Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
The following day, Maria Francesca resumed her testimony:
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To go back to the matter of the poison and the princess, I would like to add by way of making things clearer, that during those days when the princess was ill, and people were talking about her being poisoned, I also wrote a letter to Peters, in the name of the Madonna, saying: “The devil has taken my box to the pharmacy and showed us there a tin of poison. But I would like the box to remain in my daughter’s room.”
In another letter, the Madonna told Peters he should say to the princess that all the things she had heard from the mistress had been the devil’s illusions. Padre Peters should repeat this to his cardinal (His Eminence Cardinal Reisach).
Another letter revealed that Peters was waiting for a sign from the Madonna … to convince the princess, as she refused to believe. But the Madonna answered:
“No, I will give no sign! He who does not believe in the servants of God will not believe in miracles either.”
Finally, she told Peters that the devil himself would give such a sign. This sign was the inscription of the name of Jesus on a brick in Maria Luisa’s chamber. A little later, an inscription of Mary’s name appeared on another brick. Padre Peters wrote a prayer to banish the devil, for him and his fellow confessor Padre Leziroli to repeat every three months. I copied out the aforementioned prayer from Padre Peters’ handwriting.
Analyzing these supposedly divine letters from the Virgin brings to light the following course of events: Maria Luisa initially tried to protect herself from all future accusations by having the Madonna announce that the devil was appearing to people in her form. Then she built up a stark contrast between the “holy” Maria Luisa and the “unbeliever” Luisa Maria. The latter was condemned to die for her pride; the former was to be glorified by God. Finally, we glimpse how Maria Luisa set about the poisoning operation. Having inquired about strong poisons with Agnese Celeste, the doctor’s daughter, she recruited the two novices Maria Ignazia and Maria Felice as her accomplices, again saying this was a divine decree.
The fateful letter was written on December 8, the day of the scene in the choir. Sallua obtained the date from the abbess, who testified that the day before the princess fell ill (meaning December 8) Maria Luisa had come to her looking very worried. She told the abbess:
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“God wants to punish the princess, and will send her an illness which will take her life.” She repeated this several times. “And in fact,” the abbess said, “the princess did begin to feel unwell the next day, after dinner, with vomiting and pain in her guts, and by the next morning she was in the grip of that serious illness.”
The heavenly announcement of the poisoning was accompanied by prayers. Maria Luisa demanded that the novices pray a novena to the Precious Blood, asking the Lord to strike down a member of the convent with an illness. And the nuns knew very well that this meant none other than the princess.
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Repeated over nine days, this is a particularly intense form of supplicatory prayer, through which the faithful implore God to fulfill their wish. The fact that the nuns spent nine days wishing the princess dead represented a serious perversion of the Church liturgy, as the inquisitor noted.
THE DRAMATURGY OF A POISONING
Reconstructing the exact sequence of events for the poisonings presented Sallua with some not insignificant problems. Having spent more than a year questioning witnesses, the Dominican found very little agreement on this between the sisters’ testimonies. Many of
the nuns and novices had only heard rumors and, two years after the fact, were simply padding these out. The information they provided contributed relatively little to the investigation of how the crime had been committed. The inquisitor soon realized there were only a few nuns and novices from whom he could expect a reliable testimony.
At least Maria Francesca’s statements had told Sallua which nuns these were. First, there were Maria Luisa’s direct accomplices, the novices Maria Ignazia and Maria Felice—although Maria Felice had died in suspicious circumstances shortly after the dramatic events of December 1858. Then there was the doctor’s daughter, Agnese Celeste, the nurse, Maria Giuseppa—who was the only one to take a skeptical view of the heavenly letters—and finally Maria Giacinta, who had been ill and confined to bed in December 1858, like Agnese Celeste and Katharina. There was also Giacinta’s brother, the lawyer Luigi Franceschetti, who met with the madre vicaria regularly, and whom she could send on errands outside the convent without attracting too much attention.
Extensive questioning of these witnesses provided the inquisitor with the crucial information he had been looking for on the poisoning plot. Their testimonies allowed him to trace how the whole campaign had been staged and, most importantly, to pinpoint a variety of poisons that had been used, in quantities that would have felled an elephant.
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However, he still failed to present the congregation of cardinals with a convincing chronology for the attacks.
