The case of Madame Lafarge is still an unsolved mystery. Grave doubts as to her guilt prevailed, and many learned lawyers have maintained that she was the victim of judicial error. The accused, Marie Fortunée Cappelle, was a young lady in good society, well educated and well bred, who had married a manufacturer at Glandier in the Limoges country, not far from Bordeaux. She was the daughter of a colonel in Napoleon’s Artillery of the Guard. She was well connected. Her aunts were well married, one to a Prussian diplomatist, the other to Monsieur Garat, the General Secretary of the Bank of France. Her father had stood well with Napoleon, had held several important military commands, and was intimate with many of the nobles of the First Empire. Marie lost her parents early, and, being possessed of a certain fortune, a marriage was sought for her in the usual French way. She was not exactly pretty, but was distinguished looking, with a slim, graceful figure, a dead white complexion, jet black eyes and a sweet, sad smile. The husband chosen was a certain Charles Pouch Lafarge, a man of fair position, but decidedly the inferior of Marie Cappelle. He was in business as an iron master, and was deemed prosperous. He said he had a large private residence in the neighborhood of his works, a fine mansion, situated in a wide park, where his wife would be in the midst of agreeable and fashionable society. Great, almost indecent, haste was shown in arranging and solemnising the marriage. Within five days the bride started for her new home, and quickly realised that she had been completely befooled. M. Lafarge at once showed himself in his true colors as a rough, brutal creature, who treated his wife badly from the first. The family seat at Glandier was a fraud. It was a damp, dark house in a street, surrounded with smoky chimneys. The park did not exist, nor did the pleasant neighbors. She had been grossly deceived, and the reality was even worse than it appeared, for Lafarge was in serious financial difficulties, and had been obliged to issue forged bills of exchange to keep his head above water. The unhappy and disappointed wife, when face to face with the truth, made a determined effort to break loose from Lafarge. On the very day of her arrival at Glandier, she shut herself up in her room, and wrote him an indignant yet appealing letter, in which she threatened, if he would not let her go, to take arsenic. And this, her first mention of the lethal drug, was remembered against her in later days, when she was tried for her life.