October 6, 2020 • 29 mins
Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers was found guilty of poisoning her father and two brothers -- and maybe her husband and daughter. Because her conviction was based on the strength of letters written by her dead lover and a confession that was obtained by torture, her guilt remains uncertain.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia.
We're exploring the intersection of history and true crime. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Maria tru Marquis and this season
we are talking about Lady Poisoners. Today. Before we begin,
(00:22):
we do want to let everyone know that there is
content and discussion in this episode that contains descriptions of
childhood trauma, specifically sexual abuse, which some listeners may find difficult.
Then today's episode, we are going to look at the
life of Marie Madeleine Marquerite Debray Marquise de Bruvillier. Did
(00:42):
she kill her father and brothers? And if she did,
was it for the family inheritance? So Marie was born
on July t in Paris. She had two younger brothers
and one younger sister. There's really not much on record
about her mom all. According to many accounts, she may
have died during childbirth, and her father was a man
(01:04):
named Antoine dred He was a civil lieutenant of Paris.
So the family was wealthy, influential, and very well known.
People often joked that Marie was related to half the
lawyers in Paris. Marie history tells us was small, she
was pretty, and she was smart, And I think it's
funny what details stick to stories throughout the decades. And
(01:26):
apparently she also had excellent penmanship. Listen, that's a point
of pride. More than two hundred years later, biographers writing
her story couldn't quite reconcile Marie's quote uncommon physical attractions
with what came to be known as her toxic hobbies.
In one case, for instance, author Hughes Stokes described her
(01:47):
as having a soft smile, blue eyes, and a graceful figure,
and then he went on to comment about her quote
unbridled passions of a tigress. I'm not sure how Mr
Stokes would have know that, but that is certainly an
example of some healthy male chauvinism. Yeah. Uh so, Marie
(02:08):
grew up, as we mentioned, in a wealthy home. So
they had a townhouse in Paris and a chateau and
a beautiful carriage in a household filled with servants to
meet her every need. But although her childhood may sound
pretty ideal, narratives about her life suggested that it may
have been that Marie was sexually abused by possibly as
many as three servants in her family home when she
(02:30):
was about seven years old. Uh and at the age
of ten, she may also have been sexual abused by
one of her brothers, which is a situation that as
an adult, she referred to as an incestuous relationship. Now,
despite all of this troubled situation in her home life
as a child, Marie as an adult was considered quite
a catch. When she was twenty one years old, she
(02:53):
married an army officer named Antoine Goblin Marquis de Bruinvillier,
and he was a commanding officer of our regiment and
he was serving in Normandy. At the time, the couple
was doing really well financially. However, Marie's new husband was
an incorrigible gambler and the couple was very quickly in debt.
But to remember how we talked about Marie came from
(03:13):
a wealthy family, she did, and she had a dowry,
and her dowry was substantial, equal to about two U
s dollars in today's money, but they were running through
it really quickly. Stories about this marriage suggests that they
had an arrangement where it was an open one with
both partners taking lovers outside of the marriage. Marie's extramarital
affairs would of course have been gossiped about, but mostly
(03:37):
things would have kind of just been overlooked. That is,
if Marie had stayed within the high society's rules of decorum.
But Marie didn't really care about following their rules. Not
only did she take a lover, she chose to do
it with someone who was considered a bad boy. Now,
the sort of funny twist here is that it was
(03:57):
her husband who actually introduced her to this person. That
was Captain Jean Baptiste Godin de Saint Quas, a young
cavalry officer with very expensive taste, and for Marie this
was an instant connection. Okay, Um, So here's the thing
about being in wealthy society in seventeenth century France. No
one really cared that you were having an affair. They
(04:20):
just wanted to thoroughly discuss every single scandalous detail about it.
Marie's father and her two brothers saw this as a
public scandal though, and as public humiliation, and they really
did care. So when the Marquis de Blinvillier, who had
left France to avoid creditors, made no effort to stop
his wife's affair. It was ultimately her father who took
(04:40):
things into his own hands. He secured the arrest of
Saint Qua. So Marie and Jean Baptiste enjoyed riding around
Paris in her carriage, which had Marie's coat of arms
embossed on the gilded doors. They were really anything but
discreet wedding river around. In my head, this is the
seventeenth century equivalent of hiring a limb, right standing with
(05:01):
your head out of the real yelling we're having an
a fair as you drive through the streets. Absolutely, he
was some champagne glasses completely. Marie's father really did have
a lot of influence, including with the king, and he
was not afraid to use it. One afternoon when the
love birds were out taking in the sights in this carriage,
(05:23):
the carriage was stopped by the police, and the police
were carrying orders from the King that sent Qua had
to be imprisoned immediately. So he was taken away immediately,
and he was incarcerated in the mistill for probably less
than a year, maybe give or take a year. Records
a little squishy on that, but it wasn't as though
he became an antisocial hermit. While he was incarcerated, he
(05:45):
was a social gent and he quickly befriended his cellmate,
a man named Gidio Exili, who was an Italian chemist
who was also proficient in the art of poison. So
it said that Marie used a poison called at the fauna,
which was widely used in Italy, and had learned to
make it from sin Qua, and he is said to
(06:05):
have learned the method from making it from Ado. When
sint Qua died suddenly in July sixteen seventy two, people
started to say that he died in the act of
stirring up a batch of Awkwata fauna. As the legend goes,
not realizing his protective glass mask had cracked as he
leaned over the fire. He was not protected from the
(06:26):
poisonous fumes from the poison that he was compounding. This
is definitely one of those stories that sounds great, but
the truth of his death is actually hardly this titillating
or ironic. His real story is that he died after
having some kind of long illness, and it wasn't really
ever suspected that he was part of the deaths of
Marie's family. No one mentions whether or not he made poisons,
(06:47):
but just that he wasn't suspected in those deaths. When
he died, though boring as his actual passing may or
may not have been, no one came to collect his belongings,
and if they had, they would have noticed that he
left a note on one particular red leather trunk asking
that it be delivered to Marie. So left unclaimed. That
(07:10):
trunk was examined by the authorities as the authorities would do.
