by Holly Tucker
In his hand the priest clutched a key, which he claimed Sainte-Croix had entrusted to him before his death. Recognizing the key, Sainte-Croix’s wife led the priest and the commissioner to a small closet, where her husband kept his most precious possessions. She was just as curious as the others to learn what it held. For years her husband had banned her from this precious space, making it clear that she should never attempt to enter it. With Picard’s approval, the priest inserted the metal key and turned the lock.
A set of papers rested on top of several closed boxes. The priest recognized it as Sainte-Croix’s final confession. In an era when death could and often did strike without warning, it was not unusual for men and women to write detailed confessions of their sins in life, in the hopes of being forgiven for them in death. Both Picard and the priest agreed that the confession should be burned without reading it. Sainte-Croix’s sins were between him and his God.
The confession now in ashes in the fireplace, the commissioner explored the contents of the closet as the creditors and notaries looked over his shoulder. A leather box about fifteen inches long and twelve inches wide, covered in calfskin, caught his eye. Lifting the lid slowly, Picard discovered a collection of powders and liquids of assorted colors. A half sheet of cloth paper lay on top of the contents. The commissioner scanned the letter: “I humbly pray those into whose hands this Cabinet may fall, do me the favor to restore it with their own hands to Madame the Marquise of Brinvilliers . . . seeing that what is in it concerns her, and belongs to her only.” It had been written and signed two years earlier, in May 1670.
Picard replaced the letter inside the box, closed the lid, and looked around the room once again. The many mortars, pestles, alembics, and glassware now took on new meaning. This was no longer a matter for creditors. It was instead a crime scene. And he had just burned the confession.
Not far from the box Picard spotted another small package wrapped tightly with thick string and closed by eight wax seals. Another cryptic notice accompanied it: “Papers to be burnt in case of death, not being of any consequence to any person. I humbly pray those, into whose hands they may fall, to burn them . . . without opening the packet.”
Resisting the temptation to crack open the seals, Picard followed established procedures. He collected the incriminating materials and placed them in a box. He reached for a small ball of jute cord and wrapped it around the box several times. He lit a candle and dripped a large pool of wax where he had tied the string. After imprinting his silver commissioner’s seal in the wax, Picard placed the box in the safekeeping of Creuillebois, one of his trusted sergeants, and set to work drafting a detailed letter to the lieutenant of police.
Madame de Brinvilliers’s grief at the news of Sainte-Croix’s death was quickly replaced by her drive for self-preservation. For as much as Brinvilliers claimed to love Sainte-Croix, she had no illusions when it came to his trustworthiness. In the four years since her father’s poisoning, she and Sainte-Croix had remained lovers. Brinvilliers had even given birth to three children, passing them off as her husband’s. Still, Sainte-Croix’s financial problems were nothing new. During one of their many passionate meetings, Sainte-Croix had assured Brinvilliers that no one would ever know about their secret desires and dark actions—as long as she helped pay his expenses. He promised Brinvilliers that he would keep every shred of evidence that could be damning to her in a small box at his home, under lock and key.
On learning of Sainte Croix’s death, she remembered these not-so-subtle references to the hidden box. The marquise may not have known what secrets the box held, but she did know that she had no time to waste. She raced to her dead lover’s home.
Sainte-Croix’s widow opened the door. She confirmed that the police had found a very intriguing box at the house and it had Brinvilliers’s name on it. She did not know what was in the box, but she clearly delighted in the prospect that the woman with whom her husband had been conducting an affair would soon pay for her sins.
The marquise tried to remain calm, but her voice betrayed her panic as she asked Sainte-Croix’s widow if she might come in. The widow refused but made sure to give her the address of Officer Creuillebois’s home so that Brinvilliers might ask that the box be returned to its rightful owner.
Brinvilliers may have been methodical in her poisoning techniques, but she stumbled in her initial dealings with the police. She went immediately to Creuillebois’s home, only to discover he was not there. She returned two hours later, pounding on the door. When Creuillebois greeted her, she begged for the items she claimed Sainte-Croix had intended for her only to see. When he declined she shoved fifty livres into his hand in return for the box. When he rebuffed her again, Brinvilliers realized that she was in great danger. An hour later she packed her belongings and fled the country.
