Three hollowed carrots, a packet of powder, and six thalers: in July 1804, in Warsaw, the tale of a conspiracy against Louis XVIII rested entirely upon objects that no witness had ever seen delivered by the alleged conspirators. Jean Coulon, the keeper of a billiard parlour and coffeehouse frequented by the royal household, brought these articles to his former master. He asserted that he had been suborned to slip poison into the King’s broth. In 1857, the Pitaval revisited the affair, turning against the émigrés the very accusations they had once levelled against Napoleon.
One must pause first to consider this distance. The text entitled “The Poisoned Carrots,” published in the Der neue Pitaval in 1857, is neither a complete judicial transcript nor an impartial chronicle. It summarises legal depositions, cites official acts, and surrounds them with vigorous political commentary. The reality of a conspiracy against the House of Bourbon is by no means established by this narrative; on the contrary, the tribunal reported at the close of the inquiry concluded that Coulon’s denunciation was an imposture. What remains shrouded in obscurity, according to the same text, is the possibility that members of the royal entourage may have exploited the invention for partisan ends.
Warsaw was at that time a station of exile. Louis XVIII, residing under the style of the Comte de l’Isle, lived in the Prussian city surrounded by a diminutive court of servants, officers, and churchmen. In August, the London Courier circulated a startling account: agents of Bonaparte had allegedly sought to strike down the King and several members of his family by introducing poisoned carrots into the royal pot. Its correspondent assigned the role of tempter to a French agent named Boyer, portrayed as the instrument of an imperial design. The gazette did not report a discovery made by independent magistrates; it launched a political indictment into circulation.
A subsequent dispatch spoke of the indignation of Berlin, the insults endured by the French envoy, and the role of Coulon, who was said to have brought the design to light. Reading these accounts, the proof appeared already complete before the magistrates had even examined the individuals named. The Pitaval, however, identifies the true origin of these articles: according to its conclusion, émigrés from the Bourbon circle had procured the insertion of these narratives into the London journal. This detail is presented as a later admission by a representative of the court, yet the 1857 work remains the sole authority that transmits it; one must not confound its recitation of the record with its interpretation of their motives.
The scene then shifted to the Prussian authorities. The Comte d’Avaray waited upon President Hoym, intimating at first that several Frenchmen and a dozen Poles threatened the King’s life. He did not immediately specify the substance of his knowledge. Later, he spoke of a billiard-keeper, Coulon, who had supposedly been summoned to Nowawies to receive poison. Hoym doubted. The rendezvous would already have concluded by the time he could dispatch his officers; he knew not Coulon’s dwelling and could not arrest unknown individuals upon so vague a deposition.
D’Avaray returned with a memorial, and subsequently with a parcel which he presented to Hoym as containing ten to twelve young carrots that Coulon had allegedly received from the strangers. The President declined to seal a deposition that affirmed in advance the provenance of the vegetables: nothing at that juncture verified that Coulon had received them from the men he described. This discrepancy proved consequential thereafter: Coulon maintained he had received only three, and the official report of 26 July ordered the chemical analysis of three carrots and a bottle of liquor. Four experts, according to the record, concluded that arsenic was present within the roots. This finding, if faithfully reported, established the composition of the objects submitted for inspection. It proved neither who had prepared them, nor that they had been delivered by conspirators, nor that they were ever destined to enter the royal kitchen.
The chronology itself grew tangled across the versions. The narrative of Beauchamp, summarised by the Pitaval, presented a dramatic scene wherein the strangers lured Coulon beyond the city gates, placed the package in his hands, and promised him four hundred louis d’or. In the depositions lodged with the examining magistrate, Coulon related at first that he had been asked to cast a powder into the soup, then described successive meetings, a bottle of spirits intended to fortify his courage, threats, and an orchestrated flight to France. The particulars shifted continually; a handkerchief concealed beside a tree, the place of assignation, the number of carrots, and the sums promised appeared and vanished from his testimony.
