ferry plying the river before the Invalides. The letter directed that the sum be laid at the foot of this post; the police therefore lay in wait for whoever should keep the appointment.
On Tuesday the 19th of October, towards six o’clock in the morning, a man turned off the highway and descended into the ditch separating the road from the avenue of the Cours-la-Reine. He was some twenty paces from the post. Men burst forth from beneath the timber bridge, others from behind the trees. The man made to scramble back up, received a blow from a cudgel, and fled towards Paris, shouting to the carters upon the road. The exempt stepped forward, arrested him in the King’s name, and had him bound fast. The arrest, executed in full view of the passers-by, ran ahead of any explanation.
At the police commissary’s office in the Rue Saint-Martin, the man declared his name to be Garnier, an officer of the household to the Count de l’Aubespine. He was interrogated first as to his movements on the 11th of October, the date of the letter, and next concerning his presence at the Cours-la-Reine at an early hour on the 19th. He explained that his master was departing to pass the winter at Villebon, near Chartres, and that the domestic servants had been commanded to make ready. Garnier had engaged a place in the Chartres stage-coach, scheduled to set out at five o’clock from the Rue Contrescarpe. Having overslept, he had deemed it more prudent to make straight for the main road so as not to miss the carriage. An urgent call of nature had compelled him to step down into the ditch.
This explanation possessed an inherent simplicity that the prosecution would labour hard to render suspect. Yet it remained to be understood why mere chance had conducted Garnier so near the spot described. The commissary drew Mazière’s letter from his bureau and commanded him to read it. Garnier declared that he knew neither the recipient nor his dwelling, and had never so much as heard his name spoken. He begged leave to write to his master, and the request was granted. The letter he penned was never dispatched: the commissary and the exempt fancied they detected the hand of the anonymous author and seized the sheet as an exhibit for the prosecution.
After seven hours of interrogation, Garnier was conducted to prison. On the following evening, the commissary, the exempt, and two officers brought him back to the Hôtel de l’Aubespine to search for clues. The mansion stood empty: the count and countess had departed that very morning with their suite. The chambers of Garnier and his sister were searched; nothing of a suspicious nature came to light. One of the police officers nonetheless lingered beside the Swiss porter of the mansion. He told him that Garnier had been taken with his hands full of gold and that his confederates had fled. These particulars, which the source records merely as the assertions of this officer and not as established facts, spread abroad alongside the case itself.
The public clamour was soon shaped by the press. In November, the Journal politique ou Gazette des Gazettes announced the capture of the author of the letter at the appointed place, describing him as a household officer in a residence frequently visited by Mazière. The printed account brought into association two men whom Garnier insisted he had never met. The hypothesis already possessed a silhouette, an itinerary, absconding accomplices, and an interest in concealing the gold; the utter absence of proof was eclipsed by the very precision of the tale.
Following the visit to the townhouse, Garnier was returned to solitary confinement. Six days elapsed before he was questioned anew. The criminal lieutenant reproached him with having chosen the 19th of October because he knew the count was to depart on the 20th: under this construction, he might have pocketed the funds and continued on his way before any search could be mounted. Garnier replied that the departure had been resolved upon only on the 17th, whereas the letter bore the date of the 11th. He likewise advanced other circumstances tending to establish that he was not its author.
Mazière’s gatekeeper was examined. His deposition appeared damning: he claimed to recognise the man who had delivered the letter. Then, on the 5th of November, while Garnier was already in close custody, Mazière received a second threatening note; a third, pursuing the same design and in the same hand as the first, arrived on the 15th of November. It could not have issued from the cell in which Garnier lay immured. This circumstance struck a palpable breach in the accusation, yet it did not suffice to dispel all remaining suspicions. The Châtelet, after four months of preliminary inquiry, decreed a further investigation of six months, during which interval the accused was to remain in prison.
That term having expired, Garnier addressed a petition to the Parlement, which had lately been reinstated in its functions. A fresh inquiry gathered testimonies attesting to his good conduct and his fidelity towards the house that employed him. The Countess de l’Aubespine wrote to the King’s attorney: she had granted justice ample leisure to seek out the author of the letter; henceforth, no proof whatsoever had been brought against her officer, while she accounted his innocence beyond question and demanded that he be restored to his liberty.
It proved necessary, however, to re-examine the gatekeeper’s deposition, for the testimony that seemed to close the case rested upon an identification that crumbled upon confrontation. He claimed to have seen a man in a grey coat and a plain hat. Garnier maintained that twenty persons could attest that he wore on that day a green coat, a yellow waistcoat, black breeches, and a hat laced with gold. The gatekeeper replied at first that Garnier must have changed his clothes; but his explanations faltered when asked how he could identify him at all, since he had no prior acquaintance with Garnier and had never, according to the prisoner, seen him at Mazière’s house. The magistrate admonished him not to venture beyond his certain knowledge. In the end, the gatekeeper caused it to be recorded that he merely believed he recognised Garnier, without being positive of the fact.
The court perceived the weakness of this deposition. On the 31st of July 1775, it rendered a decree discharging Joseph Garnier of the complaints and accusations brought against him, ordered the striking of his committal from the gaol-book, and granted him leave to cause the decree to be printed and posted. As to the damages he had claimed, the court dismissed the petition without costs. More than eighteen months of imprisonment had passed; the judgment restored his freedom, but left the man who had been publicly exhibited as a blackmailer to bear the cost of his own defense.
The author of the letters was never discovered. The chronicle notes that Garnier’s advocate suspected they might have been no more than a jest; it does not erect this opinion into an established truth. Nothing warrants naming the practical joker, attributing to him a definitive motive, or reconstructing his design. There remains only the terrible fact that an anonymous threat was followed by a public apprehension, and thereafter by a long captivity for a man whose presence near the ferry was explained by an overlooked departure and an ordinary human necessity. The notes of the 5th and 15th of November, arriving from without while Garnier was under lock and key, ought to have compelled the inquiry to look elsewhere. They still failed to reveal who had written them. They proved merely that the letter continued its career, far removed from the hand to which the law had first sought to ascribe it.