The sick man accepted his wife’s ministrations, yet found it passing strange that he should suffer the more for them. He told her that, had she not been his wedded wife, he would have believed she was poisoning him. This remark recurred several times, according to the chronicle, throughout those days of April 1809. It already harboured suspicion, yet contained the very reason to dismiss it: the person who brought the draughts to his lips was the very one from whom Pierre-Antoine Dalleux most assuredly expected his salvation. He was not entirely lacking in perspicacity; he was merely denied the power to believe what he caught a glimpse of.
Dalleux was a husbandman and pig merchant in Juilly, near Dammartin. On Easter Sunday, the second of April, he was to spend part of the day in company with his family. His brother-in-law, Guenot, had arrived; a repast at his mother-in-law’s, followed by a call upon an uncle, made up that customary round of visits and successive tables. Towards eleven o’clock, his wife served dinner to the two men, bringing their plates separately. Guenot relished what was set before him; Dalleux, on the contrary, found his broth unpalatable and left a portion behind. When the other offered to finish it, she turned him aside.
For the moment, the scene might have passed for an ordinary domestic dispute over a meal too rich or ill-prepared. Dalleux complained, ate sparingly, asked for drink, and then accompanied his brother-in-law on his way. The sickness seized him almost immediately. He returned home and lay down fully dressed, before being compelled to take to his bed in earnest. The vomiting began; he thought at first of simple indigestion. His wife remained by his side, loosened his cravat, supported his head, and spoke to reassure him. The gestures of comfort and those for which she would later be reproached occupied the very same ground, at the edge of the very same bed.
She watched alone through that first night. On the morrow, a woman of the household, the wife of a carter, was summoned to nurse the sick man. A surgeon arrived in the afternoon; he likewise concluded it was an indigestion and prescribed a remedy. Dalleux, however, rejected almost everything forced upon him, declaring he could stomach nothing save hot water. The patient’s condition ought to have separated those potions that brought relief from those that ushered in fresh seizures. Yet when a sickness lingers, observations blur into changing courses of physic, and one readily attributes to the disease that which proceeds from the hand charged with combating it.
Dalleux’s mother arrived on the Tuesday. Alarmed, she sent for La Barthe, a physician in Juilly. From that hour, several persons stood gathered round the bed: the wife, the mother, the nurse, and the men of art. Such a presence might have seemed a safeguard. It proved insufficient, so long as each assumed the others pursued the identical end. The sick man, who hitherto had willingly called for his wife, began to prefer whatever was offered him by his mother. The paroxysms followed the same visits with excessive regularity. His former utterance returned: in any other hands, these draughts would have appeared suspicious to him.
One evening, the young wife sent the nurse away to rest, remaining once more alone beside her husband. When the other woman returned, his agonies had not ceased. She subsequently perceived an unaccustomed aspect in certain preparations, yet initially found a commonplace explanation for their cloudiness. The mother ordered basins emptied and scoured. None of this, taken in isolation, pointed as yet to a culprit. It was necessary that these observations be preserved, compared, and reported to someone capable of regarding them with a different eye. Hitherto, each person had performed her allotted task: watching, washing, preparing, and serving drink. This very regularity had perhaps prevented them from perceiving what was creeping into their midst.
On Wednesday, La Barthe witnessed a convulsion and forbade anything further to be given before his own intervention. He administered a sedative with his own hands. The night proved better; on Thursday, he conceived some hope. The mother, reassured, set off for her own home. Yet a potion hitherto tolerated provoked fresh lamentations. The nurse at last set aside what she deemed abnormal, in order to show it to the physician. The gesture was modest, yet it altered the nature of the inquiry: instead of scouring the vessel to make it fit for use, she preserved that which might explain the peril.
Upon his return, she discreetly drew La Barthe’s attention to it. He examined the sediment and suspected a toxic substance. A young cowherd of the household then provided a decisive clue: the matter shown to him resembled a powder he had fetched from Dammartin on behalf of his mistress. The physician questioned him. This connection was no chemical analysis in the sense we now understand; it nevertheless linked the irregularities of the treatment to a purchase and to a person. La Barthe alerted the patient’s father and caused a watch to be set, ensuring that the care of the invalid was no longer left to the same discretion.
Dalleux survived. The chronicle notes that he regained his strength as soon as he was shielded and ministered to by other hands. One would be wrong to allow the word poisoning, under which the dossier was filed, to obliterate this outcome: the husband did not die. His life had been imperilled for several days, and was preserved by a change in the manner of his nursing. The authorities, now apprised, investigated what had been bought. A woman keeping a grocery in Dammartin had furnished hazardous substances, requested under a domestic pretext. A letter and a packet were delivered into the hands of justice.
Interrogated, the woman Dalleux began by asserting that she had used her purchases in the lofts. She subsequently admitted having administered some to her husband. Her declarations varied regarding the number of occasions: she attempted to restrict her confession to the Sunday repast, then acknowledged further administrations in the course of the malady. It is not necessary to reconstruct each of these actions to comprehend the snare. That which was meant to cure or merely sustain the invalid had been turned against him; the worsening of his condition drew back to his pillow the very succour from which he most needed protection.
She was nineteen years of age. When asked as to her motives, she described a husband who was given to scolding, who demanded strict accountings upon his return from his journeys, and who showed himself jealous. She declared that he had neither struck nor threatened her, yet that she lived in dread of him and could ill brook an existence so different from the one she had known under her mother’s roof. The ancient narrative dismisses these grievances as trivial matters. We are under no obligation to adopt that measure of human misery; nor are we to substitute for it a conjugal violence that the record nowhere describes. Her words speak of a life she dreaded, and of a criminal answer made to that life.
She denied any intent to kill him. Her wish, so she claimed, had been to soften his harshness by making him ill, to keep him close by her side, and to obtain from an enfeebled man the gentleness she could not otherwise discover in him. She maintained, moreover, that she had been ignorant of the mortal peril of what she gave him to swallow. The defence pleaded an impairment of her faculties. The chapter furnishes neither a detailed medical report nor the entirety of the court proceedings; it allows us to know the argument, not to pronounce a diagnosis after the fact. The youth of the accused, her confessions, and her explanations did not move the jury to dismiss the responsibility laid to her charge.
The criminal court of Seine-et-Marne sentenced her to death on the nineteenth of October, 1809. Her appeal was rejected; she was executed on the second of December. The account leaves the husband living, without relating what subsequently became of his household. Thus, despite the sentence that brings it to a close, it returns us to the outset of the malady: a man hesitated to believe his wife could wish him harm; a nurse accounted for a change in appearance; a physician diagnosed an indigestion. It was necessary that an observation cease to be explained away for the chain to be broken. In this affair, saving a sick man began by refusing to call everything brought to him a remedy.