On this the mother denounced Marie to the now dying Lafarge as his murderess. The wife, who stood there with white face and streaming eyes, heard the terrible accusation, but made no protest. From this time till his last moments he could not bear the sight of his wife. Once, when she offered him a drink, he motioned, horror stricken, for her to leave him, and she was not present at his death, on the 14th of January. A painful scene followed between the mother and Marie by the side of the still warm corpse--high words, upbraidings, threats on the one side, indignant denials on the other. Then Marie's private letters were seized, the lock of her strong-box having been forced, and next day, the whole matter having been reported to the officers of the law, a _post-mortem_ was ordered, on suspicion of poisoning. "Impossible," cried the doctor who had regularly attended the deceased. "You must all be wrong. It would be abominable to suspect a crime without more to go upon." The _post-mortem_ was, however, made, yet with such strange carelessness that the result was valueless. It may be stated at once that the presence of arsenic was never satisfactorily proved. There were several early examinations of the remains, but the experts never fully agreed. Orfila, the most eminent French toxicologist of his day, was called in to correct the first autopsy, and his opinion was accepted as final. He was convinced that there were traces of arsenic in the body. They were, however, infinitesimal; Orfila put it at half a milligramme. Raspail, another distinguished French doctor, called it the hundredth part of a milligramme, and for that reason declared against Orfila. His conclusion, arrived at long after her conviction, was in favour of the accused. The jury, he maintained, ought not to have found her guilty, because no definite proof was shown of the presence of arsenic in the corpse. This point was not the only one in the poor woman's favour. Even supposing that Lafarge had been poisoned--which, in truth, is highly probable--the evidence against her was never conclusive, and there were many suspicious circumstances to incriminate another person. This was Denis Barbier, Lafarge's clerk, who lived in the house under a false name, and whose character was decidedly bad. Lafarge was not a man above suspicion himself, and he long used this Barbier to assist him in shady financial transactions--the manufacture of forged bills of exchange, which were negotiated for advances. Barbier had conceived a strong dislike to Marie Lafarge from the first; it was he who originated the adverse reports. At the trial he frequently contradicted himself, as when he said at one time that he had volunteered the information that he had been buying arsenic for Marie, and at another, a few minutes later, that he only confessed this when pressed.