Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 1.djvu/129

 proved, would at present only subject the offender to a sentence of corporal punishment. But it was not the suspected accomplice in a foolish forgery that was to be punished; it was the disorderly, rebellious and impudent prisoner, the chief of so many plans of escape, of whom an example must be made, and I wad sacrificed.

"SENTENCE.

"It appears, by the criminal tribunal of the department of the northNorth [sic], that the act of accusation made the twenty-eighth VendemaireVendémiaire [sic], in the 5th year, against certain men; namely, Sebastien Boitel, aged about forty, a labourer, living at Annoulin; César Herbaux, aged twenty, ci-devant serjeant-major in the chasseurs of Vandamme, living at Lille; Jean François Grouard, aged nineteen years and a half, second conductor of the military transports, living at Lille; Eugène Stofflet, aged twenty-three years, a broker, living at Lille; and François Vidocq, a native of Arras, aged twenty-two years, living at Lille; charged with forgery of a public and authentic document, by the director of the jury of the division of Cambrai, in manner following:

"The undersigned, judge of the civil tribunal of the department of the north, exercising the functions of director of the jury of the division of Cambrai, for formal indictments, states, that by virtue of a judgment given the seventh Fructidor last, by the criminal tribunal of the department of the north, superseding and annulling the acts of accusation, drawn up the twentieth and twenty-sixth of last Germinal, by the director of the jury of the division of Lille, charged the herein-named César Herbaux, François Vidocq, Sebastien Boitel, Eugène Stofflet, and Brice Coquelle, prisoners now present, and André Bordereau, prisoner, absent, with the crime, of forging a public and authentic