As we're about thirty letters which she had received from
Marie while he was in prison. Oh here it starts.
So contained within her writings were some very interesting pieces
of information that were eventually used against her. So this
is one example. In one letter, she promised to pay
(07:34):
cent Qua the equivalent of thirty five thousand U S.
Dollars about a week after the poisoning of her father occurred,
which I'm sure was so he could buy himself something real.
Pretty nothing nefarious. But here's the thing. The contents of
the trunk. Yes, in this trunk were packets of various poisons,
and each packet was labeled with the effects that it
(07:56):
would produce. I mean I'm actually conflicted on this because
I really like a well organized trunk, but I also
have a big problem with well labeled poisons. I mean,
you don't want poorly labeled poison. I mean, but you
do want him well labeled. And I actually really wonder
which poison packet it was the one that introduced the vomiting,
(08:17):
extreme stomach pains, burning sensation throughout your whole insides. Those
are the symptoms that Marie's dad suffered with for months
before he died in sixteen sixty six. Marie was his caretaker,
but his condition didn't improve, which we've we've heard that
story before when we've told poison caretakes, you watched out
(08:37):
for your caretaker and your tea um. His cause of death,
according to his doctor, wasn't actually poisoned. They were convinced
that he had died of complications of gout, and to
address the rumor mill Marie had an autopsy performed on
his corpse and nothing suspicious was reported. She was so lucky,
(08:58):
maybe so. The inheritance money that came up after her
father's death was divided among Marie and her siblings. Antoine,
who was her eldest brother, and the heir of the
family received a larger chunk of the cheddar. And really,
what about Marie's brothers. Here she's gotten her father out
of the way, but if she's looking for money, those
two still stand in between her and the inheritance. But
(09:22):
not for very long. And that is true, it might
not be for very long. Just as had happened with
their father, they also started suffering from vomiting, an inability
to eat, abdominal cramps, bloody stools, swelling, weight loss, and
a constant burning feeling inside their stomachs, all of this
(09:43):
right before they die. It seems like one of those
advertisements for like a pharmaceutical Commercially, we've got at the
bottom all of the terrible of the horrible that might
happen to you just from taking aspirate, you know, but
it will fix that one problem you have. Um Again,
in this case, Marie aired for her six siblings. One
of her brothers took seventy two days to die. The
(10:05):
other died after five months. Seventy days, what is that
about two and a half months. Neither took five and
some change. Yeah, that's a long time. It sounds miserable,
So it's probably felt like years to that can even
imagine the brother's jet certificates reported they had passed away
due to natural causes amazingly, And if you're keeping score,
(10:28):
all of Marie's immediate male relatives are now dead. Ah,
but not the husband. So actually, if you like us
tend to indulge in a little bit of gallows humor,
this moment in Marie's story might make you chuckle. So
it said that Marie actually did try to poison her husband,
(10:50):
perhaps as many as five or six times, with the
intent that she would finally be able to marry her
lover since Qua. But each time she did and Quaw
panicked and gave him the antidote, and this happened over
and over on repeat. You have to remember they were friends.
He's the one who introduced him to Marie. They've known
(11:12):
each other for a long time. Apparently there was no
bad blood between them, I don't know. So Marie then
also began plotting the poisoning of her sister, and allegedly
also that possibly maybe her sister in law who had
inherited money from Marie's brother. So this seems like a
good moment to take a breather have something very non
(11:34):
poisonous as a delightful treat. And when we returned, we
were going to talk about how Marie's homicidal tendencies were
finally discovered. Welcome back to Priminalia. We're getting ready to
talk about how Marie probably did not poison as many
people as some stories might like us to be leave.
(11:55):
According to the charges against her in sixty five, Marie
was said to have conspired tired with her lover to
poison her father in sixteen sixty six, then her two
brothers in sixteen seventy, all in order to inherit their estates.
Among the gossip about her, it was said that it
was her lust, greed, and vengeance that motivated her. But
(12:15):
there is a fairly large rumor that has also gotten
stuck to Marie's story, and we really need to address that.
So some accounts of her life and her poisonings accuse
her of poisoning at least fifty, maybe more people during
visits that she made to hospitals um and she was
doing these visits allegedly as a way to test the
potency of her poisons, such a good Samaritans slash. Not
(12:39):
to be clear, Marie was not charged with any such killings.
There is really no good record of her even making
these visits just hear say that she did it. None
of these killings ever came up at her trial, nor
did she confess to any such things. And as far
as we could see, she very likely did poison some people,
(12:59):
but based on the research that we've been able to
turn up, those victims were her family. They were not
random strangers that were hospital patients. It does make for
a rounded out story, but it's not a true story.
They just can't understand how anyone could have such an
organized poison trunk if they didn't do a lot of experimentation. Well,
we didn't find any sort of like makeshift seventeenth century
(13:21):
spreadsheet about all of the boys. But so her letters, right,
so you're mentioning the trunk, and so the letters were
with the trunk. And once those letters were exposed, she
fled from Paris um and she lived on the lamb
for probably very long years. Later, she was arrested in
Belgium and she was brought back to Paris to ensure
(13:44):
that she confessed to her alleged crimes. Authorities turned to
that classic standby torture, and at this time the water
cure was a popular interrogation method and it was used
extensively to illicit confessions. It was eagle in the eyes
of the French court, and it actually stayed that way
until the eighteenth century. So today there's a modified version
(14:06):
of the water cure that continues to be used around
the world. It has an emphasis on the individual having
the sensation of drowning rather than having to consume completely
lethal amounts of water. You'd know it today as water
boarding rather than the water cure, and it was legally
used by the US and the CIA as recently as
two thousand and three. But the one that we're talking
(14:27):
about now in regards to Marie was about that lethal
drinking of water that Maria just mentioned. So when interrogated
with the water cure, an individual was forced to drink
extreme amounts of water in a very short span of time.
