Riencourt was served the soup first and ate with eager appetite. The others remarked upon the singular acrimony of the broth; Demay de Vieulaine and his wife abstained entirely. Presently, Riencourt complained of griping pains in his bowels, and soon the selfsame symptoms assailed those guests who had tasted of the dish. Riencourt expired almost immediately. On the thirteenth of September, 1762, a gentle family gathering had turned into a criminal inquest.
The house belonged to the maternal uncle of Charles-François-Joseph Leroi de Valines. Prior to these events, the young man had resided with his parents at the Château de Valines. Among the invited company were the elder Riencourts; their son, a page to the Queen; a sister of Demay de Vieulaine; the parish curé; and Leroi himself. Eight persons were to sit at table, reckoning the master and mistress of the house. Yet Leroi declared that he would not dine: he intended to ride to Longpré, where no soul awaited him. He was urged to remain amongst his kin and acquaintance; he persisted, pleading pressing affairs.
He nevertheless took an early collation with the young Riencourt, who was obliged to depart before dinner for Versailles, whither his service as page summoned him. Leroi, for his part, had no legitimate appointment awaiting him at Longpré. Once his companion had ridden off, he lingered about the house and prowled into the kitchen. He repeatedly bade the cook fetch sorrel from a distant garden, feigning a desire to scour his mourning buckles. Left alone, he awaited her return. She brought him the herb; he made a show of rubbing his buckles, then quit the house for Longpré. These movements assumed their full and terrible weight after the repast, when the company fell grievously sick.
At table, six persons were served; the master and mistress of the house, mindful of the two recent deaths in their family—Demay’s sister and brother-in-law—refrained from eating. The harsh acridity of the pottage alarmed the other guests. The seizures fell first upon Riencourt, and thereafter upon those who had eaten, according to the order of their serving and the quantity consumed. Remedies were hastily sought; several sufferers found relief, but Riencourt expired upon the spot.
The tidings spread with great celerity. The King’s prosecutor at Abbeville lodged a formal complaint and summoned the magistrate to Vieulaine. The post-mortem examination performed upon Riencourt established that poison had caused his death; the remaining guests had been stricken only after tasting of the selfsame soup.
All eyes turned toward Leroi. The inquest established that he had purchased poison on several occasions, and the magistrates scrutinized his presence in the kitchen as well as his abrupt departure before dinner. They likewise inquired into his reckless expenditures and into certain larcenies he had committed under diverse circumstances. Champagnac assigns the parental inheritance as the motive for the poisoning of father and mother. These presumptions led to the youth’s arrest and directed the investigation back to the deaths of his parents.
The father had fallen ill on the thirtieth of June, having taken only a frugal meal. In the afternoon, he was seized with excruciating colic, violent cephalalgia, and harrowing lacerations of the stomach. Continuous vomiting worsened his condition; toward midnight, the paroxysms redoubled, and he expired on the second of July at six in the morning, after violent convulsions. According to Champagnac, his son had exhorted him to meet his end, repeatedly thrusting a crucifix before him while uttering pious phrases. Those who viewed the body observed that a black and fetid gore issued from the head. This observation was noted at the time, though no inquest had then determined the cause of death.
On the twenty-fifth of July, his mother was stricken with symptoms identical to those of her husband. The physician arrived only after she had drawn her last breath and could not ascertain the cause. Champagnac emphasizes that no suspicion was aroused by these precipitate deaths. She was interred without further formality, and Leroi entered into possession of the estate. Several months later, the law returned to scrutinize both demises.
Upon exhumation, putrefaction thwarted every effort to detect chemical traces of poison. Nevertheless, the surgeon who had attended the parents maintained that their seizures could have proceeded from nothing other than a corrosive poison. This testimony weighed heavily in the proceedings, though it fell short of discovering the physical substance within their remains. Champagnac names neither the specific poison purchased by Leroi nor any chemical findings.
Other utterances were closely weighed. Leroi admitted having remarked that his mother had been poisoned, but explained that she had drunk milk from an ill-tinned copper pan. The poultry-maid, to whom the recounting of this declaration was imputed, was confronted with the accused and denied the fact. Another recollection weighed heavily against the son: after the father’s death, his mother had reportedly bade him retire earlier to bed, whereto he allegedly replied that this state of affairs would not last forever, and that he would soon be his own master. Lastly, amid the agonies of her deathbed, she was said to have cried out to him: “Thou art a wretch; thou art the cause of my death.” Champagnac preserves these words through the narrative of the judicial record.
At the beginning of April 1762, Leroi was not yet sixteen years of age when he committed a burglary in the residence of a canon of Aire-en-Artois. Champagnac cites this theft as an antecedent, though the age recorded for this first misdeed does not permit a precise reckoning of the young man’s age at the September dinner. On the twenty-seventh of March, 1764, the Criminal Lieutenant of Abbeville sentenced him to be broken alive upon the wheel and his body cast into the fire for the totality of the crimes retained against him.
Upon appeal, the Parlement of Paris set aside the Abbeville judgment on certain counts on the twenty-second of August, 1764, in order to clarify several disputed facts. Leroi was put to the question and confessed to the poisoning of both his father and his mother. This confession was wrung from him under torture. Following legal contests raised by relatives presenting themselves as heirs, the matter was settled by his absolute disinheritance.
Leroi was declared unworthy to succeed to either the paternal or maternal estate, and was delivered to the executioner. Riencourt’s death had been judicially established as a poisoning following the dinner; the accusation touching the parents rested upon past symptoms, medical testimony, reported words, and an avowal extracted under torture. The exhumed remains had yielded no identifiable poison. Thus the young man lost the covetous spoils he had pursued, and the charge of parricidal poisoning conducted him to the scaffold.