The Poisoning Angel

by Jean Teulé

  The state prosecutor remained silent in his armchair facing the two doctors seated side by side on the other side of his desk in chairs with twisted legs. Another, bearded man strolled into the office and, as he passed a bookshelf, turned to say, ‘At Bidard de la Noë’s? A law professor with ambitions to be Mayor of Rennes wouldn’t be messing about committing that sort of crime. Who else lives there?’

  ‘A cook from Morbihan was there at the time of all three … incidents.’

  ‘There were three?’

  ‘Yes, well, almost …’

  At last the prosecutor Malherbe spoke: ‘Monsieur the examining magistrate, rather than going round in circles, you know now where you have to go.’

  After Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle had struck twelve for noon, a thirteenth chime rang out. The examining magistrate had just pulled the cord beside the law professor’s front door. This time it was Thunderflower who opened it. On the quayside she saw two gendarmes in their blue and white uniforms – bicorn hats, and sword at their waists – flanking the bearded man who introduced himself: ‘Hippolyte Vannier, examining magistrate …’

  The stocky man watched as the servant wiped her hands on her apron.

  ‘Are you the cook?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m innocent!’

  ‘Innocent of what? No one has accused you. Is Monsieur Bidard de la Noë there?’

  ‘At noon he sat down to a stew of peas. Come back in a little while, and bring a doctor because Monsieur Théophile will no doubt be very ill.’

  The madwoman came out on to the granite doorstep and pulled the door to behind her a little way, adding in a low voice, ‘He’s about to have lunch. He’ll fall ill and perhaps die. It’s over. He won’t last the week. So much the better if he can be saved, but you’ll see that he can’t and things will go the same way as with the other three. They didn’t all die but they were all struck down. Can’t you hear a cart axle squeaking?’

  The cook continued, ‘I’ll wait until Monsieur is buried before I look for new employers. This is all just between us, isn’t it? No one must hear of our conversation. Do you promise me that?’

  Meanwhile the professor of law could be heard asking, ‘Hmm, hmm, who are you talking to, Hélène? What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing, Monsieur Théophile. Eat your peas. They’re very good,’ answered Thunderflower, while the examining magistrate ordered, ‘Let us in.’

  Bidard de la Noë was seated at table, napkin at his neck, and lifting a big spoon to his half-open mouth when Vannier cried out, ‘Don’t eat that stew, Théophile! Officers, place that dish under seal.’

  The law professor put down his spoon. ‘Hippolyte? What are you doing here, and with the cavalry?’

  ‘Monsieur the former deputy, we are here on a difficult mission concerning two domestic servants who have died in your house. Could you see me in your study for a moment?’

  They soon emerged again and, accompanied by the police, searched the cook’s room, and found inside her bag, in a cupboard, pieces of cloth, and various objects tied to one another into a long string, much to the astonishment of the examining magistrate, who also ordered the remains of vomit found in Rosalie Sarrazin’s bed to be placed under a red wax seal, along with a phial of medicine intended for her. Thunderflower was vexed.

  ‘I, too, good Messieurs, have drunk this syrup. I took a spoonful this morning as I had stomach ache, and it didn’t poison me!’

  Vannier remarked, ‘You’re in a great hurry to exonerate this phial, whereas since I’ve been here I’ve been very careful never to mention poison in front of you. Follow us. I have an order for your arrest.’

  With a wild beast’s cruelty in her eyes she turned towards Bidard de la Noë, and an everlasting regret rotted on Thunderflower’s lips: ‘Missed him by a whisker, the expert in crime.’

  ‘Did you sleep well in prison, Hélène Jégado?’

  ‘I’d just given birth, and I was strangling the child, and its lips were going cold in the dream … I was completely naked, had no body any more, I was too poor.’

