Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky, listener discretion advised.

This is part two of our series on Marie LaFarge. If you haven't yet listened to last week's episode, I would go back and start there.

Marie LaFarge arrived at the grave site of her husband, Charles LaFarge, wearing morning clothes. She, 24 years old, was by all accounts a striking woman with long dark hair tucked under her hat and a complexion that looked particularly elegant against her all black wardrobe.

It might have looked at first glance to an onlooker that she was at her husband's grave site for his funeral, or perhaps more realistically in this case to pay her respects to quietly place flowers down on the grave of a man who had passed away from illness a year earlier.

But no, Marie LaFarge was wearing black at her husband's grave because his body was being exhumed as part of a trial. Her trial, she was accused of murdering her husband and her case had captivated the country.

There were literally hundreds of spectators crowding the grave as it was dug up with the judge of the region, Lubersak, supervising the digging.

Savvy vendors were selling smelling salts. As soon as Charles LaFarge's coffin was pried open, those salesmen began pulling in a hefty business.

A sea of hanker chips were lifted to noses in unison. Marie LaFarge swooned and seemed so faint that someone shouted that court should be postponed for the day.

The jury decreed that the trial should continue to proceed. When Marie LaFarge had first been charged with the murder of her husband, local apothecary men had tried to test her husband's body for arsenic.

But they were completely unfamiliar with the latest scientific method. A chemical test for identifying arsenic created by the Scottish doctor James Marsh.

Not only had the local men used old-fashioned in-exact methods, but their test had been completely bungled anyway. A glass tube had broken halfway through.

So the judge had determined a new test would be performed. The Marsh test, done by professional chemists in full view of the court, so no errors would be made this time around.

Unfortunately, by this point, Charles LaFarge's body had decomposed to the point where a newspaper described it as paste rather than flesh.

The expert were forced to use a spoon to scrape what they could into small pots. Those pots were swiftly transported to an open-air laboratory in tool where a group of chemists were going to be faced with the most high-stakes experiment of their careers.

With the court, a crowd of spectators and the nation waiting, these chemists scurried around their charcoal furnaces.

They painstakingly added the proper chemical reagents and set up a piece of porcelain at exactly the right distance from a flame, and then they held their breath, probably both from the stench of Charles LaFarge's remains, and from the anticipation.

The Marsh test was deceptive in its seeming simplicity. Though the chemistry involved wasn't particularly complex, there were a number of factors in its methodology that had to be absolutely perfect in order for the test to work.

And the French chemists and tool who had read about the procedure in translation were performing it for the first time.

Finally, after a day of waiting and anticipating, the chemists returned to the palace of justice.

They turned to the judge and the jury and announced they had reached their scientific conclusion as to whether there was arsenic in the body of Charles LaFarge.

Marie LaFarge looked as though she were about to faint, as she and the rest of the room waited to hear the determination that would all but seal her fate.

I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

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