A full year was missing from the bootmaker’s tenancy. An entire twelvemonth, promised upon paper, had evaporated the moment the landlord announced that the premises had to be surrendered. Within the house at No. 116 Rue du Bac, the divergence between July 1877 and July 1878 was no mere calendar subtlety: it marked the gulf between the term upon which a tenant believed he could rely and that which was actually granted him. The dispute might well have remained an ordinary suit for breach of covenant and damages. But the man who had inserted the date into the contract subsequently swore an oath that he had never written it. That very oath brought Étienne Jeanton before the Correctional Tribunal.
On June 26, 1878, the Eighth Chamber of the Parisian court, over which Judge Boulanger presided, was called upon to consider this singular migration of a civil suit into a criminal prosecution. Jeanton was fifty-two years of age and earned his living as a file-cutter. His adversary, Hertemann, dealt in footwear. Their trades had never brought them into conflict; the subject of their contention was a second-floor apartment of which Jeanton was himself merely a tenant. In subletting it, he had promised another man an occupancy that was, from its inception, entirely dependent upon his own lease. The crux of the matter lay within this very subordination: the true duration of the sublease could not be known without knowing when the head lease expired.
The initial instrument had been drawn on July 1, 1875, at an annual rent of eight hundred francs. Its text referred purely and simply to the term of the principal lease. Hertemann had asked to inspect this head agreement; Jeanton had failed to produce it. The tradesman then raised a very practical objection: the underlease, he maintained, was being granted to him for three years, and that term ought to appear in plain terms. A clause referring to an invisible document offered small comfort to the man who was to pay the rent. He proposed tearing the paper to pieces and drafting another.
Jeanton chose an expedient less radical. According to Hertemann’s deposition, he declared that he would set the matter right, and thereupon added, in his own hand, a provision assigning the head lease an expiration date of July 15, 1878. The merchant subsequently had the deed registered. He had asked for precision, obtained a date, and retained a document: the debate appeared settled. The material act was modest—a single line appended to a contract already drawn. Yet that line was destined to carry far more weight than all the explanations that followed in its wake. It gave the promise a tangible form that could be reread, displayed, and placed before an expert.
In April 1877, the owner of the building, Leguillette, informed Hertemann that he must quit the premises on the following fifteenth of July. It was not, therefore, the summer of 1878 that awaited him, but that of 1877. The shopkeeper vacated the premises and claimed damages from Jeanton. The judicial record details neither the expenses of the removal nor the commercial injury occasioned by the departure; it demonstrates, rather, how the document passed from the file of a tenancy into that of a lawsuit. Hertemann had accepted the dwelling upon the strength of a declared term. He now sought redress because that term had not been secured to him.
Before the Civil Tribunal, Jeanton did not confine himself to disputing the import of the clause. He denied being its author. At the hearing of April 24, 1878, before the Fifth Chamber, a supplemental oath was tendered to him upon this point: had he himself appended the clause? He swore that it did not proceed from his hand. According to the prosecution’s case, Hertemann thereupon lost his action. For the shopkeeper, it was no longer merely the word pledged at the granting of the sublease that was in question; the word uttered before the court had just barred his avenue to civil restitution.
Hertemann lodged an immediate complaint with the Public Prosecutor. The preliminary investigation enlisted Alfred Gobert, chief clerk at the Bank of France and an accredited handwriting expert to the courts. The instrument was submitted to his scrutiny so that he might examine the disputed addition. His conclusion, as recorded in the proceedings, was unhesitating: he attributed the insertion to Jeanton. At the correctional hearing, Gobert, then aged forty-four, reaffirmed this opinion. The debate was thus reduced to a concrete object. It was no longer a question of divining what the two contracting parties had intended three years before, but of confronting an extant piece of handwriting with the denial of the man to whom it was imputed.
As the investigation advanced, Jeanton shifted his ground. According to the prosecution's closing address, he pleaded that he had perhaps misunderstood the question put to him when the oath was administered, that he was hard of hearing, and that his failing memory no longer permitted him to speak with certainty. The prosecution regarded these successive explanations as mere subterfuges and characterized them with severity. Such severity belonged to the crown office; the record, however, preserved another voice—that of a legal practitioner who had dealt directly with the accused and who described the difficulty of obtaining any coherent explanation from him.
This man was Lamy, an attorney practicing before the Civil Tribunal. He had been retained by Jeanton to manage the dispute with Hertemann. He testified that he had perceived a certain impairment in his client’s faculties and had never been able to obtain any lucid account of the famous addition. Yet his intervention was not confined to this observation alone. When Jeanton had informed him of the criminal complaint, Lamy had made it a condition of his continued assistance that the amount of damages initially demanded by the adversary be paid over. Two thousand francs were thus disbursed, through his hands, into those of the colleague representing Hertemann.
This sum introduced into the dossier a circumstance distinct from promises and disavowals: an actual payment had indeed been made. Yet it did not relieve the court of the duty to examine the oath. Lamy could testify to the disbursement and to his dealings with his client; Gobert could deliver his opinion as to the hand that had written; Hertemann could relate how he had obtained the date. These depositions bore upon distinct moments of a single affair. The court was now hearing them combined, after a prior civil judgment had brought the quarrel to a conclusion that the criminal complaint now called into question from an entirely different angle.
The presiding judge returned directly to the line upon the contract. He reminded Jeanton of what the expert had just affirmed, attributing the added handwriting to him. The accused replied that it was possible he had written it, but that he knew nothing of the matter. He claimed to have searched his memory without being able to form an opinion. Judge Boulanger then confronted him with his earlier deposition: in the civil court, he had asserted that the clause was not in his hand. Jeanton once more pleaded his defective hearing and his failing memory. The resolute assurance of the oath had given way to an ambiguous response; and this change of front now stood exposed before the magistrates who were to deliver judgment.
Deputy Prosecutor Calary called for the rigorous application of the law, and counsel for the defense spoke on the prisoner’s behalf. The court sentenced Jeanton to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of fifty francs. The contemporary account terminates with this decree; it discloses nothing of his subsequent life, nor of the manner in which the sentence was carried out. Above all, it leaves an utterly ordinary object at the heart of the proceedings: a handwritten line that had reassured a tenant before being disowned under oath. Hertemann had asked that an expiry date be set down with precision. That very precaution had preserved the trace by which the expert dismantled the denial.