Case Two
In the year 1810, a case of living inhumation happened in France, attended with circumstances which go far to warrant the assertion that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.
The heroine of the story was Victorine Lafourcade, a young girl of illustrious family, of wealth and of great personal beauty.
Among her numerous suitors was Julien Bossuet, a poor journalist of Paris. His talents and general amiability had recommended him to the notice of the heiress, by whom he seems to have been truly beloved but her pride of birth decided her, finally to reject him, and to wed a Monsieur Renelle - banker and a diplomatist of some eminence.
After the marriage however, this gentleman neglected and perhaps even more positively ill-treated her. After passing with him some wretched years, she died - at least her condition so closely resembled death as to deceive every one who saw her.
She was buried - not in a vault - but in an ordinary grave in the village of her nativity. Filled with despair, and still inflamed by the memory of profound attachment, the lover journeyed from the capital to the remote province in which the village was situated, with the romantic purpose to disintern the corpse, and wanted to acquire her luxuriant locks of hair. He reached to the gravesite.
At midnight he unearthed the coffin, opened it, and in the act of detaching the hair, when he was shocked by the unclosing of his beloved eyes. In fact, the lady had been buried alive. Vitality had not altogether departed and she was aroused, by the caress of her lover, from the lethargy which had been mistaken for death. He carried her frantically to his lodgings in the village. He employed certain powerful restoratives suggested by his little medical learning.
In the end, she revived. She recognised her preserver. She remained with him until, by slow degrees, she was fully recovered to her original health. Her woman's heart was not adamant, and this last lesson of love sufficed to soften it. She bestowed it upon Bossuet. She returned no more to her husband, but concealing from him her resurrection, fled with her lover to America.
Twenty years afterwards, the two returned to France, in the persuasion that time had so greatly altered the lady's appearance, that her friends would be unable to recognise her. They were mistaken, however for at the first meeting, Monsieur Renelle did actually recognise and make claim to his wife.
This claim she resisted and a judicial tribunal sustained her in her resistance, deciding that the peculiar circumstances, with the long lapse of years had diminished, not only equitably, but legally the authority of the husband.
