There are lawsuits in which men dispute a field, a house, an inheritance. In this one, a man was denied his very name.
Remy Baronnet had long been away. Upon his return, he discovered that his sister, the widow of Quentin Lamort, had turned his absence to her own advantage, obtaining judicial possession of the property that fell to him from their mother’s estate. Baronnet nonetheless covenanted his share to one Aubert for an agreed sum. Aubert, now title-holder, presented his deed of sale to the widow Lamort; whereat she maintained that the man who had set his hand to the conveyance was no brother of hers, but an impostor who had usurped his name.
The claim was preposterous; it prevailed. A magistrate of the first instance had declared the contract valid; the widow appealed to the bailiwick of Reims, dug in her heels, and secured a formal inquest. A judgment delivered in March 1769 set aside the sale, forbade Baronnet from bearing that name, and decreed his bodily arrest. A second ruling, on October 29, 1773, condemned him—under the name of Guillaume Babilot—to make amende honorable before the gates of the bailiwick court of Reims, bearing placards before and behind inscribed with the words: “Forger, despoiler of an inheritance under an assumed name”; thence to be branded with the hot iron and consigned to the galleys for life. A commission affirmed the sentence in January 1774.
Picture the circumstance: a man sentenced to be branded with an iron as a forger for having dared to be himself, and dispatched to row in the king’s galleys under another man's name. The Gazette does not relate whether the sentence was carried into execution.
He obtained an order from the King's Council referring the case for review before the Parlement of Paris. By a decree of August 26, 1778, the criminal chamber of the Tournelle quashed the Reims verdict, discharged Remy Baronnet of all indictments, commanded that his committal entries be struck and expunged from every prison ledger, and granted him leave to print and post the ruling at his own expense wherever he saw fit. The Gazette, which had formerly published his accusation, observed that humanity and justice now compelled it to proclaim his innocence.
It does not say what became of the sister, nor whether the real Guillaume Babilot—if indeed he ever existed—was ever seen again. We know only that for five years there lived a man whom the King's justice held to be someone else, and whom his own kin refused to acknowledge.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1778, Parlement of Paris, Criminal Tournelle, decree of August 26, 1778 (Baronnet case, upon retrial).