The Court:

Given that after Jean François Marion died on 4 February 1923 one of his two surviving children, Jean Marion, brought an action against his sister Louise Marion, now Mme Bauthéac, on 1 December 1925 seeking the annulment of a donation of landed property made to her by her father in June 1918, disguised, with the connivance of a third party intermediary, as a sale; that a court held on 2 July 1930 that the gift was entirely void “under article 911 Code civil”, rather than merely reducible to the amount of which the father was free to dispose, a decision which became res judicata since Mme Bauthéac did not seek review;

Given that Jean Marion, relying on the retroactive annulment of Mme Beauthéac’s title to the property, then sought the annulment, on the ground of simulation, of the charge in favour of Raoux which she and her husband had granted on 15 December 1924 over a building included in the donation invalidated by the decision of 2 July 1930, and that his claim was dismissed on 17 June 1935 by a decision now under review;

Given that Raoux, as creditor of the charge, and Jean Marion, as legal heir, are both third parties in the sense of article 1321 Code civil as regards the factitious agreements of June 1918 and as such entitled by law to rely, as suits their interest, on either the apparent disposition behind which the parties concealed their true intentions or the true agreement thereby kept secret, and given that in such a situation where the options sought to be exercised by the two parties are in conflict, the courts below were entitled to give priority to the claims of the mortgagee, seeing that his mistake was due to the apparent security resulting from the mortgagors’ peaceful and prolonged possession;

From which it follows that, leaving aside the superfluous reasons criticised by the appellant, the decision under attack was justified in law.

For these reasons DISMISSES the application for review.

Subsequent Developments

Civ., 25/04/1939 : According to Article 1321 of the Civil Code, secret counter-documents are effective only between the parties. This rule, which is intended to protect third parties, enables them to rely for their own benefit on the apparent documents as against the secret agreement, even if the latter represents the real wishes of the parties to the contract. More precisely, the judgement of 1939 protects a third party who is the victim of appearances, under the principle of legal security. This judgement lays down a position of principle which now seems well established, even though a judgement of 22 February 1983 (Civ.1, Bull., no. 71) introduced a nuance: the 1939 judgement, which refers to “the error which the invincible force of appearances brought about in the mind” of the third party seemed to require, for the application of this rule, an error which itself was invincible. The judgement of 1983, for its part, requires only good faith on the part of the third party who will thus be able more easily to claim the benefit of the protection of Article 1321.