They were three, held prisoner in the Conciergerie du Palais in Paris: Barthélemy-Marie Desfaignes, Gabriel de Forges, and François-René Jacquin. Between them, they hatched a conspiracy to break out by force of arms.
Through the offices of an individual he professed not to know, Desfaignes procured five half-holster pistols, three quarters of a pound of gunpowder, and twenty-two lead balls. He made the division: two pistols, with powder and shot, to de Forges; one pistol, with powder and shot, to Jacquin; the remaining two and the balance of the ammunition he kept for himself. How such an arsenal found its way into the Conciergerie, the Gazette does not tell—and that was precisely what the magistrates were determined to discover.
On Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of September, 1784, at around nine in the evening, the three men, armed with their ball-loaded pistols, attempted to force the prison gates. Several shots were discharged. One, primed with two balls and fired by Jacquin, struck a turnkey, Antoine-Martin Fontenoy, wounding him grievously. Another, aimed at the warders, struck Jacquin himself. A third felled Louis-François Dauphin, likewise a turnkey, who succumbed to his wound the following morning at eight o’clock.
Justice moved swiftly. On the first of October, the Lieutenant-General of the Bailliage du Palais condemned all three men to be broken alive on the wheel, Desfaignes to be put beforehand to the question ordinary and extraordinary, that there might be wrung from his own lips the revelation of his confederates. They were ordered to pay five thousand livres in restitution to Fontenoy, and an equal sum to each of Dauphin’s three minor children, together with two hundred livres to have prayers offered to God for the repose of the slain turnkey’s soul. On the fourth of October, the Parlement confirmed the sentence, ordering that the decree be posted conspicuously across every prison in the city.
This final provision makes it plain enough for whose eyes the judgment was intended. One can picture the broadsheet pasted to the walls of Bicêtre, the Châtelet, and La Force, read by men who, they too, were counting the doors. One thinks, as well, of the three children of Louis-François Dauphin, for whom the Parlement had fixed the price of a father at five thousand livres apiece.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1784, Parlement de Paris, Tournelle criminelle, decree of 4 October 1784.