The first intimation of the crime lay upon a slice of bread spread with grape jam. On the evening of May 20, 1847, in a modest dwelling in Lille, Jean-Baptiste Lahousse, his wife Napoléonne, and their daughters Élisa and Hortense shared bread and raisiné. Shortly thereafter, the three eldest members of the household were seized with violent pains and vomiting. At first, the affliction seemed to admit of a commonplace explanation: spoiled food, or a preserve that had turned. Yet the family was destined to rally only to fall sick once more; and even as the father sought outside the cause of this sudden pestilence, his daughter had already begun to govern what the world might know.
Lahousse was a tailor by trade. According to the German account published in 1861 in the Pitaval, the household lived by daily labor, devoid of riches but spared from destitution, and the children were literate. This domestic portrait is drawn from a judicial chronicle composed long after the event, rather than from an official record heard firsthand. Reporting on the Nord Assizes, the Gazette des Tribunaux later identified the father as Jean-Baptiste Lahousse, the mother as Napoléonne-Augustine Brémart, and the daughter as Julienne-Hortense Lahousse. It fixed the date of the trial in November 1847 and the two administrations of poison on May 20 and 29.
The initial sufferers did not immediately summon a physician. They endured several days of agony before seeming to mend. On May 29, however, the paroxysms returned with redoubled fury. In the version recorded by the Pitaval, Hortense brought into the house a potion she presented as a soothing syrup to relieve her parents’ distress. Her father and mother drank deeply of it; her sister scarcely tasted it. This second affliction was not perceived as a fresh assault. Within the home, it appeared merely to be a relapse of the first.
Jean-Baptiste Lahousse had nevertheless begun to mistrust the raisiné. He gathered remnants of the bread and jam to have them analyzed, persuaded that some noxious matter had been mixed into them by mischance. Initial suspicion fell upon Pannequin, the grocer who had sold the preserve. The Pitaval narrative states that the merchant demonstrated he had sold the very same stock to other customers without causing illness, and that an inspection of his goods disclosed nothing untoward. The inquiry therefore shifted to the journey made by the jar between the shop and the family table.
This trail pointed directly to Hortense. She alone had fetched the grape preserve, and according to the interrogations transcribed or summarized in both accounts, she admitted to having stirred a powder into the initial dish. The father perished on June 5. The Gazette places the mother’s death on July 19. This interval of several weeks is significant: the father succumbed after the initial onset of symptoms, whereas the mother survived the early crisis, languished in protracted illness, and died much later. The court likewise treated her demise as the consequence of poisoning; the retrospective chronicle notes, however, that no trace of poison was detected in her corpse, the medical authorities explaining that the lapse of time had allowed the substance to be eliminated.
The sister, Élisa, survived. The case file records no injury in her case comparable to that suffered by her parents, yet the prosecution charged Hortense with having twice attempted the lives of all three family members. This distinction between the act alleged, its individual outcome, and the medical evidence was to prove decisive at trial. The physicians and chemists summoned before the Assizes were examined on the clinical symptoms, the remnants of the meal, and the lethal potency of the substances administered. The contemporary press summarized their conclusions as favoring the prosecution; the account in the Pitaval provides a more elaborate narrative, though it must not be mistaken for the primary court record.
On June 6, the day after her father’s death, Hortense returned to Pannequin’s shop and reproached him for selling the preserve that had sickened her family, according to the indictment cited at the trial. The gesture admitted of two interpretations: the conduct of a customer genuinely convinced of a domestic misfortune, or a calculated performance intended to divert suspicion. The press noted subsequently that Pannequin was prosecuted for criminal negligence and that Hortense appeared as a prosecution witness against him. The sources consulted here do not disclose the outcome of those separate proceedings, and it cannot be treated as an established verdict to be appended to her history.
