Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 51, No. 2, June 28, 1930

The butcher, the baker she finished with poison — and the candlestick maker had a role in the plot...

I

Aubertin, the baker, was plying his trade in the usual even tenor of his way, when, one day, at the time of the year when the grass almost bursts with greenness, he fell ill with a violent pain that tore at his stomach as if with invisible knives.

He groaned so loudly that certain of the citizens of the village in the Vosges mountains heard him.

His wife, wringing her hands in terror, remained helpless to do anything but bring him the water which he craved. In the midst of his intolerable thirst he gasped, retched, and breathed his last.

Neighbors were rushing in.

“The good God!”

“What has happened, Madame Aubertin?”

“Dead! But it is impossible!”

“Get water! Chafe the hands! A little brandy—”

“Ah, he is past all hope, I fear.”

Indeed, it was so. The baker of the Vosges village lay in death, his form convulsed, his contorted face horrible to see.

“He has had a fit, the poor man!”

The neighbors uttered their sorrow and comforted the widow as well as they could, but they were not long able to bear the sight of the deceased. Soon they departed in little groups, and the woman was left alone to take care of her dead.

The bereaved wife sent word to her daughter, who had been spending a fortnight with her friends in a near-by town.

When Yvette arrived a day later, she gazed not upon her father’s face, but on his grave, for, swiftly as the death had come, the burial was equally surprisingly sudden. Such hurried management drew more than censure upon Madame Aubertin; it drew suspicion, for whisper followed whisper about the circle of scattered cottages.

“Alas, the good man dies like a candle snuffed out, and she does not even wait for the body to lose its warmth. She is in a remarkable hurry, that woman!”

“Yet why not?” a somewhat kindlier villager said. “Even in life Aubertin’s face was a large replica of a meat ball. And since you say that he was a sight a pig would turn its eyes away from when the fit possessed him, do you blame the poor woman, all alone as she was, for burying him with such dispatch?”

“Not only are you stupid, Alphonse, but you are also gullible,” the wife of this charitable citizen said. “It is fortunate for her that the gendarmerie are also men. As if every one who is not blind cannot see how greatly the Monsieur Hennezal is concerned. And how much she is concerned with him — la! There is neither grief nor shame in the hussy.”

Thus were opinions voiced and thus were they somewhat allayed — until a day during the harvest. The death and the burial together created less consternation than what then occurred.

“Did I not tell you, Alphonse — a hundred times, no?”

The widow Aubertin had married Hennezal, maker of goblets, candlesticks and ornaments of glass. Whereupon the whispers grew to murmurs, and what was voiced as mere suspicion and gossip, became established in the minds of the villagers as a fact. Aubertin had been dealt with foully.

Whether these suspicions reached the ears of the law, the history of this case does not show.

At any rate, they were not acted upon at the time.

It is only apparent that the police authorities would not take up the stray, possibly malicious, gossip of a community, nor would it order a disinterment on the strength of such gossip unless expressly desired by the near kin of the deceased.

Thus the matter rested for a time until further circumstances, coupled with the suspicions already known, took form in a chain of evidence that made Madame Aubertin’s case exceedingly more fascinating.

Some little time passed. The Madame, seeing that her daughter was fair to look upon (indeed Yvette was being “looked upon” to some small notoriety), began to cast her eyes about her upon the eligibles of her vicinity. With characteristic suddenness, Mine. Aubertin — now Mme. Hennezal — made a choice, namely, Bourlette, a prospering butcher in a village not far away.

A meeting was arranged, and when Bourlette beheld the vivacious beauty of Madame’s daughter, he decided that his prosperity would adorn her admirably. The news of the forthcoming marriage of these two was an occasion for much cynicism in the village.

“She is young, and she has a charming face,” Bourlette heard himself congratulated. And truer, sterner friends he would not heed.

“She is cunning, like her mother. You have heard the rumor, I suppose, of the late M. Aubertin?”

Bourlette grunted, annoyed. “I look upon the litter, and you show me the sow! What have the mother’s affairs to do with the character of my Yvette? Answer me that!”

“But, my dear Bourlette, isn’t it a fact that the woman poisoned her husband?”

“My friend, your venerable beard ought to restrain such witless gossip. It is not a fact, and if it were, you could not prove it. You are positively out of your senses to repeat such gossip even to a friend.”

“Bourlette,” said the other, irritably, “I open my mouth wide to tell you are a fool. She is young and you are old, and there you have my opinion!”

“And you,” came the answer, “are altogether a confirmed cynic. You are well aware that I love the wench, and she is also, if I may say it, fond enough of me.”

“Of you,” scoffed the friend with a grimace. “Bourlette, I would save you from this misstep even at the cost of our friendship. You are certainly not what you might call a cavalier. You are certainly not young. As a matter of fact you are old. Besides that you are fat, you have three teeth missing and the others will soon drop out.

“You may be rich after a fashion, but by all the saints you haven’t a hair on your smooth, flat, empty pate. And there you have my opinion, and the opinion of every one else, if that matters to you!”

That year, 1884, Yvette came into possession of the butcher as his lawfully wedded wife.

II

Bourlette chose a spacious house, in which the couple went to live. Perhaps he looked forward some day to making a hostelry of it, for the rooms were numerous. In the meantime, he did not let them go to waste. Within a short time after his marriage the butcher let it become known that he would let some of his rooms to a few “select, genteel” boarders.