  The eyebrows of the examining magistrate went soaring, and he nodded his head, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, as if his neck were a gentle spring activated by the woman’s breath as she spoke. From his seat in a dusty office whose walls were lined with shelves cluttered with files, he looked across his desk at the alleged criminal seated between two moustached policemen, one with his arms folded over his paunch. A door opened and a secretary wearing grey silk cuff protectors scuttled in with a letter – written by the examining magistrate at Pontivy – for Hippolyte Vannier, who began to read:

  22 July 1851

  Dear Colleague,

  At the news, noised at fairs, that a domestic servant with the forename Hélène was being prosecuted in Rennes for crimes of poisoning, popular rumour in Morbihan has taken a lively interest in past events that seemed strange at the time but that never gave rise to any judicial enquiry, and in which a servant also called Hélène, employed in this département at that time, was involved. It was noted that in many families who had engaged this girl, one or more persons had succumbed to a violent death (the abbé Le Drogo at Guern, the Mayor of Pontivy’s son, so many others … on 31 May 1841, near Lorient, little Marie Bréger aged two and a half, etc.) and the question was raised as to whether she and the servant you have charged are one and the same. No one here remembers the girl’s family name but people recall her birthplace: Kerhordevin in Plouhinec. With this information it would be easy to establish whether it is the same person.

  Vannier put the letter casually aside.

  ‘Where were you born, Hélène?’

  ‘Kerhordevin in Plouhinec.’

  A big summer fly, shimmering green, flew round and round in the air and settled on the nose of one of the policemen, who banished it with an upward blast of garlic-tainted breath. It went to the other officer’s hand, which smelled too much of sweat; a movement of his finger saw it off. The buzzing of its flight was irritating. The examining magistrate lifted on to his knees the bag with two open pockets, which belonged to the woman who was looking increasingly guilty. He pulled out the corner of some checked material.

  ‘This handkerchief belonged to Rosalie Sarrazin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The diagonally opposite corner of the handkerchief was tied to a cheap necklace.

  ‘Did this glass jewellery belong to Françoise Huriaux?’

  ‘No, to Rose Tessier.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course, since Françoise didn’t …’

  The necklace was threaded through the cuff buttonhole of a white sleeve. He unfolded it. ‘Is this one of Perrotte Macé’s blouses?’

  ‘Yes …’

  The buzzing nuisance of a fruitfly touched down on Hippolyte Vannier’s beard, wandering off among the black hairs. He dislodged it with the back of his hand while investigating what the bodice’s other cuff was knotted to.

  ‘Who owned this key? Perhaps it opened a cellar door.’

  ‘Right, that’s enough now!’ Thunderflower was angry, and stood up to leave. ‘And give me back that bag of keepsakes, so that I can go. I’ve got things to do, you see. I’m on a mission. What are you thinking of?’

  Standing, the two policemen roughly forced her to sit down again. The fly buzzed past the cook who, wrists still tied, extended her hands, opening her palms and snapping them shut on the insect like a lizard’s jaws. Taken by surprise, the policemen’s hands automatically went to their swords and were drawing them as Vannier gestured to them to calm down. The servant pressed her fingers to a place beneath her left breast, grimacing.

  ‘Have you hurt your hand, Hélène?’ asked the magistrate in concern.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why can I see medals pinned to service stripes and army-issue handkerchiefs in here?’

  ‘How should I know? I must have found a pile of them at a harbour somewhere. You’re surely not going to spend the whole day asking me questions about goodness knows how many bits a
nd pieces.’

  Going through the line of things strung together, Vannier gave a sigh. ‘There are sixty of them.’

  Beneath his bearded chin he stretched out a little girl’s white dress embroidered with pearls and with a lace collar.

  ‘What size would you say this is? I’d say a two-year-old, two and a half, the age Marie Bréger was when she died near Lorient just over ten years ago, on 30 May 1841, in what is doubtless the last crime covered by the period of prescription.’

  Thunderflower thought that with the little girl’s dress moving in front of his chest, the magistrate looked like a wicked hairy dwarf in disguise, one of those gnomes encountered by moonlight on the moors around the pagan standing stones, the ones who try to make you dance with them until you drop dead.

  ‘Leave me be, you Poulpiquet. You’re not going to drag me into your dance.’

  Vannier was looking for the start of the string. ‘Who was the owner of this ring with a coat of arms on it? Who did this shoelace belong to? You’re not risking anything for that because it was so long ago.’

