The mother had recovered her son; a sennight later, she lost him a second time. This time, he did not return. In the deposition of the widow Chauveau, a milliner of the Rue Gréneta, the Deschauffours affair began with a delivery of beaver hats and ended in an absence. Between the two, an errand-boy had been brought back at eleven o’clock at night, weeping and bruised, followed by the indignation of a mother turned out of doors when she went to demand an accounting.
The events she recounted reached back to 1719. Her boy had set out to deliver beaver hats to a client. The term denoted an honest trade; the day ought to have concluded with a settlement of the reckoning, or at most with one of those sharp reckonings by which shopkeepers earn their bread. The boy did not return. His mother hastened to Deschauffours’s lodgings and at last brought him away. On the road home, he told her he had been taken to another house, in the Rue Montmartre, where men had violated him. He was never able to find that doorway again. A week later, having stepped out to attend Mass, he vanished.
The father was then still living. He had forbidden the filing of any complaint, fearful of casting discredit upon his house. That precaution, intended to preserve the family’s honour, left the child without redress. When the widow was at last able to relate her story to the magistrates, years had elapsed. Other depositions were coming in alongside her own; addresses and names began to intersect. Behind several personages whom the witnesses had known under separate guises appeared the selfsame man: Deschauffours, who styled himself Duplessis, Préau, or otherwise, shifting human signboards as easily as one changes furnished lodgings.
He frequented titled folk, entertained foreigners, and placed servants. This intermediary trade gave him ready access to young lads seeking employment and to families reassured by the promise of an honourable household. The testimonies gathered in the inquiry of 1725 reveal, beneath this veneer, a pattern of assaults, abductions, and traffic in persons. The magistrates, however, subsumed these crimes alongside relations between men under a single moral condemnation. In that judicial lexicon, consent was frequently erased, and the victims themselves had cause to fear the retribution promised to the guilty.
Daniel Perron, a cellarman’s boy, encountered this mechanism in the course of an ordinary delivery. Deschauffours had drawn him out upon the subject of his amours, then proposed a gentleman patron who, instead of costing him money, would bestow it upon him. Perron refused and begged his master never to send him back to that client. His was the deposition of a man who had walked out the door. Others related what transpired when the latch did not lift so readily.
A young Savoyard named Vaupinesque, known as Chambéry, deposed that he had been delivered over in 1723 to the Count of Monticelli. He described an assault in which Deschauffours had taken part, followed by a period of domestic servitude wherein economic dependence prolonged the violence. The confessor to whom the lad turned spoke only of damnation and hellfire. In order to quit the service, the youth returned his livery and distributed the coin he had received. He sought to break with his master; the Church had first taught him to regard himself as a sinner awaiting punishment.
A woman known as La Picarde guided the earliest inquiries. On 16 July 1725, the examinations began; two days later, the Lieutenant General of Police, d’Ombreval, ordered Deschauffours’s arrest and committal to the Bastille. The witnesses did not come forward merely to denounce wanton talk or private vices. The widow Finet brought the case of her son Henri-Hilaire, who had fallen into an unnatural slumber after drinking at the prisoner’s table and had returned home injured. Two surgeons had examined him. Their report of 10 July, later reproduced by Paul d’Estrée, mingles descriptions of physical trauma with medical theories that cannot now be credited; above all, it preserves the resolve of a mother who insisted her child be treated as an injured party.
Deschauffours denied everything. He acknowledged several worldly acquaintances but disavowed the acts laid to his charge. To every nobleman’s name, he opposed a respectable introduction; to every accusation, a personal grudge. That defence had served him well in furnished lodgings, where neighbours knew only a tenant and his callers. Before the magistrates, however, he was confronted with lives that converged upon his own. A housemaid remembered a beaten child; a surgeon confirmed having been summoned; a father described a futile pursuit down the street.
Jeanne Trappel had witnessed the arrival at Deschauffours’s lodgings of a little boy crying for his parents. According to her deposition, the man struck the lad, then informed Master Surgeon Vincent that his son had injured himself at play. The child, conveyed to the Hôtel-Dieu under the name of Jasmin, died there. The inquiry thus uncovered brutal violence beneath an alleged accident, and a fictitious paternity masking a pretence of medical care. The bailiff with whom Deschauffours lodged subsequently served him notice to quit; the affair departed the premises with the tenant, while the dead boy remained under a borrowed name.
Pierre Guillois brought forward a further scene. His child had been snatched in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine by a man who concealed him beneath a red cloak. The father pursued, but could not overtake the abductor. Another servant attempted to lend assistance; the father carried away only the sight of little feet protruding from beneath the cloth. His information spoke neither of an arrangement nor of accepted service. It spoke of a kidnapping, and the utter helplessness of a man who saw his son vanish only a few paces from his reach.
After an interruption, the proceeding was resumed under the Lieutenant General of Police Hérault. In April 1726, Deschauffours persisted in his denials and attacked La Picarde’s credibility. The magistrate pressed him with a harshness that d’Estrée’s account does not conceal, going so far as to treat the refusal to confess as additional proof of guilt. On 16 May, the accused gave way. These confessions, extorted under such unequal pressure, must be kept distinct from the independent testimonies they corroborate; nevertheless, they supplied the prosecution with its final framework.
Deschauffours confessed to drugging young Finet and delivering him to two men for coin. He admitted several transactions, explained his aliases, and assigned a destination to the Chauveau boy: a nobleman was said to have carried him away into Poland. The child who had died at the Hôtel-Dieu was likewise given a parentage, that of the son of a cobbler named Le Nain. As for Guillois’s child, Deschauffours claimed to have sold him to an abbé and located him in Lyon. For the parents, these words perhaps opened an avenue of inquiry; they brought no one back to the empty room.
Sentence and execution followed in May 1726. Deschauffours was conducted to the Place de Grève to be burned, with a clause directing prior strangulation. Contemporary accounts differ as to whether this act of mercy was truly carried out. The mob watched the end of a man whose trial was soon to furnish material for street ballads, court witticisms, and philosophical disputes. The great names under suspicion quickly dominated salon conversation. The scandal was far more conveniently recounted with marquises than with a humble milliner.
Yet the widow Chauveau had posed the simplest question of the entire affair: where was her son? The court had named a culprit; the pyre had offered a public conclusion. The answer granted to the mother remained a distant land, uttered during an interrogation. Between crime punished and a child restored, there remained all the distance that ceremonies of justice are wont to leave behind.