13
The Faithful Servant
When news of Sainte-Croix’s death reached La Chaussée, he went not to Officer Creuillebois’s home but instead directly to Commissioner Picard. The valet claimed that he had given Sainte-Croix a large sum of money to hold for safekeeping, and he wanted his name added to the rolls of creditors claiming restitution from the dead man’s estate.
Sensing something strange about the man’s demeanor, Picard told the servant that many odd things had been found among Sainte-Croix’s belongings. La Chaussée spun around toward the door and sprinted out of the commissioner’s house. He quickly made his way back to the home of Monsieur Gaussin, where he had been employed since the deaths of the d’Aubray brothers, collected his belongings, and disappeared into Paris.
La Chaussée roamed the streets by night and hid out by day. La Reynie wanted him arrested for interrogation and assigned a number of mouches (spies or, literally, “flies”) to flush the man into the open. Two months later, at six o’clock in the morning on September 4, 1672, La Reynie’s men captured him as he walked through the streets, with “his nose in his coat” attempting to avoid detection. When they searched him the officers found a number of papers as well as a small bottle filled with suspicious liquid in his cloak.
Now that La Chaussée had been captured, La Reynie needed to determine exactly what was in the calfskin box found in Sainte-Croix’s home and whether there was a link between the box’s contents and the bottle found on the servant. La Reynie brought in an apothecary, Monsieur Lebel, to examine the box’s contents.
Settling into an inspection room in La Reyie’s compound on the rue du Bouloi, Lebel placed the case on the table and began a methodical examination. Pausing frequently to take notes, he noted that the small box was divided into twelve different compartments, or “cells,” each lined with muslin. In the first compartment he found a medium-size flask containing about six ounces of clear liquid. It was corked and coated with a thick layer of red wax. An odd yellowish sediment floated at the bottom of the flask. Lebel cracked open the seal and smelled the mixture gingerly before dipping his finger into the liquid to taste it. It was both odorless and tasteless. Placing it back in the case, Lebel turned his attention to the other compartments. Two of them contained what seemed to be identical paper envelopes filled with a flourlike white powder. Another held a small box that, once opened, revealed two tiny packets also made of paper. Whatever was inside had singed the paper and turned it black. Still more packets contained powders that the apothecary quickly recognized as two common poisons: opium and antimony.
In another compartment Lebel found a small porcelain pot containing something black, which he assumed from its smell and taste was laudanum, a sleep-inducing herb. He identified one packet as mercury chloride and dismissed another holding a thick gray powder as “nothing that one could have used as poison.” How he knew this he did not say. He also did not explain how he knew that three of the envelopes in the case contained arsenic—preferring instead to note that “because its nature and effects are too well known,” no further tests were necessary.
Initially Lebel assumed that the contents of a glass vial were beni
gn. Both in smell and appearance, the liquid seemed to be little more than rosewater. Just to be sure, he gave a rooster one and a half spoonfuls of the fragrant water. The rooster died within a few hours. An autopsy revealed that the liquid burned five separate holes in the animal’s stomach.
In the days that followed, Lebel’s assistants brought a menagerie of animals upon which the apothecary could test the preparations they could not immediately identify. In one experiment they dripped a small bit of yellow-colored liquid onto a morsel of bread and fed it to a turkey. The turkey died the next day. When they opened the bird up, nothing appeared unusual. In case the timing of the turkey’s death was a coincidence, they repeated the experiment on a pigeon. It died, too, again without any visible sign of damage to its organs.
