13 Criminal Cases of Poisonings from around France
by Serge Janouin-Benanti
Translated by Eva N. Siskowski Boatwright
Here’s a book that turns true crime into a country-wide road trip, one arsenic pinch at a time. Poisoners — 13 Criminal Cases of Poisonings from around France gathers thirteen historical cases and retells them as brisk, novelistic short stories, each planted in a different city or village and each orbiting that most intimate, secretive method of murder: poison. The author, Serge Janouin-Benanti, has long specialized in “true and cruel tales,” and here he lines up a gallery of schemers and victims—lovesick spouses, swaggering frauds, fortune-tellers, self-styled healers—then lets the courts, the newspapers, and the nascent science of toxicology close the net. It’s a collection built for anyone who likes their history with momentum and their mysteries with receipts. The book is presented in English translation by Eva N. Siskowski Boatwright and openly grounded in archival sources (national, departmental, and period press), a fact that keeps the dramatization anchored throughout.
What the collection is (and how it reads)
A “map of the crimes” lists the thirteen tales and their waypoints—from Marseille to Tarbes, Antwerp to the rural Astarac—promising both variety and a slow, cumulative portrait of nineteenth-century life under the shadow of easy-to-buy toxins. The volume foregrounds that these stories are inspired by true events, and it includes an “About the Author/Translator” note that situates Serge Janouin-Benanti’s scientific background and Boatwright’s literary competence. That blend—method and narrative—gives the book its snap: every scene swings like fiction, every conclusion rests on filings, testimonies, and autopsies.
A sampler of standout cases
1) The poison shops of Marseille
The opener, “The Poisoners of Marseille,” is as sociological as it is suspenseful. In a humid whirl of jealousies and cash-on-the-counter remedies, we meet Lamberte, a fortune-teller with a clientele, and Joye, an “herbalist–sorcerer” with a backroom full of products that do “neither good nor harm”—until they do. Joye has even concocted theriac, a Renaissance-style antidote of sixty-nine ingredients in honey he touts as universal protection, a telling glimpse of the era’s credulity and the hustles that fed on it.
Serge Janouin-Benanti stages the plot like a crime novel: a lover’s triangle; a suspicious physician whose Marsh apparatus inconveniently explodes mid-test; and, finally, a police raid on Joye’s “spell room” at 27 Rue Saint-Antoine, where officers seize 505 grams of arsenic acid plus packets of belladonna and celandine—the story’s coolly horrifying talismans.
The courtroom crescendo in Aix-en-Provence is deliciously theatrical. The attorney general booms that if the racket had continued, “a few more years, and all of Marseille would have been wiped out,” while defense lawyers sketch the widows as battered, credulous, and led step by step into crime by professional poison-mongers. The verdict keeps you thinking: suppliers Joye and Lamberte, plus widows Ville and Gabriel, receive hard labor for life; Salvago gets twenty years; alleged accomplices Dye and Flayol walk free. The crowd cheers the acquitted and jeers the rest—a snapshot of public opinion, which is as much a character in this story as any witness.
2) The poisoned princes of Tarbes
If Marseille shows a network, “The Poisoned Cakes of Tarbes” shows one man’s petty vendetta. In 1895, night-shift postal workers open a parcel addressed to a retired gendarme named Fortuné Cabarrou. Inside: four “princes,” chocolate cakes crowned with candied cherries. The curious postman Auguste Borromée nicks a bite; a bitter burn spreads across his tongue. Within hours he’s dead; colleagues who barely tasted the confection survive after urgent care. A forensic pathologist peers under the cherry and tastes the crystals—strychnine—“the poison of the moment,” he remarks, with sick, clinical certainty.
