The will was ready. Following the death of Jacques Pitra, his widow brought it forth: two years earlier, he had instituted her his universal legatee. She was answered that the birth of their son, subsequent to the deed, altered the question entirely. The paper she deemed decisive resolved nothing. In this house in Boissy, where the husband had just expired after a day of agony, it was already necessary to ask who would possess the estate; soon, it would be necessary to ask what had been introduced into his meal. The very same child stood at the centre of both inquiries: the boy whom the dying man had commended to another’s care, and whose existence thwarted the widow’s expectations.
Pitra had resided for many years in England. There, he had offered French lessons and acquired a modest competence, augmented by the inheritance of a sister who kept a milliner’s shop in London. His return to France had proved less fortunate: ill-advised investments and speculation had diminished his resources to the point of ruin, according to the chronicle. He engaged Rosalie-Gabrielle Jallaquier, a seamstress, as a trusted housekeeper, and subsequently married her on 1 May 1824. Trust had thus preceded marriage. Four years later, he would die accusing the woman to whom he had wished to leave whatever remained of his fortune.
The household was tumultuous. Pitra drank frequently; upon his returns, violent quarrels broke out. The early narrative contrasts Rosalie’s fiery temperament with her husband’s drunkenness. It also preserves a confidant’s memory of the man: he spoke of his life as so wretched that he occasionally contemplated suicide. None of this constitutes advance proof of murder. These are the utterances of a man bound in an unhappy union, every syllable of which the preliminary investigation would retain, possessed as it now was of the denouement. The child had been born into this house where questions of livelihood, attachment, and resentment were inextricably mingled.
On 1 May 1828, Pitra returned home towards three o’clock to dine. The servant brought in the soup. Rosalie followed her, bade her pour out the whole of it, and then withdrew. Pitra ate with appetite. Shortly thereafter, he was seized with vomiting, which grew alarming. Someone suggested summoning a physician; his wife opposed it, declaring it to be nothing more than indigestion. There are words that, within a household, close a discussion as securely as a door. This term ascribed a common cause to the suffering, promised that it would pass, and allowed relief to be deferred.
Pitra, however, was not content with this explanation. To a servant who approached his bed, he declared that the illness had begun after the soup and that he had been poisoned. His wife, who was present, reproached him for the thought. He then questioned the maid: who had prepared the meal? She replied that she had. Had she left it unattended? She explained that Rosalie had caused it to be reheated. Pitra deemed that he knew enough. His accusation arose from a chain of events he was reconstructing from his bed, between what he had eaten, the moment he had fallen ill, and his wife’s intervention.
Towards six o’clock, the widow Pincemaille arrived. Before her, Pitra repeated his accusation against Rosalie. The sick man’s conviction thus became a declaration heard by several persons. He ceased answering his wife, addressed the servant, and commended his child to her care. The chronicle lends a poignant gravity to these exchanges: a father makes provision for what he fears he will no longer be able to do himself, whilst no one has yet delivered him from the peril he denounces. What he said illuminates his conviction. Justice would still have to seek what, beyond that conviction, could substantiate it.
Pitra’s condition deteriorated as evening fell. The servant warned her mistress that he would likely not survive the night; she later attributed to Rosalie a callous retort, expressing the wish that he might die. When the end approached, Rosalie did not return upstairs, despite a further summons. The servant and Madame Pincemaille remained beside the body. These women were to become the depositories of that final day: they had observed the ministrations, the absences, the exchanges, and the shifting state of the sufferer. Their recollections were hardening into depositions, carrying all the weight that kitchen or bedchamber gossip acquires when rehearsed before a court.
Rosalie requested that her husband be swiftly laid out and buried the very next day. She produced his will of 23 April 1826. The existence of the son born since that date, as well as the possibility of subsequent dispositions, was raised against her claim. The chronicle asserts that she showed anxiety only regarding her pecuniary interests, and only thereafter affected grief. One may follow these proceedings without presuming to weigh the sincerity of her tears. A will may furnish a motive for the prosecution; of itself, it cannot unlock a conscience. Yet the contrast between the coldness of the first day and the subsequent laments would figure prominently in the portrait drawn of her.
The investigation led to her arrest. Prior to her apprehension, she had sought to ascertain what the witnesses were disclosing to the magistrate. An apprentice, Lacroix, reported a conversation in which she spoke contemptuously of her husband and alluded to another woman convicted of poisoning who had received what she termed a lenient sentence. She was said to have added that, provided one did not confess, nothing worse could be inflicted. This was no direct admission of guilt; the prosecution, however, discovered in it a manner of speaking of the crime and its penalty that told heavily against her. The possession of arsenic, which the narrative imputes to her, provided an additional material element.
Champagnac records that poisoning was established, yet preserves neither the detailed operations of the expert analysis nor the full balance of the adversarial debate. The trial emerges chiefly through the depositions, the spoken words retained on record, and the ultimate verdict. One must not, therefore, lend to this reconstruction the certainty of an expertise that is no longer before our eyes. Rosalie appeared on 19 August before the Assize Court of Seine-et-Oise. The jury returned an affirmative verdict on the question of guilt, and the court sentenced her to death. She had maintained her composure throughout the proceedings; in prison, following the judgment, she gave way to utter despair.
On 28 October 1828, she was executed at Versailles. She contested the verdict to the very end, even amidst the preparations of her final hour, accusing witnesses of perjury and protesting her innocence. The last words the chronicle attributes to her were directed indirectly to her son: she wished this protestation to be conveyed to him. The narrative that had depicted her as preoccupied with inheritance thus concluded with another transmission, devoid of deed or seal, entrusted only to those who heard it. We do not know what was told to the child. We know only that he had already lost his father, and was now losing his mother.
The will had explained nothing of the soup; the condemned woman’s cries could not undo a verdict, any more than her earlier silence would have sufficed to prove the crime. The affair remains suspended between these objects and these words: a testamentary document, a meal, private confidences, a substance possessed, and two opposing accusations—that of the dying husband, and that of the widow against her judges. Justice had made its choice. The chronicler’s duty is to leave each piece of evidence to its true nature, and to the child the place which both spouses, at the hour of death, had suddenly restored to him.