On 5 March 1803, in the midst of a game of whist, a manservant entered the drawing room where the widow Ursinus was entertaining company. Police officers were waiting in the antechamber, requesting an audience with her. Laying down her cards, she offered her apologies to the players and announced that she would shortly return. She never did. A few moments later, her guests learned that she had been conveyed to the criminal prison of Berlin, accused of having poisoned her servant, Benjamin Klein. The chapter in the New Pitaval recounts this scene in retrospect: the proceedings were soon to sever established facts from the deaths that public rumour had already laid at the mistress’s door.
Klein had fallen ill toward the end of February. He complained of his ailment to his mistress; she served him broth, then raisins. The sickness persisted unabated. On 28 February, she gave him raisins, one of which she had filled with arsenic; Klein subsequently vomited, suffering severe pains in his stomach and head. On the following day, she brought him rice pudding mixed with arsenic. When he showed his disgust, she threw the dish into the privy. Growing suspicious of the food offered to him, he quietly searched the rooms and cupboards of the house. There he discovered a packet bearing, according to the narrative, the inscription “arsenic.” While this discovery did not in itself prove who had prepared the dishes, it turned a private indisposition into a precise suspicion.
The chambermaid Schley then entered the chain of verification. Klein confided his fears to her, along with the plums he had just been given. She took them to her brother, an apprentice in a Berlin apothecary’s shop. The examination revealed poison. The head apothecary alerted the medical authorities, who referred the matter to the criminal commission; after the initial interrogations of Klein, Schley, and the other parties involved, her arrest was ordered. The chapter thus traces a tangible transmission—a packet, fruit, an apothecary's shop, and finally the police offices—without treating every early suspicion as an already proven fact.
Yet the city did not wait for the trial to broaden the indictment. Word soon spread that the widow’s husband, who had died some years before, had likewise received poison; that her aunt, Christiane Sophie Regine Witte, had died of it; and that a Dutch officer, Theodor Ragay, had met the same fate. Berlin had found in Ursinus a modern Brinvilliers. The account notes the publication, as early as 1803, of a book purported to be her confessions, while making clear that it was in truth a romance nourished by street gossip rather than any deposition from the accused. The celebrity of the suspicion threatened to usurp the verdict long before the evidence had been properly examined.
The judicial inquiry first returned to the origin of the poison and the illness of Klein. According to the record, Ursinus admitted having obtained arsenic from her physician under a pretext, claiming she required it for an estate owner living at a distance. She explained that she had intended to poison herself. This explanation was her own; it neither erased the repeated administration of substances to Klein nor the analysis of the food. The servant recounted the episodes in which she had brought him broth, raisins, rice pudding, and plums. The analyses and witness statements were compared with her own declarations. Klein did not perish from these ingestions, but the judicial record held several attempts on his life to be proven.
The question of criminal intent occupied the judges. The accused maintained that Klein had swallowed the poison without any desire on her part to kill him, within the context of her own suicidal design; she also claimed that her aim had merely been to induce vomiting in him. The chapter sets this defence against the repeated administrations, the quantities described, the agony observed after each ingestion, and the relationship of trust between mistress and servant. It observes that she offered him dishes ostensibly intended to soothe him even as his condition worsened. These were the elements from which the tribunal could assess her intent; they do not open a window into private thoughts that the case files cannot reveal.
The earlier allegations required proof of a different nature. The case of the husband had become the foremost narrative associated with the affair in the public mind, but the physicians who had attended him testified regarding his illness and his final days. Formey, Laube, and Bremer did not consider the death to have been caused by poison. They referred to a nervous stroke, declaring that they had observed neither the expected signs of intoxication nor any deterioration compatible with the quantity of poison presumed. The chemical analysis of the body detected no arsenic. The chapter, discussing these opinions in the light of later medical knowledge, lays bare the rift between the suspicions of the magistrates and the judgment of the practitioners present at the bedside.
The death of Ragay likewise gave rise to rumours and conjectural links, notably concerning the nature of the relationship between the officer and Ursinus. Witnesses were questioned and depositions examined; Ragay’s personal history fed the curiosity of the town. Yet in the final judgment recorded in the book, the evidence was insufficient to sustain a charge of poisoning. It is crucial not to treat the liaison imputed to them by rumour as an established fact, nor to mistake the mere presence of a name among suspected deaths for legally established guilt. The court was obliged to distinguish neighborhood gossip from what the formal charges could uphold.
In the case of Witte, the procedure took another course. The aunt had been buried for several months when her body was exhumed. The physicians described inflammatory lesions and changes in the internal organs; chemical tests, however, recovered no arsenic from the viscera. The experts nevertheless concluded that there was a strong probability of death caused by arsenic, relying primarily on the observed visceral damage and the circumstances of her illness. Physicians who had attended Witte during her lifetime disputed this interpretation, seeing no signs of poisoning. The chapter sets forth this contradiction: the lack of chemical detection does not end the debate, yet neither does the post-mortem anatomical examination constitute unanimous proof.
Ursinus was present when the exhumation was announced, and, according to the words attributed to her in the book, declared that she would submit to the examination: if poison were found, her judges would know she had administered the substance, but would still not know whether she had done so with intent. This phrase is reported by the compiler; it does not settle the question upon which the medical experts were divided. The court ruled that Witte’s death was an act of poisoning and convicted Ursinus on that count. This judicial finding must be approached with the caution warranted by the record: the physical findings and the medical interpretations were by no means in total accord.
On 12 September 1803, the Criminal Senate of the Kammergericht delivered the judgment reported in the chapter. Ursinus was acquitted of the two charges concerning her husband and Theodor Ragay; she was sentenced to perpetual fortress confinement for the death of Witte and the repeated attempts upon Klein. The verdict thus separated the verified facts from the groundless accusations that had circulated through Berlin.
Ursinus served her sentence at Glatz. The chapter describes a chamber fitted out in the keep, a writing desk placed by the window, and the intellectual pursuits permitted her. After nearly thirty years in the fortress, she obtained permission to reside within the town of Glatz itself. She took in a female companion and occasionally received callers; to them she spoke of her misfortunes and protested her innocence. The text goes on to recount the long years of her captivity and her death, in 1836, following an illness. It also reflects upon the legend that formed around her memory—a figure wavering between benefactress, criminal, and salonnière. These portraits belong to the writings of her contemporaries and of the compiler; they do not alter the strict bounds of the 1803 judgment.
In Berlin, the affair had begun with refused fruit, a packet found in a cupboard, and a woman excusing herself from a game of cards. It ended with a sentence of fortress confinement, without turning every municipal accusation into a verdict of guilt. Between those two moments, justice was forced to weigh the actions reported by Klein, the chemical analyses of the food, the exhumed remains, the medical reports, and the prisoner’s own statements. The narrative of the Pitaval appends its own moral commentary to these proceedings; the reader may note that voice without mistaking it for the verdict of the court. That verdict established the felonious poisoning of Witte and the attempts upon Klein; the accusations regarding her husband and Ragay were dismissed.