They took away the dead woman’s floorboards.
Twenty-three pieces of timber entered the investigation alongside linens, phials, and the organs excised during the autopsy. They had been taken from a bedchamber on the Rue Bonaparte, where Julie de Pauw had succumbed on November 17, 1863. The dejections that had fallen upon the ground might yet contain that which the body refused to yield. The apartment, from which men believed they had borne only a coffin, perhaps harboured an accusation beneath the feet of those who came to call.
The physician under suspicion was Désiré Couty de La Pommerais. He had attended Julie’s husband prior to the latter’s death, and had subsequently become the widow’s lover. Such intimacy afforded him entry to a household where his arrival stirred no apprehension. A prescription, an explanation of an ailment, a word of financial counsel might be received from the very same voice: there was no necessity to distinguish the practitioner from the man to whom one had given one’s heart.
He had married elsewhere, taking Clotilde Dubizy as his wife. The new household brought an affluence of which he hoped to avail himself; it did not, however, put an end to his embarrassments. The physician’s style of life, his obligations, and his debts demanded resources that his practice failed to provide. In 1863, he renewed closer relations with Julie de Pauw. This return assumed the outward guise of rekindled devotion. It was soon accompanied by a design of a far less sentimental nature.
Policies upon Julie’s life were subscribed with several companies, amounting in all to five hundred and fifty thousand francs. The rights eventually passed into the hands of La Pommerais, who was to discharge the premiums and collect the capital sums upon her decease. The man who was privy to the state of her health thus became the man whose fortune her death would secure.
He later accounted for this arrangement by invoking a debt: the widow owed him monies, and he was merely securing their reimbursement. Yet the figures varied. The debt, considerable in certain instruments, dwindled under interrogation; even admitting the final amounts advanced, it remained impossible to comprehend why the preservation of so modest a sum required insurances of such magnitude, with annual premiums exceeding the very capital they purported to protect. The reckoning, of its own accord, bespoke something quite different from the prudence of a creditor.
Julie believed herself engaged in a profitable enterprise. According to the prosecution, La Pommerais had led her to hope for an annuity by prevailing upon the companies to compromise when apprised of a grave malady. It was necessary to appear threatened without being truly so. She spoke of a fall upon her staircase, complained of suffering, and indited letters. Certain of these were preserved by the physician with a care that would subsequently appear suspicious: they depicted in advance the fragility of the woman upon whose life he held policies.
The letters bore none of the customary marks of postal transit. They were not such tidings as an anxious woman might have dispatched of her own volition to an absent man. The inquest presented them as dictated documents, laid aside to serve a purpose thereafter. Julie’s trust had thus furnished the beneficiary of the policies with a written account of her future malady.
On the night of November 16 to 17, the symptoms proved genuine. Apprised of her condition, her daughters hastened to her side. Julie spoke of an attack of indigestion and sent them back to rest. La Pommerais arrived in the morning. Following his visit, she persisted in regarding the affliction as fleeting, and insisted that the children repair to their boarding school as was their custom. This apparent composure arose from a formidable cause: within the contrivance she believed she was observing, the manifestations of illness might yet appear advantageous to her.
Assistance arrived only fitfully. A neighbour looked in upon her. A physician whom she had previously consulted took offence upon learning that his regimen had been disregarded, and departed without undertaking a fresh examination. La Pommerais returned, then took his leave once more. At last, when Dr Blachez was summoned in haste, it was already too late. Julie expired that evening.
The beneficiary of the insurances presented himself anew after the decease. He made mention of the fall. A servant-woman of the household disputed this explanation: she knew full well that the alleged accident had not occurred as was claimed. The version fashioned within the letters had finally encountered someone who refused to subscribe to it. The kin made their suspicions known; the judicial inquiry commenced.
On November 30, the body was exhumed. Ambroise Tardieu discovered neither pre-existing disease nor any lesion capable of naturally explaining this sudden end. The finding was grave, yet it remained a mere absence: to find no natural cause did not amount to holding within one’s hands the proof of a poison. Together with the chemist Zacharie Roussin, he therefore embarked upon investigations of the organs, the substances collected from the chamber, and the matters seized from the physician’s residence.
Nearly nine hundred preparations had to be scrutinised. La Pommerais’s dispensatory offered an inventory considerable enough to discourage immediate certainties. The presence of dangerous substances in a practitioner’s rooms did not, in itself, establish their felonious employment. The experts were obliged to connect that which they discovered to Julie’s malady, and then to distinguish a professional possibility from a homicidal application.
Their labours pursued a course that rendered the trial renowned. Chemical analyses did not allow the identity of the sought substance to be affirmed with the expected precision. Physiological experiments and the comparison of effects, however, led Tardieu and Roussin to conclude that poisoning had occurred, and to maintain a strong presumption in favour of digitalin. They maintained a reservation regarding its precise identification. This nuance, easily lost in any narrative of scientific triumph, formed part of their very conclusion.
The defence was thus able to carry the contest to the very heart of the evidence. What did the experiment demonstrate with certainty? How far could one ascend from the observed effects to their cause? And by what means might one pass from the poisoning to the hand that had supposedly administered it? Maître Lachaud did not merely contest the figures of the contracts and the physician’s conduct: he challenged the soundness of the bridge by which science sought to join the accusation.
Another demise cast a further shadow over the affair: that of Madame Dubizy, La Pommerais’s mother-in-law, which had occurred in 1861. A belated exhumation yielded no comparable conclusions. Suspicion was not to acquire, through mere proximity to Julie’s murder, a certainty it did not possess in its own right. The trial concluded with the physician’s conviction for the death of the widow de Pauw; the charge concerning his mother-in-law was not retained.
On May 17, 1864, La Pommerais was condemned to death. His appeal in cassation failed, and he was executed on June 9. The companies never paid out the anticipated fortune. The letters, the premiums, and the shifting debt remained the scattered fragments of a thwarted calculation.
Yet that calculation had stood in need of something more than mere numbers. It had required that a woman continue to believe in the physician when she was sick, in the former lover when he returned, in the counsellor when he promised to deliver her from embarrassment. The floorboards had yielded traces; the letters had yielded a preparation. Julie’s final day revealed that which these artefacts could not exhibit on their own: danger had entered her threshold in the guise of one whose arrival she awaited only to be comforted.