Most accused men plead to be released from prison; this one demanded to be tried.
“For nine years,” he declared in the memorial drafted on his behalf by Maître Des Essarts, “I have languished in the most frightful captivity, beneath the crushing weight of an unjust accusation. I was suspected of having committed an atrocious crime; I have earned the ultimate punishment, if I be guilty of it, and I demand death, if my guilt be proved.” A royal warrant, surreptitiously obtained by his family, had stripped him of the right to clear his name and left him to groan away his days within the Bicêtre house of correction.
For that was the snare. The lettre de cachet had spared him the scaffold, but it had also barred him from the court. In the eyes of the world, his very confinement was tantamount to confession: men assumed he had been saved from the executioner only because he was guilty enough to deserve him. He did not ask that his chains be struck off, he declared; he deemed himself unworthy of liberty until he had washed away every stain of suspicion. He demanded judges.
Then he related his life. An honest family of Normandy, whose nearest relations enjoyed a brilliant fortune; a father who tilled his own smallholding in the parish of Torteval; an only son, reared to the labours of the plough. Wed at twenty, in 1764; that same year, the death of his mother; the year following, that of his wife, who left him an infant daughter. He was still mourning these bereavements alongside his father when the event occurred that wrought their ruin.
In the month of August 1766, Maître Pain, an advocate to the Parlement of Rouen, who had retired to the country where he lived alone in a room he had reserved for himself, was murdered. Both father and son fell under suspicion. Here the Gazette breaks off the memorial.
History does not record whether Rivière ever obtained his trial. There remains only this singular, unprecedented plea from a man who preferred to risk the gallows rather than live under a cloud of suspicion, and who, after nine years at Bicêtre, could still write: if I am innocent, I must be restored to society.
Gazette des tribunaux, circa 1775, “Criminal case tried in Normandy”: memorial of Maître Des Essarts on behalf of the Sieur Rivière.