On January 16, 1773, a robbery was committed at the mill of Castel-Pic, in Brittany, by six men and a woman. Ten accused persons—eight men and two women—were successively brought to book. Two of their number, Louis Coden and Yves Lecun, condemned to the galleys by the local magistrate, saw their sentence heightened to the gallows upon appeal; Lecun, on the very threshold of death, confessed to Coden’s innocence and thereby saved his life.
It was a first warning. No one heeded it.
On June 30, 1774, the judicial commission of Rennes condemned four further prisoners to the same supreme torment: Philippe Perrot, Jean Le Gonidec, and two sisters, Marie and Élisabeth Lescop. Yet the miller and his two serving-maids, the sole witnesses to the outrage, had expressly declared themselves unable to say whether either of these women was the one who, inside the mill, had tied up the bundles of plunder: her back had been turned to them throughout, and her face had never been seen.
Within the criminal chamber of Rennes, the four condemned souls were consigned into the hands of their confessors. Perrot and Le Gonidec then begged leave to speak: for the relief of their consciences, they deemed it their bounden duty to inform the law that the two women standing before their eyes, on the brink of perishing alongside them, were entirely innocent, having had no hand whatever in the theft. They implored that the reporting magistrate be summoned without delay.
The reporting magistrate, whom the Gazette designates only as the “Sieur du…”, duly arrived. The clerk of court had already begun taking down the formal deposition; the magistrate cut him short. These men were liars and rogues; he would take good care that their impostures were never committed to parchment; it was merely their past wanton commerce with these wenches that prompted them to shield them now. The priests, the clerk, the bailiffs, and the gaoler represented to him that it was without precedent to reject a dying man’s testament. He replied that he had no mind to imperil the salvation of such scoundrels by letting them damn their souls with false oaths. Turning upon the two women, he reviled them for being baseborn bastards. “What of that, my Lord?” retorted one of them. “Does that make me any the more guilty?” A priest ventured an observation; it was none of his affair, snapped the magistrate. The clerk and the gaoler made one final plea, recalling the case of Louis Coden. The Sieur du… sent word for the executioner.
The four condemned were led out to the place of torment. One of the men was executed, then one of the women, then the second man. As for the executioner, he himself whispered to Élisabeth Lescop that she must plead her belly, declaring she believed herself pregnant. The surgeons declared they could reach no certainty until four months had elapsed.
Those four months proved her salvation. The King stayed the execution and granted letters of review, directed to the Parlement of Brittany, which, by a decree of July 5, 1777, fully acquitted Élisabeth Lescop of the charge. Her sister Marie had perished three years before, entirely innocent, on the order of a man who would not hear.
The final word in this history belongs neither to the judges nor to the advocates, but to the headsman: it was he who found the means to purchase time.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1778, Parlement of Brittany: review of the trial of Élisabeth Lescop (decree of July 5, 1777).