This can result in all sorts of highly uncomfortable and
potentially fatal problems, including gastric distention, water intoxication, coma, and
(14:53):
water toxemia. So it was also known as the question
and it involved forcing eat points, which for all of
US Americans that here is a gallon um of water
into a person's stomach. If you were even luckier, you
got picked for the extraordinary question, which involved double the
amount of water sixteen points. Marie was given the extraordinary
(15:16):
question during her interrogation, she confessed to the poisoning of
her father and to her two brothers. So while Marie's
conviction was based on the information that was obtained through
the contents of her lover's letters, it really relied on
her confession. And that confession is very problematic. As we said,
it was given under torture, which should always be a
(15:37):
red flag about anyone's presumed innocence or guilt. So Marie
survived the extraordinary question, and she was found guilty. She
was convicted of the homicidal poisonings of her father and
her two brothers, and for her own potential financial gain.
She was also found guilty of attempting to murder her sister,
which she did not confess to you during that interrogation.
(15:59):
So right, let's go back to that interrogation for a minute,
because Marie had a few other interesting remarks during it.
It said that she repeatedly told her torturers and were
quoting here, half the people I know people of quality
are involved in the same kind of thing, and I
could drag them all down with me should I decide
to talk. She was not wrong, but aside from her
(16:21):
immediate accomplice being her beloved, Marie never did implicate anyone else,
and she went on to be executed in July of
that year sixty and maybe because they couldn't decide on
which was the better method, or they just really, really
really wanted to make sure that they killed her. Marie
was first beheaded and then she was burned. We should
(16:42):
discuss France at this time because poisons accusations were happening
at a fever pitch in the country and Marie's trial
was a very hot topic of conversation. So this was
a time when there were advancements happening in pharmacology, which
is great. That's actually not the point of what's going
on here, though. This was also a time when Parisian
(17:04):
society couldn't get enough things like seances and fortune tellers
and potent love potions. At this time, black magic was
a thing, and it was something to be feared, and
it also garnered ceaseless fascination. In the seventeenth century, how
poisons affected the body was still poorly understood, and it
was really hard to detect poison as a cause of death.
(17:25):
As we've talked about in other cases, it was really
difficult to place a poisoner at the scene of the crime.
Because of these key problems. It was also really hard
to get a poison conviction. And in a society where
everyone thought they might be poisoned at any moment, this
was very distressing. I'm sure it was distressing. Can you imagine,
You're like, Wow, that lemony taste a little funny. Don't
(17:47):
die tonight. So accusations were really quick, and they were ruthless,
and as many of the people that refused to name
during her interrogation were in fact later compromised in the
following scandal. In the years that went on after her trial,
(18:08):
and it went as high as the court of King
Louis the fourteenth French, paranoia about poison got so bad
that anyone with the stomachache really worried that they had
been done in. It is said that the king even
forced some of his servants to become his royal food tasters,
certainly not the first monarch to do so. This frenzy
um that was happening at this time called the Affair
(18:30):
of the Poisons. It went on for about five years,
roughly between sixteen seventy seven and sixteen eighty two. In
sixteen eighty there's a very good record of the number
of people who had been implicated. So there were at
that time four hundred forty two suspects and three hundred
and sixty seven orders of arrests that had been issued,
(18:51):
of which those two d eighteen had been carried out.
Of those found guilty, thirty six had been executed. Five
were sentenced to the galleys, which were detention and centers
at that time rather than warships. They just kept rowing
for no good reason, which reminds me of going to
the gym. Twenty three were exiled, and uh, none of
these numbers include any of the related suicides that surely happened,
(19:13):
or the number of people who had been put in
prison or had been exiled. Furthermore, many of the accused
were never actually brought to trial. Instead, they were just
imprisoned for life. Some people, likely more than a hundred,
were condemned to perpetual imprisonment by arrest warrants that had
been signed by the king, and it was Marie's trial
that had really kicked things off those who were charged
(19:36):
in the years following her trial directly after her execution
as well. We're all upper class, lower class men women.
Everyone was a suspect during this scandal, which essentially just
boiled down to being a witch trial. Yeah, alchemists, counterfeiters
and poisoners, and really anyone and everyone could be accused.
It seems like if you had any skill that not
(19:56):
everyone understood your automatically suspicious no kidding um. Of the
many who were accused amid the rumors of a royal
poisoning plot, a good number of them were French aristocrats
and prominent persons at the court of the king, whose
class did not save them from charges of witchcraft and poisoning.
(20:21):
Welcome back to criminalia, where we're about to talk about
how Marie's poisonous hand may not have really been about inheritance.
Madame de Sevignier, for instance, was a French aristocrat who's
remembered for her witty letter writing. Now this is actually important,
not just talking about letter writing. Most of her corres
(20:42):
back to the penmanship. I can't help the penmanship. I
bet she had a lovely hand I bet she practiced.
Most of her correspondents actually was addressed to her daughter.
But today her letters are considered to have both historical
and literary significance in France, and she's become a bit
of an icon in French seventeen century literature. She has
a connection to Marie. She was present at Marie's execution
(21:04):
in July sixty six, and she recounted the whole event,
including such details as quote, her poor little body was
thrown after the execution into a very big fire, and
the ashes to the winds so that we shall breathe her.