In another trial they mixed a few grains of a brownish-black powder into some bread crumbs and fed them to a turkey. Clearly corrosive, the powder had burned holes in the paper envelopes in which it was stored. To Lebel’s surprise it did not kill the animal right away. The turkey languished in pain for two more days. During the autopsy they discovered the animal’s intestines were filled with a watery, bile-like substance and its heart filled with “curdled blood.” A large cat was next in line for the experiment. It ate the doctored bread greedily. While the cat seemed “a little sad” the next day, it continued to eat. By the fourth day the cat refused the bread, so Lebel slipped some tripe in with the powder, which the cat ate “slowly and sadly.” On day five the cat could barely move. Strangely, Lebel did not explain what happened next, but it is safe to assume that the animal died.
In one of the compartments Lebel found a white powder with a blue tint. He suspected that it was vitriol, most likely a copper sulfate, which is deadly if ingested. To test his suspicion the apothecary fed the powder to a red hen. Within two hours the hen died. Lebel performed an autopsy and found that the hen’s stomach was “substantially altered in color and completely wrinkled as if it had been burned.”
Having completed his review of the materials found in Sainte-Croix’s box, Lebel turned to the items the police officers found on La Chaussée at the time of his arrest. From inside the man’s leather side-sack, they retrieved a small envelope containing a bluish-white powder. Lebel noticed it was similar to the powder he had tested. To be sure, he repeated his original experiment on a new chicken. Again the animal died and its stomach changed color, as if burned from the inside out.
Lebel returned to the notes he took during his experiments on the powder in Sainte-Croix’s case. Dipping his quill in the inkpot sitting on the table, he underlined “bluish-white powder.” He then reread his notes on La Chaussée, again underlined the words “bluish-white powder,” and wrote, “we found this material to be similar to the one contained in the case described above.” This could not be explained by coincidence alone, Lebel deduced: La Chaussée clearly trafficked in the same poisons as Sainte-Croix did. After a short trial La Chaussée received a death sentence, which would be preceded by interrogation under torture.
French law allowed for the use of torture before trial (Question préparatoire) in order to persuade the accused to reveal the names of accomplices. However, in France, torture most often took place following sentencing. There were two levels of postsentencing torture, the Question ordinaire and the Question extraordinaire, depending on the level of intensity and amount of pain to be inflicted.
Torture methods took four main forms. The first, the strappado, consisted of hoisting the criminal into the air by his shoulders using a rope and pulley. His hands would be tied behind his back and held in place by ropes held by two men, one on each side. On cue the torturers let the ropes go slack, dropping their victim violently toward the floor. As one observer explained, “The velocity of his descent . . . generally dislocates his shoulders, with incredible pain. This dreadful execution is sometimes repeated in a few minutes on the same delinquent; so that the very ligaments are torn from his joints, and his arms are rendered useless for life.”
The question d’eau (water torture) forced water down the throats of criminals with a tube while they were tied down by their wrists and ankles. The English diplomat John Evelyn witnessed the torture of a condemned thief at the Châtelet in 1651. The quantity of water “so prodigiously swell’d him, face, eyes, breast, & all his limbs,” he explained, “one would be almost affrighted to see it. They let him down, & carried him before a warm fire to bring him to himself, being now to all appearances dead with pain.”
The third and preferred form—brodequins, or torture boots—consisted of enclosing each leg in a wood or metal casing wrapped tightly with rope. The torturer then hammered wood shims into each corner of the casing (four for the ordinary question, eight for the extraordinary question). The muscles often burst and bones shattered. Interrogators frequently chose brodequins over water torture because the pain was more localized and carried less risk of unintentional death, particularly for more corpulent criminals, whose fleshy bodies increased the water’s pressure on the stomach. They wanted to be sure convicts experienced the full horrors of their execution just a few hours later.
La Chaussée was sentenced to the rack, the last form of torture, which was also frequently used as a form of execution. In preparation, guards stripped La Chaussée to the waist. They shaved his head and searched his body cavities for hidden charms that could be used to cast spells to help withstand the agony. He had also been closely watched over the preceding days to ensure that no one slipped him any herbal drugs, such as mandrake, henbane, wild lettuce, or opium, to dull the pain.
