The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (6 page)

However, though it appeared probable that a crime had been committed, no one had any idea of who the perpetrator might be. Certainly there was not the remotest suspicion that La Chausée might be the culprit. In fact, his late master had felt such gratitude for the solicitous way his manservant had treated him during his last weeks that he bequeathed La Chausée one hundred écus in his will.
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Not content with having murdered her three closest male relatives, Mme de Brinvilliers next contemplated poisoning her sister. The latter was a devout spinster who had displeased her by making large donations to various religious foundations, thus diminishing the wealth which Mme de Brinvilliers considered should be passed on intact to her children. She also would have liked to poison her widowed sister-in-law, for she had inherited Antoine d’Aubray’s fortune and in Mme de Brinvilliers’s opinion this money was rightfully hers. She was trying to devise a way of placing someone in her sister-in-law’s service to carry out her wishes when her plans were interrupted by the death of Sainte-Croix.

Sainte-Croix died on 30 July 1672. A myth subsequently developed that he had accidentally killed himself while concocting poisons in his laboratory. The story went that he had been wearing a glass mask to protect himself from the dangerous vapours given off during the manufacturing process. When this broke, he supposedly inhaled the noxious fumes and died instantly. In fact, his end was far more prosaic. He died after a long illness, having received the last rites and performed his final devotions with apparent piety.
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No one realised what terrible things he had done in his lifetime and these might never have come to light had his financial affairs been left in a better state. As it was, however, he died heavily in debt and seals were therefore placed on the doors of his lodgings in the Place Maubert so that his assets could be assessed for the benefit of his creditors. On 11 August, in the presence of various interested parties and their legal advisers, a commissary from the Châtelet started going through Sainte-Croix’s belongings.

Quite early on in the proceedings a paper scroll was discovered, inscribed in Sainte-Croix’s hand, ‘My Confession’. Unfortunately, as Sainte-Croix was not then suspected of any crimes it was agreed that this was a sacred document, subject to the secrecy of the confessional, and it was burnt ‘by common consent’. Soon afterwards, however, a casket was found, which had a note from Sainte-Croix attached. This was dated 25 May 1670 and stated that in the event of his death the casket should be given to Mme de Brinvilliers, as ‘all that it contains belongs to her and concerns her alone’.
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When the commissary peeped inside the casket he glimpsed numerous phials and packets filled with unknown substances. Finding this disturbing, he closed up the casket and entrusted it to the safekeeping of a sergeant until such time as its contents could be evaluated in the presence of an official from the public prosecutor’s office.

Matters stood thus when La Chausée unwisely attracted attention to himself. He went to the commissary and said that Sainte-Croix had been looking after some money on his behalf and that he now wished to recover it. With breathtaking recklessness he added that his late employer, M. d’Aubray, had also owed him money and that confirmation of this would be found among Sainte-Croix’s papers. However, when La Chausée heard about the discovery of Sainte-Croix’s casket he became uneasy and hastily left the commissary’s office without pressing his claims any further.

Mme de Brinvilliers also behaved in a highly suspect fashion as soon as she learned that the casket had been removed from the Place Maubert. At eleven o’clock that night she presented herself at the commissary’s house, demanding that the casket be handed over to her. She had to withdraw when he explained that he no longer had custody of it but in the next few days she made several more attempts to secure it. All proved fruitless and only served to create suspicion.

The casket was finally opened on 18 August and its contents were carefully inventoried. The first thing it yielded was a bundle of passionate letters from Mme de Brinvilliers to Sainte-Croix, including the one in which she threatened to kill herself with Glaser’s formula. Besides this, the casket contained a promissory note from Mme de Brinvilliers to Sainte-Croix for the sum of 30,000 livres. It was dated 20 April 1670,
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which was significant as this was around the time when Antoine d’Aubray had become ill and the note could be interpreted as a promise to reward Sainte-Croix once the poisoning was accomplished.

More compromisingly still, the casket proved to be brimming with all sorts of poisons. There were several packets containing different varieties of corrosive sublimate, as well as vitriol, antimony and a little earthenware pot of opium.
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Curiously, there was no arsenic, although Mme de Brinvilliers later said that that was the principal ingredient used by Sainte-Croix.

Though most of the drugs in the casket were recognised without difficulty, there were two phials containing liquids that could not be identified. These were handed to a physician named Dr Jean Moreau for testing. After conducting various experiments he pronounced himself defeated. ‘This cunning poison evades all researches,’ he reported, insisting that it differed from every sort he had previously encountered. Tests were then carried out on various unfortunate animals. A chicken, a pigeon and a dog were given some of the mysterious liquids and all died within a few hours. When the corpses were dissected the internal organs appeared unaffected, although there was a little curdled blood in the ventricles of one animal’s heart. A cat who was fed some white powder found in the casket also died. The subsequent autopsy once again failed to establish the reason, as the only unusual finding was a little reddish water, which had been retained in the stomach. Dr Moreau clearly believed that his tests had confirmed that Sainte-Croix had perfected a revolutionary new poison but it would be unwise to accept this too readily. All that had really been established was that Dr Moreau had no idea what the liquid was. As one person sarcastically commented, ‘You should believe the doctors … and always take their word for it when they admit their ignorance.’
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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,
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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