On November 21, 1769, a linen merchant of Lyon returned to his lodging and discovered that his money, his papers, and his personal effects had vanished. That very evening, he parted from his wife. He lodged a complaint for theft; she pursued an action for judicial separation, accusing him of acts of violence. The household thus passed from the shared table into two diametrically opposed suits. By the time the Superior Council of Lyon rendered its decree in 1773, the quarrel had dragged an absent daughter, a concealed birth, and an accusation of incest into the domestic fray.
The merchant is designated by Champagnac only under the truncated name of Dub… A former coachman, he had accumulated some savings and possessed household goods when, in 1763, he married a widow with two daughters. The elder was married in Lyon; the younger was nearing her majority. The dowry comprised two houses valued in all at thirteen thousand livres, yet burdened with mortgages. These were the assets around which the dispute would crystallize: two properties, their encumbrances, their rents, and the labor expended to render them more profitable.
For six years, according to the chronicle, the union remained peaceful. Dub managed the houses, raised the rents, and cleared the mortgages from the properties. Speculations in wine contributed to this recovery. Champagnac subsequently attributes to the wife and her elder daughter a design to retain the sole benefit of this administration. Such is the explanation he offers for the rupture; he recounts the affair from the husband's vantage, displaying a severity toward the wife that colors each of her actions. Behind this accusing portrait, the court records permit a closer examination of how a demand for money and a petition for separation swelled into a criminal prosecution.
The younger daughter harbored a secret. She had engaged in an affair with a vinegar-maker's journeyman, who died before marrying her, and she found herself with child. She confided in a washerwoman who offered her a place in which to be delivered. She likewise unburdened herself to her stepfather. The chronicle presents Dub's intervention as succor extended to a young woman abandoned in an arduous predicament; he concealed the matter from his wife. After the birth, the infant was carried to the foundling hospital. The young mother returned home after an absence of four or five days, explained by a falsehood, and remained there four years longer.
In September 1769, her mother turned her out. The following month, a quarrel broke out between tenants over an open door. Blows were exchanged; the wife Dub was struck. According to Champagnac, she subsequently attributed these marks to her husband. On October 18, she submitted to an examination by the police physician and surgeons. On October 28, she lodged a formal complaint against Dub for ill-treatment, requesting a second examination and a place of sanctuary. This latter refuge was granted, though she made no use of it. She remained in the conjugal dwelling; the surgeons, for their part, had duly recorded the contusions.
When the money and effects vanished on November 21, Dub was, the chronicler tells us, entirely unaware of these initial maneuvers. He submitted his own denunciation, in which the depositions implicated his wife. She was summoned to appear. She replied by pressing her suit for separation, leaning upon the medical certificates already drawn up. The dispute now encompassed certified injuries, a contest over who had inflicted them, and property whose restitution the husband demanded. The documents did not all speak to the same facts, but each was brought to bear in support of one of the household's opposing versions.
The wife added an accusation of attempted poisoning. Dub denied it, just as he denied the cruelties imputed to him. An interim maintenance was awarded to the woman; Champagnac notes that she subsequently allowed the suit to languish, producing neither witnesses nor proofs for the alleged facts. The dispute remained in this posture for two years, until the younger daughter's secret resurfaced. What had been hidden to veil a pregnancy was now to be presented as the trace of a crime committed within the domestic hearth.
On October 25, 1771, the wife accused her husband and her younger daughter of an incestuous commerce occurring in 1764. She imputed to them the abandonment of the child born of that union on March 25, 1765. The accusation thus fixed upon a precise past occurrence, which the washerwoman and the vinegar-maker's affair explained in an entirely different manner. The daughter, since her expulsion, had retired to the infirmary of a small town to nurse the sick. Being absent, she was summoned by sound of trumpet. The husband was arrested, interrogated, and then provisionally released.
The wife petitioned that the separation proceedings be conjoined with the criminal complaint. An initial sentence put her in possession of the revenues of the houses and adjourned the parties for a fortnight on the merits. Another pronounced a separation from bed and board. Dub appealed both judgments before the Superior Council of Lyon. The question of the rents, present from the inception of the feud, thus remained at the very heart of its consequences: while the husband contested the criminal charges, the revenues were assigned to the woman who leveled them.
His counsel attacked the regularity of the procedure and the foundation of the allegations. Champagnac records the vigor of the advocate's plea, and then gives the outcome of the appeal. In 1773, the decree declared the proof of incest inadmissible, annulled the proceedings before the judge of first instance, and dismissed the parties out of court upon the petition for separation. It ordered the wife to retire for two years into a convent. The chronicler deemed this measure excessively lenient; that indignation is his own. The recorded decree suffices to measure the total reversal of the decisions hitherto obtained by the wife.
The account does not trace the subsequent existence of the younger daughter, that of the child, nor that of the household following this decree. It concludes with a moral condemnation of the accuser. The case nonetheless retains another center of gravity: a birth kept secret, injuries whose origin was contested, real-estate revenues, and charges piled one upon the other. For Dub, to appeal those rulings meant restoring each of these elements to its proper place. The trial had begun with missing personal effects; it closed with the annihilation of a prosecution that had claimed to lay bare the history of an entire family.