In the night between the 12th and 13th of March, 1829, a rural carpenter, broken by agony and surrounded by the corpses of his two sons, dictated his last will and testament. He bequeathed his modest worldly goods to Bernarde, his eldest daughter; should she be unable to inherit, Françoise, his second daughter, was named next in succession. A few hours later, the father expired. On the morrow, the mother succumbed in turn. When the judicial inquiry retraced the thread of these fatalities, the modest homestead, Françoise’s wardrobe, and a dried prune traced the sinister outline of an inheritance turned to slaughter.
Françoise Trenque was twenty-four years of age. She had returned to the paternal hearth after having purloined, according to the chronicle of Champagnac, a few bundles of linen from a convent where she had served. At Arrouède, in the department of the Gers, her father earned his bread as a carpenter. Her brothers were Joseph and François; her sisters, Bernarde, the elder, and Mariette, the youngest of the house. The chronicle traces the origin of the affair to the designs Françoise harbored against her kin; yet it began, in truth, with a lingering series of indispositions that troubled their days of toil.
On the 20th of June, 1828, the elder Trenque set out for the residence of the mayor of Arrouède alongside his eldest son and a hired hand, all three bound for work upon the premises. During the three days spent upon that worksite, violent cramps seized their bellies and stomachs. Though sorely afflicted, this first bout did not prevent them from subsequently resuming their labor. Nothing in this initial sickness had yet foretold the succession of deaths that would desolate the hearth.
In the month of October, the carpenter returned to the same house, accompanied this time by both his sons and an apprentice boy. From the very first day, all were stricken: their features grew haggard, their entrails twisted in agonizing spasms, persistent vomiting ensued, their thirst became unquenchable, and a fierce burning rose in their throats. They persevered, nevertheless, in their labor. It was Françoise who brought their provisions to Arrouède.
At that very juncture, her mother and young Mariette were likewise seized with violent visceral pains followed by persistent vomiting. Françoise alone escaped these afflictions, as did Bernarde, who was then in service abroad and took her meals in the households where she hired out her days. The men upon the worksite endured until the eighth day; by then, their torment had grown so unendurable that they were forced to abandon the enterprise a second time. Bernarde, learning of her parents’ desperate plight, hastened home to nurse them, only to fall gravely ill in her turn.
The physicians prescribed oily friction rubs for Bernarde. Françoise, charged with their application, substituted nitric acid—the common aqua fortis—in place of the soothing balm. According to Champagnac, the elder sister’s agony was terribly aggravated thereby. This act, weighed later in connection with the household’s sicknesses, was to assume an ominous significance during the preliminary investigation; for the present, however, the family still faced months of an affliction that would soon rekindle with redoubled fury.
On the 21st of February, 1829, the paroxysms seized the entire household anew. On the 28th, they flared with even greater severity. The chronicler surmises that from this date onward, the poison was administered in lethal doses. The remedies and broths were prepared and served by Françoise, who mingled the venom with their infusions and bouillons. Each soul looked for solace in the cups presented to their parched lips; the very gestures of maternal care now conducted them straight to their death throes.
On the 12th of March, Joseph and François expired amid terrible convulsions. To bring, as she claimed, some small measure of relief to François, Françoise placed a dried prune within his mouth. She bade him gently to suck upon it without swallowing, that he might draw only its restorative juice. The prune had been liberally dusted with arsenic. This detail, recorded by Champagnac as words spoken directly to the dying lad, concentrated within a simple orchard fruit the cruel snare that closed over the last surviving brother.
That same night, while her father lay in his agony, Françoise presented him once more with a poisoned potion. The old man cried aloud that he was in hell; he complained of an internal fire and begged incessantly for drink. He dictated his testament in favor of Bernarde, and, failing her, to Françoise. Shortly thereafter, he breathed his last. The mother died on the 14th of March. Within the span of a few days, the household had lost its two sons, its father, and its mother; the inheritance opened by the testament now hung upon two surviving sisters, one of whom had been miraculously spared by illness, while the other had preserved herself by laboring under other roofs.
Such swift deaths, accompanied by identical symptoms, could not fail to awaken suspicions of poison. The autopsies, Champagnac reports, yielded what the chronicler deemed irrefutable proof. Arsenic and nitric acid had been unsparingly employed. A search of the premises revealed store of poison concealed within Françoise’s wardrobe, as well as traces in the victuals she had cooked. She was laid under arrest. The magistrate charged her with the murder by poison of her father, her mother, and her two brothers, alongside several counts of attempted murder upon others.
Transferred to Auch, Françoise appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Gers on the 9th of July, 1829. She was clad in deep mourning. Champagnac describes her as being of medium stature, dressed with a simplicity that bore an air of neat elegance above her humble station, gifted with a soft voice, a modest demeanor, and a pleasing smile that the chronicler nevertheless regarded as singularly cold. She listened to the indictment read aloud without the slightest tremor or change of countenance. Such a portrait reflects the severe gaze of the chronicler; before the magistrates, it preceded three days of contentious debates during which fifty witnesses were heard.
In her defense, Françoise admitted that overtures had been made to her by a female neighbor, but insisted she had spurned them. She maintained that this neighbor had planted the poisons in her wardrobe and administered the fatal doses to her kin, protesting her own absolute innocence. Both the evidence of the prosecution and the physical exhibits undermined this tale. The jury returned an unanimous verdict of guilty on all counts: theft, poisoning, and parricide. She received the capital sentence, hearing the doom reserved for parricides without displaying the faintest outward emotion.
Her condemnation did not entirely dispel the doubts that her local reputation sustained. Champagnac records that her blameless morals, her conspicuous piety, and an apparent candor had left many minded to believe in her innocence. The chronicler then relates how Françoise’s subsequent confessions swept those uncertainties away. Following the rejection of her appeal by the Court of Cassation on the 16th of September, her confessor came to announce that no earthly hope remained. She divined the truth, she remarked, by the fallen countenance of her advocate, who had lacked the heart to bring the tidings himself.
She summoned Maître Allen Rousseau to her cell, reproaching him gently for having concealed her fate. She revealed that she had recited her rosary twenty times to beseech the Almighty that the judgment might stand, adding that she was content, and that it was entirely just that she should die. She protested that she could never suffer as terribly as her parents had suffered by her hand, calling them martyrs. Then she acknowledged herself to be the sole author of the butchery: the tale of the neighbor, with her advice and complicity, had been an outright fabrication intended solely to preserve her neck from the blade.
In this confession, Françoise ascribed her monstrous deeds to a wretched avarice. A few roods of land and a humble cottage had, by her own admission, armed her hand against her entire bloodline. She repeated these declarations before the assembled witnesses and fully cleared the woman she had falsely implicated. The inheritance promised in her father’s testament—devised first to Bernarde, and in default to Françoise—thus assumed its true place in her confession as the sole motive for the slaughter upon which justice had passed sentence.
Those present exhorted her to muster her courage. She replied that she would carry to the scaffold the very fortitude that had sustained her in the execution of her crimes. Following this declaration, she insisted upon making her own toilet, donned the prescribed smock of the parricide, and, shrouded beneath a black veil, walked to the scaffold with the resolute composure attributed to her by Champagnac. After the torments of the humble cottage, the solemnity of the assize hall, and the confinement of the cell, that final walk brought to its conclusion an affair wherein an inheritance had been dictated before the family was near utterly destroyed.