City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Her next suicide attempt was as crude as it proved to be scandalous. A Monsieur de Coulanges described the incident in a letter to Madame de Sévigné, a highly respected member of the French literary elite. “She stuck a stick”—he gossiped salaciously—“guess where? It wasn’t in her eye. It wasn’t in her mouth. Not in her eye, not in her nose. Guess where? She would have died, if someone had not called for help.” One of the guards present reported that the stick was “very smelly,” a foot and a half long, and wrapped with cords and hairpins.

  En route to Paris for her trial, she begged guards to put her out of her misery. According to a guard named Barbier, she offered to “make him a fortune” if he would tie her up with a rope to a pair of horses and have them drag her to death as they ran. If he was feeling generous, she said hopefully, he could also slit her neck beforehand. The guard refused.

  For as long as Brinvilliers remained in the Low Countries, Louvois oversaw her fate. With his characteristic assertiveness, he had gladly taken the matter into his own hands. As usual this did not sit well with Colbert, who had oversight of the parlement courts where Brinvilliers’s case would be heard.

  Colbert and Louvois had long been bitter rivals. Louis’s war efforts rankled Colbert, who had argued emphatically against invasion of the Spanish Low Countries in 1667 and still bristled at the king’s hawkish tendencies. War was costly and dangerous, its outcome anything but certain. Colbert argued that the king should exhibit greater restraint, both at home and abroad.

  Despite his dedication to the king, Colbert also had difficulty quelling his frustration with Louis’s outrageous and often impulsive expenditures to display the glory of his reign. Many expensive, high-profile construction projects were now under way in Paris. The addition of massive northern and southern facades to the Louvre gave the palace new and imposing neoclassical lines. Directly across the river from the Louvre, the heavy Corinthian columns and the soaring dome of the Collège des Quatre-Nations (now the Institut de France) signaled the permanence and power of the king who built it. The construction of a state-of-the-art astronomical observatory south of the Luxembourg Gardens similarly announced the king’s presence on earth, as well as his ability to reach far into the heavens.

  Though these projects carried eye-popping price tags, they were nothing compared with the expenses related to the king’s personal project to build a palace in the marshes of Versailles, which was nowhere near complete after six years of construction. Even a single, small fountain outside the king’s bedroom at the new palace required an underground system of lead pipes “like nothing else in the world,” and a team of more than 150 horses to power the pumps needed to push water through them. With growing concern, Colbert tried to keep the country from impending financial ruin at the hands of a visionary but spendthrift king.

  To Colbert’s consternation, Louis chose to follow the counsel of the untested yet bold Louvois—a man decades younger than Colbert. The king would demonstrate his strength to the whole of Europe and go to war. “I could not believe,” Colbert exclaimed, “that such an important affair would be confided in a young man of just twenty-one years old [Louvois], without experience in this area, and who believes that he has the authority to ruin the country, and who wants to ruin it because I am the one who wants to save it.”

  In the years that followed, Louvois flaunted the king’s clear preference for war over peace, and for him over Colbert. With every new battle won, and every new financial contribution to Louvois’s war chest, Colbert had little choice but to seethe in silence as Louvois moved deeper into the king’s inner circle. “My court,” Louis XIV later wrote, “was divided between peace and war according to their various interests. If I inclined slightly for war, it was because of natural inclination, not because of favoritism.” Still, Colbert had his doubts.

  Colbert informed the attorney general of the parlement, Achille de Harlay, that the Brinvilliers matter would be handled solely by the parlement. Harlay sent a colleague to Dinan to take depositions from the marquise. Further establishing his jurisdictional authority, Colbert explained to Harlay that the attorney general could “confer with Monsieur de la Reynie on all things regarding the Madame de Brinvilliers affair.” However, “Let it be known that the affair has been committed to your care in order to satisfy the king and the public.”

