The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (14 page)

Lacenaire also found time to write his memoirs, certainly the most notorious such document up to that time. With them, he finally achieved his longed-for literary success, interspersing his poetry with the account of his life. While he claimed that he had modeled the memoirs on those of Vidocq, Lacenaire’s are marked by self-pity, with few descriptions of crimes and many more romantic explanations of why he became a criminal. His rationalizations further reveal him as a highly intelligent man who used the injustices — real and perceived — of society to excuse his behavior. This view led him to see himself as a victim and any crime as defensible.
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Scientists came to his cell to examine and measure him, trying to find the essence of what made him a criminal. Adherents of the pseudoscience of phrenology claimed to be able to determine a person’s personality from examination of his skull, and right before the execution, a phrenologist came to make a model of Lacenaire’s head.

Lacenaire was concerned that his execution be handled just right. He wrote, “I make no secret of it — it would have been very disagreeable to me to have been dispatched by a provincial executioner.”
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Thus he was displeased to learn that he would meet his fate at seven in the morning, when he would have preferred noon to attract a larger audience.

On January 9, 1836, a cold and foggy day, Lacenaire and Avril were led to the guillotine at the Saint-Jacques barrier on the south side of Paris. Though the authorities had tried to keep the time and place of execution secret and had hastily erected the guillotine at night, a crowd of five hundred people appeared — as happened at almost every execution.

Avril went first, and the execution proceeded without incident. Then Lacenaire looked at the executioner and said: “Nothing simpler. I am not afraid.”
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But when he placed his head on the block, the blade made it only halfway down before becoming stuck in one of the grooved sides. The executioner hauled it up again, and as he did, Lacenaire looked up at the triangular blade. It was the last thing he saw.

Lacenaire had one last contribution to offer. On the eve of his death, he had spoken to a Dr. Lelut of the Bicêtre Prison. One of the scientific questions of the time was whether consciousness continued after the head was severed from the body. Did decapitation instantly end consciousness? This was just the sort of thing that interested Lacenaire, and he had promised that he would give a signal by winking — specifically, closing his left eye and leaving the right one open. Dr. Lelut stood over the basket that caught the severed head of the criminal, but could see no movement of the eyelids at all.

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People have used poisons to dispatch their enemies from ancient times. Through experience or experiment, several reliably fatal substances were identified, including mercury, antimony, hemlock, and henbane. But over the centuries the most popular poison has been arsenic. From ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy, arsenic murders were common. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, white arsenic (the powder form) was even called
poudre de succession,
or “the inheritance powder,” because of its common use.

The advantage of arsenic as a poison was that it was tasteless and colorless, so that it would be undetectable when mixed with food or drink. Also, the symptoms of the poison could be confused with cholera, a very prevalent disease at the time. Thus police and judges had no way to ascertain whether a victim had died of poison or something else. The only way to convict someone was to catch him or her in the act of administering the poison.

That began to change at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1787, the German chemist Johann Daniel Metzger discovered that when substances with arsenic content were heated over charcoal and a copper platter was held above the vapors, the platter became covered with a white material that was arsenous oxide.
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It was now possible for investigators to test for arsenic, though their methods didn’t work well under certain conditions. It was found, for example, that traces of arsenic occur naturally in the human body. One man in particular was to help solve these problems: Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila, today remembered as the “father of toxicology.” Born in Minorca in 1787, the young man developed a passion for chemistry and medicine. In 1811, he went to Paris, where he became a doctor of medicine and set up his own laboratory to study poisons. Two years later he published a two-volume work on toxicology that was highly regarded throughout Europe.

In his lab, Orfila experimented on animals to try to understand the chemistry of poisons, particularly arsenic. He showed how the poison passed through the stomach and intestine to other organs such as the liver, spleen, and kidney and finally permeated the nerves themselves,
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demonstrating that even when no poison remained in the stomach, it would show up in other parts of the body. He further discovered that the arsenic was easier to detect when the animal tissue was charred.

