Part 16 (1/2)

”But, monsieur,” Josephine protested, ”that's amazing! The potage ought to be better than usual this morning, because I made a liaison for it with three egg-yolks!”

M. Boursier called his wife, and told her he couldn't eat his potage au riz. It was poisoned. Mme Boursier took a spoonful of it herself, she said, and saw nothing the matter with it. Whereupon her husband, saying that if it was all right he ought to eat it, took several spoonfuls more.

”The poor man,” said his widow, ”always had a bad taste in his mouth, and he could not face his soup.” Then, she explained, he became very sick, and brought up what little of the soup he had taken, together with flots de bile.

All this chatter of poison, particularly by Kostolo and the widow, together with the persistent rumours of an adulterous a.s.sociation between the pair, gave colour to suspicions of a criminal complicity, and these in process of time came to the ears of the officers of justice. The two doctors were summoned by the Procureur-General, who questioned them closely regarding Boursier's illness. To the mind of the official everything pointed to suspicion of the widow. Word of the growing suspicion against her reached Mme Boursier, and she now hastened to ask the magistrates for an exhumation and a post-mortem examination.

This did not avert proceedings by the Procureur. It was already known that she had refused the autopsy suggested by the two doctors, and it was stated that she had hurried on the burial.

Kostolo and the Widow Boursier were called before the Juge d'instruction.

II

There is about the Greek Kostolo so much gaudy impudence and barefaced roguery that, in spite of the fact that the main concern of these pages is with women, I am constrained to add his portrait to the sketches I have made in ill.u.s.tration. He is of the gallery in which are Jingle and Montague Tigg, with this difference--that he is rather more sordid than either.

Brought before the Procureur du Roi, he impudently confessed that he had been, and still was, Mme Boursier's lover. He told the judge that in the lifetime of her husband Mme Boursier had visited him in his rooms several times, and that she had given him money unknown to her husband.

Mme Boursier at first denied the adulterous intimacy with Kostolo, but the evidence in the hands of the Procureur was too much for her. She had partially to confess the truth of Kostolo's statement in this regard.

She emphatically denied, however, that she had ever even thought of, let alone agreed to, marriage with the Greek. She swore that she had been intimate with Kostolo only once, and that, as far as giving him money was concerned, she had advanced him but one small sum on his IOU.

These confessions, together with the information which had come to him from other investigations, served to increase the feeling of the Procureur that Boursier's death called for probing. He issued an exhumation order, and on the 31st of July an autopsy on the body of Boursier was carried out by MM. Orfila and Gardy, doctors and professors of the Paris faculty of medicine. Their finding was that no trace existed of any disorders to which the death of Boursier might be attributed--such, for example, as cerebral congestion, rupture of the heart or of a larger vessel--but that, on the other hand, they had come upon a sufficiency of a.r.s.enic in the intestines to have caused death.

On the 2nd of August the same two professors, aided by a third, M.

Barruel, carried out a further examination of the body. Their testimony is highly technical. It is also rather revolting. I am conscious that, dealing, as I have had to, with so much a.r.s.enical poisoning (the favourite weapon of the woman murderer), a gastric odour has been unavoidable in many of my pages--perhaps too many. For that reason I shall refrain from quoting either in the original French or in translation more than a small part of the professors' report. I shall, however, make a lay shot on the evidence it supplies. Boursier's interior generally was in foul condition, which is not to be explained by any ingestion of a.r.s.enic, but which suggests chronic and morbid pituitousness. The marvel is that the man's digestion functioned at all.

This insanitary condition, however, was taken by the professors, as it were, in their stride. They concentrated on some slight traces of intestinal inflammation.

”One observed,” their report went on, about the end of the ileum some grains of a whitish appearance and rather stubbornly attached. These grains, being removed, showed all the characteristics of white a.r.s.enic oxide. Put upon glowing charcoal they volatilized, giving off white smoke and a garlic odour. Treated with water, they dissolved, and the solution, when brought into contact with liquid hydrosulphuric acid, precipitated yellow sulphur of a.r.s.enic, particularly when one heated it and added a few drops of hydrochloric acid.

These facts (including, I suppose, the conditions I have hinted at) allowed them to conclude (a) that the stomach showed traces of inflammation, and (b) that the intestinal ca.n.a.l yielded a quant.i.ty of a.r.s.enic oxide sufficient to have produced that inflammation and to have caused death.

The question now was forward as to where the a.r.s.enic found in the body had come from. Inquiry established the fact that on the 15th of May, 1823--that is to say, several weeks before his death--Boursier had bought half a pound of a.r.s.enic for the purpose of destroying the rats in his shop cellars. In addition, he had bought prepared rat-poison. Only a part of those substances had been used. The remaining portions could not be found about the shop, nor could Mme Boursier make any suggestions for helping the search. She declared she had never seen any a.r.s.enic about the house at all.

There was, however, sufficient gravity in the evidences on hand to justify a definite indictment of Mme Boursier and Nicolas Kostolo, the first of having poisoned her husband, and the second of being accessory to the deed.

The pair were brought to trial on the 27th of November, 1823, before the Seine a.s.size Court, M. Hardouin presiding. The prosecution was conducted by the Avocat-General, M. de Broe. Maitre Couture defended Mme Boursier.

Maitre Theo. Perrin appeared for Kostolo.

The case created great excitement, not only in Paris, but throughout the country. Another poisoning case had not long before this occupied the minds of the public very greatly--that of the hypocritical Castaing for the murder of Auguste Ballet. Indeed, there had been a lot of poisoning going on in French society about this period. Political and religious controversy, moreover, was rife. The populace were in a mood either to praise extravagantly or just as extravagantly to condemn. It happened that rumour convinced them of the guilt of the Veuve Boursier and Kostolo, and the couple were condemned in advance. Such was the popular spite against Mme Boursier and Kostolo that, it is said, Maitre Couture at first refused the brief for the widow's defence. He had already made a success of his defence of a Mme Lavaillaut, accused of poisoning, and was much in demand in cases where women sought judicial separation from their husbands. People were calling him ”Providence for women.” He did not want to be nicknamed ”Providence for poisoners.” But Mme Boursier's case being more clearly presented to him he took up the brief.

The accused were brought into court.

Kostolo was about thirty years of age. He was tall, distinctly good-looking in an exotic sort of way, with his dark hair, complexion, and flas.h.i.+ng eyes. He carried himself grandly, and was elegantly clad in a frac noir. Not quite, as Army men were supposed once to say, ”the clean potato,” it was easy enough to see that women of a kind would be his ready victims. It was plain, in the court, that Master Nicolas thought himself the hero of the occasion.

There was none of this flamboyance about the Widow Boursier. She was dressed in complete mourning, and covered her face with a handkerchief.

It was manifest that, in the phrase of the crime reporters, ”she felt her position keenly.” The usual questions as to her name and condition she answered almost inaudibly, her voice choked with sobs.

Kostolo, on the contrary, replied in organ tones. He said that he was born in Constantinople, and that he had no estate.

The acte d'accusation was read. It set forth the facts of the adulterous a.s.sociation of the two accused, of the money lent by Mme Boursier to Kostolo, of their meetings, and all the suspicious circ.u.mstances previous to the death of the epicier.