Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature

by Unknown

FEMALE POISONERS

One of the commentators on the works of the ancient Greek writers, says, “Among the Greeks, women appear to have been most addicted to criminal poisoning, as we learn from various passages in ancient authors.” The author most frequently quoted is Antiphon, whose discourses on judicial procedure in Athens in criminal prosecutions, which appeared about four hundred and thirty or forty years B. C., are still preserved. Dr. Witthaus, the toxicologist, in repeating this observation, supplements it with an assumption which may or may not be warrantable. He says, “Women appear to have been most addicted to the crime of poisoning in the Grecian period, as they are at the present time.” A repetition may also be noted in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, under the term Veneficium, the crime of poisoning. Referring to its frequent mention in Roman history, Smith says, “Women were most addicted to it.”

This crime has furnished a theme for novelists and dramatists all the way from the Poison Maid or Bisha-Kanya of India, in the Hindu story of the “Two Kings;” in the “Secretum Secretorum” of Aristotle (XXVII.); and in the “Gesta Romanorum” (XI.), to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of “Rappacini’s Daughter.” Our modern fiction writers generally select their culprits from the male sex,—as for example, Charles Dickens in his “Hunted Down,” and Charles Reade in “Put Yourself in His Place.” Frequent references in Shakespeare’s dramatic works, such as the poisoning of Regan, daughter of King Lear, by her sister Goneril, or the removal of Leonine by Cleon’s wife in Pericles, show that this, as all else in human character and conduct, could not escape the grasp of the master spirit. He makes Richard II. say,—

“Let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:—

How some have been deposed, some slain in war;

Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;

All murdered.”

In Cymbeline, the king’s physician, in announcing the death of the queen, surprises and startles the monarch with the revelation of her fiendish purpose to destroy both him and his daughter by a former queen, in order to clear the way for her ambitious projects:

“Your daughter, whom she bore in hand to love

With such integrity, she did confess

Was as a scorpion to her sight; whose life,

But that her flight prevented it, she had

Ta’n off by poison.

“More, sir, and worse, she did confess she had

For you a mortal mineral, which, being took,

Should by the minute feed on life, and lingering,

By inches waste you: In which time she purposed

By watching, weeping, tendance, kissing, to

O’ercome you with her show,” etc.

Sanskrit medical writings, which date back several hundred years before Christ, testify that the Hindus of that early period were familiar with poisons—animal, vegetable and mineral—together with their antidotes. Passages like the following show that criminal poisoning was guarded against:

“It is necessary for the practitioner to have knowledge of the symptoms of the different poisons and their antidotes, as the enemies of the Raja (sovereign)—bad women and ungrateful servants—sometimes mix poison with food.”

To various warnings which follow is added the precaution, “Food which is suspected should be first given to certain animals, and if they die, it is to be avoided.”

There is abundant evidence that the Persians and Egyptians, as well as the Hindus, were familiar with poisonous substances, such as the venom of serpents, the hydrocyanic acid of the peach kernel, mineral corrosives or irritants, and vegetable narcotics. In the Grecian mythology there is occasional reference to the removal of inconvenient husbands by goddesses who are familiar with the deadly properties of aconite. The manner in which Ulysses neutralized the enchantments of Circe, as related in the Odyssey, shows that attention was given at an early period to the application of antidotes. Homer also tells us of the voyage of Ulysses to Ephyra,

“to learn the direful art

To taint with deadly drugs the barbed dart;”

and Ovid relates that the arrows of Hercules were tipped with the venom of serpents, differing in that respect from the modern South American poison, curare, which is a vegetable extract. Poisoned arrows are referred to in the sixth chapter of Job, but there is no reference either in the Old or New Testament to the use of poison for taking away life.

Of the poisons used in Greece in the historical period, and mentioned by Nicander, the favorite appears to have been hemlock. Whether it was the Conium maculatum, or the Cicuta virosa or aquatica, is a matter of controversy. Haller contends that the water-hemlock was the conium of the Greeks. It may be noted, however, that Pliny says that the generic term Cicuta was not indicative of a particular family of plants, but of vegetable poison in general.

For the first circumstantial report of an instance of the class under consideration, we must go back to Antiphon, who, as already noted, lived more than twenty-three centuries ago. In one of his discourses he gives a short speech, entitled “Against a Stepmother, on a Charge of Poisoning.” It treats of a case which was brought before the famous court known as Areopagos. The speaker, a young man, is the son of the deceased. He charges his stepmother with having poisoned his father several years before through the instrumentality of a woman who was her dupe. The deceased and a friend, Philoneos, the woman’s lover, had been dining together, and she was persuaded to administer a philtre to both, in hope of recovering her lover’s affection. Both the men died, and the woman—a slave—was put to death forthwith. The accuser now asks that the real criminal—the true Clytemnestra of this tragedy—shall suffer punishment.

