In Tréfort and Varambon, the name of Frillet held sway over legal instruments, lands, and men alike. As fiscal attorney, land commissioner, and notary, he held several avenues by which to reach the affairs of the indigent; Champagnac asserts that he abused these offices to enrich himself through rapacity and extortion. The tile works owned by Joseph Vallet excited his cupidity. To seize it, relates the chronicler, Frillet conceived a scheme to accuse the Vallets of two purported murders: that of Dupleix, which an earlier adjudication had attributed to pleurisy, and subsequently that of Senos, who was later to reappear alive.
The first name he sought to attach to the family was that of Antoine Dupleix. Nineteen years earlier, Joseph Vallet had already stood unjustly accused of his demise. He was acquitted, for it had been established that Dupleix died of pleurisy. This prior judgment did not deter Frillet from reviving the charge, yet he required a second casualty—an intrigue sufficiently obscure to accommodate false depositions. It was thus not merely a matter of securing a decree against the Vallets; it was first necessary, through suborned witnesses, to efface the evidence that had previously delivered them. That initial case, however, demonstrated the fragility of an accusation when the material fact it professes to elucidate admits of another cause. Pleurisy had restored Dupleix to the truth of his fate; it was now required that the judicial apparatus wrest it away once more.
In 1722, the eldest son of Joseph Vallet had been assailed and despoiled by the Pin brothers and another man. The subsequent inquiry yielded insufficient proof to convict them. Joseph Senos, a peasant concealed behind a thicket during the robbery, subsequently boasted in an alehouse that he would have brought ruin upon the Pin brothers had he been summoned as a witness. One of them, Antoine Pin, determined to silence him. He plied him with drink, struck him upon the head with a billhook, and took forty crowns from his person. Senos feigned death; Pin, believing him slain, fled into the Dombes and enlisted in the regiment of La Sarre.
The wound, however, did not prove mortal. Having recovered his senses, Senos bound his injury as best he could and remained alone in his dwelling for two days. He then vanished, without anyone knowing whither he had gone. This disappearance served to crystallize the prevailing rumor: he was believed to have been murdered, and Pin was held to be the author of the crime. Yet there was no corpse. The distinction between an assumed death and a certified demise was soon to seal the fate of an entire family.
Frillet waited six months—the time necessary, according to Champagnac, to suborn witnesses. He then caused a complaint to be lodged imputing the murder of Senos to Joseph Vallet, asserting that Vallet had buried him near the maw of his tile kiln and subsequently consigned his remains to the flames. The corrupted witnesses deposed to this effect. Warrants were issued against the family; the father, the mother, and their two sons were arrested, confined in the château of Pont-d’Ain, and cast into a dungeon, their feet and hands bound in irons. It was only during their interrogation that they learned they were charged with the murder of Senos.
The complaint likewise revived the Dupleix affair. Frillet is said to have purchased the witness who had previously exonerated Vallet, prevailing upon him to depose this time in precisely the opposite sense. Antoine Pin, now a soldier, was arrested in turn. He, too, asserts Champagnac, had been bought by Frillet: he charged the Vallets with the murder of Dupleix and dared to accuse them of that of Senos. Thus, the dossier united under a single indictment two deaths of fundamentally different nature: one was established as having arisen from natural disease, while the other had yielded no body, even as the assailant who had struck him believed him dead and had fled. Rather than elucidating these contradictions, the judge of Pont-d’Ain—whom the chronicler portrays as wholly subservient to the fiscal attorney’s interests—condemned the Vallets to the question ordinary and extraordinary on May 9, 1727. The parents and their sons, held in irons, had learned of the capital charge against them only tardily; in the narrative, the violence of their detention thus preceded the very moment at which they were permitted to answer the accusation.
The Parlement of Dijon decreed that the Vallets and Pin should be interrogated separately upon the stool of repentance. Pin, whom the magistrates deemed the most culpable, was furthermore subjected to the torture of the question. Under torment, he persisted in accusing the Vallets. Yet when the ordeal concluded, a transformation occurred. He summoned the reporting magistrate, retracted his depositions, and declared the Vallets innocent. He avowed himself solely guilty of what he believed to have been the murder of Senos. This recantation did not resurrect a dead man; it acknowledged an assault and a disappearance which the facts, hitherto, had confounded with an assassination.
On the very next day, the Parlement condemned Pin to expire upon the wheel. In his dying testament, he maintained his final declaration and revealed further names. The jailer, he asserted, had incessantly urged him to accuse the Vallets; Vaudan, he claimed, had received money from Frillet to proffer false testimony. Pin further averred that an arrest of Vaudan would bring many other matters to light. Before undergoing his punishment, he made public reparation to the Vallets, who had been unjustly accused, whereupon he was delivered into the hands of the executioners and perished upon the wheel.
Pin’s revelations pointed directly to Vaudan. Upon being arrested, the latter retracted his depositions in turn and completely exonerated the Vallets. He was sentenced to be hanged, preceded by the question. Claude Maurice, another witness, subsequently accused Frillet of having suborned him through artifice, promises, and threats. Maurice was condemned to the gibbet. The same decree ordered the apprehension of Frillet; no sooner did he learn of it than he took flight and sought refuge in Savoy.
Presently, Senos reappeared at Bourg. The man who had been accounted dead was alive. His return confirmed the innocence of the Vallets regarding the accusation fabricated against them; the family submitted a petition that Senos be interrogated. Frillet, sheltering in Savoy, urged Antoine Pin’s brother to solicit from the King’s Council of State the rehabilitation of Pin’s memory. The Council evoked the proceedings, which ultimately remanded Frillet before the Parlement of Dijon; this decree was duly executed.
Frillet underwent several interrogations and was confronted with a great multitude of witnesses. The proceedings established, according to the chronicle, that forged instruments and fraudulent writs had been manufactured, and that a host of witnesses had been suborned on his behalf. He still sought to justify himself. The final decree of August 7, 1733, condemned him to be hanged, to pay damages and interest, and to the confiscation of his property. This capital sentence was not, however, carried into effect: the King commuted the punishment to ten years’ banishment from the province. Compelled to pay the damages, Frillet died by the wayside as he set forth to undergo his exile.
Champagnac concludes upon this clemency, which he denounces as immoral and iniquitous. The suborned witnesses were condemned to the severest penalties, whereas he whom the chronicler designates as the fountainhead of their crimes escaped the gallows through banishment. The coveted tile works was merely the point of departure: it had been necessary to transmute pleurisy into murder, an injured man into a corpse, and the silence of a missing person into judicial proof. Senos returned; the sentence of Frillet was altered. In this affair, justice at last laid bare the fabrication of the accusations, yet the penalty destined to chastise their contriver was not the one the tribunal had pronounced.