The Huntsmen of La Bruyère
Near Nîmes, twenty huntsmen were not pursuing the hare. Ten brigands, broken upon the wheel. Their lookout was eleven years of age.
Read the chronicle →The 54 Registry Tales
True 18th-century courtroom tales drawn from the judicial gazettes of the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, told in a single breathless sitting.
A Single Enemy
At Chazelles, a mere two feet separated the spouses’ beds. The pistol made no mistake in its sleeper. Justice erred twice.
Read the chronicle →Six Giltwood Armchairs
The abbé kept the six armchairs and had his debtors thrown into the dungeon. The perjured witnesses confessed before a notary. The innocent men remained in gaol.
Read the chronicle →Eleven Years for a Promise of Marriage
She was thirty-six years of age and gave her consent in writing. Her father cried abduction. Eleven years on, she remained shut away in a house of correction, and he in a debtors’ prison.
Read the chronicle →Signatures in Blank
He had signed in blank for hundreds of deaths. In the spring of 1795, his own was filled in. On the Place de Grève, under the jeers of the crowd.
Read the chronicle →The Yellow and Green Cockades
Saint-Domingue is burning. The governor swears he wore none but the tricolour cockade. Before the jurors, a planter unfurls the flag of the insurgents.
Read the chronicle →The Walled-In Silver
One hundred and thirty pieces of silver bearing the Polignac arms, walled up within a closet. An inheritance draws her back from Spa. She dies on their account.
Read the chronicle →The Hammer of Senlis
A canon, his maidservant, the maidservant’s mother. A hammer. The brother and the nephew, broken alive upon the wheel in the square.
Read the chronicle →The General of the Fourteen Leagues
Twenty-one thousand men strung across fourteen leagues of fordable river. “Are you afraid?” The battalion did not retreat. It was cut to pieces.
Read the chronicle →The Pasteboard-Maker of the Rue Traversière
In the tavern, he calls for a king. He is denounced. He returns, lifts his accuser’s apron, and strikes twice. The red shirt.
Read the chronicle →The Sabre Newly Whetted
A merchant daring to draw steel against an officer of the king. A newly whetted sabre. Two arms cleaved to the bone. Three parlements.
Read the chronicle →The Man Who Was Not Himself
His sister swore under oath that he was not her brother. He was condemned as a forger under an assumed name. Five years later, the Parlement restored his own.
Read the chronicle →The Witness Who Contradicted Himself
At the bar, the witness recanted what he had signed. The presiding judge ordered him arrested on the spot. The Court of Cassation quashed the lot.
Read the chronicle →The Child of the Alms Box of Saint-Maclou
Twelve years of age, a stolen lambskin. Thirteen years of age, a night spent inside a confessional, an iron-shod staff, an unyielding alms box. Six sous in spoils.
Read the chronicle →The Vacant Living
A parish priest absconds with another man’s wife. Sentenced to the galleys in absentia, he leaves behind a flock of creditors who lay claim to his benefice.
Read the chronicle →One Hundred Livres of Prayers
The father had bequeathed his worldly goods to his daughter. The son vented his fury upon the corpse. He was condemned to pay one hundred livres of prayers for the repose of the dead man’s soul.
Read the chronicle →The Charge That Rebounded
Twenty-six years of wedlock. He brings a charge of adultery. La Tournelle dismisses his suit—and issues a warrant against his wife.
Read the chronicle →Acquitted One Day, Condemned the Next
Nine thrusts of a stiletto. The jury acquits her. On the morrow, eleven jurors recant. Cassation restores her liberty.
Read the chronicle →A Simple Prank
He carries off an underage daughter, weapon in hand, before the very eyes of her parents. Hauled before the bench, he pleads mere mischief—and demands damages.
Read the chronicle →The Gendarme Who Would Serve a King
The King is dead; the gendarme forsakes his colours. In a coffee-house, he vows revenge. Tried on the eighth of August, executed that very day.
Read the chronicle →The House in Passy
They leased a house in Passy, ostensibly for a young provincial lady awaiting her lying-in. In truth, forged assignats were to be struck there. The engraver had already laid the entire affair before the police.
Read the chronicle →The Pit Sawyer and the Curé
Concealed within her chamber, he lay in wait for the widow. A billet of wood, a knife sharpened expressly for the deed. The receiver of the stolen spoils was a parish priest.
Read the chronicle →The Tailor’s Guest
The tailor had taken him into his home. He murdered him, and had confederates carry off his furnishings. Broken alive upon the wheel at the Place de Grève.
Read the chronicle →The Sorcerers of the Domfrontais
A papal bull penned in scarlet ink. A buried hoard beneath the house. Five hundred livres, six shirts, a cured ham, and an andouille sausage.
Read the chronicle →The Commissioner of the Seals
He went to affix the seals in a dead man’s lodgings. He walked out with the pocketbook: ten shares, two lottery tickets. Then he vanished.
Read the chronicle →The Notes Cast into the Fire
The manservant had lent his life savings to his mistresses. They burned his promissory notes. He was told he would be hanged for his trouble.
Read the chronicle →The Hermit of Aignay-le-Duc
One man hanged, another perished in the galleys, three more wronged. Seven years on, the true culprit spoke: “I cannot suffer innocent men to be crushed.”
