Antoine Masson and Jean-Baptiste Tarteaux, so relates the Gazette, made wanton abuse of their freedom in Paris. The one was twenty-two years of age, the other but fourteen; the former possessed no fixed abode, while the latter lodged in a house of most questionable repute. Reduced daily to desperate shifts, they were scarcely fastidious in their choice of means.
Both were enlisted in the Fifty-eighth Regiment of Infantry, the ci-devant Rouergue. They entered into a fresh engagement with the Legion of the North—an offence in itself; and this they accomplished under assumed names, Masson passing as Larré, and Tarteaux under the name of Mâne, armed with counterfeit baptismal certificates and forged attestations from municipalities and departments. Two of these documents, one ostensibly from Pau, the other from Châteauneuf, were penned in the selfsame hand; four others, bearing the date of 1788, displayed the new seal with the motto “The Law and the King.” The officer who received their attestation noticed nothing amiss.
Ere long, the Gazette observes, the bounty filched from the nation was utterly run through. Our two knaves next appear in a café, where beer, punch, brandy, and every manner of cordial flowed in swift succession for hours on end. When the hour came to take their leave, they would hear not a word of payment. They heaped insult and injury upon the coffeehouse keeper; the National Guard was called; they showed no greater deference to the guard, and loosed a torrent of fury upon the section commissioners.
Under examination, they stood upon their false identities. Their pocketbooks were rifled: there lay the forged instruments.
They concocted a tale of a stranger who had pressed the papers into their hands in an alehouse. Before the foreman of the jury, they denied that the documents had ever been found upon their persons; Masson conceded that, if they were indeed discovered in his pocketbook, they must have been slipped to him alongside his hospital discharge, and that he had tucked them away without so much as a glance. As for the coffeehouse keeper, the patrol, and the commissioner—it was all the work of drink.
The jury found them guilty of having knowingly employed forged authentic and public instruments. Each was condemned to eight years in irons, following six hours of exposure to the gaze of the populace; and the counterfeit documents were torn to shreds and burned before a magistrate.
In the whole course of their imposture, it was not the vigilance of the state that brought about their ruin, but an unpaid tavern reckoning.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1791, Criminal Court of the Department of Paris: The Masson and Tarteaux Case, forgery of authentic instruments.