She also observed that and here's another quote from one
of her letters, never has such a crowd been seen
(21:25):
nor Paris so excited and attentive. Marie's trial was really popular,
almost as a sort of entertainment. Everyone followed it, and
those living in her time and place might have concluded
that her behaviors were sociopathic. There is even a quote
about her from the time that says heart she had none,
not even for the men she loved. But it's tricky,
(21:49):
and modern eyes may be a little more likely to
see the tragedy that could be Marie's story. Um her
story may not be about inheritance, nor about revenge having
had a lover imprisoned. Instead, with today's better understanding of
childhood abuse, this may, as Maria said, not be about
inheritance at all. What was found while we were researching
(22:11):
Marie's life is that this may be really more of
a story about a young girl who was repeatedly sexually abused,
including at the hands of her own brother, and was
not equipped to manage that trauma, because who would be
would be And it's not like she could call up
her local, you know, kick from twenty therapists in town
to help her out. This was not so for a
(22:33):
society that was enthralled by this entire trial. Poisoning for
love or money would have been a much easier story
to parse and get behind absolutely um And if Marie
was really a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, it could
and almost certainly would have impacted her as an adult
in so many ways. She may have had post traumatic
(22:54):
stress disorder. She may have experienced really intense and unwanted
emotional responses and field links um, as well as intense
and unwanted physiological sensations. She just probably didn't feel good
a lot she may have felt unable to create close
and intimate relationships with other people. And this is just
a smattering of possibilities of how her untreated trauma could
have impacted her. We're not saying that people who have
(23:16):
untreated or treated trauma are murderers but at all. But
there are many things that happened to you, when things
happened to you as a child that you just can't
understand as an adult, and it could be Marie. Yeah,
she definitely did not receive any kind of care for
this trauma. And in fact, one time that she did
(23:36):
mention it, she mentioned that the relationship that she had
with her brother, she mentioned it as a relationship as
like a a an adult sexual partnership when she was ten.
Her perspective on things was a little off as well.
She's describing what are very adult concepts as though that
was something she could have even conceived of as a child.
(23:58):
It's not right. Uh So we're never going to know
her true motivations or even if her statements about her
childhood experiences were true, but knowing that she may likely
have had all this serious trauma in her past can
help inform us as we think about her overall tendencies
and her motivations and her behaviors good or bad. Poor
(24:19):
woman to move on so that we always do end
on a more fun note. Yes, Maria, what's your poison? Okay,
so I had a funny what's your poison for this week?
Bring it off? Embarrassing now? Because whatever I figured, we
should all just maybe do our own version of the
water cure feeling dehydrated. Um no, I think he's just
(24:44):
probably much better. Yes, this is where I confess to
you that I hate water. I know it's good for me.
I try to drink it. I choke it down, but
the water cure sounds particularly horrifying to me. I just don't.
I just don't like it. You are my soul's sister.
I have to put something in it. I was not
a water drinker when I was a kid. I'm not
as an adult. Like, what does it taste? It has
(25:06):
a flavor, but it's always icky. Yes, yes, don't. I'm
not a water drinker again. I try, I know, fight dehydration,
but yuck. But she could fight dehydration with the lemons
and oranges in your drink. Yes, yes, So I wanted
to come up with something that suited Marie's story and
(25:27):
her time and place, and I looked at a few.
There are some fun drinks called love Letters to the
Last love Letter that are all lovely. But what I
ended up falling in love with as an idea was
a recipe from a cookbook, a French cookbook from sixteen
sixty and that cookbook is La Confier flancois. And this
(25:48):
is a recipe for how to make lemonade in the
seventeenth century French style. Here's how you make it. It
starts with just one pint of water and then the
juice six lemons. You also have to juice two oranges.
You put half of one of the lemon peels that's
(26:09):
been pressed in. You put half of one of the
orange peels from an orange that you have pressed in.
And here's the kicker. Then you put in half a
pound of sugar. Is insane, it's a lot of sugar.
But then you take all of this citrus juice and
(26:29):
water and sugar and you pour it back and forth
between two vessels to mix it until you feel like
it's pretty well mixed, and then you want to strain it.
The original recipe calls for you to strain it through
un selviete blanche. That's a white napkins. I just used
a regular kitchen strainer. I'm not so fancy. And then
so is it does it really need to be? Like?
(26:51):
I like pulp the pulp stay it's pretty poky, especially
because you have those peels that you can throw in
and as you're transferring the water back and forth, like
pieces of pulp brakery of those. So we tried it
at my house justin it's it's lemonade, non alcoholic form,
and it is a lovely lemonade. In fact, all of
that sugar it might be too sweet for some people,
(27:14):
but because you have so much fresh squeezed lemon juice
in there, which is very acidic, it backs off of
that a little bits. It counters it. But then what
we did to make it a yummy cocktail. We used
one botanicals, the grapefruit and rose vodka, and just put
an ounce and a half in of that. You could
(27:35):
also do it with just a grapefruit vodka, and if
you have rose syrup, it would also be lovely. Was
the rose of your thought or was that in the
actual original recipe? Because I think that sounds delicious. No,
that's mine. I think that's a great addition. I want
to put rose flavor in everything. I have a little problem.
This was such a beautiful drink, and it's one of
those things where I will maybe over share my husband's thing.
(27:58):
He's not a big drinker. He doesn't love cocktails like
I do. But he had originally said I'll just stick
with the regular lemonade. And then I made mine with
the grapefruit and rose vodka, and then he tried it
and said, can I just keep this with So it
was a very delicious cocktail, and then I was like
four gold stars from him. That's a huge endorsement from him.
(28:20):
If it were not for the fact that it would
take me half an hour to cut and juice all
that citrus, I would be making this every day. Are
lemons were particularly small, so I used seven instead of six.
It did take some time, and I'm a little clumsy
still with the juicer, and the oranges are too big
for a regular juice like lemon squeezer, so you've got
to cut them smaller. I'm not a graceful I'm pretty
(28:43):
good at it, but I'm not very graceful about it.
Like the end result is usually I could put it
together and how it tastes, not how it got put together.
I'm not even a big citrus person, and I loved it,
so that's a a clear wind. I think the drink
is the best one that we've done so far. Like
I'm going to absolutely make this sounds great. I think
you should. So that concludes this episode of Criminalia. Thank
(29:05):
you so much for joining us, he ain't. Criminalia is
a production of Shawonda land Audio in partnership with I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shawonda land Audio, please
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia.
