The Marquise and Her Poisons

The Marquise de Brinvilliers is a subject of operas and stories, a larger-than-life villainess who murdered her family with poison and almost got away with it. Almost.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised. Since it's the
week of Halloween, Let's start with a scary story. This
is one called The Leather Funnel, written by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. It was written during one of the many

(00:22):
periods in his life he was exhausted with writing stories
about his famous detective Sherlock Holmes, and somewhat resentful of
how successful that one character had become. Like all good
scary stories, this one begins with a visitor coming to
stay at the mysterious residence of a distant, eccentric friend.

(00:44):
As soon as the guest arrives, Thost apologizes profusely he
doesn't have a spare bedroom, but he does have a wide,
comfortable couch in his library. Our guest is, of course
enchanted by the idea of an evening company by a
low crackling fireplace and the warm parchment smell of books,

(01:07):
and he readily agrees. But as soon as the men
enter the library, the guest realizes that there are more
than just books there. As it turns out, the host
is a collector and his library is where he displays
his treasures, strange and maccabbre historical objects, most of which

(01:27):
the guest can't even identify. One such object in particular,
catches his interest a large, dark funnel constructed of leather
with brass accents, maybe a foot long at its widest diameter.
At the tapered side, the tube had deep notches in it,
like it was whittled away by a very sharp knife.

(01:50):
The host catches the guests staring ah. He says, I
see you've noticed my funnel. I've been wondering about this thing.
I'll tell you what. Why don't you sleep with it
next your head and see if you can glean anything
about it from your dreams. Our host was not just
a collector, but also a student of the occult and

(02:10):
the paranormal workings of the mystical arts. The guest agreed
and went to sleep on the couch in the library that,
for all of its strange objects, still did have a warm,
glowing fireplace and the familiar and wonderful smell of books.
As it so happened, that night, the man had a dream.

(02:32):
He dreamt he was in a French prison cell where
a woman in a white night dress was being tortured.
The woman's body was bent over something that looked like
a wooden beam, just taller than her hip. She was
pulled over it backwards, so that her head was pulled
down to the floor and her belly was thrust upwards.

(02:54):
Her ankles and wrists were chained to the ground while
a nervously murmuring pre east watched on. The prison guards
took a funnel, the same leather funnel, and forced it
into her mouth. In his dream, the guests saw the
massive jugs of water set nearby. Surely they can't be

(03:15):
planning on forcing her to drink those. He thought, she'll drown,
her stomach will burst. But to his horror, the guards
in the dream picked up the first jug of water
and poured it into the funnel. The woman flailed and recoiled,
rattling the chains and thrashing violently. The priest left the room,

(03:39):
horrified and seeing that there still remained another jug full
of water to torture the woman with. The man awoke
from his dream with a start, soaked with sweat, as
though he had been the one doused with water in
the morning. The host asked if he had any dreams. Dutifully,
the man recount did everything he had seen the night before,

(04:02):
the woman, the wooden beam, the jugs of water, the priest.
The host's eyes lit up, and he raced back to
a bookshelf to pull out a book. After a few
moments of frantic flipping, he found what he had been
looking for, a chapter about Madame de Brinvillier, a marquise
who had been found guilty of poisoning her brothers and

(04:26):
her father, and who had been tortured into confession with
what was ironically called the water cure. You see, the
host explained, what you saw in your dream actually happened,
and this is the very funnel they used to inflict
her torture. But what have the knife marks around the mouthpiece,

(04:48):
the guest asked, Ah, said the host, The Marquise fought
like a tiger. It seems like she had the teeth
to match. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's st worry is fictional,
as is the power of dreams to reveal unknown truths, probably,
but the story Doyle was referencing is absolutely true. The

(05:11):
Marquise de Brinvilliers is one of history's most famous poisoners,
a woman who's often painted as either evil or beautifully
mad with love or both. It's impossible to know now
the full extent of her crimes. What we can know
is that she was a woman confident that she would
get away with them, and the funny thing is she

(05:34):
almost did. I'm danis sports and this is noble blood.
If you had to be born a girl in sixty
you couldn't hope to be born much better than Marie
Meline Marguerite Debre, the future Marquise de Brinvilliers. Her father

(05:57):
was a prominent Parisian bureaucrat, himself the son of a
much respected treasurer. The family was incredibly well connected and
also very rich, which meant that Marie's two brothers would
each come into a sizeable inheritance, and that there was
no reason in the world to think that their sister
wouldn't marry extremely well and live in comfort for her

(06:19):
entire life. Marie was the family's eldest child. No one
would describe her as beautiful, maybe striking was a bit closer.
After meeting her, her general appearance would fade from your memory,
but specific features would be tattooed onto your brain. Extraordinarily thick,

(06:40):
brown hair, bone, white, nearly translucent skin, blue eyes. She
was better than her brothers at her letters, spelling words
easily and writing with thick, clean, bold, firm lines that
made her tutors press their lips together in pleasure her

(07:00):
and made her parents worry. Her siblings and playmates thought
she came across as haughty and distant at best, or
maybe slow in the head, even for her unwillingness to
join them in silly games. But the truth was Marie
was just uncommonly observant. She preferred to watch and to learn.

