PRINCES AND POISONERS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

LEGENDS OF THE BASTILLE. By Frantz Funck-Brentano. With an Introduction by Victorien Sardou. Translated by George Maidment. 1899. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 6s.

Contents.—I. The Archives; II. History of the Bastille; III. Life in the Bastille; IV. The Man in the Iron Mask; V. Men of Letters in the Bastille; VI. Latude; VII. The Fourteenth of July.

———

LONDON: DOWNEY AND CO., LIMITED.

Princes and Poisoners
STUDIES OF THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV

BY
FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO
TRANSLATED BY
GEORGE MAIDMENT

Second Impression, May 1901
All rights reserved.

PREFATORY NOTE

TWELVE months ago I had the honour of introducing M. Frantz Funck-Brentano to the English public by my translation of his Légendes et Archives de la Bastille, and in my preface to that book I gave a rapid sketch of his career which need not be repeated. If history is to be continually reconstructed, or rather, perhaps, to undergo a process of destructive distillation, there is no one more competent than M. Funck-Brentano to perform the feat. We lose our illusions with our teeth; the fables that charmed our childhood dissolve in the modern historian’s test-tube, and the mysteries that fascinated our forebears become clear with a few drops of his critical acid.

In his former book, M. Funck-Brentano solved once for all the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, showed up the impostor Latude in his true colours, and gave us surprising information about the latter days of the Bastille. In the present volume, the fruit of several years’ research among the archives at the Arsenal Library, he conclusively dispels the cloud of suspicion that has hung over the sudden death of Charles I’s winsome and ill-fated daughter Henrietta; gives us for the first time the authentic history of that beautiful poisoner Madame de Brinvilliers; suggests a very plausible explanation of Racine’s hitherto inexplicable retirement from dramatic writing; and throws a strange light upon the private history of Madame de Montespan and other fair ladies of Louis XIV’s Court. If it be objected that some of the details of the ‘black mass’ and kindred abominations are too gruesome for print, it may be urged in reply that these details are related with the cold impartial pen of a serious historian, not coloured or heightened with a view to melodramatic effect. ‘Truth’s a dog that must to kennel,’ says Lear’s Fool; Louis the Magnificent tried to stifle the damning evidence against his jealous, passionate mistress; when Time and patient research among long-forgotten papers have combined to bring the truth to light, it would ill become us to blame a scholar like M. Funck-Brentano for not joining the monarch’s conspiracy of silence.

G. M.

November 1900.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

MARIE MADELEINE DE BRINVILLIERS

I. HER LIFE

IN the judicial annals of France there has never been a more striking or celebrated figure than the Marquise de Brinvilliers. The enormity of her crimes, the brilliance of her rank, the circumstances accompanying her trial and death,—the story of which, as told by her confessor, the abbé Pirot, is one of the masterpieces of French literature,—finally, the strange energy of her character, which after her execution caused her to be regarded as a saint by a portion of the population of Paris: all these things will for long years to come attract to her the attention of all who are interested in the history of the past.

Michelet devoted to the Marquise de Brinvilliers a study in the Revue des Deux Mondes. But his story is very inaccurate and leaves many gaps. From the historical point of view, the little novel of Dumas is much to be preferred. The beautiful criminal has also been dealt with by Pierre Clément in his Police of Paris under Louis XIV, and more recently by Maître Cornu, in his discourse at the reopening of the lecture-term of the advocates to the Court of Cassation. The writer of the following pages has been able to make use of some fresh documents.

In the trial of the Marquise de Brinvilliers there is much to interest the historian. It was the first of the terrible poison cases which caused such a sensation at the court of Louis XIV in the central years of his reign, and in which the greatest names in France were implicated; and Madame de Brinvilliers herself represents the most salient and most easily studied features of a type of woman which, as we shall see, repeated itself after her even on the steps of the throne.

Marie Madeleine—and not Marguerite—d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, was born on July 22, 1630. She was the eldest of the five children of Antoine Dreux d’Aubray, lord of Offémont and Villiers, councillor of state, maître des requêtes, civil lieutenant of the city, mayoralty, and viscounty of Paris, and lieutenant-general of the mines of France. Dreux d’Aubray was himself the son of a treasurer of France, originally from Soissons. Madeleine d’Aubray received a good education, in a literary point of view at any rate. The spelling of her letters is correct, a rare thing with the ladies of her time. Her handwriting is remarkable: bold, firm, like a man’s, and such as the observer would be disposed to ascribe to an earlier period. But her religious education was entirely neglected. At her interviews with her confessor on the eve of her death she displayed an utter ignorance of the most elementary maxims of religion,—those which people learn as children, and never during the whole course of their life forget.

Of moral principles she was absolutely destitute. From the age of five she was addicted to horrible vices. At seven she was only by courtesy a maiden. These are what Michelet calls ‘a young girl’s peccadilloes.’ As time went on, she yielded herself to her young brothers. On these points her own testimony renders mistake impossible. She will show herself to have been endowed with an ardent, affectionate nature, which gave her passions command of an amazing energy; but this energy acted only under the empire of her passions, for she was powerless to resist the impressions which penetrated and ere long dominated her. She was extremely sensitive to affronts, and particularly to those which touched her pride. She was one of those natures which under good guidance are capable of heroic deeds, but which are also capable of the greatest crimes when they are wholly abandoned to evil instincts.

In 1651, at the age of one-and-twenty, Marie Madeleine d’Aubray wedded a young officer of the Norman regiment, Antoine Gobelin de Brinvilliers, baron of Nourar, the son of a president of the audit office. He was a direct descendant of Gobelin, the founder of the celebrated manufacture. Mademoiselle d’Aubray brought her husband a dowry of 200,000 livres, and as he too was wealthy, the young couple enjoyed what was for that time a large fortune.

The young marchioness was charming—a pretty, sprightly woman, with large expressive eyes. She made a great impression by her frank, decided, and vivacious manner of speaking. She was of an amiable and cheerful temperament, and dreamed of nothing but pleasure. A priest endowed with great keenness of judgment, who studied the Marquise de Brinvilliers in terrible circumstances, has described her as follows:—

‘She was naturally intrepid and of a great courage. She appeared to have been born with inclinations towards good, with an air of complete indifference, with a keen and penetrating intellect, forming clear views of things, and expressing them in words few and fit but very precise; wonderfully ready in finding expedients for getting out of a difficulty, and quick to make up her mind upon the most embarrassing questions; frivolous, moreover, with no application, uneven and inconstant, becoming impatient if the same subject were often talked about.

‘Her soul had something naturally great—a composure in face of the most unexpected emergencies, a firmness that nothing could move, a resolution to await and even suffer death if need be.

‘She had thick and beautiful chestnut hair, with comely and well-rounded features—her eyes blue, tender, and of perfect beauty, her skin extraordinarily white, her nose well-shaped enough; nothing in her countenance was unpleasing.

‘Sweet as her face naturally appeared, when some vexatious idea crossed her imagination she showed it plainly by a grimace that might at first sight scare you; and from time to time I noticed contortions that bespoke disdain, indignation, and scorn.

‘She was of a very slight and dainty figure.’

To the Marquis de Brinvilliers luxury and large expenditure had become second nature; he loved gaming and pleasure generally; and his marriage was very far from banishing his joyous habits. In 1659 he formed a close intimacy with a certain Godin, known more often as Sainte-Croix, a captain of horse in the Tracy regiment, originally from Montauban, and said to be a by-blow of a noble Gascon family. Sainte-Croix was young and handsome; ‘endowed,’ says a memoir of the time, ‘with all the advantages of intelligence, and perhaps, too, with those qualities of heart under whose empire a woman rarely fails, in the long-run, to fall.’ In after days, Maître Vautier had to sketch the portrait of Sainte-Croix in the course of an address before the Parlement. ‘Sainte-Croix,’ he said, ‘was in poverty and distress, but he had a rare and singular genius. His countenance was prepossessing, and gave promise of intelligence. Such indeed he had, and of such sort as to give universal pleasure. He took his pleasure in the pleasure of others; he entered into a religious scheme as joyfully as he accepted the suggestion of a crime. Keenly sensitive to insult, he was susceptible to love, and in love jealous to madness, even of persons on whom public debauchery assumed rights that were not unknown to him. His extravagance was amazing, and supported by no occupation; for the rest, his soul was prostituted to every form of crime. He dabbled also in external piety, and it has been claimed that he wrote devotional books. He spoke divinely of the God in whom he did not believe, and favoured by this mask of piety, which he never removed save with his friends, he appeared to participate in good deeds while really immersed in crime.’ Though he was an officer and married, Sainte-Croix sometimes assumed the garb and the title of Abbé.

Sainte-Croix was a brilliant and gallant cavalier; and the Marquise de Brinvilliers, with her blue eyes and dainty figure, was the most charming creature in the world. ‘Lady Brinvilliers,’ observes Vautier the advocate, ‘did not make a mystery of her amour; she gloried in it in society, whence there resulted much éclat.’ She gloried in it also before her husband, who responded by boasting of his own love for other ladies; but as she ventured also to brag about it before her father, the civil lieutenant, a man of the old school, he, strong in the rights with which ancient customs endowed a father, obtained a lettre de cachet against his daughter’s lover. On March 19, 1663, Sainte-Croix was arrested ‘in the marquise’s own carriage as he sat by her side,’ and was thrown into the Bastille.

Various writers who have dealt with these facts depict Sainte-Croix as the prison companion of the famous Exili, from whom he learnt the secret of Italian poisons. Restored to liberty, Sainte-Croix is said to have handed the terrible prescriptions to his mistress and others, who in their turn spread them through France.

We find this opinion expressed in the documents of the time, among others in the speech delivered by Maître Nivelle before the Parlement, on behalf of Madame de Brinvilliers.

Exili, whose real name was Eggidi or Gilles, was an Italian gentleman attached to the service of Queen Christina of Sweden. It is true that he was confined in the Bastille at the same period as Sainte-Croix. He remained there from February 2 to June 27, 1663; Sainte-Croix was there from March 19 to May 2. A captain of police named Desgrez—who will play an important part in the sequel—met Exili on leaving prison with an order to conduct him to Calais and embark him for England; but, whether Exili gave him the slip on the way, or that he had no sooner reached England than he returned to France, we soon find the Italian again in Paris, and in the house of Sainte-Croix himself, with whom he stayed for six months. After all, it was not Exili who trained Sainte-Croix in the ‘art of poisons,’ to adopt the phrase of the time. Long before he entered the Bastille the young cavalry officer had acquired a knowledge of poisons which far exceeded that of Exili. He owed it to a celebrated Swiss chemist named Christophe Glaser, who had set up an establishment in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he had attained a considerable standing, after the publication in 1665 of a Treatise on Chemistry, which had a noteworthy success at the time, and was often reprinted and translated. Glaser was apothecary in ordinary to the king and Monsieur,[1] and demonstrator in chemistry to the Jardin des Plantes. He was, moreover, a scientist of real merit. Sulphate of potassium, which he discovered, long bore his name. Glaser was the principal, probably the only person who furnished Sainte-Croix and his mistress with poisons. In their correspondence the two lovers call the poisons which they used ‘Glaser’s recipe.’ These poisons, however, as we shall see, were very simple; in these days they would appear clumsy. Exili, who goes out of our story, remained connected with Queen Christina, and in 1681 made an excellent marriage when he wedded the Countess Ludovica Fantaguzzi, cousin of Duke Francis of Modena.

As soon as Sainte-Croix left the Bastille he renewed his relations with the Marquise de Brinvilliers. Her passion had only been heightened by the imprisonment of her lover. Wounded in her pride, she felt the birth within herself of an implacable and violent hatred of her father. Her dissipations, her gaming, her wild flings in her lover’s company (she paying expenses, after the fashion of that period), had embarrassed her fortune. ‘I accuse myself,’ she said in her confession, ‘of having given a great deal of my wealth to this man, and he ruined me.’ The desire of attaining possession of her paternal inheritance, and the yearning, growing day by day more imperious, for wreaking vengeance on her father for the affront put upon her, suggested to her a frightful crime. There might frequently have been seen, drawing up at the market-square of Saint-Germain, a carriage from which alighted a young officer and a fashionable lady. They went on foot to the Rue du Petit-Lion, in which Glaser the chemist lived. Arrived at his house, they sought a retired room. The neighbours, puzzled by these strange goings-on, spoke of false money. Soon this young lady might have been seen, under the edifying appearance of piety and religion, going into the hospitals; she bent over the beds of the patients with words of gentleness and affection; she carried them confections, wine, and biscuits; but the patients whom she approached inevitably succumbed, ere long, in horrible anguish. ‘Who would have dreamt,’ writes Nicolas de la Reynie, the lieutenant of police, ‘that a woman brought up in a respectable family, whose form and constitution were delicate and who in appearance was sweet-natured, would have made an amusement of going to the hospitals to poison the patients, for the purpose of observing the different effects of the poison she gave them?’ She poisoned her own servants, too, ‘to try experiments.’ ‘Françoise Roussel says that she has been in the service of Lady Brinvilliers. The latter one day gave her some preserved gooseberries to eat, on the point of a knife, and soon afterwards she felt ill; she gave her also a moist slice of ham, which she ate, and since then she has had severe abdominal pains, feeling as though her heart were being stabbed.’ The poor woman was ill for three years.

When the marquise had tested the strength of ‘Glaser’s recipe,’ and had noted the inability of the surgeons to discover traces of poison in the corpses, the poisoning of her father was resolved on.

As Whitsuntide drew on in the year 1666, Antoine Dreux d’Aubray, who had been suffering for some months from strange disorders, set out for his estates at Offémont, a few leagues from Compiègne. He asked his daughter to bring her children and spend a few weeks with him, and when she arrived he scolded her affectionately for having been so long in coming. On the day after her arrival his sickness was redoubled; ‘he had great vomitings, continuing with increasing violence till his death,’ which occurred at Paris, whither he had himself transported in order to secure the services of the best physicians, and whither his daughter had not failed to accompany him. Madeleine de Brinvilliers confessed afterwards that she had poisoned her father twenty-eight or thirty times with her own hands, and at other times by the hands of a lackey named Gascon, presented to her by Sainte-Croix. The poison was given both in water and in powder, and the process lasted eight months. ‘She could not manage it,’ she said. It is clear that the poison she employed was simply arsenic. When in the course of time the facts were known, all Europe clamoured with indignation at the thought of this woman heaping caresses on her dying father, and responding to his embraces by pouring poison into the medicines she handed him with her engaging smile. ‘The greatest crimes,’ said Madame de Sévigné, ‘are a mere trifle in comparison with being eight months poisoning her father and receiving all his caresses and tendernesses, to which she replied by doubling the dose. Medea was nothing to her.’

D’Aubray died at Paris on September 10, 1666, aged sixty-six years. The physicians who made an autopsy of the body attributed death to natural causes; but the rumour at once got abroad that he had died of poison. The elder brother of the marquise, whose name was the same as his father’s, succeeded him in the family estates and the office of civil lieutenant.

Delivered thus from a formidable censor, Madame de Brinvilliers no longer put any restraint on her debaucheries. She had several lovers at once, in addition to Sainte-Croix. By him she had ‘two children among her own'; she was the mistress of F. de Pouget, Marquis de Nadaillac, captain of light horse, and cousin of her husband. Another lover was a cousin of her own, by whom she had a child. Finally, she granted her favours to a mere youth, her children’s tutor, of whom there will be much more to say. In spite of this, she felt keenly irritated when Sainte-Croix appeared to be unfaithful to her; and when she learnt that her husband was keeping a woman named Dufay, in her rage she thought of stabbing her. ‘She had naturally a great delicacy of feeling,’ her confessor was to write of her, ‘and was highly sensitive on a point of honour and in regard to injuries.’

Her expenses and prodigalities redoubled, and it was not long before her share of her father’s wealth had melted away. At this point occurs an incident which bears witness at once to the distress into which she had fallen and to the savage energy of her character. In 1670, a property belonging to herself and her husband at Norat, was sold by order of the Court to satisfy their creditors; in her ungovernable fury the marquise attempted to set the place on fire.

The greater part of her father’s estate had come to her two brothers, one of whom had been appointed civil lieutenant, as we have seen; the other was councillor to the Court. Madame de Brinvilliers had already tried to procure the assassination of the elder by two hired bravoes on the road to Orleans—one of those audacious strokes which to the end of her days she never ceased to devise. She declared at this moment that her brother was ‘no good.’ Pressed by need of money, she ‘resolved on fresh poisonings so as not to lose the fruits of the first.’ Sainte-Croix was fully agreed as to the necessity of the proceedings; but before he set about carrying them into effect he got from his mistress two promissory notes, one for 25,000, the other for 30,000 livres.

In 1669, Madame de Brinvilliers succeeded in introducing a wretch named Jean Hamelin, commonly known as La Chaussée, into her brother the councillor’s household as a footman. The two brothers lived in the same house, and La Chaussée had every facility for giving poison to both. One day when he was waiting at table, the dose he put into the glass he was handing was so strong that the civil lieutenant rose up in great agitation, crying, ‘Ah, wretch, what have you given me? I think you want to poison me!’ And he bade his secretary taste the stuff. The latter took some on a spoon and declared that he detected a strong taste of vitriol. La Chaussée did not lose his head. ‘No doubt it is the glass Lacroix (the valet) used this morning,’ he said, ‘when he took medicine.’ And he hastily threw the contents of the glass into the fire.