  Brinvilliers’s circumstances preoccupied Parisian society for months. “The only thing one talks about here [in Paris],” wrote Madame de Sévigné, “are the words, the actions, of La Brinvilliers.” When Sévigné left Paris to visit her family in the provinces, she lamented to a correspondent, “Alas, what good will I be . . . ? I pity you for not having me in Paris any longer so I can send you the latest on La Brinvilliers.” She rejoiced to her daughter when she returned to the capital a month and a half later. “This affair occupies all of Paris, at the expense of matters relating to the war. . . . My dearest, rest assured that I will leave you in the dark about nothing relating to such an extraordinary matter.”

  On June 28, 1676, Louis made it clear that he expected the courts to show no mercy. The king still carried vivid memories of the last moments of Henrietta Anne. While surgeons had confirmed that Henrietta Anne’s death was the result of an illness, rumors of poison still persisted. “It is important,” the king stressed to Colbert, “[that] you tell the First President [of the parlement] and the Procureur Général [attorney general] on my behalf that I expect they will do all that they should to diminish those who . . . are involved in such a villainous commerce. Send me everything that you have been able to find out.”

  Brinvilliers remained in prison in the Conciergerie complex on the Île de la Cité while the Tournelle, the highest tribunal of France, tried her case. The court met twenty-two times between April 28 and July 16. As witness after witness testified, the stories of Brinvilliers’s wretchedness mounted. Françoise Roussel, one of Brinvilliers’s servants, testified that years earlier her mistress entered the kitchen with a jar of preserves in hand. She offered the servant a taste from the point of a knife, and Roussel fell ill shortly afterward. It had been three years since that unfortunate tasting, and still she continued to suffer from intense stomach pains and a sensation that her “heart was pricked.”

  During the court proceedings an apprentice to the apothecary Christopher Glaser testified that he saw Sainte-Croix talking to his master on many occasions, often accompanied by a woman who fitted the description of Brinvilliers. Moreover, Brinvilliers herself mentioned using la recette de Glaser (Glaser’s recipe) as a poison in one of the many letters found in Sainte-Croix’s belongings after his death.

  The references to Glaser raised the scandal to new heights. The German-born Christopher Glaser was personal apothecary to Philippe, the king’s brother and Henrietta Anne’s widower, as well as owner of The Red Rose, a shop and laboratory in Paris. He wrote the first textbook for laboratory preparations in chemistry, which was published in multiple editions and languages across Europe from its first publication in 1663 until well into the eighteenth century.

  Despite the incriminating evidence against Brinvilliers, few believed that a woman of high birth could commit such heinous crimes. “The advantages of quality, birth, and fortune of Madame de Brinvilliers must strongly argue that she would not be capable of the cowardly and horrible crimes of which she is accused,” the marquise’s lawyer asserted.

  Madame de Brinvilliers finally took the stand on July 15. In the marathon session that lasted eighteen hours, she bitterly denied everything, using rank and privilege as her principal alibi. One witness, she claimed, was nothing more than a valet—and a perpetually drunk one at that. Another had been kicked out of his house because he was a morally corrupt libertine. As for the most damning evidence, the poisonous box: It “did not belong to me,” she insisted, “a man like Sainte-Croix is not one to be trusted.”

  When the questioning ended, the judge summarized the court’s response to Brinvilliers’s arguments: “She disgusts us.” T
he following day the court sentenced Brinvilliers to death by beheading.

  The court requested that Father Edmé Pirot, a professor of theology at the Sorbonne, console Brinvilliers during her final days and “exhort her to think about the salvation of her soul.” The morning after her sentencing, Harlay, the attorney general, met Pirot at the Conciergerie. There was little need to explain the details of the marquise of Brinvilliers’s case to the priest; his parishioners talked of little else after his masses.

  “We are putting her now in your hands,” Harlay said. “We hope that God will touch her soul, of course. But with the public interest in mind, we also want her crimes to die along with her. We need her to declare all that she knows about other crimes that could happen. Without this, we won’t be able to stop them, and her poisons will outlive her.”