As La Chaussée begged for mercy, the interrogators instructed men on each side of the rack to tighten the mechanism, stretching the servant’s body to its limits. La Chaussée’s cries were quickly followed by a mournful sobbing that echoed off the chamber’s stone walls. Overwhelmed by pain, La Chaussée was, wrote one witness, “touched . . . with remorse,” the kind that “ordinarily closes the last minutes of a wretched life.” He promised to tell them everything they needed to know, if only they would take him down from the rack and bring the scribe back to record his confession.
Thirty minutes later, crumpled in the corner of the prison cell, La Chaussée admitted his guilt. Madame de Brinvilliers had provided him with poison, claiming she got it from Sainte-Croix. She ordered the servant to administer it to her father and, later, her brothers. For his efforts he received a high-level position in Brinvilliers’s household, along with a handsome salary. Despite his initial reluctance, La Chaussée accepted the arrangement and agreed to do whatever she asked of him. He added powders and liquids to water and broths. He poured a reddish water into Madame de Brinvilliers father’s glass. He slipped a clear poisonous liquid into the brothers’ pies at their country home. And as he watched Brinvilliers delight in the slow deaths of her family, he came to loathe her; he said he had a “great mind to poison” her as well.
14
“Brinvilliers Is in the Air”
In the four years since Sainte-Croix’s death, rumors surfaced from time to time that Madame de Brinvilliers had been spotted in England, Germany, and many places in between. Stories abounded of multiple identities, false names, and disguises. The truth was much less romantic. For the previous three and a half years, Brinvilliers had hidden herself in a quiet convent in Liège, a city in what is now Belgium. Thanks to the minister of the military Louvois’s network of spies, however, her pious life was about to end.
Extracting Brinvilliers from Liège proved no easy task. At the time the city was an independent principality, which made any effort to seize her a difficult proposition. Fighting between the French and the Spanish for the contested territories at the borders of France and Holland had intensified. Sitting strategically on the banks of the Meuse, its guns facing in all directions, the citadel of Liège had successfully fought off assaults by both sides. The last thing Louvois wanted was to have Liège rethink its neutrality or have the Spaniards read the extradition efforts as an act of aggression. T
he stakes were too high.
Louvois and La Reynie agreed to send one of La Reynie’s officers, François Desgrez, north to track down Brinvilliers and bring her to justice in Paris. On March 16, 1676, he carried a letter from Louvois to the head of the Liège citadel requesting help. “The King wishes very much,” wrote the war minister, “to be able to arrest a person who is presently in the city of Liège. The name of this person will be indicated to you in person by the man who presents this letter to you, and that person should be arrested.”
The soldiers of the citadel obliged. That evening Desgrez accompanied troops to the convent where Brinvilliers was hiding. They found the marquise sitting quietly at a long table with several nuns, eating dinner. Brinvilliers had just reached for the water pitcher, refilled her glass, and brought it to her lips when Desgrez and the soldiers broke into the dining room to arrest her. An instant later she smashed the glass on the table and frantically shoved the glass shards into her mouth in a suicide attempt. After a short struggle, the officers stopped her before she had a chance to swallow the fragments.
As much as Desgrez tried to return Brinvilliers to Paris, the journey home proved complicated. To support the French extradition efforts, Louvois wrote to Spanish officials, requesting that “one hundred soldiers on horses, an officer, and ten archers” accompany the prisoner from Liège to the Spanish-controlled town of Dinan. From there they would go to Maastricht, then to French-controlled Rocroy, and finally on to Paris.
While Louvois and the troops waited anxiously for a response, Desgrez and his colleagues guarded Brinvilliers’s cell around the clock. They watched Brinvilliers as she paced in her cell. She often fell into fits of rage, banging at the door and shouting obscenities and accusations. The guards confiscated all of her belongings, save for a small hairbrush and dish of hairpins. In one of several more suicide attempts, the desperate Brinvilliers lunged toward the dish, grabbed a handful of pins, and shoved them into her mouth. Desgrez leaped into action, holding her down, prying her mouth open, and pulling the pins out one by one. With the help of a guard the two men searched the room again for other items she could use to kill herself. They found five more hairpins at the bottom of her chamber pot.