The child had been recognized. His aunt had pressed him to her bosom; persons who had known him small swore they found his features once more; soon an entire town knew that Auguste Voyneau was still alive. There remained but a single resistance, which everyone deemed inexplicable: his mother declared that this was not he. The more she persisted, the more monstrous her refusal appeared. The child needed a name, the family a vanished son, and the public a guilty mother. Justice would first satisfy this last expectation.
The Child Returned from the War
Louis-René-Auguste was born on November 9, 1789. He had a sister, Benjamine. While still very young, he had been taken with her to their aunts at Fontenay-le-Comte; a fall had left him with a scar upon his brow. Then the War of the Vendée scattered all refuges and all certainties. In 1793, the children had been entrusted to a peasant woman after being clad in country garments. Their mother had taken them back, then had been compelled to abandon a fresh retreat. When she reappeared with her daughter, the boy was no longer at her side.
It was reported that he had been confided to Rose Seguin, a former chambermaid, and that both had perished in a massacre in February 1794. Yet a disappearance in the midst of war left ample room for other tales. Subsistence commissioners had brought to Nantes three children found alive in the ravaged Vendée. The widow Clavier took one into her home. She gave him the care demanded by a small survivor; she was soon to find herself at the center of a contest wherein that very care would serve as an argument for both parties.
In August 1796, Jean Martineau, business agent to the Voyneau family, saw this child beneath her roof and believed he recognized Auguste. He conveyed the intelligence to the mother. She displayed none of the eagerness her accusers awaited. Mademoiselle d’Orioux, an aunt of the missing boy, repaired to Nantes, recognized her nephew, and pledged not to forsake him. A Dame Constantin, who had known him at Fontenay, shared in this recognition. Two women confident in their memory were able to lend a resemblance all the force of evident truth.
The mother came at last, examined the boy, and maintained her refusal. It was even recounted that a former servant had been recognized and spontaneously named by the child. Every detail augmented the public indignation. The mother was suspected of an inheritance scheme in favor of Benjamine, and old remarks were recalled that had allegedly foreshadowed her aversion to a son. Champagnac, in his account of 1833, observes that these remarks could never be proved. Yet they possessed a ready-made utility: explaining her refusal without ever having to take that refusal seriously.
Two Judgments for a Birth
Mademoiselle d’Orioux and the widow Clavier joined their endeavors. A guardian was appointed for the lad; the elder Voyneau had emigrated. Proceedings were instituted against the mother, who produced a death certificate drawn up in February 1795. Therein, local inhabitants attested to the demise of a child named Auguste and of Rose Seguin. She maintained, furthermore, that the boy sheltered in Nantes was the son of a miller named Pasti. This was no longer merely denying a kinship: she offered another history, which in turn demanded verification.
The Pasti woman did not identify the child with any great assurance. A kinswoman of hers showed herself more affirmative. Against their testimony was raised the hesitation of the former, and then the day they had spent at Dame Voyneau’s residence prior to appearing in court. The mortuary certificate was likewise challenged: it had been established long after the event, upon declarations by individuals who were said scarcely to have known the child. The color of his hair provided matter for dispute. In this contest, no piece of evidence arrived unattended; it trailed behind it the very conditions of its contrivance.
On January 13, 1798, the court at Fontenay declared the boy the son of Dame Voyneau. At Niort, after fifteen hearings of pleadings, this decision was affirmed. A child whom the war had left without certain identity thus entered a family by decree of the law. His purported mother had been heard and had failed to convince. For those who had opposed her, the filiation appeared saved at last. For her, the judgment transformed her resistance from a prudent caution into a fault for which men would never cease to demand the motive.
The Father Reopens the File
The father’s return altered the course of the proceedings. Having re-entered France following the amnesty granted to the émigrés, he challenged the judgments rendered during his absence. He had left a very young son and now found a lad to whom the courts had given his name. Apprised of the matter by his wife, he rejected this kinship and lodged a third-party opposition. The debate now turned equally upon his legal right to have reheard what appeared definitively established. Before faces could be compared, the tribunals had to consent to reopen their doors.
The court of Poitiers declared his suit inadmissible on July 23, 1806. He carried the question before the Court of Cassation, which annulled that decision in January 1809 and remanded the parties to Orléans. In the interim, the boy had grown to manhood. The chronicler presents him as a soldier, distinguished in a recent battle. He provides no details here that might permit the reconstruction of that career. Yet the elapsed years entailed an obvious consequence: the disputed name was no longer merely that of a foundling child; it was the name under which a young man was beginning his life.
At Orléans, Maître Moreau, counsel for the father, attacked the initial recognitions. He denounced the influence of pre-established convictions upon the witnesses and contended that the boy had been schooled in the very answers men later professed to admire. Could visits to the former dwelling-places of little Auguste constitute true tests, if the questions themselves directed the memories? The advocate also invoked the political prejudices harbored against an émigré family. Such was his argument; it did not suffice to prove that every soul who had assisted the child had knowingly engaged in a fraud.
Memories Change Their Meaning
Mademoiselle d’Orioux had herself altered her conviction. Having gathered testimonies concerning the death and burial of her nephew, she retracted her recognition. This reversal shattered an entire sequence of certainties: domestic servants had relied upon her word, others had believed those servants, and memories had grown entrenched by mere circulation. It was not merely the loss of a single witness. The prime conviction, around which so many others had crystallized, ceased to offer its foundation.
The descriptions, the placement of scars, and the traces of smallpox were taken up anew. The mere existence of a mark upon the forehead was no longer sufficient; its precise location had to be verified. The illness, likewise, had to recover its true date. Anne Pasti finally brought forward another scene of childhood: according to her, the boy was her cousin Grégoire, torn from her arms by a volunteer and placed in a cart with two other children. She claimed to have recognized him later at the home of the widow Clavier. Opposed to the narrative of the recovered nephew stood that of the cousin lost in a convoy.
On June 29, 1810, the court of Orléans forbade the claimant from styling himself the son of the Voyneaus. It ordered that this name be stricken from all acts and registers wherein it had been accorded him, and that all sums proven to have been disbursed by virtue of the retracted judgments be restored. It was a determination upon filiation and its civil consequences, not a criminal conviction of the young man for imposture. He had been a mere child when adults had recognized him; the revocation of his civil status did not permit imputing to him their supposed intentions.
Champagnac was pleased to discern in this outcome the infallible triumph of the maternal heart. The documents narrate an ordeal far less straightforward: a mother had refused recognition, an aunt had affirmed and then retracted it, another woman had harbored the survivor, and the courts had contradicted one another. On June 29, a name had to vanish from the registers. Yet the years lived beneath that name were not lines that could be blotted out. The family secured their cause; he whom they had never consented to receive was henceforth left to pursue his life after losing, through one trial, the very identity another trial had bestowed upon him.