The Poisoning Angel (17 page)

‘Ah,’ she said with a nod, and remained silent.

‘Have you nothing to say, Hélène? You won’t give us an
expression of regret? Then I have nothing more to add.’

What a performance from Guillou du Bodan. The public was won over. The defence had its work cut out. When his turn came to take the floor, the young advocate caught everyone by surprise.

‘Gentlemen of the jury, I have no desire to refute one by one the charges you have just heard from the prosecutor. Not only do I accept them all, but I think he has omitted many and I would have applauded if he had charged my evil client with yet more shameful deeds and crimes. For she is a monster!’

What a way to start a closing speech for the defence! There was stupefaction amongst the listeners. One man asked his neighbour for confirmation: ‘Who’s speaking now, the defence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Shit, you’d be justified in wondering if he’s in the right job. The cook won’t be getting off.’

Guillou du Bodan was still reeling from Magloire Dorange’s opening words, as the defence advocate continued amidst the stunned silence he had caused to descend on the court.

‘Listen, gentlemen of the jury! Listen! Do you hear what they’re shouting outside the courts? Listen carefully.’

The jurors strained their ears and heard, through the little closed window, distant shouts like ‘Old peasant slut!’, ‘Fat bitch from the sticks’, ‘She’s not human.’

‘Do you hear?’ continued the advocate. ‘She’s not human! There speaks the voice of public opinion, as well as the defence here before you this late afternoon. Yes, my client is not human and cannot then be condemned as a human being would be.’

‘Not bad,’ was the prosecutor’s professional opinion, as
he spotted the cunning angle of attack of his inspired young colleague with the Romantic hair, who continued, pointing to the accused in his turn.

‘We have here a monster, a phenomenon no less exceptional than the Cyclops or legendary creatures, half man, half tiger. Look at her! Just look at my monstrous client!’

Magloire Dorange had turned into someone exhibiting a bear or a five-legged sheep at the fair. It was as if, at any moment, he would drum up the crowds with his patter: ‘Roll up to see the woman with three heads who can jump five metres – but since her cage is only a metre long she’ll do five jumps in succession.’ He astonished the court by undermining Thunderflower much more than the prosecutor had done.

‘Hélène’s acts of poisoning are without reason or motive. She poisons people, that’s all. She would poison you with arsenic, Monsieur le président and Monsieur le procureur, and she would bake me a little cake as well, even though I’m here to defend her. She kills whoever she comes across. It’s a curse. She is no longer a human being. To we who are, she is unfathomable, beyond all understanding. She’s a mystery like certain natural phenomena. Gentlemen of the jury, could you pass judgement on the wind, the rain, the snow, the tides, the fairies and korrigans of ancestral legends told on the moors of Basse-Bretagne? Would you give your opinion on the galaxies? And night, day, eclipses, what do you think of them? Are they to be condemned or pardoned?’

The young advocate, with sweeping gestures and wide eyes as if he were in a trance, was improvising for all he was worth.

‘My client’s name is on everyone’s lips, and no one can remember anyone to compare with her. The name of Brinvilliers
has been mentioned, but only to add that Hélène Jégado stands head and shoulders above that famous female poisoner. So I have had no difficulty in understanding why, after lengthy consideration of the case in hand, the most learned specialists at the bar have reached the same conclusion. “There’s a problem here, some mystery …”’

As if under hypnosis, he went on, ‘Who, which writer might one day be able to tell us the relationship responsible for her crimes? Who will be able to lay bare the consequent logic that has determined Hélène’s entire life? For my part, I remain confounded and shall not attempt to stutter some explanation that would satisfy no one. But how can we avoid imagining that when she was very young she suffered a deep mental disturbance, some disruption of the brain, which brought with it a phenomenal lack of sense of responsibility? And that from then on she made her way through life, all alone, as if she had a scythe, to become a figure of terror? For her, our moral compass does not exist. My client, a member of the human race? Be careful, for that is a calumny against humanity.’

From outside, where the night was taking the air, the crowd could see through the little window as the advocate waved his arms like a man drowning in the sea.

