On the 27th of September 1861, the Freifrau Luise von Baumbach entered the assize court of Bruchsal leaning upon her daughter’s arm. She had endured seven weeks of detention, followed by her release upon bail, the surety for which had been furnished by her husband himself. Before the jurors, she was to answer to an accusation of attempted poisoning directed against that very spouse; yet relatives, acquaintances, and servants alike had ever described their household as united. On the morrow, the jury would pronounce her not guilty after a deliberation of four minutes. Between these two junctures lay months of suspicion, a questionable substance whose true trajectory none could trace with certainty, and a judicial inquiry which, according to the account preserved in the Pitaval, had set its sights upon a single household from the outset.
The earliest alleged facts reached back to the evenings of the 19th and 20th of May. Warm beer was being prepared for the master of the house. Babette Heiß, the cook, and Amalie Leist, the chambermaid, asserted that they had discovered in the bottom of the vessel fragments of a paste emitting an odour of phosphorus. As to the first evening, they acknowledged having cast away what they claimed to have found, without submitting it to examination. On the following day, a portion was entrusted to Johann Fritsche, the man-servant, who conveyed it to Röder, the apothecary; thence, according to the reported depositions, it passed to the family physician, Doctor Buchegger, before being delivered into the hands of the magistrate.
Nothing in these narrations proved that either woman had beheld Luise introduce any substance into the drink. Neither Heiß nor Leist described an inherently suspicious movement at the first. They conceded only that their mistress had entered the kitchen, had withdrawn from the fire a pan that threatened to boil over, and then, on the subsequent evening, had inspected the sugar before pouring it into the beer with her own hand. This gesture soon became a pillar of the accusation; yet, observed by two persons present, it had been accompanied by no sighting of any object concealed within her grasp.
The matter delivered to the authorities was identified as a phosphorated paste, resembling certain preparations intended for the destruction of rats. The apothecary observed that the compound contained mustard flour, after the manner of the mixtures dispensed from his own shop. It by no means followed that it was the selfsame product he had sold to the von Baumbach household, nor that the sample had indeed been drawn from the dregs of the beverage. The first fragment had not been preserved; regarding the second, the testimonies diverged as to who had extracted it, its appearance, and the course it had travelled. The husband had drunk of the beer on both evenings without suffering illness. As to whether phosphorus could dissolve within the liquid or impart to it a perceptible odour, the opinions of the experts were divided.
The inquiry did not pause at these two evenings. On the 26th of May, Leist reported that, while taking sugar from a cannister, she had spilt it into some sour milk; a suspicious smell was said to have arrested her. The magistrate ordered an examination of the sugar, the dining-room carpet, and other traces of paste. Fritsche, for his part, had been provided with rat poison some weeks prior. He offered several contradictory accounts of it: he claimed to have consumed all the substance, broken the jar, and cast the vessel into the garden. Yet Leist related that on Whit Monday he had shown her a jar still containing poison. Before the court, she wavered as to the date and the consistency of the substance; Fritsche wavered in turn. The compiler of the Pitaval perceived in these discrepancies an index of the servant’s guilt, going so far as to suggest a deliberate intrigue. This conjecture remains his own: no judgment ever condemned Fritsche, nor was it ever established who had deposited the fragments that were found.
Public rumour, however, had long since reached its conclusion. Throughout Karlsruhe, tongues wagged of a jealous wife, of an ailing husband, of repeated attempts upon his life. Röder stated he had heard it whispered that Luise was jealous of a lady whom the compiler chose to style Frau von Zandt; this woman was presumed to be on intimate terms with the husband, though the investigation revealed no liaison. Another occurrence gained greater weight, proceeding as it did from Doctor Buchegger: Luise had confided to him that her husband, in a fit of temper, had once pointed a pistol at her. She maintained she had disclosed this solely to enlighten the physician upon her spouse’s nervous disposition, and by no means by way of grievance. The prosecutor seized upon this as a token of domestic discord; the defence retorted that an isolated incident established neither malice nor motive.
The progress of the preliminary investigation further fed suspicion. At the outset, the servants were heard under oath as witnesses, as was the mistress of the house. Later, all three domestics were arrested in their turn, upon the suspicion of having participated in the very poisoning they had denounced. They were released from custody on the 28th of June. The initial prosecutor, who had received the file at the opening of the proceedings, moved that the charges against Luise be dropped, according to the chronicle; the indicting chamber resolved nonetheless to commit her alone to the assizes. She remained at liberty upon a bail of five thousand florins. Yet the case file had swelled to twelve volumes and fourteen hundred pages. This mass of paper, far from dissipating the contradictions, carried them into the courtroom; meanwhile, the press and salon gossip had converted contested surmises into public certainty.
An incident during the trial laid bare the frailty of human memory. In the morning session, Leist declared that Fritsche had shown her his poison in the garden on Whit Monday, after the initial alarm; Fritsche replied that the encounter had taken place a fortnight earlier. During the adjournment, he spoke with her. When the court reconvened, Leist could no longer fix the day, acknowledging their conversation. The chronicle in the Pitaval deems her first version credible, but the reader must observe what it reveals as much concerning the proof as concerning the manner in which the witnesses were henceforth preparing their answers.
At the hearing, Prosecutor Junghanns, deputy to the chief magistrate, maintained that the paste had been purposefully introduced into the beer on the 19th and 20th of May, and that Luise, the only person outside the domestic staff present at the critical moment, must have been its author. He relied upon her presence in the kitchen, upon the sugar, and upon Leist’s belated assertion that her mistress’s attire had smelt of phosphorus. He nevertheless abandoned several narratives that had become untenable—a secret key to the secretaire, a trace found in a water bottle, matches concealed in bread, and perforations in a roast. The motive remained obscure; the prosecutor invoked the threat with the pistol and the possibility that secret passions might have eluded the sight of witnesses.
The advocate for the defence, Herr Kusel, adjured the jurors to heed not common report, but the chain of evidence. The first fragment had vanished; concerning the second, the accounts failed to agree. The servants had initially denied seeing their mistress cast anything into the pot, and Fritsche had contradicted himself regarding the poison in his keeping. The husband exhibited no symptoms of poisoning; the physicians had not confirmed that his past ailments proceeded from phosphorus. The paste discovered on the 26th of May shed no light upon the events of the two preceding evenings. Conversely, argued the defence, repeated and shifting statements had gradually enclosed the accused in a role from which the inquiry had never sought to test other possibilities with equal zeal.
The presiding judge submitted three questions to the jury: Had Luise repeatedly attempted secretly to administer phosphorus to her husband? If so, had she sought to take his life or to injure his health? The jurors retired. Four minutes later, their foreman announced the verdict: “Not guilty.” The Baroness departed the courtroom, exclaiming: “Justice at last!” There followed neither conviction nor penalty. Her husband subsequently petitioned to resign his post in the service of the Grand Duke; the chronicle records that his request was granted. The acquittal restored Luise’s honour in the eyes of the law, but it could neither return the weeks spent in confinement nor blot out the months during which an accusation destitute of decisive proof had assumed the countenance of truth.
This narrative follows the retrospective account in the Neue Pitaval, published in 1862; it does not rely upon the consultation of the original court records.