Rosalie was to be married. Before the nuptials could take place, a reckoning was required: to establish what had come from her mother, to examine the property, and to settle what was rightfully owed to her. In her father’s shop on the Rue de la Harpe, this prospect had provoked a violent altercation. Four days later, the young woman was dead. The father spoke of a failing business, hinted at despair, and then turned suspicion toward another woman of the household. The inquest would have to unravel his shifting versions before returning to the accounts that the marriage had rendered inevitable.
On 21 Nivôse Year XI, in January 1803, the surgeon Caron was summoned to the home of the grocer Trumeau at around seven o'clock in the evening. Rosalie, his elder daughter, was twenty-five years of age. She had been suffering from repeated vomiting since morning. Caron found her conscious, capable of answering his questions, and prescribed a draught. Less than two hours after his departure, Marie, the younger daughter, came in search of him: her sister had just expired. The swiftness of her demise astonished him. He returned immediately to the Rue de la Harpe.
In the bedchamber, the sheets and blankets had been neatly tucked around the body. Caron wished to make a formal declaration before the magistrate and urged the father to accompany him. Trumeau refused. According to the words recorded in the chronicle, he cited the expenses, the embarrassment, and what the neighborhood might think. The following day, the surgeon renewed his request; the refusal remained firm. Caron went alone to the magistrate of public safety, who proceeded to the grocer’s shop accompanied by another surgeon, Buraud. The affair had crossed the threshold of the home because a medical practitioner refused to acquiesce to an unexplained death.
Trumeau recounted the course of the day. His daughter had been ill since morning; he had ordered tea to be prepared for her, and had then sent for Caron when her condition worsened. He placed the moment of death shortly after she had taken the prescribed remedy. Rosalie had, he added, no cause for sorrow: she was soon to wed. He spoke, nonetheless, of the shop's failing trade, which had rendered the family far less prosperous than in former days. The explanation was not yet a direct accusation, but it opened a path: one might suppose that she had taken her own life.
The surgeons noted signs they deemed suspicious and subsequently performed an autopsy. They collected the stomach contents and placed them under seal, bearing the marks of both the judicial police and Trumeau. The investigators also seized what remained of the medicinal draught. Questioned regarding the substances kept in his shop, the grocer admitted to possessing arsenic, explaining that he had purchased it long ago to eradicate rats. The packet was seized in turn. Experts from the laboratory of the School of Medicine identified arsenic in the specimens. Their report, as reconstituted by Champagnac, concluded that death had been caused by poisoning.
This finding did not yet designate the guilty party. The father then took another step before the magistrate. He spoke of Françoise Chantal, who had entered the household following his wife's death. Rosalie had reportedly resented her presence; two bitter quarrels had set them against one another. Trumeau added, however, that peace appeared to have been restored for the past month. Shortly thereafter, he reverted to the hypothesis of suicide and openly reproached his daughter for having cast him into such distress. Neighbors and investigators alike took note of his apparent lack of grief. The chronicler regarded this as damning evidence; the inquiry, however, did not rest upon the mere countenance of a father.
Trumeau and Françoise were placed under arrest. The preliminary examination gathered testimony concerning the daily lives of the two daughters. Their father had reportedly subjected them to harsh privations and treated Rosalie with marked hostility, rebuking her for resembling her mother and for having conspired with her against him. The dispute that had broken out four days prior to the death now assumed a central importance. Rosalie had demanded a formal accounting of the maternal estate. She particularly disapproved of the arrangements made to mortgage a house forming part of that inheritance. Following this scene, Trumeau had allegedly refused to speak to her until the eve of her death.
Marie’s testimony introduced another crucial element. She had tasted the beverages prepared for her sister and had in turn suffered severe pains and vomiting. She had survived. Her ordeal could not reveal what had occurred outside her presence, but it tied the afflictions of both young women to the refreshments served within the household. The hypothesis of a desperate act by Rosalie thus encountered an insurmountable obstacle. The younger sister, whom Trumeau himself described as utterly incapable of an outrage, became a living witness to the day's toxic effects.
Françoise Chantal ultimately testified against him. She had been living with the grocer in an intimacy documented by the chronicle, and she declared that he had confessed to her having poisoned his daughter. She explained her long silence by the agony she felt at denouncing a man with whom she had shared her life. She also reported that he had urged her to maintain the story of a suicide. Such were her statements: words attributed to Trumeau by a woman who was herself under arrest, which had to be weighed against the corroborating evidence. Champagnac notes the profound relief she allegedly experienced after her confession; yet this change of heart could not substitute for a rigorous examination of the facts.
The magistrate now possessed the conclusions of the medical experts, Marie's account, the testimony of Françoise, and the documented dispute over the inheritance. Trumeau’s explanations regarding the arsenic kept in the shop were also confronted with the physical evidence seized. In the eyes of the chronicler, the financial motive rendered the sequence of events fully intelligible. No inventory had ever been drawn up upon the mother’s death. The impending marriage demanded an accounting and the delivery of a dowry; the funds that Trumeau had continued to enjoy were about to pass into other hands. The prosecution contended that he had resolved to destroy the one who demanded them.
An earlier demise was brought back to light. In Year II, a sixteen-year-old niece, Marie-Jeanne Cervenon, had died beneath his roof. At that time, a surgeon had already judged the circumstances suspicious and requested the intervention of a police commissioner. Trumeau had called upon another practitioner, and the body had not been opened. He had been the young girl's legal guardian and had taken, according to the narrative, no measures to ascertain her estate. Champagnac suggests an earlier poisoning. This passage must be taken for what it was: an old suspicion revived by Rosalie’s death, rather than a second conviction, of which the record makes no mention.
Trumeau continued to profess his innocence. He once again abandoned the notion that his daughter had acted alone and cast the blame upon Françoise. Proclaiming his own blamelessness and maintaining that Marie was incapable of guilt, he asserted that the responsibility must rest entirely with his companion. This reasoning failed to sway the jury. Their verdict was unanimous: they found him guilty of the poisoning of Rosalie. The criminal court sentenced him to death, clad in the red shirt reserved for parricides on the journey to the scaffold. His appeal was dismissed on 17 Germinal Year XI, and the sentence was subsequently carried out. The chronicle leaves the ultimate judicial fate of Françoise unrecorded.
The case had opened with a father's reluctance to register a declaration of death. It had lengthened into a web of conflicting explanations that blamed in turn the victim’s despair and the malice of a rival woman. At trial, the accounts Rosalie had demanded reclaimed their rightful place alongside the physical evidence and the witnesses' words. She was not merely the stricken patient of that final evening: she was a young woman on the threshold of marriage, who sought to claim her lawful share of the estate left by her mother. The jury’s verdict imparted a terrible and lasting gravity to that interrupted reckoning.