The civil lieutenant went to his estate at Villequoy in Beauce, to spend Easter with his family. In 1670 Easter fell on April 6. His brother the councillor made one of the party, and took La Chaussée with him as his only attendant. While they stayed at Villequoy La Chaussée helped in the kitchen. One day a tart came to table, of which all who ate were very ill on the morrow, while the others remained quite well. On April 12 they returned to Paris, and the civil lieutenant had the appearance of a man who had suffered great pain.

The details of the poisoning are horrible. As D’Aubray did his best to restore his health, the poison did not take effect so quickly as usual; he was very difficult to kill. La Chaussée, assiduous in his attentions, gave his master poison at every possible opportunity. His body was so offensive during his illness that it was impossible to remain in the room with him; and he was so irritable that no one could approach him. Madame de Brinvilliers rarely showed herself, but sent her pious sister to take her place. Meanwhile La Chaussée was unremitting in his care; no one but him could change the bedclothes or the mattress. The unhappy man suffered unspeakable torture. La Chaussée could not help exclaiming: ‘This fellow holds out well! He’s giving us a good deal of trouble! I don’t know when he will give up the ghost!’

Madame de Brinvilliers was at Sains in Picardy. She told Briancourt, the tutor who had become her lover, that the poisoning of her brother the councillor was in progress. She explained to him that she wanted to set up ‘a good house'; that her eldest son, who was already nicknamed the President, would one day fill the post of civil lieutenant, and added that ‘there was still a good deal to be done.’ These sentiments were sincere. Madame de Brinvilliers endeavoured to bring up and establish her children—'who were her own flesh,’ as she said—in conformity with the brilliant dreams she nourished for the future of her ‘house.’ True, she began to poison her eldest daughter, but that was because she thought her a ninny. She was seized with regret, however, and made her drink milk as an antidote.

Such was one of her dominant preoccupations. To this must be added her longing to live with ‘honour,’ that is, with a brilliant household, with beautiful ornaments, keeping up a great style, and entertaining her lovers with magnificence. She longed for ‘the glory of the world,’ a phrase continually on her lips. It was for ‘honour’ that she poisoned so many people. Such was her own statement.

The martyrdom of her brother the civil lieutenant lasted three months. ‘He grew thin,’ declares his physician, ‘and emaciated; lost his appetite, often vomited, and had burning pains in the stomach.’ He died on June 17, 1670. The councillor died in the following September. In this case, Dr. Bachot, the civil lieutenant’s usual attendant, along with surgeons Duvaux and Dupré and the apothecary Gavart, declared after an autopsy that the deceased had been poisoned; but so little were the perpetrators of the crime suspected that La Chaussée drew a hundred crowns left him by his master as a reward for his faithful service.

We must follow the career of the marquise after the poisoning of her father and brothers, to understand to what depths her ill-regulated passion had thrown this woman, who belonged to the highest ranks of society by her name, her fortune, and the position of her family, and who was so charmingly endowed by Nature.

She was at the mercy of a lackey, who held her honour and her life in his miserable hands. ‘She used to receive him privately in her sitting-room, where she gave him money, saying, “He is a good fellow, and has done me great service”; and she caressed him.’ Visitors coming upon her unawares found the marquise ‘in great familiarity with La Chaussée,’ and ‘she made him hide behind her bed when the Sieur Cousté came to see her.’

Sainte-Croix was a more formidable accomplice. What must have been the agony of this proud and passionate woman when she understood little by little that this man, to whom she had sacrificed everything, had seen in her only an instrument of his own pleasure and fortune, and now profited by his mastery of her secrets to squeeze money out of her by the most vulgar methods of intimidation! Sainte-Croix had locked up in a small box, which was to become famous, the letters, thirty-four in number, sent him by the marchioness, the two promissory notes signed by her after the murder of her father and brothers, and several bottles of poison. ‘The said Lady Brinvilliers coaxed Sainte-Croix to give her his box, and wished him to give her her note for two or three thousand pistoles; otherwise she would have him poniarded.’ The woman speaks out in this last phrase. At other times, desperate, frantic with terror, she thought of poisoning herself. She implored Sainte-Croix to give her the box, and when she received no answer, sent him this touching note: ‘I have thought it best to put an end to my life, and I have therefore taken this evening what you gave me at so dear a price—the recipe of Glaser; by which you will see that I have willingly sacrificed my life to you; but I do not promise you, before I die, that I will not await you somewhere to bid you a last farewell.’ In the last line she becomes herself again; there you have the menace of the offended woman.

What scenes for a romancer to write! One day, by way of reply to these cries of blood, Sainte-Croix made her swallow poison. It was arsenic; but the pain she felt warned her immediately, and she absorbed great quantities of warm milk and so saved herself. She was ill from the effects for several months. She declared after the death of Sainte-Croix ‘that she had done what she could to get the box from him while he was alive, and if she had succeeded, she would afterwards have cut his throat.’

Like all criminals, Madame de Brinvilliers was dominated by the unconquerable impulse to lead the conversation continually to the subject of her crimes. She would talk about poisons to any one she met. Her servants found bottles of arsenic in her dressing-room. One day, when very merry—she had taken too much wine—she went up to her room carrying a sort of casket in her hand, and meeting one of her servants told her ‘that she had the wherewithal to wreak vengeance on her enemies, and that there were many inheritances in that box'—a terrible phrase which was repeated at her trial and became a catchword; poison was called afterwards ‘powder of inheritance.’ ‘When she came to her senses shortly afterwards the marquise told her servant that she did not know what she was saying when she spoke of inheritances, and that her troubles were sending her out of her mind.’ She fancied that she had also betrayed herself before her maid, Mademoiselle de Villeray, and it is possible that in 1673, to secure her silence, she poisoned her too.

Little by little she came to reveal her crimes in all their details to Briancourt. In the course of her conversations with him, she displayed no regret at the death of her brothers, whom she despised, but she often wept when speaking of her father. ‘On the morning after one of these confidences,’ said Briancourt before the judges, ‘the Marquise de Brinvilliers rushed into my room like a madwoman, and told me that she much mistrusted me, having confided to me matters of the utmost consequence, in which her life was involved. I told her that I would never speak of the things confided to me, but I begged her, with tears in my eyes, that if she was not satisfied with my conduct she would allow me to return to Paris. The lady replied: “No, no,—if you will only be discreet; I will make your fortune, and I am sure of your discretion.” About the same time the lady fetched Sainte-Croix back, and they held long conversations together. He showed me the greatest marks of friendliness, assuring me of his services, and begged me to watch over the little boy, of whom he was fond.’ We know by Madame de Brinvilliers’ own confession that this little boy was actually Sainte-Croix’ child.

This deposition of Briancourt constitutes one of the most curious documents in our possession. This man was well disposed and at heart upright, but lacked backbone. His terrible mistress ruled and awed him. Yet he had flashes of that boldness into which feeble natures are occasionally drawn. After having poisoned her father and brothers the marquise had still to get rid of her sister, Thérèse d’Aubray, and her sister-in-law, Marie Thérèse Mangot, widow of the civil lieutenant. That is what ‘remained to be done.’ ‘Seeing the imminent peril of Mademoiselle d’Aubray and even of Madame d’Aubray (though the widow’s danger was not so near as the younger lady’s), and because La Chaussée had not yet entered the house of Madame d’Aubray, and Madame de Brinvilliers said that she wished the widow’s business to be managed in two months or not at all, he (Briancourt) begged the marquise to take care what she was at, said that she had cruelly put her father and brothers to death and wished to do the same with her sister; that he had never come upon an example of such cruelty in all the annals of antiquity, and that she was the cruelest and wickedest woman that ever had been or would be; that he begged her to reflect on what she meant to do, and to remember how that wretch Sainte-Croix had ruined her and her family; that he saw no safety for her, but sooner or later she would perish; that he himself would never allow the murder of Mademoiselle d’Aubray, even though she had once written to Madame de Brinvilliers a letter in which she accused him of being a rogue and rake.’ It was unquestionably Briancourt’s attitude which saved the lives of Madame de Brinvilliers’ sister and sister-in-law; he had further warned Mademoiselle d’Aubray, through the marquise’s maid Mademoiselle de Villeray, to be on her guard. In her confession the marquise declared that if she had thought of poisoning her sister it was out of hatred, by way of revenge for remarks she had made to her about her conduct.

Briancourt had only succeeded in diverting the peril upon himself. Madame de Brinvilliers resolved to rid herself of a lover who responded to her confidences by playing the censor. The customary means, poison, was obviously the first to suggest itself. ‘Sainte-Croix,’ says Briancourt, ‘had introduced into the Brinvilliers household a porter related to La Chaussée, and a lackey named Bazile, who was extraordinarily assiduous in serving me with food and drink; but seeing these attentions and, further, some sign of roguery in this fellow, I handled him so roughly that Madame de Brinvilliers had to dismiss him.’

There followed a remarkably romantic scene, as Briancourt described it before the court.

‘Two or three days after Bazile’s departure, Lady Brinvilliers told me that she had a very handsome bed, and hangings embroidered to match; that it was a bed which Sainte-Croix had pawned and which she had redeemed. She had it put up in her large room, where there was a close and wainscoted chimney-piece, and told me that I must come that night and sleep in that bed, and that she would expect me at midnight, but that I must not come earlier, because she had to arrange with her cook. Instead of going down at midnight to a gallery which commanded the windows of the room, I came down at ten o’clock, and looking through the windows into the room, the curtains not being drawn, I saw the lady walking up and down and dismissing all her servants.’

We may remark in passing that this gallery still exists at the present day in the mansion inhabited by Madame de Brinvilliers in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul.[2]

‘About half-past eleven,’ continues Briancourt, ‘Lady Brinvilliers, having undressed and put on her dressing-gown, took a few turns in the room, holding a torch in her hand; then she went to the chimney-piece, which she opened. Sainte-Croix stepped out, dressed in rags, with a worn-out jerkin and an old hat, and kissed the lady, and for a quarter of an hour they talked together. Then Sainte-Croix went back into the chimney-piece, and the lady pushed its two folding-doors to, so as to shut him in, and then came to the door, in some agitation; my own agitation was no less. Should I enter, or should I go away? But the lady seeing my confusion said: “What is the matter? Don’t you want to come?” I saw much rage in her countenance, which was changed in an extraordinary degree. I went into the room, and the lady asked me if the bed was not very fine; I said that it was, and the lady rejoined, “Let us lie down then.” Then the marquise got into bed. I had placed the torch on a stand, and she said, “Undress yourself and put out the light very quickly.” I pretended to be undoing my shoes, desiring to know how far the lady’s cruelty would go, and she said, “What is the matter with you? You look very solemn.” Then I rose and, giving the bed a wide berth, said to the lady: “Ah, how cruel you are! What have I done that you want to have me murdered?” The lady sprang out of bed and flung herself upon me from behind; but freeing myself, I went straight to the chimney-piece. Sainte-Croix came out, and I said to him: “Ah, villain, you have come to stick a knife into me!” and as the torch was burning, Sainte-Croix made to flee, while Lady Brinvilliers rolled on the floor declaring that she would live no longer, but die; at the same time she sought her case of poisons, opened it, and was on the point of taking poison. I prevented her and said, “You wanted to get me poisoned by Bazile, and now you want to get me stabbed by Sainte-Croix.” The lady threw herself at my feet, declaring that such had not happened to me and would never happen, and that she would pay with her death for what she had just done—that she saw clearly that it was all up with her and that she could not survive such an occurrence. I told her that I would forgive her and forget all about what she had done, but that I was determined to go away in the morning, since they wanted to get rid of me, and I made the lady promise that she would not poison herself. I remained in the room until six o’clock in the morning with the lady, whom I compelled to go back to bed, I remaining on a sofa beside the bed near her.’

After this scene, Briancourt at once set about procuring pistols, deeming them necessary to his safety; then he went to ask the advice of Monsieur Bocager, a professor of the law school, who had introduced him to Madame de Brinvilliers.

From the first day he saw the terrible marchioness, Briancourt had advanced from surprise to surprise; but his greatest astonishment awaited him in the study of the law professor. The young man said to him, ‘Sir, I have a great secret to communicate to you; I think that you will give me good advice, and that you will tell the first president, whom you often see, what is going on, so that he may take the proper steps.’ The professor’s discomposure was evident in his features, and he leaned back uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Monsieur Bocager turned very pale, and said nothing, except that I must keep my secret and not speak about it to the curé of St. Paul or any one else. He assured me that he would see to everything, and that I ought not to leave the Brinvilliers’ house so soon, but wait some time, while he sought some new employment for me.’ Briancourt asked himself whether all that he heard and saw were real events in a real world. How far had this terrible woman been to seek her accomplices? How far had she pushed her crimes?

‘Two days afterwards,’ continues Briancourt, ‘the marquise told me that Monsieur Bocager was not so upright a man as I imagined, as I should see some day. And as I was passing down the street in the evening, just opposite St. Paul’s, two pistol-shots were fired at me, without my being able to tell whence they came, and one of them pierced my coat. Seeing that I was marked down, I went next day to Sainte-Croix’ house, carrying two pistols, having left a man at the street door to see that it remained open. I told Sainte-Croix that he was a villain and a scoundrel, that he would be broken on the wheel, and that he had caused the death of several people of quality. He declared that he had never caused anybody’s death, but that if I would go behind the Hôpital Général with pistols he would give me every kind of satisfaction; to which I replied that I was not a soldier, but that if I were attacked I should defend myself.’

Such was the strange existence of the poor bachelor in theology, tutor to the children of the Marquis de Brinvilliers. In his fear of poison he was continually swallowing some nostrum or other by way of antidote.

The marquis himself lived in equal terror. He knew what was going on, and took things philosophically. Here is a sketch of a dinner at his house. ‘The marchioness put Sainte-Croix on her right; the marquis was at the sideboard end of the table. The latter was very carefully served by a domestic specially attached to his person, to whom he always said: “Don’t change my glass, but rinse it every time you give me anything to drink.”’ When the evening was over, the marquis retired to his room; Sainte-Croix and the marchioness went to the lady’s room, and Briancourt went upstairs with the children. With the horrors of crime there were thus mingled scenes of burlesque.

Accommodating as her husband was, the marchioness began to poison him; then, struck with remorse, she called in to attend him one of the most famous physicians of the time, Dr. Brayer.

‘She wished to marry Sainte-Croix,’ writes Madame de Sévigné, ‘and with that intention often gave her husband poison. Sainte-Croix, not anxious to have so evil a woman as his wife, gave counter-poisons to the poor husband, with the result that, shuttlecocked about like this five or six times, now poisoned, now unpoisoned, he still remained alive.’ Brinvilliers emerged from this violent treatment with a weakness in the legs. Afterwards he always carried theriac about with him, that being regarded as an antidote; he took it from time to time, and gave doses to his people.

Briancourt, however, succeeded in escaping from the service of his formidable mistress, and, under the baleful impression of what he had seen in the world, he retired to Aubervilliers, where he lived in solitude, giving lessons in the establishment of the Fathers of the Oratory there. Seven or eight months had passed when the marchioness came to see him; then she sent from time to time to ask how he was doing. It was at Aubervilliers that one evening, on July 31, 1672, he received from his late mistress a very urgent note, begging him to go immediately to Picpus, where she had an important communication to make to him. There had just happened an event which was to entail incalculable consequences: on July 30 Sainte-Croix died in his mysterious dwelling in the cul-de-sac of the Place Maubert.

A widespread legend makes Sainte-Croix’ death the result of a chemical experiment; it is said that the glass mask with which he covered his face to protect it from the poisonous vapours had broken. But he really died a natural death after an illness of some months, in the course of which he was visited by several persons who have left their testimony in regard to the matter. In the legendary laboratory of the cul-de-sac there was found indeed a furnace of ‘digestion.’ Sainte-Croix ‘philosophised’ there, that is, worked at the philosopher’s stone, and more particularly at solidifying mercury, that eternal dream of the alchemists.

Madame de Brinvilliers soon learned of the death of her lover. Her first cry was, ‘The little box!’

II. HER TRIAL

Sainte-Croix died overwhelmed in debt. His things were all put under seal. The seals were raised on August 8, 1672, by Commissary Picard, assisted by a sergeant named Creuillebois, two notaries, the agent of the widow, and an agent of the creditors. The three first meetings had passed without incident when a Carmelite monk who was present handed to the commissary the key of the private room in which the furnace was kept. Entering, they saw on the table a rolled-up paper bearing the words, ‘My confession.’ The persons present decided without hesitation to keep the paper secret, and to burn it on the spot. They found, further, at the end of a shelf, a small box, oblong in shape and red in colour, from which hung a key. It contained some phials, some of which were filled with a clear liquid like water, others with a liquid of reddish colour; and in addition, there were the letters addressed by Madame de Brinvilliers to Sainte-Croix, the two promissory notes signed by the marchioness after the poisoning of her father and brothers, and a receipt and power of attorney relating to a sum of 10,000 livres lent by Pennautier, receiver-general of the clergy, to Monsieur and Madame de Brinvilliers through the agency of Sainte-Croix. These two last papers were in a sealed envelope on which was written: ‘Papers to be restored to the Sieur Pennautier, receiver-general of the clergy, as belonging to him; and I humbly beg those into whose hands they fall, to be good enough to return them to him at my death, they being of no consequence except to him alone.’

