Madeleine Smith and the Letters

A Glasgow heiress, a secret lover, a bundle of letters, and Scotland's third verdict.

Madeleine Smith was the daughter of a prosperous Glasgow architect. For two years she conducted a secret, passionate romance with Pierre Emile L'Angelier, a clerk from Jersey her family would never have accepted, by letter and by late-night meetings at her bedroom window.

The puzzle

In 1857 Madeleine became engaged to a respectable suitor her parents approved of, and asked L'Angelier to return her letters. He refused, and threatened to show them to her father. Weeks later L'Angelier died of arsenic poisoning.

But no one could prove she had met L'Angelier on the nights he fell ill, and his own habits and diaries gave the defence room for doubt.

What happened next

At her trial in Edinburgh the jury returned Scotland's third verdict: not proven. The phrase came to mean, in the public mind, "we think you did it, but they couldn't show it." Madeleine moved to London, married an associate of the designer William Morris, and later emigrated to the United States, where she died in 1928.

Why it still fascinates

The letters, read out in court and printed in the newspapers, scandalised Victorian Scotland. They still read as some of the most vivid love letters of the age, and they are the reason a dull poisoning became a legend.