The two families shared a single staircase, yet inhabited entirely different worlds. On the Rue Royale in Paris, the Count de Montgommery occupied the lower storeys; the d'Anglades lived above. The count possessed wealth, carriages, a retinue of servants, and even a domestic chaplain attached to his household. His neighbor commanded far more modest revenues, though he moved readily in polite society. Bows were exchanged; occasional visits were paid. Nothing demanded any particular intimacy between them. For such proximity to become perilous, it required only that a strongbox be forced during an absence.
In September 1687, the Montgommerys invited the d'Anglades to spend several days at their country estate in Villebousin. The couple accepted, then excused themselves. They were later to rue this change of plans as bitterly as a crime. On the evening of the twenty-second, the count and his wife set out with their retinue and François Gagnard, their chaplain. A few persons remained in the Parisian mansion, among them several embroideresses. The d'Anglades were at home. In hindsight, this simple circumstance took on the guise of a calculated maneuver: they had remained behind, it was whispered, to take advantage of the empty house.
The masters returned earlier than anticipated. Servants found the neighbors visibly surprised to see them back. It is impossible to know what this astonishment was worth before a theft came to light; afterward, it seemed an involuntary confession. A small room where several servants slept was found merely pulled to, whereas the chaplain swore he had turned the key twice in the lock. The unlatched door, the startled faces, the declined invitation: these particulars had existed independently. The announcement that a fortune had vanished suddenly bent them all in a single direction.
The count’s strongbox had been broken open. He declared a considerable loss, comprising sacks of silver coin, gold pieces, and a pearl necklace. The magistrates arrived to search the house for what was missing. The d'Anglades requested that the inspection begin in their own lodgings. Chests, drawers, beds, and mattresses were scrutinized to no avail. They had opened their doors themselves; yet this compliance did not prevent suspicion from dogging them from room to room, and then up into the garret.
Madame d'Anglade was taken ill and did not accompany this final search. In an old trunk, amid linen and cast-off garments, the officers discovered seventy louis wrapped in a printed genealogical sheet that Montgommery recognized as his own. There was now a tangible piece of evidence to exhibit and a precise spot where it had been uncovered. The lady’s sudden faint could be reinterpreted as dread of discovery. A proper inquiry would still have to determine who had access to the trunk and who had deposited the coin. The impression produced by the packet appeared to offer a far swifter answer.
The search descended next into the chamber where the chaplain, the page, and the valet de chambre slept. Madame d'Anglade reminded the officers that this door had been found unbolted upon the master’s return. Several sacks of silver coin were promptly discovered inside. This second find might well have broadened the investigation to include the men who occupied the room. Instead, it hardened prejudice against the woman who had directed attention toward it. If she pointed out the hiding place, it was assumed she knew it only too well; had she held her tongue, would her silence have appeared any less suspect? The count answered for his servants. The neighbors enjoyed no such guarantee.
The husband was conveyed to the Châtelet, his wife to the Fort-l'Évêque. Their effects were placed under seal. Other rumors soon crept into the dossier: d'Anglade, it was said, was an inveterate gambler; he had once lodged in a house where silverware had gone missing; he was even accused of an old theft of ribbons. The chronicle emphasizes how easily earnest testimony and malicious tavern gossip blurred together in these reported remarks. The man ceased to be merely the neighbor in whose quarters stolen property had been sought. His entire life was recast as a long apprenticeship for the robbery.
D'Anglade challenged the proceedings and recused the magistrate directing the inquest. The matter nevertheless returned to that very judge. Champagnac saw in this personal clash an added spur to judicial relentlessness. In January 1688, the accused was put to the question; he confessed to nothing. The following month, he was sentenced to nine years in the galleys, and his wife to nine years’ banishment from Paris. The decree spared their lives, but it sundered the couple, ruined their estate, and condemned the husband to a journey that his broken health rendered lethal.
He fell gravely ill while in custody. When he was shackled into the convict chain, he had not recovered. The overland march to Marseille heaped fresh miseries upon the damp rot of the dungeon. Having reached his destination, he was carried directly to the convicts’ infirmary. There he died on March 4, 1689. Suspicion of ill-gotten wealth had been drawn from his outward manner of living; he ended his days far from home, without ever setting foot to the oars to which he had been condemned. In Paris, the weight of the prosecution continued to crush his wife and their daughter, whom the record depicts as a mere child at the time of their arrest.
Mother and daughter shared the ordeal of imprisonment. Champagnac describes a dank cell, the utter destitution of bare necessities, and a child of five sharing an affliction whose causes she could scarcely grasp. For her, these absences bore none of the precise titles given by the law: transfer, sentence, departure with the chain. Her father had simply vanished from her existence. Her mother struggled to preserve enough strength to demand their exoneration. The family no longer had rooms to pace, callers to receive, or invitations to answer; their fate hung on petitions made elsewhere and on the leisure that strangers might deign to grant them. It was this same child who would later appear in the judicial record, pleading in her turn that her parents’ name be scrubbed clean of the broken chest.
Deliverance arrived through anonymous letters. Their author claimed a desire to unburden his conscience before taking the cowl. He named two culprits: Gagnard, the household chaplain, and Vincent, known as Belestre. He also pointed out a woman capable of enlightening the investigators, Madame de la Comble. An unsigned letter could not overturn a judicial sentence. Yet it furnished names and a tangible scent for justice to pursue, rather than circling endlessly around the d'Anglades' attic.
Subsequent inquiries focused upon the intimacy between the two men and their sudden affluence. Belestre had purchased an estate. Gagnard, who had quit the count’s service, was spending far beyond what his former station warranted. Apprehended in connection with other offenses, both were interrogated. Madame de la Comble supplied precise details regarding the burglary on the Rue Royale. The manufacture of false skeleton keys entered the narrative of the crime. D'Anglade’s daughter, represented by a guardian, intervened to petition that her parents’ conviction be definitively quashed.
The chronicle records the confessions of both men, Belestre’s delivered on the eve of his execution. The robbery received an entirely different explanation, substantiated this time by the evidence amassed against its true perpetrators. Yet redress remained to be won. Letters of revision were granted; an action for damages against Montgommery gave rise to protracted pleadings. On June 17, 1693, an arrêt of the Parlement rehabilitated the Sieur and Dame d'Anglade. Nearly six years had elapsed since the declined invitation. On the staircase of the Rue Royale, witnesses had imagined they read the guilt of neighbors startled by an unexpected return. At the end of the affair, there remained only that other return made forever impossible: that of the father, dead in Marseille, whom his daughter could never again await.