Chapter II: The Case of Madame Lafarge

The story of Madame Lafarge, who was tried in France for the murder of her husband in 1840, is a strange and romantic one.

Marie Fortunée Cappelle was the daughter of a captain in the Imperial Artillery. Her parents died during her childhood, and she was placed in the care of an aunt, who, at the earliest opportunity, determined to relieve herself of the burden of her support by negotiating a marriage for her. While still a girl, through the instrumentality of a matrimonial agent in Paris, an alliance was arranged between Marie Cappelle and one Monsieur Charles Lafarge, who was a widower and an ironmaster of Glandier.

The marriage, which was purely a commercial transaction, took place in Paris on August 15, 1839, after which Lafarge and his young wife set out for his old and gloomy seigneurial château at Glandier.

From statements made afterwards, Madame Lafarge became disgusted with her husband’s brutality before the honeymoon was over. After they reached their own house, however, they were reconciled, and there seemed to be every possibility of their spending a happy wedded life together.

Besides the newly married pair, there lived in the château the mother and sister of Lafarge. His chief clerk, Denis Barbier, was a frequent visitor there, and was apparently at liberty to walk through the place without restriction.

In a very short time Madame Lafarge discovered that both she and her relatives had been deceived as to the position of her husband, and that instead of being a man of considerable fortune, he was straitened for means. On his representations she bestowed upon him all her fortune, and even wrote letters at his dictation to some of her wealthy friends, asking them to aid him to find money to develop a new method he claimed to have discovered for smelting iron. With these letters of introduction, Lafarge set out for Paris in December, 1839, to raise money to start his new project.

While he was away, his wife had her portrait drawn by an artist in Glandier, and determined to send it to her absent husband. She therefore packed it in a box, with some cakes made by his mother, together with an affectionate letter, and despatched them to Paris. This box, which contained nothing but the five small cakes, the portrait, and the letter, was packed and sealed by Madame Lafarge in the presence of several witnesses.

When it reached Paris and was opened by Lafarge, it contained only _one large cake_, after partaking of which he was suddenly taken ill, and was eventually compelled to return home, where he arrived on January 5, 1840. His sickness continued and increased in severity, and nine days afterwards he died.

Shortly after his death his mother and friends, who were well aware how the widow disliked them and also her husband, who had made her life so unhappy, at once imputed the cause of death to poison administered by his wife in the cake she had sent to Paris, and Marie Cappelle Lafarge was arrested on suspicion.

When the house of the deceased man was searched, certain diamonds were found which were supposed to have been stolen from the Vicomtesse de Léotaud by Madame Lafarge before her marriage.

The unfortunate woman was therefore charged with the double crime of theft and murder.

Though arrested in January, 1840, the trial of Madame Lafarge did not commence till July 9 of the same year, and the charge of theft was first proceeded with in her absence, and she was found guilty.

While this judgment was still under appeal, she was brought to trial on the graver charge.

The evidence for the prosecution went to prove that the illness of Lafarge commenced with the eating of the cake received from his home. As already stated, when the box arrived in Paris the seals had been broken, the five cakes had disappeared, and _a single cake “as large as a plate”_ had been substituted for them. It was alleged by the prosecution that this single cake had been prepared by Madame Lafarge, and secretly placed in the box; but no evidence could be brought to prove that she ever tampered with the box after it had been sealed. Lafarge’s clerk, Denis Barbier, made a clandestine visit to Paris after the box had been despatched, and he was with Lafarge when it arrived in Paris, yet no notice seems to have been taken of this suspicious fact. It transpired, it was he who first threw out hints on his master’s return that he was being poisoned by arsenic, and told a brother employé that his master would be dead within ten days. There was ample proof, however, that there was a considerable quantity of arsenic in the house at Glandier. It was found that Madame Lafarge had purchased some in December, stating she required it for destroying rats; Barbier also stated in evidence that Madame had requested him to procure her some arsenic. He bought some, but did not give it to her. It was further stated that Madame Lafarge was seen to stir a white powder into some chicken broth which had been prepared for her husband, the remains of which, found in a bowl, were said by the analyst to contain arsenic.

The medical men who conducted the post-mortem examination gave it as their deliberate opinion that the deceased man had been poisoned by arsenic, of which poison they professed to have found considerable quantities. The friends of the accused then submitted the matter to Orfila, the famous French toxicologist, who, on giving his opinion of the methods and manner in which the analysis had been carried out, said that owing to the antiquated and doubtful methods of detection employed by the medical men, it was probable they _fancied_ they had found arsenic where there was none. Thereupon the prosecution asked Orfila to undertake a fresh analysis himself, which he consented to do, and, on making a careful examination of the remains, stated he discovered just a minute trace of arsenic.