During the Renaissance in Italy, poisoning became a fine art; the victims were numbered by thousands, and the female fiend was everywhere in evidence. In the seventeenth century the use of poison as an instrument of secret murder became so common as to warrant a violation of the confessional. In 1659 the priests of Rome informed the Pope, Alexander VII., of the great number of poisonings revealed to them in the confessions of young widows. Investigation led to the discovery of a secret society of women which met at the house of Hieronyma Spara, a fortune-teller, who dispensed an elixir or “acquetta” for the dissolution of unhappy marriages. After a large number of victims had been sacrificed, La Spara’s practices were detected through cunning police artifice. She and thirteen of her companions were hanged; others were publicly whipped half-naked through the streets of Rome, and those of the highest rank were banished.

There was a similar society of married women in Naples headed by a Sicilian woman named Tofana, who devised the arsenical solution known as the Aqua Tofana, Acquetta di Napoli, or Aqua di Perugia. It was usually labeled “Manna of St. Nicholas of Bari.” Eventually the nature of her transactions was discovered and she was cast into prison. It is said that she was strangled, but whatever her end, it is certain that she confessed, under torture, to instrumentality in six hundred murders by poison, including two popes, Pius III and Clement IV.

Murrell says that the Aqua Tofana was made by rubbing white arsenic into pork, and collecting the liquid which drained from it during decomposition. To an irritant mineral poison was therefore added, by this vile process, a ptomaine or cadaveric alkaloid possessing properties of the highest degree of toxicity. Be this as it may, there is well-grounded belief that corrosive sublimate and opium were sometimes added to the arsenic.

In other countries there was similar activity in this line. Thierry, the historian of the Norman conquest, for example, tells us of one queen of the Franks, Fridegonde, in the sixth century, whose life “could be summarized in a chronological table of assassinations by steel or poison”; and of another, Brunhilde, who poisoned her grandson and ten kings or sons of kings.

In Russia, Catherine I., wife of Peter the Great, noted for her scandalous misconduct, is believed to have poisoned her husband; and in France, Francis II. and Charles IX. were poisoned with the connivance of Catherine de Medici, wife of Henry II., who instigated the massacre of St. Bartholomew, to say nothing of the prompting of the assassination of Henry of Guise and his brother the cardinal. Catherine had in her employ a Milanese named Reni, who served her in the double capacity of perfumer and poisoner. Here, again, the backward swing of the iconoclastic pendulum has challenged the verdict of history, but historic judgment is still firm and impregnable.

In England the most noteworthy case in high life was that of the Countess of Somerset, who poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury, in the Tower of London, in 1613, with corrosive sublimate. As Lady Essex she had procured a divorce from her husband in order to marry Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Overbury was in possession of incriminating facts concerning Lady Essex which would have been fatal to her success, and he was put out of the way ten days before the decree of divorce was pronounced. More than two years elapsed before circumstances led to the discovery of her crime. She was found guilty, but was pardoned by James I. This leniency was in marked contrast with the treatment of those who had no friends at Court. A statute of Henry VIII. ordered prisoners to be boiled to death, and in accordance therewith, it is related that a young woman who had poisoned three families at Smithfield was boiled alive.

In the course of the latter half of the seventeenth century a mania for secret poisoning was developed in France, which extended to all classes of society. La Spara and Tofana had fitting types and imitators in Paris in two midwives and fortune-tellers named Lavoison and Lavigoreux. So great was their traffic in poisons, and it may be said, so fashionable, that their houses were thronged with purchasers, both of high and low degree, from Paris and the provinces. The usual motives and incentives were in full play, jealousy, revenge, avarice, court intrigue, political enmity, and removal of all obstacles that stood in the way of iniquitous plans and projects. To suppress and punish this class of offenders, a special tribunal was established in the reign of Louis XIV., known as the “Chambre Ardente.” Lavoison and her confederate were condemned and executed in 1680, and their accomplices in various cities of France, to the number of more than one hundred, were burned or beheaded.

