Read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal Online
Authors: Hubert Wolf
In the midst of all this, Maria Ignazia had the presence of mind to think about the questions that might be asked later.
I went to the mistress and told her everything, and then said: “What will the nurses say when they find out the novice has not taken the medicine, and one of the glasses is missing?”
She replied: “Tell them you tripped on the stairs of the dormitory, you spilled the medicine and the glass was broken.”
This I told to everyone who asked me. I then went back to the princess and found her in a much worse state. I left the room together with the mistress, who was also there, and repeated that we needed to call the doctor.
Again, she said: “Why such a rush? You should wait, but it’s your decision. The doctor will come and let her bleed, and then it will all be over.”
From her words, I thought she didn’t want anyone to call the doctor, because he would task her with something and then it might all go wrong.
I went back to the princess, who was doing so badly that she asked me to fetch her first one bottle, then another that she had in her room, so she could smell them and recover herself. I could see her condition was still worsening, and I wanted to help her in some way, so I set off to see the abbess. I met the mistress on the way, and repeated that the princess was getting worse and worse.
She said to me: “Off you go to the abbess then, and tell her that the princess is not well.”
I found the abbess in the choir, and told her about the princess’s condition and that I believed she had suffered a stroke.
The abbess replied: “Oh! Lord, here I am.”
As we were going to the princess, we saw the mistress; she told us she had already sent for the doctor. The abbess was very alarmed to see the princess in that condition; the two doctors and two father confessors were sent for in a great hurry, and they came.
Then Maria Ignazia described to the court the doctors’ diagnosis, and the action the confessors had taken.
First of all, Doctor Marchi came and said, “it is a syncopation of the heart: quick, a good leech treatment”; this was carried out.
When Doctor Riccardi came, he said: “This is a syncopation of the head, which has attacked the fibers of the brain.” He called for a second leech treatment straightaway, which was carried out.
When the doctors had gone, the confessors came and quickly brought the princess the last Communion. As her condition was still worsening and her fever was getting higher, she was given extreme unction after the midday meal. She took her vows in the presence of the father confessor, the abbess, the mistress and a few other nuns.
It was common practice to allow mortally ill novices to take their vows on their deathbeds. But somehow, Katharina didn’t die. Maria Luisa had no idea how two ounces of opium could have failed to kill her. On the evening of December 14, the novice mistress seemed very ill at ease. “It seems impossible that she should survive this,” she told Maria Ignazia. “She could still die tonight, don’t you think?”
The hearings of the two convent doctors basically corroborated Katharina’s statement, and those of the many witnesses—at least, with regard to the symptoms of her illness.
40
However, the thought that poisoning could have been the cause of Katharina’s surprising malady didn’t occur to them. Doctor Gregorio Bernardo Riccardi “never had any kind of suspicion that the princess’s illness could be down to a misuse of medicines or an intake of food dangerous to her health.”
41
Maria Luisa’s strategy had worked: the poisons she had used were undetectable. But her real aim still eluded her.
Hoping to hasten the princess’s demise, Maria Luisa turned to her confidante Maria Ignazia: “Could you do something for me? When the princess is fast asleep, take this little bottle of chloroform and
hold it under her nose, so she falls into an even deeper sleep.” Katharina used chloroform
42
regularly for certain “unctions,” as she told her doctors. Was this an indirect confession that she was one of many nineteenth-century noblewomen who “sniffed” chloroform to put themselves in an intoxicated state? Whatever the truth of this, the vapor that the chloroform gave off was so strong that Katharina had to ask other nuns to leave the cell when she used it. Eventually, the doctors banned her from using chloroform altogether, saying the Italians “simply could not get used to it.” It seems Maria Ignazia didn’t want to risk this distinctive smell in Katharina’s cell, and she took the little bottle into another room.
Katharina was still alive on the morning of Wednesday, December 15, and Maria Luisa asked Franceschetti to procure another two ounces of opium, which he did immediately. Maria Ignazia stated:
I saw it in her hand, when she took the tin out of the bag.
“Here,” she said to me, “I ordered this; we will mix it with the medicines that the princess has to take.”
But the doctors prescribed no more medicines. Katharina’s condition had deteriorated greatly, and she was no longer in a fit state to take them. So she could not be given any more opium, and the treatment had to be continued with leeches. I never found out what became of the opium.