We're exploring the intersection of history and true crime. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Maria tru Marquis and this season
we are talking about Lady Poisoners. Today. Before we begin,
(00:22):
we do want to let everyone know that there is
content and discussion in this episode that contains descriptions of
childhood trauma, specifically sexual abuse, which some listeners may find difficult.
Then today's episode, we are going to look at the
life of Marie Madeleine Marquerite Debray Marquise de Bruvillier. Did
(00:42):
she kill her father and brothers? And if she did,
was it for the family inheritance? So Marie was born
on July t in Paris. She had two younger brothers
and one younger sister. There's really not much on record
about her mom all. According to many accounts, she may
have died during childbirth, and her father was a man
(01:04):
named Antoine dred He was a civil lieutenant of Paris.
So the family was wealthy, influential, and very well known.
People often joked that Marie was related to half the
lawyers in Paris. Marie history tells us was small, she
was pretty, and she was smart, And I think it's
funny what details stick to stories throughout the decades. And
(01:26):
apparently she also had excellent penmanship. Listen, that's a point
of pride. More than two hundred years later, biographers writing
her story couldn't quite reconcile Marie's quote uncommon physical attractions
with what came to be known as her toxic hobbies.
In one case, for instance, author Hughes Stokes described her
(01:47):
as having a soft smile, blue eyes, and a graceful figure,
and then he went on to comment about her quote
unbridled passions of a tigress. I'm not sure how Mr
Stokes would have know that, but that is certainly an
example of some healthy male chauvinism. Yeah. Uh so, Marie
(02:08):
grew up, as we mentioned, in a wealthy home. So
they had a townhouse in Paris and a chateau and
a beautiful carriage in a household filled with servants to
meet her every need. But although her childhood may sound
pretty ideal, narratives about her life suggested that it may
have been that Marie was sexually abused by possibly as
many as three servants in her family home when she
(02:30):
was about seven years old. Uh and at the age
of ten, she may also have been sexual abused by
one of her brothers, which is a situation that as
an adult, she referred to as an incestuous relationship. Now,
despite all of this troubled situation in her home life
as a child, Marie as an adult was considered quite
a catch. When she was twenty one years old, she
(02:53):
married an army officer named Antoine Goblin Marquis de Bruinvillier,
and he was a commanding officer of our regiment and
he was serving in Normandy. At the time, the couple
was doing really well financially. However, Marie's new husband was
an incorrigible gambler and the couple was very quickly in debt.
But to remember how we talked about Marie came from
(03:13):
a wealthy family, she did, and she had a dowry,
and her dowry was substantial, equal to about two U
s dollars in today's money, but they were running through
it really quickly. Stories about this marriage suggests that they
had an arrangement where it was an open one with
both partners taking lovers outside of the marriage. Marie's extramarital
affairs would of course have been gossiped about, but mostly
(03:37):
things would have kind of just been overlooked. That is,
if Marie had stayed within the high society's rules of decorum.
But Marie didn't really care about following their rules. Not
only did she take a lover, she chose to do
it with someone who was considered a bad boy. Now,
the sort of funny twist here is that it was
(03:57):
her husband who actually introduced her to this person. That
was Captain Jean Baptiste Godin de Saint Quas, a young
cavalry officer with very expensive taste, and for Marie this
was an instant connection. Okay, Um, So here's the thing
about being in wealthy society in seventeenth century France. No
one really cared that you were having an affair. They
(04:20):
just wanted to thoroughly discuss every single scandalous detail about it.
Marie's father and her two brothers saw this as a
public scandal though, and as public humiliation, and they really
did care. So when the Marquis de Blinvillier, who had
left France to avoid creditors, made no effort to stop
his wife's affair. It was ultimately her father who took
(04:40):
things into his own hands. He secured the arrest of
Saint Qua. So Marie and Jean Baptiste enjoyed riding around
Paris in her carriage, which had Marie's coat of arms
embossed on the gilded doors. They were really anything but
discreet wedding river around. In my head, this is the
seventeenth century equivalent of hiring a limb, right standing with
(05:01):
your head out of the real yelling we're having an
a fair as you drive through the streets. Absolutely, he
was some champagne glasses completely. Marie's father really did have
a lot of influence, including with the king, and he
was not afraid to use it. One afternoon when the
love birds were out taking in the sights in this carriage,
(05:23):
the carriage was stopped by the police, and the police
were carrying orders from the King that sent Qua had
to be imprisoned immediately. So he was taken away immediately,
and he was incarcerated in the mistill for probably less
than a year, maybe give or take a year. Records
a little squishy on that, but it wasn't as though
he became an antisocial hermit. While he was incarcerated, he
(05:45):
was a social gent and he quickly befriended his cellmate,
a man named Gidio Exili, who was an Italian chemist
who was also proficient in the art of poison. So
it said that Marie used a poison called at the fauna,
which was widely used in Italy, and had learned to
make it from sin Qua, and he is said to
(06:05):
have learned the method from making it from Ado. When
sint Qua died suddenly in July sixteen seventy two, people
started to say that he died in the act of
stirring up a batch of Awkwata fauna. As the legend goes,
not realizing his protective glass mask had cracked as he
leaned over the fire. He was not protected from the
(06:26):
poisonous fumes from the poison that he was compounding. This
is definitely one of those stories that sounds great, but
the truth of his death is actually hardly this titillating
or ironic. His real story is that he died after
having some kind of long illness, and it wasn't really
ever suspected that he was part of the deaths of
Marie's family. No one mentions whether or not he made poisons,
(06:47):
but just that he wasn't suspected in those deaths. When
he died, though boring as his actual passing may or
may not have been, no one came to collect his belongings,
and if they had, they would have noticed that he
left a note on one particular red leather trunk asking
that it be delivered to Marie. So left unclaimed. That
(07:10):
trunk was examined by the authorities as the authorities would do.
