On the night of the fifth to the sixth of December, 1780, the hermitage of Saint-Michel at Aignay-le-Duc, in Burgundy, was broken into and violently plundered. Thieves had battered down the door, trussed the hermit, blindfolded him, rained blows upon him, and threatened his life to discover where his coin lay hid, departing at last with nine and a half louis. The hermit laid the blame upon five inhabitants of Aignay-le-Duc: he believed he had known the voices of several among them. Justice took him at his word. Claude Gentil was sentenced to the gallows and duly put to death. Guillaume Fauriot was condemned to the galleys for life, where he died—so the Gazette relates—of grief and heartbreak. Two others, Pajot and Loignon, remained under the cloud of an indefinite “order for further inquiry”; a third, Jean-Baptiste Gentil, was discharged from the bar.
They were innocent.
The cause grew famous; the advocate Godard undertook the defense of the condemned, and their names were soon ranked alongside those of Calas and Sirven. He recounted that, on that selfsame night of December fifth, the mother of three of the accused, the widow Gentil, was drawing her final breath, and that her children were keeping vigil at her deathbed whilst the old recluse was being beaten at the hermitage. The Parlement of Dijon reopened the proceedings and instituted another trial against the true perpetrators of the robbery: Étienne Roger, known as Blandis, and Charles Dupuis, both fugitives from justice, and Charles-Noël Larue, who was transferred from the gaols of Montargis to those of Dijon.
Larue thereupon performed an act which the Gazette deems almost heroic. He declared himself guilty of the robbery. “I know that I must perish,” said he; “yet I will not suffer innocent men to be crushed for a crime of which they bear no part.” He furnished particulars that compelled belief; conducted to the scene, he pointed out every detail, recognized everything, and explained the whole affair.
A single man held out against the evidence: the hermit himself, who maintained to the very end that the accused of Aignay were guilty.
The Parlement was due to enter upon its recess on the fifteenth of August. It petitioned the King for letters extending its sittings until judgment could be pronounced, and set the innocent prisoners at liberty during the inquest, recalling them only on the eve of the decree. The ruling was delivered on August 18, 1787. It cleared the memory of Claude Gentil, who had been hanged, and that of Guillaume Fauriot, who had died a galley-slave; it absolved Pajot, Loignon, and Jean-Baptiste Gentil of all guilt. And it condemned Charles-Noël Larue and Étienne Roger—the latter in absentia—to be hanged by the neck in the public square of Aignay.
The magistrates, observes the Gazette, were generous enough to acknowledge their error. One cannot help but reflect upon what that error had cost, and upon the strange equity of fate: it required a thief to embrace the noose before two dead men could have their honor restored.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1787, Parlement of Dijon, decree of August 18, 1787 (the case of the Hermit of Burgundy); and the brief of Maître Godard, reviewed in a preceding issue.