On the twenty-first of February, after the morning meal, four members of the household at Chatonay were seized with violent vomiting. Five servants, who had drunk the grounds of the coffee sweetened with a lump of brown sugar, suffered no ill effects whatsoever. In the bedchamber, coffee prepared with egg yolks had been made for the Abbé de Bouvard, an intimate friend of the family; the chambermaid had brought up the sugar bowl, and the mistress of the house had shared the mixture with her children. One man alone had taken none: Monsieur de Vocance, who was present during the repast, never broke his fast in the morning and never touched coffee. Before night fell, the abbé would be dead and his host cast under suspicion.
Monsieur de Vocance, formerly a councillor in the Parlement of Grenoble, had withdrawn from public life when that sovereign body was suppressed in 1771. He occupied his days with his private affairs and the education of his children. In the fair season, he removed his household to Chatonay, in the Bas-Dauphiné, four leagues from Vienne. There he had formed an attachment with the Abbé de Bouvard that had endured for nine years. A canon of Saint-Pierre, related to Madame de Vocance and advanced in years, the abbé possessed but modest means; the country house had become his home as much as that of his hosts, and he was accustomed to spending half the year beneath their roof.
Bouvard, ill-pleased with certain of his nephews, wished to settle a portion of his modest estate upon his friend’s children, in recognition of the hospitality and tender care he had received. Monsieur de Vocance declined this benefaction, pointing out to the testator the youngest of his nephews as the rightful heir. In the testamentary dispositions finally drawn up, his name appeared solely as executor. To Champagnac, this refusal rendered it wholly improbable that he should thereafter have sought to usurp the abbé’s estate by means of a crime. This reasoning belongs to the advocate for the defense; the act itself, recorded in the chronicle, preceded by only a few weeks the catastrophe that would transmute their friendship into a cause for suspicion.
Toward the close of December 1780, Bouvard returned to lodge at Chatonay. The Vocance family had been preparing to return to Vienne for the winter, yet they prolonged their stay by two months to indulge the desire of their friend. On February 20, 1781, the abbé requested for the morrow a dish of coffee prepared with egg yolks. Madame de Vocance ordered the meal. The cook cracked two eggs and separated the yolks upon a plate; the chambermaid went to the pantry, brought back the bowl filled with brown sugar, and dusted the yolks with it. She then carried the whole into the chamber where Madame de Vocance, her children, and her husband were assembled.
Monsieur de Vocance beat the eggs. His wife returned, blended the coffee, and poured two cups, which she filled with the prepared beverage. She kept one for herself and sent the other to Bouvard, who was still abed, carried by their ten-year-old daughter. The mother likewise administered several spoonfuls to the children gathered around her. In the meantime, the domestics had poured milk over the spent coffee grounds; the cook had added to their drink a single hard lump of brown sugar, the size of a walnut, taken from the selfsame sugar bowl. Five of them drank thereof without injury.
The effects of the breakfast soon fell upon the mother and the children. Monsieur de Vocance, who had tasted neither the eggs nor the coffee, joined them only upon hearing their cries of distress. He and his wife hastened into the abbé’s apartment: they found him upon his bed, gripped by the very same torments. The village surgeon was summoned in haste. He examined the coffeepot, the fork, and the plate, finding no suspicious residue upon any of them. Attention then turned toward the sugar bowl. The chambermaid took a pinch of the sugar and swallowed it to demonstrate her conviction that the brown sugar was innocuous; she, too, was instantly overcome with violent retching. The surgeon stirred a portion of the sugar in lukewarm water and believed he detected, in the sediment at the bottom of the glass, a particle of arsenic.