In part, this was because it was the first time the Dominican had been confronted with a criminal case. An experienced investigator would have reckoned with the inconsistency of the witness statements from the start, particularly with regard to timings, and would have attempted a critical comparison of these with the sequence of events presented in Katharina’s
Denunzia
. Doing this exposes some of their contradictions as failures of memory, and reveals a relatively clear chronology for the murder plot.
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After the incident in the choir, Maria Luisa didn’t hesitate for a second before setting in motion her plan to murder Katharina. One of her first steps was to isolate the princess from the other sisters. She thus forbade Katharina from taking part in the deathbed prayers for the mortally ill Maria Saveria, for which the sisters gathered in her cell on December 8. As Maria Giuseppa reported, immediately after
Maria Saveria’s death, the madre vicaria fell into a long swoon. When she awoke, she claimed to have been transported to heaven, where she spoke to Christ about Maria Saveria’s judgment. In what Jesus had said about Maria Saveria, she “also recognized his judgment of Luisa Maria.” The princess would “soon die and be damned,” because Maria Luisa’s “tears and prayers [had] achieved nothing with God.”
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That evening, Maria Luisa turned her attention to producing a deadly brew for the princess. Agnese Celeste and some of the other novices observed the mistress breaking up shards of glass. The nuns thought the glass dangerous, and warned Maria Luisa to be careful of her eyes. Depending on their size, splinters of glass can injure the inside of the mouth, the stomach, and even the intestines, causing internal bleeding. The finer the glass is ground, the less obvious the bleeding. At around six o’clock in the evening, during Vespers, Maria Luisa put her plan into action. The nuns had to be in the choir of the church for Divine Office, and she thought nobody would observe her. When Maria Giacinta, who was lying ill in her cell, asked Maria Luisa why she had crept past on tiptoes, she replied sanctimoniously that she hadn’t wanted to wake her, as she was ill. “Then I started to suspect that somebody really did want to kill the princess. And more so when I noticed the novices Maria Ignazia, Maria Felice, Agnese Celeste and Mistress Maria Luisa busying themselves over the princess’s bed. They had declared themselves the only people responsible for the princess’s care.”
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Maria Ignazia was to give the princess the gruel containing the ground glass on this Wednesday evening. She remembered the novice mistress summoning her:
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Maria Luisa began speaking to me as follows: “My daughter, what I am about to tell you must remain absolutely secret; do not tell anybody. I will not say anything to Maria Felice, as she could make things difficult for me. You know that those who are obedient never do anything bad; now we are showing obedience to the padre (I think she meant Peters). So you must take a little piece of
spongia
and put little bits of glass into it, and mix this with the gruel you are taking to Luisa Maria (the princess) this evening.”
I was still very confused by her instructions, and answered as best I could:
“My mother mistress, if the Lord has commanded you in this matter
,
it would be best for you to do it alone, for you know how the command should be carried out. You can well imagine that Luisa Maria might notice, and the matter would not stay secret.”
The mistress said nothing to this. Shortly afterwards, she asked me: “Do you know which medicine is also a poison?”
I replied:
“Opium is a poison!!”
This was how the matter was left on that day, and when Padre Peters came out of the princess’s cell, the mistress accompanied him to the door. Feeling anxious, I went into the little choir, to confide in the Lord and the Blessed Virgin, so that they might enlighten me as to whether I must obey the mistress or not—and whether the person who had spoken to me was actually the mistress.
After Maria Ignazia’s hesitant reaction, Maria Luisa decided to take matters into her own hands. Agnese Celeste observed her outside the door to Katharina’s cell, “reaching under her collar and drawing something out” that she mixed into the gruel that was to be given to the princess.
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Katharina ate the gruel, which apparently caused her to feel unwell. On that Thursday morning, December 9, she asked for a cup of black tea, which was brought to her straightaway. But this made her feel no better: on the contrary, the tea caused severe stomach pains, nausea, and vomiting.
The sickness may have been caused by tartar emetic in the tea. Sant’Ambrogio’s nurse and apothecary, Sister Maria Giuseppa, told the inquisitor that the novice mistress had asked her for tartar emetic. She showed her a little bottle of this, and impressed upon her that “one small drop is enough to cause severe nausea.”
