by Tori Telfer
Were they in love? Was anybody in love with their spouse back then? Toward the end of her life, Marie wrote of a deep affection for Gobelin, but shortly after their wedding they were both openly taking lovers. This was scandalous, and yet not at all unusual; in fact, a young, attractive, wealthy married woman was practically expected to have a paramour or two. Taking a lover didn’t get you ostracized in seventeenth-century France—it got you talked about. Besides, Gobelin was a weak man who didn’t seem to care what Marie did as long as he was free to indulge in his own lackluster affairs. Marie, on the other hand, “possessed superabundant vitality,” and it wasn’t long before she fell deeply in love with someone who was far better at meeting her needs than her husband was.
Unfortunately, she chose one of the bad guys. Her lover was a devilishly handsome army officer named Godin de Sainte-Croix—a ladies’ man with a serious dark side, a brilliant bastard who could wax eloquent on anything from theology to chemistry. For Marie, he was the “demon who brought about the storm and troubled the security of the family.” But Marie had always loved the storm. The two were soon the deliciously scandalized talk of the town.
While Marie’s husband was busily carrying on affairs of his own and didn’t care what she did with Sainte-Croix, her powerful father and brothers weren’t so easily distracted. They saw how openly Marie flaunted her affair, and they were absolutely humiliated by it. Other nobles may have tittered in delight at Marie’s erotic rampages, but for her male relatives, her behavior was neither aspirational nor a hilarious Parisian joke. It was utter ignominy.
Back then, if you were an important French person and someone was bringing shame on your family, you simply requested a little form for your nemesis’s arrest, signed by the king and known as a lettre de cachet. So one afternoon, as the two lovebirds rolled around Paris in their expensive carriage, they were intercepted by guards flashing a lettre de cachet from Marie’s father, and Sainte-Croix was promptly dragged off to the Bastille.
You can imagine the anger Marie felt at having her lover wrenched away by her father in public. On her way home, she “raged with the blind fury of a wild animal.” This was the beginning of everything for Marie. Later, she would note, chillingly, that “one should never annoy anybody; if Sainte-Croix had not been put in the Bastille perhaps nothing would have happened.”
Good People
As Sainte-Croix whiled away six weeks in prison, he may have crossed paths with another prisoner there, a mysterious Italian poisoning expert named Edigio Exili. Serious poisoning hysteria hadn’t hit Paris yet, and poison was still thought to be the realm of the sneakier Italians. (A French pamphlet from the time claimed that in Italy, poison was “the surest and most common aid to relieving hatred and vengeance,” as though it were simply describing some sort of gastrointestinal medication.)
Marie would eventually claim that Exili taught Sainte-Croix all about the enigmatic art of poisoning. Then she changed her story, saying that Sainte-Croix actually learned about poison from the Swiss chemist Christophe Glaser, celebrated scientist and apothecary to the king. Glaser was famous as much for his scholarship as for his wild recipes that called for ingredients like “the skull of a man dead of a violent death.” Of course, poisonous powders were available at any apothecary, so Marie could have picked up a vial of arsenic or antimony anytime she wanted. But these origin stories speak of the lovers’ desire to link their crimes to something bigger than themselves. They didn’t want to be regular, humble poisoners. They wanted to be co-conspirators with the greats; they wanted their poisoning attempts elevated to the ranks of macabre art.
With Sainte-Croix in the Bastille, Marie had a lot of time to grow angrier and angrier about the temporary loss of her lover. But that wasn’t the only stressor on her plate—she also needed money. Her husband was terrible with his finances, there were gambling debts to deal with, and Sainte-Croix was an expensive boyfriend, blowing through her income as though it were his own. Needless to say, her father’s wealth was starting to look particularly appealing.
As soon as Sainte-Croix was released on May 2, 1663, he rented a laboratory and began telling people he was an alchemist, or at least really close to becoming one. Ever aware of his bad-boy reputation, he began to hint portentously that he was very, very near a big breakthrough. But he also began doing something far more sinister—experimenting with poisons.
