Before the tribunal, Cécile Blanchard answered that she went by two Christian names: Cécile and Léda. She showed no such facility when answering the decisive question. Wherefore had she presented herself under the name of the Princesse de Polignac? Because she believed herself truly wed, she declared, in a secret religious ceremony solemnized at Valenciennes in 1856. The prosecution urged the court to pass judgment solely on the title she had assumed; her counsel unfolded the narrative of a life shared with Camille de Polignac, of children born to them, of letters dispatched from America, and of a voyage undertaken to rejoin him. The marriage itself, however, was never established by any formal record produced at the hearing.
The proceedings opened on May 27, 1873, before the Tenth Correctional Chamber of Paris. Blanchard was forty-one years of age. The presiding magistrate reminded her that she stood accused of having assumed, for the purpose of securing an honorary distinction, the name and title of Princesse de Polignac. The prosecution did not arise from the initial complaint of fraud that had set the machinery of justice in motion. That complaint had originated with a novelty shop where a debt of 2,200 francs had been incurred; payment having since been made, an order of dismissal had ensued. The president took care to specify that the tribunal was called upon to judge solely the illicit assumption of the name and title.
Blanchard persisted in maintaining that she had every right to it. She placed her religious marriage on July 26, 1856, at eight o’clock in the evening, within the parish house of the cathedral of Valenciennes. She stated that the Abbé Foucard had drawn up the act, though she had never seen what was inscribed in the register; neither she nor the prince had set their signatures to it. She asserted that no witnesses attended the ceremony, and that the priest had subsequently informed her sister and her nephew. This account was meticulous in its hour and its address, yet it was accompanied by no document whatsoever presented to the court.
The preliminary inquiry had sought out the abbé. The central police commissioner of Valenciennes reported that the priest had never been curé of the cathedral, nor had he ever resided in its presbytery. According to the particulars furnished to the examining magistrate, he had merely been an auxiliary priest at Notre-Dame around 1852, after relinquishing a cure in the district of Avesnes. This reply shook the version of a ceremony performed by a cathedral curé in 1856. It did not, for all that, furnish direct proof that Blanchard had fabricated her entire relationship with Polignac: this question became the subject of a bitter contest of interpretations at the bar.
The president observed that she had borne this name for fifteen years, yet the indictment concerned only a recent period of less than three years. The shop clerk Dumour, the sole witness called, testified that he had known Blanchard for two years as a patron of the establishment La Capitale under the name of the Princesse de Polignac. This evidence confirmed the recent use of the title in a commercial setting; it bore no witness to the alleged ceremony, nor to the manner in which she had come to believe herself authorized to assume it.
The representative of the public prosecutor maintained that the title did not belong to her, and that she had persisted in bearing it long after all relations with Camille de Polignac had been severed. He cited a receipt signed "Princesse de Polignac" a few weeks before the trial, as well as an acknowledgment addressed to Madame de Polignac. He evoked, moreover, Blanchard’s financial embarrassments, querying whether the title had not served to preserve a more favorable social standing. This motive was a theory advanced by the prosecution. The tribunal was not called upon to adjudicate a debt already settled, nor to decide whether pecuniary distress explained every employment of the name; its duty was to assess the specific offense charged.
Lachaud, Blanchard’s counsel, did not contend that the title belonged to her by right of law. He gave assurances that his client would henceforth refrain from using it. Rather, he contested the imputation of conscious imposture, maintaining that she had acted in the bona fide belief that she was married. To lend substance to this conviction, he went back to the year 1855, when she had made the acquaintance of Camille, then a comrade of her brother. According to the plea, an amorous liaison ensued, followed by a shared life near Le Mans. Two children were born, in 1857 and 1858. The advocate emphasized that their given names included Armand and Marie, and subsequently Marie, Camille, and Olivier, as unmistakable tokens of kinship with the prince’s own Christian names.
This domestic history was advanced by the defense; it had never been validated by a formal decree of filiation. The prosecution raised against it Blanchard’s own statement, recorded in the police commissioner’s minutes, wherein she confessed to having borne an elder daughter prior to her liaison with Camille. This child, she had said, was reared by strangers, and she had since lost all knowledge of her fate. The prosecution found therein ample reason to distrust the defense’s moving portrayal. The court record does not permit a determination of the biological paternity of the children; it merely reflects the arguments adduced on either side in the debate over good faith.
The defense pursued its narrative through Camille’s exile. He had reportedly resigned from the French army to enlist in the Confederate forces in the United States, subsequently sending for Blanchard and the children. Lachaud read aloud letters dated from Dublin and New York in June 1861. In the former, Camille addressed Léda, enjoining her to look to the children; in the second, he proposed that she join him across the sea with them, traveling under an assumed name. These letters bore witness to an intimate relationship and to a projected reunion overseas, precisely as the defense contended. They did not constitute the alleged certificate of marriage, and the tribunal did not treat them as proof that the ceremony at Valenciennes had ever been legally solemnized.
Counsel added that upon her return from America, Blanchard had received allowances from female relations of the Polignac family. He read also a letter from Camille, dated January 1864, discussing one of the children, his future prospects, and the financial assistance tendered by a sister-in-law. To the advocate’s mind, such exchanges were wholly incompatible with the hypothesis of a stranger fabricating a family tie out of whole cloth. The prosecution countered that an actual liaison conferred no legal title, and that the story of the marriage had never been substantiated. At the heart of the proceedings lay two distinct propositions: Blanchard’s close intimacy with Camille, powerfully supported by the correspondence read by Lachaud, and the validity of the marriage she invoked, which remained devoid of any act or witness produced in court.
The substitute prosecutor, in his rebuttal, conceded that the defense had pleaded with moderation. He reiterated that the designated clergyman was not the curé Blanchard claimed, and asked why she had never sought legal recognition for the union if she truly believed in it. He turned her admission regarding her firstborn daughter against her, contending that the pathos of the narrative offered no answer to the legal question. The contemporary gazette recorded several of his thrusts, some directed at the defendant’s private life and morality. These belonged to the rhetorical conventions of the bar; they did not constitute an independent judicial finding on her bond with Camille.
The court sentenced Blanchard to a fine of one hundred francs. The record does not show that it validated her marriage, nor that it ruled upon the paternity of the children. It rendered judgment strictly upon the usurpation of the name and title encompassed by the charge. Thus did the judicial forum adjudicate the prosecuted conduct without unraveling the biographical enigmas that the correspondence and the conflicting accounts had brought to light. The chronicle leaves side by side an intimacy attested by letters read before the bench and an alleged marriage for which no formal parchment was ever produced.
In the eyes of the prosecution, the name of Polignac had served to maintain a social facade; it then became the very corpus delicti of the trial. Caught between the missing parish register, the disputed status of the priest, the letters addressed to Léda, and the fine pronounced, the court marked a boundary without writing the history of a whole life. It condemned the assumption of the title; it did not retrospectively validate the secret rite that Blanchard claimed to have held as her wedding day.
Documentary note: Contemporary account of the hearing of May 27, 1873, Gazette des tribunaux, May 28, printed pages 504–505. The complaint concerning the commercial debt had been settled by payment and dismissed; the charge examined herein related solely to the usurpation of the name and title. The narrative of the ceremony was furnished by Blanchard, whereas the history of the liaison, the children, and the letters was presented by her advocate. The judgment imposed a fine of 100 francs and cannot be taken to establish either the alleged marriage or the filiations.