The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV

by Anne Somerset

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  As soon as she was informed of these developments, the widow of Antoine d’Aubray rushed to Paris seeking vengeance for his murder. She lodged a formal complaint at the Châtelet, demanding that proceedings be instigated against La Chausée. Mme de Brinvilliers promptly fled the country. For a time La Chausée also went into hiding but at six o’clock in the morning of 4 September 1672 he was captured as he slunk down a Paris street ‘with his nose in his overcoat’.36

  La Chausée was imprisoned while evidence was gathered that could be used against him at his trial. The judicial process in seventeenth-century France differed from that in England in several important respects. In particular, there was no trial by jury, but this did not necessarily mean that the French system was more prejudicial to the interests of an accused person than was the case across the Channel. In France the Crown’s case was pieced together by an investigating magistrate who interrogated the accused and interviewed other witnesses. The resulting depositions were subsequently laid before a panel of judges. The accused was also brought face to face with hostile witnesses, who repeated in his presence allegations they had made earlier. Although the defendant was never permitted access to legal counsel, during these confrontations he was entitled to challenge the witness’s fitness to give evidence and to contradict specific pieces of testimony. The judges considered what emerged at these encounters before proceeding to the final stages of the trial when the accused appeared in court and was questioned while seated on the culprit’s stool, or sellette. The judges then reached their conclusions, aided by the recommendations of the Attorney-General, who had independently inspected the evidence and formed his own judgement.

  The case against La Chausée was far from compelling. At the time of his arrest he was found to be carrying Cypriot vitriol, but he claimed that he used this in his professional capacity as a barber to treat clients cut while shaving. One witness came forward to testify that despite La Chausée’s ostentatious attentions to his late master, in private he had displayed a callous indifference to his sufferings. When asked about M. d’Aubray’s health La Chausée had allegedly responded, ‘That bugger’s taking his time! He’s causing us a lot of trouble. I don’t know when he’ll die.’37 However, this scarcely constituted proof that La Chausée had poisoned the d’Aubray brothers.

  While reluctant to convict the defendant on such slender grounds, the judges accepted that the use of torture was warranted. This was unusual, for a suspect could only be tortured prior to conviction if the investigating magistrate could claim to have uncovered ‘considerable proof’ of culpability, but it was felt that in this instance the criteria had been fulfilled. However, there was no certainty that torture would force La Chausée to confess and the law stated that if a prisoner withstood the pain without incriminating himself he could not subsequently be convicted. There was, in fact, quite a strong likelihood that La Chausée would have managed to save himself in this way, for prisoners who knew that their lives hung in the balance could show remarkable fortitude under torture. Though there can be no doubt that victims of ‘preparatory torture’ were subjected to terrible pain, it would seem that the torture was applied somewhat less rigorously than in the past. In the fourteenth century virtually all torture sessions resulted in admissions but of the 101 cases where it was used in the year 1619–20, only three acknowledgements of guilt were secured.38 And indeed, precisely because she was fearful that La Chausée would confound his interrogators, Antoine d’Aubray’s vengeful widow now intervened to persuade the judges that it would be inappropriate to offer La Chausée any chance of escape. The judges decided she was right. Although they had only ‘conjectures and strong presumptions’ on which to base their decision,39 on 24 March 1673 they pronounced La Chausée guilty of murder and sentenced him to be broken on the wheel after undergoing torture.

  The object of torturing a condemned person after obtaining a conviction was to force the prisoner to name any accomplices who had connived in the crime. The First President of the Paris Parlement, Guillaume Lamoignon, had recently urged that the practice should be banned. This was not merely on humanitarian grounds but also because it produced such unsatisfactory results, for it was ‘rare that it has extracted the truth from the mouth of a condemned man’.40 It could even lead investigators astray, as would subsequently be demonstrated during the Affair of the Poisons. In a bid to relieve their agonies victims could say things which were completely misleading and excessive reliance on confessions obtained in this way had many dangers. Nevertheless, torture remained an integral part of the French justice system.

  In La Chausée’s case it appeared at first that nothing would be wrung from him by this means, but in the end torture did produce the desired results, He was subjected to the brodequins, a fearful instrument in which the legs of the victim were trapped between planks. These were progressively tightened as wedges were inserted, crushing the limbs and causing excruciating pain. Throughout the torture session La Chausée continued to protest his innocence and it was only when he was released from the ghastly contraption and placed on a mattress to recover that his resolve suddenly crumbled. Just as his interrogators were despairing, he volunteered a full confession acknowledging that he had murdered the d’Aubray brothers.

  With his guilt established beyond doubt, La Chausée went to his execution. His sufferings were not yet over, for he was killed in the horrible manner known as ‘breaking on the wheel’. After he had been spreadeagled on a cartwheel, his limbs and torso were struck repeatedly with iron bars, breaking his bones and damaging internal organs. He was then left to die in agony. An English traveller who saw a criminal being put to death in this way in Poitiers was shaken by the experience. On that occasion a degree of mercy was shown, as the victim was eventually put out of his misery by being strangled. Even so, the Englishman noted that ‘seeing what this caitiff suffered made us conclude that it was a cruel death to be broken in that sort’.41

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  Meanwhile, even before La Chausée had been brought to trial, attempts were made to lay hands on Mme de Brinvilliers. In the autumn of 1672 it emerged that she had fled to England and the French at once sought to extradite her. Permission for this was granted, but the English declined to arrest the fugitive themselves, and the resultant delays gave Mme de Brinvilliers time to escape to the Continent. During La Chausée’s trial she was pronounced in contempt after ignoring a summons to appear in court and for this the judges sentenced her to be beheaded. For several years, however, Mme de Brinvilliers remained beyond the reach of justice as she travelled war-torn Europe, never resting long in one place and eking out a penurious and wretched existence. Ironically, her main means of subsistence was a small allowance sent to her by the devout sister whom she had once plotted to kill. In August 1675 the sister died of natural causes, leaving Mme de Brinvilliers in a more precarious condition than ever.

  Then, in the spring of 1676, Mme de Brinvilliers made the colossal blunder of renting a room in a convent in Liège. Liège at the time was an independent city state but it had become embroiled in the war between France and Holland, and a year earlier French troops had occupied its citadel. When her presence there became known the French applied to the city authorities for permission to arrest her and this was granted. On 25 March she was seized and taken to the citadel. The news was at once relayed to a delighted Louis XIV, who had shown a keen interest in her case and taken it ‘very much to heart that Mme de Brinvilliers does not escape justice’.42

  When her room at the convent was searched a document was found headed ‘My Confession’. Unlike that written by Sainte-Croix, the paper was carefully preserved by her captors who saw that, provided it could be used in evidence against her, it contained extraordinarily damaging admissions. Most important, she acknowledged in it that she had poisoned her father and two brothers, and she also recorded that she had tried to poison her daughter and her husband, though in neither case had this proved fatal. In all, she had made five or s
ix attempts on her husband’s life, thinking ‘to make myself more comfortable’ by ridding herself of him, though she had subsequently thought better of it and nursed him back to health.

  Other disclosures were startling in a different way, for she detailed a history of remarkable sexual depravity. She noted that three of her five children had not been fathered by M. de Brinvilliers, for two were the product of her fourteen-year union with Sainte-Croix and another was the offspring of an unnamed cousin. She would have had more illegitimate children had she not taken drugs to induce abortion. Besides taking lovers, she had ‘committed incest three times a week, perhaps three hundred times’ in all. She further claimed that she had lost her virginity aged seven and that she had been even younger when she had first had impure ‘touchings’ with her brother.43