Sainte-Croix had addressed the little box, with its contents, to Madame de Brinvilliers in these terms: ‘I humbly beg those into whose hands this box falls to do me the favour to return it into the hands of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who lives in Rue Neuve-Saint-Paul, since all that it contains concerns her and belongs to her alone, and moreover it is of no use to anybody in the world but herself; and in case she dies before I do, to burn it, and all that is in it, without opening it or meddling with it; and so that no one may pretend ignorance, I swear by the God I adore, and all that is most holy, that I state nothing but the truth. If perchance any one contravenes my intentions, just and reasonable as they are, I charge it in this world and the next upon his conscience, for discharge of my own, and declare that this is my last will. Made at Paris, afternoon, May 25, 1670. Signed: Sainte-Croix.’ Below were these words: ‘There is a single packet addressed to Monsieur Pennautier, which is to be given to him.’ The very energy of these formulæ impressed Commissary Picard. He sealed up the case and confided it to the care of two sergeants, Cluet and Creuillebois, so that the inventory might be made by the civil lieutenant in person. Sergeant Creuillebois took the box home.

It was Sainte-Croix’ widow who on August 8—that is, the day when the box was discovered—sent word to Madame de Brinvilliers at Picpus that things belonging to her were under seal. The marchioness instantly sent some one to find the box. As that was no longer in Sainte-Croix’ house, a servant was sent off to Commissary Picard to tell him that Madame de Brinvilliers desired to speak to him without delay. Picard answered that he was busy. The marchioness, however, herself hurried to Madame de Sainte-Croix, insisting on the box being given to her. It was nine o’clock at night. ‘She complained of its having been sealed up, offered money to obtain it, proposed to break the seals in order to take out what was inside, and to substitute something else.’ But the box had been taken away. ‘It’s very amusing,’ she said, ‘for Commissary Picard to carry off a box that belongs to me!’ She got some one to take her to Sergeant Cluet, whom she made come down, so that she might speak to him from her carriage. ‘The lady told him that Pennautier had come to her, and told her that he was anxious about the box, and would give fifty golden louis to have what was in it. She also said that all that was in the said box concerned Pennautier and herself, and that they had done everything in concert.’ We see here the first step in a manœuvre which Madame de Brinvilliers afterwards developed. Knowing that several of the papers in the box concerned Pennautier, she sought to link her cause with the financier’s, speculating on his high position and influence.

Cluet answered that he could do nothing without the commissary. Accordingly the marchioness hurried off to him at eleven o’clock at night. Picard sent down word that he could not receive her till the morning.

In the morning, August 9, the commissary received a visitor from a Châtelet[3] attorney named Delamarre, to whom the marchioness had intrusted her interests. He told the commissary that the little box was of great importance to Madame de Brinvilliers, begging him to send it back to her, and saying ‘that she would give him all she had in the world.’ ‘There came also a man in black’ (it was Briancourt) ‘who told him that the marchioness would give him anything he could wish for.’

Madame de Brinvilliers understood that the box was not to be given up, and made preparations for flight. ‘Delamarre, her attorney, repaired to Picpus at ten o’clock at night and carried off her principal furniture, which was even thrown hastily out of the windows.’ The marchioness, however, sent for Cluet and Creuillebois to come to Picpus. She changed the line of her defence, and told Creuillebois that ‘Sainte-Croix was clever enough to have forged the letters, but that she would find a way out, and had good friends.’ To Madame de Sainte-Croix, who also went to Picpus, she said that she had nothing to do with the box, that it could only contain trifles, that she had not seen Sainte-Croix for a long time, that these were forged letters, and that she had a complete justification. She went on, in order to spread it abroad that her interests were connected with those of Pennautier: ‘If it trickles on me, it will rain on Pennautier.’ She said to the wife of a Châtelet clerk named Fausset, who spoke to her of the rumours of poisoning that were already going about. ‘There is nothing in it: it will blow over; there is a man accused with me who will give four or six thousand livres to arrange matters,’ adding that ‘he was not of high rank, but was very rich.’

The seals placed on the box were raised by the civil lieutenant on August 11. Madame de Brinvilliers was represented by her attorney, who made the following declaration: ‘That if there was found a promise signed by Lady Brinvilliers for the sum of 30,000 livres, it was a document obtained from her by fraud, against which, in case the signature proved genuine, she intended to appeal, in order to have it declared null and void.’

The liquids and the powder contained in the chest were tested on animals, death being the result. Experts decided that they contained poison, but could not determine its nature. The general belief was that it was arsenic.

Madame de Brinvilliers and Pennautier were soon the engrossing topic of conversation in Paris. Fantastic rumours circulated about the poisons found in the box, of which Madame de Sévigné made herself the sedulous echo.

The marchioness hastened to pay a visit to Pennautier. He was not at home. His wife turned her out neck and crop. Pennautier responded by taking a step which did him honour: he went to Picpus to see Madame de Brinvilliers. Asked later, after his arrest, what was his motive in going to Picpus, he replied that, not believing Madame de Brinvilliers guilty of such a crime, he went to pay her his respects, as is usual on such occasions. Speaking of this step of his, his enemies wrote: ‘Actuated by a sentiment of courtesy, he neglected his most obvious interests, in which life, honour, and fortune were at stake; his excessive politeness made him forgetful of all his interests. What a rare and marvellous character! How free from thoughts of self!’ These lines, written with ironical intention, really express the truth. Not long before, Monsieur and Madame de Brinvilliers had done Pennautier a great service in a moment of difficulty by the loan of 30,000 livres; and he seized the opportunity to show that he had not forgotten their kindness.

P. L. Reich de Pennautier—Pennautier was the name of an estate in the neighbourhood of Carcassonne—though scarcely thirty-five years old, had already made an enormous fortune. His two appointments as receiver-general for the clergy and treasurer of the Languedoc Exchange brought him in hundreds of thousands of francs annually. He was one of the most active and intelligent of Colbert’s lieutenants. On such questions as the resuscitation of the French manufacture of fine cloth, the Languedoc canal, the purchase of Greek MSS. in the Levant, the draining of the fens of Aigues-Mortes, the name of Pennautier is linked with that of Colbert in enterprises of the utmost utility ‘From a petty cashier,’ says Saint-Simon, ‘Pennautier became treasurer of the clergy and treasurer of the States of Languedoc, and enormously rich. He was a tall and well-made man, with a gallant and dignified air, courteous and eminently obliging; he had plenty of intelligence, and had many connections in society.

On August 22 the civil lieutenant summoned Madame de Brinvilliers and Pennautier to appear at the examination of the documents found in the box. Pennautier was in the country; the marchioness was represented by her attorney, who repeated his protests. A third personage appeared on the scene, namely, La Chaussée. He fancied his audacity would save him, and from the first had opposed the sealing of the house, on the ground that he had deposited with the deceased, in whose service he had been for seven years, 200 pistoles and 100 silver crowns which should be, he said, behind the window of the study in a bag, with a note proving that the money belonged to him. He claimed also a number of papers, which he described. The knowledge that La Chaussée displayed of Sainte-Croix’ laboratory awakened suspicion. When Commissary Picard told the whilom valet that the confiscated box had just been opened, he stood petrified with confusion for a moment, then fled precipitately, leaving the commissary in open-eyed amazement. The same day he left Gaussin, a bath-proprietor whose service he had entered, and, concealing himself during the day, roamed about Paris at night-time till he was arrested on September 4 at six o’clock in the morning by a police officer named Thomas Regnier. La Chaussée was very crestfallen as he walked down the street.

From that moment the gravest suspicions were entertained against Madame de Brinvilliers, but there was a reluctance to arrest her because of her rank. Regnier repaired to Picpus and told her bluntly that he had found La Chaussée, and that he had learned a good many things from the commissary. The marchioness blushed. ‘What is it, madam? You say nothing?’ But the lady, changing the subject, asked him to escort her to mass. When they returned, she spoke to him again about the box. She seemed a prey to uneasiness. ‘But madam,’ said Regnier, ‘surely you are not mixed up in this business?’ ‘Why should I be?’ she replied. ‘That villain La Chaussée, when with Commissary Picard, must have said something against you, and would say it again if he was captured.’ ‘It would be well to take the villain to Picardy,’ said the marchioness. She said also that she had long been pressing Sainte-Croix to return the box, and that Pennautier was involved with herself in the matter. Regnier left Madame de Brinvilliers and went to find Briancourt at Vertus. He told him, to begin with, that he had arrested La Chaussée, and Briancourt exclaimed, ‘Then she is a lost woman!’ He went on to speak of the poison which she had often talked about, and said that she had several sorts of it in her house.

Meanwhile Madame Antoine d’Aubray, widow of the last civil lieutenant and sister-in-law of the marchioness, had learned what was going on—that her husband had actually died of poison as the doctors had suspected. Hastening to Paris, she presented a petition to the Châtelet on September 10, and was admitted a plaintiff in a civil action for damages against La Chaussée and Madame de Brinvilliers. The latter had just fled to England, with no other attendant than a kitchenmaid. All suspicions were at once confirmed. The action against La Chaussée heard before the Châtelet ended on February 23, 1673, in a decree sentencing the defendant to the preliminary torture, manentibus indiciis. If the wretched man gave proof of endurance under torture, it would be the salvation both of himself and of the marchioness. Madame d’Aubray made a passionate intervention. She appealed to the Parlement,[4] endeavouring to prove, in a fresh affidavit, that the charges had been fully sustained, and that it was not permissible to have recourse to a preliminary dubious in itself and one that might snatch the criminals from due punishment. The case was reopened at the Tournelle.[5] In spite of a skilful defence, La Chaussée was condemned to death on March 24, 1673. The sentence set forth that he was convicted of poisoning, and condemned to be broken alive on the wheel after being put to the ‘question ordinary and extraordinary,’ and that Madame de Brinvilliers was to be beheaded for contempt of court.

When submitted to torture, La Chaussée displayed uncommon courage and denied everything. The mode of torture adopted was that of the boot. The legs of the condemned man were placed between boards, which were driven by degrees closer together by the introduction of eight wedges in succession, the legs being thus horribly mangled. Released from the machine, he was carried on a mattress to a corner of the fireplace, and refreshed with brandy. In anticipation of instant death, La Chaussée voluntarily confessed his crimes, including the poisoning of Villequoy’s tart, and then spoke of the iniquities of Madame de Brinvilliers. ‘What accuser,’ says La Reynie, ‘would have been listened to for a moment if God had not permitted the capture of this valet, whom the first judges could not condemn for want of proof, but whom the Parlement condemned on conjectures and strong presumptions; and if God had not touched the heart of this wretch, who, after having suffered torture in absolute silence, confessed his crimes a moment before being executed?’ La Chaussée was broken on the wheel the same day.

Taking refuge in London, the marchioness led a wretched existence, in distress which she found insupportable, and a prey to incessant fears.

Louis XIV had from the first taken a very strong personal interest in this case. It was his sincere desire that the investigation should be made as complete and luminous as possible, and he was determined to follow up and strike at all the accomplices, however high they were placed. The Secretaries of State had not awaited the declarations made by La Chaussée on May 24, 1673, before requesting the English Government to extradite the accused woman. In November and December 1672 several letters were exchanged between Colbert and his brother the Marquis de Croissy, then French ambassador at the court of Charles II. The king of England consented to the extradition, but declared that he could not allow the arrest to be made by English officers; that would have to be undertaken by France. Croissy was highly embarrassed. The embassy was not provided with tools for such jobs. Colbert insisted, and at length the ambassador was on the point of winning Charles’s consent to the employment of English police, when Madame de Brinvilliers, taking fright, quitted England for the Netherlands.

Meanwhile her husband, this amazing Marquis de Brinvilliers, had quietly taken up his abode, with his children and domestics, in the chateau of Offémont, belonging to the estate of his father-in-law and two brothers-in-law whom his wife had poisoned. He had taken possession of the surrounding domain, and actually it was not till two lettres de cachet had been signed by Louis XIV, bearing date February 22 and March 31, 1674, ordering him to leave the chateau and never approach within three leagues of it, that he decided to allow the widow of the civil lieutenant to enter upon the enjoyment of her own property.

We have very little information on the life of the marchioness between her departure from London and her arrest on March 25, 1676, at Liége in a convent where she had taken shelter. She had gone from London to the Netherlands, then into Picardy, the country conquered by King Louis, thence to Cambrai and Valenciennes, where she entered a convent, but was obliged to leave it on account of the war. From Valenciennes she fled to Antwerp, then to Liége. She had nothing to support her but an annuity of 500 livres, which fell to 250 on the death of her sister; she was sometimes ‘reduced to borrowing a crown.’ While at Cambrai, she appears to have sent asking her husband to join her there; his answer was, ‘She would poison me like the rest.’

It came to the ears of Louvois that Madame de Brinvilliers was in hiding at Liége. He at once despatched Desgrez, the captain of police, a man of tried ability. Desgrez was instructed to make all speed, for the French troops then in possession of Liége were on the point of handing over the town to the Spaniards. Michelet and the majority of historians have woven the arrest of the marchioness into a romance. Desgrez, a handsome fellow, disguises himself as a courtly abbé, and wins a warm welcome from the lady, always eager for gallant adventures: at the rendezvous, the lover appears as a police officer, accompanied by a number of archers. As a matter of fact, the arrest was managed in the simplest manner, ‘on the last day,’ writes La Reynie, ‘that the king’s authority was recognised in the town of Liége.’ It was not even Desgrez who carried it through, but a French political agent in the Netherlands, a former clerk of Fouquet’s named Bruant, otherwise Descarrières. ‘The burgomasters,’ wrote the latter to Louvois on March 25, ‘have behaved so well that they confided to me their master-key to go and arrest this lady, without wanting to know why it was to be done.’ Next day, March 26, Descarrières wrote again to Louvois: ‘I arranged that the detective (Desgrez) should be present as privy to the capture'; he informed him also that a small box was seized on the lady’s person, at which ‘she appeared much agitated, and at first told mayor Goffin that her confession was in the casket,’ begging him to have it restored to her. Descarrières sealed the box with his own seal and that of Desgrez.

La Reynie says upon this subject: ‘It was God who ordained that this wretched woman, who fled from kingdom to kingdom, should be careful to write and carry with her the proofs necessary to her condemnation.’ This confession, in which the marchioness recalls in a few pages all the crimes of her life, was published by Armand Fouquier; but its flavour is so strong that the editor was not able to reproduce the original text, but had to translate the principal passages into Latin.

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.

‘Eight letters were shown her, and she was enjoined to disclose to whom she had written them; she said she did not remember.

‘Asked why she wrote to Théria to secure the box, she said she did not know what that was.

‘Asked why, in writing to Théria, she said she was lost if he did not get the box and win his case, she said she did not remember.’

The marchioness was lodged in the Conciergerie on the day of her arrival in Paris, namely, April 26. She was left under the guard of the archer Barbier, to whom she continued to intrust letters, which he said he carried to their addresses, but which he really handed to the judges.

On April 29 she wrote to Pennautier:—

‘I hear from my friend that you are intending to help me in this business, and you may be sure that this will be to me an additional obligation to all your kindnesses. Wherefore, sir, if you really mean this, you must please not lose any time, and not be seen with the people who will go to find out from you in what way you wish to manage things. I think it would be much to the purpose if you did not show yourself too much, but your friends must know where you are, for the counsellor severely examined me about you at Mézières.’

There follows a recommendation to buy the silence of the ‘Bernardins widow,’ that is, the widow of Sainte-Croix, who lodged in the Rue des Bernardins.

Madame de Brinvilliers disclosed by and by the motives of her conduct in regard to Pennautier. ‘I do not know at all,’ she said on the night before her death, ‘that Monsieur Pennautier ever had any communication with Sainte-Croix about the poisons, and I could not accuse him without betraying my conscience. But as a note concerning him was found in the box, and as I saw him many times with Sainte-Croix, I thought that their friendship had progressed so far as to have dealings in poisons, and in this suspicion I ventured to write to him as though I knew it was so, running no risk of injuring my own case thereby, and inwardly arguing thus: if there was any connection between them in regard to the poisons, Monsieur Pennautier will believe that I must know the secret, considering the step I am taking, and that will induce him to exert himself on my behalf as much as on his own, for fear lest I accuse him; and if he is innocent, my letter is waste labour. I risk nothing but the indignation of a person who would be careful not to stand up for me, nor to render me any service if I had written him nothing.’

The letters of the prisoner increased the suspicions against Pennautier to such an extent that a decree was issued for the arrest of the unlucky functionary, and he was shut up in the Conciergerie in the same room that Ravaillac[6] had occupied.

Marie Vosser, widow of Hannyvel de Saint-Laurent, Pennautier’s predecessor in the office of receiver for the clergy, was striving to arouse public opinion against Pennautier. She accused him of having poisoned her husband on May 2, 1669, in order to succeed him in an office of considerable emolument. She overwhelmed him with affidavits drawn up by Vautier, one of the best advocates in Paris. These damaging documents were in everybody’s hands.

