In June 1789, the Parlement of Toulouse annulled the criminal proceedings instituted against Reyneaud de Lafitte and ordered a new trial. For this former infantry officer, held in custody after three years of sustained accusations, the decree ought to have marked a fresh beginning. The Revolution, however, offered him another exit: the prison gates swung open. He walked out, never to return to demand of justice the judicial vindication his advocate had pledged in his name. Thus the case leaves us upon the threshold of a second hearing that was never held, with a child at the core of the first, two sworn retractions, and a provincial town where the accused man’s adversaries held the municipal magistracies.
Lafitte resided at L’Isle-Jourdain, living apart from his wife by mutual agreement. His children were young; a woman named Naudin managed his domestic affairs. A seamstress, Anne Verdier, likewise lodged under his roof. In the version recorded by Champagnac, this household became the seat of an enterprise of subornation wherein Justine, the former officer’s young daughter, was made the instrument. The chronicler takes a resolute stand on behalf of the father. Yet his account must be followed to its final lines: they record no definitive acquittal.
Justine had not yet reached thirteen years of age when the affair erupted. Naudin, so the chronicle asserts, first dangled before the girl the prospect of a life freed from paternal authority, and subsequently urged her to accuse her father of sexual violence. Promises, it is said, were soon followed by threats. The text recounts acts of abuse inflicted upon the child, presented as a deliberate scheme to manufacture physical evidence against Lafitte. It further records that Justine sought refuge with Anne Verdier, confiding what she had just endured, whereupon Naudin threatened both women to ensure their silence. Behind the formal complaint later recorded at the town hall, the narrative thus places an anterior violence, directed against the very child who was about to be heard.
When Lafitte journeyed to Toulouse upon business, Naudin reportedly confined Justine in an aviary for eight days, while publicly announcing her disappearance. During the night of the 21st to the 22nd of June 1786, she is said to have finally commanded her to seek out the deputy mayor, Riscle. According to Champagnac, this magistrate was an avowed enemy of the father. At six o’clock in the morning, Justine presented herself at his residence to demand justice. Riscle directed her to the municipal court, where her denunciation was promptly drafted into a legal deposition.
The child declared before the court that she was fourteen years of age and had suffered her father’s violences for five years. She also offered a tale of flight: for eight days, she claimed, she had lived hidden among the wheat fields, venturing forth only at night to beg for bread at outlying farmsteads. These statements were duly entered into the record. The mayor and the fiscal prosecutor thereupon summoned surgeons and ordered an inquest. Justine was to remain at the town hall. The official record, the physical examination, and the initial judicial orders all bear the single date of June 22. In the span of a few hours, a spoken declaration made at daybreak had become a full criminal proceeding whose constituent documents seemed to answer one another with suspicious precision.
Meanwhile, Naudin publicly voiced her distress over the missing girl. Another townswoman rebuked her, asserting that she knew full well where Justine was and warning her that she was courting ruin. The chronicle attributes to Naudin a sudden recoil: she is said to have instructed Marie Guion to entreat Riscle to return the child, urging that no credit be given to her words. But the denunciation had already been signed. An accusation lodged before sworn magistrates could no longer be recalled into a private house at the mere bidding of the woman who, according to this narrative, had set it in motion.
Lafitte returned the following day. Naudin had quit his service. Through the intermediary of a friend, he had Justine placed with the Ursulines of Gimont, with the avowed purpose of shielding her from further influence. He lodged a formal complaint for subornation with the seneschal. His adversaries, however, were pursuing an alternate avenue: seeking from the Crown a lettre de cachet to have him immured in a fortress. Mayor Latournelle drafted a petition. Several of Lafitte’s kinsmen signed it; other signatures were alleged to have been forged. To the accusations concerning Justine, the petition added the deaths of his sons.
The eldest boy had died in April 1780. A rumour had circulated that his father had left him to perish, locked away and laden with irons. On this point, the chronicle does not deny all paternal severity: Lafitte had indeed punished the child by keeping him confined with irons upon his feet. Yet it places this punishment several years before the boy’s demise and invokes the certificate of the surgeon who attended his final illness, which attested to a natural death. As for the violent death imputed to the father regarding another son, the chronicle notes that neither witness nor official inquest existed to substantiate it. It was necessary to distinguish acknowledged acts of severity, the actual circumstances of a death, and alleged capital crimes; the municipal petition, however, blended them into a single damning portrait.
Apprised of this petition and of an arrest warrant issued against his person, Lafitte departed for Paris. His aim was to elude capture and secure the revocation of the royal order. Naudin was summoned before the Châtelet, where she retracted her statements. Champagnac explains that several witness testimonies rested entirely upon her assertions; her retraction thus struck at their very foundation. The administrative orders preparing the lettre de cachet were rescinded. Lafitte returned to L’Isle-Jourdain and appeared openly in public, yet the municipal judicial proceeding remained active.
On May 10, 1787, Justine in turn executed a formal declaration before a notary, retracting her accusations and affirming her father’s innocence. The seneschal, seized of the complaint for subornation, issued decrees against Lafitte’s principal adversaries and summoned multiple witnesses. The retaliation was immediate: the former officer was arrested and conducted to the prisons of Toulouse. His accusers obtained a suspension of the proceedings against themselves and a halt to the inquest into subornation. The two rival procedures now vied for custody of the same individuals: the man who had lodged the complaint lay in chains, while those he accused laboured to stifle the inquiry.
An ecclesiastical monitory was likewise sought to compel testimony. Placards affixed to the church doors of Toulouse and L’Isle-Jourdain published the imputations; among them now appeared the allegation of a child slain by three thrusts of his father’s knife. Such publicity lent the claims fresh resonance, though it provided no proof in itself. To explain this relentless animus, Champagnac singles out Pascal, an itinerant comptroller established in the town for twenty-five years, who wielded influence over local authorities through his ties to the council of the King’s brother. Once Lafitte’s friend, he had fallen out with him; several civil suits had reportedly preceded this criminal accusation. Riscle, Latournelle, and the fiscal prosecutor Cruchent figure, in this version, as his ready instruments.
The chronicler further hints at Naudin’s jealousy toward Anne Verdier. He presents this, however, merely as a hypothesis, and not as a judicially established motive. His defense of Lafitte occasionally turns to broader themes, invoking the natural instincts of a father to refute the imputed crimes. Such arguments belong to the art of the advocate. The true examination of the case rests upon different ground: the exact tenor of the declarations, their subsequent retractions, the documentary evidence, and the procedural regularity of the prosecution.
Following prolonged jurisdictional conflicts, the advocate Mailhe pleaded the cause before the Parlement of Toulouse in June 1789. The initial procedure was quashed; a new trial was ordered. Then the convulsions of the Revolution interrupted the ordinary course of justice, and Lafitte stepped out of prison. Champagnac expresses wonder that he did not reappear to seek that definitive examination, before venturing several conjectures as to his motives. We need not embrace any of these suppositions to conclude his history. Justine had accused, then retracted; Naudin had likewise recanted; the proceedings had been annulled, without any definitive verdict rendered upon the facts. At the end of this prolonged struggle, an open gate restored a man to liberty, leaving his dossier forever deprived of the judgment his counsel had promised.