The amende honorable was customarily performed before the portal of a church. This one was afforded a rarer theater: the Grand-Chamber of the Parlement of Paris itself, while the court sat in open session.
By a decree of August 1, 1778, the Court condemned Jean-Philippe Hurtrel de Landel, who styled himself an advocate, to make amende honorable in the Grand-Chamber, barefoot, bareheaded, in his shirt, a rope around his neck, holding in his hand a burning torch weighing two pounds, with a placard before and behind bearing these words: “Notorious Forger.” He was thereafter to be branded upon both shoulders and dispatched to the galleys for life.
He did not stand alone. Pierre-Gabriel Pilliet was condemned to witness the amende honorable, and then depart for nine years of banishment. Jean-Baptiste-Denis Nesme was to be formally reprimanded; Claude-Antoine Regnaudin, admonished; Jean-Michel Pillot received an injunction to be more circumspect in the future; while one Jean-François Bodeck, absent and judged in contumacy, remained held over for further inquiry. The forged instruments produced at trial were to be lacerated and burned by the executioner of high justice. The decree concluded with a reminder of the Court’s regulations governing bailiffs.
That final line is perhaps the key. The Gazette does not disclose what manner of papers Hurtrel de Landel had fabricated; but the gradation of penalties, from the galley bench to a simple admonition, sketches a miniature society of courthouse denizens—a bogus advocate and his confederates—and the admonishment to the bailiffs suggests that writs and official acts had been counterfeited.
The choice of setting is thereby made clear. A man who had falsified the sovereign word of justice was condemned to sue for pardon in the very hall where it was rendered, before the eyes of those whose hands he had dared to forge.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1778, decree of the Parlement of Paris, August 1, 1778.