The professor turned the key in the cabinet lock. He had just shut away that which, in any well-ordered house, one would have made haste to cast out: the evacuations of a dying woman. Hélène Jégado was wont to carry off the chamber pots, scrubbing, scouring, and effacing every trace with the eager alacrity of a devoted maidservant. Théophile Bidard had resolved at last that this cleanliness must cease. Rosalie Sarrazin lay suffering still in the adjoining room; the physicians had wavered for days, and another maidservant had already perished beneath the selfsame roof.
Later, before the Court of Assizes at Rennes, Bidard cautioned the judges that he could not recount the events in the sequence in which he had understood them. Their true meaning had revealed itself to him only at the very close. It had required a third servant falling stricken for the nature of that first death to transform itself within his memory. This deposition lends the Jégado affair its most disquieting momentum: the occurrences were plain to see, the inmates spoke among themselves, the men of medicine came and went; yet each possessed some plausible pretext not to draw the fatal conclusion.
Hélène had entered his service in October 1850 bearing excellent testimonials. One former master lamented having let her go; another attested to several years of faithful service. She professed herself devoted to her kin and to her toil. Rose Texier, the confidential housekeeper of the dwelling, had herself procured her to replace an outgoing cook. Thus the first victim of this final period had unwittingly helped to unbar the door. Bidard, consumed by his professorial lectures and other civic duties, relied upon Rose to conduct the domestic economy.
The difficulties began almost at once. Hélène chafed under the authority of the parlourmaids. Rose was suffering from a bruised back following a fall; the cook foretold that the mishap would have grievous consequences. Having returned to Rennes in early November, Rose was seized with violent vomiting. Hélène remained at her bedside, brewed draughts, and ministered to her. The physicians initially conjectured a nervous affection, and subsequently an internal inflammation. Within the sickroom, the deepening misery could yet pass for the ordinary progression of an ailment as yet unnamed.
Rose expired after several days of agony. Her mother lost in her not merely a daughter, but her sole earthly support. Doctor Pinault had harboured suspicions of poison, but the conjecture of suicide, the dread of a public scandal, and the cook’s outward solicitude stayed his hand. Could a woman who kept such ceaseless vigil be the very creature who dealt out death? Such a suspicion demanded a total reversal of the meaning of domestic devotion. Thus the ministrations were ascribed to fidelity, and the demise to the sorrowful chapter of human misfortune.
Françoise Huriau took the place left vacant by Rose. She stood in dread of Hélène and scarcely ventured to reply to her. One day, Bidard came upon the two women partaking of two distinct broths at opposite ends of the board. He reminded them that he wished his servants to be nourished as he was himself, upon a proper linen cloth. Hélène took deep umbrage. The incident seems of trifling account until one perceives the stake at hand: who decides what each shall receive? The kitchen conferred a dominion which the master believed he could temper with a mere household injunction.
Françoise swelled up, grew faint, and petitioned to leave before her term was run. She quitted the house in May 1851. Rosalie Sarrazin succeeded her; Hélène had at first warmly recommended her. Rosalie was proficient in writing. When Bidard required the cook to render an account of the household expenses through her, this friendship soured into enmity. To this newcomer who inspected the ledgers, Hélène soon leveled the very reproaches she had cast at the others: that she assumed too much room, and commanded where, in her eyes, she had no right to rule.
Bidard announced that he would dismiss the cook upon Midsummer Day. On the very evening of one of these altercations, she insisted upon serving him a dish of green peas, which he declined. Rosalie partook of them and fell gravely ill. When the master sought to set aside the remainder of the dish, it had vanished. The ensuing days mingled respites with relapses. The young woman might accompany Bidard to the country, appear restored, and then fall once more to vomiting. Hélène became pleasant once again, offered to escort the invalid to the physician, and passed comment upon the prescriptions.
The dismissal did not take place. Hélène pledged to dwell in peace with Rosalie; Bidard consented to retain her. At the trial, he revisited this decision with the agonizing precision of a man seeking the exact juncture at which he might have arrested the catastrophe. His journeys, the medicaments ordered, the glasses handed by this one or by that, became tragic landmarks. The selfsame remedy seemed now to assuage the pain, now to burn like fire. The malady defied explanation, for a human hand was unceasingly altering its course.
Doctor Pinault and his colleagues were led at last to compare these symptoms with those of the late Rose Texier. The suspicion of arsenic returned, was dispelled by a momentary rally, and then imposed itself afresh with redoubled force. Bidard himself wavered between the terror of harbouring a poisoner and the spectacle of an admirably devoted servant. He contemplated having Hélène seized, and then drew back. It was not for lack of witnessing Rosalie’s torment: he watched by her, searched for nostrums, and hastened to the physicians. He lacked merely that certitude necessary to transform his domestic into a felon.
When he locked the vessels away at last, he altered the very government of his house. Thenceforth, what Hélène made haste to dispose of would be preserved. He endeavoured to banish her from the bedside, but Rosalie’s mother, spent with fatigue, permitted her once more to draw near. The young woman expired in the closing days of June. The judicial authorities were apprised; Jégado was apprehended on the first day of July. The medical men subsequently described the post-mortem examinations, the samplings, and the exhumations. The remains of Rose Texier and of Perrotte Macé—another servant who had died prior to Hélène’s entry into Bidard’s employ—were subjected to analysis. Chemical tests summoned arsenic into the very places where physicians had successively invoked the nerves, inflammation, or ill fortune.
The investigation then traced the long trail of Jégado’s domestic service across Brittany. Demises long buried, particularly those that had occurred at Guern in 1833, rose up once more around her name. This sombre retrospective fed her renown as an arch-poisoner with countless victims; the trial itself, however, was bound to weigh strictly defined charges and respect the statutes of limitation. At Rennes, in December 1851, the witnesses related what they had seen, what they had thought, and what they had at times kept silent. Sundry articles discovered among her effects added the charge of domestic theft to the dossier of poisonings.
Jégado denied all. She disputed the murderous designs attributed to her, maintaining that she had tended the sick solely for their welfare. Her advocates, among them Maître Magloire Dorange, endeavoured to make her condition and moral accountability understood within a courtroom vibrating with violent hostility. Dorange protested even against a blow aimed at the prisoner’s face as she entered the dock. On the fourteenth of December, she was condemned to death. She was guillotined at Rennes on the twenty-sixth of February, 1852.
In this affair, the sheer number of the dead has often served to swallow up their names. Bidard’s testimony restores them to their rightful station: Rose directed a household; Françoise sought only to regain her strength to take another place; Rosalie supported her mother and knew how to balance the books. They had not entered into a legend; they had accepted domestic service. And the key clutched firmly in the hand of a professor remains as a reminder of how late a household may perceive that the hand proffering the draught is the very hand from which the sufferer must be saved.