On December 26, 1886, Clément Foucault prepared to depart for Argentan in the company of his servant, the Caumont woman. His wife, Rosalie Guibout, made ready the broth and served it. According to the indictment read before the assizes, a moment wherein she found herself unobserved permitted her to take from a drawer a packet purchased on December 15, to empty half of its contents into her husband’s broth, and to cast the remainder into the fire. Clément ate. He subsequently drank a cup of coffee which he found foul to the taste, though he swallowed it nonetheless. The indictment dwelt upon this point: by the confessions Rosalie was said to have made during the preliminary examination, the venom had been placed within the broth, and not within the coffee.
The journey toward Argentan was soon arrested by violent bouts of vomiting. Toward noon, Clément felt so grave an indisposition that he was compelled to halt at the Hôtel des Trois-Croix, kept by one Delaunay, and there remain bedridden for several hours. Means were found to convey him back to Saint-Léonard. His stomach rejected all sustenance; excruciating visceral pangs gripped his body, while an agonizing thirst consumed him. His illness had declared itself immediately following the repast, yet the physician summoned several days afterward remained ignorant of its true cause.
Clément Foucault was twenty-eight years of age and had hitherto enjoyed robust health. He expired on January 1, at the stroke of noon. Doctor Malfilâtre, who had examined him on December 29, had noted an acute inflammation of the stomach and bowels without being able to gauge its ultimate gravity. Following the demise, the post-mortem examination and the chemical analyses were presented as substantiating Rosalie’s admissions. In the bill of indictment, these findings were invoked to demonstrate that the act was one of deliberate, premeditated poisoning.
The spouses did not live in concord, the indictment affirmed. At the beginning of November, a youth of fifteen and a half years, Aldonce Alléron, had entered their service. The prosecution attributed to Rosalie an illicit intimacy with the young farmhand, asserting that Clément had ended by turning him out of doors after observing their familiarities. From the hour of this expulsion onward, the state depicted the poison as the instrument selected to remove the husband and ensure the continuance of the liaison.
On December 15, according to the charge, Rosalie had repaired to an apothecary in Argentan. There she requested a small packet of starch meal blended with arsenious acid, which she professed to require for the destruction of rats. This poison, the indictment averred, was destined for her husband. Shortly thereafter, following Alléron’s dismissal, the Caumont woman reportedly overheard the menace: “You have turned Aldonce out; sooner or later, you shall have your dose.” The selfsame words were allegedly repeated to Clément on the evening of December 25. The purchase of the substance, the threat reported by Caumont, and its repetition on the eve of the meal formed, in the eyes of the prosecution, the consecutive links of a steadfast design.
The indictment further stated that Rosalie had previously attempted to introduce the poison into his coffee, only to abandon that method because any foreign matter would have been more readily perceived. This preparatory attempt was recorded as an admission made by the accused herself. On the 26th, once the packet was opened, she reportedly chose the broth, casting the second half of the powder into the flames. The Caumont girl maintained at the trial, in contradiction to her earlier statements, that she had remained in the kitchen until the broth was entirely consumed. The chronicle retains Rosalie’s confessions as fixing the poison within the dish. This divergence did not efface either account, but set them side by side in the dossier submitted to the court.
Throughout the course of the agony, the Caumont woman ministered to the dying man. The indictment reproached his wife with never approaching his bedside nor seeking to bring him ease. It accused Rosalie, moreover, of having dispatched a message to Alléron on the very day following the fatal repast, and of having received him on December 29. The youth was said to have come to lie with her in the bed already occupied by the female domestic, in a chamber adjacent to that wherein Clément lay dying. Following his demise, Rosalie withdrew to a neighbor’s house; on the morning appointed for the burial, she repaired to the dwelling of her paramour’s family so as to avoid the funeral solemnities. It was there that she was apprehended on the following day.
According to the record of the indictment, Rosalie confessed almost immediately, laying bare the circumstances of the deed. She disputed neither the procurement of the poison nor its administration; the autopsy and the chemical analysis corroborated the findings of the magistrate’s inquiry. To explain her act, she was said to have declared that she killed Clément because he had brought beneath their roof the Caumont girl, her husband’s former mistress. She intimated that their correspondence had never ceased since Clément’s days of military service. The indictment retorted that Rosalie had offered no opposition to Caumont’s arrival and had even aided in her installation; this rejoinder by the prosecution was advanced to counter the justification attributed to her by the press.
At the assize session of April 30, Rosalie, the widow Foucault, was twenty-seven years of age. The gazette described her demeanor as impassive. Under interrogation, she acknowledged the facts set forth in the indictment along with others brought to light by the examining magistrate. When the presiding judge observed to her that it appeared inherently improbable that she should have slain her husband out of jealousy, she offered no reply. The report also recorded another threat that Rosalie admitted having uttered: “You shall croak by no hand but mine.” When Clément, already seized with sickness, departed for Argentan, she had reportedly told him to take the air, adding that it would do him good.
The judicial narrative added that she admitted having left her husband without succor during his two days of illness, having refused to shroud his corpse, and having met with Alléron on the day of the obsequies. This duration does not harmonize with the calendar established elsewhere in the indictment, which spans the meal of December 26 to the death on January 1; the contemporary report leaves these discrepancies unreconciled. She declared further that her paramour had approved the project when she confided it to him, and had congratulated her after the deed was done. These utterances did not render Alléron an accused felon at the bar. The president censured the lad’s conduct with severity, but observed that the mere approval of a crime did not constitute complicity within the strict meaning of the law. He likewise addressed a stern reprimand to the apothecary Peschard for having dispensed several grams of a deadly poison without the warrant of a medical prescription.
The position occupied by Caumont within the household remained a subject of dispute. She denied at the bar ever having maintained a guilty connection with Clément. Nevertheless, several witnesses testified to having seen Rosalie in possession of love letters, a lock of hair, and a photograph that she had seized from her husband. This evidence lent weight to the jealousy pleaded by the defense, without diminishing the other proofs of poisoning marshaled in the bill of indictment. The press identified Alléron as being fifteen and a half years of age. The president denounced him for having commended the design; yet he was not, for all that, joined as a co-defendant alongside Rosalie.
The public prosecutor, Monsieur Sourdat, retraced the circumstances of the death, the threats, and the deportment of Rosalie both before and after the meal. In his view, the sole motive lay in her unbridled passion for Alléron. He refrained from demanding a specific sentence, committing to the jury the determination of extenuating circumstances. Maître Boivin-Champeaux, appearing for the defense, petitioned precisely for such clemency. He reviewed the history of the marriage, laid great stress upon the letters from Caumont, and pleaded that Rosalie’s jealousy was the prime mover of her crime. He did not dispute her guilt; he maintained that equity commanded the admission of extenuating circumstances.
The jury concurred with the view of the defense upon this head. Rosalie Guibout was sentenced to hard labor for life. In that solemn courtroom, the sickness of Clément, the recorded confessions, and the conflicting accounts of Caumont and Rosalie culminated in a verdict wherein guilt and mitigating circumstances were bound together. The gazette’s account concludes upon this sentence; it makes no mention of what subsequently befell the condemned woman.