When Professor August B. encountered the young man near the Borromean Islands, he found him in tears. He had just lost, so he said, the woman he loved and all that constituted his earthly happiness. The professor soon perceived that he stood before the son of Councillor Weise, who had vanished two years prior following his father’s suspicious death. Yet he had not disclosed his name: when the professor inquired after it, he answered merely that he should call him “Inconsolable.” But the destination he announced proved sufficient to awaken his companion’s recollections. This encounter is related to us by the Neue Pitaval, which cites a letter from the professor entered, according to its account, into the judicial record.
Two years earlier, in the autumn of 1835, Councillor Weise had returned home following an evening in town, still in good health according to his family. The record describes him as an energetic man, still vigorous; his second wife, Anna, was considerably younger. His son Constantin, born of a first marriage, was twenty-six years of age and preparing for a career in the magistracy. His sister Adelaide, born in 1811, had married a government assessor. The household appeared affluent, orderly, and free of open discord.
On the morrow, the father expired after a sudden seizure. Men spoke of apoplexy. His son Constantin carried the intelligence to the pastor and took his place among the heirs. The testament was opened on the 28th of September. The estate was to be divided among the children, and Constantin received a considerable sum, investment capital, and a house. During the partition of the property, Adelaide observed lingering glances and whispered asides between her brother and Anna, her stepmother. An intimacy whose nature she could not fathom inspired her with mistrust.
It was a young maidservant, Brenner, who gave a name to her suspicions. She begged to speak with Adelaide in secret, threw herself at her feet, and disclosed what she claimed to have witnessed: Constantin and Anna together, alone, on several occasions. She asserted that at first they had paid her to hold her peace. One evening, she had surprised them in an embrace; Constantin had flown into a rage against her, but Anna had drawn her aside and given her two ducats. Thenceforth, Brenner explained, the assignations had continued, even while the father was present in the house.
The maidservant’s confession did not establish a murder. It nonetheless cast the councillor’s death in an entirely different light, and Adelaide could not keep the intelligence to herself. The Pitaval account records that her husband laid the denunciation before the magistrates. The police instituted a search for Constantin and Anna. On the 16th of November 1835, warrants were issued against them, but the fugitives had already fled the town.
The inquiry re-examined the councillor’s final days. Intimates stated that he had appeared hale and hearty prior to his sudden illness. It was further learned that poison had been purchased from an apothecary by Constantin, who claimed to require it for the destruction of mice. The body was exhumed. At the autopsy, the physicians at first discovered no lesion capable of explaining his demise; yet a chemical examination of the stomach contents revealed dissolved arsenic in a quantity quite sufficient to kill. The hypothesis of apoplexy was no longer tenable.
It remained to discover the son. The notices of search yielded nothing. It was believed he had quitted Europe. In May 1837, Professor August B. was residing on the shores of Lake Maggiore. A young German, pale and crestfallen, fell into conversation with him and related that he had lost his earthly paradise. He mentioned that he must shortly rejoin his sister in a Saxon town. The professor then recalled the history of the murder of Councillor Weise, whose son and stepmother had disappeared.
Upon making inquiries at Arona, the professor learned that a German couple had lodged there under an assumed name. The young woman had been delivered of a stillborn infant in April 1836, and had expired a year later. The man had departed from Arona after her obsequies, bearing the name inscribed upon a forged passport. The professor wrote to Constantin’s brother-in-law, who transmitted the missive to the magistrate. But justice had no need to arrange his apprehension upon Italian soil. Constantin returned to Saxony of his own accord. He presented himself at Adelaide’s door, confessed the murder to her, and laid down a parcel containing a substantial sum of money and the three rings missing since the succession. He then repaired to the magistrate, reiterated his declarations, and requested to be conveyed to prison. The magistrates interrogated the authorities of Arona and corroborated the couple’s movements, the birth of the deceased infant, and Anna’s death; the replies agreed, in all essentials, with his narrative. Interrogated as to his guilt, he sought in no way to exculpate himself: he declared that he had merited the death he demanded. At his trial, he never retracted this confession.
According to his confession, he had known Anna before she became his father’s second wife. Their childhood affection had ripened into passion; after the marriage, they had continued to meet in secret. Constantin stated that he also dreaded the reproaches of his father, who judged him negligent and dissipated. In September 1835, Anna informed him that she was with child. They were seized with terror lest his father discover their commerce and deprive them of every possibility of living together. Constantin stated that they had spoken of fleeing abroad, but that he had come to believe he must slay his father to preserve their two lives.
He related having purchased arsenic under the pretext of destroying mice. On the evening of the dinner at Wagner’s, Constantin remained at home. According to his confession, he caused Brenner to prepare the draught his father was accustomed to take before retiring, then poisoned it prior to the couple’s return. The old man was seized with cramps and a burning thirst. Constantin claimed to have gone in search of the physician, and then the surgeon; he asserted that he had found them absent. He admitted later that he had lied, leaving his father destitute of all aid. The councillor expired the following afternoon. Constantin also acknowledged having purloined three diamond rings and fabricated his forged passport from a blank form abstracted from the magistrate’s office. His counsel contested separately the proceedings for domestic theft: no relative had lodged a formal complaint, a condition rendered requisite by the law cited in the chronicle.
In the course of the interrogations of the summer of 1837, Constantin acknowledged the broad outlines of his confession and confirmed before the judges that he had administered the poison. He described his liaison with Anna, but did not assert that she had poured the poison. Constantin’s advocate contended that passion and terror had so disordered his reason as to extinguish his discernment. He challenged likewise the medical certainty regarding the fatal dose. The tribunal weighed these arguments, but the judgment upheld the prisoner’s criminal responsibility and did not set aside the chemical findings that attributed the death to poison.
On the 3rd of October 1837, the court found him guilty of the murder of his father and sentenced him to be broken upon the wheel. He renounced any further legal defense, but petitioned to address the sovereign. On the 23rd of October, the sentence was commuted to decapitation. On the eve of his execution, accompanied by an officer and a clergyman, he repaired to his father’s grave, where he prayed at length. His sister came to see him; she threw herself into his arms and addressed not a single reproach to him. Constantin wrote to her once more, beseeching her to bestow a portion of his worldly goods upon the poor, and to provide, if any remained, for the indigent kinsfolk of Anna.
On the 3rd of November, he mounted the scaffold following a prayer. The chronicler, adopting the account of the clergyman, relates that he met his death with composure and fortitude. His father’s demise had at first been accounted natural; a maidservant’s confidence, the traces of arsenic, and the son’s confession had transformed it into a family scandal, and subsequently into a public trial. The man who had believed he could remove an obstacle to preserve his liaison had obtained only a flight devoid of any shared future: Anna died in a foreign land, and he returned to answer for the crime he claimed to have committed for her sake.