(07:21):
Even as an adolescent, The future Marquise de Burunvillier was
shrewd and sharp as a fresh cut blade. Studious as
she was, she refused to learn her prayers or waste
her mornings in church unless absolutely forced. She was bored
and disinterested by religion, which seemed in her youth as

(07:43):
just a minor defect of an aristocratic woman. But looking
back on the woman that she became, maybe it was
a sign from the beginning. Maybe there is always a
certain wickedness that lingered beneath her skin that repelled her
from studying the Holy scripture, the same way a demon
news to pull itself away from holy water at age

(08:06):
twenty one. In sixteen fifty one, Marie got married to
a titled nobleman and twine, gou Blond de Brunevillier, a
marquis and a baron. Love might have been too much
to ask for from the much older man, who, even
from their wedding night, seemed to prefer the company of
mistresses to his new wife. But the Marquis treated Marie

(08:26):
with something even less than affection, less than mild interest,
something worse even than outright hatred, because at least hatred
has a spark of passion to it. The Marquis treated
the Marquise with complete and utter indifference. He left his

(08:46):
wife alone while he spent evenings in smoke filled parlors,
sipping champagne and tasting sweets and oranges, racking up gambling
debts and new women to take home. The Marquise, who had,
above all else in childhood hated boredom, was left to
fend for herself. Well, that's not entirely true. The Marquis

(09:09):
did give his wife one kindness. He introduced her to
one of his young military friends, a tall and handsome
young officer the marquis own age named Gaudine de Saint Croix.
By any estimation, Sant Croix was not the sort of
person a young, married aristocratic woman should be associating with.

(09:31):
He was an officer, yes, but just a simple captain
in the cavalry. His birth could virtuously be called dubious,
although everyone knew he was probably just a bastard. But
Sant Croix had a winning habit of smiling when he
talked to people, acting as if he was including them
in on a secret. He mirrored not only hand gestures

(09:52):
back at people, but personalities. With vicars, he was pious
and straight backed, with gamblers lush an indulgent, and with
the Marquise de Burnevillier he was clever and patient and romantic.
Far from being angry that his wife began in affair
with one of his oldest friends, the Marquis was delighted

(10:17):
it gave him more time to spend with his mistresses.
Weeks would go by before the Marquis and the Marquise
slept under the same roof. Husband and wife would occasionally
lock eyes from across the rooms of salons and parties.
Parties were the Marquis gambled and the Marquise glittered like

(10:38):
a jewel on the arm of her lover, Sancroix. Meanwhile,
the marquise skill in picking up new mistresses was matched
only by his skill in picking up new debts. And
when every creditor in town began to send out collection notices,
the nobleman ran, fleeing the country and leaving his wife

(11:00):
in the capable hands of his former friend. The Marquise
de Burnevilliers and Saint Croix were far from subtle. People
began talking about the way the woman behaved, flaunting her affair,
ignoring even the pretense of her marriage. It was almost disgraceful.
And remember this was coming from people in France. Word

(11:25):
got to Madame de Bernevillier's brothers about the way their
sister was living in sin. They were outraged, and as
a pair they arrived on the doorstep of her Paris
home unannounced, to beg her to abandon Saint Croix in
order to preserve the honor of the family. When she refused,

(11:45):
their pleads turned to threats. They swore they would get
a magistrate. The Marquise de Bernevilliers laughed in their faces.
She wished them a good day, shut the door and
returned to her lover in the foyer. Burning with humiliation,
the marquise's brothers went to their father, the esteemed bureaucrat

(12:06):
Drew d'lbrey. The pair told their father what their sister
had been doing, how she had taken up with a
common soldier, flaunting her disrespect of her marital vows. Their
father took a deep breath, He rose and walked around
to his desk, where he carefully dipped his favorite pen
and ink and began to write. In silence, The brothers

(12:30):
looked at one another, confused. For several silent moments, they
watched their father write something on parchment, crossing out a
word here there before Finally, he pursed his lips with satisfaction,
dusted the ink to dry it, and sealed the letter
with his personalized wax stamp. Finally, he spoke, I will

