It sometimes happens that the Gazette des tribunaux, which will lavish entire pages upon a petty squabble over an inheritance, dispatches in a mere four lines one of the darkest affairs of the year. Such is the present case, slipped into the close of an issue from March 1781, between the creation of several notarial offices and a notice to subscribers.
Two decrees of the Parlement de Paris, dated the 16th and 19th of March. The first condemns Charles Lafosse the elder to be broken alive upon the wheel in the public square of Senlis, for having murdered with blows of a hammer Messire Louis Lafosse, deacon and canon of the church of Senlis, his brother, as well as the canon’s maidservant and the mother of that servant, and for having thereafter robbed them by committing multiple breakings. The second condemns Charles-Paul Lafosse the younger to the selfsame torment, for the selfsame crime.
That is all. Yet read it once more. The canon was no stranger to his murderers: he was brother to the one, and uncle to the other. Those who struck knew the house, knew the servant, and doubtless knew that her mother was also within. And after the blows of the hammer, there were still locks to be forced: whatever the family had come for, they had not found lying close to hand.
The Gazette says nothing more: neither the motive, nor the day of the deed, nor whether the son had struck or merely followed. The Parlement, for its part, made no distinction between father and child; it consigned them to the same agony, upon the same square, three days apart.
One wonders what scene was witnessed, in Senlis, upon that public square where they broke two men who bore the name of a canon of their own church; and what crossed the minds of those who, on the following Sunday, heard that very name once more from the lips of the priest, at the prayer for the dead.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1781, decrees of the Parlement de Paris of 16 and 19 March 1781.