Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

The enormity of this crime rivalled that of the recorded murder already narrated, of the Duchesse de Ganges, some score years earlier, these both being rivalled by the series of murders, perpetrated by poison, of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers. It is recorded in her connection, that

“In the plaster-cast shop is a small, delicate, plump little hand, dimpled and beautiful, which is sold to artists as a model. You take it in yours, handle it, admire it, almost fancy you are shaking hands with the good-humoured and festive little personage to whom it must have belonged. You ask whose it was, and are told that it was that of Madame de Brinvilliers, the notorious poisoner. You recoil as if you had been handling an asp.”

Marguérite d’Aubrai was the daughter of one Monsieur d’Aubrai, lieutenant-civil of Paris, and she was married at an early age to the Marquis de Brinvilliers, to whom for a while she was devotedly attached. In time her affection waned in favour of a Gascon officer named St Croix, a worthless adventurer. Monsieur d’Aubrai, discovering his daughter’s infatuation, obtained an order for the imprisonment of St Croix in the Bastille. During the year he was confined there, he contrived to make acquaintance with an Italian named Exili, who was an adept in the art of toxicology, and possessed the secret of the concoction of the terrible Aqua Toffana—to call it by its best-known name, and as it was in its later form called by “la Toffana,” the Neapolitan woman who got possession of the recipe from the reputed witch, la Sphara, the hag of a hundred years earlier, who was in the pay of the Borgias. In course of time the secret of the hideous brew—originally styled by la Sphara, “The Manna of St Nicolas of Bari”—had leaked out through the confessional, the father-confessors, appalled probably by the many penitential revelations made, had in course of generations given vent almost unwittingly to the disclosures of so many crimes at so many different hands; for it is said the “Manna,” had poisoned over six hundred persons, and Exili had learnt the secret of the ingredients of the subtle mortal poison, which was a tasteless colourless drug. On the release of St Croix, the marchioness’s mad love for him had only waxed greater, and when she had extracted from him this recipe for death, they planned together to poison her father, her sister, and two brothers successively, all in the same year of 1670, the marchioness, meanwhile, being apparently a most charitable and pious visitor of the sick in the Hôtel Dieu, and other hospitals of Paris, but suspected later of trying the effects of her potions on the various patients.

One day brought the discovery of the crimes of these two. The poisons that St Croix delighted in, were many of them, so deadly of breath, that he wore a glass mask to protect his face and lips from the vapours, and on one occasion, while he was at work, the mask fell off. He died instantly. No one coming forward to claim the adventurer’s effects, they fell into the hands of Government. Among the articles was a certain casket, which the marchioness claimed, and so insistently and vehemently, that the authorities became suspicious, and first had the casket opened. Its contents were composed of packets of many kinds of poisons, each ticketed with a description of the effects they produced. When she learned of the opening of the casket, the murderess made her escape to England; but still in terror of pursuit, she fled back to the Continent, where she was tracked down at Liège, and taken under arrest back to Paris. The crimes, one by one, were brought home to her, and she was condemned to be beheaded and burned. Refusing however, to plead, she was put to the question by the torture of swallowing water—“Surely,” she cried, when she saw the three bucketfuls of water standing ready, “it is not intended to drown me, for it is absurd to suppose that a person of my dimensions can swallow all that!”

Not content with her own criminal work, she was proved to have supplied the means for it to many suspected of similar crimes. Implicated among those was the Duc de Luxembourg, and some of his friends, who, it will be remembered, were suspected of causing the death of the amiable and lamented Duchesse d’Orléans.

One person escaped who might well be supposed would have been one of the marchioness’s first victims—her husband. It is believed that his indifference to her induced her to pass him over. Madame de Sévigné, however, mentions the on dit that she did more than once attempt to poison Brinvilliers; but that St Croix, for his own reason, administered him an antidote, and the marquis survived to intercede for his wife’s life, but, of course, ineffectually.

When she was arrested at Liège, a kind of general written formula framed in vague allusion to her criminal doings was found upon her, clearly for using in confession, to which she went with great regularity. This was sufficiently explicit to confirm the other evidences of her guilt.

“She communicated her poisons frequently in pigeon-pies—by which a great many were killed,” writes Madame de Sévigné, “not from any particular reason for despatching them, but out of mere curiosity to try the effects of her drugs. The chevalier de Guet, who had been a guest at her delightful entertainments about three years ago, has been languishing ever since. She inquired the other day if he was dead; upon being answered ‘No,’ she said, turning her head on one side, ‘He must have a very strong constitution then.’ This Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld swears to be true.”

During the next ensuing days, Madame de Sévigné’s letters brim with details of the wretched woman’s latest hours.

“At six o’clock on the morning of her execution,” she writes, “la Brinvilliers was carried in a cart, stripped to her shift, with a cord about her neck, to the church of Notre Dame, to perform the amende honorable. She was then replaced in the cart, where I saw her lying at her length on a truss of straw, only her shift and a suit of plain head-clothes, with a confessor on one side and a hangman on the other. Indeed, my dear, the sight made me shudder. Those who saw the execution say she mounted the scaffold with great courage.”