  One should perhaps be cautious about accepting all aspects of this confession as the literal truth. Mme de Brinvilliers herself would later attempt to discredit it by insisting that she had been of unsound mind when she wrote it and while it was obviously in her own interests to say this, parts of it invite scepticism. For instance, it is hard to know what to make of her claim that she had sinful contact with one of her brothers (the eldest of whom was two years younger than her) at such an early age. However, when knowledge of this confession seeped out, few people bothered with quibbles of this sort; the text was instead taken as confirmation that she had been predisposed to evil even as a child. Nowadays a different interpretation can be drawn from it for, if it was true that she was sexually abused as a very young child, this might explain, even if it cannot excuse, her extraordinary callousness and psychopathic tendencies.

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  Once a passport had been obtained, Mme de Brinvilliers was driven under military escort through the Spanish Netherlands to France. En route she made several suicide attempts, repeatedly swallowing glass and pins, and also attempting to impale herself on a sharp stick inserted into her vagina. Reports of the last incident were seized on with glee by a male correspondent of Mme de Sévigné, the widowed noblewoman whose own witty and insightful letters are such an imperishable source for the period. He affected to believe that, far from trying to harm herself, Mme de Brinvilliers had been seeking sexual gratification, for he wrote archly, ‘She thrust a stick – guess where! Not in her eye, not in her mouth, not in her ear, not in her nose, and not Turkish fashion [i.e. up the anus]. Guess where!’ During her trial Mme de Brinvilliers’s judges were less inclined to be jocular about these suicide bids. One remarked that her attempts to kill herself represented a wilful rejection of the possibility of divine redemption and were hence her greatest sin of all.44

  When Mme de Brinvilliers reached Mezières on the French borders an office holder from the Paris Parlement named M. Palluau was sent to interview her. Palluau had been the investigating magistrate in the proceedings against La Chausée and hence was already familiar with the essentials of the case. It was thought significant that the King had decided the preliminary part of the investigation should take place outside the capital, for already there were fears that the magistrates of the Parisian law courts were so closely related by blood and marriage to Mme de Brinvilliers that they would be prejudiced in her favour. It may seem strange that there could be concern on this point, for Mme de Brinvilliers’s victims had also been members of the legal fraternity and one might therefore have thought that class solidarity would have encouraged those judging her to be particularly severe. On the contrary, however, it was felt that the magistrates might consider that her conviction would reflect dishonourably on their own profession and that on this account they would treat her too indulgently. Later it was even suggested that M. Palluau was swayed by considerations of this sort and that he had failed to pursue the case against Mme de Brinvilliers with the requisite energy.

  By the end of April Mme de Brinvilliers had been transferred to Paris, where she was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. Palluau set about assembling evidence against the accused, but at first he uncovered nothing that established her guilt beyond doubt. La Chausée’s testimony in the torture chamber was not particularly helpful for, while he had made it clear that he had murdered the d’Aubray brothers on the orders of Sainte-Croix, he had been ambiguous about the part Mme de Brinvilliers had played. At one point La Chausée had said that it was she who had supplied Sainte-Croix with the poisons used to kill her brothers, but he later contradicted himself by saying that Sainte-Croix had told him she had been unaware of his plans to poison the two men. The fact that Sainte-Croix had written that everything in his casket belonged to her was also far from conclusive, for his note was dated 25 May 1670 and it was arguable that the poisons had been placed in the casket after that.

  Testimony gathered from witnesses was also not very impressive. A former servant girl of Mme de Brinvilliers alleged that her mistress had tried to poison her with gooseberry jam and ham, permanently affecting her health. Another maidservant testified that Mme de Brinvilliers had once ordered her to fetch a pair of earrings from her casket, and when she unlocked the box she had seen it contained pots of paste and powder. The maid said that, as the daughter of an apothecary, she had recognised these as forms of arsenic. She added that on another occasion, when Mme de Brinvilliers was plainly drunk, her employer had opened up her casket and said laughingly, ‘This is what you need to revenge yourself on your enemies; it is full of inheritances!’45 When she had sobered up, Mme de Brinvilliers had clearly regretted her indiscretion and had begged her servant not to tell anyone what she had said. Although the evidence against La Chausée had not been much more substantial, it needed weightier proof than this to persuade the judges to convict a woman of Mme de Brinvilliers’s standing.

