No one was paying her board. That was one of the unforeseen avenues by which Catherine-Michelle Castille regained her freedom. Shut away in Sainte-Pélagie, torn from her husband and her children, she had waited without knowing what was to become of her. Those charged with detaining her could turn away her friends, but they could not subsist indefinitely upon an unpaid debt. When the house demanded what was due, her presence there had to be called into question. An expense that no one wished to shoulder came to disrupt three years of captivity.
Catherine-Michelle Peuchet was born at Stenay in 1724. Her parents had sent her to Paris to lodge with a kinsman, one Langlois. There she met Castille, a man who kept the books of merchants and had earned a name for method and probity. He possessed savings of his own; she received from an uncle who was a chaplain a dowry of ten thousand livres. The marriage contract, executed on October 6, 1744, established a community of property. The marriage was solemnized on December 26 at Saint-Gervais, after the publication of banns and before witnesses. In the young woman’s eyes, the union was fortified by public records, a church, signatures, and the consent of both families.
Six years went by. Three children were born, two boys and a girl. The youngest, Hippolyte-Louis, came into the world in July 1750 and was placed with a wet nurse in the Brie country. On November 4, his father had gone to see him. Catherine was then in the Rue de la Verrerie, in a chamber adjoining the lodging of Madame Delage, a mistress seamstress. By her side was her little daughter, Reine-Michelle, then four and a half years old. It was there that an exempt of police presented himself, armed with warrants of arrest against both spouses.
The pretext announced overturned everything she had believed secure: Castille was denounced as an apostate religious who had deserted his abbey and contracted a union forbidden by his vows. Catherine protested. Her neighbor Delage hurried in, declared she knew her well, and offered to answer for her conduct. The officer proceeded with his errand. The young mother was taken to Sainte-Pélagie. The following day, Castille was seized in the Brie, stripped of his effects and his papers, and transferred under guard to the Abbey of Orval. The infant remained with his nurse. A household hitherto joined by public and lawful deeds found itself torn asunder by secret orders.
The monastic authorities alleged vows taken at Orval in 1714 and a departure from the monastery in 1725. Yet the validity and the supporting documents of this profession would later be hotly contested. The arrest had been solicited by the Abbot of Clairvaux. Dom Mayeur, who managed the affairs of the Order, and an uncle of Catherine’s named Jean Peuchet were also party to these maneuvers. An agreement between them provided that Castille’s estate would be conveyed to the uncle, upon condition that the latter defray the costs necessary to apprehend him and convey him to Orval. The very man who financed the pursuit was thus to lay hands upon the fortune from which the husband and wife had drawn their livelihood.
That estate consisted largely of paper: debt instruments, royal securities, commercial shares. Castille was accustomed to carrying his pocketbook upon his person whenever he went abroad. The judicial seals were not affixed to the lodging until two days after Catherine’s arrest, and suspicions of embezzlement were raised regarding that interval. When the seals were broken in January 1751, Castille’s effects were auctioned off by the uncle. Delage preserved Catherine’s personal belongings so as to restore them to her one day. Powerless to prevent the abduction, the seamstress at least safeguarded whatever could await her friend’s return.
At Sainte-Pélagie, Catherine was barred from receiving those who might have aided her. She knew nothing of what had become of her husband and her children. Every denied visit left her not only captive, but utterly deprived of news of those whose daily wants she had governed and whose lives she had shared. Delage attempted to see her, only to be turned away with shameful insinuations concerning the prisoner, as though the woman’s reputation alone justified closing the door against her. Mayeur and Peuchet, however, were freely admitted. They did not come with the same remedies. The uncle urged her to sue for the annulment of her marriage; Mayeur sought to persuade her to take the veil. The one wished to establish the nullity of the bond in which she had lived; the other offered to replace her wedded life with perpetual cloistered seclusion.
She refused this latter path. Communications were exchanged with Orval, whose reply brought an extract of Castille’s death. Catherine would never see him again. The chronicle does not record the circumstances of his end; the document received merely certified a separation that had now become irrevocable. The marriage whose life she sought to reclaim could no longer restore her husband to her. There remained her children, her property, and the public acknowledgment of what she had been made to suffer. To achieve this, she first had to escape the place where others presumed to determine her fate without her.
The uncle had been charged with paying her pension, but he neglected to do so. The administrators of Sainte-Pélagie addressed a petition to the Lieutenant General of Police on January 27, 1753; a judgment rendered in March condemned him to pay. He could not. The directors of the house then refused to maintain the boarder at their own expense. A fresh inquiry into her conduct brought about her release, after roughly three years. Catherine returned to Delage’s roof, where she found the welcome that had been denied her behind prison walls.
In that house lodged a young man named Delaunay, an employee of the French East India Company. He already knew her misfortunes, and he married her. The newly wedded pair first appealed to the successor of the Abbot of Clairvaux to obtain redress out of court. The negotiations dragged on for years. At last, on December 30, 1762, they brought an action for damages. The suit was carried before the Grand Conseil. The woman who had once been sequestered in a cell was now a plaintiff whose cause was followed by the public.
Her adversaries disclosed that she had been with child prior to the wedding of 1744, endeavoring to turn this circumstance of her private life against her. The gallery, at first sympathetic, wavered. Her virtue was debated as though it ought to determine the right to arrest her, strip her of her possessions, or keep her from her family. But the arguments returned to the muniments produced against Castille. The defense demanded proof of his monastic profession. The parchment tendered appeared altered; the irregularities of the deed and the doubts surrounding his vows were laid bare before the court. What had furnished the pretext for the entire enterprise ceased to appear incontrovertible.
Gerbier pleaded for Catherine; the King’s advocate supported the demand for reparation. On September 7, 1763, the Grand Conseil ordered the religious involved to pay thirty thousand livres in damages to Catherine, and an equal sum to her daughter, Reine-Michelle. The pecuniary liability thus decreed did not make every member of an order personally culpable for the arrests. Yet it afforded the victims a judicial remedy, after years of hollow promises and closed doors. Mother and daughter now each stood recorded in the decree for a distinct sum.
The chronicle relates that as she left the hall, flowers were strewn before Catherine by flower-girls mingling with the crowd. She had borne successively the names of Peuchet, Castille, and Delaunay; none of them could efface the years lost under her first marriage. The money awarded could not bring back the husband who had died at Orval. Yet an immense gulf separated the beginning of this affair from its conclusion: when she had been arrested, she had asked what her crime was; when she stepped forth from the tribunal, it was of those who had disposed of her life that a court of law demanded satisfaction.