第59章 THE MERRY WIDOWS(2)

It is perhaps to the rather loud-mouthed habits of this Kostolo that the birth of suspicion among the neighbours may be attributed.On the death of Boursier he had remarked that the nails of the corpse were blue a colour, he said, which was almost a certain indication of poisoning.Now, the two doctors who had attended Boursier, having failed to account for his illness, were inclined to suspect poisoning as the cause of his death.For this reason they had suggested an autopsy, a suggestion rejected by the widow.Her rejection of the idea aroused no immediate suspicion of her in the minds of the doctors.

Kostolo, in addition to repeating outside the house his opinion regarding the blueness of the dead Boursier's nails, began, several days after the funeral, to brag to neighbours and friends of the warm relationship existing between himself and the widow.He dropped hints of a projected marriage.Upon this the neighbours took to remembering how quickly Kostolo's friendship with the Boursier family had sprung up, and how frequently he had visited the establishment.His nursingactivities were remembered also.And it was noticed that his visits to the Boursier house still went on; it was whispered that he visited the Veuve Boursier in her bedroom.

The circumstances in which Boursier had fallen ill were well known.Nobody, least of all Mme Boursier or Kostolo, had taken any trouble to conceal them.Anybody who liked to ask either Mme Boursier or the Greek about the soup could have a detailed story at once.All the neighbourhood knew it.And since the Veuve Boursier's story is substantially the same as other versions it may as well be dealt with here and now.

M.Boursier, said his widow, tasted his soup that Sunday morning.

What a taste!'' he said to the cook, Josephine.This rice is poisoned.''

But, monsieur,'' Josephine protested, that's amazing! The potage ought to be better than usual this morning, because I made a liaison for it with three egg-yolks!''

M.Boursier called his wife, and told her he couldn't eat his potage au riz.It was poisoned.Mme Boursier took a spoonful of it herself, she said, and saw nothing the matter with it.Whereupon her husband, saying that if it was all right he ought to eat it, took several spoonfuls more.

The poor man,'' said his widow, always had a bad taste in his mouth, and he could not face his soup.'' Then, she explained, he became very sick, and brought up what little of the soup he had taken, together with flots de bile.

All this chatter of poison, particularly by Kostolo and the widow, together with the persistent rumours of an adulterous association between the pair, gave colour to suspicions of a criminal complicity, and these in process of time came to the ears of the officers of justice.The two doctors were summoned by the Procureur-General, who questioned them closely regarding Boursier's illness.To the mind of the official everything pointed to suspicion of the widow.Word of the growing suspicion against her reached Mme Boursier, and she now hastened to ask the magistrates for an exhumation and a post-mortem examination.This did not avert proceedings by the Procureur.It was already known that she had refused the autopsy suggested by the two doctors, and it wasstated that she had hurried on the burial.

Kostolo and the Widow Boursier were called before the Juge d'instruction.

There is about the Greek Kostolo so much gaudy impudence and barefaced roguery that, in spite of the fact that the main concern of these pages is with women, I am constrained to add his portrait to the sketches I have made in illustration.He is of the gallery in which are Jingle and Montague Tigg, with this difference--that he is rather more sordid than either.

Brought before the Procureur du Roi, he impudently confessed that he had been, and still was, Mme Boursier's lover.He told the judge that in the lifetime of her husband Mme Boursier had visited him in his rooms several times, and that she had given him money unknown to her husband.

Mme Boursier at first denied the adulterous intimacy with Kostolo, but the evidence in the hands of the Procureur was too much for her.She had partially to confess the truth of Kostolo's statement in this regard.She emphatically denied, however, that she had ever even thought of, let alone agreed to, marriage with the Greek.She swore that she had been intimate with Kostolo only once, and that, as far as giving him money was concerned, she had advanced him but one small sum on his IOU.

These confessions, together with the information which had come to him from other investigations, served to increase the feeling of the Procureur that Boursier's death called for probing.He issued an exhumation order, and on the 31st of July an autopsy on the body of Boursier was carried out by MM.Orfila and Gardy, doctors and professors of the Paris faculty of medicine.Their finding was that no trace existed of any disorders to which the death of Boursier might be attributed--such, for example, as cerebral congestion, rupture of the heart or of a larger vessel--but that, on the other hand, they had come upon a sufficiency of arsenic in the intestines to have caused death.