It all began with tavern talk on the Rue Traversière, in the Faubourg Antoine. Pierre Morin, a pasteboard-maker, maintained to anyone who cared to listen that affairs would never go well unless a master were chosen and entrusted with the stewardship of France; that workingmen could not live unless their daily wages were raised from five to ten livres, and from ten to fifteen; and that the greater part of the Convention’s deputies and their committees were scoundrels.
Another drinker, Étienne Olivier, took umbrage. Morin paid him no heed. Olivier declared he was off to denounce him; he stepped outside, and denounced him forthwith.
A member of the revolutionary committee of the eighth arrondissement arrived backed by armed force. Morin had already left the cabaret; he had gone back to work at the shop of another pasteboard-maker along the same street. They went thither to fetch him; the commissioner summoned him to return to the wine-merchant’s to explain himself, and Morin came.
It is here that the Gazette, usually so dryly legalistic, turns to narrative. Morin cast terrible glances at Olivier, heaped insults upon him, and lunged forward to strike him; the guards held him back. An instant later, he furtively drew a knife from his pocket, opened it, lifted with one hand the apron covering Olivier, and with the other dealt him two thrusts in the belly. Olivier fell backward; they hoisted him up; he collapsed again; he expired.
“He is dead!” cried Morin. And he added words which the Gazette records without softening: that he would be sorely vexed were he not dead; that he had struck him with the full intent to kill him; and, as for the guillotine, he said of it what one might readily guess.
They confronted him with the corpse. “Take off that cap covering his face,” said he; it was indeed the man, and he recognized him by his clothes and the features of his countenance.
Then came the morrow, before the director of the jury, and he was another man. Morin had been drunk. He recalled none of the vainglorious speeches he had flaunted the evening before; a moment of heated temper had wrought his ruin. They showed him the knife and asked if he recognized it: yes, he answered, turning his head away and bursting into tears. Was it with this knife that he had struck Olivier? “Alas! I had no other.”
The jury declared that there had been homicide, committed with premeditation, following acts of violence directed against the commissioner acting within the law, with counter-revolutionary intent, and after having proposed the establishment of a power injurious to the sovereignty of the people. The court condemned Pierre Morin to death, and ordered that he be led to execution clad in a red shirt, as the law prescribed for assassins.
Of the entire affair, it is perhaps the word spoken on that final day that lingers, that of a man sobered before a knife: he had no other.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, Criminal Tribunal of the Department of Paris, sitting in revolutionary judgment: the Pierre Morin case.