The culprit? A schoolteacher, Gérard Contre, who bought cakes at Augé on Rue des Grands-Fossés, laced them with strychnine, and mailed them with a clumsy love note from “Suzanne.” He’s arrested fast and tries a crafty defense: he claims he only added saltpeter—a laxative—blaming a pharmacist for any mix-up. The jury splits hairs: not guilty for Borromée’s death, guilty (with mitigation) for attempted poisoning of Cabarrou. Seven years’ hard labor. The story packs moral torque—about mischievous curiosity, about the luck of dosage, about the thin line between prank and murder.
3) Gilt-edge homicide in Antwerp
Across the border, “The Poisoner of Antwerp” follows Marie-Thérèse Joniaux, a society woman whose polished composure wobbles only when anyone hints her husband might have been complicit. The trial’s scale—296 witnesses and experts—makes it an endurance sport. The press snarks that Belgium sips her famous cases “in small sips,” but the effect is cumulative: after weeks of testimony and a prosecutor’s closing that aligns character and circumstance like clockwork, the jury votes guilty on three poisonings. The court pronounces death, then King Leopold II’s de-facto moratorium transforms it into life in Mons. It’s a study in privilege, patience, and how a performance can harden into a mask.
4) “Sentenced to Death by Persuasion”
The most chillingly titled tale tracks Jean-Claude Aymé, who decides that revenge should arrive as dessert. On New Year’s Eve in Paris, he buys eleven cakes from five different pastry shops, hires a café scribe to pen decoy notes, and has street kids hand off boxes so no one can identify him. Then he fills the cakes with arsenic, smoothing the jam to hide the punctures and sprinkling the remaining powder on top—it looks like icing sugar—before sending them to his targets. The economy of the plan—and its grotesque banality—stick with you long after the chapter ends.
5) “Honey Bear and Turtle Dove”
If you can handle a darker plunge, the title refers to the pet names of Jean-Claude Jacquemard and Françoise Briot, lovers who wait, mid-tryst, for his wife Marguerite to die in the next room. They have already dosed her sugar water; their dialogue—callous, giddy, obscene—plays against the woman’s final cries. Then the seven-year-old daughter listens from behind the door, terrified and certain of what her father has done. Later, with money draining, the pair eye a life-annuity house and stage a serial solution: dose the elderly sellers, Monsieur and Madame Caulet, because “they’re old, no one will pay it any attention.” The author lets the horror speak without amplification.
But the chapter’s secret star is an investigating judge who turns to science and psychology. He lectures Jacquemard (off the record) on Marsh’s test and the famed Mathieu Orfila, warning that arsenic leaves traces and juries love science; then he batters the suspect with irregular interviews until the façade trembles. It’s riveting procedural storytelling—and a neat primer on how forensic chemistry, invented in the 1830s, rewired justice by the 1860s.
6) “I’m Going to Kill You All!”
Mass poisoning, industrial suburb: in Saint-Denis, a deliveryman named Baude retaliates against his baker boss by dumping arsenic into the flour. The town reels; doctors count 300-plus residents sickened, and a dog dies of a high dose. Tried in Paris in 1880, Baude gets death, then—because the baker himself petitions for mercy alongside jurors and clients—President Jules Grévy commutes the sentence to hard labor for life. The paradox is haunting: public compassion for a would-be mass killer, spearheaded by the man he aimed to ruin.
7) “Don’t Wake the Dead”
When Jeanne Gilbert is suspected of killing relatives, a cousin suggests the simplest path to truth: authorize an autopsy. Her answer—“We must never wake the dead; we must let them rest in peace”—gives the story its title and spine. In a collection fascinated by evidence, this is the counter-theme: silence, propriety, and the powerful taboo against disturbing the grave, even when rumor corrodes the living.
8) “Nothing to Understand?”
The closing piece is less whodunit than indictment of bureaucratic neatness. In the Boeglin affair, a young woman goes from death sentence to acquittal on appeal—an outlier so awkward that a minister literally strikes the anomalous “1” from his report summary. The line between “explained” and “filed away” has rarely looked thinner; the coda leaves you with the discomfort of unanswered motives and the soft censorship of statistics.
