The Isle of France, which we know today as Mauritius, lay far from Versailles—far enough that a mere bureaucratic feud might fester into outright persecution.
The Sieur Loustau served as Chief Clerk of the island’s Superior Council and was, so the Gazette assures us, universally esteemed. The arrival of a new intendant, however, marked for him the dawn of relentless harassment. It appears that the Sieur Bailly, secretary to the intendancy, became his mortal foe after Loustau engineered the revocation of a pension of twelve hundred livres levied upon the registry’s own emoluments. It appears, likewise, that a new attorney general, arriving in June 1778, looked upon him with no greater favour.
A succession of criminal prosecutions was promptly engineered against him. The attorney general and the intendant denounced him as guilty of extortion and malversation in the collection of his office’s statutory fees. A decree of the Superior Council subjected him to a personal summons, suspended his salary, and assigned as judge-rapporteur a councillor whom Loustau regarded as an avowed enemy; Loustau challenged the appointment, only for a decree of January 9, 1779, to dismiss his challenge as impertinent and condemn him to a fine of two hundred livres.
Loustau appealed to the King’s Council. On September 15, 1779, that august body annulled the entire proceeding, reinstated him in his functions, and ordered the payment of his withheld emoluments. Yet even as he pressed his suit at Versailles, his adversaries, far from laying down their arms, multiplied their grievances; a fresh decree from the island condemned him to hefty restitutions, humiliating injunctions, and public amends toward the intendant.
On January 6, 1781, three decrees of the King’s Council vindicated him completely. The first quashed the whole of the criminal proceedings and declared null and void the apologies he had been commanded to make to the intendant. The second dismissed an accusation of forgery brought by a certain Sieur Rivière, declared the charge calumnious and vexatious, and cast the accuser in damages and costs.
Reading these dates, one gauges the agonizing pace of colonial justice: months of ocean voyage for every petition, conflicting decrees crossing paths upon the high seas, and enemies who gained ground on the island while precious time was lost at Versailles. The clerk triumphed in the end; but it cost him nearly three years of strife, and required his dossiers to round the southern tip of Africa more than once.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1781, King’s Council: Complete vindication of the Sieur Loustau, Chief Clerk of the Superior Council of the Isle of France (decrees of September 15, 1779, and January 6, 1781).