Throughout the year of grace 1784, there fell upon the environs of Nîmes a season in which no man took to the road save in fear and trembling. In roadside taverns as in noble châteaux, the talk was of nothing but highway robberies and murders, of doors hewn down, of manor houses put to the sack; and each passing week brought forth some wretched traveller discovered by the wayside, despoiled of his purse and, as often as not, of his life. The highways to Sauve, to Uzès, to Sommières had turned into bloody cutthroat alleys, and no one, setting out at cockcrow, could warrant whether he would reach his shelter by nightfall.
The springhead of this evil was soon laid bare. Four convicts had broken their chains at the galleys; vagabonds they were, wandering the scrub, yet singularly adept at rallying to one another at need. They gathered in bands of three, of six, of eight men—and still more when the prize warranted the hazard—falling upon wayfarers along the King’s highway and leaving in their wake, well-nigh everywhere, the crimson traces of their passage. They kept women in their train, whom the Gazette styles their concubines, and, more lamentable still, a child.
So monstrous an accumulation of outrages could not long go unpunished. Monsieur de la Bruyère, the King’s Prosecutor at the Presidial Court of Nîmes, succeeded in discovering that these malefactors withdrew, together with their women, to certain solitary tileworks nestled between Nîmes and Saint-Gilles. It was no small achievement to have tracked them to their lair; the true hazard lay in taking them by surprise. To assail them by open force was to court musket fire at a hundred paces from desperate men who had nothing left to lose.
The magistrate resolved, therefore, to wed stratagem to strength. He chose three sharp-witted bailiffs, to whom he joined a score of resolute young men of good will and stout heart; and, that they might draw near without arousing suspicion, the entire company assumed the habit, the gear, and the bearing of a hunting party. One readily pictures this cavalcade wending its way through the garrigue, fowling pieces on shoulder, game bags at the hip, halting here for an imaginary hare, there for a phantom partridge, and tightening by imperceptible degrees the fatal noose about the tile kilns. The Gazette makes no mention of how long this comedy was sustained; it notes merely that they took their measures with such rare discretion that they advanced without their design ever being penetrated.
Of a sudden, the counterfeit huntsmen invested the tileworks. Ten of these ruffians were taken unawares and clapped in irons. There and then the bloody course of their misdeeds came to its term.
The preliminary investigation was lengthy and scrupulous: more than one hundred witnesses were examined, and their depositions sealed the evidence. By sovereign decree of the fifteenth of February, 1785, the ten brigands were condemned to be broken alive upon the wheel. On the morrow, their concubines were sentenced to be bound to the pillory, and thereafter shut up for life in a house of correction.
There remained the child. He was a lad of eleven years, who had served, according to the Gazette, but a single month’s apprenticeship in that abominable brotherhood, yet had already found his appointed station. He kept watch; he was the scout who ranged ahead along the highways; he was even the first to bring travellers to a stand, whom his masters, crouching in ambush, fell upon in the next breath to despoil. Who would ever think to distrust a child asking his way?
The magistrates did not condemn him. They ordered that he be confined in a hospital for six years, there to be bred up in the Catholic religion; and the chronicler of the Gazette adds, with a pious strain in which one senses more hope than conviction, that perchance age and reason might yet reclaim this heart, so prematurely depraved by the precepts and example of these villains.
One would give much to know what became of that boy, discharged from the hospital at seventeen, in 1791, into a France that bore no manner of resemblance to the one that had passed judgment upon him. The registers keep their silence. Such was the close of this affair, wherein the cunning of a magistrate achieved what force alone could never compass, and wherein the justice of the age, though ruthless toward grown men, remembered at least that a child is not yet a criminal.
Source: Gazette des tribunaux, 1785, sovereign judgment of the Presidial Court of Nîmes, 15 February 1785.