Orfila still faced the problem posed by trace elements such as iron, zinc, and iodine, which occur naturally in the body and may conceal the presence of arsenic. The solution was found by James Marsh of the Royal British Arsenal, who developed the Marsh tube. Marsh’s discovery was based on the principle that when either sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid is mixed with any liquid containing arsenic and brought together with zinc, a chemical reaction results, producing the gas arsine. Marsh’s device was a U-shaped glass tube in which the elements could be combined and a scientist could check for the presence of arsine.

Marsh published a paper on his device in 1836, and Orfila saw its potential immediately. Meanwhile, Orfila had improved on his earlier method of charring the sample with nitric acid to remove “animal matter.” He also showed that traces of natural arsenic appeared only in the bones and therefore did not interfere with testing of body organs. In addition he realized that the ground where a body was buried might contain arsenic, which should be taken into account in cases of exhumation in determining whether arsenic poisoning had been the cause of death.

Orfila’s work earned him enormous respect, and he was named dean of the Medical School of Paris in 1831. (One of his colleagues there was Marie-Guillaume-Alphonse Devergie, the first man to use a microscope in practical forensic pathology.) For his part, Orfila would make history as the first expert to use the science of toxicology to convict a person of murder.

Marie Lafarge developed delusions of grandeur at an early age. Born Marie Capelle in 1816, she was the daughter of one of Napoleon’s favorite officers. Her maternal grandmother was a natural daughter of Philippe-Égalité, duc d’Orléans, whose legitimate son Philippe, the so-called Citizen King, had ruled France when Marie was a teenager. Though she could claim a noble lineage, Marie never became securely established in the aristocratic society that she aspired to. After the deaths of her parents when she was a teenager, she was shuffled between two aunts.

Still, Marie was educated in fine schools in Paris, where she learned the proper etiquette and made friends of high social standing. She grew to be a striking young woman, tall and slender, with a porcelain complexion and jet black hair. Despite her intelligence, Marie lived in a fantasy world of ideal love, turning down one proposal of marriage by saying it was impossible for her to marry a “commoner.”

When Marie was twenty-four, one of her aunts decided it was time to marry her off and placed her name with the De Foy Matrimonial Agency in Paris, which specialized in pairing well-born men and women. She got a response. The man, Charles Joseph Pouch Lafarge, claimed to be a wealthy ironmaster with a huge estate, Le Glandier, in Corrèze in southwestern France. He provided drawings showing a beautiful château that looked out over a splendid landscape. Marie fantasized herself as the mistress of her own private realm.

When she met Lafarge, reality began to set in. He was a large, crude twenty-eight-year-old man with little education and no culture. What Marie did not know was that he was a bit of a fraud as well. He had misrepresented his wealth, hoping for a woman with a large dowry to invest in his iron business, and Marie’s dowry of 100,000 francs looked very good to him.

Marie tried to back out of the arrangement, but her aunt insisted. In August 1839, within two weeks of their first meeting, the two were married. Marie set out for Le Glandier with her new husband and her servant Clémentine. On the trip to the estate, Charles’s manners offended Marie. He ate noisily with his hands, ignoring napkins and licking his fingers. When she tried to engage him in conversation, he exclaimed, “For God’s sake, stop talking!”
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As Marie reached the château, she experienced another shock. Le Glandier was a seedy, dilapidated wreck. Inside, conditions were even worse. Rats scampered over the floor, and the smell of decay and animal excrement attacked Marie’s refined nose. She was so horrified that she locked herself in her room with Clémentine and refused to see anyone. She sent her maid with a letter to Charles, begging him to let her leave, promising he could keep the dowry and her possessions and even agreeing to take the blame for the failure of the marriage. She also threatened to poison herself with arsenic if he would not release her — a threat that would later take on sinister significance.

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 that they had even preserved some of Charles’s vomit for examination.

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.