On July 12, the police questioned Hortense regarding the poison and her associations with Eugène Laugeois, a young journeyman sculptor. The Pitaval recounts a further interrogation on July 17, following which the girl, returning home in tears, reportedly threw herself at her mother’s feet and confessed to the poisoning. She initially cast the blame upon Laugeois: he had allegedly furnished the money to purchase the toxic substance and threatened her with violence should she refuse. These assertions remain reported statements, not proven facts against him.
The Gazette des Tribunaux gives the indictment a more precise procedural framing. Laugeois, initially charged and detained for roughly a month, received a formal nolle prosequi before Hortense was brought to trial. The girl retracted her allegations, stating she had merely wished to avoid bearing the sole burden of the crime. The journal reproduced the questions put to her during the proceedings: she admitted both administrations of poison, but initially sought to excuse her actions by alleging cruel treatment at the hands of her mother and sister. These relatives, as well as subsequent witnesses, emphatically disputed her claim. The surviving record does not permit us to transmute this domestic discord into psychological certainty.
The trial, therefore, turned not merely on the presence of poison. It posed the grave question of whether a fifteen-year-old girl possessed the discernment to comprehend the nature of her acts and answer for them criminally. The prosecution outlined a premeditated scheme: advance purchases made separately, two administrations spaced nine days apart, and the false accusation leveled against an innocent man. The defense did not deny that fatal acts had been committed; rather, it sought to explain how an adolescent without any discernible pecuniary interest could strike at her own kin, contending that she had acted without discernment. The pleadings summarized in the Pitaval mingle legal doctrine, now-obsolete medico-legal theories, and moral judgments concerning the girl’s deportment.
The 1861 narrative dwells heavily on her demeanor in the dock and her romantic life, deducing from them an innate cruelty and a chilling absence of remorse. Such commentary belongs entirely to the nineteenth-century compiler. It establishes neither motive, nor mental competence, nor the reality of any coercion by Laugeois. The trope of the “child-monster” offered the narrator a convenient resolution to an affair whose true motives eluded him, but it cannot supplant the rigorous examination of facts. Throughout the testimonies and legal arguments preserved in the press, the proposed explanations—willfulness, jealousy, domestic abuse, or a deficiency of moral sense—remain matters of unresolved dispute.
The Court of Assizes of the Nord sat at Douai from November 15 to 17, 1847. The Gazette records that the jury returned affirmative verdicts on the principal counts of guilt, and that a separate question was submitted regarding discernment. The indexed OCR of the article leaves the precise wording of this final answer uncertain. The ultimate outcome, however, is corroborated both by the periodical and by a bibliographic notice in Criminocorpus: Hortense was sentenced to twenty years’ solitary confinement (réclusion). She was then sixteen years old; at the time of the commission of the offenses, she was not yet sixteen—an age threshold that both the press and the bar treated as central to the determination of the penalty.
A material discrepancy must be noted. The second edition of the Pitaval asserts that the sentence was twenty-five years’ imprisonment. The contemporary report in the Gazette and the bibliographic record of an 1847 pamphlet entitled Her Condemnation state twenty years. The digitized files of the Gazette could not be directly inspected in the research environment; their indexed OCR was consulted, as was the bibliographic record, though not the pamphlet itself. In the absence of the original judicial decree, these sources cannot definitively resolve the contradiction: the Gazette reports twenty years, while the Pitaval records twenty-five. This chronicle preserves both figures without claiming either has been verified against the original minute of the judgment.
The trial thus left two distinct questions open. The first was legal: the evidence was deemed sufficient to convict Hortense, whereas the proceedings against Laugeois were abandoned before reaching the court. The second, touching upon motive and moral agency, was debated at the bar but remains unanswered in any form that can be reported without attribution. Two meals, separated by nine days; a father dead; a mother succumbing later; a sister spared: these physical elements form an undeniable sequence. They do not, of themselves, explain why an adolescent chose such a path, nor what she understood of the lethal reality of her acts. The 1861 chronicle fills this void with dogmatic moralizing; the contemporary records reveal instead the deep friction between material proof, legal culpability, and the vulnerabilities of youth.