The decree was to be read to Marc Game at the very moment the court stood prepared to judge his appeal. He never heard that judgment. An illness forced him from his dungeon to the Hôtel-Dieu; he died there a few moments after his arrival, before the superior court could redress, according to the chronicle, the miscarriage of justice that had condemned him. Meanwhile, in Lyon, it was already known that the notes bore a handwriting that was not his own. He had nevertheless been sentenced to three days on the pillory, to branding, and to nine years in the galleys, while the true author of the thefts eluded the preliminary examination.
Game was born in Saint-Paul-d’Yenne, in Savoy. He had served twelve years in the Tarentaise Regiment, then settled in Lyon, where he found employment successively in the service of several private households. Nine masters had provided certificates attesting to his good conduct and fidelity. In 1770, he married Jeanne-Marie Jacob and established a modest trade in flour. The officers of his quarter, his neighbours, the corn-chandlers, and the flour-dealers all certified that he had fulfilled every duty of an honest man. His reputation was not that of a powerful notable; it rested upon those ordinary folk who saw him day after day managing his trade and his household.
Toward the close of 1772, a thief made his rounds through the shops of Lyon armed with forged notes. He borrowed the names of well-known personages, penning requests plausible enough for the merchants to deliver their goods to a supposed servant. On October 17, a man presented himself at the shop of Chollet, a hosier, with a note attributed to one Chaix. He asked for six pairs of silk stockings and two pairs of women’s mittens, ostensibly intended for Monsieur Chay. The name, correctly spelled Chaix, was familiar enough that Madame Chollet and her shopmen surrendered the merchandise without hesitation.
The selfsame stratagem subsequently procured sausages and salted pork from the woman Bergeret, and candles from the woman Clémençon. The tradesmen discovered the fraud only when demanding payment from Chaix. The note and the signature were counterfeit; the culprit remained unidentified. It was during this interval, while the victims knew the deception but not the thief, that a specific name was uttered.
Game had worked for some eight days in Chaix’s household. A maidservant in the house had wished to marry him, so the chronicle relates, and he had declined her suit. Champagnac leaves open the motives that impelled her to point him out: heedless indiscretion or a thirst for vengeance. What remains certain in the narrative is that Chaix adopted her conjecture. Yet the description supplied by the shopkeepers did not fit Game: they spoke of a man between thirty and thirty-five years of age, whereas Game was visibly older. His coat of grey ratteen, another cited detail, was ordinary attire among the servants of a populous city. Once suspicion fastened upon him, however, these glaring discrepancies no longer checked the accusers’ assertions.
Chollet and the woman Zacharie repaired to Game’s shop under pretext of purchasing goods, the better to observe him. The woman Zacharie conceded that he was neither unsettled nor surprised by their arrival. He answered without embarrassment and displayed the wares they requested. Such composure might well have dispelled suspicion; instead, it was seized upon to confirm it. Madame Chollet, who waited nearby, was persuaded by those returning from his shop. She boasted a memory and an eye so unerring that she claimed she could recognize, after six years’ lapse, a man glimpsed but once. The archival account mentions no formal confrontation that properly established Game’s identity with the man to whom she had delivered the stockings.
On the following day, the woman Zacharie stopped Game upon the stone bridge and demanded the price of the cords he had allegedly taken from her shop. He denied having ever bought them and asked for her name and address, promising to call upon her to clear up the misunderstanding. He went as agreed. Chollet’s two shopmen greeted him with insults and ordered him to follow them. Within the house were gathered Chaix, Bergeret, Madame Chollet, her father, and several others, all already convinced of his guilt. There was talk of having him beaten, then of having him arrested. Before the accused had even been heard by a magistrate, he was treated as an established thief.
Game protested and called his neighbours to witness the outrages done to him. He initiated legal steps to obtain redress. Meanwhile, the true rogue pursued his depredations. He obtained forty pounds of wax candles from Maron, a chandler, once again by means of an assumed note and forged signature, and then repeated the fraud with other tradesmen. Maron accused Game and had him conducted to prison. The tradesman had not torn the mask from the actual thief; he merely adopted the name already chosen by the others.
