The casket was now opened, and fully explained her apprehensions. On top was a paper written by St. Croix which ran: “I humbly entreat the person into whose hands this casket may come to convey it to the Marchioness Brinvilliers, rue Neuve St. Paul; its contents belong to her and solely concern her and no one else in the world. Should she die before me I beg that everything within the box may be burned without examination.” In addition to the letters from the Marchioness, the casket contained a number of small parcels and phials full of drugs, such as antimony, corrosive sublimate, vitriol in various forms. These were analysed, and some portion of them administered to animals, which immediately died.
The law now took action. The first arrest was that of La Chaussée, whose complicity with St. Croix was undoubted. The man had been in St. Croix’s service, he had lived with Antoine d’Aubray, and at the seizure of St. Croix’s effects, he had rashly protested against the opening of the casket. He was committed to the Châtelet and put on his trial with the usual preliminary torture of the “boot.” He stoutly refused to make confession at first, but spoke out when released from the rack. His conviction followed, on a charge of having murdered the two Lieutenants-Criminel, the d’Aubrays, father and son. His sentence was, to be broken alive on the wheel, and he was duly executed.
This was the first act in the criminal drama. The Marchioness was still at large. She had sought an asylum in England, and was known to be in London. Colbert, the French minister, applied in his king’s name for her arrest and removal to France. But no treaty of extradition existed in those days, and the laws of England were tenacious. Even Charles II, the paid pensioner of Louis and his very submissive ally, could not impose his authority upon a free people; and the English, then by no means friendly with France, would have resented the arbitrary arrest of even the most dastard criminal for an offence committed beyond the kingdom. History does not say exactly how it was compassed, but the Marchioness did leave England, and crossed to the Low Countries, where she took refuge in a convent in the city of Liége.
Four years passed, but her retreat became known to the police of Paris. Desgrez, a skilful officer, famous for his successes as a detective, was forthwith despatched to inveigle her away. He assumed the disguise of an abbé, and called at the convent. Being a good looking young man of engaging manners, he was well received by the fugitive French woman, sick and weary of conventual restriction. The Marchioness, suspecting nothing, gladly accepted the offer of a drive in the country with the astute Desgrez, who promptly brought her under escort to the French frontier as a prisoner. A note of her reception at the Conciergerie is among the records, to the effect, that, “La Brinvilliers, who had been arrested by the King’s order in the city of Liége, was brought to the prison under a warrant of the Court.”
On the journey from Liége she had tried to seduce one of her escort into passing letters to a friend, whom she earnestly entreated to recover certain papers she had left at the convent. These, however, one of them of immense importance, her full confession, had already been secured by Desgrez, showing that the Abbess had been cognisant of the intended arrest. The Marchioness yielded to despair when she heard of the seizure of her papers and would have killed herself, first by swallowing a long pin and next by eating glass. This confession is still extant and will be read with horror—the long list of her crimes and debaucheries set forth with cold-blooded, plain speaking. It was not produced at her trial, which was mainly a prolonged series of detailed interrogatories to which she made persistent denials. As the proceedings drew slowly on, all Paris watched with shuddering anxiety, and the King himself, who was absent on a campaign, sent peremptory orders to Colbert that no pains should be spared to bring all proof against the guilty woman. Conviction was never in doubt. One witness declared that she had made many attempts to get the casket from St. Croix; another, that she exulted in her power to rid herself of her enemies, declaring it was easy to give them “a pistol shot in their soup;” a third, that she had exhibited a small box, saying, “it is very small but there is enough inside to secure many successions (inheritances).” Hence the euphemism poudre de succession, so often employed at that time to signify “deadly poison.”
The accused still remained obstinately dumb, but at last an eloquent priest, l’Abbé Pirot, worked upon her feelings of contrition, and obtained a full avowal, not only of her own crimes, but those also of her accomplices. Sentence was at once pronounced, and execution quickly followed. Torture, both ordinary and extraordinary, was to be first inflicted. The ordeal of water, three buckets-full, led her to ask if they meant to drown her, as assuredly she could not, with her small body, drink so much. After the torture she was to make the amende honorable and the acknowledgment, candle in hand, that vengeance and greed had tempted her to poison her father, brothers and sisters. Then her right hand was to be amputated as a parricide; but this penalty was remitted. The execution was carried out under very brutal conditions. No sooner were the prison doors opened than a mob of great ladies rushed in to share and gloat over her sufferings, among them the infamous Comtesse de Soissons, who was proved later to have been herself a poisoner. An enormous crowd of spectators, at least one hundred thousand, were assembled in the streets, at the windows and on the roofs, and she was received with furious shouts. Close by the tumbril rode Desgrez, the officer who had captured her in Liége. Yet she showed the greatest fortitude. “She died as she had lived,” writes Madame de Sévigné, “resolutely. Now she is dispersed into the air. Her poor little body was thrown into a fierce furnace, and her ashes blown to the four winds of heaven.”