Meanwhile, the madre vicaria retreated to the convent dispensary to forage for more poisons. Maria Ignazia said:
The following morning, Padre Peters went to celebrate Mass. The mistress sent me to the abbess for the key to the dispensary, which she gave me, and I took it to the mistress. The mistress told Sister Maria Felice to stay with the princess and said to me: “Come with me.”
And then: “Go to our room, fetch the little tin and bring it to me in the dispensary.”
When I had given her the tin, she said: “Stay here by the dispensary door, and watch to see if anyone comes; if Maria Giuseppa comes, let me know at once.”
She stayed in there for quite a long time. She left the casket
there, came out and closed the door. Then she said to me: “Well, what a chaotic dispensary we have in Sant’Ambrogio!”
We parted ways. In the evening she took me back to the dispensary, to fetch the tin, which she told me to take back to her cell.
Maria Luisa must have found what she was looking for in the poison cupboard. On Thursday, December 16, she gave Maria Ignazia a paper packet containing a wood-colored powder, saying: “Pour that into the princess’s lemonade, for it will make anyone go out of their mind, and causes vomiting.” Maria Ignazia took the powder “with a heavy heart.” Her statement continues:
Finally I decided to put just a tiny bit into the princess’s lemonade, so that she would drink it. I did it, but then it was impossible for me to take the lemonade away before the princess asked me for it, so I had to give it to her. She drank only a sip, without noticing anything and without feeling any ill effects. Then I promptly took the lemon water away. I met the mistress and told her I had done everything she had instructed, and the princess had not had any complaint.
She replied: “I see. I imagine you only put a tiny amount in, and of course that would have no effect.”
I gave her the rest of the powder and went away.
After this, Maria Luisa made another attempt at poisoning Katharina’s lemonade, this time using opium again. Maria Ignazia was once more entrusted to carry out the task:
As I was also in the room, she said to me: “Put three drops of the opium water into this.”
I pointed out to her that this water was dark in color, while the lemonade was white, so this would color it.
But she argued: “You must do it out of obedience.”
She left the glass there. She was hardly out of the door when she met Maria Giuseppa and cried loudly: “What is this? What is the meaning of this, what are you trying to claim? Such things do not happen in the house of God.”
Maria Giuseppa replied: “But if you have not put anything in the lemonade, then what is Maria Ignazia doing in this room?”
“I was standing at the door,” I said. “I am just standing here, not doing anything.”
Then the mistress took the glass of lemonade, went to the abbess and said: “What is going on? Maria Giuseppa believes that something has been put into the lemonade. Here, there is nothing in it.”
The mistress and the abbess drank the lemonade in the presence of Maria Giuseppa, to show her there was nothing in it. And in fact there was nothing, because I had not yet added the three drops that the mistress told me to put in it.
After this, Maria Ignazia refused to carry out any more orders from Maria Luisa to poison the princess, and told her she wanted to go back to the novitiate. The novice mistress finally agreed. She had now lost her most important accomplice.
But Maria Luisa refused to give up, and revisited Agnese Celeste’s idea of using turpentine. She asked Franceschetti to purchase a turpentine pill for the dispensary. However, as he handed it over, the lawyer warned her that “whatever it touches, it will burn at once,” and the novice mistress took fright and threw the pill away.
43
Over the New Year of 1858–1859, the attempts to poison Katharina tailed off, and finally ceased altogether. Whether this was really down to Katharina clearing the air with Maria Luisa on the morning of December 16, as she reported in her
Denunzia
, is open to question.
Katharina slowly recovered from the effects of the various poisons, although over the months that followed she refused almost all the food and drink she was offered. In particular, she no longer drank chocolate at breakfast. She ate only bread and drank water, in the belief that nobody could poison them. But she still suffered from terrible indigestion, and on several occasions during the spring the abbess ordered a “sealed whey-based laxative” from the pharmacist. Sometimes, however, the bottle would arrive with a broken seal. When this happened, the abbess decided not to give the medicine to Katharina—evidently erring on the side of caution. She wanted the princess to feel she was no longer under threat in the order’s community. The abbess’s aim was to keep her in the convent at all costs: leaving would give Katharina the opportunity to talk about Sant’Ambrogio’s secrets and what had happened there to the outside world. The grass must be allowed to grow over the whole affair first.
