The Gazette opens this cause with the sigh of a moralist: let us not seek the depravity of morals solely in the capital; the contagion hath spread, and the smallest towns are infected with it. It then recounts, withholding full names, the history of the Sieur and Dame de la V…, residents of a small town in the French Vexin.
For six-and-twenty years they had lived in concord. Then discord stole into the household; the lady’s conduct grew, as the Gazette puts it, more than suspicious, and her husband petitioned for a lettre de cachet to have her shut away. Getting wind of this, she obtained the revocation of the order and launched a counter-offensive: a petition for judicial separation on grounds of misconduct, cruelty, and defamation. The husband replied with a criminal complaint for adultery against his wife and against one Sieur D…, her accomplice. Warrants of arrest were issued against both; an appeal ensued; the Parlement referred the entire matter to the Tournelle.
The lady’s defense was deft. The complaint, she argued, was mere recrimination; the witnesses were the husband’s own servants and the avowed enemies of the accused; Sieur D… established an alibi. Above all, the husband had forgiven her: since lodging his complaint, the spouses had shared the same pew in church, had dined together at Pontoise and at Sannois, had slept in the same bedchamber and beneath the same alcove. What the husband truly coveted, she maintained, was her income, which was considerable.
The husband countered with testimonials from the notables of his town, maintaining that the cruelty and defamation imputed to him were utterly beyond belief.
The decree of 12 June 1780, rendered upon the submissions of Avocat Général d’Aguesseau, is of a nature to astonish. It declared the husband’s complaint inadmissible and condemned him to pay costs to Sieur D…: the adultery would not be tried. Yet it took formal notice of the public prosecutor’s denunciation alleging acts of prostitution against the Dame de la V…, issued a warrant for her arrest, and ordered that she be put upon her trial.
Thus the man who had accused his wife lost his cause, and the wife who had prevailed found herself prosecuted by the King himself. The Gazette records neither what this second trial brought to light, nor whether the alcove at Sannois had been a genuine forgiveness or a calculated snare.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1780, Parlement of Paris, Tournelle, decree of 12 June 1780 (case of the Sieur and Dame de la V…).