Another person was implicated in this black affair, Reich de Pennautier, Receiver-General of the clergy. When the St. Croix casket was opened, a promissory note signed by Pennautier had been found. He was suspected of having used poison to remove his predecessor in office. Pennautier was arrested and lodged in the Conciergerie, where he occupied the old cell of Ravaillac for seven days. Then he was put on his trial. He found friends, chief of them the reticent Madame de Brinvilliers, but he had an implacable enemy in the widow of his supposed victim, Madame de St. Laurent, who continually pursued him in the courts. He was, however, backed by Colbert, Archbishop of Paris, and the whole of the French clergy. In the end he was released, emerging as Madame de Sévigné put it, “rather whiter than snow,” and he retained his offices until he became enormously rich. Although his character was smirched in this business he faced the world bravely to a green old age.
In France uneasiness was general after the execution of the Brinvilliers and the acquittal of Pennautier. Sinister rumors prevailed that secret poisoning had become quite a trade, facilitated by the existence of carefully concealed offices, where the noxious drugs necessary could be purchased easily by heirs tired of waiting for their succession, and by husbands and wives eager to get rid of one another. Within a year suspicion was strengthened by the picking up of an anonymous letter in the confessional of the Jesuit Church of the rue St. Antoine, stating that a plot was afoot to poison both the King and the Dauphin. The police set inquiries on foot, and traced the projected crime to two persons, Louis Vanens and Robert de la Nurée, the Sieur de Bachimont.
The first of these dabbled openly in love philtres and other unavowable medicines; and he was also suspected of having poisoned the Duke of Savoy some years previously. Bachimont was one of his agents. From this first clue, the police followed the thread of their discoveries, and brought home to a number of people the charge of preparing and selling poisons, two of whom were condemned and executed. A still more important arrest was that of Catherine Deshayes, the wife of one Voisin or Monvoisin, a jeweller. From this moment the affair assumed such serious proportions that it was decided to conduct the trial with closed doors. The authorities constituted a royal tribunal to sit in private at the Arsenal, and to be known to the public as the Chambre Ardente or Court of Poisons. La Reynie and another counsellor presided, and observed extreme caution, but were quite unable to keep secret the result of their proceedings. It was soon whispered through Paris that the crime of poisoning had extensive ramifications, and that many great people, some nearly related to the throne, were compromised with la Voisin. The names were openly mentioned: a Bourbon prince, the Comte de Clermont, the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Princesse de Tingry, one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting, and the Marchionesse d’Alluye, who had been an intimate friend of Fouquet. The Duc de Luxembourg and others of the highest rank were consigned to the Bastile. Yet more, the Comtesse de Soissons, the proudest of Cardinal Mazarin’s nieces and one of the first of the King’s favorites, had, by his special grace, been warned to fly from Paris to escape imprisonment.
No such favor was shown to others. Louis XIV sternly bade La Reynie to spare no one else, to let justice take its course strictly and expose everything; the safety of the public demanded it, and the hideous evil must be extirpated in its very root. There was to be no distinction of persons or of sex in vindicating the law. Such severity was indeed necessary. Although the King wished all the documents in the case to be carefully destroyed, some have been preserved. They exhibit the widespread infamy and almost immeasurable guilt of the criminals. Colbert stigmatised the facts as “things too execrable to be put on paper; amounting to sacrilege, profanity and abomination.” The very basest aims inspired the criminals to seek the King’s favor; disappointed beauties would have poisoned their rivals and replaced them in the King’s affections. The Comtesse de Soissons’s would-be victim was the beautiful La Vallière, and Madame de Montespan was suspected of desiring to remove Mdlle. de Fontanges. Madame La Féron attempted the life of her husband, a president of Parliament. The Duc de Luxembourg was accused of poisoning his duchess. M. de Feuquières invited la Voisin to get rid of the uncle and guardian of an heiress he wished to marry. The end of these protracted proceedings was the inevitable retribution that waited on their crimes. Two hundred and forty-six persons had been brought to trial, of whom thirty-six went to the scaffold, after enduring torture, ordinary and extraordinary. Of the rest, some were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, some to banishment, some to the galleys for life. Among those who suffered the extreme penalty were la Voisin, La Vigouroux, Madame de Carada, several priests and Sieur Maillard, who was charged with attempting to poison Colbert and the King himself. The Bastile, Vincennes and every State prison were crowded with the poisoners, and for years the registers of castles and fortresses contained the names of inmates committed by the Chambre Ardente of the Arsenal.