  The priest entered Brinvilliers’s prison cell and nodded to the guards who stood watch there at all times. The cell was larger than he expected, taking up a full floor of the Conciergerie’s Montmorency tower. The furnishings were sparse. A curtained bed sat at one end of the room, and two chairs at the other. The priest gestured Brinvilliers toward the chairs, away from the guards. “I have come to prepare you spiritually as best I can,” he said. “I wish that it were for another occasion than this one.”

  Pirot spent the next few days developing a rapport with Brinvilliers. They took meals together and spoke at length about matters of faith and religion. Pirot purposely steered clear of discussing the specifics of the case, other than confirming that he knew she had been sentenced to death for poisoning. From time to time the priest peppered in reassurances that God forgives all sins. “But you cannot hope for God’s pardon if you do not declare to the judges what your poison was, who made it . . . and who your accomplices are.”

  Slowly Brinvilliers’s cold heart showed signs of melting. Her eyes welled up regularly as she thought about her impending death and, to the priest’s surprise, she sobbed uncontrollably while reading the Ten Commandments. He reported his progress to Harlay, who declared the woman ready for the Question.

  At seven thirty the following morning, the guards arrived to escort Brinvilliers to the torture chamber. She held a small prayer book, a gift from Pirot, in her hands. As she left the cell she turned toward him and asked, “you are not coming with me?” Pirot shook his head, but he would be waiting nearby should she need him.

  Once in the torture room two magistrates in crimson red gowns read aloud the order for her execution. Behind them bloodstained handcuffs, chains, levers, pulleys, as well as several buckets of water stood at the ready. Staring at the buckets of water, Brinvilliers turned to the magistrates. “Messieurs, there is no need for this. I will tell you everything without the need for the Question. Father Pirot persuaded me to tell you everything as it is, even when you haven’t asked, and to declare everything I know. This is what I will do, Messieurs.”

  As proof of her contrition, he blurted out a litany of her crimes: “I poisoned my father twenty or thirty times with my own hands, and with the help of La Chaussée, with the poisons that Sainte-Croix gave me. . . . I also had La Chaussée poison my brothers . . . and I tried to poison my husband five times.” The words tumbled from her mouth as she described her method. She used arsenic, in a dose no bigger than a button each time, so that the effects would not be immediately noticed.

  When she was done talking, the torturer stepped forward, a length of rope in his fist. She presented her hands to him, which he tied together tightly.

  History leaves us neither any formal record of Brinvilliers’s being administered the Question, nor precise documentation of the tortures to which Brinvilliers was subjected. What we do know is that, seven and a half hours later, Father Pirot was called to the chamber to attend to her. On his way to see the marquise, he passed Monsieur Paluau, one of the magistrates who attended the interrogation. She said little, Paluau explained, besides what they already knew. When the priest entered the chamber, he found her weak but not physically broken, lying on a dirty mattress in front of the fire. Attendants were changing her clothes and preparing to serve her several raw eggs, intended to bolster her strength. She would need it for her execution.

  At six o’clock on the morning of July 17, prison guards fetched Madame de Brinvilliers from her cell. Outside the prison the crowd buzzed with excitement. People came from all over the country to catch a glimpse of the infamous poisoner. Street vendors hawked crudely produced newspapers and broadsides claiming to tell the true story of Brinvilliers’s deeds in all their gore. The windows of buildings along the route Brinvilliers would walk to her death spilled over with onlookers who paid homeowners a tidy sum for the privilege to watch above the crowds.

  When the main doors of the Conciergerie swung open, a front flank of guards pushed the crowd out of the way, preparing the way for the open cart containing Brinvilliers. Wearing only a linen sack dress, she held a lit torch in her hands in a show of penitence. Her confessor Pirot, who walked alongside the cart, noted the “continuous murmur in the streets along our route, lasting all the time until the scaffold.”