The rapidly acquired wealth of Pennautier, far from protecting him in the opinion of the public, had raised up a thousand enemies who diligently spread false reports about him. The people regarded his influence and wealth with amazement, the nobility with envy. On the other hand, Pennautier, like Fouquet, found some faithful friends, a circumstance which does honour to the time. ‘It is wonderful,’ says Saint-Simon, ‘how many of the most notable men are working on his behalf.’ This generosity of sentiment was the more admirable in that the recollection of the disgrace which overwhelmed Fouquet’s friends was present to every mind. The Cardinal de Bonsy, the Duke de Verneuil, the Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvallon, and Colbert were among the most active. The judges, who were suspected by Louis XIV himself of having been corrupted, gave proof of an admirable independence.

Pennautier was writing a letter to one of his cousins in his office on June 15, 1676, when the police made a sudden raid upon his room. What he had written was as follows:—'I think that, for our friend, a stay of a month in the country will suffice....’ Startled by this sudden interruption, Pennautier nervously put this note in his mouth as though to swallow it. This fact remained in the sequel the sole charge which the prosecutor could bring against him, after Madame de Brinvilliers had entirely exculpated him. His declarations under examination were of convincing frankness; moreover, in a statement printed in answer to the pamphlets of Sainte-Croix’ widow, he established incontestably the falsity of some points on which his adversaries were endeavouring to base their accusations. These latter found themselves reduced to maintaining that the official reports drawn up at the time when the seals had been broken at Sainte-Croix’ place had been falsified.

‘I am accused of having poisoned Saint-Laurent,’ added Pennautier; ‘but has it been so much as proved that he died of poison? It is at least singular to declare me guilty of a crime that was never committed, for the reports of the doctors, as well as the circumstances under which he died, prove that his death was natural.’

The close of Pennautier’s reply was crushing for his accuser. He pointed out that Madame de Saint-Laurent had waited six years before bringing her case into court. How was that silence explained? Saint-Laurent being dead, Pennautier was appointed to his office of receiver-general for the clergy. ‘Saint-Laurent’s wife gave him her nomination on June 12, 1669; the same day they drew up a sort of contract together, by which the lady reserved half the emoluments of the office, and Pennautier gave 2000 pistoles to the Sieur de Mannevillette, who claimed from the lady the right to return to this office, in accordance with the deed of defeasance given him by Saint-Laurent when the Sieur de Mannevillette resigned that office in his favour on March 17, 1669. The dame de Saint-Laurent quietly enjoyed this moiety of the emoluments of the office until the last day of December 1675, when the agreement terminated; and if Pennautier had been willing to renew the agreement with her, when the general assembly of the clergy did him the honour to elect him receiver-general for ten years, which will end on the last day of December 1685, those who know the dame de Saint-Laurent are convinced that she would never have accused Pennautier of poisoning the Sieur de Saint-Laurent her husband.’

We have dwelt at some length on this incident because of the important part played by Pennautier in the restoration of commerce and industry in France under the direction of Colbert.

Nothing was talked about in Paris but Madame de Brinvilliers and Pennautier—'a grave injustice to the war,’ as Madame de Sévigné said.

Through the privilege of nobility, Madame de Brinvilliers was brought before the highest judicial tribunal in the kingdom—the High Court and the Tournelle in conjunction. She requested a counsel to assist her in her defence, but the request was refused, at least provisionally.

The court was presided over by the first president, Lamoignon. Between April 29 and July 16, 1676, the case occupied twenty-two sittings. The marchioness displayed an energy and force of will which was a constant subject of astonishment to her judges. She denied everything obstinately, and contradicted her accusers in a hard and haughty voice, but never failed in the respect due to the judges—a respect in which pride and nobility mingled, and which made the audience feel that she considered herself at least the equal of the men judging her.

When they came to read the account of the examination at Mézières on April 17, there occurred a scene which was not unexpected. The following is an extract from the official report of the proceedings:—

‘At the reading of these interrogatories, the first president wished to intervene and postpone it until after the confession had been read. This raised a difficulty, and a discussion ensued as to whether it was allowable to question the lady on these particular crimes, such as sodomy and incest, which being on this occasion only a matter of confession, it seemed that they should be kept a great secret; some were for, others against.

‘Monsieur de Palluau said that, having consulted the law-doctors, he had been told that, a confession having been found en route, it ought to have been burnt under penalty, as some believed, of mortal sin.

‘Other doctors held that the said Palluau, in his capacity as judge, had had no choice but to give a description of the confession, and to interrogate her on the aforesaid paper beginning, I accuse myself, my father, etc.

‘The first president held that the question was extremely uncertain, yet he thought the papers ought to be read.

‘The President de Mesmes held that this sort of confession had been utilised in Christian countries, and quoted the epistle of St. Leo, showing that the judges had made use of them.

‘Nivelle, advocate, urged the contrary opinion.

‘The first president answered that the epistle of St. Leo was utterly opposed to the contention of Monsieur de Mesmes, and that there was nothing for it but to resume the reading.

‘The question having been argued, the reading was continued.

‘Asked if she had not made her confession, and to whom she ought to confess, she answered that she had had no intention whatever of making a confession, and knew no priests or monks to whom she ought to confess.

‘Monsieur Roujault reported in the afternoon that he had put the question to Monsieur Benjamin, an ecclesiastical judge, to Monsieur du Saussoy and other casuists, and to Monsieur de Lestocq, doctor and professor in theology, who all agreed that this paper should be seen, and Madame de Brinvilliers questioned on it; that the secrecy of the confessional could only be between the confessor and the penitent, and a paper having been found purporting to be a confession, it might be read by the judges.’

On July 13, 1676, a terrible deposition was heard—that of Briancourt, who related in detail his mistress’s life. He spoke in a voice broken by emotion. The marchioness contradicted him with the same cold, haughty impassivity. ‘Her spirit quite overawes us,’ said President Lamoignon. ‘We worked yesterday at her case till eight o’clock in the evening; she was confronted with Briancourt for thirteen hours, and to-day another five, and she has gone through both ordeals with surprising courage. No one could have more respect for the judges, nor more scorn for the witness confronting her: she taunted him with being a besotted lackey, bundled out of the house for his disorderly conduct, and one whose testimony should not be received against her.’ But she was lost. The marchioness saw looming before her the spectacle of her ignominious punishment—the public penance on her knees before the porch of Notre Dame, clad only in her shift, torch in hand; she saw the instruments of torture, the thought of which might make the boldest shudder, then the scaffold, the stake, the ‘tomb of fire’ whence the hand of the executioner would scatter her ashes, under the gaze of the mob. The judges themselves, who were about to condemn her, felt a tightening at the heart. And when Briancourt, at the close of his deposition, his eyes streaming with tears, his voice choked with sobs, said: ‘I warned you many a time, madam, about your disorders and your cruelty, and that your crimes would ruin you,’ the marchioness replied—a wonderful reply in its pride and self-control—'You are chicken-hearted, you are crying!’ Could one find such a saying in Roman history, or in Corneille? We prefer the bare cold version of the official minute to the version reported by President Lamoignon to the abbé Pirot: ‘She insulted Briancourt about the tears he shed at the remembrance of the death of her brothers, when he declared that she had made him her confidant in regard to their poisoning, and told him that he was a villain to weep before all these gentlemen—that it resulted from a mean spirit. All this was said with great coolness, and without any appearance of changing countenance during the five hours we all watched her to-day.’

Advocate Nivelle, on whom fell the heavy task of presenting the defence of the accused lady, acquitted himself of it with remarkable success. His defence was still renowned in the eighteenth century. It was broad in style, and some of his phrases were of great beauty.

‘The enormity of the crimes,’ he said, ‘and the rank of the person accused require proofs of the most convincing clearness, written, so to speak, with rays of sunlight.’ He went on to ask if the proofs adduced against Madame de Brinvilliers were of this quality. He succeeded in throwing doubt on the sincerity of several of the more weighty depositions—that of Sergeant Cluet, for instance, who was devoted body and soul, he said, to the opposite party; to the widow d’Aubray, who sustained her part of plaintiff with the extremest animosity. The deposition of Edme Briscien, he maintained, should be entirely rejected, for the witness was not confronted with the marchioness, and on that point the rules of procedure were absolute. He very cleverly took advantage of some inconsistencies in La Chaussée’s declaration after torture. The argument based on Sainte-Croix’ famous box seemed to him to have as little weight. Indeed, the note of May 25, 1670, in which Sainte-Croix declared that the contents of the box belonged to the marchioness, was undoubtedly anterior to the introduction of poison bottles into the box; it applied only to the lady’s letters to Sainte-Croix, in which there was no question of poison. Coming at last to the written confession seized at Liége, Nivelle strongly protested against the inferential proof of guilt which the judges drew from it. ‘The last proof,’ he said, ‘relates to a paper found among those of the marchioness, in which she had written a religious confession. It is astounding that the accusers desired the judges to read this paper, for it was of a nature which laws human and divine hold sacred and inviolable under the seal of secrecy and silence demanded by the rules of one of the most august of mysteries, as I will prove by invincible arguments.’ These arguments were exhausted in a minute study of the writings of the Church fathers and of ecclesiastical history, from which the advocate produced numerous examples and excerpts likely to imbue the judges with the profoundest respect for the secrecy of confession, under whatever form it might present itself.

Finally, Nivelle set himself to win a little sympathy, or at any rate pity, for his client. He depicted this woman as a frail thing, of noble birth, beautiful and sensitive by nature, a butt for several months past to calumnies prompted by hate, to the rough treatment and insults of archers, drunken soldiers, and coarse jailors; she had also been deprived of spiritual consolation, and even on Whitsunday had been refused permission to hear mass. Undoubtedly Nivelle largely contributed to that revulsion of feeling in favour of the marchioness which was so strongly marked during the last days.

The advocate concluded his address with a powerful appeal to the prosecutrix: ‘The accuser ought not to press hardly against the lady, because she has already received satisfaction for the death of her husband in the exemplary punishment of that wretched criminal (La Chaussée) who slew him; she should rather wish that the family to which she is allied should not be sullied with an eternal disgrace, and that she should not incur the reproach of being wanting in natural feeling for her nephews, whom she ought to consider as her own children. The death of the late Messieurs d’Aubray has been publicly avenged, and if they could now tell us what they feel, they would doubtless show that the affection they always bore to their sister was a sign that they recognised how incapable she was of so unnatural a crime; they would themselves plead for their own blood, and be far indeed from sacrificing their relatives and exposing them to infamous punishment; they would prove that their highest satisfaction is to preserve their honour in preserving her life, and that otherwise it would be to punish themselves rather than to avenge them. But if they find their consolation in the acquittal of Lady Brinvilliers; if her children—who would suffer punishment as if they were guilty, and to whom life would become a torture and death a consolation—find in it the preservation of the honour of a family so notable as that from which their mother is sprung—these wise magistrates who are to judge her will also have more glory in giving to the public a famous example of their justice, their piety, and their sovereign equity, by declaring her innocent.’

On July 15, 1676, Madame de Brinvilliers appeared for the last time before her judges for her final cross-examination, and in the course of this long ordeal, in which for three hours her whole life was remorselessly dissected, she did not flag for a moment. She denied everything; she did not know what poison and antidote meant; her pretended confession was sheer madness. ‘She did not appear affected by what the first president said, though, after he had done his part as judge, he assumed the tone of a merciful friend, and addressed to her words most admirably calculated to move her, and bring her to feel in some degree the lamentable state in which she was. The first president,’ we read in a summary report of the trial, ‘dwelt upon the dreadful illness of her father, on the perilous state she was in, and told her that she was engaged in perhaps the last act of her life; he invited her seriously to reflect on her evil conduct, which had drawn upon her the reproaches of her family, and even of those who had lived in sin with her. The President de Novion reminded her that her brother the civil lieutenant had suspected other persons, and that this suspicion had embittered his last moments. The first president told her also’ (and this is one of the most curious features of the trial for the study of the moral ideas of the period), ‘that the greatest of all her crimes, horrible as they were, was, not the poisoning of her father and brothers, but her attempt to poison herself. She was kept for another half hour, but would say nothing, merely showing signs of a little distress at heart.’

‘The first president wept bitterly,’ writes the abbé Pirot, ‘and all the judges shed tears.’ She alone kept her head proudly erect, and preserved undimmed the stony clearness of her blue eyes.

Taine has given in one line a marvellous definition of the character of Racine’s heroines and the art of the poet himself: ‘We imagine the tears which never appear in their beautiful eyes.’ The sequel of our story will indicate, even more than the preceding pages, that Madame de Brinvilliers in some points resembled some of Racine’s heroines, and will help to show with what exactitude the incomparable poet reproduced the models presented him by the society of his time.

In closing this memorable scene on July 15, President Lamoignon told the prisoner that, out of charity and on the plea of her sister the Carmelite nun, a person of the greatest merit and the highest virtue was being sent to her to console her and to exhort her to think of her soul’s salvation. We are about to see coming upon the stage one of the most interesting figures in the drama, the sympathetic abbé, Edme Pirot.

III. HER DEATH

Edme Pirot was a professor of theology at the Sorbonne. Born at Auxerre on August 12, 1631, he was of the same age as the Marchioness of Brinvilliers. His discussions with Leibnitz had made his name famous throughout Europe. His was an ardent and sensitive soul: his heart was torn when he came in contact with the griefs of others. ‘The delicacy of my temperament was so great,’ he said, ‘that I could never bear the sight of blood, not even my own, and at one time I had turned quite faint at the sight of a wound being dressed, and never since ventured to come within sight of a similar operation.’ He had an acute and subtle intellect, endowed with a remarkable faculty for psychological insight.

President Lamoignon, in appointing the abbé Pirot to attend Madame de Brinvilliers, had given a fresh proof of his knowledge of men. He knew that the gentle and soul-stirring words of the priest would act on the heart of the prisoner, and perhaps obtain what all the machinery of justice had not succeeded in achieving—the revelation of her accomplices, the composition of her poisons and the proper antidotes to employ. ‘It is for the public interest,’ said Lamoignon to the abbé Pirot, ‘that her crimes should die with her, and that she should acquaint us with all the consequences her poison might have, so far as she knows them; without which we should be unable to counteract them, and her poisons would survive her.’ Further, it was his earnest desire to find in Pirot a priest whose exhortations would, at the hour of death, touch this rebellious soul and set it on the narrow road to salvation.

The good abbé has described the last day of Madame de Brinvilliers minute by minute. His story fills two volumes, one of the most extraordinary monuments literature can show. It is written with no regard for artistic effect: the conversations are reported at length, with repetitions and interminably wearisome details; but the clear, exact, and flowing style, the just and restrained expression of the keenest passions, continually remind us of the tragedies of Racine. Phédre and the abbé Pirot’s story were composed in the same year; if the priest had given any thought to the public as he wrote, and had paid some attention to his style and to the avoidance of repetitions and prolixity, posterity unquestionably might well have signed both works with the same name.

Michelet has strikingly described the appearance of the priest in the tower of the Conciergerie:—

‘Quaking with terror, Pirot was ushered into the Conciergerie, and taken to the top of the Montgommery tower; there he entered a room in which there were four persons—two warders, a wardress, and, farthest away from him, the monster.

‘The monster was quite a little woman, dainty, with very soft blue eyes, marvellously beautiful. As soon as she saw Pirot, she prettily thanked a priest who up to then had attended her, and expressed with easy grace her absolute confidence in the learned abbé. He saw at once how much she was loved by those who lived with her. When she spoke of her death, the two men and the woman burst into tears. She seemed to love them too, and was kind and gentle with them, not proud at all; she made them eat at her table.

‘“To be sure, sir,” she said to Pirot, “you are the priest that the first president has sent to console me; it is with you that I am to pass the little that remains of life: and I have long been impatient to see you.”

‘“I come, madam,” answered Pirot, “to render you in spiritual matters what service I can. I could wish it were in any other matter than this.”

‘“Sir,” she rejoined, “we must submit to everything.”’

And at that moment, turning towards an Oratorian named Father de Chevigny, she said: ‘Father, I am obliged to you for bringing this gentleman, and for all the other visits you have been good enough to pay me; pray God for me, I beseech you: henceforth I shall speak to scarcely any one but the father here. I have matters to discuss with him that are spoken of in secret. Farewell.’

The Oratorian retired.

Madame de Brinvilliers seems to have been won at the outset by the affectionate expression of her confessor, and by his sincere and sympathetic words. Judgment had not yet been pronounced. ‘My death is certain,’ she said; ‘I must not delude myself with hope. I have to tell you the story of all my life.’ But the conversation drifted away to what was being said of her in society. ‘I can imagine pretty well that they are talking a good deal about me, and that I have been for some time a byword among the people.’ And her eyes flashed.

Pirot tried to show her that, assuming she was guilty, her duty was to disclose all her accomplices, to reveal the composition of her poisons and the means of counteracting them. She interrupted him: ‘Sir, are there not some sins that are unpardonable in this world, either from their gravity or their number? Are there not some so atrocious or so numerous that the Church cannot remit them?’ ‘Believe, madam, that there are no sins irremissible in this life,’ answered the priest, and he enlarged on this theme with force and warmth and an infectious faith. Conviction by degrees took possession of the prisoner’s soul, and with it there dawned a gleam of regeneration, hope in a future life serene and happy—glorious, as the abbé said—and with the thought her heart was changed. ‘“Sir,” she answered me, “I am convinced of all you tell me. I believe that God can pardon all sins; I believe that He has often exercised this power; but all my trouble now is to know whether He will apply His power to one so wretched as I.” I told her that she must hope that God would take pity on her in His infinite mercy. She began to describe in general terms the whole of her life, and from that moment I saw that her heart was touched, and she burst into tears beholding her wretchedness.’ By the contagion of his sympathetic kindness, and by the light of redemption, Pirot had in a few hours melted this heart of brass like wax.