Yet witnesses came forward placing Game elsewhere on the mornings the thefts took place. Persons who had kept him in plain sight without interruption attempted to disabuse his accusers. The latter were committed too deeply to retract: their initial supposition had hardened into certainty through mere repetition. A faceless forger had been supplanted by the readiest man upon whom suspicion could be cast, and every parcel of merchandise purloined under a fresh note reinforced an existing prejudice rather than subjecting it to scrutiny.
Another merchant held a decisive piece of evidence, unaware that it bore upon Game’s fate. The true author was Barrat, a former domestic in the service of the Sieur Baley. Barrat had already been convicted of housebreaking and had subsequently escaped the clutches of the law. He had obtained goods under Baley’s name in several quarters. To prevent further frauds, the merchant had sent specimens of his authentic signature to the tradesmen, enjoining them to compare the notes against it before delivering any goods whatsoever.
A shopkeeper informed of Game’s prosecution asked Baley to describe Barrat. The wanted man was thirty to thirty-five years old and habitually wore a coat of friezed grey ratteen: he answered precisely to the description of the swindler, not to that of Game. The forged notes were shown to Baley; he recognized the handwriting of his former domestic and produced letters penned by his hand. The identical hand appeared upon the cards used to steal under Baley’s name. Barrat had fled or gone into hiding. One man was missing from the dock, yet the case against Game had already reached the tribunal.
Following proceedings that Champagnac deems profoundly irregular, the sentence of March 11, 1773, condemned Game to three days on the pillory, to branding, and to nine years in the galleys. He lodged an appeal and petitioned the Superior Council to be admitted to prove his exculpatory evidence. The case was finally to be scrutinized by a higher jurisdiction; the witnesses, the certificates of good character, and the forged cards could at last take their proper place in the judicial inquiry. For Game, however, this revision came too late.
When the day appointed for the judgment of the appeal arrived and the inquiry stood complete, he fell mortally ill in his cell. Champagnac attributes his sickness to the foul air engendered by floodwaters that had invaded the prison during an inundation. It became necessary to convey him to the Hôtel-Dieu. There he expired almost immediately, at the very juncture when the court prepared to read the decree to him. The council had received his exculpatory evidence; Game would never hear it pronounced.
Jeanne-Marie Jacob then took up the appeal against the sentence delivered against her husband in her own name. A decree upon petition authorized her to cite whomsoever she saw fit. She served writs upon the witnesses heard during the preliminary inquiry, claiming thirty thousand livres in damages. The legal battle to rectify the error was henceforth waged by the voice of a widow, bereft of the man whose name she defended, demanding from the witnesses the price of their false accusation.
In 1774, the Superior Council of Lyon entered formal record of a complaint lodged by the procureur général against Barrat, whom Game’s advocates pointed to as the true perpetrator of the thefts. The court ordered that judgment on the widow’s appeal against the sentence passed on her husband be stayed, and it dismissed the witnesses from her claim for damages. At this juncture the surviving record breaks off. It contains neither a final decree upon Game’s appeal, nor the conviction of Barrat, nor any restitution accorded to the widow.
The condemnation of March 1773 thus remains in these pages alongside the traces of what had made it possible: the denunciation of a maidservant reported with circumspection by the chronicler, the brazen confidence of Madame Chollet—who claimed to recognize after six years an individual seen but once—a physical description that ill fitted the prisoner, and witnesses unable or unwilling to recant their initial certainties. The trail leading to Barrat and the identification of his handwriting had been reported prior to the sentence of March 1773. After Game’s death, fresh evidence strengthened his justification; in 1774, the Superior Council recorded a complaint against Barrat and stayed judgment on the widow’s appeal. The final recorded act is therefore neither the conviction of the forger nor the definitive rehabilitation of Marc Game.