On the morning of 27 September 1828, Frau Heider knocked upon the bedchamber door of Auguste Ader. The young woman did not answer. The knocking grew more insistent, and at length a locksmith was summoned. In the adjoining room, the door was finally forced, revealing Auguste stretched prone beside her bed, her right arm deeply slashed. Her uncle, a surgeon, endeavoured to revive her; but the loss of blood had already done its work. The journeyman barber who laboured under the same roof had vanished.
On the eve of the tragedy, Auguste had prepared a small cake and an embroidered collar for her aunt, setting them amidst a garland of flowers. As she offered them, she had burst into tears. Frau Heider saw in this nothing more than a token of filial gratitude. Such an interpretation commended itself not merely by its naturalness: nothing within the household had ever betrayed the intimacy the young woman shared with Karl Gleichmann.
Auguste was twenty-two years of age. Heider and his wife, having no children of their own, had taken her in six years prior. She assisted her aunt in the domestic labours, enjoyed the esteem of all who knew her, and had grown up in a house where her uncle maintained a rigorous discipline. Karl, for his part, slept behind a partition upon the landing. He had arrived in 1827 as a journeyman barber; by day, he served Heider’s clientele while attending to customers of his own. Auguste’s bedchamber lay upon the same floor, at the far end of a corridor opening onto the common rooms.
Karl’s previous conduct went far to explain the reservations his new master had initially entertained regarding him. His father, Dietrich Gleichmann, kept a barber’s shop, but drank to such excess that he neglected his kin. Young Karl had displayed an erratic temper at school, and subsequently stole money from his master of apprenticeship and from a patron. His mother had made good one of these losses to shield her son from the rigours of the law. Thereafter, he had laboured with greater regularity, though without ridding himself of his overweening vanity or his fits of petulance. In Heider’s house, he kept his distance from the master, whom he feared, and chafed under the unbending order of the establishment.
He and Auguste had drawn close in the winter of 1827. No member of the household ever surprised them in an intimate encounter. The servant Louise had seen them converse and linger together, yet she took their cordiality for ordinary good fellowship. Karl’s companions knew that he spoke incessantly of Auguste, declaring her pledged to him. They mocked him for it: in public, the young woman met his pretensions with curt dismissals and appeared in no wise to return his affection. One of these acquaintances related that she had complained of the vexation Karl caused her, and had professed to fear that her uncle would dismiss him were he to learn of it.
The gulf between what the household observed and what Karl subsequently maintained was never bridged. In the course of his confessions, he recounted a clandestine liaison, commenced after long evenings spent alone with Auguste. He asserted that she had surrendered herself to him and believed herself to be with child. The post-mortem examination, however, could not elevate this conviction to certainty: certain appearances might have corresponded to a recent conception, but equally to other physiological causes. A distinction must therefore be drawn between what Auguste was said by Karl to have dreaded, and what the medical inspection actually established.
On 26 September, Karl had announced to one of his comrades that he was betrothed to Auguste. He wore a ring and declared that she had bestowed upon him a lock of hair. That same day, he returned a ring and a chain of woven hair to his brother, entreating him to preserve them as a keepsake. To an acquaintance who wished to purchase a cravat pin from him, he observed that this was the very last day he might do so. These utterances assumed their true significance only after the death; at the time, his listeners perceived in them no intimation of an irrevocable departure.
In the Heider household, the day had unfolded after its usual fashion. Auguste baked pastries for her aunt’s birthday. In the evening, her uncle and aunt went abroad. The servant heard Auguste pounding some substance in a mortar and subsequently observed her washing the vessel with meticulous care. She assumed it was sugar intended for the sweetmeats. Later, upon returning, she found Auguste abed and Karl seated upon her counterpane. He told her he was about to take his rest, and begged her to awaken him betimes that he might hone his razors. In her turn, Frau Heider urged her niece to rise from the bed ere her husband should come upon her there. Auguste embraced her, bade her good night, and withdrew to her chamber.
Shortly after ten o’clock, the household retired. No one reported hearing a cry or any disturbance in the night. At daybreak, the knocking upon the door met with no reply. The lock was forced. Auguste bore two deep gashes upon her right arm, the one at the wrist, the other in the crook of the elbow. Beside her lay a bloodstained razor. Behind the bed stood two bottles of wine, drained nearly to the dregs; upon a table were raisins, almonds, and peppermint lozenges. In the room, traces of an arsenical poison were detected. Karl had quit the house by the courtyard door, carrying away the key to the bedchamber.