‘After she had given me an outline of her life, knowing that I had not yet said mass, she intimated spontaneously that it was time to say it, and that I might go down to the chapel for that purpose. She begged me say it to our Lady on her behalf, so as to obtain the pardon of which she stood in need, and asked me to come up again as soon as the sacrifice had been completed, saying that she would be present in spirit, since she was not permitted to attend in person, and that she thought of telling me in detail on my return that which she had so far told me only in general terms.

‘After my mass,’ continues Pirot, ‘as I was taking a sip of wine in the jailer’s room before returning to the tower, I learned from Monsieur de Sency, librarian to the Palais, that Madame de Brinvilliers was condemned. I went upstairs and found the marchioness awaiting me in great serenity.

‘“It is only by dying by the hand of the executioner,” she said, “that I can win salvation. If I had died at Liége before my arrest, where should I be now? And if I had not been taken, what would my end have been? I will confess my crime to the judges to whom I have denied it hitherto. I fancied I could conceal it, flattering myself that without my confession there would have been nothing to convict me, and that I was not bound to accuse myself. To-morrow, at my last examination, I mean to repair the ill that I have done at the others.

‘“I beg you, sir,” she went on suddenly, “to make my excuses to the first president. You will please see him on my behalf after my death, and will tell him that I ask his pardon, and that of all the judges, for the effrontery they have seen in me; that I believed it would serve my defence, and that I never believed there would be proof enough to condemn me without my avowal; that I now see things in a different light, and that I was touched yesterday by what he said to me, and that I put violent constraint on myself to prevent my features from showing what I felt. Ask him to forgive me for the offence I gave to the whole bench assembled to judge me, and to beg the other judges to pardon me.”

‘It was thus,’ Pirot continues, ‘that she went on relating to me the whole matter until half-past one, when a servant came and brought the cloth for dinner. She took nothing but two fresh eggs and a little soup, and talked to me, while I was eating, about indifferent things, with very great freedom of mind and a tranquillity which surprised me, as if she were entertaining me at dinner in a country house. She invited to the table the two men and the women who were her usual guard. “Sir,” she said to me, after she had told them to sit down, “you will not mind our dispensing with ceremony for you? They are accustomed to eat with me to keep me company, and we shall do so to-day if you do not object. This,” she said to them, “is the last meal I shall take with you.” And turning towards the woman who was beside her, she said: “Madam, my poor Du Rus, you will soon be quit of me; I have long been a trouble to you, but it will soon be over. To-morrow you will be able to go to Dranet. You will have time enough for that. In seven or eight hours you will have me no longer to bother you, for I do not think you have the heart to see my end.”

‘She said all this with a coolness and serenity which indicated rather a natural equality of mind than an affected pride. And as these people from time to time burst into tears and withdrew to conceal them from her, she, noticing it, threw me a glance of pity, though she shed no tears, as though sorry for their grief, almost as a mother might do on her deathbed, when, seeing around her her weeping servants, she looks at the confessor kneeling near her and marks the sorrow their affection gives him.

‘From time to time she urged me to eat, and scolded the jailer for putting cabbage in the soup. She asked me with much politeness to allow her to drink my health. I thought that I might do her some pleasure in drinking to hers, and it was not difficult to show her this little attention. She asked me to excuse her for not serving me, careful not to say that she had no knife for that purpose, so as not to give the slightest shadow of complaint.

‘“Sir,” she said to me at the end of the meal, “it is fast-day to-morrow, and though it will be a very tiring day for me”—she was to undergo torture and then be beheaded—“I have no intention of eating meat.” “Madam,” I replied, “if you need a meat soup to sustain you, there will be no occasion to stand on scruples; it will not be out of fastidiousness, but from pure necessity, and the law of the Church is not rigorous in such a case.” “Sir,” she replied, “I would not be particular if I needed it and you ordered it; but I am sure it will not be necessary. All I require is a little soup this evening at supper-time, and again at eleven o’clock; to-day they will make it a little stronger than usual, and with that, and a couple of eggs I can take at the torture, I shall get through to-morrow.”

‘It is true,’ adds the good priest, ‘that I was thunderstruck at all this composure, and I shivered when I heard her tell the jailer, so quietly, that the soup was to be stronger that evening than usual, and that two servings were to be kept for her before midnight.

‘I saw in her at this moment much affection for Monsieur de Brinvilliers, and as it was generally believed that she had always had little enough love for him, I was surprised to find that she had so much. Indeed, it appeared to me to verge towards excess, and for half an hour I saw her more distressed for him than for herself.’ And when Pirot, to test her, said that her husband appeared very insensible to her approaching fate, he drew from her a dignified reply: he must not judge things so hastily, she told him, or without intimate knowledge, and that up to that day she had only had to congratulate herself on her husband.

She asked for a pen, and with a rapid hand wrote this astonishing letter to the Marquis de Brinvilliers:—

‘Being as I am on the point of going to give account of my soul to God, I want to assure you of my affection, which will endure to the last moment of my life. I ask your pardon for all that I have done that I ought not to have done. I die an honourable death, brought upon me by my enemies. I forgive them with all my heart, and beseech you to forgive them. I hope that you will also forgive me for the disgrace that may be reflected on you. But remember that we are here only for a time, and perhaps ere long you yourself will have to go and render to God an exact account of all your actions, even your idle words, as I am now preparing to do. Watch over our temporal affairs and our children: bring them up in the fear of the Lord, and yourself set them an example. On this consult Monsieur Marillac and Madame Cousté. Offer up for me as many prayers as you can, and be assured that I die yours devotedly,

d’Aubray.’

Pirot objected that what she said about her death and her enemies was not correct. ‘How so, sir?’ she said. ‘Are not those who have driven me to death my enemies, and is it not a Christian sentiment to forgive them their rancour?’

Pirot’s answer was as might be expected, but it was to her a revelation which plunged her into great astonishment.

Then the confession was resumed.

‘King David was troubled at the sight of his sin,’ said Pirot, ‘his heart pined with grief at the remembrance of his crimes. His flesh was bruised, his bones were broken, his heart quailed, his face, his bread, and his bed were bathed in his tears, his voice became hoarse with the cries he uttered to heaven in imploring mercy. His groaning was like that of the turtle-dove that ceaseth not. That also is the picture of the Magdalene. She watered the feet of Christ with her tears and did not cease to kiss them. Her holy tears which are never spent, her sacred kisses which continue without interruption, are marks of the greatness and constancy of her contrition for her sins, and her love for God. All these words and a thousand others like them,’ adds Pirot, ‘caused her to weep bitterly.’

Twice after dinner the priest was interrupted by the procurator-general, who came to see in what condition the prisoner was, and if she was disposed to confess her crimes before the court, to name her accomplices, and reveal the nature of her poisons. The marchioness replied that she would tell everything, but not till the morrow; that till then she did not wish to be interrupted in her preparation for death; and she persisted in her resolution in spite of the entreaties of Pirot, who would rather the confession had been made at once.

She spoke of her children, displaying a tender affection for them. ‘“Sir,” she said to me, “I have not asked to see them; that would only have upset both them and me. I beseech you to be a mother to them.”’ Pirot replied that it was the Virgin who would serve them as mother, and that the marchioness should pray to her to maintain them in purity and humility all their life long. From the first, Pirot had probed his fair prisoner’s character to the bottom. ‘Ah!’ she said, interrupting him, ‘those are grand virtues! Do you know that, humbled though I be by my hapless present state, yet I do not feel humble enough? I am still attached to this world’s glory, and it is hard to bear the shame with which I am loaded.’ And to the priest’s remarks she replied: ‘I tell myself all that when I reflect, but that does not prevent feelings of pride and glory sometimes passing through my mind, as they are natural to me.’ And she added words that must have terrified the unhappy priest: ‘At this present hour in which I speak to you, there are still moments when I cannot regret having known the man (Sainte-Croix) whose acquaintance has been so fatal to me, or hate his friendship which is so dire to me and has brought upon me so many misfortunes.’

Pirot supped that evening with the prisoner; then, when night had fallen, he withdrew, promising to return in the morning. He was in great agitation, and on reaching his apartment he had recourse to his breviary. ‘The image of the lady I had seen all day so powerfully possessed me that I could hardly attend to what I was reading: it seemed to me that I was for nearly half an hour circling round Domine, labia mea aperies, returning always to where I had begun. At last, seeing that I must get on, I applied myself a little more diligently to my reading, so as to be less distracted by this idea. But in spite of all my close attention, I was quite three hours in reciting my office.’

He has described at length his sleeplessness, the thoughts that crowded upon his mind, the anguish which choked him: ‘I got no sleep at all. Those who know the delicacy of my nature, how sensitive I am to the misery and pain I see in persons who are indifferent to me, will have no difficulty in realising the depth of my sorrow for a lady whom I had seen so afflicted, and who was so near to my heart by reason of the interest I was bound to take in the salvation of the soul intrusted to me.’ Stretching out his clasped hands towards heaven, he cried: ‘O God, I am greatly concerned for her whose salvation is as dear to me as my own; I die every moment for her, and all the reward I ask in the conflict I have to maintain with her before she closes her career is to see her crowned with Thee!’

In the morning Pirot returned to the prisoner. ‘I was taken up the tower, where I found Father de Chevigny in tears as he closed a prayer with the lady, who greeted me with the same courage that I had seen in her on the previous evening.’

Madame de Brinvilliers has slept as peacefully as a child.

One of the first questions she put to her confessor related to a fear which had arisen in her mind, and the thought of which gave her much torture. ‘Sir,’ she said to me, ‘you gave me yesterday some hope that I might be saved, but I cannot have the presumption to promise myself that that will be till after a long time in purgatory. How shall I know whether I am in purgatory or hell?’ Pirot reassured her.

Soon afterwards a message came that Madame de Brinvilliers was to descend to hear her sentence read. ‘She was prepared for death and torture; but she had not thought of the public penance or of the fire. She answered fearlessly, “In a moment, but just now we are finishing our conversation, this gentleman and I.” We shortly finished our talk in great serenity.’

On leaving the prisoner, Pirot betook himself to the chapel of the Conciergerie. ‘I said mass for her, and went into the jailer’s room. I found him there, and he told me that he had accompanied her to the torture-chamber, and that after her sentence had been read, when the executioner approached to seize her, she looked him up and down without saying a word, and seeing a rope in his hand, she offered him her hands already clasped. I learned after dinner from the procurator-general that she had been agitated at the reading of her sentence, and that she got it read a second time.’

The sentence was dated July 16, 1676:—

‘The court has declared and declares the said d’Aubray de Brinvilliers duly accused and convicted of having poisoned Maître Dreux d’Aubray her father, and the said d’Aubray, civil lieutenant and counsellor in the said court, her brothers, and for reparation has condemned and condemns the said d’Aubray de Brinvilliers to do public penance before the principal door of the church of Paris, where she will be taken in a cart, bare-footed, a rope on her neck, holding in her hands a lighted torch of two pounds weight, and there on her knees to say and declare that wickedly, from revenge and to have their property, she has poisoned her father and two brothers, and attempted the life of her late sister, of which she repents, and asks pardon of God, the king, and justice; this done, to be led and conducted in the said cart to the Place de Grève of this city, to have her head cut off there on a scaffold, which will be erected for that purpose on the said place; her body to be burned, and her ashes thrown to the winds: the question ordinary and extraordinary to be first applied in order to obtain revelation of her accomplices.’

She declared in the evening that the part of the sentence which had so startled her at the first reading that she could not hear the rest, was the passage which stated that she was to be put in a cart. Her pride was aroused.

After the sentence had been read, the condemned woman was led into the torture-chamber, and when she saw the apparatus, she said: ‘Gentlemen, it is useless, I will tell everything without torture. Not that I think I can escape it—my sentence orders me to be tortured, and I suppose it will not be dispensed with—but I will declare all beforehand. I have denied everything hitherto, because I imagined I was thus defending myself, and that I was not bound to confess anything. I have been convinced of the contrary, and I will behave in accordance with the instructions given me. And I can assure you that if I had seen three weeks ago the person whom I have had given me the last twenty-four hours, you would three weeks ago have known what you are going to learn now.’ Then raising her voice, she made a clear and complete avowal of the crimes of her life. As to the composition of the poisons she had employed, she knew only arsenic, vitriol, and the poison of toads. The strongest poison was ‘rarefied arsenic.’ The only antidote which she had used herself when poisoned by Sainte-Croix was milk. As to her accomplices, apart from Sainte-Croix and her lackeys she declared that she had never had or known any.

The judges were struck by the frankness of her words. And as we know, she spoke at that moment with entire sincerity.

Madame de Brinvilliers underwent the cruelest torture then applied by the Parlement of Paris: the ordeal of water. Enormous quantities of water were introduced into the stomach of the condemned through a funnel placed between the teeth. This water, rapidly accumulating inside the body, produced the most horrible agonies.

Meanwhile the poor abbé Pirot was suffering as much from the torture as the sufferer herself: ‘I did not see her from half-past seven until two o’clock in the afternoon. I can say that this was the only bad time I had that day; apart from the time I spent without her, the rest cost me nothing. But while she was under torture I was extraordinarily restless, saying to myself at every moment, “They are now giving her torture.”’

He took refuge in a little room where, in spite of the promises of the jailer, he was besieged by importunate visitors. Curious ladies of the court flocked to him. While there some one handed to him a little medal, with a message from the wife of President Lamoignon, saying that she had received it from the pope, with the authority to bestow indulgence on any dying person she chose, and that she gave it to Madame de Brinvilliers.

At last Pirot was told that he would find the marchioness lying on a mattress near the fire. It was a thrilling moment. By his gentle and sympathetic words, and his exhortation to repentance, Pirot had little by little bent this character of iron. He had sent the condemned lady resigned and submissive to the judges. But under the pangs of torture which made strong men yield, under the brutal force she had to suffer, all the pride of her proud nature started up, the worst instincts were awakened. In revenge, she accused Briancourt of false witness; she charged Desgrez, who had arrested her at Liége, with purloining documents. Pirot found her full of hatred and stubbornness, her eyes blazing. ‘She was highly excited, her face red as fire, her eyes gleaming, her mouth distorted. She asked for wine, which I had brought to her at once.’

The rest of the story is really touching. The abbé Pirot watched with the care of an anxious mother over the reputation of the lady about to die. ‘I expressly notice this circumstance,’ he says, ‘to undeceive those who believe that she was too fond of wine and was guilty of taking it to excess, and that she could not refrain from drinking it freely on the day of her death. I saw nothing of the kind. It is true that on Thursday, as on Friday, she had a cup from which at times she tasted as much as a fly might swallow; but this was only to keep up her strength and to refresh herself, at a time when the strain of recalling to mind her whole life, in order to assure herself of any criminality there might have been in it, much exhausted and excited her; and if care was taken to have good wine on the day of her death, it was only to cheer her a little in her natural depression of spirits. It has even been cast up against her, unjustly, that a bottle was provided for her on the way to the scaffold: I am responsible for that. I feared that her heart might fail her, and knowing that at one time it was common to offer criminals strong drink of some kind, to give them courage to suffer death, I thought that, as I had seen her necessity that day of refreshing herself now and then, it would be well to have wine ready; and, to tell the truth, I thought a little of myself. The wine was only used by the executioner, who drank a mouthful immediately after the execution.’

Before setting out for her punishment the marchioness was to be allowed to pray for a few moments in the chapel of the Conciergerie, before the Holy Sacrament exposed for the purpose; but she had to appear there surrounded by other prisoners, who were all admitted to the chapel when the Host was placed on the altar. ‘When we entered the vestry of the Conciergerie, she asked the jailer for a pin to fasten the kerchief she had on her neck, and as he went in all good faith to look for one, she said to him: “You must not be afraid of anything now: the gentleman will be my surety, and will answer for it that I do not want to do myself harm.” “Madam,” he replied, giving her a pin, “I beg pardon, I never mistrusted you, and if anybody ever did so, it was certainly not I.” He fell on his knees before her, and thus kneeling kissed her hands. She begged him to pray to God for her. “Madam,” he replied, his voice choked with sobs, “I will pray for you to-morrow with all my heart.”’

‘Meanwhile,’ says Pirot, ‘she had not yet recovered the penitent spirit which I had seen in her that morning and the night before.’ She spoke of the sentence. The punishment did not terrify her, but she was bitterly indignant at the degrading circumstances introduced into it—the public penance, the scattering of her ashes to the winds. Pirot replied: ‘Madam, it matters nothing to your salvation whether your body be laid in the earth or be cast into the fire. It will rise glorious from the ashes if your soul is in grace.’ And further: ‘Yes, madam, this flesh which men are soon to burn will rise one day, the same but glorified, provided that your soul rejoices in God; it will be born again, bright as the sun, no more to suffer, subtle and quick as a spirit.’

By degrees Pirot regained his hold upon the fair penitent. ‘The cloud of nature was dissolved, her agitation appeared no longer, and, instead of the hard fierce looks, the biting of lips, and the other impetuous manifestations of a shattered pride, there were only tears and sobs, remorse for sin and yearnings for repentance, that would make one’s heart bleed. I could not keep back my tears, and for an hour and a half I wept with her, speaking, nevertheless, with more force than I had yet done. She was still more affected by my tears than by my words, and, pondering on the cause of my tears, she said: “Sir, my distress must be great to compel you to weep so much, or you take a great interest in what concerns me.”’

