The magistrate asked to see the registry. There was none. For more than twenty years, Pourthé replied, the proceedings had been kept under his own roof. It was therefore to the clerk’s private dwelling that Rigaud went to seek the instruments that had brought Catherine Estinès to a sentence of death. He had come to collate an official extract with its original. He was to discover that the discrepancies were not confined to the copy alone: the very document from which the truth was purported to be drawn had itself undergone additions and alterations.
A few months prior, Catherine had been living at Cazaux, in Comminges. Her father, Barthélemy, combined several trades: meat, grain, tobacco, and an inn. He had acquired a modest competence. Following the death of his first wife, he had remarried with Dominiquète Fontan. The chronicle portrays a household that had grown hostile to Catherine, whom her stepmother wished to see depart to join her brothers established in Spain. The young woman worked outside the home to earn her bread and took her meals under her father’s roof only when work failed her. She still dwelt in the house, but she no longer had a place within it.
In July 1784, Dominiquète fell ill after eating a bowl of gruel. She accused Catherine of having mingled arsenic with it. Other table companions had partaken of the dish without the slightest indisposition, and this first accusation had no recorded judicial sequel. It nonetheless left a word lingering in local parlance: poison. When Barthélemy fell gravely ill a few months later, the word lay already at hand. It was enough to revive it to lend a fresh malady the appearance of a longstanding design pursued against the family.
The merchant returned from Montréjeau seized with violent pains. He took to his bed for five or six days. His wife attended him; Catherine, detained out of doors by her labor, came near him only at nightfall, and then with difficulty. On January 21, 1785, she did not enter the bedchamber until after eight o’clock. Her father expired at ten. The prosecution maintained that a broth administered several hours earlier had contained the venom and that Catherine had introduced it. Yet the illness had declared itself long before that final meal. The hour of her visit and that of the preparation were to become questions to which common rumor supplied too prompt an answer.
Dominiquète had sent for Mounic, a barber from an adjacent village, bidding him bring an antidote. He ministered to the dying man after listening to her suspicions. Two days following the decease, the judicial officers of Rivière arrived in company with Pourthé, the clerk. Mounic and Soudane, another barber, were commissioned to open the body. Their report was drawn up in the garden. Later, both men would declare that it did not faithfully render their findings: certain words had been shifted, others inserted, and they had been made to sign without having it read over to them.
Witnesses raised identical protestations. One had merely repeated what he had heard from the widow; another asserted that he had set his hand to the paper without hearing the deposition recorded in his name. These divergences did not turn upon an appraisal of Catherine’s character. They struck at the very fabrication of the documents upon which the judge was to pronounce. Between what a deponent had uttered and what a tribunal could read, an alien hand had found room to interpose itself. For the present, the papers traveled faster than the disavowals.
On January 28, Judge Barre decreed Catherine’s arrest, upon the requisitions of Laguens the elder. She was standing before her door when the horsemen came to take her, and she made no attempt to fly. She was conducted to Saint-Gaudens. Within the dead man’s house, the estate had likewise become a subject of contention. Her brother-in-law had demanded the affixing of the seals; these were subsequently broken in an irregular manner, and personal effects were sold off. The proceedings that professed to vindicate the father’s memory were thus attended by transactions upon his patrimony. The daughter, under lock and key, could not keep watch over what was being carried away.
The preliminary examination remained almost stationary until March, when twenty witnesses were heard in the span of a single day. The widow stood among them. Their testimonies largely echoed the charges originating with her or with another woman, Jeanne Minotte. Champagnac perceives behind this enterprise several personal animosities, including that of a parish priest hostile to Catherine; his narrative denounces these figures with vehemence. Yet the liabilities that justice would ultimately visit with punishment were first and foremost those of the men who had drawn up the acts, framed the requisitions, and rendered judgment. It was their conduct in the procedure that it would soon become possible to confront with the written record.
On May 25, 1785, Catherine was condemned to capital punishment of an extreme cruelty. The sentence excited keen indignation. Thereupon ensued a singular reversal: those appointed to guard her urged her to escape. The chronicle records that occasions were multiplied for her, even during her conveyance toward Toulouse. Catherine refused them all. To flee would have been to leave behind her a conviction for her father’s blood; she was determined to obtain from other magistrates a judgment that would not compel her to bear that brand wherever she might wander.
At Toulouse, where she arrived at the beginning of June, her demeanor engaged the interest of prison officials and magistrates alike. But personal impressions could not suffice to overthrow a dossier. Catherine petitioned for an inspection of the original records. A young magistrate, Rigaud, offered to repair to the scene at his own charge; Advocate General de Resseguier supported the application. On June 20, the Parlement granted him a commission to that end. That which was to preserve the prisoner was not merely that she was believed; it was that the court consented to verify what the initial papers had induced men to credit against her.
Rigaud set out on the morrow and reached Montréjeau on the morning of the 22nd. Pourthé conducted him to his abode, where the records were deposited. In company with the registrar who attended him, the commissioner collated the extract remitted to Toulouse with the original record of proceedings. The discrepancies were legion; the original, moreover, exhibited overt alterations. Under their very eyes, the inquiry shifted its course. The instruments designed to condemn Catherine became in their turn the corpus delicti of an accusation of forgery. Rigaud caused Pourthé to be arrested and returned to Toulouse with the fruits of his examination.
On July 7, the court decreed the detention of the clerk, the apprehension of both Laguens, and the personal appearance of Judge Barre. The Laguens took to flight. A complaint for forgery was lodged, and fresh proceedings were instituted. Rigaud returned to the locality to pursue his verifications and confrontations. In October, Barre vanished in his turn. Catherine was no longer solitary in answering before the law: those whose signatures had lent authority to the accusation now found themselves pursued for the manner in which they had contrived it.
Her innocence was at length proclaimed. The Parlement of Toulouse condemned both Laguens, father and son, by contumacy, to ten years in the galleys; Barre and Pourthé were sentenced to ten years’ banishment and to damages in Catherine’s favor. The chapter supplies no date for this final decree. Nor does it record any sentence against the stepmother or the curate, notwithstanding the charges it marshals against them. Redress overtook the identified officers of the procedure; it does not warrant transforming all the other imputations of the narrative into supplementary judicial verdicts.
Catherine had claimed fifty thousand livres; the recorded decree awarded her four thousand livres in damages. The figures cannot recompense the months endured under the shadow of an agonizing death, yet they mark the reversal of her condition: she was thenceforth the claimant against those who had impeached her. In the beginning, she had been confronted with witnesses whose words had been penned by other hands. In the end, two texts set side by side had made the disparity visible to all. A magistrate had demanded the originals; that demand had opened to the prisoner a door she had been urged only to force by taking flight.