  Outside the Palais de Justice in Rennes the atmosphere was like a market. What a hubbub! In this city, which was badly looked after in spite of its inhabitants’ booming trade, the crowd that had gathered had their shoes soiled by early December mud. Regardless of the dirt, they all wanted to be at the trial that was about to be held before the assize court of Ille-et-Vilaine. Dress hems were swishing in the mud when a newspaper seller called out: ‘The Jégado case in Le Conciliateur for Saturday 6 December 1851, fifteen centimes! Only fifteen centimes for Le Conciliateur!’

  ‘What do you mean “only”? It’s usually five centimes.’

  ‘That will be the price during the nine days of the trial. Since the stunt in the capital – last Tuesday’s coup d’état by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte – the entire national press, if it’s not already censored or banned, is writing about nothing but the dissolution of the Assemblée nationale, parliamentarians arrested in their beds, the capture of the Palais Bourbon and the barricades going up in Paris against the soldiers. Only Le Conciliateur is giving priority to the Breton poisoner and will relate everything that’s said at her trial so it will be as if you the reader were there. Fifteen centimes!’

  Despite having trebled in price, the local daily paper was selling like hot cakes, as were handbills printed with the words of a song performed by two twisted old men covered in mud with long hair stuck to it.

  With his round hat held on with tapes under the chin, the tall one-eyed man was playing the biniou, which he looked to have found in a muddy waste pit. While his left arm squeezed the inflated cowskin bag, his fingers covered any old holes on the chanter, which was, in any case, broken. With cheeks puffed to bursting point and lips too tightly pursed on the mouthpiece, he was quacking out ear-splitting B’s. At the opening of the other long tube resting on his shoulder, bubbles of beige liquid clay formed and then burst, running down the piper’s back like earthen diarrhoea. It was gross. As for the small twisted one in bragou-braz, who was also bare-chested despite the season, he was handing out the handbills with his wrongly set arm behind him. With the other arm he was taking the coins, and whinnying out the story of the heroine of the day through his smashed jaw. It was all badly written, badly played, and sung off-key, but it sold nevertheless. After the fifty-seven quatrains of the interminable lament, they went back to the beginning:

  Cheleuet-hui Coh a Youang

  En histoer man d’oh e laran

  Seanet diar Hélène Jégadeu

  E buhé a zou lan a Grimeu!

  They expressed themselves only in Breton now. Under the vault of the entrance hall in the law courts, pious women (the sanctimonious sort) were selling to those privileged to attend the trial packets of holy dust for throwing at Thunderflower – the person at the centre of the uproar in Rennes and exciting unprecedented curiosity among the Celts.

  Inside the second civic chamber with its walls decorated with intricate motifs, and varnished wooden benches on to which the noisy crowd slid, the smells of various fields hung in the air, carried on trouser hems from Ille-et-Vilaine, Côtes-du-Nord, Morbihan and even Finistère. There was also a smell of clay because, over by a wall, a young sculptor with a thin beard and sporting a cap with multi-coloured ribbons was placing his heap of supple, workable clay on the revolving plate of a turntable and adjusting its height so that he could work standing up. A reporter from Le Conciliateur stood beside him, notebook in hand, and asked the artist, ‘Who is your work intended for?’

  The sculptor was about to reply when suddenly the doors opened and the presiding judge entered, flanked by his two assessors, while the state prosecutor general and the defence advocate took up their respective positions. Overawed, the members of the jury – a farmer, a shopkeeper, a cloth salesman, a tanner, etc. – shrank into a gregarious huddle. There was a bunch of blue thistles on the desk of the judge, who gave the order for the accused to be brought in.

  That was the point at which a long shudder went through the room, from fat to thin, young to old, bourgeois to daily servants. Here was the woman people were afraid of, who had sent rumblings of alarm along the rutted roads of Brittany.

  ‘Wow!’ exclaimed the sculptor, as he lined up his tools on his plate. ‘What an air she has about her!’