Then she confessed the calumnies she had been unable to avoid conceiving under torture against Briancourt and Desgrez. Pirot was alarmed, and when he told her that she ought to repair the fresh sin by a fresh declaration she appeared surprised. However, the opportunity was about to be afforded, for about six o’clock the procurator-general sent for the abbé Pirot.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘this is a most vexatious woman.’

‘How, sir? For my part, I am greatly consoled by the state in which I now see her, and I hope that God will have mercy upon her.’

‘Ah, sir! she confesses her crime, but she does not reveal her accomplices.’

Shortly afterwards the procurator-general returned to the chapel along with some commissaries and Drouet the clerk of the court. Pirot repeated to the marchioness what had just been said to him, adding that she could only hope for pardon if she revealed to the judges all she knew. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘it is true that you told me that at first and at greater length, and I have followed your instructions and know nothing more than I have declared. I have already testified to these gentlemen that you had well instructed me, and it was through that that I told them everything. I have told everything, sir, and have nothing more to say.’ Monsieur de Palluau at once said, ‘This is more than enough, sir; adieu.’ ‘He went away at once, and we were given only a short time to spend in that place, the day beginning to decline; it might be about a quarter to seven. I have no doubt she was pretty tired of so much questioning; however, I saw not the shadow of a complaint, so great was her courtesy.’ Before the procurator-general and the rest retired, Pirot, with the authority of the prisoner, cleared Briancourt and Desgrez from the accusations brought against them in the torture-chamber.

Madame de Brinvilliers remained a moment longer prostrate before the altar, then went out to meet her doom. At this moment the executioner came up to speak of ‘a saddler to whom she owed the balance of the price of a carriage; she told him shortly that she would see to it, and said that very sweetly, but as she would have spoken to a man much inferior to herself.’

As she left the chapel, she stumbled upon some fifty people of rank—the Countess de Soissons, Mademoiselle de Lendovie, Madame de Roquelaure, the Abbé de Chaluset, all jostling one another to see her. Her pride was offended, and after freely staring at them, she said to her confessor: ‘Sir, what a strange curiosity!’

She went on, barefooted, clothed in the coarse linen shirt of condemned criminals, holding in one hand the penitent’s candle, and in the other a crucifix.

On leaving the Conciergerie she was lifted into the cart. ‘It was one of the smaller carts you see in the streets loaded with rubbish; it was very short and narrow, and I feared there was not room enough for her and me. Yet four of us got in, the executioner’s assistant sitting on the board which closed it in front, with his feet on the shafts on either side of the horse. She and I sat on the straw put down to cover up the wood, and the executioner stood upright at the back. She got in first, and leant her back against the front-board and against the side, slightly at an angle. I was near her, pressing against her to make room for the executioner’s feet, my back against the side of the cart, and my knees doubled up uncomfortably.’

The cart proceeded slowly towards the Place de Grève, which extended from the Hôtel de Ville to the Seine. It was not easy to get through the crowd which pressed around it. The streets were black with people, and the windows crowded with sightseers. At this moment the lady’s features underwent a sudden change of expression: ‘They were dreadfully convulsed, the keenest agony being expressed in the eyes, and the whole countenance wild.’ ‘Sir,’ she said to her confessor, ‘would it be possible, after all that is passing now, for Monsieur de Brinvilliers to have so little feeling as to remain in this world?’

Pirot answered as best he could, endeavouring to ease her mind; but what he said fell on deaf ears, for the marchioness ‘then suffered one of the strongest convulsions of her nature in the vivid apprehension of so much shame. Her face contracted, her brows were knitted, her eyes flashed, her mouth was distorted, and her whole aspect was embittered.’ ‘I do not think,’ adds Pirot, ‘that there was a moment in all the time that I had been with her when her appearance betokened more indignation, and I am not surprised that Monsieur Le Brun, who is said to have seen her at that spot, where he could look close at her for some minutes, made so fiery and terrible a head as he is said to have done in the portrait he took of her.’ Le Brun’s sketch is now No. 853 at the exhibition of the Louvre; it is in red and black chalks. It is an admirable drawing, unquestionably the artist’s masterpiece. Pirot is sketched in silhouette beside the lady.

As the cart passed slowly through the crowd, voices were raised crying out for blood, and heaping curse on curse; but others spoke pitiful words, and she heard prayers for her salvation. There was a sudden revulsion of opinion in her favour, which grew stronger and stronger till the hour of her death.

The shirt in which she was clothed filled her with amazement. ‘Sir,’ she said to her confessor, ‘look; I am dressed all in white.’

All at once a new contraction marked her features. She had just noticed Desgrez riding near her, the man who had arrested her at Liége, and subjected her to some rough treatment. She asked the executioner to move so as to hide this man from her; then she felt remorse for this ‘delicacy,’ and asked the executioner to return to his former position. ‘It was the last time her countenance showed any grimace,’ says Pirot. From that moment she was wholly under the fortifying influence of the priest who assisted her. Hope arose in her soul, more and more clear and radiant, and gave strength to her heart.

She knelt down on the step of the great door of Notre Dame, and there repeated with docility the formula dictated by the executioner, in which she publicly confessed her crimes. ‘Some people say that she hesitated in saying her father’s name,’ observes Pirot; ‘but I noticed nothing of the sort.’

Then they remounted the cart to wend towards the Place de Grève. ‘Not a word of reproach or complaint against any one escaped her; she showed no sign of vulgar fear. If she dreaded death, it was only in anticipation of the judgment of God, and neither the sight of the Grève, the proximity of the scaffold, nor the appearance of all the terrible apparatus used in this kind of execution gave her the least shadow of fright.’

The cart stopped. The executioner said to her: ‘Madam, you must persevere: it is not enough to have come here and to have responded hitherto to what this gentleman has been saying, you must go on to the end as you have begun.’ ‘This he said in a noticeably humane manner,’ observes Pirot, ‘and I was edified by it. It is true that she answered never a word, but she courteously bent her head as though to show that she took well what he had said and that she meant to continue in the temper in which he saw her. He confessed to me that he was surprised at her firmness.’

At this moment a clerk of the Parlement appeared. The commissaries were sitting in the Hôtel de Ville ready to receive any declaration Madame de Brinvilliers might still have to make about her accomplices. ‘Sir,’ she replied, ‘I have no more to say; I have told all I know.’ She renewed the declaration whereby she freed Briancourt and Desgrez from the accusations fabricated against them at her torture.

The executioner placed the ladder against the scaffold. ‘She looked at me,’ says Pirot, ‘with a gentle countenance and an expression full of gratitude and tenderness, and with tears in her eyes. “Sir,” she said to me in a pretty loud tone, which showed how self-possessed she was, but as courteous as it was firm, “we are not yet to separate. You promised not to leave me till my head is off; I hope that you will keep your word.” And as I answered nothing, because the tears and sighs which I could only with difficulty restrain robbed me of all power of speech, she added, “I beseech you, sir, to forgive me and not to regret the time you have given to me. I am sorry, for my part, to have given you so little satisfaction, at least at certain moments; I beg your pardon for it. But I cannot die without asking you to say a De profundis on the scaffold at the moment of my death, and a mass to-morrow. Remember me, sir, and pray for me.”’ Pirot remarks, ‘If I had not been at that moment more deeply moved than I had ever been in my life, I should have had many things to reply to her courtesies, and I should have promised her more than one mass; but I found it impossible to say anything more than “Yes, madam, I will do all that you bid me.”’

Just as she was walking up the steps Madame de Brinvilliers found herself next to Desgrez. She then asked his forgiveness for the trouble she had given him, and begged him to say a few masses and to pray for her. She ended her ‘compliment’ by saying that ‘she was his servant, and so she would die on the scaffold.’ Then she added, ‘Adieu, sir.’

The throng was immense. Madame de Sévigné, who had come to witness the execution from the window of one of the houses on the bridge Notre Dame, writes: ‘Never was such a crowd seen, nor Paris so moved or so eager.’

The marchioness knelt down on the scaffold, her face turned towards the river. ‘It was at that moment,’ says Pirot, ‘that I saw her so intent upon herself, so wholly occupied with what I had said we would do on the scaffold, telling me with such wonderful composure all that was necessary, and making me pass from one thing to another in due order without any prompting from me, wholly absorbed in what I said to her to prepare her for death, without the appearance of any wandering in her thoughts.

‘She was absolutely without fear. She was gentle, courteous, steadfast, and self-forgetful. She had very great patience to endure with extraordinary docility all the executioner’s preparations. He undid her hair while she was on her knees; he cut it behind and at both sides; to do so he made her turn her head several times in different ways, and he even turned it himself sometimes with no great gentleness: that lasted quite half an hour. She felt keenly the shame of the proceeding in the sight of so great a company; but she overcame her grief and submitted to everything even with joy. I fancy that she had never allowed her hair to be done so quietly as she then let it be cut and shaved; the executioner’s hand felt no rougher to her than that of a maid doing her hair; she punctually obeyed his instructions as to turning, lowering, and raising her head when he pleased. He tore off the top of the shirt which he had put over her cloak when she left the Conciergerie, so as to uncover her shoulders. She let him bind her hands as though he were putting on golden bracelets, and knot the rope about her neck as if it had been a necklace of pearls.

‘“I should like to be burned alive,” she said, “to render my sacrifice more meritorious, if I could have sufficient confidence in my courage to bear that kind of death without falling into despair.”’

The Abbé Pirot chanted the Salve, and the people crowding round the scaffold continued the chant that he began. Then he told the lady that he was about to give her absolution. Thereupon she said, her soul at peace, ‘Sir, you promised me just now to give me a second penitence on the scaffold, when I pleaded that what you gave me was too easy, and now you say nothing about it.’ ‘I asked her to say an Ave and a Sancta est Maria mater gratiae. At the end of which, saying to her, “Madam, renew your contrition,” I gave her absolution, saying only the sacramental words because time was pressing.’

The expression of her face was transformed. It was an expression of hope and joy, of serene faith and love, mingled with the exaltation of the penitent. ‘Never have I seen anything more touching,’ says Pirot, ‘than her eyes appeared to me, and if I had to paint a countenance full of contrition and sorrow of heart and hope of pardon, I could wish for no other features than those I remember still, and shall remember all my life long.’

Guillaume the executioner bandaged the eyes of the condemned woman. She repeated the last prayers along with her confessor. Guillaume with the back of his sleeve wiped away the beads of sweat which covered his brow. Suddenly Pirot heard a dull blow, and ceased to speak. ‘Madame de Brinvilliers held her head very straight. The executioner severed it at a single stroke, which cut so clean that it remained for a moment on the trunk before falling. I was indeed in agony for an instant, fearing that he had missed his aim and that he would have to strike a second time.’

‘Sir,’ said the headsman, ‘isn’t it a fine stroke?’

He added: ‘On these occasions I always commend myself to God, and hitherto he has been with me; five or six days ago this lady was troubling me and I couldn’t get her out of my head: I will have six masses said.’ And, uncorking a bottle, he drank a good draught of wine.

The body was borne to the stake; the flames consumed it, and then the ashes were scattered; but the mob struggled to collect some fragments of the charred bones: all who had been able to get near the scaffold had seen the face of the criminal illumined with a halo, and they departed saying that the dead woman was a saint. Madame de Sévigné writes that Pirot repeated the saying to every one he met.

The children of the Marquis de Brinvilliers took the name of Offémont.

Pennautier was acquitted and left the prison on July 27. He recovered his high position and the repute in which he had been held.

In declaring that she had had no other accomplices than Sainte-Croix and her lackeys Madame de Brinvilliers was speaking the truth. But at that period crimes as great as hers were being committed in Paris, and it was not long before the judges discovered them. There was for instance the celebrated case heard by the ‘Chambre Ardente,’ to which that of Madame de Brinvilliers serves as introduction.

THE POISON DRAMA AT THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV

I. THE SORCERESSES

The Dinner of La Vigoureux.

THE trial of Madame de Brinvilliers had just caused an immense sensation. The penitentiaries of Notre Dame, without naming any person, declared that ‘the majority of those who had confessed to them for some time accused themselves of poisoning somebody.’ The court and the city were still disturbed by the catastrophe which had at St. Cloud suddenly carried off the charming Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, by the sudden death of Hugues de Lionne, the great statesman, and by the startling fate which had just befallen the Duke of Savoy. A note found on September 21, 1677, in the confessional of the Jesuits in Rue Saint-Antoine denounced a plot to poison the king and the dauphin. On December 5 following, La Reynie, lieutenant of police, caused the arrest of Louis de Vanens, who said he had been an officer. The papers seized on him and on Finette, his mistress, brought to light an association of alchemists, coiners, and magicians, in which priests, officers, important bankers like Cadelan were associated with light women, lackeys, and vagabonds. The Parlement was investigating the matter, when La Reynie put his hand on a second association, like the first to all appearance, but soon to reveal itself to the eyes of the magistrates as an affair of much greater importance still.

Towards the end of the year 1678, an advocate in small practice named Maître Perrin was dining in Rue Courtauvilain with a certain Madame Vigoureux, wife of a ladies’ tailor—the trade, it will be seen, existed before to-day. The company was merry, and the wine flowed freely. Among the party was a ‘big, powerful, large-faced woman,’ who choked with laughter as she poured out for herself bumpers of burgundy that would have made a grenadier stagger. Her name was Marie Bosse, and she was the widow of a horse-dealer. She was further a well-known fortune-teller—'devineresse,’ as they said in those days. ‘A fine trade!’ she cried, and spoke of the grand people who frequented her little rookery in the Rue du Grand-Huleu—duchesses and marchionesses and princes and lords. ‘Another three poisonings, and she would retire with her fortune made!’ At this remark the guests began to laugh still more loudly: this fat woman was irresistibly funny. Maître Perrin alone saw, by a sharp and rapid frown on the face of Madame Vigoureux, that there was something serious in it. He knew Desgrez, the police officer who had arrested Madame de Brinvilliers, and to him he related the incident. Desgrez did not laugh at all, and that very day he sent the wife of one of his archers to the fortune-teller with a complaint against her husband. The fortune-teller, at the first visit, promised her assistance; at the second, she gave her a phial of poison, which the wife at once carried home to her dumfounded husband. La Reynie forthwith ordered the arrest of Madame Vigoureux, of Marie Bosse, with her daughter Manon, and her two sons, one of whom was a soldier in the guards, and the other, a boy of fifteen, was just leaving the workhouse of Bicêtre, where he had been placed to ‘improve his morals and give him a taste for work.’ Marie Bosse was arrested at her own house on the morning of January 4, 1679, in bed with her two sons. Her daughter had just risen. ‘There was only one bed, in which they all slept together.’ The preliminary inquiry brought to light a crime, the news of which created a sensation almost as great as that evoked by the poisonings by Madame de Brinvilliers.

An order in council, dated January 10, instructed La Reynie to proceed against the women Bosse, Vigoureux, and their accomplices. On March 12 an officer set about the arrest of Catherine Deshayes, wife of Antoine Monvoisin, a peddling jeweller. This woman, usually known as La Voisin, was the greatest criminal of whom history has any record. She was arrested as she left the church of Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle after hearing mass. In her track La Reynie was to penetrate into a region of crime that the imagination can scarcely conceive. ‘Human life is publicly trafficked in,’ he wrote in utter consternation: ‘death is almost the only remedy employed in family embarrassments; impieties, sacrileges, abominations are common practices in Paris, in the country, in the provinces.’

Sorcery in the Seventeenth Century

To understand the facts and the characters of the persons we are going to study, we must dwell briefly upon the beliefs of that time—a time when beliefs were dominant influences in the life of men. We know what power religious sentiments had in the seventeenth century—sentiments of an intensity and a simplicity we know little of to-day, and the corruption of which could not but engender the most absurd superstitions. That was the epoch when the sweet Marguerite Alacoque, in her divine ecstasy, exchanged her heart with that of Christ, and wrote in her own blood, under dictation from on high, the contract which ascribed to God these words: ‘I constitute thee heiress of my heart and all its treasures for time and eternity; I promise thee that thou shalt only lack succour when I lack power; thou shalt be for ever the well-beloved disciple, the plaything of my good pleasure and the burnt-offering of my love.’ And that, too, was the period when Catherine Monvoisin, the terrible sorceress of Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, found numerous and ardent followers.

The beliefs in the action of the devil, and in the power of the sorcerers, so deeply rooted in the imagination of the seventeenth century, were summed up in 1588 in the Démonomanie des Sorciers of the famous Jean Bodin. He defined the sorcerer as one who ‘by devilish and unlawful means endeavours to attain some end'; but in his book he speaks for the most part of witches. As Sprenger, the German inquisitor, remarked, ‘We should talk of the heresy of the witches, and not of sorcerers, for these are of little account.’ In Bodin are to be found most of the practices in black magic still flourishing at the end of the seventeenth century. Sorcerers and witches formed a sort of vast fraternity. There were entire families whose formulae and whose customers were handed down as heritable property. Jeanne Harvillier, burnt to death on April 30, 1579, may serve as type. Her mother, a witch like herself, had been burnt to death thirty years before. Such a death was the natural end to her career, an end foreseen, and one that terrified those fascinated by the strange vocation much less than one would imagine. Jeanne was born about 1528, at Verberie near Compiègne. At the age of twelve she was presented by her mother to the devil, who appeared to her in the shape of a very tall dark man. Jeanne renounced God, and consecrated herself to the ‘Spirit.’ ‘At the same time she had carnal intercourse with him, which continued from the age of twelve to the age of fifty, when she was arrested. It sometimes happened that her husband, lying by her side, failed to perceive what was going on.’ This was the incubat. Jeanne Harvillier was brought to justice on the charge of causing the death of men and beasts by witchcraft. She confessed to it with the greatest frankness, and told the story of her last homicide: ‘She laid some powders, prepared for her by the devil, in the place where the man who had beaten his daughter was to pass.’ Another man came by to whom she wished no harm, and immediately he felt a sharp pain all over his body. She promised to cure him, and in fact took her place at the bedside of the sick man and tended him with the gentleness of a sister of mercy. She fervently besought the devil to restore life to the dying man, but the devil replied that it was impossible.

