Parfait Devaux died the day after executing a codicil that granted certain legacies to a Dame de Noinville. His demise, occurring after alarming symptoms, aroused grave suspicions of poisoning; yet the doubts that set the inquest in motion were never sufficient to determine who had brought about his end. Two separate actions were thereupon instituted side by side, the one criminal, the other civil. The former saw the cooper Durand and his wife released upon provisional liberty after a year’s imprisonment, for want of further charges; the latter, more than twenty years after the decease, stripped her of the inheritance on grounds of unworthiness. This civil decree was by no means a criminal conviction for the administration of poison.
Devaux and the Garnier brothers had been boarders together at the Collège de Navarre. This friendship endured long after their studies had ceased. One of the Garniers married; upon the birth of his daughter, Devaux jested that he would one day make her his wife. He soon fell into the habit of addressing Marie-Marguerite Garnier by that title, and the child, as soon as she could speak, styled him her husband. This playful familiarity persisted until Devaux’s death, despite the journeys that occasionally took him far afield and the offices he subsequently purchased in the households of the King and Queen.
Marie-Marguerite married Nicolas Durand, a master cooper. Devaux’s associations with the young woman grew markedly more frequent when, about 1737 or 1738, he sold his offices to take up residence in Paris. She and her mother were wont to repair to his lodging early in the morning, dine there, and remain until nightfall. Observers noted between Devaux and Dame Durand an intimacy well calculated to nurture suspicion; the husband, according to Champagnac, was fully aware of what transpired and raised no complaint. The chronicler strongly implies an illicit commerce, yet the record does not transform such an interpretation into proof of a capital crime.
Devaux became a valetudinarian. Dame Durand redoubled her attentions, refusing to permit any other hand to administer the prescribed remedies. On February 25, 1740, Devaux drew up a holographic will appointing her his universal legatee. He lodged a duplicate with a notary, fearful lest his legal heirs might purloin the original, and preserved the initial draft among his personal papers. A codicil subsequently confirmed the testament, while also granting legacies to the heirs of both the maternal and paternal lines, on condition that they consent to the execution of the principal bequests.
On December 15, 1741, he executed an additional deed of gift in favour of Dame Durand, assigning her an annuity of twelve hundred livres, representing a principal sum of twenty-four thousand livres. The instrument recorded his esteem for her and her kin; it stipulated that the donee might dispose of this sum without her husband’s marital authorization, though Devaux reserved the usufruct thereof unto himself for the duration of his natural life. She could therefore enter into enjoyment of it only after his decease, precisely as she could inherit under the testament only upon that same contingency.
An anonymous letter had previously endeavoured to warn Devaux against the young woman. He dismissed the denunciation outright. Champagnac suggests he was blinded by his affection; the document, however, does not permit us to read his inner thoughts, and the historical narrative attributes no further content to the missive beyond this caution. It was also reported that he had contemplated marriage with a widow, the Dame de Noinville—a union that would have imperilled the earlier dispositions had legitimate issue been born of the match. On November 21, 1742, he drew up a second codicil in this lady’s favour.
On the following day, Devaux expired. The violent symptoms of his final illness prompted immediate suspicions of poisoning; his body was opened, and the medical practitioners declared that corrosive substances had caused his death. On November 24, the King’s Prosecutor at the Châtelet lodged a formal complaint to obtain a second medical inspection and an official inquest. The physicians and surgeons of the Châtelet examined the remains; they noted a gangrenous stomach and marked lesions upon its lining, concluding that death was due to a corrosive poison. Yet this determination as to the physical cause of death pointed to no specific perpetrator.
An initial inquiry was opened. The public prosecutor deemed it so inconclusive that he demanded the proceedings be carried further. Dame Durand, her mother, and one of Devaux’s lackeys were taken into custody. Two supplementary witnesses were heard. André Boisval, a grocer and druggist, declared that the cooper Durand had come to his shop to purchase arsenic for the purpose of destroying rats. Yet his testimony altered upon crucial particulars when subjected to formal verification: at first, he claimed to have sold an ounce of arsenic; later, he altered his statement to half an ounce of corrosive sublimate. Both the nature of the substance and its measure varied from one deposition to the next.
Champagnac asserts that the confrontation between Boisval and Dame Durand threw the tradesman into utter confusion, and that this interview might have operated toward her complete exoneration had it been recorded with fidelity. He accuses the clerk of court, Marot, of having offered the accused woman a “favourable turn” in the drafting of the record in exchange for a bribe, and of turning vindictively against her upon her refusal, suppressing exculpatory details in his minutes of the confrontation. These accusations rest entirely upon the chronicler’s narration; unsupported by independent documentary evidence, they cannot be accepted as established judicial fact.
Boisval subsequently absconded; the author presumes that dread of prosecution for perjury and a guilty conscience prompted his flight, though such motives remain purely conjectural. It was nevertheless upon his deposition that the cooper Durand had been arrested. Husband and wife languished in prison for a whole year under an order of further inquiry. No fresh evidence coming to light at the expiration of this term, they were released upon their own recognisance, bound to reappear whenever justice should summon them. The chronicle records neither a definitive acquittal nor any criminal sentence establishing that they had poisoned Devaux.
Concurrently with this criminal inquest, Devaux’s collateral heirs brought suit to set aside both the testament and the deed of gift. The civil litigation proved exceedingly protracted, the rulings being contested by appeals on either side. These deeds of bounty conferred upon Dame Durand substantial fortunes, of which she could enjoy the fruit only after her benefactor’s death. The dispute over the estate did not turn solely upon the circumstances of his demise: the heirs challenged her capacity as legatee and the validity of the gift, while the criminal proceedings had failed to assign guilt for the alleged poisoning.
In 1765, more than twenty years after Devaux’s death, Dame Durand pleaded the statute of limitations to obtain execution of the testament. Her petition was declared inadmissible and she was condemned in costs; the issue of unworthiness was decided against her, upon the sole ground that she lay under suspicion of having poisoned her benefactor. This civil decree stripped her of the estate Devaux had intended to bequeath to her. Suspicion thus determined the descent of the property, though it can in no wise be equated with a penal conviction declaring that she had administered the poison.
The affair left two irreconcilable conclusions. Devaux died of a corrosive poison according to the medical men consulted; yet those who procured or administered it were never identified by the courts. The cooper and his wife, after a year of incarceration, were released under provisional terms, and no final judgment in the criminal chamber is on record. In the civil courts, by contrast, Dame Durand was excluded from the succession as unworthy by reason of suspicion alone. This civil resolution does not retrospectively resolve the question of the crime: it merely demonstrates that an accusation may exert its full force upon an inheritance even when the criminal law has failed to establish guilt.