Moisnel was a timid and foolish boy of eighteen.
Jean François Lefebre, Chevalier de la Barre, was a young Norman, not yet twenty years old. He had been educated by a country curé. His aunt, the Abbess of Willancourt, had given him masters, and he had rooms assigned to him in her convent. It is thought, but is not certain, that La Barre was in the army. What is certain is that this clerical education had been a very bad one. The Abbess, if not a wicked woman, was certainly one who loved pleasure; who enjoyed a joke, even if it were against the religion she professed; who gave rollicking little supper-parties; adored her good-looking lively young scapegrace of a nephew, and permitted him not only to sing roystering and indecent drinking songs with foolish companions within her sacred walls, but to keep there a library which included not only some very indecorous books—but that little volume which “smelt of the fagot,” “The Philosophical Dictionary.”
At her supper-parties young La Barre had often met one Duval, or Belleval, who, it is said, had been in love with the Abbess, and was not a little jealous of her handsome nephew. It was Duval who had heard young La Barre chant Rabelaisian ditties, and quote “what he could recollect” from the “Pucelle” and the “Epistle to Uranie.” It was Duval who hated him, and Duval who denounced him.
On October 1, 1765, La Barre was arrested in the Abbey of Longvilliers, near Montreuil. Moisnel was also arrested.
On October 4th, the Abbess burnt her nephew’s library, which would have been a prudent act if she had done it thoroughly, but she did not. On October 10th, the authorities searched the boy’s rooms, and found in a press some indecent literature—and that “Philosophical Dictionary.”
After five cross-examinations, unhappy young Moisnel said practically what his judges told him to say, not only respecting himself, but respecting La Barre. He swore that d’Étallonde had mutilated the crucifixes, an assertion to which La Barre also swore. D’Étallonde was safe in Prussia. Moisnel, who was delicate in health and in horrible fear of death, lost in the trial the very little sense he had ever had. Young La Barre, on the other hand, kept all his pluck, wit, and coolness.
To a charge that, on the Feast of the Holy Sacrament, he and his two companions had lingered near a religious procession in the street, and neither knelt nor uncovered as reverence and custom demanded, he pleaded “Guilty.” He was in a hurry, he said, and had no evil intentions.
To the charge that to a person who bade him take another route if he could not behave himself, he had replied that he looked upon the Host as nothing but a piece of pastry and for his part could not swallow all the apostolic assertions, he answered that he might have used some such words.
It is not unworthy of remark that, though under torture he confessed to having mutilated the crucifix in the cemetery, the judges discovered no proof, and no proof ever was discovered, that he had mutilated the crucifix on the bridge. It is very much more remarkable that in his sentence the affair of the crucifixes was not even mentioned, and that he and absent d’Étallonde were condemned for “impiously and deliberately walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering; uttering blasphemies against God, the Saints, and the Church; singing blasphemous songs, and rendering marks of adoration to profane books.”
Now it will be allowed by any fair-minded person—whatever be his religion or irreligion—that to thus insult a faith, dear to millions of people for hundreds of generations, merited a sharp punishment.