Whether in his former life or in this one, during both passages through law school André had been taught the same lesson, repeated until it was bone-deep: litigation is a battle, and the courtroom a battlefield. He agreed without reserve.
On the very night he accepted the brief, he went to call on Judge Vinault. The judge kept a villa on the Île Saint-Louis—a house of consummate luxury whose classical taste, from façade to cornice, seemed to have ripened since the fifteenth century. The neighbours were, as one might expect, all men and women of fortune.
Vinault himself was a man in his fifties, florid of face and comfortably stout, with plump hands and a voice made for court—perhaps the product of nearly two decades spent as a prosecutor before he mounted the bench.
"You are quite certain you mean to take Babeuf's case?" he asked again. Before the answer could form, footsteps sounded beyond the study door.
André looked up. The mistress of the house entered, bearing a tray with two cups of coffee—a young wife in a gown of pink silk and a shimmer of jewels.
Vinault rose at once, took the cups from her hands, passed one to André and kept the other, then drew his wife close, kissed her smooth cheek with fond courtesy, and murmured that it would be best if they were left undisturbed for the next hour.
Host and guest drank without ceremony—each to his own cup. It was a blunt way to take coffee, not at all aristocratic, but it pleased André; it was like being carried, for a moment, back to some street-corner café of the twenty-first century.
At the door the judge's wife paused, lifted her proud chest a little, and flashed the handsome visitor a glance; a slip of paper flicked between her fingers as she turned away with an undulating grace.
The boldness of it unsettled André. So, two small verses to flatter a lady's salon—must she trade them like signals between guilty lovers? Enough to set a man's heart pounding… unless— He fixed his eyes on the aromatic cup and pressed the rising mischief down.
The quiet exchange did not escape Vinault. There was no jealousy in him; rather, a contentment that the world might envy so lovely a wife. In Paris, a gentleman's lady attracted admirers as naturally as a lantern drew moths.
As for André, the little poems he had furnished for madame had made her the bright talk of several salons, and reflected honour upon the judge as well. Beyond that, Vinault preferred not to speculate.
When the study door closed again, André dragged his thoughts out of perfume and coffee and back to business. "Yes," he said. "I have joined Danton's chambers, and Babeuf will be my first criminal case. For the sake of propriety, I ought to submit a resignation."
Vinault inclined his head and was silent. He shut his eyes as if to taste the coffee; in truth he weighed advantage and loss.
It was true that, for years past, he had acted—on behalf of the Palais—for Paulze and his like; but the traffic between judge and farmer-general had never run to intimacy. It was the old exchange: power for money, and each kept his hands clean.
Since 1789, however, the Constituent Assembly, which in practice held the reins of state, had grown impatient with the farmers-general and their feudal privileges. A deputy from Champagne—famed for his sharp tongue—had sneered in debate: "The miserly farmers pay the nation five hundred thousand livres and squeeze out three million in compensation; and poor France must spend another million to repair the damage from their savage exactions."
That deputy had moved to abolish the farm at once. The right and the centre—great bourgeois and liberal nobles—had smothered the vote as too radical. Yet the left had carried, on the back of that defeat, another measure: when the existing contracts expired, the farm would not be renewed, and all revenues must flow to the Assembly.
And that very day, when Vinault had gone with his colleagues from the Palais to the Riding School to advise the constitutional committee, he had learned that the first Constitution of France, to be promulgated next year, would explicitly abolish the farm and every relic of feudal practice besides.
A jurist of thirty years' standing, Vinault understood the difference between the August Decrees of 1789 and the Constitution of 1791. Both repudiated feudal abuses; but the former spoke as exhortation, while the latter would speak with the force of the grundnorm—the mother-law—backed, if need be, by the police and the army.
If the farmers-general had had any sense, they would have yielded to the Assembly, declared the farm ended in advance, and bought indulgence by donating a portion of their wealth. Instead they chose folly—evading the question, hiding assets, smuggling fortunes abroad.
To the judge, it was a road to ruin.
A sudden pang of envy touched him. He was jealous—yes—of the novice before him, who had arrived at the very lip of a historical turning, with the chance to perform, through a single celebrated defence, an act that would be written into the books. Whatever the verdict, André's name would stand among his generation's first.
Looking at André Franck, his mind slipped back a few years to Georges Danton tendering his resignation. Two tall young men; two pupils, in a sense. Both gifted; both ambitious; both of a temperament that, once resolved, went forward without fear of obstruction. And both, it seemed to Vinault, had the rare grace of gratitude.
