Upon a prison staircase, Lainé whispered to two comrades that they must suffer the magistrate to believe he had killed Bulson. He had just taken the blow upon his own head, trusting thereby to preserve the letters of pardon that might deliver all three. Yet Lainé had never struck Bulson. The hand that wielded the blade was Savary’s, and he had fled ere the crowd could point him out. Thus, a fabricated confession was to lodge itself at the very heart of a trial in which the first witnesses had proved incapable of distinguishing between the soldiers.
We must return to the beginning. On the 13th of November 1764, around four o’clock in the afternoon, Savary and Lainé, privates of the French Guards, sat drinking with two bourgeois acquaintances in a tavern at the corner of Rue Saint-Marcel and Rue du Verbois. Lamet, their fellow soldier, chanced to pass before the door. Hailed by them, he stepped inside, found them far gone in drink, and sought at first to take his leave; yet, perceiving they were ready to depart, he tarried to support those who could scarce govern their steps.
The two bourgeois dwelt in the immediate neighbourhood. Lamet first saw them safely to their doors, then returned with his fellows to the Cabaret de la Providence. There they drank yet another pint, all three remaining on their feet, without once sitting down. This brief sojourn was to become one landmark among many: the companions had quitted a room, traversed a passage, and encountered artisans, several of whom were likewise taking their leave. Nothing, until then, portended that a violent death and a criminal inquest would divide the three soldiers.
In the narrow alleyway, Savary and a workman, both unsteadied by liquor, collided. The artisan turned about and hurled an insult. Savary sought to answer with a blow; Lamet parried his arm. The workman thereupon seized Savary by the hair, whilst five other artisans threw themselves upon him, raining down blows. The precise tally of each gesture now mattered beyond all else: who had sought to keep the peace, who had defended himself, who had drawn steel? The affray, in a matter of moments, raised up witnesses, yet it endowed them neither with the same recollections nor with equal certainty.
Lainé, beholding his comrade under assault, laid hand to his sword. Lamet feared, according to the chronicle, that drunkenness might lead him to strike blindly; he threw himself before him, pinioned his arms, and thrust him against the wall on the opposite side of the street. Yet the artisans continued to batter Savary. Lainé protested against the restraint imposed upon him; he broke free of the embrace, but Lamet seized him anew at the mouth of the alley, dragging him back by his sword-belt. These two desperate efforts to hold a soldier back soon became almost indistinguishable from the general tumult.
Savary believed himself forsaken and feared for his life. He drew his sword—not, the chronicler insists, with intent to kill, but to terrify those who hemmed him in. The steel he brandished at random failed to disperse the band; it served only to inflame their wrath. Bulson, more inebriated than the rest, sprang forward to take Savary by the collar and hurled himself directly onto the blade. He expired upon the spot. Here lay the central fact about which depositions, errors, and stratagems were to gather: a hand had driven the cold iron, yet it remained to be proved whose hand it was, under what circumstances it had moved, and with what intent.
At the sight of death, Savary came to his senses and fled. Lamet released Lainé, urging him to follow. The crowd was swelling; voices were crying murder. Lamet perceived that his comrade was not behind him, turned back toward him, and then, beholding the mob closing in, took to his heels in his turn. The regimental guard arrived and laid hold of Lainé, whom the crowd surrendered to their hands. Savary had vanished before the populace gathered in force: rumour, therefore, fixed upon the man who had remained upon the ground.
Justice had at first only witnesses who were unable to name the soldiers. Confronted with Savary and Lainé, they declared they could not say which of the two had dealt the mortal stroke. A solitary voice claimed to recognise the culprit: François Mercier, a founder. His testimony pointed to Lainé, not Savary. Upon this single assertion, the docket closed fast around the man whom the first outcries had already delivered up. Certain errors are born of mere resemblance; this one was nourished by the absence of the fugitive and the unshakeable assurance of an isolated witness.
Savary, however, had not maintained total silence. He had recounted the calamity to a woman named Lahaye, beneath whose roof he had sought shelter; she wiped his sword with her kerchief. Upon returning to barracks, he informed the sentry and several other soldiers. He was presently conducted to the very prison where Lainé lay confined. Such an avowal ought to have hindered the prosecution from halting at the first name; but the inquest had not yet attained that harmony of evidence necessary to undo what a single deposition had determined.
