After sentence of death had been passed on this most miserable woman, she was denied the consolations of the Church, but a priest found courage to give her absolution as she was carried to the scaffold. The Marchioness was followed to her death by the husband whom she had tried in vain to send to his death, and who, it is said, wept beside her the whole way from the Conciergerie to the Place de Grève. Conspicuous in the enormous crowd assembled in the square were women of fashion and rank, whom the noble murderess rallied on the spectacle she had provided for them. One of the ladies was that distinguished gossip, Madame de Sévigné, who wrote the whole scene down for her daughter on the following day. De Brinvilliers was beheaded, and her body burnt to ashes.
This signal example—the torture, beheading, and burning of a peeress of France—was signally void of effect.
The secrets of Sainte-Croix and La Brinvilliers had not been buried with the one, nor scattered with the ashes of the other. Four years later, Paris talked of nothing but poison and the revival of the "black art" which was associated with it; and, in 1680, the King established at the Arsenal a court specially charged to try cases of poisoning and magic. The notoriety of the widow Montvoisin, more commonly known as La Voisin, who dealt extensively in both arts, was inferior only to that of the Brinvilliers. Duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, and other high dames of the Court were concerned in this scandal, and Louis himself was active in seeking to bring the culprits of title to justice,—or to get them out of the way. He sent a private message to the Comtesse de Soissons, advising her that if she were innocent she should go to the Bastille for a time, in which case he would stand by her, and that if she were guilty, it would be well for her to quit Paris without delay. The Comtesse, who was "famous at the Court of Louis XIV. for her dissolute habits," fled and was exiled to Brussels; the Marquise d'Alluye or d'Allaye was banished to Amboise, Mme. de Bouillon to Nevers, and M. de Luxembourg was imprisoned for two years in the Bastille. A far more terrible expiation was prepared for La Voisin.
Outwardly, this was a woman of a grosser type than the Marchioness Brinvilliers. The Marchioness, is described as "gracieuse, élégante, spirituelle et polie." La Voisin was a repellent fat creature, as coarse in speech as in appearance. Yet she lived as a woman of society (en femme de qualitè); and composed and sold to the beauties and gallants of the Court, poisons, charms, philters, and secrets to procure lovers or to outwit rivals; she called up spirits for a fee, and would shew the Devil if one paid the tariff for a glimpse of that celebrity.[[3]]
[3]. Dulaure.
Her attitude in the Salle de la Question of the Conciergerie became her well. She cursed, flouted the examiners, and "swore that she would keep on swearing" if they racked her to pieces. "Here's your health!" she cried, when the first vessel of water was forced down her throat; and, as they fastened her on the rack,—"That 's right! One should always be growing. I have complained all my life of being too short." It is said that, having been made to drink fourteen pots of water during the water torture, she drank fourteen bottles of wine with the turnkeys in her cell at night. Her sentence was death at the stake, and on her way to the place of execution she jeered at the priest who accompanied her, refused to make the amende honorable at Notre-Dame, and fought like a tigress with the executioners on descending from the cart. Tied and fettered on the pile, she threw off five or six times the straw which was heaped on her. Sévigné, who looked on, detailed the scene with animation, and without a touch of feeling, in a letter to her daughter.
Confounding the real crimes with chimerical ones, the new court continued to prosecute poisoners and "sorcerers" together; and even at that credulous and superstitious date, when judges listened gravely to the most baseless and fantastic accusations, there were persons interrogated on charges of sorcery who had the spirit to laugh both judges and accusers in the face. Mme. de Bouillon said aloud, on the conclusion of her examination, that she had never in her life heard so much nonsense so solemnly spoken (n'avait jamais tant ouïdire de sottises d'un ton si grave); whereat, it is chronicled, his Majesty "was very angry." It was not until the bench itself began to treat as mere charlatans the wizards of both sexes who appeared before it, that trials for sorcery and "black magic" fell away and gradually ceased.
It was the Conciergerie which presided over the examination, torture, and atrocious punishment of Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV., and Damiens, who attempted the life of Louis XV. Ravaillac, the first to occupy it, left his name to a tower of the prison.
"You shiver even now in the Tower of Ravaillac," say MM. Alhoy and Lurine in Les Prisons de Paris,—"that cold and dreadful place. Thought conjures up a multitude of fearful images, and is aghast at all the tragedies and all the dramas which have culminated in the old Conciergerie, between the judge, the victim, and the executioner. What tears and lamentations, what cries and maledictions, what blasphemies and vain threats has it not heard, that pitiless doyenne of the prisons of Paris!"
Ravaillac, most fearless of fanatics and devotees, said, when interrogated before Parliament as to his estate and calling, "I teach children to read, write, and pray to God." At his third examination, he wrote beneath the signature which he had affixed to his testimony the following distich: