The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal

by Hubert Wolf

  The sickness may have been caused by tartar emetic in the tea. Sant’Ambrogio’s nurse and apothecary, Sister Maria Giuseppa, told the inquisitor that the novice mistress had asked her for tartar emetic. She showed her a little bottle of this, and impressed upon her that “one small drop is enough to cause severe nausea.”26

  Tartar emetic contains antimony, which belongs to the same chemical family as arsenic. Potassium antimonyl tartrate tastes unpleasantly sweet, with a disgusting aftertaste, and causes terrible, unappeasable nausea. In the nineteenth century, small doses were taken as a decongestant for coughs. The maximum daily dose is 0.5 gram; higher doses lead to inflammation of the stomach and intestines, severe vomiting and diarrhea, and the breakdown of the intestinal walls.

  Katharina must have been in a desperate state on that Thursday, and Maria Luisa was unable to conceal her delight. Maria Giacinta, who was still ill, said the novice mistress had come to her in very high spirits, saying:27 “Did you know? The princess is already having pains.”

  Maria Giacinta went on: “Later I saw Maria Ignazia, and when I inquired about the princess’s health, she snapped: ‘Yes, she is doing badly. She is lying in bed, mistrustful, with her eyes open, like a hangman. She wants neither medicine nor chamomile tea, and she will hardly even taste her food, sending it back because she thinks she is being poisoned.’

  “I was completely astonished, and said: ‘What, is this the Macchia della Faiola then?’ ”

  The Macchia della Faiola had become a byword for a den of Briganti, the bands of robbers who were much talked about in nineteenth-century Italy.28 Maria Giacinta’s exclamation shows just how implausible she found the poisoning story.

  But Maria Luisa wanted to make absolutely certain the princess would die, and the effects of the ground glass and tartar emetic weren’t enough for her. And so, later that day, she enlisted Agnese Celeste as another collaborator. The novice gave the inquisitor a detailed account of their conversation.29

  In the evening the mistress came to my room, closed the door and told me she had to ask me something. But for heaven’s sake, she said, I must say nothing of this, particularly to Maria Giacinta and Padre Peters. I promised, and she said: “As you are the daughter of a surgeon, can you tell me what is needed to kill a person with poison? But so that the cause cannot be found out. The body should not be bloated, for example.”

  Before I answered, I asked her: “Mistress, have you already tried this using the glass you broke up yesterday evening?”

  She replied: “Oh, the glass was not enough.”

  I: “Does the glass sink to the bottom?”

  She: “Yes, the glass sinks.”

  I: “What if you ground it more finely and stirred it well into the gruel?”

  She: “We tried that, but still it sinks.”

  But although I suspected that the aim of this conversation was to poison the princess, the mistress said to me: “Think nothing of it: a superior may have many reasons for asking such questions.”

  After this I answered her, saying that a large quantity of opium can cause death, or so I had heard when my sister was ill. When the mistress inquired further, I added that opium was black. She asked about the exact lethal amount, and I said: “Usually you administer a small amount as a medicine, but if you raise that amount just a little, it can be fatal.”

  I reminded her that Maria Giacinta had once been given two opium pills, and afterwards she had a severe inflammation. Finally she asked me whether I knew of anything else that was lethal.

  I answered: “Turpentine, and it is a clear liquid.”

  To which she said: “You cannot just mix that in, it would be noticed.”

  It now became clear to me that she wanted to poison the princess.

  I also suggested quicklime.… I don’t recall whether I also mentioned belladonna and quicksilver. She left my room, telling me I should try and think of other possibilities, and to keep the conversation secret.

  Turpentine and quicklime corrode the digestive tract and ultimately cause death, but to start with, Maria Luisa had to press ahead using the things she had to hand. On the evening of December 9, Giuseppa Maria was tasked with preparing chamomile tea for the princess, into which Maria Luisa put something from “another smaller cup,” as the nurse testified. Katharina tried the tea, but didn’t want to drink it. It looked blackish and tasted “disgusting.”30 She asked a novice to try the tea and she, too, found it undrinkable. The novice mistress, appearing unexpectedly in Katharina’s cell, gave the novice a terrible scolding, as Maria Ignazia confirmed in her statement: “I would like to add that the chamomile tea the princess was given that day must have had something mixed into it: Giuseppa Maria knows about such things and honestly attests to this, and the mistress shouted at us for tasting it.… I actually ran to the princess’s chamber to get rid of the cup. The mistress told Sister Maria Nazarena to tell me to do this.”31 The poison couldn’t be allowed to fall into other hands. They had to get rid of the Corpus Delicti.

  From then on both nurses, Maria Giuseppa and Giuseppa Maria, were certain that the madre vicaria was trying to poison the princess. The novice mistress had also asked them about the effects of opium and tartar emetic, and she had demanded the key to the dispensary, which gave her direct, unsupervised access to the poison cupboard. To prevent the worst from happening, the two nuns waited until everyone was gathered in the refectory for supper, and shut themselves in the convent’s pharmacy. They “emptied all the containers and tins in which poisonous substances were kept,” substituting harmless powders of the same color.32 They replaced the tartar emetic with cream of tartar, which is the same color, and swapped the opium for licorice. After Vespers, they then obediently handed the dispensary key to the vicaress.

  On Friday, December 10, during early Mass, the two of them noticed a light in the dispensary. Soon afterward, Maria Luisa and Maria Ignazia came out, the latter holding a lantern. They clearly hadn’t found what they had been looking for. The easiest way to obtain poison inside the convent had thus failed.

  That day, as Sister Giuseppa Maria stated, another opportunity unexpectedly presented itself, when the doctors prescribed Katharina a “laxative containing castor oil.” Before the princess was given this medicine, the mistress poured a few drops of varnish into the little bottle of castor oil. She took the varnish from the tins of paint and vitriolic acid left in Sant’Ambrogio’s refectory by the painters who were working there. Giuseppa Maria saw Maria Luisa, her hands smeared with oil paint, on her way to the infirmary to clean herself up. Katharina took the poisoned castor oil, and once again suffered severe nausea and vomiting.

  Afterward, Maria Luisa gave the medicine bottle to Giuseppa Maria, but “because of the color and the smell,” she noticed immediately that the medicine Katharina had been given was contaminated with varnish. To make absolutely sure, she asked her fellow nurse Maria Giuseppa to check what was in the bottle. She confirmed it was contaminated straightaway “and, horrified, immediately ran to the abbess with the bottle.” The abbess cried out: “This is a betrayal! This is not castor oil. Bring me a spoon, I want to try it.” The oil that was left at the bottom of the bottle tasted nothing like castor oil. The abbess therefore ordered Giuseppa Maria to take the little bottle to an apothecary outside the convent for a precise analysis of its contents. She set out immediately, but Maria Luisa stopped her at the gate and took the bottle from her, simply saying, “Somebody gave that poor woman rancid oil.”

  A nun who was looking after the princess’s “bodily needs due to the castor oil she had taken” told the investigating judge that Katharina, “tormented by terrible pains in her intestines,” had passed “pieces of white stuff that looked like fat” in her excrement. These may have been pieces of her stomach lining—a result of the tartar emetic. Once her diarrhea had subsided, however, Katharina seemed to recover a little over the course of that Friday.

  Meanwhile, Maria Luisa was conducting a fevered search for new poisons to finish t
he princess off. And she quickly had a bright idea. She told Maria Ignazia:33 “Sister Agnese Celeste told me that atropa belladonna—that is, belladonna extract—is the most effective poison of all. I myself will order everything from the apothecary this morning, but I will do it via the lawyer Franceschetti and not the estate manager. So as not to arouse his suspicion, I will also have him buy magnesia, tartar and some other things along with the belladonna extract and the opium.” And a few hours later, Franceschetti duly handed over the medicines Maria Luisa had requested at the convent gate. As he confirmed in his hearing, he procured nine or ten different substances, including magnesium oxide, tartar, and opium.34 He had admittedly wondered about one of the items on Maria Luisa’s list: atropa belladonna. He doubted the apothecary would even sell him this dangerous poison, but the latter provided it without any objection. Sallua managed to identify the apothecary—Barelli, on the Salita del Tritone—and included the receipt in the files. He also got ahold of the medicines Franceschetti had bought. The convent apothecary said that nobody in Sant’Ambrogio had asked for any medicines at that time: they already had everything they needed for the nuns who were ill. Clearly, the procurement of the poisons was exclusively Maria Luisa’s doing.