(12:55):
take care of your sister. On a brisk day at
the end of March, police stopped a carriage on a
crowded street and pulled a man out. When the man
demanded an explanation, the policeman brandished a letter from the
King himself authorizing the arrest. Onlookers gawkeed the man agreed

(13:16):
to go without struggle. But please, sir, he told the policeman,
there's no need to scandalize the young woman. I'm riding
with the crowds. Don't need to see her face. Take me,
but please let the carriage continue its journey home safely.
The policeman agreed, and so, even as the Marquise de
Bourunevillier shouted from its window in protest and anger, the

(13:41):
carriage continued on further and further away, until the sight
of Sant Croix, her lover, being arrested and pulled to prison,
disappeared in the chaos of the peristree. In between Notre

(14:03):
Dame and the Palace of Justice on the Ille de
la Cite, in the heart of Paris lies the city's
oldest hospital, the Hotel Dieu. It was a grotesque place
where nuns and priest doctors patrolled filthy hallways, three thousand
patients waiting in varying proximity to death. The patients with

(14:25):
skin diseases and contagious viruses lay next to mothers in
labor beds contained six patients, three with their heads at
one end and three with their heads at the other.
Operations happened in the middle of wards, in the full
view of other patients, and all of the wards were
just feet from the hospital's dead house and dissecting rooms.

(14:48):
The stench of death never left the place. Even so,
the noble ladies of Paris came regularly to bestow their
largesse upon the less fortune it. They arrived in small groups,
clutching handkerchiefs to their noses to ward off the stench.
Among the most dedicated visitors was the Marquise to Brunevilliers.

(15:12):
Nearly every day, the Marquise arrived at the hospital bearing
suits and wine and biscuits, treats that she distributed among
the grateful and lonely sick who had been waiting in
boredom and misery. The Marquise gave each a treat and
a winning smile and a flick of her extraordinarily thick hair,

(15:32):
and they wondered if she was an angel. Brinvillier's lover,
San Croix, had been released from prison at the Bastille
after three months, and since he returned home, the pair
acted as the very models of Christian virtue. Brun Villiers
made her daily hospital visits. Sant Croix went to confession

(15:53):
and the two were never seen at clubs or parties together. Instead,
they were staying home and working together side by side
in the new laboratory the Marquise de Briunflier had paid for.
In prison. Sant Crois roommate was a man named Exili,
a mysterious Italian who had been arrested for coming into

(16:16):
France while he was in the service of the eccentric
Queen of Sweden. He was being detained while the French
government figured out exactly what he was there to do
and which of the stories from his past were true
and which were mere rumors. People said that Axily was
a magician and a poisoner, and that he had worked

(16:37):
in Rome under the illustrious Madam Olympia, and that he
had been responsible for the deaths of over one hundred
and fifty people with the strange tonics and waters that
he brewed. San Croix had always been a smart man,
always knowledgeable about the clear, colorless liquids that could be
tipped into a cup of wine, or the inheritance powder,

(17:00):
as they called it, that could be sprinkled over a
stew to haste in a wealthy relative's demise. But in
his time in a cell with exili he became an expert.
He learned about arsenic and belladonna, and vitriol, and aquato fauna,
and in particularly noxious poison venen de cropas, or toad venom,

(17:22):
which was brewed by boiling down the liquids of a
dead toad and carefully distilling its essence. And when Saint
Croix returned from prison, the Marquise de Burunevilier was still
bubbling with anger towards her brothers and towards her father,
the men in her life who had sold her to
an indifferent husband and then denied her the only happiness

(17:45):
she had ever known. What could she take from the
men who had tried to take everything from her? With
her brother's gone, the Marquise would inherit her father's vast estate.
She could take their fortunes, but the Marquise thought she
could also take their lives, And so the Marquise and

(18:16):
Saint Croix set to work mixing their own variation on
the poison aquaitot fauna, which was already famous in the
back alleys of Europe among women who want to taste
in their widowhood. All the while, the pair behaved pious
as Saints Saint Croix with his church going and confessions,
and the Marquise de Burunevilliers with her regular hospital visits.

