had not forgotten the food items that Marie gave to Charles and were set aside. He requested that the test be performed on those as well. The defence, by then in a magnanimous mood, agreed. This time, when the chemists arrived, they declared that they tested positive for arsenic, with the eggnog containing enough "to poison ten persons". The prosecutor took this fact as a chance to recoup his earlier setbacks. He declared that in view of the contradictory results, it was apparent that the court should call upon Orfila to settle the issue once and for all. Because it was the defence who originally asked for Orfila, they could not object to this request. The defence agreed, confident of Marie's acquittal. Mathieu Orfila When Orfila arrived, he insisted that the local chemists witness his experiments that night. He used the same test materials and chemical reagents that they used in the earliest tests and performed the Marsh test in an anteroom of the courthouse, behind locked and guarded doors. At last, on the afternoon of the next day, Orfila entered the courtroom, followed by the three chemists with bowed heads. He declared that he had found arsenic on the samples taken from the body of Lafarge, excluding all other extraneous sources, such as arsenic naturally occurring in the body, from the reagents, or from arsenic from the earth surrounding the coffin. The courtroom was stunned, especially Maître Paillet, as he listened to Orfila, his client and defense witness, explain the misleading results obtained by the local experts with the Marsh test. It was not the test that gave the erroneous results, but rather, the test was performed incorrectly. Knowing that Orfila's testimony had tipped the balance against them, the defense team sought to call a known opponent of Orfila, François Vincent Raspail, to refute his testimony. While Raspail had agreed, as he had done in previous courtroom clashes with Orfila, but he arrived four hours too late. The jury had decided on Marie's case: guilty. Conviction and controversy In the end, despite the passionate pleadings of Charles Lachaud, Marie, no longer as composed as she was previously throughout the trial, heard herself sentenced by the president of the court to life imprisonment with hard labor on 19 September and was brought to Montpellier to serve her sentence. King Louis-Philippe, however, commuted her sentence to life without hard labor. By