There lived within the jurisdiction of the présidial court of La Flèche an abbé whom the Gazette designates merely by three asterisks, and who put his money to a use scarcely befitting his holy cloth. He had placed upwards of fifty thousand crowns with sundry merchants, exacting usurious interest while flattering them with the prospect of ceding a portion of his estate to them as a life annuity. Chance brought him into dealings with two men, the sieurs Roumegoux and Goffin; he advanced them diverse sums at considerable interest, promising them a life annuity for which another, standing higher in his graces, was ultimately preferred.
Seeing themselves duped, Roumegoux and Goffin repaired on the 11th of August 1776 to the abbé’s estate, repaid a portion of what they had borrowed, and promised to return on the 16th to discharge the remainder. They duly returned on the appointed day. They settled their account; they demanded—naturally enough—an abatement of the exorbitant interest the abbé had invariably withheld in advance; and they claimed at the same time diverse goods he had exacted from them as pledges, without ever entering them into his ledgers.
The inventory merits recital, for it paints the man to the life: a gold snuffbox, a silver porringer, a mantel clock in ormolu, a gold-headed cane, an oil-and-vinegar cruet stand, and six giltwood armchairs upholstered in damask. The abbé refused to surrender a single item. The two men instructed an attorney to bring suit against him.
To ward off their claim, the abbé took the offensive. On the following 15th of November, he lodged a criminal complaint against his debtors for burglary. Two witnesses—what bribe they received remains unknown—came forward to depose to the theft, if not to the breaking and entering. Writs of bodily arrest were decreed against Roumegoux and Goffin.
Whereupon they did what the guilty seldom do: they surrendered themselves to prison of their own accord, and lodged a counter-complaint for subornation of perjury.
The effect was instantaneous. Seized with panic, the perjured witnesses took flight, and along their way, in the chambers of the very first notary they chanced upon, executed a deed confessing their crime. One can picture the scene: two breathless knaves thrusting open the door of a rural notary’s office and, before vanishing into thin air, dictating the confession that was to seal their doom.
The abbé, in turn, sensed all the atrocity of his conduct—or at least all its peril. He cast himself at the knees of those he had accused, had them importuned from every quarter, and that very day signed a settlement acknowledging that he had rashly and slanderously accused the sieurs Roumegoux and Goffin, that they were innocent of any theft, and that his witnesses were utterly impeachable in every respect; he begged them to grant him their forgiveness, and to consign the matter to oblivion.
All appeared concluded. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The machinery of justice, once set in motion, does not halt merely because the accuser implores it to desist. The abbé had the gaoler formally summoned three times to unbolt the prison; the gaoler conceded that the two men were entered upon no formal register, yet steadfastly refused to release them. The King's prosecutor, who perceived two crimes instead of one, had the accused officially booked and proceeded concurrently with both the indictment for theft and the complaint for subornation.
The false witnesses, having been subpoenaed, failed to appear: they had fled. The abbé, against whom a warrant of bodily arrest was likewise issued, decamped. And the only two men in the entire affair who had done nothing whatsoever remained behind bars.
It required a ruling of the 17th of December 1777—more than a year after the malicious complaint—to order their provisional release and the arrest of the two witnesses, together with a female cousin of the abbé, whose exact role the Gazette fails to disclose, though one readily divines it was by no means negligible.
Such was the denouement—provisional, as is everything that touches upon the law—of this affair, wherein a pawnbroking cleric was seen to accuse of burglary the very men who had merely come to claim their armchairs.
Source: Gazette des tribunaux, 1777, présidial of La Flèche, decree of the 17th of December 1777.