The preliminary inquest established that death had not proceeded from poison. Chemical analyses brought to light faint traces of arsenic in the stomach, upon a shattered drinking glass, and on a pocket handkerchief; the wine and the sweetmeats were pronounced entirely untainted. The medical examiners, however, judged the quantity ingested to have been far too slight, and the compound too sparingly soluble, to have caused Auguste’s demise. She had succumbed to haemorrhage occasioned by the two incisions. According to the expert testimony, she could not have inflicted them herself: the cuts, clean and executed in a single stroke, required a degree of force and precision that her stiffened left arm could not command. No sign of struggle was discernible. The physicians concluded that the wounds had been dealt by another hand, with her own consent.
At dawn, Karl appeared at the quarters of his brother, a non-commissioned officer. He told him that Auguste was dead, and that he was the author of her end. He demanded a weapon wherewith to dispatch himself, and then related that they had agreed to perish together. An initial attempt, during the night of 25 to 26 September, had miscarried: a widow from whom he had solicited rat poison had, through an error, delivered to him Glauber’s salt, an agent devoid of the desired efficacy. According to Karl, Auguste had subsequently discovered arsenic in her uncle’s medicine chest.
He affirmed that he had wished to defer the fatal hour. Auguste, he claimed, had proved unyielding, binding him by an oath to accompany her into death. On the night of 25 to 26 September, they had reportedly shared the poison in water; perceiving no effect, they had parted until the morrow. On the evening of the 26th, he had purchased the wine and the delicacies, repairing to Auguste’s side once the house had grown still. She had prepared the arsenic, which they both partook of in wine. When she had vomited and death still tarried, she was said to have implored him to open her veins. Karl admitted having done so, and of having subsequently inflicted a superficial wound upon himself. He fled without carrying through the stroke against his own life.
His account coincided in several particulars with the physical findings: the missing poison from Heider’s stores, the scrupulously cleansed mortar, the bottles, the sweetmeats, the razor, and his own flesh wound. The letters discovered and the depositions of his companions corroborated that he was enamoured of Auguste; the servant girl attested to his unusual presence in the bedchamber on the evening of the 26th. The medical report affirmed that the young woman’s wounds had been dealt by an external hand. The prosecution, however, possessed no direct witness to the deed. Its case rested predominantly upon Karl’s admissions and the reconstruction of a nocturnal scene concerning which Auguste had died without leaving any deposition.
A letter written by the young woman, found within her chamber, was addressed to her kin. Therein she took her leave, distributed sundry personal effects, and begged that her body might not be opened after her death. She added these words: “Forgive him who kills me.” Such phrases bore witness that she had contemplated her end and knew another hand might bring it about. Yet they abolished neither the violence of the act nor the uncertainty surrounding what she had precisely consented to undergo. The document remained the testament of a woman who believed herself dying; it was in no sense a compact capable of resolving beforehand the question submitted to the tribunal.
That question divided the jurists: could a man be condemned for taking the life of a person who had implored him to do so? The defence invoked a doctrine holding that, the victim having surrendered her right to life, the perpetrator was merely accessory to a suicide. The court rejected this reasoning. The right to life, it held, could not be alienated by a mere declaration; society lay under an obligation to shield its members, and he who dealt the fatal stroke likewise deprived his victim of any opportunity to repent of her resolve. The alleged consent attenuated the guilt, but did not extinguish it.
By judgment of 19 March 1829, Karl Gleichmann was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in a house of correction (Zuchthaus). The tribunal took into account Auguste’s suicidal design, the attempts she was said to have made, and Karl’s recourse to his brother immediately following the deed. The sentence did not elevate romantic passion into an absolute excuse: rather, it traced the boundary between a requested death and the authority—conferred upon no man—to execute it. The record relates that Karl did not deem the chastisement unduly harsh. A few days later, he was conducted to the penal institution.
The locked door had at first concealed the precise instant of the death. The trial brought to light the preparations, the deeds, and the spoken words; yet Auguste’s final resolve could never be verified from her own lips. The tribunal was able to characterise Karl’s act and to punish it; it could not restore to the young woman the power to reply.