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The doctors who had attended Charles in his last days were called in to do an autopsy. They removed the stomach, tying the ends together so that its contents were saved for examination, before the rest of the body was buried. After testing, the doctors declared that they had found arsenic in the stomach of the deceased, as well as in all the foods that Charles had ingested. The only substance that did not show arsenic was the rat paste that Alfred the groom had turned over to them. Magistrate Moran thought that he had enough evidence to charge Marie with murder. On January 25, she was arrested and taken to the jail in the town of Brives.

The crime became a cause célèbre. Marie declared that she was being persecuted by anti-royalists because of her links to the royal family. Throughout the country, people took up sides for or against her. Some saw her as a saint, a political martyr because of her royal blood. Other people saw her as a liar who had killed her husband to avoid having sex with him. Not until the Dreyfus case of the 1890s would a trial so divide the country.

Marie received more than six thousand letters in prison, most of them showing support. Some of them, often heavily cologned, were proposals of marriage. Others promised support in her legal defense. Money poured in, as well as such lavish gifts as perfumes, wines, lingerie, and expensive foodstuffs. Marie clearly enjoyed her celebrity, fantasizing that she was the Marie Antoinette of her time. Writing her memoirs in prison, she portrayed herself as “the poor reviled one.” 21

Her trial began on September 3, 1840, in the town of Tulle in the Dordogne region. Gendarmes had to be stationed to keep back the crowds, though it was a hot day. All the inns in the vicinity were filled with journalists and curiosity seekers who had arrived from all over Europe. The prosecutor opened what he saw as a very strong case. He described Marie’s unhappiness with the marriage and read to the jury the letter she had written Charles on her arrival at Le Glandier, emphasizing her reference to arsenic. He linked her purchases of arsenic to Charles’s bouts of illness: Her first purchase came only a few days before she had sent her cake to Charles in Paris. Her second was one day before he returned home, where he steadily grew worse after eating food that she fed him. One of the most damning pieces of evidence seemed to be the chemical analysis of the so-called rat paste, which turned out to be bicarbonate of soda. The prosecutor drew the conclusion that Marie had substituted bicarbonate for the arsenic when she gave the material to the groom and used the real arsenic to poison her husband. When Marie was asked why the “arsenic” she had given to the groom was harmless, she cheerfully answered, “Now I understand why the rats continued coming. Bicarbonate would never stop them.” 22

But Marie’s high-powered Paris lawyer, Maître Paillet, was ready to refute the prosecution. In Paris, he had shown Orfila copies of the autopsy and chemical reports, and Orfila picked holes in them. The local doctors in Brives were using outdated methods and were inept to boot. During one of their analyses, the test tube had exploded. Paillet grilled the doctors about their knowledge of the newest developments in toxicology, exposing them as woefully behind the times. He asked the doctors if they had ever heard of the Marsh apparatus, developed just four years earlier; they had not.

Paillet called his own experts — three noted chemists from Limoges. They were asked to use Marsh’s method of measuring the amount of arsenic in Charles’s stomach. The chemists reported the results of their tests on February 5, dealing a severe blow to the prosecution’s case. The conclusion was that “in the materials presented to us no trace of arsenic is contained.” 23 The court record noted, “These final remarks produced an indescribable commotion in the court… Madame Lefarge, clasping her hands, raised her eyes to heaven.” 24 Paillet “wept tears of triumph.