There are causes whereof the Gazette records solely the decree, and wherein the decree suffices. This one occupies but a handful of lines, slipped between an ordinance concerning libels and a dispatch from Vienna.
A decree of the Parlement of Paris, from December 1777, condemns François Liégé, a vine-dresser at Montigny, to make the amende honorable before the principal portal of the church of Châtillon-sur-Marne, with a halter about his neck, holding in his hand a torch of two pounds’ weight, with a placard before and behind bearing these words: “Doubly Parricide.” Next, to have his fist severed; then to be conveyed to the public square of the town, there to be broken alive upon the wheel and cast into the fire. For having cut the throats of his father and mother.
The Gazette adds: “This decree was executed on the 14th of December.”
That is all. We know neither the day of the crime, nor its cause, nor the age of the parents, nor that of the son. We know not whether there was some quarrel over vineyard or inheritance, a drunken fury, or madness. One perceives only what the ancient justice reserved for parricide, the crime it held to be the most contrary to nature: the amende honorable before the church, the severed fist, the wheel, the pyre, and, surmounting all, that inscription upon the placard which no soul in Châtillon could have read without a shudder.
The word “doubly” was written by the clerk’s hand, and it says everything. A man could not be punished twice; so they wrote it twice.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1777, decree of the Parlement of Paris of December 1777, executed on December 14.