Charles-Jacques Pinguenet, a bourgeois of Paris, was a salaried man of affairs: he received his clients’ money in trust and administered it on their behalf. Among their number was a widow, Marie-Élisabeth Thomas, the widow Maignon.
The Provost of Paris found him duly convicted of having abused this trust to commit breaches of faith and embezzle considerable sums, which he claimed to have ventured on the lottery. The magistrate condemned him to nine years’ banishment and a fine, and, upon the widow’s petition, ordered him to restore to her the ninety-one thousand livres he had employed for his own profit, together with interest. Pinguenet declared his acquiescence to the sentence. One suspects he counted himself fortunate.
He had reckoned without the appeal of the public prosecutor. On October 23, 1781, the Vacation Chamber of the Parlement annulled the decree and replaced it with another of an entirely different complexion. Pinguenet was to be fastened to the pillory in the Place Maubert, bearing a placard inscribed with these words: “A man of affairs who diverted the monies of his till to employ them in lottery tickets for his own profit”; he was to be stripped bare, beaten and scourged with rods, branded with a hot iron, and conveyed to the galleys to serve the King for nine years. Under pain of bodily attachment, he was to restore the ninety-one thousand livres.
The Gazette does not relate how many tickets he had purchased, nor whether fortune had ever favored him. Still less does it say what portion of her ninety-one thousand livres the widow Maignon ever recovered from a man who had gambled them away and was bound for the galleys.
What endures is the placard, which said everything in a single line, and the lesson the Parlement wished the crowd to read in the Place Maubert: for such a man, exile bore far too close a resemblance to retirement.
Gazette des tribunaux, 1781, Parlement of Paris, Vacation Chamber, decree of October 23, 1781.