Further suspicious circumstances were adduced against her. It was urged that after the case had been despatched to Paris she was strangely agitated, her excitement increasing on the arrival of news that her husband was taken ill, that she expressed the gravest fears of a bad ending, and took it almost for granted that he must die. Yet, as the defence presently showed, there were points also in her favour. Would Marie have made her mother-in-law write referring to the small cakes, one of which the son was to eat, if she knew that no small cakes, but one large one, would be found within? How could she have substituted the large for the small? There was as much evidence to show that she could not have effected the exchange as that she had done so. Might not someone else have made the change? Here was the first importation of another possible agency into the murder, which never seems to have been investigated at the time, but to which I shall return presently to explain how Marie Lafarge may have borne the brunt of another person's crime. Again, if she wanted thus to poison her husband, it would have been at the risk of injuring her favourite sister also. For this sister lived in Paris, and Lafarge had written that she often called to see him. She might, then, have been present when the case was opened, and might have been poisoned too. Lafarge so far recovered that he was able to return to Glandier, which he reached on the 5th of January, 1840. That same day Madame Lafarge wrote to the same chemist for more arsenic. It was a curious letter, and certainly calculated to prejudice people against her. She told the chemist that her servants had made the first lot into a clever paste which her doctor had seen, and for which he had given her a prescription; she said this "so as to quiet the chemist's conscience, and lest he should think she meant to poison the whole province of Limoges." She also informed the chemist that her husband was indisposed, but that this same doctor attributed it to the shaking of the journey, and that with rest he would soon be better.