Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [50]
Charles’s mother persuaded her son to make concessions. He agreed to allow Marie to renovate the estate and begin a round of social activities. Her piano was sent from home and she received a subscription to the Paris newspapers. Finally, her husband would not claim his “marital privileges.” 18 For a short time she was mollified. But she soon found out that there was no money to clean up the estate, and no opportunities for her to have a social life in this place. Marie began to plot another way to escape from her husband: murder.
She proceeded with caution and hid her embittered state. In letters to her aunts in Paris, she described a happy life. “All my new family are delightful and kind to me. I am admired. I am adored,” she wrote. 19
In December, learning that her husband was taking a trip to Paris, she persuaded him that they should both make out wills, naming each other as beneficiaries. He agreed, and Marie gave Charles part of her dowry for expenses and wrote letters of introduction to powerful friends who might invest in his business. But unknown to Marie, Charles was a cheat as well as a boor — he secretly made out another will leaving all his possessions to his mother.
Right after Charles set out on his journey, Marie ordered some arsenic by mail from a druggist named Eyssartier in a neighboring town. She claimed that she needed it to use against the rats that infested the château. Then Marie asked her mother-in-law to make some cakes to send Charles for his Christmas holiday in Paris. Marie personally wrapped the package, including a small portrait of herself with an affectionate letter.
When Charles received the present on December 18, he found a single large cake, instead of the six small ones that his mother had baked. Not suspecting anything, he had a piece of it. Within a short time he began vomiting and suffered from violent cramps. Servants found him writhing with pain on the floor of his hotel room. A doctor was called, but he could not stop the vomiting. The diagnosis was extreme dysentery. Charles slowly recovered but could not travel until January 3, when he telegraphed his family that he was coming home.
The day before Charles arrived, Marie ordered more arsenic from Eyssartier, telling him there were many rats. When the family physician, a Dr. Bardon, came to examine Charles, she asked him for arsenic as well. Though Marie personally tended to him, Charles did not improve and even seemed to get worse. As his condition declined, members of the Lafarge household became suspicious of Marie. Some claimed to have seen her put white powder in his food. When she was confronted with the accusation that she was trying to murder her husband, she called a groom named Alfred, who claimed that he had personally beaten all the arsenic Marie had ordered into a paste, which he had stuffed into the nooks and crannies of the château to kill the rats.
On January 13, a new doctor, named Lespinasse, was called to the estate to look at the now desperately ill patient. He was told that many in the household believed that M. Lafarge was being poisoned by his wife. After examining him, the doctor concurred. In his opinion, Charles Lafarge “is indeed being poisoned to death — all the symptoms show it. But it is too late to save him. He is a dying man.” 20 The diagnosis was correct: Charles died the next day.
Marie’s mother-in-law called her to the bedside of the corpse and accused her of killing Charles. Marie remained calm, answering the accusations only with a stony stare before retiring to her room. A few hours later, Mme. Lafarge called the police to the château. The local magistrate, named Moran, arrived on the fifteenth and listened to the accusations. He took evidence that members of the household had collected — the remains of food that Charles had eaten, including eggnog, soup, and sugar water. So suspicious had the servants been