The Gazette des tribunaux consigns this affair to a catalog of judicial decrees, sandwiched between an itinerant peddler who forged lottery tickets and an abstruse point of canon law regarding matrimonial dispensations. It occupies but a single sentence. Yet what a sentence it is.
By decree of the 11th of February, 1781, the Parlement of Toulouse condemned Louis Boissonade, a locksmith of the parish of Saint-Laurent-d’Olt, in Rouergue, being accused and convicted of having insulted and maltreated the corpse of his father, out of hatred that the deceased had disposed of his estate in favor of his daughter, sister to the said Boissonade.
One must pause over these words. The father is dead; the testament unsealed, or its contents made known; the inheritance passes entirely to the sister. And the son, rather than taking to the courts, turns upon the body itself. The Gazette does not specify the nature of these outrages and indignities, nor where they transpired—whether in the chamber of death or upon the road to the churchyard; nor does it disclose who bore witness to the scene. It records only the hatred, and the grievance that bred it.
The penalty exhibits an ingenuity that smacks of a moral lesson. Boissonade was condemned to make the amende honorable before the portal of the Cathedral of Saint-Étienne in Toulouse, a halter about his neck, led by the executioner of high justice; he was banished from the jurisdiction of the Parlement for the term of ten years; and he was ordered to pay one hundred livres, to be employed in having prayers said, in the parish church of Saint-Laurent, for the repose of his father’s soul.
Thus the son who had desecrated the dead over a matter of inheritance was compelled, out of his own pocket, to purchase his victim’s masses. One would give much to know whether the sister was present in the pews.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1781, Parlement of Toulouse, decree of February 11, 1781.