  On the evening of December 10, the novice mistress had another conversation with the doctor’s daughter, asking her whether she had thought of any more poisons.35

  Agnese Celeste replied:

  “If you leave things in copper, they become poisonous.”

  She: “Does that have negative effects?”

  “It causes bloating,” I told her.

  She: “That’s no good to me. Tell me how opium can be administered.”

  “In pill form,” I answered.

  She: “No, she will never take it like that.”

  So I recommended that she mix the opium with cassia, which is the same color. She asked me again about the dosage, and I replied that, when in doubt, it was better to give too much than too little. She warned me again to keep the conversation to myself, and left me. Fearing that the mistress really wanted to poison the princess, I felt bad, but I calmed myself with the thought of how the beautiful Judith murdered Holofernes,36 which was an act of divine splendor.

  Now Maria Luisa just had to wait for a suitable opportunity. For the next few days, she remained extremely cautious, and spoke to no one else about the poisoning, not even her confidantes: the witness statements provide no information about December 11, 12, and 13. On these dates, Maria Luisa brought the princess meat broth and rice soup, both with the same bitter aroma.

  Katharina was mistrustful and, as she said in her Denunzia, on December 12 she filled a little bottle with some of the meat broth and gave it to Padre Peters, pleading with him to have an apothecary analyze it for poison. Peters claimed the apothecary to whom he had given this task had found no poison—only alum, which in nineteenth-century medicine was used as a caustic agent against hemorrhages, or as a corrosive for the removal of warts. The taste is initially sweet, then bitter, making the mouth contract. Used internally, alum corrodes the lining of the stomach and intestines, and in high doses can be fatal. But how alum, a water-soluble double salt of potassium and aluminum, could have caused the bitter smell of the meat broth remained Padre Peters’s secret. Whether he really had the little bottle analyzed is open to question.

  A little later, Doctor Luigi Giovanni Marchi visited Katharina’s sickbed, and ordered the nuns to give her cassia with tamarind, to detoxify her and stimulate her metabolism. This finally provided Maria Luisa with an opportunity to kill the princess. Agnese Celeste had advised her to mix opium with cassia, as it was the same color and the cassia would mask the smell. Now the doctor was prescribing this very medicine. To Maria Luisa, it must have seemed like an act of divine providence. The madre vicaria told her accomplice, Maria Ignazia, that Maria Giuseppa had been spreading rumors that she was trying to poison the princess. This meant her hands had been tied for days. And now the doctor had prescribed a medicine that was ideally suited to disguising poisons, and entrusted this to her personally.

  On Monday, December 13, Maria Luisa turned the opium into liquid so that it could be mixed with the cassia.37 Several witnesses observed her going into her cell and dissolving opium in oil, using a tin plate over a pan of charcoal. She poured the liquid into a cup. Maria Ignazia told the inquisitor she had come into Maria Luisa’s cell in the evening.38 “I could smell a strong and very repulsive stench.… The mistress noticed the expression on my face. When I told her there was an unbearable stench, she answered: ‘But no, no stench, it must be the medicine.’ Then she added: ‘Tomorrow morning, get up and dress quickly, then dilute the medicine with hot water and take it to the princess.’ ” Maria Ignazia also noted “that there was now a larger dose of the cassia and tamarind medicine in the glass, and it was a different color.”

  Then she described in detail her own role in Katharina’s poisoning on Tuesday, December 14.