It was necessary to bring relief to the sufferers. The surgeon first administered milk, and then replaced it with tartar emetic, exhibited repeatedly and in heavy doses. Bouvard, who had consumed an entire cup, was the most desperately afflicted; the retching continued without respite. The practitioner next made him take an elixir of the Chartreux and Alicante wine. After twelve hours of agony, the abbé died. Champagnac attributes a decisive role in this demise to the treatment itself, recording that Bouvard’s final moments were divided between spiritual consolations and expressions of sorrow directed to his friend. This death carried off the man who had bestowed his affection and a portion of his worldly goods upon the Vocance children; it left the mother and the little ones upon the very brink of the same grave, from which they recovered only after a fortnight had elapsed.
The local magistrate opened a preliminary inquiry. The witnesses capable of throwing light upon the circumstances were examined; the official report detailed the progress of the meal, the use of the same sugar by the servants, and the condition of the sufferers. The judge issued no warrant. Yet, before tranquility could be restored to the house, public rumor seized upon the occurrence. Why had the abbé’s obsequies been conducted in such haste and secrecy? Monsieur de Vocance had wished to conceal the death from his ailing wife; the town gossips distorted this precaution into an evidence of guilt. It was asked whether the master of the house had not himself mingled the arsenic with the sugar, and whether jealousy or a taste for play might not explain a design to rid himself of both his family and his friend.
The clamor swelled to such a degree that the procureur général of the Parlement of Grenoble decreed a fresh investigation. Monsieur and Madame de Vocance, their domestics, neighbors, druggists, and apothecaries were subjected to interrogation. It was discovered that the former councillor had purchased arsenic several years prior to destroy rats. This revelation provided an answer to the presence of the mineral in the house, but it proved nothing as to who had introduced it into the brown sugar. The possession of a poison and the identification of its owner did not suffice to establish a felonious intent.
The magistrate at Vienne caused the cook, the chambermaid, and one of the male servants to be apprehended. Two months later, a decree of personal summons was issued against Monsieur de Vocance. The latter withdrew beyond the reach of the law, fearing, according to the chronicle, that the proceedings instituted against his servants might shortly place his own neck in jeopardy. In his absence, the judge dismissed the charges against the three domestics, but condemned the councillor to an indefinite further inquiry and to the costs of the suit. The procedure had failed to demonstrate the source of the poison; it nevertheless kept the sword suspended over the liberty and the honor of a man it could not convict.
By what means had the arsenic been mingled with the brown sugar? Champagnac replies that no man was ever able to determine it with certainty. The pantry in which the sugar was kept was also infested by vermin; the key was frequently left in the lock, and the children might have made the mixture through thoughtless imprudence. Another explanation, described by the chronicler as the more probable, arose from two depositions: the grocer had allegedly sold several pounds of brown sugar that he had carelessly poured into a sack containing, in all likelihood, the dregs of former parcels of arsenic. The household scooped from the top of the sack; the brown sugar had become contaminated only when they reached the bottom. This hypothesis accounted for an accidental origin, yet the author presents it merely as a plausible conjecture, not as an established fact.
Monsieur de Vocance lodged an appeal before the Parlement of Grenoble. The court decreed a renewed inquest and issued monitory letters to illuminate an affair in which the honor and the life of a citizen were at stake. This time, the proceedings proved favorable to the accused. The celebrated advocate Servan undertook his defense, exerting his eloquence against the prejudices that had invested a domestic misfortune with the dark colors of a crime. On July 15, 1783, the Parlement annulled the previous judgment and fully discharged Monsieur de Vocance and the three domestic servants who had been implicated in the accusation.
Bouvard was in his grave; Madame de Vocance and her children had survived a perilous sickness; the councillor had endured flight, exile, and a decree that held him under an open-ended cloud of suspicion. The brown sugar had yielded a trace of arsenic, yet the absence of proof in the initial inquest had surrendered the truth to conjectures concerning the sugar bowl, the pantry, the key, and the grocer’s sack. The final decree did not name the hand that had mingled the venom with the sugar. It merely restored to the accused the unblemished possession of their names: the indictment was dismissed against Vocance and his servants alike, and the abbé’s end remained bound to an origin that the chronicle itself was unable to unveil.