The rather banal petition doesn't prepare us for the extraordinary interview, and the domestic tragedy it hints at. Many plaintiffs must have found the legal grounds on which interdiction rested much too narrow. Many defendants must have blessed this narrowness. As other examples show, however, not all escaped, as Holbach seems to have done. An interdiction full of surprises in which nothing is what it seems.
Some cases are just too good to be true.
They're all the more interesting for it. An angry father tries to get rid of a difficult daughter and succeeds. As in the d'Holbach case, the situation seems to have been much less simple than the plaintiff lets on. Balzac before Balzac. A very sad case.