On 24 August 1781, at six o'clock in the evening, the mounted troopers of the Maréchaussée brought to Palluau a man arrested as a vagrant. They lodged him within the manorial prison without inscribing his name upon the register: he was placed there "upon loan," pending his conveyance before the competent jurisdiction. At daybreak, he was discovered stretched out upon the straw, grievously wounded in the neck, surrounded by his own blood. The surgeons summoned by the constabulary deemed his condition well-nigh desperate. The curé visited him repeatedly. In a certificate dated 28 August, the priest noted that the wounded man was so feeble as to answer his inquiries only by scarcely intelligible gestures.
Then the man vanished. In the night between 25 and 26 August, he was no longer to be found within the prison. Had he escaped despite his wound? Had someone carried him away? And if he were dead, whither had his body been conveyed? These questions initially resolved themselves into a single enigma: how was one to understand what had transpired behind the barred doors of Palluau?
The procureur fiscal, Voyneau, had entered upon his duties but two days prior. On the morning of the 27th, he departed his dwelling at Saint-Étienne-du-Bois, two leagues distant, and presented himself before the judge of Palluau to take official cognizance of the scene. The prisoner's rags remained within the room. Upon the tiled floor and the walls, several stains of blood were visible; beneath the straw, patches of gore had not yet dried. Nothing was broken about the doors or the casements. Yet the window of the chamber, leaded and shuttered with defective louvers, stood nine feet above the street. As for the entrance door, though locked from without, it might be drawn open from the inside by a single person. The premises bore no unequivocal testimony to flight: they left open sundry manners of departing, or of entering.
That very day, Voyneau laid a formal complaint against whosoever had directly or indirectly compassed an escape or an abduction. The judicial inquiry held on the morrow heard eleven witnesses residing about the prison. Public rumour had it that the man had cut his own throat with a knife. The words reported by the witnesses appeared to support this version of events, yet resolved neither the wounded man's condition after the deed nor the manner of his disappearance.
Pierre Seguin, a butcher's boy, recounted that on the morning of the 25th, towards seven o'clock, he had heard the gaoler's son cry out that the wretch was slaying himself. He had rushed upstairs and beheld a man unknown to him thrusting a knife into his own throat, despite the remonstrances addressed to him. The Peaudeau woman, who lay abed, stated she had heard the gaoler's son call to his father: he must come up at once, for the prisoner was killing himself. These depositions placed a voluntary wound at the very heart of the affair, yet they possessed not the same weight: Seguin claimed to have seen the man act, whereas Peaudeau reported only words overheard from her bed. The curé's certificate and the procès-verbal of the Maréchaussée officer were likewise joined to the inquiry. None of these pieces designated anyone who might subsequently have transported the prisoner. Upon this second head, the testimonies directly contradicted one another.
Voyneau was unwilling to determine so delicate an affair upon his own authority. He wrote to the deputy of the Procureur Général at Poitiers to lay out the facts and solicit instructions. While the answer was awaited, the corpse was discovered upon the brink of a ditch or pool within the jurisdiction of Palluau. Its putrefaction indicated that death had taken place several days prior. No witness pointed to those who had deposited it there. As it gave off noxious miasmas, Voyneau caused it to be conveyed to the churchyard of La Chapelle-Palluau. The deputy subsequently replied that, should the proceedings establish that the man had cut his own throat, a writ of bodily caption must be issued against him as a suicide, in order that the prosecution might proceed against his memory.
On 20 September, Voyneau moved for the decree advised by the deputy; the judge of Palluau issued it the very same day. The procedure was directed against the memory of the deceased under the presumption of felo-de-se, not against any identified perpetrator of the wound or of the transport. Later, when expounding the suspicions directed against Voyneau, Champagnac finally assigns a Christian name to the deceased: François. His disappearance, his death, and the question of who had conducted him to the pool remained three distinct matters.
Once the prisoner was discovered dead, Voyneau suspended the proceedings. On 26 March 1782, however, the Procureur Général commissioned the court of Fontenay to resume the criminal prosecution. The investigation, pursued at vast expense, heard upwards of one hundred and fifty witnesses. It cast little light upon the affair, writes Champagnac, for the witnesses had been ill-chosen and their depositions drawn up with excessive haste. Five persons were decreed and committed to prison. This multitude of depositions had failed to dispel the uncertainty shrouding the hours spent beyond the prison walls; it now expanded the inquiry to the relations and conversations of all who had transacted business with Voyneau. Presently, the procureur fiscal found himself among the accused, charged with having counselled and abetted the abduction and murder of François.
The accuser was now become the accused. In Champagnac's view, the suspicions harboured against Voyneau were largely explicable by the enmities he had incurred in the discharge of his offices: the collection of manorial dues, the assessment of the tallage, and the alignment of public streets. The chronicler portrays him as the mark of hatreds engendered by his functions, affirming that the accusation rested upon no proof whatsoever. He ascribes the conflict to local rivalries and private interests.
The specific charge turned upon a conversation regarding the conveyance of the prisoner. Arrested by the Maréchaussée, the man pertained to the provost's jurisdiction. The troopers were bound to conduct him, within twenty-four hours, to the royal prison of Montaigu. On 25 August, towards five o'clock in the afternoon, Voyneau encountered the sub-lieutenant of the Maréchaussée, Saint-Étienne. He reproached him for having failed to transfer the wounded man. Saint-Étienne replied that he could be moved neither on foot nor on horseback by reason of his hurt. Voyneau was alleged to have retorted that he might well have been carried in a cart, even were it to cost a louis. The Barreteau woman represented this utterance as an instigation to carry the prisoner off.
According to Champagnac, the phrase passed from mouth to mouth, suffering a total perversion of meaning: a reproach touching a delay in legal transport became the foundation of the decree launched against Voyneau. The chronicle vigorously espouses the cause of the procureur fiscal; it likewise reconstructs the pilgrimage of a spoken word, from a discourse upon the duties of the constabulary to an indictment for complicity in murder. Yet the reported remark does not, of itself, establish that an abduction was commanded. No more does the testimony regarding the self-inflicted wound reveal who subsequently conveyed François beyond the prison gates.
On 21 March 1785, the court reversed the decree of bodily caption against Voyneau and reinstated him in his functions. He had begun by laying the occurrence before the law, only to find himself compelled to defend his own innocence. The procureur recovered his office. Yet François remained the sole casualty of this transaction: neither the testimonies nor the inquisitions recounted by Champagnac had succeeded in naming the hand that bore him to the water's edge. The rehabilitation of a magistrate offered no answer to the lingering questions left behind by the prisoner's vanished shadow.