The poison had been delivered to the woman it was meant to kill. The silver box, the petty sums advanced to the manservant, the promises attending the bargain: all had reached Madame Chénié before her luncheon was ever imperiled. She could henceforth watch her daughter-in-law enter, fully aware of what the younger woman had sought from a domestic. The dinner of the first of January would wear the outward guise of a family gathering. In an adjoining room, two men would stand waiting, listening in secret.
A few years earlier, this same family had already been torn asunder by the marriage itself. Levaillant, an officer quartered at Saint-Omer in the house of a former merchant named Brutinel, had resolved to marry his host’s daughter. His mother, who had remarried Monsieur Chénié, a tax collector in Paris, opposed the match. Having attained the age of twenty-five, the son overrode her refusal by having the formal respectful summonses served as prescribed by law. The union was solemnized on the 10th of Thermidor, Year XII. The legal process had sanctioned the wedding; it could not compel the parents to share in the promised felicity.
That felicity was soon contested between the spouses themselves. In a letter of January 1808 reproduced by Champagnac, Adèle Levaillant reproached her husband for the modesty of their prospects. Refusing the station of a clerk’s wife, she reminded him of the grand hopes he had fostered and demanded a position worthy of her ambitions. The chronicler drew from this a lengthy moral against the education of young women. The letter bespoke, more simply, an estrangement: two beings who no longer attached the same meaning to the life they had pledged to share.
Following the campaign of 1809, Levaillant returned to Paris, and his wife joined him there. She was introduced to the Chéniés. The archival account presents her as having been received with benevolence; during her interrogations, she would describe, on the contrary, humiliations and refusals of assistance that allegedly nurtured her hatred. These conflicting versions of domestic life would shadow the entire proceeding. They did not account in the same manner for the shift from disappointed expectations to a criminal design. Yet both placed money, dependence, and resentment at the very heart of these family visits.
The lady’s maid, Magnien, became the first confidante of the plot. According to her deposition, her mistress disclosed to her, in December, an intention to poison her mother-in-law. Adolphe, a domestic in the Chénié household and Magnien’s companion, was to serve as intermediary. He affirmed that he promptly forewarned the threatened party. Adèle, for her part, maintained that both servants had urged her on. From the outset, those who spearheaded the prosecution were thus also those whom the accused would charge with having fostered her resolve rather than arresting it.
Visits to several apothecaries were recorded. None would sell the requested arsenic; nevertheless, a compound intended for vermin was obtained. Magnien subsequently recounted falling ill after a meal and suspecting her mistress of having tested a toxic substance upon her. Adèle denied any such poisoning. The historical record itself notes the difficulties inherent in this testimony: the maidservant allegedly remained in the household despite believing her life to be in jeopardy. This suspicion was to form a distinct charge, upon which the jury would have to deliberate separately.
In the reported conversations, the conspiracy against the Chéniés assumed larger proportions. Adolphe observed that the death of Madame Chénié would not necessarily transfer her estate to her son, as her husband would retain his share. Adèle allegedly extended her design to encompass her father-in-law. A consignment sent from Saint-Omer was to supply what she had been unable to procure in Paris. The father, Brutinel, was in turn indicted for knowingly furnishing the poison. He contested the shipment; his daughter varied in her statements regarding the circumstances and the nature of her request.
The delivery to Adolphe of a box containing the substances, along with seven five-franc coins, altered the nature of the case. The inquiry was no longer confined to words exchanged between a mistress and her servants. The man appointed to execute the deed carried everything directly to Madame Chénié. The latter proceeded to the Prefecture of Police; Adolphe also entered his formal deposition there. The denounced peril was thus known to the authorities prior to the family dinner, and every movement to follow would be observed through the prism of that prior disclosure.
Adolphe explained that he had feigned compliance solely to frustrate the crime. His conduct might therefore be viewed as succor brought to the family; it could also be challenged as encouragement offered to the woman he was watching. The outward acts were identical, yet the alleged intention fundamentally altered their gravity. It was this dual interpretation that the depositions, confessions, and retractions would jointly place before the jurors.
On the first of January, the young couple dined at the Chénié residence. The chronicle records that Adèle was to take advantage of a signal given by Adolphe to join him privately. Messieurs Bouvard and Beaupoil-Saint-Aulaire stood concealed near the room where the colloquy was to occur. Adolphe brought up the guests expected that day, then spoke of Magnien’s indisposition. According to this account, Adèle asked to postpone the undertaking; when an unexpected sound made her suspect they were being overheard, she demanded the box back and declared her renunciation. The witnesses emerged from their hiding place. Shortly thereafter, the police placed her under arrest.
This demand for restitution was to become the crux of the trial. Did it represent the retreat of a woman relinquishing her purpose, or the expedient reaction of one who had just discovered she was watched? The precautions arrayed about her had prevented the anticipated criminal consummation. They also obscured the determination of what she would have done left to her own devices. The box preserved by the family proved a delivery; it did not of itself resolve the question of the precise moment the design had ceased, nor that of the agency by which it had been arrested.
In the transcribed interrogations, Adèle admitted having conceived and pursued the scheme against the Chéniés. She nevertheless contested the servants' role, alleging their incitement, and asserted that she had abandoned her design of her own accord. She likewise denied the poisoning of Magnien. Her statements shifted further regarding her father and her husband, whom she sought alternately to shield and to incriminate. It was by no means a uniform confession to which all evidence naturally conformed: the admission of the plot coexisted with a bitter struggle over responsibility, instigation, and voluntary desistance.
Levaillant was arrested as he was on his way to see his wife. He denied all knowledge of the conspiracy. On the following day, he took his own life while in custody, leaving letters in which he proclaimed his innocence, pleaded for clemency for Adèle, and reproached the domestics for failing to warn him. His death permitted neither his conviction nor his exoneration through an adversarial trial. It left a mother among the targeted victims, an indicted wife, and written declarations from which each party might seek to extract a final justification.
At the close of the proceedings, the jury’s findings severed what the scandal had conflated. Adèle was acquitted of the attempt to poison Magnien. The jury found against her a deliberate homicidal intent toward the Chéniés, manifested by overt acts, but declared that it had not been followed by any commencement of execution. Nor did the jury find that the suspension of the enterprise was due to circumstances independent of her will. Brutinel, for his part, was declared not guilty of complicity by knowingly providing the poison.
The court thereupon acquitted both defendants. The presiding judge accompanied the decree with a stern admonition addressed to Adèle: while the moral opprobrium remained unabated, no sentence could be passed under the specific terms of the jury’s verdict. Champagnac, who severely censures her throughout his narrative, concludes by conceding the possibility of a repentance prior to the arrest. Justice had not been called upon to choose between a blameless household and a guilty family; it had been forced to trace a legal boundary through an entanglement of deeds, confidences, and snares. The box had remained untouched before luncheon. The son, however, would never return to the table.