  Under repeated interrogations Mme de Brinvilliers herself revealed remarkably little. She adamantly maintained her innocence, insisting that she had been wholly ignorant of Sainte-Croix’s machinations against her brothers. She explained the promissory note in Sainte-Croix’s casket by saying she had hoped to lodge money with him in order to safeguard it from her creditors. As for her written confession, she disowned it entirely, claiming that she had written it when delirious with a fever, which had filled her mind with ‘reveries and suchlike extravagances’.46

  The investigating magistrate did not accept her explanation but he was doubtful whether he could make use of her confession. If it was agreed that the document had been drawn up under the secrecy of the confessional, then it was by definition ‘extra-judicial’ and it would be sacrilegious to reveal its contents in a court of law. Concerned about the prospect of violating ‘one of religion’s most sacred mysteries’, Palluau consulted a panel of senior judges. Several disagreed with Palluau’s belief that the document was inadmissible, but the First President of the Paris Parlement, Guillaume Lamoignon, did not deny that the matter was ‘highly problematic’. In the end the question was referred to a group of theological experts who pronounced that, in view of the fact that no priest had been present when the document was written, it was not a confession in the religious sense. Accordingly, it was permissible to use it as evidence.47

  On its own her confession might not have sufficed to convict her, but on 13 July there was a major new development. In the autumn of 1670 Mme de Brinvilliers had employed as a tutor for her children a barrister in his early thirties named Jean-Baptiste Briancourt. Soon after entering her service he had become her lover. After Mme de Brinvilliers’s arrest he had been imprisoned in hopes that he would testify against her, but so far he had said nothing incriminating. Now, however, he indicated to the Attorney-General that he was prepared to reveal all he knew.

  On being taken before the court, Briancourt related that shortly after starting his job he had travelled with Mme de Brinvilliers to her country house in Picardy. Her younger brother had died fairly recently and during the journey she suddenly confided that she and Sainte-Croix had poisoned him. She described how they had used La Chausée to effect this, and later came close to admitting that she had killed h
er father and her other brother in the same way. Briancourt said that he had naturally been alarmed to discover what ‘a strange woman’ he had taken as his mistress, but that he was too infatuated to break off the relationship.

  Briancourt had grown more uncomfortable when, after receiving a visit from Sainte-Croix, Mme de Brinvilliers started hinting to him that she wanted him to help her murder her sister and sister-in-law. Briancourt had indignantly told her that he would rather die than harm either of them, but he at once saw that this response had vexed Mme de Brinvilliers and made her distrustful of him. Shortly afterwards Mme de Brinvilliers had invited Briancourt to visit her at midnight in the bedroom of her Paris house. Before doing so, Briancourt had looked into the room through a window and to his horror had seen her assisting Sainte-Croix to conceal himself. Realising that Sainte-Croix was planning to attack him as he lay in his mistress’s arms, Briancourt entered and, ignoring Mme de Brinvilliers’s attempts to entice him into her bed, flushed Sainte-Croix from his hiding place. Sainte-Croix promptly fled, whereupon Mme de Brinvilliers leapt upon Briancourt’s back like some crazed incubus. With difficulty he shook her off, but she then became hysterical and threatened to take poison. She only calmed down when Briancourt somewhat surprisingly promised to forgive her. Though he had genuinely hoped they were reconciled, within a few days Briancourt became convinced that Sainte-Croix was still trying to assassinate him. This had finally persuaded him that the situation was untenable and that he had no alternative but to quit Mme de Brinvilliers’s nightmarish household.48