Poisoning made sense to the lovers. They needed money, they were furious at Marie’s dad, and if they hit upon the right formula, it would look like her father died of gout, stomach troubles, or a really terrible fever. In order to perfect their formula, Marie decided to test it on the patients of Hôtel Dieu, the famous public hospital next to Notre Dame. There, she wandered among the sick, distributing poisoned jams and sweets to her favorites, and weeping inconsolably when they inevitably died.
“Who would have dreamt that a woman brought up in a respectable family . . . would have made an amusement of going to the hospitals to poison the patients?” wrote Nicolas de la Reynie, the chief of police at the time. Marie looked like a good noblewoman, with her big eyes and pretty figure; she acted like a good noblewoman, deigning to stroke the fevered brows of dying beggars. It was hard for authorities like la Reynie to reconcile all this surface-level kindness and nobility with the fact that Marie wasn’t actually good at all. (Even when Marie should have been keeping house like a proper wife, she instead brought the evil home. She experimented on one of her servant girls by feeding her a one-two punch of poisoned gooseberries and poisoned ham, which gave the poor servant a terrible burning sensation in her stomach and three years of poor health.)
When the lovers became confident their poisons were undetectable and highly effective, they moved in on Marie’s father. Marie planted a servant in his household who began dosing him with arsenic. The year was 1666. It was time for Daddy to die.
“Poisonous Waters”
Over the next eight months, Marie watched her father slip further and further away. After her servant had given him enough poison to destroy his health, Marie joined her ailing dad at his country estate and took over the dreadful process, dropping arsenic into his food and drink. His agonizingly slow death didn’t move her; she dosed him with poison almost thirty separate times. When her older brother came to check in on their father, he wrote to his boss in shock: “I have found him in the condition that was told me, almost beyond any hope of recovering his health . . . in such extreme peril.” After months of vomiting, tremendous stomach pain, and a burning sensation throughout his insides, Monsieur d’Aubray died on September 10, 1666. The cause of death, according to his doctors? Gout.
The inheritance money was divided among the four d’Aubray siblings, and Marie and Sainte-Croix quickly burned through their share of it. By 1670, they were back where they started: desperate for money, chased by creditors, and resentful of anyone who’d ever opposed their love.
Marie’s brothers lived together, conveniently enough, but the older one was married to a woman who hated Marie. This meant that Marie wasn’t welcome in the kitchen, and so she was unable to “access” (wink) the tarts, the savory pies, and the wine. So she planted another servant. He went by the name La Chausée, and he was perfect for the job: he’d already worked for Sainte-Croix, he had a criminal record, and, like Marie, he was creepily patient when it came to watching people die. La Chausée went to work right away with a selection of “poisonous waters” (there was a reddish one and a clear one), spiking various drinks and an elaborate meat pie that both brothers ate with gusto. Soon enough, the men were complaining of burning sensations in their stomachs.
The death of Marie’s brothers was another excruciatingly drawn-out process. We’re talking months of suffering: vomiting, inability to eat, cramps, loss of eyesight, bloody stools, swelling, weight loss, and a constant fire gnawing away at their stomachs. Their bodies grew so “stinking and infected” that it was hard to be in the room with them. It’s difficult to imagine the type of sister who
could watch her siblings die so slowly, in such agony, but that was the thing about Marie. She was furious. The “violent Passions” that saturated her life included not just lust and greed, but a burning desire for revenge. And her brothers, along with her father, made up the patriarchal cage she was constantly rattling against. They sent her off to a weak, boring husband and then punished her when she tried to escape him. They insisted that she behave not just for her own sake, but for the sake of their reputations. She answered them with terrible vengeance.
Her older brother passed away in June, while the younger one lived until September. Autopsies for both brothers revealed the same wrecked insides: the stomach and liver were blackened and gangrenous, and the intestines were literally falling apart. After the younger brother’s death, doctors began to suspect the two had been poisoned, but they didn’t press the matter. No one had any idea who could have committed the crime, since La Chausée masqueraded so well as a faithful servant and Marie made sure she was miles away when each one died. La Chausée even received a tidy bonus of one hundred crowns for his faithful service.