  The cart stopped first at Notre-Dame. As guards pushed back the crowds, Pirot helped the woman to her knees in front of the cathedral’s large, closed doors. Fulfilling the duties of the amende honorable (literally, “honorable amends”) and a symbolic donation to the Church, she confessed her sins. “I recognize that wickedly and for vengeance, I poisoned my father and my brothers . . . in order to obtain their goods. I beg pardon from God, from the King, and from Justice.” Following her prayers, the guards shoved Brinvilliers back into the cart, which rumbled slowly across the narrow Notre-Dame Bridge toward the Hôtel de Ville and the place de Grève.

  For more than four hundred years, criminals had been punished or executed for crimes both quotidian and spectacular in this public space in front of city hall. In the following century the installation of the guillotine solidified the place de Grève’s macabre reputation.

  Arriving at the place de Grève, the driver of the cart struggled to cut a path through the unruly mass of people waiting to see Brinvilliers meet her bloody end. “Never were there so many people nor Paris so moved or so attentive,” wrote one witness. Despite the excitement of it all, however, “in truth, it made me shiver.”

  The marquise ascended the stagelike platform where the execution would take place. Showing no resistance, Brinvilliers fell to her knees, allowing the executioner to turn her head from side to side like a rag doll’s as he cut her hair. The crowd’s excitement intensified as the executioner ripped Brinvilliers’s sack dress off her shoulders, exposing her breasts. He grabbed her wrists and tied them behind her. The marquise showed no expression, acting as if this were as natural as wearing “gold bracelets or a pearl necklace.”

  Holding a large cross high in the air, Father Pirot heard the woman’s second and final confession as she knelt. With a nod, he signaled that it was time. The executioner blindfolded Brinvilliers and placed her head against the chopping block. He placed his fingers against her neck, gauging its span. In a moment and with a dull thud, it was over; the executioner “swallowed her head with a single strike of the ax.”

  Taking a swig from a large jug of wine, the executioner turned to the priest. “Father, wasn’t that a nice job?” he asked. The priest nodded absently. For as dramatic and as charged as the morning’s events had been, he felt nonetheless “consoled.” Brinvilliers met her death with as much “sentiment of piety and contrition” as he could have hoped for her.

  Brinvilliers’s head and body were burned; the ashes thrown to the wind. “And so it is,” wrote Sévigné in one last commentary, “Brinvilliers is in the air . . . we will now breathe her, and, with this, she will turn us all into poisoners.”

  Father Pirot may have been reassured by Brinvilliers’s pious death. La Reynie, however, could not have been more unsettled. As she raged in her prison cell, Brinvilliers made ominous statements suggesting that she was far from having been alone
in her poisonous acts. During her questioning, she muttered in passing that “half of the nobility have done the same things, if I felt like talking, I’d ruin them all!”

  La Reynie shuddered at the thought that Brinvilliers would never have been caught had it not been for a few lucky breaks. “Who would have thought that a woman raised in an honest family, with such an apparently gentle demeanor, could have been capable of such a long meditation [of] such a list of crimes?” he wrote. What would have happened, he asked himself, “if God had not permitted that Saint-Croix die of an extraordinary death and leave his papers” so that they were found by the authorities?

  By the grace of God, Brinvilliers had also been found. She had been convicted, tortured, and executed. La Reynie worried what would happen if they were not so lucky next time.

  PART

  IV

  “Cease Your

  Scandals”

  15

  House of Porcelain

  In March 1669 Athénaïs delivered her and Louis’s first child in secrecy at a small house near the Tuileries Gardens. Within minutes of the delivery, the doctor took the baby girl to a nearby carriage, where a woman named Françoise d’Aubigné waited.

  For Athénaïs the thirty-four-year-old woman seemed the perfect choice as governess for her illegitimate children with the king. Abandoned by her parents at a young age, Françoise was raised by nuns in a convent. Without any dowry to speak of, she had little choice at the age of sixteen but to marry Paul Scarron, a well-known yet physically deformed author twenty-six years her senior. Scarron died six years later, leaving her destitute but with many connections at court. Athénaïs’s cousin César d’Albret had long been a supporter of Scarron and took Françoise in after his death. In return the young woman handled domestic matters at d’Albret’s home with efficiency and discretion, which impressed Athénais.