From Liége the marchioness was led under guard to Maestricht, where she arrived on March 29; she was there locked up, and rigorously watched in the town hall. Immediately after her arrest, the prisoner tried to commit suicide by swallowing the fragments of a glass which she had broken between her teeth. She swallowed pins, too, but did not succeed in killing herself. Resne, one of the sentries, vigorously abused her: ‘You are a wicked woman! After having dyed your hands in the blood of your family, you want to do away with yourself!’ She answered, ‘If I did so, it was under evil counsel.’ On another occasion Desgrez was informed that the lady had endeavoured to commit suicide in a far more horrible fashion. ‘Ah, you wretch!’ he cried. ‘I see that you want to do for yourself, and that you did poison your brothers!’ She replied: ‘If I had only had good advice! We often have our evil moments.’ The archers who guarded her during her journey from Liége to Paris gave the judges a description of this third attempt at suicide which it is impossible to reproduce. The following is a note from Emmanuel de Coulanges, forwarded by Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignan: ‘She stuck a stick into herself; guess where: it was not in her eye, nor her mouth, nor her ear, nor her nose, nor was she absolutely brutal.’
During the journey Madame de Brinvilliers was escorted by the Marshal d’Estrades in person as far as Huy, and from Huy to Rocroi by the troops of Monsieur de Montal. The prisoner’s character displayed itself in all its untamed energy. Locked up at Maestricht, she suggested to Antoine Barbier, an archer of the guard who had won her confidence, to make a gag and a rope-ladder: the gag was for Desgrez and the rope-ladder for her own escape. She promised Barbier a thousand pistoles. At other times she urged him to help her throttle Desgrez, kill the valet de chambre, detach the two leading horses from the coach, take the documents, the casket with her confession, and another important paper, and burn them all, for which purpose he was to carry a lighted match.
She wrote to former servants who remained faithful to her, and actually succeeded in getting letters delivered to them, for they endeavoured to rescue her, and tried to bribe her guardians.
She persisted in the plan she had devised in regard to the accusation under which Pennautier lay. She asked Barbier for ink to write to him; he gave her some, and feigned to have despatched the letter. And when he asked her if Pennautier was one of her friends, ‘Yes, yes,’ she replied, ‘and he is as much interested in my safety as I am myself.’ Another time she said: ‘He must be much more frightened than I am. I have been questioned about him, but I have said nothing, and have too much feeling to charge him: half of the aristocracy are involved too, and I should ruin them all if I spoke.’ This she repeated several times.
At Mézières the marchioness met Denis de Palluau, a Parlement counsellor, whom the court had deputed to put her through a first interrogation. Corbinelli, the friend of Madame de Sévigné, wrote to Madame de Grignan: ‘The king has required the Parlement to depute Palluau, counsellor in the High Court, to go to Rocroi, where he is to interrogate the Brinvilliers, because they don’t wish to wait till she arrives here, where the whole bar is connected with the poor criminal.’
The first examination to which Palluau subjected the marchioness is dated Mézières, April 17, 1676. The prisoner took refuge in systematic denials.
‘Questioned on the first article of her confession, as to the house she set on fire, she said she had not done so, and that when she had written such things she was out of her mind.
‘Questioned on the six remaining articles of her confession, she said she did not know what that was, and remembered nothing about it.
‘Asked if she had not poisoned her father and brothers, she said she knew nothing about it.
‘Asked if it was not La Chaussée who had poisoned her brothers, she said she knew nothing of all that.