Fuchs de Thérigny had been laid to rest before more than forty witnesses. Yet ten months later, incendiary libels asserted that he had been interred in the dead of night, his body consumed by quicklime to efface every trace of a crime. The deceased was twenty years of age, his accusers alleged; he was said to have lent twenty thousand livres to the Count de Viry, who had purportedly assassinated him to escape repayment. A locked chamber, a sudden demise, an opulent lord: nothing was wanting but a debt. The legal memorials addressed to the procureur général duly supplied it.
The chronicle of Champagnac relates an entirely different history. Upon his estates in the Bourbonnais, Viry maintained several destitute families. Six mendicants sat at his table the year round; six households were lodged gratuitously in his tenements. He discharged other rents and paid for wet nurses. Such charitable portraiture does not, of itself, establish a man’s innocence; yet it explains the position the chronicler assigns to Thérigny—that of a protégé transformed, after his demise, into the putative creditor of his benefactor.
Fuchs de Thérigny had been attached to the count as his secretary. His family lived, according to the account, in circumstances bordering upon penury. When a grave illness contracted in Paris imperiled his life, Viry defrayed every charge and commended him to the care of physicians. The young man recovered his health and returned to the count’s estates in November 1774. There he resumed his station in the household, sharing meals and maintaining that familiarity to which his accusers would soon lend a murderous construction.
On November 25, the frost was biting. Thérigny spent part of the afternoon upon the ice, challenging and pursuing the estate’s business agent. Following this exertion, he plunged half-naked into the snowdrifts, professing an intention to cure his chilblains. The chronicler lays great stress upon this rash imprudence; the medical men summoned during the proceedings would fail to agree upon what it might explain. That very evening, however, nothing appeared to presage an approaching death. Thérigny returned chilled to the bone, supped with the count, and took delight, the narrative relates, in the rustic music his master had commanded for the occasion.
The castle servants danced far into the night. At midnight, the secretary retired and locked his bedchamber door, as was his customary practice. On the morning of November 26, he failed to appear. A servant dispatched by Viry knocked repeatedly, receiving no answer. Two hours elapsed; a second attempt met with the same impenetrable silence. Unease mounted throughout the house, yet the door remained bolted. The count was obliged to join his former parish priest. Prior to his departure, having taken a hasty repast, he gave orders to force the door should Thérigny still fail to show himself.
The servants tarried a little longer, then carried out the command. The household assembled to witness the breach. Within the bed, they discovered the young man lying cold and lifeless. Word was carried to Viry; the intelligence caused him to swoon away, according to the chronicle, and he had to be conveyed back to the chateau. The estate manager took charge of the obsequies. Domestics, laborers, and tenants came to view the remains. On November 27, the funeral procession set forth before a considerable gathering. It was an open, public mourning, the circumstances of which many could attest.
For nearly ten months, nothing gave rise to an official complaint. Then the written accusations emerged. They reversed the relationship between the two men: the patron who had paid for medical care was now depicted as the debtor of the youth he had succored. They likewise transformed the funeral rites into a clandestine operation. The discrepancy was no mere variance between two recollections. On the one hand, witnesses had seen the corpse and followed the hearse; on the other, it was alleged that the remains had been destroyed to preclude judicial inquiry. These allegations nonetheless engaged the attention of the public prosecutor.
On September 9, 1775, the Parlement ordered an inquest into Thérigny’s death. Canonical monitory letters were published throughout the province, and the body was exhumed. Upon opening the chest cavity, the surgeons observed an extravasation of blood, which they interpreted as the potential consequence of a violent blow. A contrary medical consultation attributed it to the young man’s reckless exposure on the eve of his demise. Champagnac openly favors this latter opinion. Here we confront the conflicting medical interpretations recorded in an ancient proceeding; the snow does not, thereby, become a scientifically demonstrated cause of death.
The inquest soon reached the domestic staff of the estate. Warrants for bodily arrest were issued against the manager and two servants. Viry lodged an appeal against the proceedings conducted by the magistrates of Moulins. He petitioned for their recusal, regarding certain of their number as his sworn personal enemies. The Parlement of Paris declined to grant his petition: he was compelled to stand before the very judges he had challenged. His friends urged him to flee the realm. He chose the contrary course, quitted Paris in haste, and surrendered himself as a prisoner.
The proceedings were immense. One hundred and eighty-three witnesses were examined concerning the indictment for assassination; seventy further depositions were taken regarding a cross-complaint for subornation of witnesses. Interrogatories, formal re-examinations, and confrontations succeeded one another without respite. The death discovered behind a bolted door had swelled into an affair wherein it was equally necessary to scrutinize how testimony had been elicited and how suspicions had been manufactured. The chronicler, though harsh toward the count’s detractors, emphasizes the searching rigor of these investigations: the decree of discharge he is about to relate did not proceed from a perfunctory inquiry.
On February 28, 1777, the Seneschal’s Court of Moulins discharged Viry and his servants of the accusation of assassination. More than forty notables—including churchmen, magistrates, and gentlemen of quality—had signed an attestation certifying his lifelong acts of beneficence. The judicial ruling restored to the count far more than tokens of esteem: it released him from the peril of the law. Following the judgment, he was invested with the Royal and Military Order of Saint-Louis. Champagnac closes by designating several personal adversaries, naming the curé Fleury among those he holds to be the true authors of the calumny.
Viry stood vindicated in the chronicle, but Thérigny remained in his grave. The man accused of a murderous debt had been the very one who defrayed his protégé’s medical care; the allegedly clandestine burial had been solemnized before a multitude. Between November 1774 and February 1777, these simple truths had been forced to traverse the entire apparatus of provincial justice to regain their standing. The chamber door had resisted the servants for only a few hours. The accusation itself had held fast far longer.