For a long time she would confess nothing; it was not till April 16, 1810, that her courage gave way, when she learned the result of the examination of the body of Frau Glaser. Then, weeping and wringing her hands, she confessed she had on two occasions administered poison to her. No sooner had she admitted this than she fell to the ground in convulsions “as if struck by lightning,” and was removed from the court. Strange to say, although she knew that by her confession she had more than justified her condemnation to death, she laboured to the very last to gloss over and explain the worst features of her chief crimes, and in spite of ample evidence, denied all her lesser offences. It was impossible for her false and distorted nature to be quite sincere, and when she told a truth she at once associated with it a lie. When Anna Schönleben fell into the hands of justice, she had already reached her fiftieth year; she was of small stature, thin and deformed; her sallow and meagre face was deeply furrowed by passion as well as by age, and bore no trace of former beauty. Her eyes were expressive of envy and malice and her brow was perpetually clouded, even when her lips moved to smile. Her manner, however, was cringing, servile and affected, and age and ugliness had not diminished her craving for admiration. Even in prison and under sentence of death, her imagination was still occupied with the pleasing recollections of her youth. One day when her judge visited her in prison, she begged him not to infer what she had been from what she was; that she was “once beautiful, exceedingly beautiful.” Her life history antecedent to the events just recorded has been constructed from trustworthy sources and her own autobiography which fills eighteen closely written folio sheets. Born in Nürnberg in 1760, she had lost her parents before she reached her fifth year. Her father had possessed some property and until her nineteenth year she remained under the charge of her guardian, who was warmly attached to her and bestowed much care upon her education. At the age of nineteen she married, rather against her inclination, the notary Zwanziger, for that was her real name. The loneliness and dulness of her matrimonial life contrasted very disagreeably with the gaieties of her guardian’s house, and in the many absences of her husband, who divided his time between business and the bottle, she passed her time in reading sentimental novels such as the “Sorrows of Werther,” “Pamela” and “Emilia Galeotti.” Her husband, with her help, soon ran through her small fortune, which was wasted in extravagant entertaining and in keeping up an establishment beyond their means. They sank into wretched impecuniosity, with a family to support and without even the consolation of common esteem. She took to vicious methods and presently her husband died, leaving his widow to follow the career of an adventuress.