From the prosecutor's desk to the supreme court, Danton had aided him often and well. The handsome young man before him never complained, and he was kind at heart. The municipal police he had urged into being, and the elegant solution of the Blair case, had won him the quiet admiration of the Palais.
On such grounds, Vinault would not be found aboard a sinking ship. As André's guide, he had a hundred reasons to stand in the same trench. The decision came quickly: he would support André's suit—openly where he could, covertly where he must.
He knew why André had come to the house to resign instead of waiting for the morrow at the Palais: the young man wished to slip by the door-keeper and see certain inside papers.
He needed background on the trial judge, the prosecutor, the witnesses, even a juror—their origins, employments, tempers, tastes. Nor would he neglect the clerks and ushers, the gaolers and turnkeys—those overlooked cogs that can jam the whole machine.
Vinault agreed without demur; they fixed an hour and a place for delivery. A favour rendered is a favour banked, and the judge, too, wished to see whether André might yet surprise him.
When André proffered four assignats—each for three hundred livres—as a gratuity, the judge, a man not innocent of greed by reputation, only laughed and took one, returning the other three along the path they had come.
Bribing a judicial officer; stealing judicial secrets; obstructing justice—any one of these could fetch eight or ten years. André did not care. This was not the quick, blazing century of information; this was a slower age, and besides, the first breach had come from the other side: the state's own accuser had colluded with the bench.
You could see it in the jury. Of twelve, one was an active citizen—in Paris that meant a man whose direct taxes for the year topped four and a half livres; seven were clerics of the conservative stamp, nobles, or rural gentry; three were urban property-holders; and the last a freeholding farmer who had sold his land and come to Paris.
What sympathy could such men extend to a suspect who had roused peasants to resist taxation? The handful of proprietors and freeholders, timid by habit and eager for quiet, had not stormed the Bastille nor marched to Versailles; they would not begin a revolution from the jury box.
The outcome, then, hardly needed a prophet.
In 1790 the rule in capital cases was plain: if seven of twelve found guilt, the trial judge would pass sentence—imprisonment, life at hard labour, or hanging. (If seven did not agree, the accused was released unless the prosecutor lodged an appeal.) Should the prisoner persist in his plea, he would climb the steps to the Court of Appeal at the Palais. (The guillotine had not yet been invented.)
For three full weeks after he resigned, André shut himself in the attic, leaving only to eat, drink, and sleep. He read and reread the confidential dossiers Vinault supplied, covered hundreds of pages in notes, and drew, upon the white walls, a timeline and a graph of every relation in the case.
Before the hearing, however, he had to visit his client, still held in the Châtelet prison.
The French judicial machine was bureaucratic and slow; a criminal matter could be tossed from hand to hand for years. Babeuf's case was unusual: the first hearing had been held early in the month; the second was fixed for mid-April.
Beginning on the first of the month, André applied to the criminal court for leave to see his client. Twice he was refused with discourtesy by the judge and his aide.
The first time, the Châtelet pleaded delay: they must verify André's credentials. The plea was hollow. He had a bachelor's in law from Reims, had served two years as a university tutor, then a year at the Palais; he held the Paris advocate's certificate and now appeared under Danton's name.
Days later, he tried again. This time the court declared that Babeuf's health had worsened, and he could not receive counsel. At André's insistence they allowed an exchange of letters, subject to inspection. André sent books.
On the third attempt the judge's aide began the same solemn nonsense. André turned on his heel, went straight to the Palais, and filed a memorial he had already drafted: a complaint to the Court of Cassation that the Châtelet had, by unlawful pretexts, repeatedly barred counsel from his client, thereby violating the fairness of proceedings and the basic rules of justice.
The single sheet exploded in the capital's legal world; it was as if someone had lit a powder barrel in a palace that was none too quiet to begin with.
In both civil and common law, the attorney–client relation is a cornerstone. And here, within sight of the Palais itself—only the river between them—the sacred hall of justice had let a cornerstone be trampled in open view. If the wrong were not righted at once, Paris—and France with it—would be shamed.
However little the judges and prosecutors of the Palais liked Babeuf, they would not see the edifice crack.
That afternoon, at Vinault's urging, the Court of Cassation formed a committee of five to inquire. André, for his part, made sure the gentlemen were not out of pocket—two thousand livres in assignats found their way, discreetly, into the machinery.
On 8 April the committee issued a sharply worded interpellation, commanding the criminal court to honour the principles of publicity, fairness, and impartiality. The disreputable Châtelet, already the butt of jokes in the capital's legal circles and ladies' salons, became a laughing-stock once more.