Bodin gravely recounts how witches on the Sabbath flew through the air on broomsticks. He adds: ‘What we have said of the travels of the witches, both in body and in spirit, and the frequent and memorable experiences of the same, show as in broad daylight, and bring to the test of touch and sight, the error of those who have written that the flights of witches are imaginary, and nothing but a trance.’ This last opinion had been maintained by John Wier, physician to the Duke of Cleves, in a book which is almost a work of genius for that period. Bodin devoted all his energy to its refutation, for to throw any doubt upon the fact that the devil transports witches from one place to another would be, he said, to bring gospel history into ridicule.

Coming to study the maladies attributed to the incantations of sorcerers—consumption, hysteria, melancholy, delusions, debility—John Wier found the remedies to consist in a regular life, in conformity with the laws of God, and in the skill of physicians. What an abominable doctrine! says Bodin. He had lost all respect, then, for anything. Bodin was beside himself. John Wier, he says, wrote under the dictation of Satan. Moreover, had he not himself confessed that he was a disciple of Agrippa, ‘the greatest sorcerer that ever was'? When Agrippa died in the hospital of Grenoble, a black dog which he called ‘Monsieur’ instantly went and sprang into the river. Wier declared, it is true, that this dog was not the devil, but there was not a single sensible person who believed him.

Without taking a side in this famous dispute between Bodin and John Wier, we are bound to state that the writings of the latter had no success, at any rate in France, while Bodin’s book became a classic. Bossuet, for all his powerful intellect, firmly believed in sorcery. At the close of the seventeenth century, Bonet was obliged to go to a Protestant republic to get his treatise on medicine printed, in which he spoke lightly of magic and demoniacal possession. We have to come far into the eighteenth century to find one Abraham de Saint-André—and he was physician to Louis XV—daring, in his famous Letters, to cast doubt on the magic and witchcraft of sorcerers.

The following case, tried at the period in which the events of our story occurred, and reproduced here after the archives of the Bastille, will enable us to understand the ardour of belief with which the sorcerers themselves were animated.

By sentence of the Tournelle on September 2, 1687, a certain Pierre Hocque was condemned to the galleys. He was a shepherd, skilled in magic, who had, as the judgment declared, caused the death, by a spell he cast over them, of 395 sheep, 7 horses, and 11 cows belonging to Eustache Visié, receiver of taxes at Pacy-en-Brie. Hocque was chained up with the other galley prisoners. Nevertheless, the cattle of Eustache Visié continued to die. He had no sooner bought a cow or a sheep and placed it in his farm than it perished. Clearly the only remedy was to get Pierre Hocque to remove the direful spell he had imposed. Visié won over, by a promise of money, the galley prisoner who was fastened to the chain next to Hocque—a man named Béatrix. He spoke to the shepherd, who replied that he had in fact cast a poison-spell over the cattle of Visié, and that, failing himself, only two shepherds named Bras-de-Fer and Courte Epée had the power to remove the fatal charm. At the urgent request of Béatrix, Hocque dictated a letter to be sent to Bras-de-Fer, but the letter was no sooner despatched than he fell into a horrible despair. He cried hoarsely that Béatrix had made him do something that would cause his death, which he would be unable to escape from the moment Bras-de-Fer began to raise the spell he had cast on the cattle. And the unhappy wretch writhed about in such dreadful contortions that the other prisoners would have murdered Béatrix but for the intervention of the guards. The despair and the convulsions lasted for several days, and then Hocque died. ‘And it was the exact time,’ says the official document, ‘when Bras-de-Fer began to exorcise the cattle.’ The judges add: ‘It is established that Pierre Hocque died because Bras-de-Fer removed the poison-spell from the horses and cows, and it is true that since that time no more of Eustache Visié’s horses and cows have died.’

The conviction of the unhappy sorcerer that he was bound to die as soon as his mate undid his work was so strong that he did die. Is it possible to imagine a more striking proof of the robust faith people then had in all these devilries?

The practices of the Witches

To magic, black or white, the witches added medicine and pharmacy. They kept drugstores with phials innumerable: syrups, juleps, ointments, balms, emollients in infinite variety. They were old wives’ remedies, but their efficacy had been proved by experience, and their preparation was perfected from age to age. Paracelsus, the great Renaissance physician, burnt in 1527 the medical books of his time, declaring that nothing but the formulae of the witches was of any use. The old hags had soothing draughts for pain, healing ointments for wounds, and they acted on nervous maladies by suggestion. That was the serious side of their art. Most often the witch was a midwife too; but just as in that strange world the poisoner lurked behind the druggist, and the alchemist and the coiner were one, so the midwife played the part of baby-farmer. Finally, the witches were fortune-tellers, who cast one’s horoscope according to the drawing of cards or the lines of the hand.

What were the declarations of the witches arrested by La Reynie? Marie Bosse said that ‘nothing better could be done than to exterminate all that sort of people who examine the hand, because they are the ruin of many a woman, women of quality as well as others; the fortune-teller soon finds out their weak spot, and thereby knows how to take them and lead them wherever she will.’ She added that in Paris there were more than 400 fortune-tellers and magicians ‘who ruined a great many people, especially women, and of all conditions.’ She went on to speak of the money her cronies earned, telling how they bought places for their husbands and built houses, and that they did not realise such fortunes merely by looking at people’s hands. La Voisin said that nothing could be better than to hunt up all the people who looked at hands, that those engaged in the business ‘heard strange things when love intrigues were not prospering, that poisonings were an everyday occurrence, that many of them were paid as much as 10,000 livres’ (£2000 of our money). Similar declarations were made by Leroux, another witch, and by the magician Lesage. ‘It is extremely important,’ said the latter, ‘to get to the bottom of these wretched practices, and to fathom this mystery of iniquity which exists among all those who ostensibly are seekers after treasure, after the philosopher’s stone, and other like things, but who keep up their trade by very different means: abortions and other crimes are greater treasures than the philosopher’s stone and fortune-telling; the people who apply to the workers in mystery discuss usually the poisoning of a husband, or a wife, or a father, and even sometimes of babies at the breast.’ He went on to say that ‘these wretched people had obtained the protection of very powerful friends, so that they acted with perfect assurance and in almost perfect freedom.’ These statements are confirmed by the documents La Reynie was able to get together.

What the public asked of the witches was, first of all, to withdraw the veil from the future, and then to enable them to discover treasures. For this purpose various means were employed, all tending to the same end—to compel the ‘Spirit,’ that is the devil, by charms and incantations to present himself and reveal the mysterious spot where treasures lay hid. ‘A woman,’ writes Ravaisson, ‘usually a prostitute on the eve of accouchement, was placed at the centre of a circle drawn on the floor, and surrounded with dark candles; when the child was born, the mother gave up her son to be consecrated to the devil. After pronouncing filthy incantations, the priest cut the victim’s throat, sometimes under the very eyes of its mother; but more often he carried it away to sacrifice it elsewhere, because at the last moment outraged nature asserted her rights, and these unhappy creatures snatched their babes from death. At other times, they were content to cut the throat of a deserted child; of such there was no lack; imprudent girls, light women, gave the witches authority to dispose of the fruits of an unlawful love. There were even licensed midwives who did a large business in procuring abortion; the children after being baptized were put to death and carried at once to the cemetery; most often they were buried in the corner of a wood or consumed in an oven.’ And the witch Marie Bosse added: ‘There are so many of this sort of people in Paris that the city is choke-full of them.’

These were the practices, with others more abominable still, which caused La Reynie to write: ‘It is difficult to think merely that these crimes are possible; one can hardly bring oneself to consider them. Yet it is those who have committed them that themselves declare them, and these villains give so many particulars that it is difficult to harbour any doubt.’

The Alchemists

Alongside of the group of witches and magicians appears another group, that of the alchemists and ‘philosophers,’ represented by such people as Vanens, Chasteuil, Cadelan, Rabel, and Bachimont. We have mentioned the arrest of Louis de Vanens on December 5, 1677.

The origins of this association of alchemists and seekers after the philosopher’s stone were highly dramatic. François Galaup de Chasteuil, second of the name—he belonged to an illustrious family of Languedoc, which had produced men of the highest distinction in arms, religion, and literature—was its chief, or to use the cant expression of the cabala, its ‘author.’ His life had been more than ordinarily romantic. Born at Aix, on November 15, 1625, he was the second son of Jean Galaup de Chasteuil, attorney-general of the Exchequer Court of Aix. His elder brother Hubert, solicitor-general to the Parlement of the same town, was ‘renowned for the nobility of his mind and the profundity of his knowledge'; his younger brother Pierre was a poet, the friend of Boileau, La Fontaine, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry. After a successful student career, François was admitted doctor of law. In 1644 he became a knight of Malta. He did signal service to the Order, and Lascaris, the grand master, placed on his breast the cross of honour. He then became captain of the guards of the great Condé. In 1652 he retired to Toulon, fitted out a ship, and under the Maltese flag went privateering against the Mussulmans. Algerian corsairs captured him and led him into captivity. After two years of slavery he came to Marseilles, where he turned monk and became prior of the Carmelites. He smuggled into the convent a young girl—a slender, fair-haired child, with large, bright blue eyes; and there he kept her locked up in his cell. When she was on the point of giving birth to her child, Chasteuil, assisted by a lay brother, strangled her in her bed, and on a pitch-dark night carried her into the chapel of the convent, where he lifted several slabs of the floor and dug out a grave in which to bury her. The silence of the arches was disturbed by a dull sound. A pilgrim, lying asleep against a pillar, woke up, and saw the sinister toilers by the light of the moon which shone through the stained windows. Transfixed with fright, he remained hidden out of sight in a dark corner until dawn, when the chapel was opened, and he ran to inform the magistrates. Chasteuil was arrested, tried, and condemned. He was on the way to execution when, at the foot of the gibbet, up came Louis de Vanens, captain of the galleys, along with several soldiers. Chasteuil and Vanens were old friends. Chasteuil was rescued, and, taking his rescuer with him, he fled to Nice.

Hiding in a quiet spot, the two friends began working at the philosopher’s stone, that is, at converting copper into silver and gold. Chasteuil had some experience of alchemy, and fancied he was master of the famous secret. Full of gratitude for the service done him, he gave Vanens the secret so far as silver was concerned, but would tell him nothing about the gold, ‘not thinking Vanens prudent enough for that.’ Shortly afterwards we find Chasteuil in the service of the Duke of Savoy, captain of the guards of the White Cross, and—extraordinary fact—tutor to his son! While occupied with the education of the young Prince of Piedmont, Chasteuil continued his ‘philosophy,’ and discovered an oil, which, as he appeared convinced himself, would turn metals into gold. He also wrote translations of authors sacred and profane—the minor prophets, Petronius, the Thebaïd of Statius; and he dabbled in poetry. He had just passed his fortieth year. A contemporary gives us his portrait: ‘Middle height, very thin, always troubled with a nasty cough caused by a wound he received in the body, round-shouldered, slightly crooked, with a wry mouth, scanty beard, hair black and flat, complexion swarthy and sallow.’ Moréri adds: ‘Monsieur de Chasteuil was one of the most accomplished of gentlemen, and a perfect master of the platonic philosophy.’

Vanens and Chasteuil struck up an alliance with Robert de Bachimont, lord of La Miré, who had married a cousin of Superintendent Fouquet. Bachimont had at Paris a house near the Temple, with four smelting furnaces: a large one on the third floor, two smaller ones in an ante-room, and a large one in the cellar. He also had apartments at Compiègne in the Ecu de France, where there was nothing but crucibles, alembics, vessels of glass and of earthenware, cucurbits, philosophical stoves open and closed, grates and mortars, retorts and matrasses, sal-ammoniac and iron filings, and a thousand varieties of powders, pastes, and liquids. Finally, he had another establishment at the abbey of Ainay, near Lyons, completely fitted up for the fusion of metals, the distillation of herbs, and other practices of alchemy. Before long the association was enlarged by the addition of a person of some importance, Louis de Vasconcelos y Souza, Count of Castelmelhor, who had been practically the governor of Portugal for five or six years as the favourite of King Alfonso VI. Bachimont says that Castelmelhor taught him the secret of colouring glass red. After the death of the Duke of Savoy on June 12, 1675, Castelmelhor withdrew to England, where he gained the favour of Charles II., an ardent alchemist and astrologer. He was present at the death of the English king, and it was he that brought in the Catholic priest who gave him extreme unction.

Chasteuil and his partners spent their time in the quest for the philosopher’s stone, contact with which was to convert metals into gold; and, like the majority of alchemists, they believed that it was to be found in the solidification of mercury. ‘The hermetic philosophers,’ writes M. Huysmans, ‘discovered—and modern science to-day does not deny that they were right—that the metals are compound bodies of identical composition. Their varieties are due simply to the different proportions of the elements in combination; it is possible then, by the aid of an agent that would alter these proportions, to change these bodies one into another—to transmute mercury, for instance, into silver, and lead into gold. And this agent is the philosopher’s stone, mercury: not ordinary mercury, which, to alchemists, is only a bastard metal’ (M. Huysmans uses another expression), ‘but the mercury of the philosophers, called also lion vert.’

Among the papers of La Voisin was found an MS. poem in honour of the philosopher’s stone:

‘De l’or glorifié qui change en or ses frères.’

The secret consisted in an elixir, of which a single drop, cast

‘dans une mer profonde
Où couleraient fondus tous les métaux du monde,
Suffirait pour la teindre et fixer en soleil.'[7]

Chasteuil and his fellows did not merely seek the solidification of mercury, which was to produce the philosopher’s stone, but the liquefaction of gold by cold: this was to furnish a universal panacea. ‘Liquid gold restores health and strength, gives flesh to greybeards and colour to the cheeks of girls, cures the plague,’ and so on.

Solid mercury being unobtainable, they sought, for the transmutation of metals, those powders or oils about which we hear so frequently at that period; and, as we shall see, they had the best reasons in the world for believing that they had put their finger on the secret, at least as far as silver[8] was concerned.

In 1676 our partners all established themselves at Paris, where they added to their company three collaborators, all important in different ways: the quack Rabel, a physician celebrated in his day; a rich banker of Paris named Pierre Cadelan, secretary to the king; and a young Parlement advocate named Jean Terron du Clausel. Du Clausel lodged with Vanens in the Rue d’Anjou, in a house which had for sign Le Petit Hôtel d’Angleterre. He was a valuable addition to the band, because he could distil at pleasure, being ‘licensed.’ Rabel seems to have been possessed of considerable real science. Rabel water, which he invented, is still used in our own day—a mixture of alcohol and sulphuric acid, which acts as an astringent in cases of hæmorrhage. Rabel had compounded another elixir, whose innumerable merits were celebrated in notices in prose and verse which the most glowing of modern advertisements have not surpassed. Cadelan supplied funds. Bodin speaks in very precise terms about the alchemists: ‘They extract the quintessence of plants, and make admirable and salutary oils and waters, and discourse subtly on the virtues and the transmutation of metals; but they also make false money.’ At the moment when Cadelan and his associates were arrested, he was on the point of farming the Paris mint. Was this in order to make false louis d’or, as historians have supposed? We believe rather that it was to find means of circulating the products of the alchemical experiments of his associates, for by that time they had no manner of doubt about the efficacy of Chasteuil’s formulae. A bar of silver cast by Vanens, and taken by Bachimont to the mint, had just been accepted there at a good price as pure metal. It is scarcely necessary to add that this could only have been due to an error of the mint official; this famous silver made out of copper by Vanens and Chasteuil was nothing but ‘white metal.’ Nevertheless, it was a success which opened before the eyes of our partners splendid vistas of future wealth.

When Louis de Vanens was arrested on December 5, 1677, Louvois believed that he had seized a spy. But he had put his hand on an alchemist, and soon the whole band—Terron, Cadelan, Monsieur and Madame Bachimont, Barthomynat (known as La Chaboissière), de Vanens’ valet—were laid by the heels, some in the Bastille, the others at Pierre-en-Cize. Chasteuil had just died quietly at Verceil. Rabel had escaped into England, where Charles II lodged and fed him, gave him a pension, and loaded him with presents. Later he returned to France, and was incarcerated in his turn.