Of the prisoners of the aristocratic class of that period, none commanded such widespread interest, and none is so well remembered as Marie-Marguerite d’Aubray, la Marquise de Brinvilliers. Here was a woman with every advantage of high birth and position, of large wealth, of influential connections, of singular beauty, fascinating manners and elegant accomplishments, recklessly throwing all away in the attempt to substitute a scoundrelly lover for a reprobate husband. This lover, Gaudin de St. Croix, who, while incarcerated in the Bastille, in company with the Italian chemist, Exili, had learned from him the preparation and application of poisons, so far as then known, became in turn the instructor of the marchioness. This Jezebel, in order to test the efficacy of the materials which St. Croix supplied, and to qualify herself for the sure destruction of her father and her two brothers, who antagonized her shameful amour, visited the hospitals, particularly the Hôtel Dieu, day after day, in the guise of a sister of charity, to experiment upon helpless invalids. In the course of this diabolical work she often produced effects as mere aggravated symptoms of the maladies she was ostensibly endeavoring to alleviate, and while outwardly gentle, tender, compassionate, and sympathetic, she succeeded in sending a large number to the deadhouse without incurring suspicion. St. Croix afterwards lost his life by inhaling deadly fumes in his laboratory; letters compromising the marchioness were found in his cabinet, and she escaped to Liège, but was eventually decoyed from a convent in which she had taken refuge, and brought back to Paris, tortured into confession, and beheaded on the scaffold in the Place de Grève. The best narrative of her romantic career may be found in the admirable historical novel of Albert Smith, better known as an entertaining writer than as an English surgeon.

With respect to social position, there is a wide gulf between coarse and vulgar reprobates and such society leaders as the Belgian aristocrat, Madame Marie Thérèse Joniaux, whose trial at Antwerp, several years ago, for the murder of her sister, brother, and uncle, all insured in her favor, created a profound sensation. She was the daughter of General Ablay, a distinguished cavalry officer; had been brought up in an atmosphere of refinement and cultivated taste; had been twice married to men of superior rank, and had moved among the best social circles of Brussels and Antwerp. But down in the depths of her moral sense she proved to be as depraved, as vicious, as impenitent as the low-born wretches to whom we have referred. Her love of luxury and display and her passion for cards exhausted her fortune, and her nearest relatives were sacrificed to repair it. Yet she was so far above suspicion that it was only the rapidity with which the claims successively matured, and the impetuous and indecent haste with which payment was claimed, that led to her betrayal.

A case which attracted widespread attention was that of Madeline Smith, of Glasgow, who was tried in July, 1857, for the murder of her lover and seducer, Pierre Emile L’Angelier. He sought to crown his perfidious conduct with marriage, but her parents not knowing of their illicit relations, forced an engagement to marry a man of their choice, Mr. Minnoch. Thereupon the revengeful scoundrel exposed to friends of the family Madeline’s piteous letters to him with reference to her enceinte condition, and drove her to desperation. The indictment read, “administering arsenic or some other poison in coffee, cocoa, or some other food or drink, in February, 1857.” The trial ended with the Scotch verdict, “not proven,” to the great relief of the community, everybody being in sympathy with the defendant. In the course of the analytical evidence, several chemico-legal questions were involved, one of the most important of which related to the degree of solubility of arsenic. In the stomach of the deceased the chemists found ninety grains of arsenic either dissolved or suspended, and there was arsenic enough in the intestines to cause violent purging. This, by the way, was seized upon by the defence as consistent with the theory that the deceased died of cholera morbus. But while the crown contended that the arsenic had been administered in coffee or chocolate, the defence claimed that it was impossible that such a quantity could have been taken unconsciously by the deceased in these or any other liquid media. With reference to this view, Witthaus very properly notes that it presupposes that solution is a requisite to secret administration, but while this may be true of a transparent medium, and where the victim is in the possession of his senses, it must not be forgotten that a much larger quantity than could be dissolved may be stirred into a thick and opaque liquid, and taken without producing any effect upon the senses, except possibly a rough taste or gritty sensation.

No case of arsenical poisoning in recent times has attracted so much attention, aroused so much interest, and provoked so much discussion as that of Mrs. Florence Maybrick. The fact that James Maybrick was in the habit of taking arsenic as a tonic in fractional doses, and the insufficiency of such alleged motives as the life insurance, and the attachment to Brierly, were points in favor of the defence. On the other hand, the repeated investigation of the Home Secretary, and his stubborn resistance to appeals for pardon from England and America, strengthened the presumption of guilt. But even those who were unconvinced of the prisoner’s innocence of criminal intent gladly acquiesced in the release from long imprisonment which finally came in response to persistent demand.