As we're about thirty letters which she had received from
Marie while he was in prison. Oh here it starts.
So contained within her writings were some very interesting pieces
of information that were eventually used against her. So this
is one example. In one letter, she promised to pay
(07:34):
cent Qua the equivalent of thirty five thousand U S.
Dollars about a week after the poisoning of her father occurred,
which I'm sure was so he could buy himself something real.
Pretty nothing nefarious. But here's the thing. The contents of
the trunk. Yes, in this trunk were packets of various poisons,
and each packet was labeled with the effects that it
(07:56):
would produce. I mean I'm actually conflicted on this because
I really like a well organized trunk, but I also
have a big problem with well labeled poisons. I mean,
you don't want poorly labeled poison. I mean, but you
do want him well labeled. And I actually really wonder
which poison packet it was the one that introduced the vomiting,
(08:17):
extreme stomach pains, burning sensation throughout your whole insides. Those
are the symptoms that Marie's dad suffered with for months
before he died in sixteen sixty six. Marie was his caretaker,
but his condition didn't improve, which we've we've heard that
story before when we've told poison caretakes, you watched out
(08:37):
for your caretaker and your tea um. His cause of death,
according to his doctor, wasn't actually poisoned. They were convinced
that he had died of complications of gout, and to
address the rumor mill Marie had an autopsy performed on
his corpse and nothing suspicious was reported. She was so lucky,
(08:58):
maybe so. The inheritance money that came up after her
father's death was divided among Marie and her siblings. Antoine,
who was her eldest brother, and the heir of the
family received a larger chunk of the cheddar. And really,
what about Marie's brothers. Here she's gotten her father out
of the way, but if she's looking for money, those
two still stand in between her and the inheritance. But
(09:22):
not for very long. And that is true, it might
not be for very long. Just as had happened with
their father, they also started suffering from vomiting, an inability
to eat, abdominal cramps, bloody stools, swelling, weight loss, and
a constant burning feeling inside their stomachs, all of this
(09:43):
right before they die. It seems like one of those
advertisements for like a pharmaceutical Commercially, we've got at the
bottom all of the terrible of the horrible that might
happen to you just from taking aspirate, you know, but
it will fix that one problem you have. Um Again,
in this case, Marie aired for her six siblings. One
of her brothers took seventy two days to die. The
(10:05):
other died after five months. Seventy days, what is that
about two and a half months. Neither took five and
some change. Yeah, that's a long time. It sounds miserable,
So it's probably felt like years to that can even
imagine the brother's jet certificates reported they had passed away
due to natural causes amazingly, And if you're keeping score,
(10:28):
all of Marie's immediate male relatives are now dead. Ah,
but not the husband. So actually, if you like us
tend to indulge in a little bit of gallows humor,
this moment in Marie's story might make you chuckle. So
it said that Marie actually did try to poison her husband,
(10:50):
perhaps as many as five or six times, with the
intent that she would finally be able to marry her
lover since Qua. But each time she did and Quaw
panicked and gave him the antidote, and this happened over
and over on repeat. You have to remember they were friends.
He's the one who introduced him to Marie. They've known
(11:12):
each other for a long time. Apparently there was no
bad blood between them, I don't know. So Marie then
also began plotting the poisoning of her sister, and allegedly
also that possibly maybe her sister in law who had
inherited money from Marie's brother. So this seems like a
good moment to take a breather have something very non
(11:34):
poisonous as a delightful treat. And when we returned, we
were going to talk about how Marie's homicidal tendencies were
finally discovered. Welcome back to Priminalia. We're getting ready to
talk about how Marie probably did not poison as many
people as some stories might like us to be leave.
(11:55):
According to the charges against her in sixty five, Marie
was said to have conspired tired with her lover to
poison her father in sixteen sixty six, then her two
brothers in sixteen seventy, all in order to inherit their estates.
Among the gossip about her, it was said that it
was her lust, greed, and vengeance that motivated her. But
(12:15):
there is a fairly large rumor that has also gotten
stuck to Marie's story, and we really need to address that.
So some accounts of her life and her poisonings accuse
her of poisoning at least fifty, maybe more people during
visits that she made to hospitals um and she was
doing these visits allegedly as a way to test the
potency of her poisons, such a good Samaritans slash. Not
(12:39):
to be clear, Marie was not charged with any such killings.
There is really no good record of her even making
these visits just hear say that she did it. None
of these killings ever came up at her trial, nor
did she confess to any such things. And as far
as we could see, she very likely did poison some people,
(12:59):
but based on the research that we've been able to
turn up, those victims were her family. They were not
random strangers that were hospital patients. It does make for
a rounded out story, but it's not a true story.
They just can't understand how anyone could have such an
organized poison trunk if they didn't do a lot of experimentation. Well,
we didn't find any sort of like makeshift seventeenth century
(13:21):
spreadsheet about all of the boys. But so her letters, right,
so you're mentioning the trunk, and so the letters were
with the trunk. And once those letters were exposed, she
fled from Paris um and she lived on the lamb
for probably very long years. Later, she was arrested in
Belgium and she was brought back to Paris to ensure
(13:44):
that she confessed to her alleged crimes. Authorities turned to
that classic standby torture, and at this time the water
cure was a popular interrogation method and it was used
extensively to illicit confessions. It was eagle in the eyes
of the French court, and it actually stayed that way
until the eighteenth century. So today there's a modified version
(14:06):
of the water cure that continues to be used around
the world. It has an emphasis on the individual having
the sensation of drowning rather than having to consume completely
lethal amounts of water. You'd know it today as water
boarding rather than the water cure, and it was legally
used by the US and the CIA as recently as
two thousand and three. But the one that we're talking
(14:27):
about now in regards to Marie was about that lethal
drinking of water that Maria just mentioned. So when interrogated
with the water cure, an individual was forced to drink
extreme amounts of water in a very short span of time.