But in early summer 1859, the madre vicaria resorted to poisoning
again. Just before Easter, she had shown her hatred of Katharina to be undiminished, this time expressing it in a liturgical context. While she washed the novices’ feet on Maundy Thursday, as Jesus did for his disciples before the Last Supper,
44
the novice mistress told them there was a Judas in their midst, who was not present in the church at that moment. The only nun missing from the liturgy of the Last Supper was Sister Luisa Maria, alias Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Maria Luisa was reiterating the accusation she had made on December 8, 1858, when Katharina had knelt before her with the cord around her neck.
After Hohenlohe had removed the princess from Sant’Ambrogio, the abbess received a letter from the Virgin, interpreting this event as a divine intervention: “Recognize the great mercy I have shown to you by freeing you from this soul: in the eyes of God, what you took to be gold was in fact vile excrement.” The Virgin Mary even assigned the abbess a penance for being so accommodating to the princess during the final six months of her stay in the convent. Padre Peters also received a letter from the Madonna, containing the same divine judgment and penance, which the confessor insisted on observing.
Katharina von Hohenzollern’s exit from Sant’Ambrogio must have been a terrible defeat for Maria Luisa. Ever since she had read the Americano’s letter to Katharina, she had made every effort to silence or kill her. Now the princess was outside and able to speak freely. And more importantly, Maria Luisa had mixed the poisoned drinks for Katharina and given them to her via her helpers. There were simply too many witnesses: it would be easy to convict her. Her best hope might have been to address the matter head-on with Katharina, beg her forgiveness and try to dissuade her from bringing criminal charges. But Maria Luisa adopted quite a different strategy. She turned once more to the supernatural, though this time to hell rather than heaven.
“IT WAS MOST CERTAINLY THE DEVIL”
Sallua exposed Maria Luisa’s devilish exculpation strategy with the aid of an exemplary witness, in the shape of Maria Ignazia. She had already admitted to being Maria Luisa’s “accomplice,” giving several
self-incriminating testimonies. In his
Relazione
for the cardinals, the Dominican remarked that Maria Ignazia’s honesty had led “truth to triumph” in the tortuous story of the poisoning.
45
In her hearing on March 2, 1860, Maria Ignazia painted a compelling picture of the strategy Maria Luisa and the father confessors were using to justify themselves.
46
One evening, when the princess was well again, I went into the novitiate wing to receive the blessing from Mistress Maria Luisa.
She said to me: “Daughter, be a good girl and do not cause me any trouble like these other novices.”
I assured her that I would not say anything to anybody.
She: “Daughter, what do you mean? Do you still have such things in your head? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And then I began to cry and reminded her of what she had made me do for her with regard to the princess.
The mistress seemed astonished and said to me, falteringly, “But what? I never said or ordered these things, nor do I know anything about them. Remember the reading that was given in the refectory today, from the life of Sister Veronica Giuliani?
47
These things can happen again.”
The reading from the life of Sister Veronica had been about how the devil had taken her shape and thus done many evil things.
Finally, she said to me: “Go to bed, and tomorrow come to me when it is time for morning prayers. I will soon drive this nonsense out of you.”
I went to her room punctually the following morning. I repeated to her everything she had said and what she had instructed me regarding poisoning the princess, and recounted all the details, including the places, the exact words, and the people involved.
Then she: “But daughter, I know nothing of all these things.”
She said she had suffered greatly from worrying about the princess, and had only been to see her occasionally, to provide comfort with her words.
To me she said: “Take courage, Maria Ignazia.”
I said, “Yes, that is true, but it is also true that you said and instructed me to do all the other things.”
She: “Daughter, that certainly was not me.”
I: “Then who was it? I have done a great deal of harm, and will have to tell the padre everything, will I not?”
She: “No, daughter, you have done no harm. You were obedient. Trust in obedience: remain silent, and never say a word. If you are questioned, always deny. This is the best way to defy the devil.”
I replied: “So it was the devil in your shape, Reverend Mother?”
She:
“Alas!
I wish it were not so. The devil has taken on my form on too many other occasions, as he also did in this case. You threw away the cup and did other things that you have described to me. This you can openly deny, as I know that the devil also took on your shape.”
I asked her: “Where were you on those days?”
She answered, “I had foreseen everything that would come to pass. And so I withdrew myself and prayed in the little rooms in the lower choir, and left them only when it was absolutely necessary.”
She repeated: “Stay calm and do not say a word.”
I told her that her words and conscience had reassured me, and I would never say anything.