We regarded it as essential to say something of this band of alchemists and ‘philosophers’ by way of introduction to Louis de Vanens. This young noble of Provence, ‘a man of well-knit and graceful figure,’ had brilliant connections at court, where he was on a footing of intimacy with the king’s dazzling mistress, Madame de Montespan. On the other hand, he was an assiduous visitor to La Voisin, and was even for some time her ‘author.’ Vanens was the link between the alchemists and the witches. He was devoted to demoniacal practices. His valet, La Chaboissière, declared that one night he had to accompany his master and a cleric into the woods on the outskirts of Poissy, where they searched for treasures with incantations and invocations to the ‘spirit.’ Vanens was a diabolical character. He was confined at the Bastille in the same room with other prisoners, as the custom was. He had with him a sort of white and tan spaniel. As midnight approached, he recited some prayer over the body of the dog, and went through the ceremony of consecration. Then he took a prayer-book containing a picture of the Virgin, and laid the picture on the back of the dog, saying, ‘Avaunt, devil! Behold thy good mistress!’ To the remarks of his companions in captivity, he replied: ‘Neither God nor the king shall prevent me from doing what I have done.’ To gauge the strange and passionate vigour of these superstitions, we must remember that Vanens was in the Bastille, quite aware that these practices might bring him to the stake.

We shall see in the sequel the importance of Vanens when we recall the following lines found in the notes of Nicolas de la Reynie: ‘To see La Chaboissière again about his reluctance to have written down in his statement, after hearing it read, that Vanens had been concerned in giving Madame de Montespan counsel which deserves that he should be drawn and quartered.’

La Voisin

To the portraits of Chasteuil the alchemist and of Vanens, we must add that of the most famous of the witches, Catherine Deshayes, known as La Voisin. It was of her that La Fontaine wrote:

‘Une femme à Paris faisait la pythonisse.’

La Voisin stated to La Reynie: ‘Some women asked if they would not soon become widows, because they wished to marry some one else; almost all asked this and came for no other reason. When those who come to have their hands read ask for anything else, they nevertheless always come to the point in time, and ask to be ridded of some one; and when I gave those who came to me for that purpose my usual answer, that those they wished to be rid of would die when it pleased God, they told me that I was not very clever.’ Margot, La Voisin’s servant, said that the whole world came there, adding: ‘La Voisin is to-day dragging a great ruck down with her—a long chain of persons of all sorts and conditions.’ The Parisians used to go in companies to the house of the fortune-teller: they were quite pleasure parties. The merry crew would overflow into the garden lawns surrounding the cottage at Villeneuve-sur-Gravois. This was the district, but sparsely inhabited, between the ramparts and the St. Denis quarter.

The sorceress was brought into the city drawing-rooms as nowadays fashionable singers are brought. ‘At that time, La Voisin had as much money as she wanted. Every morning, before she rose, people were waiting for her, and she had visitors all the rest of the day: after that, in the evening, she kept open house, engaged fiddlers, and enjoyed herself thoroughly; this went on for several years.’ This life had little resemblance, it will be seen, to that of her ancestress, the witch described by Michelet: ‘You will find her in the most dismal places, isolated,—in houses of ill-fame and ruined huts and hovels. Where could she have lived except on wild heaths—the hapless wretch who was so hunted down, the accursed, proscribed, hated poisoner?’

La Voisin earned in a year as much as £2000 or even £4000 in English money; but her gains were spent in revelry. She entertained her lovers in princely style, for she would have thought it unworthy of her if they were not comfortable; and her lovers were many. We find in the first rank of them André Guillaume, the executioner of Paris, who beheaded Madame de Brinvilliers, and who, by a horrible coincidence, only just escaped executing La Voisin herself: among them also the Viscount de Cousserans, the Count de Labatie, Fauchet the architect, a wine merchant of the neighbourhood, Lesage the magician, the alchemist Blessis, and others.

We must add that Blessis and Lesage spent much money on her, ostensibly in connection with the philosopher’s stone, for La Voisin had a sincere faith in alchemy. She subsidised great enterprises, and helped to establish manufactures, being much interested in scientific and industrial progress; but in regard to industrial undertakings she fell mainly into the hands of sharpers who swindled her out of her money.

However, La Voisin, proud of her trade as sorceress, which brought persons of the highest rank to bend before her in obsequious and suppliant attitudes, did not stick at any expense that seemed likely to augment her glory. She delivered her oracular sayings clothed in a robe and a cloak specially woven for her, for which she paid 15,000 livres (£3000 of English money). The queen herself had no finery more beautiful than this ‘imperial robe,’ which ‘was the talk of all Paris.’ The cloak was of crimson velvet studded with 205 two-headed eagles of fine gold, lined with costly fur; the skirt was of bottle-green velvet, edged with French point. Even her shoes were embroidered with golden two-headed eagles. The mere weaving of the eagles on the cloak cost 400 livres (£80 to-day). We possess the bills of the maker.

But under the glittering shows of wealth La Voisin had preserved most dissolute manners. She was constantly drunk. She indulged in fishwife’s brawls with Lesage. Latour, who was her ‘great author,’ used to thrash her. She fought with Marie Bosse and tore her hair out. ‘One day, Latour being with her on the ramparts, she got him to give her husband fifty blows with a stick, while she held Latour’s hat.’ On that occasion, Latour bit poor Monvoisin’s nose. But on the other hand, the sorceress regularly attended the church of the Abbé de Saint-Amour, rector of the University of Paris, an austere Jansenist; and Madame de la Roche-Guyon stood god-mother to her daughter.

The husband whom La Voisin so brutally got beaten, appears to have been a decent man. In those days there was at Montmartre a chapel dedicated to St. Ursula, who enjoyed the power to ‘improve’ husbands. The procedure was to carry there, some Friday morning, a shirt of the wicked spouse. Our sorceress had the most implicit faith in the efficacy of this practice, and we must do her the justice to state that she always began by sending to Montmartre women who came to her with tales of their troubles. She availed herself of the remedy on her own account, and poor Monvoisin had to march to the place carrying his shirt under his arm. He was a husband for whose improvement St. Ursula does not appear to have been required to spend much effort.

Lesage, the witch’s lover, advised her to get rid of Monvoisin. A sheep’s heart was bought, ‘to which Lesage did something,’ and then it was buried in the garden behind the gate. Lo and behold, Monvoisin was seized with severe pain in the stomach. He cried out that if there was anybody who wished to do for him, he had better shoot him at once instead of letting him linger. La Voisin, struck with remorse, hastened to the Augustines to confess and obtain a general absolution; she took the sacrament, and on her return compelled Lesage to undo his wicked charms.

She related very simply and frankly to La Reynie the first steps of her career. Her husband, at that time, was doing nothing, but he had been a hawking jeweller, and then a shopkeeper on the Pont-Marie. He had lost his shop, and then, seeing her husband ruined, ‘she had devoted herself to cultivating the powers that God had given her.’ ‘It was chiromancy and face-reading that I learnt at the age of nine. I have been persecuted for fourteen years: that is the work of the missionaries’ (these were the members of a community established by St. Vincent de Paul, then very popular, who were actively occupied in converting sinners and removing scandals of all kinds). ‘However,’ she continued, ‘I gave an account of my art to the vicars-general, the Holy See being vacant, and to several doctors of the Sorbonne to whom I had been sent, and they found nothing to object to.’ Marie Bosse also spoke of the time when her friend went to the Sorbonne to argue on astrology with the professors.

Thus La Voisin set up as fortune-teller in order to restore order and comfort to her household. One of her friends, La Lepère, told her sometimes that she ought not to engage in such great crimes. ‘You are mad!’ cried the witch, ‘the times are too bad. How am I to feed my family? I have six persons on my hands!’ And in fact, until her arrest, La Voisin had been the constant support of her old mother, to whom she gave money every week.

La Voisin’s claim that her art was founded on face-reading was quite genuine. She had made a profound study of physiognomy. We find innumerable references to this subject in the documents of her case, and also a ‘Treatise on physiognomy, supported on six immovable columns: (1) sympathy between body and mind; (2) relations between rational and irrational animals; (3) the differences between the sexes; (4) national diversities; (5) physical temperaments; (6) diversities of age; not depending on a single sign, for men are often attacked by some defect which force of mind, aided by grace, can assuredly overcome.’ When the Countess de Beaufort de Canillac came to consult the fortune-teller, ‘the lady wishing to give me her hand without unmasking, I told her that I did not know physiognomies of velvet, whereupon the lady removed her mask.’ La Voisin confessed that she read much more in the features than in the lines of the hand, ‘it being no easy thing to conceal a passion or any considerable disturbing emotion.’ She was not merely a physiognomist, but an expert psychologist, and that was how she gave a real foundation to her sorcery. We may cite the following incident among many others.

Marie Brissart, widow of a Parlement counsellor, tenderly loved and handsomely supported a captain of guards named Louis Denis de Rubentel, Marquis de Mondétour, who became lieutenant-general in 1688. He was a personage of whom Saint-Simon, a severe censor, speaks thus: ‘He had been able to contemn basenesses, and to withdraw into his virtue, which was beyond his wealth.’ Madame Brissart used to send him money when he was on service, after having equipped him from top to toe on his departure. It happened that the cavalier displayed some coldness towards his mistress, with the idea of getting her purse to open still more generously. The widow, seeing nothing of her captain, became alarmed, and hastened to La Voisin. She began her incantations, with the assistance of Lesage. The magician walked up and down the garden with a wand, with which he struck the earth, repeating the words, Per Deum sanctum, per Deum vivum! Then he said: ‘Louis Denis de Rubentel, I conjure thee in the name of the Almighty to go find Marie Miron (Madame Brissart’s maiden name): she to possess thee wholly, body, soul, and spirit, and thou to love none but her!’ On another occasion, he put into a little ball of wax a paper on which the names of Rubentel and Madame Brissart were written, and in the presence of the latter threw the ball into the fire, where it burst with a loud noise. These fine charms were still without result, when one morning La Voisin, with the intuition of a clairvoyant, said to her weeping client: ‘You write every day and send your maid to Rubentel, but he pays no attention to you; it is mad conduct to write and send every day'; and the lady having ceased to write and send, Monsieur de Rubentel, who in turn began to be afraid lest so precious a fount should dry up, returned to her ‘without anything else having been done; yet the lady, believing that La Voisin had done some extraordinary thing, gave her twelve pistoles.’

The witch heard all sorts of confessions. There were wonderful dreams of adoring affection told her by lovers of twenty years, who came to her red with emotion, or wrote thrilling letters in order to bring their torment to an end, begging her to soften the hard hearts of their mistresses, or to bend the opposition of a cruel father. Or it was the fierce carnal love of mature women obstinately clinging to the lovers who were neglecting them for fresher girls. There were also the passions of ambitious women, greedy for money and honours, which bring us to the horrors of the ‘black mass.’

La Voisin was assisted in these monstrous rites by a priest ‘squint-eyed and old,’ with bloated face, and prominent blue veins forming a network on his cheeks—the terrible Abbé Guibourg. Formerly chaplain to the Count de Montgommery, he was at this time sacristan of St. Marcel, at St. Denis. He used to say mass, according to the proper rites, wearing the alb, stole, and maniple. ‘The women on whose bodies mass was said were laid stark naked, without even their chemise, upon a table which served as altar; their arms were stretched out, and they held a taper in each hand.’ Sometimes they did not actually undress themselves, ‘but only tucked up their garments as high as the throat.’ The chalice was placed on the bare belly. At the moment of the offertoire, a child had its throat cut. Guibourg usually stuck a long needle into its neck. The blood of the expiring victim was poured into the chalice, and mixed with the blood of bats and other materials obtained by filthy means. Flour was added to solidify the mess, which was thus made to resemble the Host, to be consecrated at the moment when, in the sacrifice of the mass, transubstantiation takes place. The scene is reconstructed by La Reynie according to the testimony of the accused.

Black masses were not the only sorceries whose rites required the sacrifice of children. La Voisin and her fellow-witches perpetrated a terrible slaughter of them. Children deserted by their unmarried mothers, others bought from poor women, did not suffice: several sorceresses were convicted of having killed their own children for these atrocious proceedings. Here, for instance, is a horrible detail: the daughter of La Voisin, on the very eve of her trouble, not trusting her mother, fled the house, and only returned after placing her infant in safety. The witches ran off with children in the streets. La Reynie wrote to Louvois: ‘Remember the great disturbance in Paris in 1676, when there were seditious gatherings and mobs and runnings to and fro in several parts of the city, through the rumour that people carried off children to cut their throats, though no one then understood what the cause of the rumour could be. The mob, however, proceeded to various excesses against the women suspected of being child-stealers. The king ordered an inquiry. Proceedings were taken (against those who rose against the witches), and a woman who was guilty of violence was condemned to death, but obtained a special pardon.’

La Voisin, like all the sorceresses, practised medicine. Among her papers were found recipes for the cure of pimples, a remedy for headache, the prescription for ‘a quintessence of hellebore which kept the Dean of Westminster alive for 166 years.’ She was a midwife, and especially a procurer of abortion. ‘Above the room (where she gave consultations) there was a sort of loft in which she procured abortions, and behind the room there was a recess with a stove, in which were found the charred remains of small human bones.’ Little children were burned in this stove. One day, in an effusive moment, La Voisin confessed that ‘she had burnt in the stove, or buried in the garden, the bodies of more than 2500 children prematurely born.’ Here again we come upon surprising particulars. The witch was very insistent that children thus brought into the world should be baptized before death. One evening La Lepère, a midwife friend of La Voisin, happened to be in the famous room with the witch’s husband. La Voisin, who was in the loft, came down suddenly in joyous haste and with radiant countenance, crying: ‘What luck! the child has been dipped!’

Such was the strange and horrible creature—the last of the great sorceresses who haunted the imagination of Michelet—the extraordinary woman whose crimes sent a shudder through the man who had heard the confessions of the most redoubtable criminals of his time—Nicolas de la Reynie.

We have a portrait of La Voisin by Antoine Coypel. She is represented on the way to execution in the linen shift of condemned criminals. Contemporaries depict her as a small stoutish woman, rather pretty, owing to her eyes, which were extraordinarily bright and piercing. The artist has given her a froglike expression, but no doubt he sketched her under the influence of a preconceived idea. Madame de Sévigné, who had a singular taste for this sort of spectacle, saw her mount to the stake: ‘La Voisin,’ she wrote, ‘very prettily surrendered her soul to the devil.’ The confessor of the sorceress has given his testimony to her edifying end: ‘I am loaded with so many crimes,’ she said with simple and profound emotion, ‘that I could not wish God to work a miracle to snatch me from the flames, because I cannot suffer too much for the sins I have committed.’

The Magician Lesage

La Voisin’s principal coadjutor was the magician Lesage. He was one by himself in this world of sorceresses, alchemists, and magicians. A sceptic among believers, he duped the women with whom he worked as well as the fashionable ladies who came to avail themselves of his art.

Originally from Venoix near Caen, his real name was Adam Cœuret. His portrait is sketched by La Vigoureux: ‘he wore a ruddy wig, was ill formed, clothed as a rule in grey, with a cloak of homespun.’ He was a wool merchant. Though he had a wife in Lower Normandy, he promised La Voisin that he would marry her if she became a widow. The first alias he chose was Duboisson. In 1667 he was arrested, condemned to the galleys for dealings with the devil, and liberated in 1672 through the kind offices of La Voisin. The galley in which he rowed was lying in sight of the port of Genoa when the pardon reached him.

Set at liberty, Cœuret returned to Paris, where he renewed his relations with the witches.

His whole art consisted in a remarkable talent for jugglery, by which he deceived the witches themselves, persuading them that he possessed ‘all the science of the cabala.’ They adopted him as partner in their lucrative operations. The reports of the examination of La Voisin give curious information on this head. ‘Lesage took a live pigeon in the Vale of Misery (on the quay of La Mégisserie, where poultry was sold) and burnt it in a warming-pan. Having then sifted its ashes, he put them in his room. It was the beginning of Lent, during which he used to recite the Passion of our Lord daily, with his feet in water, though it was freezing hard. Then he put a white cloth on the table, lit two tapers, and sent for three crystal glasses, with which having performed his “mystery,” which was Greek to La Voisin, he shut them up in a cupboard with a twig of laurel, and then, though he retained the key, he asked her for the three glasses and the laurel twig which he had locked in the cupboard. They were not found there; and then he said that he would give her nothing else to keep, and having sent her into the garden, she found them all three in a row in the summer-house. And when she asked him how he did that, Lesage said that he was one of the apostles and of the company of the Sibyls.’

At other times Lesage celebrated a sort of mass, got up as a priest. At the moment of the offertory he would break two pieces of ordinary bread, and after having made La Voisin and her husband kneel down, he gave them each a piece of bread ‘just as if they were at communion, and then made them drink some holy water which, as he said, he had turned into wine, and it was a liquid of an extremely pleasant taste.’ ‘A sergeant having come to La Voisin’s house to distrain on her at the instance of an upholsterer named Lenoir, La Voisin sent for Lesage, told him that she was ruined, and that there was something in the cupboard which must be taken away, namely, a consecrated wafer; and at the same time Lesage sent away the Marquise de Lusignan, who happened to be in the house, and told her to go home, and when she got there to put a white napkin on her bed, for something he was going to send her. And in fact the wafer was found by the marquise at her own house, without any one seeing who had taken it there.’

The pretended sorceries of Lesage thus consisted simply of clever conjuring tricks. They sufficed to amaze his clients. He made them write, for instance, requests to the devil in notes which he then pretended to throw in the fire, enclosed in balls of wax; and some days after he gave them back to them, saying that the devil, who had received them through the flames, had returned them.