The linen-draper sent to take back the needlework. In an affair soon to be argued before the magistrates, this single gesture brought an immediate consequence for Louise Perthuy: the woman who gave her employment had just judged her guilty. Louise hastened to the shop. The widow Royère demanded to know what had become of her infant, for a dead child had been found upon the ramparts of Dijon. Louise answered, contradicted herself, and took her leave. From this visit, the linen-draper would fashion a deposition; the confiscated needlework would soon vanish behind far more formidable questions the seamstress would be forced to answer.
The affair unfolded between the close of 1801 and the beginning of 1802. Two gendarmes had discovered upon a rampart the body of a newborn child, swaddled in linen and ringed with burning embers. The magistrate of public safety arrived accompanied by a health officer. The practitioner observed burns which he attributed to the fire, then put forward several potential causes of death: suffocation, but also the possible consequences of the umbilical cord having been left untied. He declared the child to be of the male sex, carried to full term, and brought into the world less than twenty-four hours prior. These findings formed the opening stage of an investigation that was still in search of a mother.
Louise, visibly pregnant not long before, had recently been seen pale and noticeably thinned. She had vacated her lodging. Her chamber was opened, where the bed, shifts, and linens bore traces of a severe loss of blood; near a sack of coarse reddish cloth, a small heap of embers was noted, resembling those found encircling the body. The inquiry thus held material correspondences, to which were joined the observations of her neighbors. The woman Perrier knew of the pregnancy and assumed a recent confinement. The woman Dorey answered in much the same terms. Neither, in the recorded depositions, claimed to have witnessed the birth or seen the child perish.
The body was exhumed. The health officer performed the hydrostatic test then in use to ascertain whether the lungs contained air: he immersed them in water and observed them float. From this he concluded that the infant had breathed and had been born alive. The weight the prosecution would attach to this finding was to be contested at trial; for the moment, it appeared to supply what the traces in the chamber lacked. A birth had occurred, and the practitioner affirmed that life had followed upon that birth. Yet between such assertions and a willful homicide, essential facts remained to be established.
Placed under arrest, Louise acknowledged her pregnancy and her delivery. But her answers shifted. She spoke first of a stillborn girl whom she claimed to have cast into the latrines. When it was pointed out that this could readily be verified, she admitted the child was a boy, still dead at birth in her account, whom she had placed in a sack, wrapped in cloths, and carried to the castle rampart. She stated she had not tied the cord because she believed the infant to be lifeless. As for the burns, she denied having kindled any embers to cause them. The contradictions bore upon the sex of the child and the disposal of the body; the magistrate sought equally to determine whether she was lying upon the decisive question of a live birth.
The widow Royère contributed the account of an earlier visit, prior to the encounter at the shop. Louise had worked for her for several years. Suspecting the confinement, the linen-draper had gone to her lodging in company with a Demoiselle Darbois and pressed her to speak, promising aid and protection. According to her deposition, Louise had ended by confessing she had been delivered eight days before. A midwife, whose name she refused to disclose, had allegedly taken the child and carried it to the hospital. Thus a third destination emerged from the words attributed to the young woman: after the hospital would come the privy, and then the rampart.
When Royère learned of the discovery of the body, she concluded Louise was responsible and dispatched her servant to retrieve the work entrusted to her hands. At the shop, the mistress continued, the seamstress had maintained she had brought forth a dead boy, whom she had thrown into the latrines. She had then declared, in the courtyard, that she meant to kill herself, for they would surely put her to death. Bystanders were said to have restrained her; she was subsequently sent away with a little money and clothing bestowed out of charity. Louise later denied ever having voiced such an intention. The record preserved both the draper’s assertion and the prisoner’s denial, leaving the reader unable to meld them into a single, certain truth.
Before the director of the jury, Louise maintained that her son had been born dead. She once more altered the date she assigned to her delivery and spoke of a fall suffered three days earlier, contending that the birth had been premature. Against this version was set the report of the health officer. She was also reminded that she had stated before witnesses that she had delivered a living child. She did not deny having uttered those words; she replied that she had lied because she still kept the body in her room and knew not what to do with it. Her acknowledged falsehoods hardly lightened the burden of those she now asked to believe her.
She explained her silence toward her neighbors by the terror of what might follow upon a formal declaration. Her flight, she said, sprang from the dread of being prosecuted for abandoning the corpse. In her defense, she recalled at last that at the birth of an earlier daughter she had summoned a midwife. Thus did she seek, in a previous maternity, an argument against the murder imputed to her. The interrogations perpetually returned to the same impasse: how to distinguish what she had concealed, what she had invented to hide something else, and what might yet remain true in her answers?
A special grand jury indicted her on 9 Nivôse. At the trial, the public prosecutor marshaled the circumstantial evidence: the known pregnancy, the traces of childbirth, the sack and the embers, the discovery of the body, the incompatible declarations, and the medical conclusions. Champagnac, who relates the case, depicts the totality as damning. Yet defense counsel did not rest content with parrying each appearance one by one. He attacked the fundamental premise upon which the charge of infanticide rested: had this child truly entered the world alive?
Her advocate contended further that one found in his client neither the motive of shame, since she was already a mother for the third time, nor that of destitute misery, since public charity and the hospice could have received the infant. These arguments belong to his courtroom plea; the existence of potential relief does not, of itself, demonstrate what resources were truly at Louise’s command. But his dissection of the health officer’s report rendered the live birth, according to the chronicle, sufficiently doubtful that the jurors refused to find a crime. The prisoner’s contradictions remained. Yet they did not supply the affirmative proof that the defense had called into question.
Louise Perthuy was acquitted by a judgment rendered on 29 Pluviôse, Year X. Champagnac concludes by deploring a body of laws he deemed powerless and the impunity he believed it afforded to the guilty. His indignation does not alter the verdict, nor does that verdict permit us to reconstruct the final moments of the infant. The accusation had been judged; the hours lived within that chamber had not been restored. The needlework taken back by the linen-draper, the clothing bestowed in the courtyard, and the words spoken by Louise remain, upon the margins of the record, the scattered fragments of an existence that the trial had reduced almost entirely to a single question.