‘I believe there are creatures for whom there exists, above human justice, a different truth. Beings made like this go directly towards their goal without concerning themselves with obstacles. When Hélène, who has committed countless crimes, cannot kill people, she attacks clothes, or books, as she did at the convent in Auray. And when she can no longer harm people or things, she turns on herself. Because know, gentlemen of the jury, that since
her arrest Hélène has developed a terrifying illness in her chest, one that spares no one. She will die of it, because she has to kill.’

Thunderflower – reviled by everyone – listened in a state of languid indifference. She drifted into sleep, one hand pressed to her heart, while the young advocate, dripping with sweat, was getting worked up on her behalf.

‘Ah, what am I doing at this moment? Rather than asking you to spare her life, should I not be begging you to take it? For Hélène, your pitiless verdict would mean deliverance from the terrible physical sufferings to come. But no, gentlemen of the jury, you will not do this because you are not murderers! Patiently, obstinately and ceaselessly, Hélène has destined to death all those with whom she has come into contact. Her extraordinary perversity is a madness, but if it is legitimate to protect oneself from a madwoman, is it right to punish her?’

Shaking their heads from side to side, certain jurors did indeed seem to be asking themselves whether … and then Magloire Dorange hammered home his point.

‘Make a distinction between the fate you have in store for Hélène and that which you would inflict on a criminal possessed of all his faculties. And then will you hesitate between a dungeon door closing for ever on a curse, and the executioner who kills in public to teach people that they must not kill?’

The argument hit its mark. The advocate concluded, ‘The prosecutor asks Hélène to repent. All well and good, but we must allow her time for that. Repentance will not be born quickly in her soul. You know that. Therefore it is in the name of justice that I entreat you to grant her the benefit of extenuating circumstances. Mercy for her soul!’

It was half-past seven in the evening. It was late and everybody was hungry. That day when all the talk had been of poisonings, the spectators’ stomachs were rumbling, eager to go and dine, but the representative of the people – worried by the unexpected efficacy of the defence speech – obtained the judge’s permission to reply to the defence. So Guillou du Bodan stood up, still just as haughty and didactic.

‘I cannot allow to pass without protest the peculiar theories and unsafe assertions that have escaped from a young advocate carried away by his own words. So, the defence conceded the certainty of all the crimes, while the prosecution did not go beyond the stage of probability in some of them. And yet Hélène Jégado is not guilty? But why? The same defence advocate brought as support phrenology, physiology, psychopathology, and goodness knows what else. Gentlemen of the jury, it is easy to lose one’s way in the realm of ideas. Nothing is more difficult than to keep to the right path. Fortunately, I have a thread to follow, a sure guide; that guide is the penal code, which punishes murderers with death!’

He displayed his copy of Dalloz to the court as if he were Moses brandishing the Tablets of the Law.

‘After that, what argument is left to the defence, the unprecedented number of misdeeds? What a refuge for innocence that is. So because Hélène Jégado has committed more poisonings than any female killer under common law known on earth throughout all ages, that’s why she should be pardoned! As if by committing more and more crimes one earned the right to go unpunished. Perhaps I am failing to discern the “poetry” – I don’t know what sort, incidentally – that the defence appears to
sense in such a litany of murders. My view is that, between virtue and crime, Hélène has freely chosen crime. Let her then feel the full consequences of her deplorable choice, and that’s that.’

Despite being mentally exhausted after his inspired plea for the defence, Magloire Dorange claimed his right of reply. ‘One sentence, just one sentence, Monsieur le premier président!’ Then without even waiting for permission he declared, ‘In his disdain for the defence, and blinded by the penal code behind which he is hiding, the prosecutor is refusing to see that for Hélène it’s as if some merciless thing had given her a mission, ordering her, “You must keep going, ever further …”’

It was the end of the session. The verdict was due the next day, Sunday 14 December 1851, starting at noon. People left the court yelling, ‘Time for dinner!’

‘Unless it’s Jégado doing the cooking, of course!’

‘Gentlemen of the jury, in my capacity as presiding judge, here is my recommendation for you as you begin your deliberations: above all, discuss things in a calm and collected state of mind.’

He rapped the desk in front of him with the tip of his finger so as to explain clearly to them. ‘If it has not been proven to you that Hélène Jégado has committed the acts for which she is blamed, acquit her!’

