Among the causes that the Gazette dryly enters under the rubric of “French Jurisprudence,” there are decrees that delineate in a mere handful of lines a criminal stratagem with the precision of a textbook. This one, dating from December 1779, is such a case.
They were three: Jean-Claude Berger, Claude Chassaigne, known as Labussière, and Jean Masselin, known as Baptiste. Under the pretext of an old acquaintance, they gained admittance to the lodgings of an elderly gentlewoman and, having prepossessed her in their favor with specious words, procured an invitation to dinner. In the course of the repast, they took care to remove all assistance from her side; then one of their number went out to fetch coffee, into which cup they caused her to take a narcotic potion. She sank into a lethargic stupor, attended by convulsions and subsequent delirium, and her life hung in the balance.
Masselin possessed another specialty. In the Rue Dauphine, accompanied by two confederates whose identities remain unknown, he made as if to pick up a three-livre crown before a seventy-two-year-old stone-merchant, Léger Vial, and persuaded him to step into a tavern to divide the windfall. There, under the guise of sweetening the glasses with sugar, he poured the selfsame draught into the old man’s drink. Vial slept for fourteen hours. Meanwhile, they stripped him of his box, his watch, and his coin, having thrust him by force into a hackney carriage where he was abandoned to his fate. For more than a month he remained in a kind of delirium, with extravasated blood about his face and eyes, rack’d by grievous pains and a debilitating weakness of the stomach.
The decree condemned them to make the amende honorable before Notre-Dame, bearing a placard inscribed “Poisoner and Thief,” then to be broken alive upon the wheel in the Place de Grève and cast into the flames.
History has not kept the name of the old lady. We know only that of Léger Vial, seventy-two years of age, who fancied one morning that fortune had favored him, because a stranger had found a crown at his feet.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1780, decree of the Parlement de Paris, December 1779.