Now that all her closest male relatives were dead, Marie began plotting the murder of her sister, a devout single gal with a large fortune. She also wanted to poison her sister-in-law, who had just inherited some of the d’Aubray wealth, a fact that irritated Marie. Plus, she’d been toying with the idea of poisoning her husband and marrying Sainte-Croix—though Sainte-Croix didn’t seem very excited about that idea. One of the great gossips of the time, Madame de Sévigné, noted that while Marie kept giving her husband poison, Sainte-Croix—“not anxious to have so evil a woman as his wife”—kept slipping the poor man remedies. The result? “Shuttlecocked about like this five or six times, now poisoned, now unpoisoned, he still remained alive.”
Needless to say, Sainte-Croix and Marie were no longer in their honeymoon period. A furious Marie even wrote him a letter claiming that she didn’t want to live anymore and so had just poisoned herself with his formula, which she’d bought from him at such a high price. In fact, Marie had taken another lover just after her brothers died. This man would be just as destructive to her as Sainte-Croix was, but in a different way; while Sainte-Croix encouraged her crimes, this lover would turn against her because of them. But for now, Marie had no idea that he’d ever betray her. All she knew was that this new man was kind, young, and good.
Sundry Curious Secrets
Jean-Baptiste Briancourt was hired as a tutor for Marie’s children in the fall of 1670 and became her lover shortly afterward. Like her husband, Briancourt was a weak, cowardly man, but he must have been an appealing foil for Sainte-Croix, since Marie was feeling especially vulnerable about her relationship with Sainte-Croix at the time (thus the marriage attempts and the threat of suicide). Where Sainte-Croix was unscrupulous and unafraid, Briancourt was moral and wary. He was completely infatuated by the marquise, but also terrified of her; she talked incessantly of poison and told him all about her crimes. He could see how cruel she was to her daughter, and suspected Marie was trying to poison the girl.
Eventually, Briancourt began to wonder if the marquise was plotting to kill him, too. His worst fears were confirmed when Marie asked him to come to her bed at midnight. When Briancourt happened to pass by her room a bit earlier than planned, he saw Marie hiding Sainte-Croix in her closet. The resulting scene was practically vaudevillian: Briancourt showed up at midnight, hurt and silent; Marie tried to tempt him into bed; Briancourt suddenly lunged toward the closet; Marie flung herself onto Briancourt’s back, shrieking, to prevent him from opening the door; Briancourt opened it anyway, came face-to-face with a creeping Sainte-Croix, and screamed, “Ah, villain, you have come to stick a knife into me!” At that, Sainte-Croix scrambled out of there as fast as he could, and Marie rolled on the floor screaming and crying and threatening to poison herself. Eventually, Briancourt calmed her down by promising to forgive her, all the while hatching a plan to flee in the morning.
Marie was cracking. She may have been cool about murdering relatives, but the torrid relationship with Sainte-Croix was starting to fray her. She was beginning to realize that this man had, in a way, stolen her entire life. She had given him her wealth and her time and her love; she had bound herself to him with the most horrible secrets. In turn, he had taken and taken from her without remorse and, now that things were getting messy, he seemed to be pulling away. Finally, in his last great betrayal of Marie, Sainte-Croix died before his crimes were ever discovered, leaving her to take the fall for both of them.
Legend says that on July 30, 1672, Sainte-Croix was whipping up poisons in his secret laboratory, wearing a glass mask to avoid breathing the dangerous fumes. As he bent over the fire to stir some devilish pot, his mask shattered, and Sainte-Croix was immediately killed by his own poison. His actual death wasn’t nearly so poetically just. He simply died after a long illness, with none of the authorities suspecting him to be a criminal. In fact, he died a good man in the eyes of the church: he was able to perform his final devotions and receive the last rites.