He thumped on the wood again, a little further to his right. ‘If you consider that, without being absolutely devoid of free will, this woman has been blessed with less of it than most human beings, grant her the benefit of extenuating circumstances …’

He gave another knock a little further along, still going from
left to right. ‘If, however, you judge her guilty, seeing in her neither intellectual impairment nor ignorance of morality, then fulfil your duty to be firm, and in that case, remember that in order that justice be done it is not enough that sentence is passed; it must also be proportionate to the crime!’

The jury retired. Outside, the December sun was dazzling. At 4.30 p.m. everyone made their way back to the benches. The foreman of the jury, Pierre Boudinot, a Rennes wine merchant, announced the verdict: ‘Sentenced to death.’ President Boucly asked Thunderflower whether she had anything to say. She replied, ‘Those who have condemned me, thus preventing me from carrying out my mission, they will … repent in the hereafter, where they will meet me again and they will see … And he’ll see, Monsieur Bidard de la Noë!’

Shouts of anger rang out around the courtroom. The condemned woman was led out amid much commotion. Several gendarmes had to stand around her to protect her from the crowd, who would have ripped her to shreds. ‘Leave her to us! Give us that bitch, the filthy slut!’

Under her little headdress trimmed with Breton lace, Thunderflower grew quietly drunk on the shrill sound of the two muddy Normans’ broken biniou. She made a nice target for the Rennes marksmen who threw rotting sardines and stale brine at her, so that soon she gave off an appalling stench. Insults flashed through the air like lightning, or danced like will-o’-the-wisps. ‘Go to the devil, he’ll have a job for you!’ ‘No one will miss you, you nasty piece of work!’ ‘Poison pourer, the little stars spinning in the sky are closer to us than you are, much closer …’

As, at the mercy of them all, she was being taken across to the
prison on the other side of the square, the shouts grew hoarse around her. The world said she was odious, but what of it? She remained calm amid this hostility, the universal hatred of which she was the object! Her lifelong dream of becoming the spittoon for the maledictions of the universe, fulfilled! Oh, the infinitely pleasing – to Thunderflower – contempt of respectable people making up the feverish and mad multitude of a crowd every bit as ignoble! As soon as they saw her, pilgrims bent the knee and said a prayer. Convulsing holier-than-thou types barked as they tried to empty their slop pails filled with blessed shit over her. It was clear that an abyss had opened up. Like a cloud of squawking crows, lots of men in double-layered waistcoats and round hats swooped towards her, laughing, and giving her nasty looks. Some of them stuck their tongue out, while others made fun of her body, calling her ‘ugly’ – she who, in the past, with her perfect siren beauty would have had them all falling at her feet. One of them made a show of disgust. ‘Put it away, love.’

‘Murderer! Worthless piece of muck! Devil’s spawn!’

The whole world had deserted her but she noticed Matthieu Verron standing still among the crowd, gazing at her out of the gesticulating rabble. She read the soundless words on his lips. ‘We will no longer go walking together on Sundays …’

The words he mouthed had such a perfect meaning and his hands, hanging by his sides, were bathed in tears. His loving eyes were too faithful. Thunderflower, at that moment (how silly), recalled one of Matthieu’s kisses on her soft flower of flesh, which would no more open up to love. She knew he would not want to be present at her execution but would go back to his little white house with the green shutters in Lorient and end his days
there alone, hoeing his lettuces and his flowerbeds. It made you want to die.

Everyone wanted to see Thunderflower’s face better, in real life. Women tried to tear off her Morbihan headdress. The sculptor from the first day of the trial waved his arm in the air, inviting them to admire the plaster copies of his model instead. Beside him the reporter from
Le Conciliateur
enquired eagerly: ‘Have you sold many?’

‘I wish! Just one.’

First came the external walls with broken bottles along the top, then the thick doors with triple bars on them and then a rusty key turned in a gigantic lock to open the door into a very small space with an old maid hermetically sealed, as it were, inside it. Sitting on the edge of her straw mattress, she looked round, blinking her eyelids in the direction of the smoking candle carried by a warder whose flat face resembled a round cheese alive with maggots.