What ties the book together
Poisons are the obvious ligature—chiefly arsenic and strychnine, alternately subtle and spectacular. The Marseille chapter even details how mixing belladonna with arsenic masks symptoms and increases arsenic tolerance, a macabre “innovation” gleaned from encyclopedias and peddled as folk know-how. Elsewhere, the Tarbes pathologist’s glance under a pastry cherry turns into a pocket lesson in forensic heuristics; in Côte-d’Or and Haute-Saône, Marsh’s test moves from laboratory bench to courtroom rhetoric. The book doubles as a plain-spoken history of how we learned to see what poisoners hoped was invisible.
But the human throughline is even richer. Serge Janouin-Benanti is tuned to class (brothels and drawing rooms, farms and boulangeries), gender (why juries sometimes forgave women more readily for the “weapon of the coward,” as one judge puts it), and the public theater of justice (cheers for acquittals, jeers for “poison shops”). You feel how gossip becomes evidence, how newspaper sarcasm shapes expectation, how a confident defendant can seem charming until the timeline of debts and deaths clicks together like gears.
How it’s told (and why it works)
Serge Janouin-Benanti writes compact scenes that begin in motion—a door half-open on an eager adulteress; a postman cracking twine; a night courier pressing coins into a boy’s palm. He favors dialogue that sounds lived-in and chooses details that do two jobs: the bitter taste on a cake, the address “27 Rue Saint-Antoine,” the gaudy glass of a pastry box. Those specifics establish time and place while nudging the plot forward. As each chapter closes, the author resists lecturing; instead, the court (and sometimes the crowd) delivers a moral the story refuses to pin down. It’s persuasive precisely because it doesn’t tell you what to think; the sentences and juries do that.
The translation reads clean and nimble. Boatwright keeps the tone elastic, capable of handling crooked humor (the Tarbes postman’s gluttony) and blunt cruelty (Jacquemard’s bedroom whispers) without smoothing out the edges that make these period voices feel local and particular. The result is immersion without fuss—a clarity that serves the book’s documentary backbone and lets its drama breathe. The opening pages even collect a pair of crisp early notices that frame the project’s promise: a “genuine tour through France one poison apple at a time” and a “bottomless pit” for crime writers’ imagination. It’s a playful touch, but it fits: these are stories that stick to your ribs.
Who it’s for (and how to read it)
If you devour true-crime podcasts, love historical mysteries, or want a smart companion to nineteenth-century French life beyond Balzac and Zola, this is an easy recommendation. Read it in order to watch the forensic and legal threads knit tighter, or out of order as thirteen compact shocks. Either way, it invites reflection. Consider how often money sits at the center (annuities, insurance, shop revenues), how often reputation constrains action (the shame of brothels, the pride of pharmacists), and how frequently collective feeling—a jeering crowd, a pleading petition—reshapes justice’s trajectory. The case of Baude in Saint-Denis (doomed, then saved) and the Boeglin footnote (a life flipped between two verdicts, then politely erased) offer mirror images of that social power.
Bottom line: why you’ll want to read it
Because it moves. Because it teaches without preaching. Because it treats the past not as a postcard but as a place where people make small, terrible choices for reasons that feel uncomfortably familiar. The book’s architecture—a tour of thirteen places tied by a single, secretive weapon—means you can finish a story at lunch and still think about it at dinner. You’ll come away with characters (Joye and his theriac; the indignant Marie-Thérèse Joniaux; the broken-hearted baker who begs mercy for the man who ruined him), scenes (a pathologist squinting under a cherry; a judge whispering about Orfila), and questions about culpability, gender, class, and the crowd’s appetite for punishment. Most of all, Poisoners gives you the sensation of history freshly felt. The sources are there; the scaffolding shows; yet each chapter lands like a short noir. It’s the rare true-crime collection that rewards curiosity as much as it gratifies it—one that trusts readers to connect the dots between lab glass, love letters, and the human hunger for both justice and spectacle. If that sounds like your blend, clear an evening: these thirteen doses are potent.
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