hat is no answer.
Have you, yes or no, made such a statement to Mme. Durand?

Castaing: I don't recollect; if I had said it, I should recollect it.

Another lady whom Castaing had attended free of charge swore, with a
good deal of reluctance, that Castaing had told her a somewhat similar
story as accounting for his possession of 100,000 francs.

Witnesses were called for the defence who spoke to the diligence and
good conduct of Castaing as a medical student; and eighteen, whom he had
treated free of expense, testified to his kindness and generosity. "All
these witnesses," said the President, "speak to your generosity; but,
for that very reason, you must have made little profit out of your
profession, and had little opportunity for saving anything," to which
Castaing replied: "These are not the only patients I attended; I have
not called those who paid me for my services." At the same time Castaing
found it impossible to prove that he had ever made a substantial living
by the exercise of his profession.

One of the medical witnesses called for the defence, M. Chaussier, had
volunteered the remark that the absence of any trace of poison in the
portions of Auguste Ballet's body submitted to analysis, constituted an
absence of the corpus delicti. To this the President replied that that
was a question of criminal law, and no concern of his. But in his speech
for the prosecution the Avocat-General dealt with the point raised
at some length--a point which, if it had held good as a principle of
English law, would have secured the acquittal of so wicked a poisoner as
Palmer. He quoted from the famous French lawyer d'Aguesseau: "The corpus
delicti is no other thing than the delictum itself; but the proofs of
the delictum are infinitely variable according to the nature of things;
they may be general or special, principal or accessory, direct or
indirect; in a word, they form that general effect (ensemble) which goes
to determine the conviction of an honest man." If such a contention as
M. Chaussier's were correct, said the Avocat-General, then it would
be impossible in a case of poisoning to convict a prisoner after his
victim's death, or, if his victim survived, to convict him of the
attempt to poison. He reminded the jury of that paragraph in the Code
of Criminal Procedure which instructed them as to their duties: "The Law
does not ask you to give the reasons that have convinced you; it
lays down no rules by which you are to