Foulard asked the executioner to embrace him. The young man drew back. He was unaccustomed to a condemned prisoner extending toward him the very last shred of liberty left to his person; above all, he had not yet put anyone to death. In the account left by the Sansons, the assistants grasped the danger before their new master did. They seized the prisoner, marched him to the steps, and consummated the execution without awaiting the signal. He who was meant to command found himself a mere spectator to his own entrance into the trade.
The condemned man was named Pierre Charles Rodolphe Foulard. He was barely twenty years of age and served among the light horse of the Royal Guard, stationed in garrison at Versailles. Two women had been killed for a watch and a pair of earrings. This very disproportion lent the affair its initial brutality: lives destroyed, and, on the thief’s side, a handful of trifles that might fit within a single hand. The uniform compounded the scandal. A man armed to uphold order had turned his force to the despoilment of those he ought to have left in safety.
A broadside ballad of February 1819, later collected by Du Mersan, preserved the names of Vignot and Champoudry. It made the murderer speak in the first person and announced that a child had discovered the crime. It then led him before the mayor of Châtillon, where he entered his denials. The ballad supplied no judicial dossier; it offered the public a brief narrative, easily retained, wherein the accused soon confessed that which he had initially repelled. The two deceased women entered memory through rhyme, before the final scene made the condemned man the principal figure.
On January 13, 1819, the Seine Assize Court pronounced the capital penalty. The Sanson narrative specifies that the jurors had rejected premeditation; this finding did not preclude the death sentence for the acts retained against him. There remained the appeal in cassation and the hope of a reprieve. The former was subject to the rule of law; the latter depended upon the sovereign. For a lad of that age, each delay might still assume the likeness of a beginning. For the executioner, on the contrary, each passing day brought closer an obligation that had become harrowing to discharge.
The elder Sanson lay ill. For a long time, his son had known he must succeed him, yet this knowledge had remained a mere domestic arrangement, a future whose full reality might be deferred. He had married; he lived beside a young wife, beneath the domestic shelter of a father and mother who sought to render an inherited condition endurable to him. He had accompanied executions. He had not taken upon himself, alone, the one that now drew near.
News of the rejection of the appeal arrived in February. On Tuesday the 16th, the warrant appointed the execution for the morrow. It would have been necessary to summon a colleague from the provinces; time was wanting, and the son’s presence rendered such an expedient embarrassing. The father, barely convalescent, wished to rise. The son took his place. The memoirs invest this resolution with the character of a filial sacrifice: to spare his father a perilous exertion demanded the performance of that very task whose approach he had hitherto dreaded.
The apprenticeship was practical. Orders had to be transmitted to the carpenter, the assembly verified, the duties of the assistants mastered. The father particularly commended two experienced men; they were to sustain their young master quite as much as obey him. The mechanics of the scaffold were thus doubled by a human apparatus, capable of making good the weakness of the man set at its head. The assurance given him had nothing of the abstract: he would have few gestures to perform. This economy of gesture in no way diminished its consequence.
When morning came, the carriage conveyed the men to the Conciergerie. The young Sanson recalled adopting an imperious tone toward the prison warders, fancying he read contempt in their eyes. He borrowed an air of authority to conceal his agitation. Foulard appeared with the Abbé Montès. The youth of the condemned man struck him who was to deliver him to the guillotine: he was but a year or so older than the prisoner. At that moment, the difference between their stations owed nothing to bodily vigor or the probable span of a life, but solely to a sentence and an office.
The assistant Fauconnier bade Foulard sit and took charge of the preparations. The condemned man, hitherto despondent, suffered himself to be led. In the cart, the priest remained at his side; the young executioner took his place with his assistants. The memoirs present this arrangement as an act of consideration: allowing the man to die beside one who could still speak to him without commanding him. Montès, however, also addressed a few words to Sanson. In that same vehicle, two men stood in need of support, but only one was to return.
Along the quays, Foulard broke his silence. He addressed the parents gathered along the way, imputing his wanderings to the abandonment in which his family had left him. The Sansons record this accusation without providing verification. It served, nonetheless, an immediate purpose: at the moment when an entire city might look upon him as the sole author of his misfortune, he sought a place for others in the history of his undoing. He no longer denied the crime; he refused to bear alone the explanation of it.
Upon the Place de Grève, he caught sight of a non-commissioned officer of his company among the soldiers forming the cordon. He called out to him. The man stepped from the ranks and came forward to receive his farewell. This gesture restored, for a fleeting moment, a tie that the law had severed: Foulard remained a comrade to someone. The embrace altered nothing of the judgment, restored nothing to the two victims; it merely prevented the condemned man from being treated as a thing before he was dead.
He then sought to embrace Sanson. The latter drew back, and the assistants proceeded with their work. The plea for universal forgiveness, as the memoirs transmit it, had reached the boundary of ceremonial: it rendered the relation between the condemned and the executioner far too personal. Once the head had fallen, the men resumed the necessary operations. The young master, for his part, fled through Paris. He recounted having walked as far as Neuilly, pursued by the impression that eyes were upon him and that he stood accused.
He returned home at last. His career had just begun, and Foulard had given him a memory that no professional repetition would ever render commonplace. The memoirs fashioned it into the history of an executioner seized with horror before his charge; the broadside ballad, that of a young murderer chastised. Between these two chronicles remain Vignot and Champoudry, named in a handful of verses. The refused embrace has traversed the century with greater luster than the two lives for which the Place de Grève had filled.