conducted a number of shady enterprises in the Misedon woods that surrounded their house at the Closerie des Poiriers. Sometime before 1780, Jean Cottereau, in the company of his brother, René, and a few others, were in the forest drinking moonshine alcohol, in breach of the laws of Olivet, when they were surprised by two local constables, Pierre Bériteau and Jean Guitton. A brawl ensued. When it was over, a surgeon from Laval declared that one of the two was so badly injured that he could not stand to be transported to hospital. Instead, he was transported to an inn at Saint-Ouën-des-Toits, where he remained for several weeks. The Cottereaus, called before the bar of justice, were ordered to pay for the injured man's medical treatment, and for his room and board during the period of his confinement. This episode was just one of a large number of transgressions engaged in by Jean and his brothers. The thuggish Cottereaus, over a period of several years managed to injure or cripple almost all their neighbors, usually for nonsensical reasons, and, inevitably, one or more of them was brought to court and forced to pay compensation to their victims in order to avoid imprisonment or deportation. This ruined the family financially. Before the French Revolution In 1780, when he was twenty-three years old, Jean Chouan was a wanted man. He was being hunted down for having beaten a man named Marchais, who, he suspected, had informed the authorities about his salt-smuggling activities. He was also wanted for a more serious crime: with his friend, Jean Croissant, Chouan was alleged to have killed a customs agent, Olivier Jagu, with repeated blows of a billy-club, in a Saint-Germain-le-Fouilloux inn. Sentenced to death in absentia, his execution took place in effigy, along with that of his accomplice, Jean Croissant. He had gone into hiding by fleeing the area where he was well-known and enlisting, under a false name, in the 37th Infantry Regiment in Turenne in central France. Other sources indicate that his mother, suspecting that he had been abducted by the crown and summarily imprisoned (or executed), went to Versailles to ask for his pardon from the king. This is doubtful. In fact, the possibility that Chouan was already in custody is contradicted by the fact that the proceedings initiated against him in 1780 were resumed in 1785. From family recollections and papers gathered