The Gazette tucks it between an extension granted to the stocking-frame weavers of Angers and a notice for the renewal of subscriptions. Yet it is one of those cases that needs only to be stated.
A decree of the Parlement of Paris from February 1781, condemning Nicolas Gérard—a man already branded by the law—to be broken alive upon the wheel in the Place de Grève, for murder committed with premeditated design upon the person of one Herse, a tailor, who had extended him hospitality and sheltered him beneath his roof. Following the killing, Gérard had seized his victim’s furniture and personal effects, causing them to be hauled away by his own trusted confederates.
One divines the tale without the Gazette having to recount it. A man already marked by justice, roofless in all likelihood, and a tailor who opens his door to him. Days, perhaps weeks, beneath the selfsame rafters. Then the crime—premeditated, notes the decree—and, in its wake, an orchestration that chills more deeply than the butchery itself: accomplices summoned, a cart or sturdy arms hired to empty the lodgings, the dead man’s household goods carried down the staircase in the very heart of Paris.
The tailor’s name stands in a single word: Herse. Neither his Christian name nor his age is known, nor why he had taken Gérard into his keeping. Nothing remains of him in the annals of justice save this hospitality—and what it cost him.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1781, decree of the Parlement of Paris, February 1781.