  Thunderflower was frowning, her forehead low and severe; she had become as ugly as a witch escaped from a Breton moor. Her face was partially hidden by the wide hood of a cloak that surrounded her whole body, to the sculptor’s delight: ‘That means fewer details of clothes for me to shape,’ he said gratefully, piling up the heap of clay with his palms, and putting a ball on top for the head. ‘Come to that, I could do without this as well since they’ll be cutting it off!’ he joked, giving the court chronicler a dig with his elbow, which made his pen slip on the paper.

  The judge began with the obvious question of identification. ‘You the accused, were you not called by your parents Hélène Jéga—’

  Suddenly the advocate got to his feet. ‘President Boucly, the defence wishes the case to be held over to another session.’

  ‘Does it now? What an idea. And why is that, Maître Magloire Dorange?’

  ‘Huh, yes, the very idea!’ echoed the sculptor in astonishment, holding a steel wire – like for cutting butter – with which he was poised to carve into the mass of clay, after shaping the bench where the accused sat, placed on top of a pedestal.

  ‘Oh, no,’ moaned the reporter from Le Conciliateur on his left, already imagining having to go and tell his editor in chief they would have to put the price of the paper back down to five centimes.

  The young advocate, twenty-four years old, with the long hair of a Romantic poet brushing his shoulders, justified his request. ‘The first of my three witnesses, Dr Baudin, who was to tell us about the complexities of looking for arsenic in an exhumed body, was killed yesterday …’

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ cried Thunderflower.

  ‘… gunned down in Paris on the barricades of Faubourg Saint-Antoine by the soldiers of Louis-Napoleon Bo—’

  ‘What did I tell you? They throw the book at me, whereas Léon Napo—’

  ‘My second witness, the celebrated toxicologist Émile Raspail, was flung into prison this morning …’

  ‘That’ll be my fault too, you’ll see …’

  ‘… in Bourges by the new High Court of the Prince-President.’

  ‘Where’s Bourges?’ Hélène asked.

  ‘The accused is to be quiet,’ ordered the judge. ‘And you can drop that hooligan attitude.’

  ‘On 2 December, France was murdered …’ mourned the young republican defence advocate, with tears in his eyes.

  ‘France? But I don’t even know where that is. Is it in Brittany?’

  The public mocked this piece of Celtic wit by pelting the accused with their open packets of holy dust, which flew everywhere.

  ‘Finally,’ coughed the downcast advocate, enveloped in a grey cloud,
which he tried to dispel with his hand, ‘my third witness, Dr Guépin, who was to give me the aid of his scientific knowledge, has been detained in Nantes in his capacity as counsel general to protest against the violation of the Constitution that occurred in Paris on Tuesday …’

  ‘What a twist of fate! It’s true that’s a very bad start for the defence, destroys it even,’ conceded the court chronicler.

  This was not the opinion of the judge, who, after a word or two with his assessors, pronounced on the subject of the postponement.

  ‘Maître Magloire Dorange, the whole of France is currently moved by the coup d’état, but the cause of the country is still standing. There are interests common to us all that we must safeguard. Public peace, the peace of our cities, must above all be assured. The tutelary power in society must not abandon its mission. Political providence will decide the rest. As for your experts, only called to give their opinion as chemists, we think that their assistance is not indispensable to you. The trial will proceed. The court rejects your request.’

  Extremely disappointed, the novice advocate sat down complaining timidly, ‘None the less you might take into account the fact that right now in Paris, where I was born, people like my father, who makes shoes there, are fighting for …’ Seeing this, the very experienced prosecutor stood up, displaying the full length of his black robe. He was apparently not at all dismayed by the arrival of the dictatorship and, eyes like a hawk, began harrying mild Magloire Dorange in powerful theatrical tones.

  ‘My dear new colleague, who seem too easily knocked off balance and rendered silent for one with your role, you are Parisian? And your father is a shoemaker? Well, my friend, rather than wearing out your robe on the defence bench opposite me to no purpose, would you like some good advice? Go back to Paris and follow your father’s example on the barricades: make shoes! Ha, ha!’