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Updated: May 19, 2025
She declared that one Clap, a friend of her late husband, had come to her one day to say that a certain Charles, a manservant, had remarked to him, ``Boursier poisoned himself because he was tired of living. Called before the Juge d'instruction, Henri Clap and Charles had concurred in denying this. The accusation maintained that the whole attitude of Mme Boursier proved her a poisoner.
There was, however, sufficient gravity in the evidences on hand to justify a definite indictment of Mme Boursier and Nicolas Kostolo, the first of having poisoned her husband, and the second of being accessory to the deed. The pair were brought to trial on the 27th of November, 1823, before the Seine Assize Court, M. Hardouin presiding.
Bailli, at one time a clerk to Boursier, said he had helped his patron to distribute arsenic and rat-poison in the shop cellars. He was well aware that the whole of the poison had not been used, but in the course of his interrogation he had failed to remember where the residue of the poisons had been put. He now recollected.
To further questioning he answered that he had never proposed marriage to the Veuve Boursier. Possibly something might have been said in fun. He knew, of course, that the late Boursier had made a lot of money. The cook, Josephine Blin, was called. At one time she had been suspect.
Josephine declared that Mme Boursier had ordered her to clean the soup-dish out with sand, but her mistress maintained she had bade the girl do no more than clean it. For the rest, Josephine thought about fifteen minutes elapsed before Boursier came to take the soup. During that time she had seen Mme Boursier writing and making up accounts.
But, combined with the medico-legal evidence, the weight of circumstance might easily have hoisted the accused in the balance. It will be seen, then, how much on foot the case of the Veuve Lacoste was with that of the Veuve Boursier, twenty years before. It is on the experience of cases such as these two that the technique of investigation into arsenical poison has been evolved.
The circumstances in which Boursier had fallen ill were well known. Nobody, least of all Mme Boursier or Kostolo, had taken any trouble to conceal them. Anybody who liked to ask either Mme Boursier or the Greek about the soup could have a detailed story at once. All the neighbourhood knew it.
The answer was unintentionally funny, but the Greek took credit for the amusement it created in court. He conceived himself a humorist, and the fact coloured all his subsequent answers. Kostolo said that he had called to see Boursier on the first day of his illness at three in the afternoon. He himself had insisted on helping to nurse the invalid.
Mme Boursier at first denied the adulterous intimacy with Kostolo, but the evidence in the hands of the Procureur was too much for her. She had partially to confess the truth of Kostolo's statement in this regard. She emphatically denied, however, that she had ever even thought of, let alone agreed to, marriage with the Greek.
On this M. Hardouin discharged the accused, improving the occasion with a homily which, considering the ordeal that Mme Boursier had had to endure through so many months, and that might have been considered punishment enough, may be quoted merely as a fine specimen of salting the wound: ``Veuve Boursier, said he, ``you are about to recover that liberty which suspicions of the gravest nature have caused you to lose.
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