The story of Marie Lafarge reads like a gothic novel. A well-bred, attractive woman living in a mansion in the country, married to a man she doesn’t love, sounds like a tale we’d all like to read. And read, people did. Her case was one of the first trials to be followed by the public through newspapers. She was the first person to largely be convicted due to direct forensic and toxicology evidence.
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According to Jenni Davis’ book Poison A History (affiliate link), Marie was born to wealthy parents, but her father died when she was 12 years old. Her mother remarried but died when Marie was only 18. She was raised with all the drawing-room charms of any young lady of the day and well educated, too. After her mother’s death, she was sent to live with her aunt, who found her difficult to live with, claiming that she was too “impractical and dreamy.”
The next five years, her aunt tried to get her married off. She paraded her in front of every man around, but she was never pretty enough or wealthy enough to land herself a husband. So, the aunt decided to hire a matrimonial agent to plan a match for Marie secretly. It wasn’t long before they found Charles Pouch Lafarge.
Charles was 28 when he met Marie. He wasn’t a handsome man, described his awkward and overweight, but the matchmaker told Marie’s aunt and uncle that he lived in a lovely chateau and had a promising future.
Though Marie wasn’t exactly excited about the match, she went on with the marriage, and the two were wed on August 10th, 1839. Three days later, they arrived at their home La Glandier. But the house was far from what Marie had been promised. She had expected this beautiful chateau with all the modern conveniences, but that simply wasn’t the case. The house was dilapidated, dreary, and infested with rats. That very first night, after meeting an unfriendly mother-in-law, Marie locked herself in her room and wrote Charles a letter. In the letter, she begged for him to release her from the marriage, claiming to be in love with someone else. She felt betrayed that things weren’t how she’d been promised. Charles persuaded her to stay for a little longer, promising that things would improve in time. Reluctantly, Marie decided to stay.
After a time, Marie’s mother-in-law allowed her to set the house the way that she liked. Charles purchased her a piano, and Marie began ordering fancier food. She even made a friend with Charles’ niece Emma Pontier.
After being married for three months, Charles went to Paris on business. Marie seemed to have accepted her fate and was even writing Charles warm and loving letters. While he was there, she sent him his favorite cake. After eating the cake, Charles became incredibly sick. He had cramps and vomiting but believed the cake had gone bad because of the long journey there. He still wasn’t feeling well when he came home, and after his first meal being back at the house, he felt even sicker.
Charles’s mother and Marie did everything they could think of to help him. At night they could hear the rats running across the rafters. Marie had asked the servants to pick her up some arsenic, which was placed in the hallways and the corners to kill them once and for all hopefully. Meanwhile, Charles continued to get sicker and sicker. Marie fed and tended to him, but the family had started to become suspicious, especially after a family friend told his mother she believed she saw Marie putting a white powder in his eggnog. They warned Charles not to eat or drink anything Marie brought him. After one month of horrible suffering, Charles died on January 16th of 1840.
Ten days after Charles died, Marie was arrested. About four doctors had treated Charles. They tested samples of the chicken broth and eggnog that Marie had been feeding him and found them to have been poisoned with arsenic. They also tested the arsenic paste samples that Marie had made to place around the house to kill the rats and found that it had only flour and water in it, which explains why the rats were never eradicated.
Marie said, “The small quantity of arsenic…had not been enough to exterminate our little colony of rats; they had become still more odious to my husband.” (Davis, 93)
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Charles’s stomach was saved to be tested for arsenic, which they found. Later during the trial, Charles’s body was exhumed, and other organs were tested for arsenic. At that time, no other organs showed signs of poison.
The prosecutor asked that a world expert in toxicology by the name Mathieu Orfila come from Paris and examine Lafarge’s remains and test the organs again for arsenic.
“Madame Lafarge was brought into court on Thursday, in an arm-chair, so pale and weak that she seemed scarcely alive.” –From the journal of Thomas Raikes, a commentator of the trial (Davis, 95)
And again, as if stepping from a novel, the scene was set before them. A thunderstorm rumbled as Orfila confirmed that, yes, arsenic was found. “On August 30th,1841, Marie Lafarge was found guilty and sentenced to a life of hard labor. She had to be carried from the courtroom.” (Davis, 95)
From beginning to end, the trial for Marie Lafarge had taken nearly a year. Newspaper articles wrote about Marie, and public opinion went one way one week and the other way the next. She’d become popular with young men, who wrote her and promised to save her from this unfair fate and proposed marriage.
Marie wrote a memoir while imprisoned that would go on to become a bestseller in France, England, and America. In it, she proclaimed her innocence.
Some believed that Marie was innocent, so much so in fact, that France seemed to be divided on the subject. Some argue that Charles may have had cholera, which displayed the same symptoms—such as cramps, vomiting.
In addition, the Marsh test used to detect arsenic had only just been developed upon Marie’s trial. And with the test reading once negative and later positive, it does make you wonder if there was any possibility Marie could have been innocent.
We will never know.
Marie served 11 years in prison, but hard labor strongly affected her health. She’d contracted tuberculosis and was released by Napoleon III in June of 1852. She died six months later at the age of 36.
Music:
“A Hoax” by Mary Riddle: https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/YgEoWTVfYv/
Ghostpocalypse – 6 Crossing the Threshold by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
