Justice is "public vengeance, not private." 1 So pronounced Pierre de Saumaise, the Seigneur de Chasans, one of the key players in a cause célèbre that shook Burgundy in the mid-seventeenth century.This book is about that historical episode. It centers on the murder trial of a distinguished and powerful man, Philippe Giroux, a président, or presiding judge, at Burgundy's Parlement, the highest court of appeal in the province. The trial was not simply of provincial importance, however, for it

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... e to involve the most powerful men in France, among them Henri II de Bourbon, the prince of Condé; the prime minister Cardinal Richelieu; and the king himself, Louis XIII. Because of the powerful figures who became entangled in this affair, it dramatically illuminates the intricate web of power relations of the time, and so demonstrates how power and influence were exerted in concrete, lived situations. One goal of mine, therefore, is to show the reader how power worked, both formally through the law and informally through patron-client relations. I also hope that this story exposes something more subtle and perhaps even more profound about the nature of seventeenth-century political culture: the deep contradictions upon which the social, judicial, and political systems rested. Saumaise's pronouncement about the public nature of justice was only partly true, in fact, for families driven by private interests guided by social imperatives captured the judicial system at a time when impartial law and disinterested justice-what we call the rule of law-were crystallizing as essential theoretical attributes of governing public polities.