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Tartar emetic contains antimony, which belongs to the same chemical family as arsenic. Potassium antimonyl tartrate tastes unpleasantly sweet, with a disgusting aftertaste, and causes terrible, unappeasable nausea. In the nineteenth century, small doses were taken as a decongestant for coughs. The maximum daily dose is 0.5 gram; higher doses lead to inflammation of the stomach and intestines, severe vomiting and diarrhea, and the breakdown of the intestinal walls.
Katharina must have been in a desperate state on that Thursday, and Maria Luisa was unable to conceal her delight. Maria Giacinta, who was still ill, said the novice mistress had come to her in very high spirits, saying:
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“Did you know? The princess is already having pains.”
Maria Giacinta went on: “Later I saw Maria Ignazia, and when I inquired about the princess’s health, she snapped: ‘Yes, she is doing badly. She is lying in bed, mistrustful, with her eyes open, like a hangman. She wants neither medicine nor chamomile tea, and she will hardly even taste her food, sending it back because she thinks she is being poisoned.’
“I was completely astonished, and said: ‘What, is this the
Macchia della Faiola
then?’ ”
The
Macchia della Faiola
had become a byword for a den of
Briganti
, the bands of robbers who were much talked about in nineteenth-century Italy.
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Maria Giacinta’s exclamation shows just how implausible she found the poisoning story.
But Maria Luisa wanted to make absolutely certain the princess would die, and the effects of the ground glass and tartar emetic weren’t enough for her. And so, later that day, she enlisted Agnese Celeste as another collaborator. The novice gave the inquisitor a detailed account of their conversation.
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In the evening the mistress came to my room, closed the door and told me she had to ask me something. But for heaven’s sake, she said, I must say nothing of this, particularly to Maria Giacinta and Padre Peters. I promised, and she said: “As you are the daughter of a surgeon, can you tell me what is needed to kill a person with poison? But so that the cause cannot be found out. The body should not be bloated, for example.”
Before I answered, I asked her: “Mistress, have you already tried this using the glass you broke up yesterday evening?”
She replied: “Oh, the glass was not enough.”
I: “Does the glass sink to the bottom?”
She: “Yes, the glass sinks.”
I: “What if you ground it more finely and stirred it well into the gruel?”
She: “We tried that, but still it sinks.”
But although I suspected that the aim of this conversation was to poison the princess, the mistress said to me: “Think nothing of it: a superior may have many reasons for asking such questions.”
After this I answered her, saying that a large quantity of opium can cause death, or so I had heard when my sister was ill. When the
mistress inquired further, I added that opium was black. She asked about the exact lethal amount, and I said: “Usually you administer a small amount as a medicine, but if you raise that amount just a little, it can be fatal.”
I reminded her that Maria Giacinta had once been given two opium pills, and afterwards she had a severe inflammation. Finally she asked me whether I knew of anything else that was lethal.
I answered: “Turpentine, and it is a clear liquid.”
To which she said: “You cannot just mix that in, it would be noticed.”
It now became clear to me that she wanted to poison the princess.
I also suggested quicklime.… I don’t recall whether I also mentioned belladonna and quicksilver. She left my room, telling me I should try and think of other possibilities, and to keep the conversation secret.
Turpentine and quicklime corrode the digestive tract and ultimately cause death, but to start with, Maria Luisa had to press ahead using the things she had to hand. On the evening of December 9, Giuseppa Maria was tasked with preparing chamomile tea for the princess, into which Maria Luisa put something from “another smaller cup,” as the nurse testified. Katharina tried the tea, but didn’t want to drink it. It looked blackish and tasted “disgusting.”
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She asked a novice to try the tea and she, too, found it undrinkable. The novice mistress, appearing unexpectedly in Katharina’s cell, gave the novice a terrible scolding, as Maria Ignazia confirmed in her statement: “I would like to add that the chamomile tea the princess was given that day must have had something mixed into it: Giuseppa Maria knows about such things and honestly attests to this, and the mistress shouted at us for tasting it.… I actually ran to the princess’s chamber to get rid of the cup. The mistress told Sister Maria Nazarena to tell me to do this.”
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The poison couldn’t be allowed to fall into other hands. They had to get rid of the
Corpus Delicti
.