The first suspicion assumed a domestic character. Following the departure of the court, Coulon’s wife was arrested upon a rumour that she had sought poison from a grocer. She acknowledged having asked for a powder, but claimed it was intended to destroy rats and mice, unknown to her husband. Coulon then admitted that he had instructed his wife to make the purchase. He offered an explanation: the strangers had initially demanded an agent against vermin, then substituted a poison intended for the King. Yet this version refused to hold firm. Coulon admitted that the physical objects and the package he claimed to have received had not figured in the earliest stages of his depositions as he later asserted.
Interrogated by the Prussian magistrates, he altered his course entirely. He confessed to having fabricated the plot to secure a reward at a moment when the King’s departure threatened his livelihood. He claimed to have fashioned the carrots himself, hollowing them out with a spoon and a wooden stick before introducing the arsenic purchased at the apothecary’s shop. He explained further that the handkerchief concealed at Nowawies was merely a prop intended to lend credibility to his fiction. This recantation did not conclude the matter: Coulon subsequently reverted to his initial accusation, embellishing it with fresh details, and then accused certain gentlemen of the royal court of having guided his conduct and orchestrated the public revelation of the affair.
With each of these variations, a reward, an escape, or a pension was invoked. Coulon spoke of considerable sums, yet the figures fluctuated wildly. He claimed at first that the strangers had offered him four hundred louis; later, he spoke of an expected bounty of one hundred ducats for his denunciation. He asserted that his former master, the Baron de Milleville, had promised him a pension; the Pitaval also noted a payment of thirty-five ducats made at the very moment his first narrative was committed to writing. These are depositions and clues whose import remains contested, not unilateral proof of a royalist intrigue.
The most compromising material exhibit against Coulon, according to the record, was the implement discovered in his lodgings. After he acknowledged having hollowed out the roots and filled them, the investigators discovered a small wooden stick whose point still bore a yellowish stain. The chronicler likewise relates that he was made to repeat the operation upon other carrots, matching the originals in form and in the thread wound about one of them. Coulon subsequently recanted this material admission. For the Pitaval, the exhibits and the contradictions in his testimony entirely demolished the theory of an imperial conspiracy; they do not, however, permit modern scrutiny to determine with certainty what portion of each declaration contained the truth.
The tribunal was thus called upon to judge not an attempted assassination, but a malicious denunciation. At the conclusion of its inquiry, the Berlin Kammergericht determined, according to the decree summarised by the Pitaval, that Coulon, with the probable participation of persons in the entourage of the Comte de l’Isle, had falsely accused Boyer of serving as the instrument of a poisoning plot, and had done so from interested motives. The text presents this judicial conclusion as founded upon the preliminary investigation; its language of probability regarding the other participants must be strictly maintained. Coulon was sentenced to four years of hard labour in a fortress. The appeal confirmed the judgment, and he was conveyed to the fortress of Cosel.
The journalist of 1857 did not confine himself to this judicial resolution. He poured scorn upon the Legitimists, charged certain of them with having fabricated or exploited the denunciation, and drew parallels between this episode and other political intrigues. His indictment of the émigrés was as partisan as the accusations against Napoleon had been in the gazettes of 1804. Such symmetry does not render all hypotheses equivalent: the Kammergericht, according to the Pitaval, judged Coulon’s accusation naming Boyer as an intermediary to be an imposture; the chapter records no separate trial of Boyer. The precise complicity of the dignitaries of the court remains the chronicler’s suspicion, rather than an established verdict.
There remain, therefore, three carrots and two narratives disputing their origin. In the first, a servant of the royal household foils a regicide commanded by the Emperor; in the second, an indebted publican fabricates an accusation, whilst others seek to turn it to political profit. The tribunal determined the criminal culpability of Coulon, not every motive attributed to the émigrés, nor all the statecraft of that age. The carrots possess no voice; the dossier, conversely, possesses far too many, and each demands to be believed.