This apparently sealed the doom of the accused woman, and served to strengthen the bias of the jury.

But now another actor appeared in the drama in the person of Raspail, another distinguished French chemist, who from the beginning had watched the case with interest.

On September 17, 1840, a young barrister knocked at the door of Raspail’s apartment in Paris at eleven o’clock at night. Exhausted by thirty-six hours in a postchaise—for he had come straight from Tulle where the trial of Madame Lafarge was being held—he handed the following note to the chemist—

“I am innocent and most unlucky. I am suffering and make appeal to your science and your heart.... M. Orfila has arrived and I have refallen into the abyss. My hope, Monsieur, is in you. Lend the aid of your knowledge to an unfortunate victim of calumny. Come and save me while all others abandon me.—MARIE LAFARGE.”

The writer was an utter stranger to Raspail at this time, but though he had reached the age of forty-six years and was in indifferent health, he decided to sacrifice his night’s rest and at 2 a.m. was posting as hard as horses could carry him on the southern high road to the scene of the trial. When he arrived at Limoges he was in a high state of fever and took a room to rest for an hour. The rumour reached him there that Madame Lafarge had been acquitted, so he remained the night and the next day posted on another fifty miles and arrived at Tulle just an hour too late. Madame Lafarge had been found guilty and condemned to penal servitude for life.

It was then that Raspail wrote to the presiding judge the words so often quoted: “Give me anything you like—your own armchair—and I will find arsenic in it.”

Raspail has left a long description of his interview with Madame Lafarge whom he then saw. After asking to be allowed to examine the three plates with arsenical deposits that had passed through Orfila’s hands, he asked to be allowed to test the reagents left at Tulle by Orfila. The reply was made that “M. Orfila left all his reagents with M. Bories, a pharmacist, except his potash, his zinc, and the nitrate of potash by means of which he obtained the deposit on the third plate.”

“Supposing,” continues Raspail, “I had acted like Orfila (as he did on another occasion), applying the pretty expression of ‘ignorant crowd’ to the host of reagents obtained from local pharmacists and bringing from Paris a nitrate of potash capable of revealing a poison where no other reagent could find an atom, what would the Advocate-General have said? Would he not at once have required that the phial of nitrate from Paris should be examined by the experts present?”

Raspail then took the zinc wire with which Orfila had experimented to the shop where the toxicologist had procured the article, and he found on analysis that the _zinc itself_ contained _more arsenic_ than Orfila had detected by his examination. Orfila had used Marsh’s test, which is infallible so long as the reagents used are free from arsenic themselves.

As already related, Raspail reached Tulle too late to give evidence at the trial, and the unhappy Marie Cappelle Lafarge, after a trial lasting sixteen days, had been found guilty and condemned to imprisonment for life with hard labour, and exposure in the pillory. Raspail, however, would not let the matter rest, and at once set to work to save the condemned woman. He informed Orfila that the zinc he had used was already contaminated with arsenic, and at length got him fairly to admit his error and join with him in a professional report to the authorities to that effect.

After being imprisoned for twelve years, in the end, the sentence on Madame Lafarge was reduced to five years in the Montpellier house of detention, after which the Government sent her to the Convent of St. Rémy, from whence she was liberated in 1852, but only to end her wretched life a few months afterwards.

There appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_ for 1842 a careful examination of this interesting case from a legal point of view, in which the writer states that the strongest evidence indicated Denis Barbier and not Madame Lafarge as the perpetrator of the crime. It was proved that this man lived by forgery, and assisted Lafarge in some very shady transactions to cover the latter’s insolvency. He was further known to harbour a deadly hatred for Madame Lafarge. He was with his master in Paris when he was seized with the sudden illness, and it transpired that out of the 25,000 francs the ironmaster had succeeded in borrowing from his wife’s relatives, only 3,900 could be found when he returned to Glandier. On his own statement he was in the possession of a quantity of arsenic, and he was the first to direct suspicion against his master’s wife. Yet all these facts appear to have been overlooked in the efforts of the prosecution to fasten the guilt on the unfortunate woman. That Lafarge died from the effects of arsenical poisoning there seems little doubt, but by whom administered has never been conclusively proved, and the tragedy remains among the poison mysteries still unsolved.