The Marshal de Biron, colonel of the regiment, had solicited letters of pardon. Drawn up in the light of Mercier’s deposition, they ascribed the homicide to Lainé. When the time came to have them ratified, the Lieutenant-Criminal inquired of the prisoner whether he had indeed struck the blow. Lainé was on the point of saying no; it was represented to him that, being named as the slayer within the letters, he ran the hazard, by denying it, of seeing the pardon quashed altogether. He therefore pleaded guilty, believing he was thereby safeguarding his own liberty and that of his fellows.
Upon the prison stairs, he informed Savary and Lamet that their sole hope of salvation lay in suffering the judge to remain in error and upholding his falsehood. This they did. In seeking to shield the pardon, they compromised the truth. The magistrates perceived in the stroke allegedly delivered by Lainé—severed as it was by a considerable interval from the general brawl—a premeditated design; the homicide ceased, in their eyes, to be an act committed in the heat of peril. The rejection of the pardon, the chronicler observes, held out to Lainé the certainty of execution. The artifice devised to preserve him transformed him, upon the face of the record, into a cold-blooded assassin.
It was then that Savary understood the price his compliant silence might exact from his comrade. From the depths of his cell, he wrote to the Marshal de Biron, to the Marquis de Cornillon, major of the regiment, and to Monsieur de Chenevière, councillor to the Parlement. He himself supplied the names of the witnesses capable of disabusing the bench. This step did not yet purchase his freedom; but it stripped the prevailing error of the corroboration of those who had sustained it.
Ere sentence was finally passed upon Lainé, a fresh inquest was ordered. Lamet, who had hitherto surrendered voluntarily to the prison in order to partake of the pardon, was formally committed and interrogated anew on the 1st of October. Questioned concerning his previous deposition, he confessed that it was false and that he had merely obeyed Lainé’s counsel, whispered upon the stairs. A second interlocutory decree directed that fresh witnesses be heard. Lahaye, the sergeant, and several soldiers of the guard deposed to what they knew of Savary’s initial admissions. The three men were confronted with one another and with these witnesses.
Savary at length confessed under oath that his own hand had dealt the blow; he maintained that he had acted solely in self-defence after being brutally handled by Bulson and his fellows. Upon hearing the depositions read, he acknowledged their truth; Lamet and Lainé did the same. The chronicle preserves the words wherein Savary embraced the consequences of his confession: “The blow I dealt was involuntary; but, if death be the consequence of that stroke, let Lainé step down; it is for me to mount the scaffold.”
The entire complexion of the cause was altered. What had begun with a man restrained in a scuffle and another abandoned to the fury of the mob ended in a far more arduous solidarity: Savary owned to the fatal gesture, whilst Lainé retracted the false confession that had brought him to the brink of ruin. Biron solicited fresh letters of pardon for Savary; the magistrates joined their own supplications to those of the colonel. They were duly obtained and ratified, to the immense relief of a public deeply stirred by the cause.
One must not confound the pardon granted to Savary with an absolute exoneration of his deed: Bulson was dead, and the steel had been drawn by his hand. Yet neither can one erase the blows sustained, the terror, the confusion of the fray, nor the desperate resolve with which he stepped forward to prevent an innocent comrade from perishing in his stead. As for Lainé, his fabricated confession had exposed him to the very doom it was intended to avert; Savary’s avowal, substantiated by Lamet and the witnesses, finally dissolved the snare.
Thus concluded, in Champagnac’s narrative, the affair of the French Guards: the truth did not emerge at first from the confrontations, nor from the earliest declarations, but from a tardy dread lest a judicial falsehood become irreparable. A dead man remained at the centre of this history; about his corpse, the mob had designated a culprit, a single witness had confirmed him, and royal letters of grace seemed set to seal the error. Lainé at last renounced the confession that had condemned him; Savary acknowledged the act he had at first concealed. It required this twin return to truth for the judges to look once more upon the hand that had actually held the sword.