The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (7 page)

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 six 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.
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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.
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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!’
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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’.
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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.
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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 her 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.
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After Briancourt had finished giving evidence Mme de Brinvilliers was brought in for her confrontation with the chief witness for the prosecution. Her composure never faltered throughout this gruelling session, which lasted until eight in the evening of 13 July and then resumed early the next morning for a further five hours. She began by objecting that Briancourt was a drunkard whom she had dismissed from her household for disorderly conduct and that therefore no reliance should be placed on his testimony. When his allegations were put to her, she calmly rebutted them, sneering, as Briancourt began weeping, that this merely demonstrated his utter baseness and that he should be ashamed to make such an exhibition of himself before the judges. While not disguising her contempt for Briancourt, she remained throughout in complete control of her emotions, speaking calmly and showing great respect for the judges. The most senior judge present was simultaneously repelled and fascinated by her performance for, though chilled by her utter lack of remorse, he could only marvel at the steely resolve and self-possession of this ‘intrepid or, rather, unfeeling soul’.
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On 15 July Mme de Brinvilliers underwent her final interrogation on the
sellette.
Once again she unflinchingly maintained her innocence but she did so in vain, for the judges had already made up their minds. Mme de Brinvilliers was then returned to prison so that they could record their verdict and decide on her sentence. On 16 July they pronounced her guilty and decreed that she should be tortured in the hope that she would name her accomplices. After that she would be beheaded, then her body would be burnt and the ashes thrown to the winds. In passing this sentence the judges were, in fact, being generous. In his report on the case the Attorney-General had recommended that, prior to execution, the prisoner should be punished for her parricide by having her right hand cut off at the wrist. The judges had overruled him and they had also shown leniency by specifying that she should be beheaded, when they could have condemned her to be burnt alive.

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It was now necessary to find a confessor to minister to the condemned woman during her final hours. The man selected for the task was a Jesuit professor of theology named Edmé Pirot. In some ways it was a surprising choice for he had no previous experience of attending prisoners on their way to execution. However, as the First President of the Paris
Parlement
made clear to Pirot, it was not simply concern for Mme de Brinvilliers’s immortal soul that had influenced the decision. There were fears at the highest level that she still harboured terrible secrets and it was felt that in order that ‘her crimes die with her’ she must be persuaded to divulge all she knew. Otherwise there was a danger that associates of hers would carry out similar crimes without being apprehended and in this way ‘her poisons would serve her after her death’.
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Pirot saw Mme de Brinvilliers for the first time on the morning of 16 July. As yet she had not been notified of the judges’ decision, but she told him she considered it inevitable that she would be found guilty, which meant that, within twenty-four hours, she would have to undergo torture and face death. Like the judges who had tried her, Pirot was amazed by the fact that she did not seem at all perturbed by the prospect. When she was given her midday meal she tranquilly requested that the soup served that evening should be more nutritious than usual, as the following day was likely to be ‘very tiring for me’.
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However, as the hours passed by, Pirot was able to penetrate her protective carapace by impressing upon her that even the vilest sinner could attain divine forgiveness through penitence. He was delighted to see ‘the first signs of contrition and distress’ as she began to weep, declaring it was fortunate that her crimes had not gone undetected, as this afforded her a chance to escape eternal damnation. Pirot urged her to summon the judges immediately and admit everything, but though she promised she would ultimately make a full confession to the Attorney-General, she said she did not wish to do this until the following day. She realised that if she delayed it would be assumed that her admissions had been coerced from her by torture, but she said that for the remainder of the day she wished to concentrate on the spiritual guidance Pirot could offer her.