The public, wrote the Gazette in July 1791, was already privy to every circumstance of the crime. It chose therefore not to recount them, leaving us to divine what transpired through the few scant words preserved in its columns.
The woman Baptiste was the daughter of a flower girl of the Palais-Royal. For two years she had lived in the closest intimacy with one Pringault, a paid grenadier of the Sixth Division. She murdered him, records the Gazette, in her very embrace.
The chronicler makes no effort to conceal his revulsion: he speaks of an execrable creature who carried into the very temple of the law the unvarnished impudence of crime. One easily pictures an accused woman who refused to lower her eyes before the bench. The tribunal of the first arrondissement condemned her to hang; on the eighth of July, the tribunal of the second arrondissement affirmed the sentence.
Yet she stayed the execution by declaring herself with child; and she entered an appeal in cassation. The Gazette viewed this as an expedient abused by all too many prisoners.
It conceded, nevertheless, with an honesty that does it honour, that the proceedings contained fatal procedural flaws. The prisoner’s young advocate, Maître Ponssarpin the younger, had pressed them vigorously—above all the lack of proper publication regarding the rules of extraordinary procedure. The magistrates had not thought fit to dwell upon such technicalities in a case of flagrant delict, and for a deed as manifest as it was atrocious.
The year was 1791, an interregnum between two dispensations of justice: the old order had perished, and the new had not yet taken form. A woman who had butchered her lover in her arms could still, at the very foot of the gallows, claim sanctuary in an unborn child and an omitted formality. The Gazette does not record what became of either.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1791, tribunals of the first and second arrondissements of Paris: the case of the woman Baptiste.