Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1902-11-01 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

GUILTY?  OF STA  TLING SKETCHES.]  TTCHINGS. If London Life," etc., etc.  she saw that the grand chateau was nothng but a gloomy, dilapidated manor house. Fleeing to her own room to indulge her tears, she found herself in an enormous apartment, cold and bare: and almost beside herself with disappointment and mortification, he sat down and wrote to her husband a foolish letter imploring him to consent to a separation. He might have her wedding portion if he would but give her her freedom, and she would go away to the East and never trouble him more.  At this Lafarge was both angry and distressed, and there followed another "scene," which ended, however in a reconciliation. Front her letters during the next few weeks it would seem that Marie had determined to make the best of her extremely bad bargain. She told her friends that in her husband, in spite of his roughness and coarseness, and in Spite of his habit in going about with his nails in mouating, she saw a man who at any rate had -a sincere affection for her, and she was resolved, therefore, to reconcile herself to her lot.  Towards the end of the year, .having obtained from his wife legal authority to raise a loan on her security, Lafarge went. to Paris to take out his patent. Now it is a curious circumstance that. while he was staying there the man Barbier paid a surreptitious visit to the capital. What business he had in Paris was ncver asecrtained. Was it in any way connected with the mysterious event. now to be related P  On the Ist of December Lafarge received from his mother a letter informing him of the despatch of a box of little cakes. She herself had made them at the suggestion of his wife, who wished him to eat them at a given hour, when she also would eat some of the same baking, and thus they would be thinking of and communing with each other. The box duly arrived, and was opened while Lafarge was absent. When he examined its contents, he was surprised to find not several little cakes, but one large one. Of this he ate a small piece, and that same night was seized with agonising pains. His illness continued, and anxious, now that he had finished his errand, to be once more at home, he set out for Glandier, and arrived there on the sth of January (1840). But he was no better at home than in Paris, and on the 14th of the same month, after dreadful suffering, he died. The doctor who first attended Lafarge on his return home diag,noised his malady as nervous colic, by which he had been attacked before. But another medical man who was called in, and to whom the man Barbier suggested that the sick man was being poisoned by his wife, regarded the symptoms a.s pointing to arsenical poisoning. Now it must at once be said that Marie had arsenic in her possession. She had sent to chemists on several differont occasions, both before the cakes were made and after her husband's return, for large quantities o fthis poison, in order, she said, to get rid of the rats that infested the old manor house. Of these purchases she had spoken openly before hcr husband, who was disturbed by the 'scampering of rats as he lay on his sick bed, nor did she attempt to deny them when taxed with having put the arsenic to murderbus uses. But.  )SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS ISSSSSSSSSSSS