He was, however, disastrously in debt, and so the Paris courts sent over a commissary to put his affairs in order. (Ironically, the commissary came from the same building where Marie’s father used to work.) The man initially uncovered a mysterious scroll titled “My Confession,” but since Sainte-Croix wasn’t accused of anything at the time, he decided that the document was some sort of sacred declaration between a man and his God, not meant for public consumption. As such, he tossed it into the fire.
But the commissary also discovered a little box full of cryptic vials and powders, which turned out to be things like antimony, prepared vitriol, corrosive sublimate powder, and opium. Even stranger, the box came with a note saying that upon the event of Sainte-Croix’s death, the contents should be immediately given to the marquise de Brinvilliers. “All that it contains concerns her and belongs to her alone,” ran the note. “In case she dies before I do . . . burn it, and all that is in it.” There were also multiple papers and envelopes marked “to be burnt in case of death,” and one biographer reported that Sainte-Croix actually dared to label an envelope “Sundry Curious Secrets.” Unsurprisingly, the commissary turned the box over to the police.
The whole affair only grew more suspicious when Marie rushed over to the authorities late at night, demanding that the box of poiso—uh, “curious secrets”—be handed over to her. She should have played it cool, acting nostalgic for the effects of a deceased lover, but her “very eager and extraordinary manner of demanding it” immediately caused the authorities to become apprehensive. Instead of giving her the box, they decided to test its contents, and fed two of the most enigmatic liquids to a selection of animals, all of which died within hours.
When Marie’s sister-in-law heard about the mysterious box full of poisons, she went on a legal rampage, demanding vengeance for her husband’s murder. She lodged an accusation against La Chausée, who was dragged off to jail, and she told the authorities to snatch up the marquise de Brinvilliers immediately.
Marie fled the country.
Ordinary and Extraordinary Questions
While French authorities scoured the continent for the marquise, La Chausée went to trial. As a low-ranking member of society with a criminal record and an angry noblewoman on his case, he never stood a chance. He was found guilty before he had confessed a thing, based solely on “conjectures and strong presumptions.” On March 24, 1673, the judges sentenced him to be executed after undergoing torture: the “ordinary and extraordinary questions.”
The questions were a form of water torture in which the victim’s nose was pinched shut, his body stretched backward over a trestle, and copious amounts of water forced down his throat—twice as much water for the extraordinary as for the ordinary. After groaning through the questions, La Chausée was then shoved into a horrific torture device called the brodequins: with his legs stuck between planks, wooden wedges were slowly hammered into the space between plank and
leg, eventually crushing his calves. La Chausée refused to confess a thing during the torture, but once he was released from the brodequins, the truth came pouring out of him. (Apparently this was common with torture—the sheer relief of being free from the pain often brought about a veritable torrent of confession.) He was then tied to a wheel, beaten with iron bars, and left to bleed out in agony. An execution like this was known as being “broken on the wheel,” and brings to mind a sort of cross—one where the victim dies facing the sky.
For exactly three years and one day after La Chausée was sentenced to death, Marie avoided capture. She moved around Europe, surviving on small amounts of money sent by her sister—the same sister she had once planned to kill. When her sister died in 1675, Marie was left to survive as best she could and eventually rented a convent room in Liège, which was then an independent city-state full of French troops. This was a huge mistake. Word soon reached the Parisian authorities that the infamous La Brinvilliers was hiding out in a convent, and they descended on her.
As Marie was dragged back to Paris for trial, she tried to kill herself multiple times by attempting to swallow pins and mouthfuls of crushed glass. If she’d been the talk of the town during her halcyon days with Sainte-Croix, she was even more famous now. A rumor began to circulate that she had tried to impale herself by pushing a sharp stick between her legs. As a friend wrote to Madame de Sévigné, “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 [anally]. Guess where!” La Brinvilliers had carried on a public affair for so many years that now even rumors of her suicide attempts framed her in a hypersexual light. But Marie was no longer the wild child of libertine Paris. At forty-six, she was a marked woman, and she was exhausted.