these questions Castaing's answers were such as to lead the
President to express a doubt as to whether they were likely to
convince the jury. Castaing was obliged to admit that he
had allowed, if not ordered, the evacuations of the sick man to
be thrown away. He stated that he had thrown away the morphia
and antimony, which he had bought in Paris, in the closets of the
hotel, because, owing to the concatenation of circumstances, he
thought that he would be suspected of murder. In reply to a
question from one of the jury, Castaing said that he had mixed
the acetate of morphia and tartar emetic together before reaching
Saint Cloud, but why he had done so he could not explain.

The medical evidence at the trial was favourable to the accused.
Orfila, the famous chemist of that day, said that, though the
symptoms in Auguste Ballet's case might be attributed to
poisoning by acetate of morphia or some other vegetable poison,
at the same time they could be equally well attributed to sudden
illness of a natural kind. The liquids, taken from the stomach
of Ballet, had yielded on analysis no trace of poison of any
sort. The convulsive symptoms present in Ballet's case were un-

doubtedly a characteristic result of a severe dose of acetate of
morphia.[14] Castaing said that he had mixed the acetate of
morphia and tartar emetic together, but in any case no trace of
either poison was found in Auguste's body, and his illness might,
from all appearances, have been occasioned by natural causes.
Some attempt was made by the prosecution to prove that the
apoplexy to which Hippolyte Ballet had finally succumbed, might
be attributed to a vegetable poison; one of the doctors expressed
an opinion favourable to that conclusion "as a man but not as a