and though he was not handling the Girard case, having 
lately been charged with the more famous and important 
but less interesting Mata Hari dossier, he followed it 
with expert attention, even interviewing Girard in 
Iresnes prison after the conviction, in the interests of 
mycological lore. Fauvel published an admirable narra- 
tive of the affair many years later, in the Supplément to 
the issues of June and August, 1936, of the Revue de 
Mycologie, and we have drawn our facts from his account. 
It should be added that Girard died in his prison bed of 
tuberculosis a few days after he was interviewed, never 
having admitted his guilt nor that he had relied on the 
unsound advice of Dumée. But Fauvel’s inference is 
based upon evidence that leaves little room for doubt. 
All that we have set forth in this chapter up to now 
the description of the singular properties of lethal mush- 
rooms, the inadequacy of mystery writers when they deal 
with this theme, our comments on alleged poisonings of 
eminent personages and the mushroomic murders of un- 
important folk—has had only one purpose: to equip the 
reader for areconsideration of the death of the Emperor 
Claudius in A.D. 54. On that occasion, the whole of the 
Roman Empire and the known world swung on a dish 
of poisoned mushrooms. he accounts in the ancient 
writings of that famous event are an old, old story, fa- 
miliar to all students of antiquity. Those texts have been 
parsed by students, dissected by historians, pondered by 
moralists for close on twenty centuries. It would seem 
that by now every conceivable interpretation must have 
been hit upon, and the resources of scholarly inquiry 
exhausted. Indeed, the signs of exhaustion are not lack- 
ing: In our own generation Guglielmo Ferraro in his 
The Women of the Caesars has not only struggled to 
exonerate Agrippina of the dreadful charge laid at her 
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