Slid between two decrees in the 1783 volume of the Gazette des tribunaux, one discovers a text that is neither a judicial ruling nor a plea, but a supplication. It bears the signature of a churchman, the Abbé Hurault, and concludes with a line that cannot be read without a tightening of the heart: any charitable relief intended for the Sieur K… should be remitted directly to the editor of these sheets.
Here is the history of that man, whom the Gazette designates by an initial alone.
He was born of an honest family and reared with care. His father died destitute, leaving nothing behind but debts. The son, heeding only the dictates of his scrupulous honor, undertook to discharge them, trusting to furnish the means through the fruits of his own industry; he even purchased an office in that corps which the Abbé felicitously styles the eye of the magistracy. Yet the creditors for whom he had stood surety pressed hard upon him, blighting his efforts; and necessity, that sharpener of human wit, prompted him to consider that an advantageous marriage offered the sole escape from his perplexity.
He possessed neither fortune nor patrons. He took into his confidence a gentlewoman of good birth, herself down on her luck, who offered to find him a maiden—one of common stock, to be sure, but endowed with a handsome competency. The go-between conducted him to the town where the family resided and presented him; he found favor. Soon thereafter, without the slightest constraint, sound of mind, having attained the age of six-and-thirty and acting in the full maturity of her will, the lady bound herself in writing to marry him, exacting of him the selfsame pledge.
Six-and-thirty years. Let us hold fast to that number; the entire affair turns upon it.
Our man returned to Paris, where he learned that his betrothed had arrived in the company of the intermediary; he made haste to wait upon her, through a sequence of attentions that were entirely natural. Yet she had a father, whom she had not consulted, and from whose scrutiny she deemed it prudent, for a season, to conceal herself.
The father soon set every myrmidon of the Paris police spycraft in motion. He ran his daughter to ground, promised her his forgiveness, and then, by means of an order obtained by deceit, had her locked away. Whereupon he lodged a formal complaint against the suitor, whom he charged with abduction, seduction, and rape.
The proceedings were carried on in the father’s own town, where he enjoyed a measure of affluence and local credit, and where the accused possessed neither means nor influence. The local judge, eager to avenge the alleged rape of a woman in the full ripeness of her majority, himself violated—writes the Abbé—every canon of the judicial order: he sentenced the accused to the galleys, and branded the go-between with legal infamy.
Upon appeal, the sentence was mitigated. He was not dispatched to the oars; he was condemned merely to fines, court costs, and damages to be paid to the father.
The trouble was that he could not pay. It was to discharge his debts that he had sought to wed in the first place. And a man unable to deposit the sums to which he stands condemned remains behind bars until he deposits them.
When the Abbé Hurault took up his pen, the man had been there for eleven years.
The betrothed, for her part, had ever since been detained by her father in a house of correction. If she lingered there still, she was seven-and-forty years old, and had spent eleven years under lock and key for having presumed, as a woman of full age, to choose her own husband. Her confessor and her neighbors alike bore witness that she had never shown the slightest sign of mental derangement. As for the father, he was already deep in years at the time of the suit, and, in the Abbé’s account, held under the sway of envious and rapacious spirits: around this aged man one senses the presence of expectant heirs who had no desire to see the daughter wed.
Whether the readers of the Gazette ever dispatched their crowns, or whether the Sieur K… ever laid eyes upon the open street again, history does not record. We know only that in 1783, in Paris, beneath the scepter of a king reputed to be benevolent, two persons of full legal age could lose eleven years of their lives together for having pledged themselves to one another in writing.
Source: Gazette des tribunaux, 1783 (subscription volume for 1784), supplication of the Abbé Hurault.