Read the chronicle →Punch, Beer, and Brandy
Two deserters re-enlist under assumed names. Their bounty squandered in a tavern, they refuse to settle the reckoning. In their pocketbooks: forged baptismal certificates.
Read the chronicle →Jeanne Ribes
Violated at the mill, she gave birth alone to a stillborn child and had it buried behind the church. The judges of first instance condemned her to death.
Read the chronicle →The Ninety-Eight-Year-Old Mother
He had beaten her for years. One morning, he cast her out of her own bed and lay down in it himself. She was ninety-eight years old.
Read the chronicle →The Old-Clothes Merchant and the Seals
The official seals had been affixed in his lodgings. “I am master in my own house.” He broke them, exchanged gold for pinchbeck, and sold the pier-glasses. Eleven years in irons.
Read the chronicle →“The Apostle and Martyr of Liberty”
Marat enters; the courtroom erupts in applause. “It is no guilty man who appears before you.” His own articles are read aloud to him.
Read the chronicle →The Undisturbed Beds
The mistress found lifeless in the narrow passage beside her bed. The maidservant claimed to have heard nothing more than a chamber pot clattering to the floor. Neither bed had been slept in.
Read the chronicle →Had He But Been Bled
A parricide executed at Marchiennes. An advocate writes that a timely bloodletting would have saved him, just as it would have Ravaillac and Damiens. The King’s Procurator-General denounces the letter before the Parlement.
Read the chronicle →Ninety-One Thousand Livres on the Lottery
The man of business gambled his client’s fortune on the lottery. The first magistrate decreed exile. On appeal: the pillory, the lash, the branding iron, and the galleys.
Read the chronicle →Five Pistols at the Conciergerie
Five pistols, three quarters of a pound of powder, twenty-two lead balls. Nine o’clock at night at the gates of the Conciergerie. Come morning, a turnkey lies dead.
Read the chronicle →The Faithless Gamester
An evening at the gaming tables in an officer’s quarters. Heavy losses, and a sharper to unmask. The host, drummed out of his regiment, has a young merchant clapped in irons to wring a confession from him.
Read the chronicle →The Lescop Sisters
At the foot of the scaffold, two condemned men swore upon their souls that the two sisters were innocent. The magistrate refused to set pen to paper. One was hanged. The other declared herself with child.
Read the chronicle →The Old Lady’s Coffee
An old acquaintance, a dinner, coffee fetched from the street outside. A leaden stupor, convulsions, delirium. Broken alive upon the wheel and cast into the fire.
Read the chronicle →The Resident in London
A Frenchman keeps Versailles apprised of England’s battle fleets. His informants sell him out. At the Old Bailey: high treason, decreed against a foreigner.
Read the chronicle →Doubly Parricide
A vine-dresser cuts the throats of his father and mother. Placard: “Doubly Parricide.” A two-pound torch, severed fist, the wheel, the pyre.
Read the chronicle →The Attempt
He carried false keys and had stolen nothing. Eight years in irons. “No one may be punished except by virtue of a law.” The Court of Cassation vindicated him.
Read the chronicle →The Flower Girl of the Palais-Royal
She killed him in her arms. Condemned to the rope, she declared herself with child and appealed in cassation.
Read the chronicle →“Notorious Forger”
An advocate, barefoot, in his shirt, a rope about his neck, a torch in hand, in the Grand-Chamber itself. The placard: “Notorious Forger.”
Read the chronicle →The Sacred Vessels of the Château des Faures
The sacred vessels of a private chapel are stolen. His wife journeys to Paris: clearly she went thither to fence them. Months in a dungeon for a village surgeon.
Read the chronicle →The Man Who Demanded a Trial
Suspected of murder, immured at Bicêtre by lettre de cachet, never brought to trial. Nine years later: “If I am guilty, I must perish upon the scaffold.”
Read the chronicle →The Latin of the Curé of Augé
At the seigneur’s funeral procession, the parish priest delivers the coffin to his neighboring counterpart with a Latin formula: “the fetid body of my enemy.”
Read the chronicle →The Man of the Aure Mountains
Having fled to a mountain cave at the age of eleven, he was for years the terror of the countryside. He carried, it was said, an herb that could eat through iron.
Read the chronicle →Twenty-Nine Years of Contumacy
Condemned and executed in effigy, he wandered for twenty years. His son, having become a merchant in Spain, learned that the true culprits had cleared him at the foot of the scaffold.
Read the chronicle →The Stones of the Montbrison Road
The father who had surrendered everything lived to rue it. Along the path to the garden, he cast stones. He collapsed. The son was charged with parricide.
Read the chronicle →The Glazier of Comines
A glazier spirited away by night by a mounted trooper of the Maréchaussée. Over a month behind bars, without warrant or cause. He takes the Provost General to court.
Read the chronicle →The Chief Clerk of the Isle of France
He had caused a pension enjoyed by the intendant’s secretary to be revoked. Accusations of extortion, a hostile judge-rapporteur, suspension from office: Versailles quashed the entire affair.
Read the chronicle →The Tale of the Uncle and the Axe
He had threatened his uncle. He was seen prowling about with an axe. He was condemned. Shortly thereafter, the true culprit was discovered.
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