The Gazette opens this affair with a philosophical conceit: sorcerers, once so thick upon the ground, have vanished before the dawn of letters and reason; they no longer dare haunt the towns, reappearing only in the depths of remote hamlets, where credulous simplicity still yields to the marvelous. The Parlement of Normandy had, as it happened, just examined four of them at close quarters.
They went by the names of Manoury, Étienne Lebert, François Petrou, and Mesnil, and plied their trade throughout the villages of the bailiwick of Domfront. Their method rested upon a single instrument: a papal bull of their own fabrication, dated the 25th of May, 1780, and inscribed in red letters—a hue judged best calculated to bedazzle the eye. This bull proclaimed the existence of a gold ingot and further specie in the village of La Burlière, within the parish of La Baroche, lodged in the dwelling of one René Peccate, whom it took great care to name.
The snare was crude, the Gazette concedes; but René Peccate, who likely could not read, knew only how to marvel and believe. He was fleeced of some five hundred livres in silver, along with six shirts, two bedsheets, thread, a cured ham, and an andouille sausage.
One might suppose such a stratagem could succeed but once. Yet at the outset of a certain Lent, one Pierre Portier, of the village of Viverel in the parish of Aubusson, was duped in his turn: upwards of three hundred livres, an eleven-franc bridle taken from his son, and, from the latter’s young wife, two silver rings, two balls of wool, and three napkins. One of the wizards, an older hand at the craft, had already, in 1778, wheedled out of a Pierre Morieux, of the parish of Prousse, one hundred and eighty-three livres seventeen sous, a bedsheet, and a pair of gaiters.
The renown of the magicians reached the ears of the deputy procureur-général, who resolved to inspect them at first hand. Jean Manoury and Mesnil took to their heels; the others were arrested. By a decree of October 14, 1781, the Parlement sentenced four of them to make amende honorable, bearing placards inscribed with these words: “Pretended sorcerers, swindlers, and forgers of deeds to dupe the public under the pretext of discovering buried treasure,” and to nine years in the galleys; the two fugitives were condemned in absentia, whilst two suspects were discharged.
Of the entire affair, the inventory remains the most eloquent testament. No treasure was ever found; yet Norman sorcery in the year 1780 was paid for in shirts, in napkins, and in andouilles—that is to say, in all that was possessed by those who longed to be rich.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1781, Parlement of Rouen, decree of October 14, 1781 (after the Causes célèbres of Des Essarts and Richer).