The Gazette opens with a pious wish: may this trial be the last of its kind to soil the courts. The prevarication of a public officer, it observes, is one of those heinous offences against which society must visit the most exemplary retribution.
Adrien-Louis Carré was a commissioner at the Châtelet of Paris. His office required him to affix and lift the official seals in the houses of the deceased, safeguarding the estate until the partition of property. He was summoned to the home of a departed merchant named Armand, whose heirs—the Armand brothers—were likewise in trade. While affixing the seals, he purloined a pocketbook.
The inventory of this pocketbook, which the heirs presented before the court, speaks eloquently of what constituted the fortune of a Parisian merchant in 1790: ten shares in the Caisse d’escompte, complete with their accrued dividends, each valued at four thousand livres at the beginning of January; five half-shares in the same institution, worth upwards of two thousand livres apiece; two six-hundred-livre tickets from the lottery of April 1783; a promissory note to bearer for three thousand livres; and an assignat of five hundred livres. All told, roughly fifty-four thousand livres.
The judicial inquiries rendered proof of the theft as complete as the complainants could have desired. Carré, for his part, had absconded with the effects.
The trial then turned upon a fine point of jurisprudence, which the Gazette recounts with relish. The heirs sued for eighty thousand livres in damages, demanding to be satisfied preferentially from the sale price of Carré’s purchased office itself, ahead of all his other creditors. To justify this, the theft had to constitute a “fait de charge”—that is, a malversation committed in the execution of an act inherently attached to the office. The King’s commissioner cited the precedent of the bailiff who misplaces deeds entrusted to his custody, or of the receivers of consignments whose very office stands surety for the monies deposited: the public, having no choice in its bailee, must find a guarantee in the office itself.
Had Carré stolen in his quality as commissioner, or merely as a common thief who chanced to be upon the premises? The entire dispute hung upon this distinction, and whatever the Armand brothers might recover depended upon it. One measures how far matters had drifted from the day the seals were set: the deceased, his shares, and his lottery tickets had dwindled to an abstract point of law, and the fleeing commissioner to nothing more than a mortgage upon his own office.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1791, third court established at the Palais: trial of Adrien-Louis Carré, commissioner at the ci-devant Châtelet of Paris.