On the morrow of the execution, the body of Doctor Bors had vanished from the anatomical theatre of Saint-Côme. The College of Surgery had duly claimed it; the door, discovered forced open, guarded nothing save an empty chamber. A few days later, a headless trunk was recovered from the Canal du Languedoc. Champagnac attributes this abduction to the medical students, yet the chronicle names no perpetrator. This singular denouement recalls a man whose existence had repeatedly shifted through diverse callings, towns, and social identities, until it brought him at last to the gallows for theft.
Bors was a native of Rouergue and the son of a village locksmith. The parish priest had conceived an affection for him, teaching him to read, write, and the rudiments of Latin. This bond was severed when the poor box was forced and the priest discovered his pupil implicated in the larceny. Bors was dismissed. The chronicle next relates that a gentlewoman, estranged from her collateral kin, took the youth under her roof, assumed the charge of his education, and sent him to the Collège of Rodez.
There he pursued his studies for several years, his patroness faithfully discharging his pension. His schoolfellows, however, noted the recurring disappearance of purses and personal effects. More than once, Bors was convicted of these petty thefts. Pledging to mend his ways, he remained at the college, his board being punctually defrayed. Having completed his course in rhetoric, he returned to his benefactress, who rejoiced at his progress. Yet he sought to appropriate a sum of money newly brought in by a tenant farmer. She cast him out. The house that might have fallen to him as his inheritance was henceforth barred against him.
At Carcassonne, he obtained a position as preceptor to the children of a merchant. A fresh swindle soon compelled him to seek refuge in Bordeaux. Champagnac notes that the city’s police registers frequently bore his name for sundry frauds, and that he evaded prosecution; the chronicler omits the precise nature of these affairs. Bors set forth once more for Toulouse. There he entered the household of an affluent and esteemed exchange broker to instruct his sons. For two years, according to the narrative, he dipped into his master’s strongbox without arousing suspicion, concealed by the manifold transactions of the house.
The funds thus purloined enabled him to live above his station and to cast aside the ecclesiastical habit he had worn, the chronicler affirms, the better to dissemble his conduct. He had himself admitted as a doctor of medicine. When he quitted the exchange broker, the master harboured regret rather than suspicion. Bors had forged ties with a professor of medicine, to such an extent that the latter wished to bestow a female kinswoman upon him in marriage. Trust continued to open doors before him, even as substantial sums had melted away in two neighbouring houses.
In time, the signs converged. The broker observed that his till had been rifled during his absence. The physician’s brother, who was engaged in financial affairs, had likewise suffered a theft during a sojourn in the countryside. The broker reasoned that the thief would return were another absence announced. Agreeing with his friend, he let it be known that he would depart on the morrow for his farmsteads. He indeed left the house, yet left concealed within it his son, the physician’s brother, several friends, and his domestics.
On the first of November 1779, towards six o’clock in the evening, while a conflagration consumed several houses in the neighbourhood, Bors presented himself at the apartment. He wore a threadbare frock coat and carried duplicate keys upon his person. Those awaiting him seized him within. Accused of the recent thefts, he confessed them and begged for his life, offering to comply with whatever might be demanded of him. Interrogated as to the funds he possessed, he pointed to bags of coin in his newly acquired house in the Rue Saint-Rome, and then to twenty-eight thousand livres secreted in a house near the Jacobins. The sums were duly discovered in the places he had named.
A notary was summoned. In his presence, Bors signed an instrument whereby he sold all his movable and immovable goods to the exchange broker, in exchange for a price he acknowledged having received. Yet once the public officer had departed, the doctor was stripped of his purse and his jewels. He was left with a few louis and some linen, and was threatened with the rigours of justice should he fail to change his place of abode. The chronicle represents this transaction as the immediate outcome of his capture; it records neither a formal sentence nor a judicial decree at this juncture. Bors took the road for Bordeaux.
Two leagues from Toulouse, he halted at an inn and requested a chamber above the kitchen. The innkeeper, perceiving drops of blood filtering through the gaps in the floorboards, ascended the stairs. He found the traveller senseless and bathed in his own blood. A surgeon was called; Bors survived the wounds he had inflicted upon himself in a paroxysm of despair, according to the chronicle. Having regained his strength, he continued on his way to Bordeaux.
There he engaged himself as a surgeon’s mate aboard a frigate upon the point of setting sail for North America. He was apprehended prior to embarkation at the instance of the public prosecutor, and conveyed back to Toulouse to stand trial. The proceedings turned upon the thefts committed against the broker, the recovered monies, and the instrument executed following his capture. Bors steadfastly denied the thefts, asserting his innocence throughout the interrogations. He likewise petitioned for letters of rescission against the contract he had ceded to his former master.
In July 1780, the Parlement of Toulouse condemned him to be hanged. The sentence was carried out that selfsame day. Emerging from the palace at half past noon, Bors summoned two chairmen to convey him to the prison of the Hôtel-de-Ville. Through the streets, the populace thronged along his passage; Champagnac depicts him gazing upon the multitude with a countenance proud and serene. Upon arriving at the prison, he discharged the chairmen with the thirty sous remaining to him, informing them that he hoped soon to be released to reward them more handsomely.
Several young men detained on account of an affray invited him to dine. Bors ate sparingly and left the board before the conclusion of the repast, having dispatched an emissary to the clerk of the gaol. He was presently summoned to the chamber of question, where his sentence was pronounced to him. The chronicler records no word from him at that instant. Bors thereupon hurled himself violently against the corner of a chimney-piece, cutting his head. A surgeon dressed the wound; the authorities hastened the execution of the decree, fearing, according to the source, that time would fail them.
Upon his emergence, the pallor of his features and the blood from his wound were plain to see. Having descended from the cart, he walked towards the gallows. The magistrates inquired whether he had any declaration to offer; he replied in the negative. He then exhorted the executioner to make an end of it without delay. The chronicle records that he threw himself into the void.