At Pillau, the dossier of a young female prisoner was reopened a second time—not before the judges, but within the garden of the fortress. Margarethe von Ka… had already been condemned for the death of a child born out of wedlock. Her sentence had been running for years; she had petitioned for clemency, then formed an intimacy with an officer. Before February 27, 1790, she was once again with child. The first trial had seemed to close the affair. It had merely placed the young woman behind walls, where the very same secret would take shape anew.
The account in the Pitaval reaches back to 1784. Margarethe was then twenty-three years of age and had succeeded in concealing her pregnancy from her mother. On November 24, around ten o’clock in the evening, the first pains drove her from the bedchamber she shared with four servant-girls. One of them followed her, and two others joined them when she went outside once more. They found her upon her knees near a great boulder, some thirty paces from the house; the labor had begun, and it came to an end before their eyes. Margarethe severed the cord with a knife she had carried with her. When Barbe attempted to carry the child into the house, the young mother opposed her and began to scrape away the earth, bidding her lay the infant therein. Barbe nevertheless entered with the newborn and placed her upon her mistress’s bed. Her wailing woke the grandmother, who had the child brought into her room, wrapped in linen, and laid atop a chest.
The little girl remained through the night without care, the umbilical cord unknotted. In the morning, by order of the grandmother, she was wrapped in a pelt and carried into a cold room; there she remained without nourishment. It was only at dusk that Margarethe went to look upon her. Finding her chilled to stone, she buried her in the garden, at the very spot where she had first sought to make her a grave. At the inquest, the physicians ascribed the death to rapid cold; the narrative describes no deliberate injury sufficient to establish murder in the material sense. Culpability coalesced around the conduct of two women: she who had given birth, and she who had taken in the child only to abandon her to that lingering neglect.
The tribunal condemned both. Margarethe’s mother received eight years’ detention; her daughter, six. On February 7, 1786, they entered the fortress of Pillau. Margarethe subsequently pleaded for pardon. After her mother’s death in 1787, she sought to cast the entirety of the blame upon her. The petition was rejected. The source indicates, however, that she was treated with a certain leniency within the fortress, and that the ordinary course of confinement left her associations that were to open a second intrigue.
This first conviction had thus set a duration, but it had not erased the past. Margarethe’s mother died before serving out her sentence; her daughter remained imprisoned, left alone to carry the memory of the garden. The version she submitted in her petition—that her mother had commanded everything, that she had been merely the instrument of her resolves—was not admitted. We cannot know what precise considerations the administration weighed to dismiss her suit. The chapter passes swiftly from this decision to her life within the fortress, without detailing the daily conditions of her confinement.
An ensign, designated only by the initial J., became attached to her. The chapter furnishes neither his full name nor the particulars of their encounters; it states only that she conceived. The officer could not fail to perceive that a second birth, under such conditions, would expose the prisoner to an inquest and perhaps to a heavier sentence. This time, Margarethe said nothing. She concealed her condition, denied that any pregnancy were possible, and kept her secret until the day when her body could harbor it no longer.
On February 27, 1790, she was on a visit at the lodging of Lieutenant von Sch. The chronicle records that she slipped from the house and gave birth in the fortress garden, sheltered from view. Prior to her labor, she had hollowed out a shallow trench in the earth. The child was laid therein. Blood, footprints, and the ensuing search led the investigators straight to her. This time, the medical examination admitted of no such doubt as had lingered in 1784: the newborn was at term, had breathed after birth, and had perished of suffocation beneath the earth. The difference between the two affairs turned upon a few brief hours and a single decisive question: had the child been living when the earth was cast over it?
Margarethe confessed to the birth and the burial, but maintained at first that she had perceived no sign of life. She pleaded panic and bewilderment, not a premeditated resolution. At the trial, her initial narrative failed to convince. The judgment decreed the lash and penal servitude for life within the fortress. Yet this verdict was not to be the final word. The defense appealed; the judges of the superior instance re-examined the cause and substituted death by the sword. The King confirmed this sentence on November 28, 1791.
On the final day of the year, the judgment was read to her in open court, along with its royal confirmation. According to the account of a bystander preserved in the chapter, Margarethe asked whether no mercy could be shown her, and whether the King knew that she maintained the child had not lived. The president replied that her assertion had been duly transmitted, together with the contrary opinion of the physicians, and that several reports had been prepared for the sovereign. She expressed anxiety over the fate of her family, inquired whether she might be buried in consecrated ground, and asked if she might make a testament; to each of these points the president answered her. Returning to the prison, she begged that the day of her death not be hastened, saying she wished to make confession of her entire life. The narrative ascribes this scene to the observer then present; it does not record the exchange as an official protocol.
The condemned woman did not lack for unexpected defenders. On January 6, 1792, a Pole named von Sp…—the text yields no more—presented himself, offering to marry her if such an alliance could save her life. The gesture seemed to proffer an avenue of escape for a woman punished for having delivered a child outside the bonds of matrimony. Yet Prussian law did not allow for a belated marriage to a felon to extinguish a capital sentence passed upon a woman. The suitor likewise raised questions of translation and mental capacity; the authorities discovered no sufficient ground to overturn the judgment.
The intervention grew yet more fraught when it became known that von Sp… had endeavored to induce Margarethe to recant her confession. She protested against his machinations and against the intrusion of this man who claimed to speak in her name. He ended by taking flight when his maneuvers were brought to light. The petition for mercy had therefore failed to deflect the course of justice; it merely introduced a brief tempest, that of a marriage proposed as a legal instrument and a confession sought to be retracted. On March 6, 1792, the King once more confirmed the sentence.
The date of execution was fixed for March 28. Prior to her death, Margarethe conceded that the second infant had indeed shown signs of life. This late acknowledgment contradicted what she had initially urged at trial; it fortified the medico-legal findings upon which her conviction rested. It altered nothing of the outcome. The chapter recounts no theatrical repentance, no edifying final scene: it halts at the plain fact that the condemned woman had ultimately acknowledged that the newborn was alive when she buried it.
Between the two births, eight years had elapsed. The first case had joined mother and daughter in a single condemnation, yet the division of responsibility remained distinct: the infant had been taken in, then deprived of care; the young woman had buried it only after its demise. In the second, the autopsy and the final confession attested that the child had drawn breath before being covered with earth. The resemblance of the gardens and the secrets must not obscure these divergences. The old narrative binds them together under a single title; yet the reader must permit each death to retain its own cause.
The fate of Margarethe thus hung between the silence of a fortress and the tardy precision of an expert inquest. The first time, an appeal for clemency and the shifting of blame onto her mother failed to unbar the gates. The second time, a concealed pregnancy, a disputed confession, an appeal, and an offer of marriage could not alter the royal decree. There remains neither the full name of the lineage, nor those of the men bound up with these pregnancies, nor any detail of the life of the child who was rescued from abandonment only to perish. There remain two proceedings and two verdicts. The capital sentence had been confirmed by the King prior to Margarethe’s final declaration; her belated confession cast light upon the facts, but could not alter a resolve already sealed.