also of Amanita mappa and ecitrina. Girard and his wife 
would serve these fungi to their victims at sumptuous 
dinners in their own apartment. Sometimes the guest 
went home and after a lingering illness died, but on 
other occasions, to the surprise and discomfiture of the 
Girards, the intended victim suffered no ill effects. In- 
deed, 2 number of them lived to give their evidence to 
the police. 
In 1918 the standard mushroom manual of France was 
Paul Dumée’s. Like all of the over-cautious manuals of 
that time, it lumped Amanita citrina with the deadly 
ones. Girard had not thought it necessary, therefore, to 
distinguish the lethal amanitas when instructing old 
Théo about the mushrooms to gather. Thus it came 
about that when Théo brought in a mess of Amanita 
phalloides, the victim would enjoy a dish of tasty mush- 
rooms and later die. But when Théo produced specimens 
of innocent A. citrina, the intended victim must have 
found them less pleasant to the taste, and that was the 
end of the matter. For the deadly amanita makes a de- 
lectable dish, whereas its relative the innocent citrina 
scarcely rises palate- wise to the mediocre level. 
Thus it may be said that Girard was deceived and 
misled by Dumée’s over-cautious manual, with the re- 
sult that some of his friends and intended victims un- 
wittingly survived his honest efforts to do them in, and 
he in turn was fatally entangled in the law’s toils. Now 
that the French manuals have improved, Girard’s mis- 
take is unlikely to be repeated. Had Girard hailed from 
Sérignan, Henri Fabre’s village in the Provence, he 
would have known from childhood not to rely on Dumée, 
for these peasants need no manuals. 
Girard’s crimes would have been forgotten, had it not 
happened that Camille Fauvel, that prodigious myco- 
phile, was a Commissaire de Police in Paris at the time, 
[115 } 