This can result in all sorts of highly uncomfortable and
potentially fatal problems, including gastric distention, water intoxication, coma, and
(14:53):
water toxemia. So it was also known as the question
and it involved forcing eat points, which for all of
US Americans that here is a gallon um of water
into a person's stomach. If you were even luckier, you
got picked for the extraordinary question, which involved double the
amount of water sixteen points. Marie was given the extraordinary
(15:16):
question during her interrogation, she confessed to the poisoning of
her father and to her two brothers. So while Marie's
conviction was based on the information that was obtained through
the contents of her lover's letters, it really relied on
her confession. And that confession is very problematic. As we said,
it was given under torture, which should always be a
(15:37):
red flag about anyone's presumed innocence or guilt. So Marie
survived the extraordinary question, and she was found guilty. She
was convicted of the homicidal poisonings of her father and
her two brothers, and for her own potential financial gain.
She was also found guilty of attempting to murder her sister,
which she did not confess to you during that interrogation.
(15:59):
So right, let's go back to that interrogation for a minute,
because Marie had a few other interesting remarks during it.
It said that she repeatedly told her torturers and were
quoting here, half the people I know people of quality
are involved in the same kind of thing, and I
could drag them all down with me should I decide
to talk. She was not wrong, but aside from her
(16:21):
immediate accomplice being her beloved, Marie never did implicate anyone else,
and she went on to be executed in July of
that year sixty and maybe because they couldn't decide on
which was the better method, or they just really, really
really wanted to make sure that they killed her. Marie
was first beheaded and then she was burned. We should
(16:42):
discuss France at this time because poisons accusations were happening
at a fever pitch in the country and Marie's trial
was a very hot topic of conversation. So this was
a time when there were advancements happening in pharmacology, which
is great. That's actually not the point of what's going
on here, though. This was also a time when Parisian
(17:04):
society couldn't get enough things like seances and fortune tellers
and potent love potions. At this time, black magic was
a thing, and it was something to be feared, and
it also garnered ceaseless fascination. In the seventeenth century, how
poisons affected the body was still poorly understood, and it
was really hard to detect poison as a cause of death.
(17:25):
As we've talked about in other cases, it was really
difficult to place a poisoner at the scene of the crime.
Because of these key problems. It was also really hard
to get a poison conviction. And in a society where
everyone thought they might be poisoned at any moment, this
was very distressing. I'm sure it was distressing. Can you imagine,
You're like, Wow, that lemony taste a little funny. Don't
(17:47):
die tonight. So accusations were really quick, and they were ruthless,
and as many of the people that refused to name
during her interrogation were in fact later compromised in the
following scandal. In the years that went on after her trial,
(18:08):
and it went as high as the court of King
Louis the fourteenth French, paranoia about poison got so bad
that anyone with the stomachache really worried that they had
been done in. It is said that the king even
forced some of his servants to become his royal food tasters,
certainly not the first monarch to do so. This frenzy
um that was happening at this time called the Affair
(18:30):
of the Poisons. It went on for about five years,
roughly between sixteen seventy seven and sixteen eighty two. In
sixteen eighty there's a very good record of the number
of people who had been implicated. So there were at
that time four hundred forty two suspects and three hundred
and sixty seven orders of arrests that had been issued,
(18:51):
of which those two d eighteen had been carried out.
Of those found guilty, thirty six had been executed. Five
were sentenced to the galleys, which were detention and centers
at that time rather than warships. They just kept rowing
for no good reason, which reminds me of going to
the gym. Twenty three were exiled, and uh, none of
these numbers include any of the related suicides that surely happened,
(19:13):
or the number of people who had been put in
prison or had been exiled. Furthermore, many of the accused
were never actually brought to trial. Instead, they were just
imprisoned for life. Some people, likely more than a hundred,
were condemned to perpetual imprisonment by arrest warrants that had
been signed by the king, and it was Marie's trial
that had really kicked things off those who were charged
(19:36):
in the years following her trial directly after her execution
as well. We're all upper class, lower class men women.
Everyone was a suspect during this scandal, which essentially just
boiled down to being a witch trial. Yeah, alchemists, counterfeiters
and poisoners, and really anyone and everyone could be accused.
It seems like if you had any skill that not
(19:56):
everyone understood your automatically suspicious no kidding um. Of the
many who were accused amid the rumors of a royal
poisoning plot, a good number of them were French aristocrats
and prominent persons at the court of the king, whose
class did not save them from charges of witchcraft and poisoning.
(20:21):
Welcome back to criminalia, where we're about to talk about
how Marie's poisonous hand may not have really been about inheritance.
Madame de Sevignier, for instance, was a French aristocrat who's
remembered for her witty letter writing. Now this is actually important,
not just talking about letter writing. Most of her corres
(20:42):
back to the penmanship. I can't help the penmanship. I
bet she had a lovely hand I bet she practiced.
Most of her correspondents actually was addressed to her daughter.
But today her letters are considered to have both historical
and literary significance in France, and she's become a bit
of an icon in French seventeen century literature. She has
a connection to Marie. She was present at Marie's execution
(21:04):
in July sixty six, and she recounted the whole event,
including such details as quote, her poor little body was
thrown after the execution into a very big fire, and
the ashes to the winds so that we shall breathe her.
