On 10 November, Castaing appeared at the prisoner's bar. The affair had created a great sensation even before it was made public; and the Assize Court presented the appearance usual when an important case is on—that is to say, so many lovely women and fashionably dressed men put in an appearance that one might have thought it the first night of a new play which had been announced with great pomp. The accused was brought in. An indefinable movement of interest agitated the spectators: they bent forward and oscillated with curiosity, looking like a field of corn tossed about by the wind. He was a handsome young man, well set up, with a pleasant face, although there was something rather odd in his expression as he looked at you. Without being elegantly attired, he was dressed with care.
Alas! the preliminary investigation had revealed terrible facts. Auguste Ballet's death had caused judicial attention to be bestowed upon this unlucky family, and it was discovered that, since Castaing had known the family, the father, the mother, the uncle had all disappeared, struck down mortally within five months of each other, leaving the two brothers Hippolyte and Auguste a very considerable fortune; and, finally, Hippolyte died in his turn in Castaing's arms, without either his brother Auguste or his sister Madame Martignon being able to get to him. All these deaths had successively concentrated pretty nearly the whole of the family fortune on the head of Auguste Ballet.
On 1 December 1822, Auguste Ballet, aged twenty-four, in health of mind and body at the time, made a will, constituting Castaing, without any motive, his residuary legatee, with no reservations beyond a few small bequests to two friends and three servants. Auguste Ballet died in his turn on 1 June, seven months after his brother. Now this is what the proceedings had elicited concerning the two points which in similar cases are specially investigated by those in charge of the case—namely, Castaing's intellectual and his physical life. With regard to his intellectual life, Castaing was a hard worker, urged on by ambition, burning with the desire to become rich; his mother revealed horrible things concerning him, if a letter that was seized at her house was to be believed; his father reproached him with his licentious life and the sorrow with which he overwhelmed both his parents. In the midst of all this, he worked on perseveringly: he passed his examinations; he became a doctor.
Anatomy, botany and chemistry were the subjects to which he devoted most time. Especially chemistry. His note-books were produced, full of observations, extracts, erasures. They attested the determination shown in his researches and the profound study he had made of poisons, of their various kinds, of their effects, of the palpable traces some leave on different bodily organs, whilst some, quite as deadly and more insidious, kill without leaving any vestiges perceptible to the eyes of the most learned and experienced anatomist.
These poisons are all vegetable poisons: brucine, derived from false angostura; strychnine from Saint-Ignatius nut; morphine from pure opium, which is extracted from the Indian poppy. Now, it was a strange and terrible coincidence that on 18 September 1822, seventeen days before the death of Hippolyte Ballet, Castaing bought ten grains of acetate of morphine. Twelve days later, Hippolyte, suffering from a serious pulmonary disease, but not yet in danger, was seized with a deadly attack and died, as we have said, far from his sister and his brother, after five days' illness! He died in Castaing's arms.
Then Castaing's fortunes changed: he who had been very hard up heretofore lent his mother thirty thousand francs and invested under assumed names or in bearer stock the sum of seventy thousand francs. The matter was further complicated by matters arising out of the will of Hippolyte Ballet, questions which will never be properly cleared up, even in the law courts, and which seemed to imply that Auguste Ballet became Castaing's accomplice. Hence Auguste's weakness for Castaing; hence that will in his favour; hence the intimacy between these two men, who never separated from one another; all these things were explained, from the moment when, instead of the ordinary bond of pure and simple friendship, the link between them was supposed to be the indestructible chain of mutual complicity.
For—and this is the time to return to his outward life, that we have put to one side in order to speak of the intellectual life—Castaing was not wealthy: he lived on a moderate income allowed him by his mother; his own efforts barely produced him five or six hundred francs per annum; he had a mistress, also very poor, a widow with three children; he had two other children by her, so the young doctor had to keep a family of six persons whilst as yet he had no practice. It seems that he adored his family, especially his children. Letters were found showing warm fatherly affection in a heart that was consumed, even more on behalf of others than on his own account, with that thirst of ambition and that craving for riches which brought him to the scaffold.
We have seen that Castaing's finances suddenly became easier, that he lent his mother thirty thousand francs and that he invested seventy thousand francs in assumed names or in bearer bonds.
Then, next, we saw that on 29 May he arrived at Saint-Cloud with Auguste Ballet, and that, on 1 June, Auguste Ballet died, leaving him residuary legatee. Castaing was in Paris on the evening he was absent under pretence of taking a walk: he bought twelve grains from one chemist and one drachm from a second, of acetate of morphine, or, in other words, of that vegetable poison which leaves no traces and of which he had already bought ten grains, seventeen days before the death of Hippolyte Ballet.
The above is a résumé of the accumulated evidence brought against Castaing, who had to face the jury under the weight of fifteen charges relative to the poisoning of Hippolyte Ballet, of thirty-four connected with the business of the will and of seventy-six relative to the poisoning of Auguste Ballet. People will remember the different phases gone through during that long and terrible trial; the steady denials of the prisoner, and his bearing on receipt of the sentence condemning him to death; a sentence decided by the turn of only one vote—that is to say, by seven against five.