Marie Tondu dwelt in a Corsican village recorded by the Gazette as “Calais.” She stood accused of having, in the course of a brawl, struck a woman named Hippolyte Paciola with nine blows of a knife or stiletto—wounds from which the victim died.
She was brought before the trial jury of the department. Following the pleadings, the jurors declared the charges against her unproven. The presiding judge duly pronounced her acquittal and ordered her release; yet the law required that four-and-twenty hours elapse before the prison gates were opened.
Those four-and-twenty hours proved the pivot of the entire affair. Ere they had run their course, eleven members of the jury, deeming their verdict mistaken, submitted a petition praying that they be permitted to deliver a new one. The petition was contrary to law; the King’s commissioner said as much, with a firmness that the Gazette warmly commends. The criminal tribunal overrode his objection, permitted the jurors to reconvene, and on the very morrow of her acquittal, those same men declared Marie Tondu guilty of murder.
One may readily surmise how those four-and-twenty hours had been spent on an island where the slaying of a woman was not forgotten in a single day: whispered conversations, visits, perhaps the family of the deceased pressing their claims. The Gazette says nothing of what swayed eleven consciences in the space of a single night.
The King’s commissioner and the accused appealed together in cassation, and the Tribunal of Cassation upheld their plea. It annulled the jury’s second verdict and the sentence that had ensued from it: an accused declared not guilty and acquitted was to be set at liberty forthwith, and could never again be retaken or indicted for the same deed. Had the judges been unanimously persuaded that the jurors had erred, the law afforded them another avenue: to add three jurors to the original twelve, and decide by a four-fifths majority. They had not taken it.
Had Marie Tondu struck Hippolyte Paciola? The jury had answered no, and then yes; the law held to their first word. It is perhaps the most lucid lesson of those turbulent years: an acquittal is no provisional opinion, to be revoked after a restless night.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1792, Tribunal de cassation, judgment of June 22, 1792 (Marie Tondu case, criminal tribunal of the department of Corsica).