Jeanne Ribes was born in Limoux to poor but honest parents, and lived by the labor of her hands. Her conduct, says the Gazette, had ever been regular.
At the beginning of September, her mistress sent her to have grain ground at the Fournié mill. There she found herself alone with the miller, Thomas Barreau. The Gazette speaks plainly: the man seized her with violence and sated his lust; she, having swooned, came to her senses only to flee, and never saw him again.
She did not comprehend what befell her thereafter. She took it to be a chill contracted in a cellar into which she had stepped barefoot; womanly remedies were recommended to her. She tended her mother through a lingering illness whereof the woman died. Whispers circulated about her; her brother and sister-in-law, under whose roof she dwelt, pressed her to confess. Time, which dispels every doubt, at length opened her eyes; her thoughts turned to the mill, and she confided her secret to a friend.
One day, whilst working as a day laborer, the birth pangs took her. She was brought home, a surgeon was summoned, and a woman kept vigil at her bedside until midnight, departing with the promise to return should she be needed. Left alone, Jeanne was delivered. She wished to see her child; it was but a tiny body, come before its term, devoid of life.
A child that had not received baptism could have no Christian burial. She wrapped it in her neckerchief, concealed it in the space between her bed and the wall, then behind the cellar door, and implored her sister-in-law, Élisabeth Ribes, to bury it; the latter at length consented and interred it behind the church.
They had been watched. The child was disinterred; infanticide was whispered. The physicians and surgeons attested that it bore no marks of violent death and, by the test of the lungs plunged into water, that it had perished in coming into the world. The criminal assessor remained unconvinced: he repaired to her lodgings with the physician, had her delivery attested, and she was cast into a dungeon on the second day of her childbed. The judges of first instance condemned her to death.
Her young advocate, Maître Bavière de Vieusac, argued on appeal before the Tournelle of Toulouse that the Edict of 1556, a holy and severe statute, had been turned in the hands of the first judges into a barbaric law: it was framed to punish the mother who causes her child to perish, not her who brings into the world an infant already dead. The issue concludes upon his plea. There one reads, set down in full, an appeal to snatch an innocent victim from the sword of the law.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1781, Parlement of Toulouse, Tournelle criminelle: the case of Jeanne Ribes, accused of infanticide.