Soon the house was filled with a convivial spirit. Merchants from the cities, gentlemen from the south, and foreigners from over the German border came and found rest there, and Yvette smiled on them all.

One whispered: “How does it happen so pretty a girl should be the wife of this eye-sore of a butcher? His naked skull is the color of a skinned ox, and there is more lard in him than in a full tub of his hog-fat.”

A gentleman from Paris shrugged with such expressiveness that his eyes shut.

“She has a lover,” he stated positively, though he had arrived only the day before. Bourlette, himself, became aware that this was the actual state of affairs.

But he did not fly into a rage. Discreetly he took one of his younger “genteel” boarders aside and admonished him in a respectable manner.

“Sir,” he said, “I beg of you to leave this house. And if you prove swine enough to linger three blinks of an eye, by the sacred name of a rabid dog—”

Bourlette had come out of his shop, and a cleaver was in his hand. The young boarder left.

Later, when the couple were alone, the butcher had no other cudgel than his large right hand, which, without a single word of explanation, he used vigorously across the mouth of his wife.

Bourlette had distinct cause to remember the day that followed. When evening came he relished his onion soup with customary keenness, and after supper sat down to read.

It was not long before he forsook his chair for the floor. Ten thousand demons began to torment his mid-regions. His face was screwed up in pain; he gasped, he retched, and called for water.

“Name of a name! I am dying!” he choked. “Curse you and your mother, together with the mother that begot her. Yvette, you have poisoned me, I swear!”

Pale faced, Yvette protested that he lied. She brought the water he craved. Bourlette gulped great draughts which only for the moment quenched the terrible fires that burned within him.

“By all the saints!” the butcher went on when he was at last able to gasp the words. “I have married into a family of poisoners. What my friend warned me against has come true, and may you be struck by a thousand thunders!”

“You lie! It is not true!”

Spasm after spasm seized the unfortunate Bourlette, while his wife merely looked on with staring malevolent eyes.

Strange as it may seem, the fit passed, and Bourlette did not die. Yvette it was who suffered then, for in the next few days her husband watched her like a hawk. He would not let her prepare his food; he spied upon her wherever she went; peeped suspiciously into every pot and pan, until, furious, she packed her things and left hint without so much as a good-by. Where she went he did not know.

Bourlette, now at peace, relaxed his vigilance. But only to his cost. A week later a similar malady, though not as violent as the first, brought him low. During the days that followed he became well and ill by turns. One day he lay gasping, and the next he was up and fuming at the base treachery that pursued him in his own household.

He discharged his servants one after another. He got rid of a cook, a gardener, a stable boy, and finally every last boarder. But even these expedients did not seem to help. The fearful attacks came nevertheless. Despairing at last, he wrote to his wife’s mother, the Madame Aubertin:

Yvette came, and her mother with her. Tears, protestations, and forgiveness poured like rainfall, after which mother and daughter settled down to nurse their invalid back to health.

“For a week you must eat nothing but gruel,” Madame laid down the law. “Too much meat and strong seasoning have caused your sickness. At the end of a week’s time — behold, what a difference!”

The butcher submitted meekly to their ministrations, while the inexperienced hand of the daughter was aided by the proven skill of the mother. Not the end of the week, but four days was the limit of Bourlette’s endurance. The knowledge which the younger woman did not have the other supplied. During the fourth day Bourlette passed into the Beyond, too weak in his final hour to voice further suspicion or to invoke a single curse.

III

This time the villagers did not stand idly by. Some one demanded that a doctor from the city be taken to view the remains of Bourlette. No sooner had the physician arrived at the village than a hundred tales were poured into his startled ears. Stories flocked upon him from all neighborhoods. Of these, one more than all the rest was later to count heavily against the pair.

It was to the effect that during the time the young Madame Bourlette was away, her mother, the Madame Aubertin, was seen to prowl at night at the back door of Bourlette’s house. She had kept her presence secret, and then had departed.

Did she have possession of her daughter’s key, and did she enter the house by this means? If this were probable, then indeed she could have had opportunity to scatter poison like dust to the four winds, over every article within her reach.

The villagers waited breathlessly to hear what the physician would report. A prompt examination was made. Arsenic — tons of it — was found in the stomach contents of the corpse.

Confronted with a direct accusation by the police, Yvette wailed: “We have had no luck here at all! No sooner do we settle down to live in a neighborhood, but people begin to die about us like flies. One day they are here, and the next day — piff paff — they are gone.”

Heaven only knows what further accusations were laid against Madame Aubertin, and what other deaths could be accounted to her!

The butcher, the baker — the indictment pointed to these two only. Meanwhile, where was — to complete the verse — the candlestick maker? That is to say, did Hennezal, the second husband of Madame Aubertin, have a hand in this reign of agony, convulsion and death? Hennezal, maker of goblets and ornaments, and candlesticks of glass?

It was to him, as a matter of fact, that the arsenic was actually traced. Was not arsenic used in the making of glassware?

Where else, indeed, could Madame Aubertin have obtained her instrument of destruction?

Upon all this evidence both mother and (laughter were tried, despite their protests; convicted, and sentenced to death.

But M. Grevy, a kind and overcompassionate man, who was also death on capital punishment, afterward pardoned Madame Aubertin and the young widow, Yvette. And they never paid.