  The following morning I got up at the first wake-up call and quickly went to the mistress’s cell. I lit the lamp. She said I should call Sister Maria Felice at once and tell her to fetch hot water from the kitchen; I had to stay with her. While Maria Felice went to fetch the hot water from the kitchen to dilute the medicine, the mistress gave me the following speech: “Do you know? I fear that the princess will not take the medicine that was prepared yesterday evening, because there is too much of it and it is too thick. We should therefore prepare this other one, which was actually meant for Sister Agnese Celeste. But I beg you, do not get confused; it should not be given to Agnese Celeste. Take care not to make a mistake.”

  I replied: “Don’t worry. I will not get confused and will not give it to her.”

  Then she said: “Good, fetch our casket.”

  I fetched it, and she took the key she had with her. While I held the lamp and she lay in bed, she opened the casket and took out a tin of medicinal clay, which was sealed with red wax and carried the apothecary’s stamp, though I cannot describe this. The mistress took a little packet from the tin, cut the wax paper open with scissors and emptied the contents into the glass containing the medicine for Sister Agnese Celeste. The little packet had the inscription “atropa belladonna.” The mistress also told me herself that it was belladonna extract.

  The mistress instructed me to leave the medicine glass on her little table; she shut the casket and said to me: “Now find a suitable place to throw this tin away, then clean the scissors. You won’t have time to take the medicine to the princess, so when Maria Felice comes to me I will get her to take it.”

  I went into the parlor with the lamp to carry out this task, and when I went in, there was the same stench that I had smelled in the mistress’s cell the previous evening. I looked behind the door and saw a plate on the floor. It was dirtied with oil, and some black, melted stuff that I could not identify. I thought other nuns might notice this, so I threw the tin away and carefully washed the plate and the scissors.

  When I went back to the mistress’s cell, I told her about the plate and the smell, and she replied: “Oh! Yes, I put that there yesterday and forgot to tell you to clean it.”

  I asked her what the oil and the black stuff were, and she said: “The black stuff was opium; it was so hard that it could not be ground up. It was still in little pieces, so I dissolved it in oil, on the plate that I left in the parlor yesterday evening.”

  When the final bell rang from the choir stalls, I asked her to go to Matins, but she said: “Off you go. If the princess needs anything, I will have someone call you.”

  Maria Felice went into Katharina’s chamber and proffered her two glasses on a tray. One contained a relatively thick mixture of cassia and the opium Maria Luisa had melted. The second glass of cassia, originally intended for Agnese Celeste, contained the belladonna. The brew was of a thinner consistency, and even a small dose of the deadly nightshade extract would have been fatal. Against expectations, the princess chose the thicker cassia with the opi
um, rather than the belladonna. “After the sick woman had taken six spoonfuls from Maria Felice’s hands, she could drink no more, and fell back on the pillow, as if she had suffered a stroke, quite dazed and panting hard.”39

  At this moment, Maria Luisa entered the princess’s chamber, and immediately called Maria Ignazia back from the choir. Maria Ignazia recalled the incident very precisely:

  I left the choir stalls straightaway, terribly afraid of what might have happened. When I came to the door of the room by the arches, I recognized the mistress coming towards me, although it was dark. In a low voice, she said: “Run quickly to the princess, for she is dying.”

  I went and ran to the princess’s cell, where I found Maria Felice, supporting the princess’s head; she was very scared and said to me: “Dear sister, come quick, look at what has happened.”

  I saw the princess, much disheartened and dazed, and I called her by her name: “Luisa Maria.”

  She replied with a gasp, “Maria Ignazia, I am dying.”

  In a state of great anxiety I left the cell to find somebody. I encountered the mistress, who at once asked me: “how is Sister Luisa Maria?”

  “The princess,” I answered, “is doing badly; come, for God’s sake, we have to call the padre and the doctor.”

  The mistress said: “Why such a rush? Wait and tell me, where did you leave the other medicine?”

  I quickly went to the princess’s cell and saw she had taken the medicine that the mistress had mixed with opium the previous evening in her cell. The princess said to me: “See, I have not taken all the medicine!”

  And I said to her: “Just leave the medicine there and do not think about it.”