Let us come lastly to the work of Dr. Legué, Médecins et Empoisonneurs, the most important part of which is occupied with a minute study of the circumstances surrounding the death of Madame. Monsieur Legué’s conclusion is, poisoning by sublimate poured into the famous chicory water. His study is interesting, like the whole book, but his conclusions crumble away under the following considerations:—
1. Professor Brouardel writes: ‘If the chicory water had contained the smallest dose of sublimate, Madame would have pushed the glass from her after the first sip. Sublimate has a revolting taste. In the medicinal dose (one gramme to a litre) the taste is atrocious.’
Madame had been taking chicory water for several days in the evening, and this evening she drank it as usual.
2. ‘To kill a person,’ adds Professor Brouardel, ‘at least ten or fifteen centigrammes are necessary. This dose corresponds to a quantity of solution representing about 200 grammes of liquid. It seems impossible for any one to imbibe that without being stopped by its horrid taste.’
Madame certainly did not drink 200 grammes of her chicory water; she took a few sips only.
3. ‘Poisoning by sublimate,’ writes the professor, ‘produces lesions of the abdominal mucous membrane, which could not have escaped the notice of the physicians who made the autopsy.’
We have five accounts of the autopsy, which are unanimous in stating that the stomach, except for the little hole of which we have spoken, was in a good condition.
4. The facts on which Dr. Legué relies for his diagnosis of poison by sublimate, and which he borrows from the account of the Abbé Bourdelot, occurred, not after the drinking of the cup of chicory water, but before. In transcribing the account in question, Monsieur Legué has inadvertently omitted the passage: ‘There is indication of the bile having been accumulating for a long time,’ where it may be clearly seen from the following lines that the author is speaking of a state long before the fatal attack.
Thus Monsieur Legué’s argument is in no way sustained.
The historian may remark, finally, that Madame’s daughter, Marie Louise, the young Queen of Spain, died in 1689, almost at the same age as her mother, after drinking a glass of iced milk, and on this occasion also rumours of poison spread abroad. When Charles II, Madame’s brother, died somewhat suddenly, there was more talk of poison; and when the granddaughter of Madame, the young and charming Duchess of Burgundy, was stricken with the disease which carried her off, people believed that she too had been poisoned. In earlier days, when Madame’s mother, Henrietta Maria of France, widow of Charles I, died on September 10, 1669, at her country house of Colombes, her physician Vallot had been accused of accidentally poisoning her by giving her pills chiefly composed of opium.