Catherine Phelippeau did not ask this man to prove he was a prince. She wished to know if he was her son. Before the letters to the Bourbons, before the visitors who came to salute a majesty in the prison of Rouen, there had been this mother, an inn, and a traveler invested with the countenance of an absent child. The entire affair would take on royal proportions; its first wound was sustained within a family.
In 1815, a bargeman named Fraimbaut met this ill-clad stranger and believed he recognized the Phelippeau boy. The traveler denied it, according to the bargeman’s testimony; yet the latter would not relent, lent him twelve francs, and conducted him to his supposed mother. One may resist an impostor; it is far more arduous to defend oneself against him who brings hope. The son had left home for the army. Could the man who now crossed the threshold be the one so long awaited?
At the hearing, Catherine recounted that he had answered sometimes yes, sometimes no. In the end, she lavished upon him the care she reserved for her child. A silver watch slipped into his fob did not please him; she arranged with her son-in-law to procure him one of gold. She had clothes made for him, gave him money, and bore his coarse manners. The municipal deputy had voiced his doubts to her: she would not run the risk of turning away her son. Uncertainty, far from closing her purse, had opened it.
He remained there for two or three weeks. Later, when he sent word requesting fresh assistance, Catherine at last imposed a condition: that he sign his own name. She would recognize her child’s hand. In court, she spoke of six hundred francs; he advanced eight hundred, and still more in the course of his interrogations. Yet it was not the reckoning that pained her most. Above all, she mourned the embraces bestowed upon a man to whom she had entrusted, along with her savings, something that could never be returned.
This man traveled under the name of Charles de Navarre. At Vezins and in the surrounding countryside, others knew him as Mathurin Bruneau, raised in a family of clog-makers. His former acquaintances and his kin met with the same resistance: he accepted their hospitality, knew their private affairs, yet rejected the name they gave him. His cousin Jeanne Ténier recounted that he had promised to make his family happy should he mount the throne. She replied, she said, with a blow from her wooden shoe across his shoulder. The monarchy sometimes met its kin in a most unceremonious fashion.
Arrested at Saint-Malo, then lodged in the Bicêtre prison at Rouen in January 1816, Bruneau might well have vanished among the common herd of prisoners. At first, he returned to the fashioning of clogs. Soon, however, the prison was to provide his pretensions with the confederates they had lacked in the world outside. Étienne-Augustin Vignerot, long persuaded that the son of Louis XVI was still alive, desired to see him. He gave him three gold coins, returned with his family, and brought other visitors in his wake. An isolated belief was beginning to grow into a society.
Offerings flowed in. Rose Avenel, wife of Dumont, furnished money and clothes, commissioned a portrait of the prisoner, and facilitated visits. To hear certain witnesses, one could find about him wine, porcelain, crystal glasses, and men who addressed him as “Sire.” He had no need to venture forth to hold his court. Yet not all who entered were conspirators: some were sustained by hope, others came to observe, others still to render a service. It would fall precisely to the trial to draw the line between these several conducts.
The principal undertaking of this court was a book. Fellow prisoners wrote for Bruneau; Tourly transcribed letters and proclamations, while Gabriel-Louis Branzon collected notes for the memoirs of his life. The purpose was to convey to the Duchess of Angoulême the history of the brother she was believed to have lost. Names, adventures, and recollections of the Temple were to furnish the prisoner with what his bare assertions could not procure: a continuous existence capable of withstanding scrutiny.
Yet this existence was borrowed from a novel. In the account published in 1828, the prosecution compared the pretender’s narratives to Le Cimetière de la Madeleine. Tourly acknowledged having copied passages from this work. The escape from the Temple merely changed its conveyance: a basket of linen in one version, a hobbyhorse in the other. A character named Cyprien in the book became Adrien on Bruneau’s lips, according to the prosecutor. The very detail devised to persuade ended by revealing the workshop wherein that persuasion had been forged.
Two missions to Paris came to naught. De Foulques attempted in vain to present a copy; Madame Morin, likewise charged with a missive, could not gain access to the princess and burned the letter, as she declared under oath. The authorities removed Bruneau from Bicêtre. Seditious placards had, moreover, alarmed Rouen and its environs; ties were sought between their authors and the prisoner. Yet the matter brought before the correctional tribunal did not permit the assembly of all these alarms into a proven conspiracy. There remained to be judged the remittances of money, the assumed names, and the liability of each accused.
The proceedings opened on February 10, 1818. Standing trial alongside Bruneau were Branzon, Tourly, Madame Dumont, and the Abbé Matouillet, who failed to appear. The spectators laughed at the principal defendant's rejoinders; the judicial collection abounds in contemptuous remarks directed against him. Yet beneath the jests and the invective, an ordinary question pressed forward: had those who gave money done so because they had been persuaded they were succoring the son of Louis XVI? Vignerot concealed neither his conviction nor his generosity. Bruneau himself admitted having received relief in that royal quality.
The witnesses of his youth proceeded to dismantle the royal genealogy. One of his sisters explained that she had received him as her brother, notwithstanding his denials. Another had received from him so many particulars regarding the family that she had recognized him without hesitation. Before the examining magistrate, he had addressed her as Mathurine; the presiding judge seized upon this childhood name as an unmistakable domestic token. She had once sent him twelve francs during his detention, and he admitted having received them. The petty sums constantly resurfaced in this grand affair: less dazzling than a crown, they bound the scattered years together.
Former shipmates spoke of the navy, of desertion, and of labor in America. Bruneau shifted his ground, acknowledged one chapter of his life, repudiated the next, and launched into insolent retorts. He refused to choose a defender. Counsel for his co-defendants, however, developed an objection that could not be dissolved in laughter: to have believed a man was not necessarily to have aided him in his deceit. Branzon maintained that he had allowed himself to be persuaded; Tourly pleaded the selfsame error. Their advocates asked why comparable actions brought some to the dock while leaving others upon the witness stand.
The judgment of February 19 drew distinctions that the narrative of a simple band of swindlers would have effaced. Bruneau was found guilty of vagrancy, the public usurpation of royal titles, swindling, and contempt of court. He received five years’ imprisonment for the offenses charged, with an additional two years to be served thereafter for his conduct during the proceedings, together with a fine of three thousand francs. Upon the expiration of this term, he was to remain at the disposal of the government for such time as it saw fit to determine. The seven years, therefore, did not of themselves promise an open gate.
Branzon was sentenced to two months: the tribunal deemed him an accomplice in the assumption of false royal titles, but not in the swindling. Tourly and Madame Dumont were discharged for lack of sufficient evidence; the Abbé Matouillet was acquitted of the charge in his absence. For Tourly, already detained by virtue of a prior conviction, this decision did not bring liberty. Madame Dumont was to recover her bail. Justice had severed the destinies that Bicêtre had drawn together.
Upon the reading of the sentence, Bruneau maintained his claim. He left the courtroom condemned under a name he still refused to acknowledge. Catherine Phelippeau had asked for far less than the recognition of a kingdom: her son’s signature would have sufficed. Between these two demands, the affair had deployed its scribes, its portraits, its embassies, and its promises. Lengthy hearings had been required to reduce so much majesty to a vulgar fraud; yet no judgment could restore to that mother the caresses she lamented far more than her money.