in mind, we choose to think that Marfa Matveevna died 
of a gluttonous appetite for mushrooms at Christmastide 
in 1715, the autopsy revealing the cause of her death, 
that cause supplying History with her only claim on 
lasting fame. 
So much for the famous men and women whose deaths 
have been attributed rightly or wrongly to mushrooms. 
This mortuary procession of alleged mushroomic victims 
would be incomplete if we did not here add the murders 
revealed by /affaire Girard. In this case the victims were 
persons of no consequence: their very names are for- 
gotten. But the circumstances that brought them to 
their deaths are, for mycophiles and epicures of crime, 
both instructive and fascinating. 
The standard mushroom manuals of France, like those 
of Kngland, have always been saturated with mycopho- 
bic caution. By overstating the toxic dangers of various 
species, they have aimed at assuring the safety of their 
readers. But, through a strange conjuncture of events, 
that very bias once contributed to the disastrous end of 
a man who trusted his mushroom manual too much. 
Such is the lesson to be learned from this police episode. 
Girard’s murders would doubtless have drawn wide 
attention if the press stories had not broken at the pre- 
cise moment of the great spring offensive of 1918, the 
final year of the first World War. Girard was a Parisian, 
and his accomplices were his wife and his mistress. He 
murdered only his friends, after insuring their lives in 
his own favor. Poisons were his instrument, and among 
other poisons he used toadstools gathered for him in the 
forest of Rambouillet by an old hobo known as le pére 
Théo, whose testimony later was damning to the ac- 
cused. From time to time Girard would order from 
Théo a mess of amanitas: they had to have white gills 
veil, and volva—the stigmata of the deadly amanita, but 
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