The Gazette, for once, declines to narrate the affair in full: the facts are so extensive, the proceedings so labyrinthine, that the account would burst its bounds. It settles instead for setting the two advocates face to face. It is, perhaps, the finest way to tell the tale.
Maître Blondel, appearing for the Sieur Dufour, a merchant of Bordeaux, opens thus. A young trader is invited to an officer’s lodgings to play games of hazard alongside other men of the sword; he has the misfortune to accept. Both the guest officers and he suffer considerable losses. The officers protest that they have been played for dupes, laying this foul villainy at their host’s door; they succeed in ruining him and seeing him cast out from his corps.
To retrieve his honor, the advocate continues, the host conceived the scheme of sacrificing that of the young trader: he resolved to force him to sign an authentic instrument wherein the youth would consign himself to ignominy and declare himself the faithless gamester. To that end, he obtained by stealth orders that delivered the young man entirely to his discretion; he held him captive in a private house, loaded with irons, cut off from all intercourse with the world, a prey to the most horrific cruelties.
Maître Loyseau, for the Sieur Le Maire, a captain in the Legion of Conflans, presents the cause in a wholly different light. On the one hand stands a soldier distinguished by his service, worthy in his conduct, who has long claimed the protection of the laws; on the other, a man abandoned to the vilest passions, who has stayed the arm of justice for far too long. Between the two, says he, stand honor and vice, decency and debauchery, crime and virtue.
The Parlement, guided in criminal matters by formal charges and inquisitions rather than by forensic briefs, rendered on January 31, 1778, a decree that vindicated neither party: it dismissed the litigants out of court, each bearing their own costs.
One is left, then, without knowing who had cheated that evening around the gaming table, nor whether the young Bordelais had truly worn irons in a private dwelling. One knows only that two Paris advocates portrayed the very same men—the one as a tormentor and a victim, the other as a hero and a profligate—and that justice, confronted with these two likenesses, declined to choose.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1778, Parlement of Paris, Tournelle: cause between the Sieur Dufour, merchant of Bordeaux, and the Sieur Le Maire, captain in the Legion of Conflans; decree of January 31, 1778.