She also observed that and here's another quote from one
of her letters, never has such a crowd been seen
(21:25):
nor Paris so excited and attentive. Marie's trial was really popular,
almost as a sort of entertainment. Everyone followed it, and
those living in her time and place might have concluded
that her behaviors were sociopathic. There is even a quote
about her from the time that says heart she had none,
not even for the men she loved. But it's tricky,
(21:49):
and modern eyes may be a little more likely to
see the tragedy that could be Marie's story. Um her
story may not be about inheritance, nor about revenge having
had a lover imprisoned. Instead, with today's better understanding of
childhood abuse, this may, as Maria said, not be about
inheritance at all. What was found while we were researching
(22:11):
Marie's life is that this may be really more of
a story about a young girl who was repeatedly sexually abused,
including at the hands of her own brother, and was
not equipped to manage that trauma, because who would be
would be And it's not like she could call up
her local, you know, kick from twenty therapists in town
to help her out. This was not so for a
(22:33):
society that was enthralled by this entire trial. Poisoning for
love or money would have been a much easier story
to parse and get behind absolutely um And if Marie
was really a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, it could
and almost certainly would have impacted her as an adult
in so many ways. She may have had post traumatic
(22:54):
stress disorder. She may have experienced really intense and unwanted
emotional responses and field links um, as well as intense
and unwanted physiological sensations. She just probably didn't feel good
a lot she may have felt unable to create close
and intimate relationships with other people. And this is just
a smattering of possibilities of how her untreated trauma could
have impacted her. We're not saying that people who have
(23:16):
untreated or treated trauma are murderers but at all. But
there are many things that happened to you, when things
happened to you as a child that you just can't
understand as an adult, and it could be Marie. Yeah,
she definitely did not receive any kind of care for
this trauma. And in fact, one time that she did
(23:36):
mention it, she mentioned that the relationship that she had
with her brother, she mentioned it as a relationship as
like a a an adult sexual partnership when she was ten.
Her perspective on things was a little off as well.
She's describing what are very adult concepts as though that
was something she could have even conceived of as a child.
(23:58):
It's not right. Uh So we're never going to know
her true motivations or even if her statements about her
childhood experiences were true, but knowing that she may likely
have had all this serious trauma in her past can
help inform us as we think about her overall tendencies
and her motivations and her behaviors good or bad. Poor
(24:19):
woman to move on so that we always do end
on a more fun note. Yes, Maria, what's your poison? Okay,
so I had a funny what's your poison for this week?
Bring it off? Embarrassing now? Because whatever I figured, we
should all just maybe do our own version of the
water cure feeling dehydrated. Um no, I think he's just
(24:44):
probably much better. Yes, this is where I confess to
you that I hate water. I know it's good for me.
I try to drink it. I choke it down, but
the water cure sounds particularly horrifying to me. I just don't.
I just don't like it. You are my soul's sister.
I have to put something in it. I was not
a water drinker when I was a kid. I'm not
as an adult. Like, what does it taste? It has
(25:06):
a flavor, but it's always icky. Yes, yes, don't. I'm
not a water drinker again. I try, I know, fight dehydration,
but yuck. But she could fight dehydration with the lemons
and oranges in your drink. Yes, yes, So I wanted
to come up with something that suited Marie's story and
(25:27):
her time and place, and I looked at a few.
There are some fun drinks called love Letters to the
Last love Letter that are all lovely. But what I
ended up falling in love with as an idea was
a recipe from a cookbook, a French cookbook from sixteen
sixty and that cookbook is La Confier flancois. And this
(25:48):
is a recipe for how to make lemonade in the
seventeenth century French style. Here's how you make it. It
starts with just one pint of water and then the
juice six lemons. You also have to juice two oranges.
You put half of one of the lemon peels that's
(26:09):
been pressed in. You put half of one of the
orange peels from an orange that you have pressed in.
And here's the kicker. Then you put in half a
pound of sugar. Is insane, it's a lot of sugar.
But then you take all of this citrus juice and
(26:29):
water and sugar and you pour it back and forth
between two vessels to mix it until you feel like
it's pretty well mixed, and then you want to strain it.
The original recipe calls for you to strain it through
un selviete blanche. That's a white napkins. I just used
a regular kitchen strainer. I'm not so fancy. And then
so is it does it really need to be? Like?
(26:51):
I like pulp the pulp stay it's pretty poky, especially
because you have those peels that you can throw in
and as you're transferring the water back and forth, like
pieces of pulp brakery of those. So we tried it
at my house justin it's it's lemonade, non alcoholic form,
and it is a lovely lemonade. In fact, all of
that sugar it might be too sweet for some people,
(27:14):
but because you have so much fresh squeezed lemon juice
in there, which is very acidic, it backs off of
that a little bits. It counters it. But then what
we did to make it a yummy cocktail. We used
one botanicals, the grapefruit and rose vodka, and just put
an ounce and a half in of that. You could
(27:35):
also do it with just a grapefruit vodka, and if
you have rose syrup, it would also be lovely. Was
the rose of your thought or was that in the
actual original recipe? Because I think that sounds delicious. No,
that's mine. I think that's a great addition. I want
to put rose flavor in everything. I have a little problem.
This was such a beautiful drink, and it's one of
those things where I will maybe over share my husband's thing.
(27:58):
He's not a big drinker. He doesn't love cocktails like
I do. But he had originally said I'll just stick
with the regular lemonade. And then I made mine with
the grapefruit and rose vodka, and then he tried it
and said, can I just keep this with So it
was a very delicious cocktail, and then I was like
four gold stars from him. That's a huge endorsement from him.
(28:20):
If it were not for the fact that it would
take me half an hour to cut and juice all
that citrus, I would be making this every day. Are
lemons were particularly small, so I used seven instead of six.
It did take some time, and I'm a little clumsy
still with the juicer, and the oranges are too big
for a regular juice like lemon squeezer, so you've got
to cut them smaller. I'm not a graceful I'm pretty
(28:43):
good at it, but I'm not very graceful about it.
Like the end result is usually I could put it
together and how it tastes, not how it got put together.
I'm not even a big citrus person, and I loved it,
so that's a a clear wind. I think the drink
is the best one that we've done so far. Like
I'm going to absolutely make this sounds great. I think
you should. So that concludes this episode of Criminalia. Thank
(29:05):
you so much for joining us, he ain't. Criminalia is
a production of Shawonda land Audio in partnership with I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shawonda land Audio, please
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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