The chronicler of the Gazette confesses his revulsion at the head of the article: how painful the task, he writes, and how hideous the spectacle of a man dripping with his mother’s blood. He adds that the ancient legislators had never dared conceive that such a thing as parricide could exist.
Jean-Louis Maurice frequented taverns, never leaving them without having lost all reason; wine drove him into a frenzy. His mother, despite her great age, fell victim each day to his rages. He would revile her; knife in hand, he pursued and threatened her. “Old bitch,” he would sneer, “you shall die by no hand but mine.”
One morning in Pluviôse, at half-past nine, staggering out from a debauch, he broke into her lodging. She was still in bed. He showered her with insults and blows, battered her face, and threatened to murder her; then he tore her from the bed and took her place. The widow Collignon, ninety-eight years of age, was forced to flee her own home and wander barefoot across the courtyard to seek refuge in a distant room.
Maurice was denounced. The surgeon found the old woman covered in bruises and severe contusions; her condition would not be alarming, he noted, were it not that her extreme senility lay exposed to a host of unforeseen perils. Maurice, under interrogation, protested that he had not mistreated her: her injuries, he insisted, were the consequence of a fall.
The docket passed from the police to the director of the jury, who resolved to examine the mother in person. His order, says the Gazette, came too late: the widow Collignon was dead. The surgeon attested that the violent assaults had sent her to her grave.
Maurice had a sister and a niece whose callous indifference seemed suspect; they were taken into custody. They maintained they had been absent when the crime occurred and had denounced Maurice the moment they learned of it; yet their testimonies diverged on one point. One asserted that, since that night, the mother had refused all nourishment; the other insisted she had continued to go about her daily affairs. The jury cleared them of all charges.
It found that blows had been struck against the widow, that they had caused her death, and that Jean-Louis Maurice had struck them willfully. The tribunal sentenced him to death. History retains this solitary image from a morning in Pluviôse: a woman nearly a century old, barefoot in the courtyard, while her son slept in her bed.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, Year III, Criminal Tribunal of the Department of Paris: the case of Jean-Louis Maurice.