The day before his tragic death he gave to a fellow-prisoner, Count B----, the last memento he possessed of the lady who had been the first innocent cause of his sufferings, a tortoise-shell box with the portrait of the Princess Amelia. The 9th Thermidor saved the count, and the box was long preserved in his family. CHAPTER III NOTORIOUS POISONERS Famous female poisoners--This crime not so prevalent in Germany as in southern countries--Frau Ursinus--Her early history--Mysterious deaths of her husband and aunt--Attempted murder of her man-servant--Arrested and sentenced to imprisonment for life in the fortress of Glatz--Anna Schönleben or Zwanziger--Deaths followed her advent into different families--Arrested at Bayreuth, confessed her guilt and was condemned to death. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic wars caused constant conflict and change, crime flourished with rank growth in most European countries and nowhere more than in the German states,--both those that remained more or less independent and those brought into subjection to the French Empire. Whole provinces were ravaged by organised bands of brigands, such as that which obeyed the notorious Schinderhannes; travelling was unsafe by all ordinary roads and communications; thieves and depredators abounded; murderers stalked rampant through the land; the most atrocious homicides, open and secret, were constantly planned and perpetrated; swindling and imposture on a large scale were frequently practised, and crimes of every kind were committed by all kinds of people in all classes of society. Poisoning was not unknown as a means of removal, although it never prevailed to the same extent as among people of warmer blood. It never grew into an epidemic affecting whole groups and associations, but it occurred in individual cases, exhibiting the same features as elsewhere. This form of feloniously doing to death has ever commended itself to the female sex. Women are so circumstanced as wives, nurses and in domestic service that they possess peculiar facilities for the administration of poison, and so the most prominent poisoners in criminal history have been women. A curious instance is to be found in the German records, and the story may be told in this place as belonging to this period. The murderess was a certain Frau Ursinus, widow of a privy counsellor who was also president of a government board. Ursinus was a highly esteemed member of the upper classes of Berlin. Deep interest attached to this case of Frau Ursinus from the prominent position occupied by her late husband, her considerable fortune, her prepossessing person and spotless reputation, as well as her cultured mind which made her conspicuous in the society of the Prussian capital. The news, therefore, of her sudden and unexpected arrest on a criminal charge, caused great consternation and surprise.