On November 22, 1867, the landlady of Mathilde von Ledske entered the bedchamber she had not visited since the preceding evening. Two teacups, still half-full, stood waiting upon the table. The teapot had vanished; the key to the door was likewise missing. Between the table and the sofa, the young woman lay prone, her head resting against the edge of the seat as though she had slipped gradually to the floor. A thin rivulet of blood had escaped her lips. Nothing bore the mark of a struggle.
On the previous evening, Mathilde had received a caller newly arrived from Vienna. They had passed the afternoon in each other’s company and were, so Mathilde declared, to attend the theater together. Towards half-past six, the foreign lady inquired of the widow Hartmann whether the staircase was lit and whether her daughter was at home; she desired a carriage. Madame Hartmann stepped out for five minutes to fetch one; upon her return, the door was locked fast. She saw neither her lodger nor the visitor again, and presumed the two ladies had set out on foot.
On the morrow, Mathilde failed to appear. The landlady fancied she had slept at her companion’s quarters, until word came that the stranger had departed her hotel alone that very evening of the 21st. Hartmann and her daughter gained entry through a side door. The supper stood precisely as it had been left: pastries, cold meats, fruit, and the two half-drained cups. The tea had been poured into a glass vessel; the teapot was gone. The candle had not burned to its socket: a hand had extinguished it.
The medical examiner inspected the body two days later. Outward marks offered no clue to the cause of death. Upon opening the stomach, the physicians detected a characteristic odor, altered blood, and pathological signs they attributed to prussic acid. The beverages remaining upon the table—tea, milk, and rum—contained no venom; chemical analysis, however, revealed its presence within the gastric contents and the blood. The report concluded that a portion of the cyanide had been absorbed into the organs and that the victim had suffered an almost instantaneous loss of consciousness. Costly jewels and a gold watch remained undisturbed. Several letters and a signet ring were missing. In the eyes of the magistracy, robbery was out of the question.
The foreign lady had made her appearance in Munich on the morning of November 20, putting up at the Hotel of the Four Seasons under the name of “Baroness Marie Bay.” She had ordered wine, caused it to be decanted into two small phials, and secured theater tickets, announcing her intention to remain two days. On the night of the crime, she returned to the hostelry in the utmost agitation, demanded her reckoning, and alleged that a telegram from her husband summoned her immediately to Paris. No such dispatch had arrived. She distributed bountiful gratuities, stepped into a carriage with the very man who had escorted her to the play the night before, and took the train for Vienna.
Upon her apprehension, her true name came to light: Julie Ebergenyi, a lady of the noble chapter of Brünn. The dead woman, too, concealed another condition. Mathilde von Ledske was in truth Countess Chorinsky, the estranged consort of Gustav, an Austrian officer. For years she had dwelt far from him, first beneath her in-laws’ roof, later in sundry towns; by the autumn of 1867, she rented a modest room in Munich. The revelation of this wedlock cast the crime across two distinct judicial theaters: the Bavarian inquest into the homicide, the Austrian prosecution of Julie, and, looming behind both, the designs of a man resolved to marry anew.
Gustav Chorinsky and Julie had met in the spring. They had exchanged vows of betrothal, and the Count had formally solicited her father’s consent to their union. Yet Mathilde still drew breath; a dissolution of the marriage appeared utterly unattainable. Separation had left the legal bond intact, and the sum of twelve thousand florins settled by Gustav remained irrevocably tied to his wife’s maintenance. Mathilde’s own letters retraced the bitter decline of an early devotion into dread and mortification: she wrote that her husband had cast her off, commanded her to efface herself from the world, and informed her in plain terms of his resolve to wed an heiress of substantial fortune.
According to the documents preserved in the Pitaval, Julie departed for Munich under a false identity, furnished with papers and a letter of recommendation calculated to grant her access to Mathilde. On November 26, when a police commissary presented himself at her lodgings, she blanched, trembled, and begged leave to dress. At the station, she ultimately confessed to having procured cyanide from a photographer and poured it into the Countess’s tea whilst they were drinking together. Yet she broke off abruptly: “I have said it was I; write it down if you will, I am plunging myself into ruin. A certain person in Munich conceived the design.”
Her testimony thereafter shifted continually. Mathilde, she now asserted, had merely succumbed to a sudden swoon; a certain Baroness Bay, and later a shadowy Victoria Horvath, were said to have furnished the phials or brewed the poison. The police traced neither the one nor the other. Julie maintained that the fictitious Horvath had entrusted her with the teapot, a key, and a parcel, which she had subsequently secreted. Yet her chambermaid testified that Julie had bade her wash a teapot; moreover, a sealed packet surrendered to her sister was found to contain letters from Mathilde and a small phial of cyanide. Among her effects, the search yielded the Countess’s signet ring; one of the seized keys fit the lock of the victim’s commode.
The Count, placed under arrest in Munich, initially disclaimed all knowledge of the journey’s fatal purpose. The prosecution, however, marshaled a chain of overt acts which, it argued, had smoothed the path for the crime: he had caused his wife’s lodging to be ferreted out, procured a passport and a letter of introduction, changed currency for Julie, designated her lodgings, and arranged her conveyance to the railway terminus. A confidant, Rampacher, had been dispatched to Munich to ascertain whether Mathilde was truly dead; he returned bearing confirmation and alerted the police. In the letters retained by the court, Gustav subsequently urged Julie to cleave to a concerted tale and on no account to waver from her declarations.
Julie stood her trial in Vienna. The public prosecutor demanded the scaffold; the defense did not contest the fact of the poisoning, but pleaded the irresistible ascendancy of Gustav, arguing that the statutory grounds for capital punishment were not met. On April 25, 1868, the tribunal found her guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced her to twenty years’ imprisonment in a fortress, with a week of solitary confinement at the close of each year and the forfeiture of her nobility. The judgment underscored the artifice by which she had wormed her way into Mathilde’s confidence, while granting as extenuating circumstances her state of emotional subjection, the instigation of a third party, and an unblemished past. Her appeal was dismissed.
On June 22, Gustav answered before a jury in Munich. The question was no longer merely what he had desired, but what he had performed. Medical experts clashed over his sanity; the defense sought to portray his contradictions, violent passions, and erratic impulses as symptoms of an affliction that extinguished all criminal responsibility. To the interrogatory of instigation, the jury answered in the negative; to that of participation, they answered in the affirmative: he had assisted Julie, prior to the act, by his counsels and by supplying the means for her journey, her approach to his wife, and her retreat.
The court sentenced him to twenty years’ hard labor in a fortress, followed by perpetual banishment from the realm. The penalty was mitigated out of regard for his military rank and the honorable record of service pleaded by his superiors. Julie had been condemned as the hand that struck the blow; Gustav, though acquitted of direct instigation, was punished for having sustained and prepared the enterprise. In the aftermath of these dual verdicts, the tea, the phials, and the keys ceased to be mere stage properties: they bound the locked chamber in Munich to the promise of a bridal bed that only murder could unlock.