The reprieve afforded no sanctuary to his flesh. Pascal-Brigaud Desbrosses had obtained a stay in the execution of the decree pronounced against him; yet the branding iron was applied nonetheless, and the measure served merely to defer his departure for the galleys. He was thus condemned to pursue the rehearing of his trial while already bearing the indelible mark of his infamy. Long before becoming this aging supplicant seeking a fresh examination of his exhibits, he had served as an army chaplain, a superior of regular monasteries, and an unyielding defender of rights that others sought to wrest from his grasp.
Born at Paray in Burgundy, Desbrosses had taken his vows among the Picpus Fathers of Lyon in 1718. He was subsequently elected superior and later entrusted with the temporal affairs of his order in Paris. Appointed chaplain to the Piedmont Regiment, he earned glowing attestations for his succour of the wounded. Officers attested to his valour under fire. In the military hospitals, he disbursed his own funds to nourish and clothe the sick. These past services formed the portrait of virtue that his defenders would, many years later, set against a charge of poisoning.
Failing health compelled him to relinquish these duties. Returning to Paris, he became chaplain to the Princess of Conti and transferred to the Order of Saint Benedict, making his profession on April 2, 1737. The governance and litigations of religious houses henceforth consumed the greater part of his energies. Benefices yielded revenues, but also muniments and titles that could be contested, resigned, or amalgamated. In these protracted disputes, Desbrosses displayed a tenacity that brought him to notice. That reputation was destined to draw him into a new priory and into conflict with new adversaries.
Berryer, the incumbent prior of Perrecy, was determined to prevent his house from being annexed to the bishopric of Autun. He wished to preserve the austere reform he had introduced there. Aged and anxious for the future, he designated Desbrosses as his successor, precisely because he knew him capable of defending a benefice to the utmost. The office came encumbered with a pledge: never to permit Perrecy to be swallowed up in the proposed union. What bore the appearance of a regular succession was thus an engagement to perpetuate an ancient conflict. Desbrosses inherited not merely revenues, but a mandate for resistance.
No overtures could induce him to yield. Cardinal de Fleury, who favoured the annexation, resorted to coercion and had him confined at Saint-Lazare. Following Berryer’s death, Dom Bernard was collated to the priory by the bishop; yet a decree maintained Desbrosses in legal possession. The latter subsequently assigned monastic duties to Bernard. In the account favourable to Desbrosses preserved by Champagnac, this gesture of conciliation came to naught. The man he had confronted as a rival remained established within the very house he was charged to govern.
A second religious, Antoine Villette, known as Brother Hilarion, entered Perrecy in 1745. Desbrosses confirmed his title to the priory of Sigy and secured his ordination as deacon, but subsequently refused his advancement to the priesthood on the grounds of misconduct. The feud now touched upon personal ambition. To these dissensions was added the administration of temporalities: Bernard and Hilarion managed the monastery during a period in which Desbrosses had been ousted. When an arrêt of November 9, 1751 reinstated him, he exercised his right to demand an audit of their accounts. The figures demanded served only to inflame personal animosities.
The annexation to the bishopric was once more pursued, only for the proceedings to be declared abusive in May 1755. Desbrosses unceasingly returned to the same task: obtaining a decree, opposing it to another, and recovering the prerogatives torn from him. He also sought to introduce a religious, Régis Roch, to assist in restoring monastic discipline. This admission sparked fresh discord. A defamatory memorial was presented under the names of Hilarion and Dom Cyr; the latter subsequently protested that his signature had been obtained by surprise, disavowing the accusations. Within the cloister, legal instruments no longer merely settled revenues: they had become weapons between brethren.
The accounts of Sigy remained disputed. Desbrosses reproached Hilarion with diverting its resources to his private quarters and absenting himself without leave. He also produced correspondence from which he framed formal complaints against his conduct. Letters and satiric verses were preserved, only to be lodged in the court records. The chronicler discerns in these skirmishes the seeds of vengeance. Yet the dossier was soon to shift from mundane questions of discipline and ledgers to an accusation of far darker gravity: Hilarion alleged that his superior had attempted to poison him.
The accusation gathered disparate occurrences spread over several years. It was asserted that Desbrosses had kept poison in his chambers years before. A conversation from October 1759 with Brother Dorothée, the convent apothecary, concerning toxic substances and antidotes, was brought forward. Finally, Hilarion maintained that viands intended for his table had been tainted. To those inclined to believe him, the long-standing feuds provided a compelling motive; to the prior’s defenders, they offered equal reason to suspect a calculated and malicious denunciation. The enmity produced two irreconcilable readings of the very same facts.
On July 25, 1764, the Official of Dijon pronounced canonical sentences against Desbrosses and his brother, the curé of Perrecy, who was accused inter alia of suborning witnesses. On August 7, an arrêt of the Parlement condemned the prior to the galleys for life, preceded by branding, confiscation of property, and severe pecuniary penalties. A fine of one hundred livres and eight thousand livres in damages were added to the forfeiture of his estate. The man who had spent years demanding reckonings found himself mulcted in vast sums by a judgment whose validity he denied. His brother was sentenced in absentia to three years in the galleys. Desbrosses petitioned for a reprieve. He obtained it, yet the brand was nonetheless burnt into his shoulder. The procedural battle was thus pursued only after an irreparable portion of the punishment had already been inflicted.
He lodged a petition in cassation and for a rehearing. In January 1768, the King’s Council instructed the Parlement of Douai to review the case. Desbrosses was transferred thither in May. For three months, the vast dossier of this protracted trial was scrutinized. The outcome was not what he had hoped: the court affirmed the condemnation rendered at Dijon. A second sovereign jurisdiction had upheld the first. Those who continued to believe him the victim of an iniquity could no longer promise him an acquittal; they were forced to seek other avenues to deliver him from his punishment.
He was advised to solicit royal clemency by way of commutation rather than another judicial reversal. On July 5, 1769, the sentence of the galleys was commuted to perpetual banishment from the realm. He obtained leave to depart under a different penalty, but won no recognition of his innocence. The distinction was vital to his fate: he had altered the course of his future without expunging the convictions or the scar of the iron. The former army chaplain, who had traversed battlefields to succour others, was now forced to leave his native land under the enduring burden of an unreversed decree.
Champagnac resolutely espouses his cause, contesting the very existence of the corpus delicti of poisoning. His chronicle preserves a passionate protest against two judicial decrees, not an acquittal ever granted by the courts. This discordance gives the affair its enduring gravity. The charters and muniments whose every line Desbrosses had championed had repeatedly restored him to his priory; the final letters patent he obtained granted him nothing more than exile. Between the law he incessantly invoked and the fate meted out to him, an entire life had been consumed in pleading that the documents be read anew.