As the pall of smoke lifted from the town square of Grainville-la-Teinturière in the spring of 1693, the bourg's inhabitants were left looking at a pile of ashes representing villager Jacques Lefrançois. The ashes were not those of Jacques Lefrançois himself; they were his straw effigy, which had been hanged and set afire according to the court's order. Judge Pierre Alexandre and the king's prosecutor, Robert Maribrasse, were presiding over a theater of death in which the sentence was read out before an empty prisoner's stool and a straw man burned in justice for a very real murder. The spectacle would have displeased Cardinal Richelieu, who had written a few decades earlier (perhaps not intending the double entendre), that “ordinances and laws are entirely useless if they are not followed by executions.”

Preserving security and order was the principal function of the French state at every level, and local magistrates were deeply conscious of their duty to keep the king's peace. But the preservation of order was exercised very differently in the bailiwicks by local officers than it was practiced in the minds of ministers. Local judges could seldom afford to be so contemptuous of common opinion as Richelieu was when he advised that in criminal matters one should scorn the “discourse of an ignorant populace.”