(18:41):
And the Marquise had also been transformed into a dutiful daughter.
Three years after Saint Croix had been sent to prison,
the Marquise's father visited Paris. His daughter called on him,
begging for his forgiveness for her youthful scandal and assuring
him that she had all but forgot in his letter
to the king. The two became so close that when

(19:04):
her father began to feel ill and decided to retire
to his country estate for some clean air, he invited
his daughter to come be at his bedside. His mood
lifted as soon as she arrived, and he jokingly chastised
her for not coming sooner. But then her father's condition deteriorated.
It was slow at first and then suddenly quicker. He

(19:28):
called upon the best doctors, but in the end it
was of no use. It was his daughter, the Marquise
de Burnevillier, cooing at his bedside and wiping his forehead
with a wet cloth to soothe him in his final
moments before he died, and a similar fate befell the
Marquise's two brothers. Strangely, their health began to worsen soon after.

(19:51):
They hired a servant on their sister's recommendation. She assured
them that there was absolutely no servant in Paris more loyal,
and there wasn't. The servant filled their wine glasses with
the dedication and precision of a man at the top
of his profession, and as they became sicker, he never
left their sides. He was at their bedsides day and

(20:15):
night as they died, first one and then the other.
The poisons had been masterfully brewed, slow acting and subtle,
so that even to a well trained eye, it seemed
as though the victims had merely taken ill and died
of natural causes. Brinevilliers had become an expert. She had

(20:37):
tested the doses dutifully. People didn't tend to pay attention
to the noble woman making a charitable visit to a hospital,
and people paid even less attention to the impoverished sick
when they got even sicker. Who could have noticed the
way that the patients all seemed to take a turn
for the worse After the Marquise de Brinvilliers had come

(20:59):
by to drop off one of her little treats. You see,
it took years of trial and error to perfect the
dosage of her poisons, but fortunately for the Marquise, she
had found the perfect test subjects. For a decade, the

(21:21):
Marquise de Brinvillier lived a quiet life. Her affair with
Saint Croix had dampened as affairs are wont to do
in the aftermath of homicide, and the two drifted out
of touch, although Brinvilliers continued to pay for Saint croix laboratory,
where he continued his experiments with poisons. That's where Saint
Croix was found dead in sixteen seventy two, collapsed on

(21:45):
the floor of his laboratory, next to the broken fragments
of the glass mask that had been meant to protect
him from the deadly fumes with which he was working.
Saint Croix was no longer content with poisons made from
liquid or powder. He was chasing the idea that an
item could be so poisonous that merely touching it would

(22:07):
kill someone. There were rumors that the elder brother of
Charles the seventh had died after wiping his face with
a poisoned napkin at a tennis match, and that Catherine
de Medici had designed gloves that would kill the wearer.
As san Croix worked on his own formula, his glass
mask protected him from the fumes. At least it had

(22:30):
until it fell off and broke. Sancroix died heavily in debt.
Like the Marquise de Burnevillier's long disappeared husband, her former
lover was addicted to the rush of gambling. When the
financiers examined his home, claiming whatever looked like it could
be sold, they came across a strange locked box. It

(22:52):
was eighteen inches long, seemed to be wrapped in red
dyed leather, and there was a letter across the top.
I very humbly beg those persons in whose hands this
casket may fall into, to be good enough to return
to Madame the Marquise de Burnevilliers, as all that it
contains concerns her alone, and in case she should have

(23:15):
predeceased me, everything in it is to be burnt without examination.
But unable to resist temptation, the magistrate pried open the
lid and piqued inside. When word reached the Marquise de Burnevilliers,
that Saint Croix was dead, and that the police had
found in his possession a small red casket. The Marquise

(23:37):
de Burnevilliers fled the country with whatever money she could gather.
In a few hours, Burnevilliers escaped to London, then to Holland,
and finally to Antwerp, where she found refuge in a convent.
She lived in exile for almost three years, but the

(24:00):
French police had not stopped looking for her. Inside that
little red casket, the police had found tiny vials containing
a white powder that, when thrown on a fire, made
it burn blue arsenic. Also inside the casket, perfectly preserved,
were letters detailing the exact formula for poison that the

(24:24):
Marquise and her lover had spent years concocting. Letters written
in the clean, bold, firm handwriting of the Marquise de Brinevilliers.
She was found finally in that nunnery in Antwerp by
a magistrate who disguised himself as a priest. As soon
as she was caught, she broke a glass and tried

(24:45):
to swallow the pieces to end her life. When they
no longer allowed her glass, she tried to swallow a pin,
but unable to kill herself. The Marquise de Brinvilliers was
brought to Paris to be tortured into confession. Her body
was bent backwards across a wooden beam, with her arms
and legs chained to the floor. A funnel was shoved

(25:07):
into her mouth, and the torturers forced down a full
gallon of water. You're killing me, Brunevilliers sputtered. When the
gallon was finished, they demanded that she name her accomplices.
She claimed that she had none left. The torture continued.
The Marquise de Burunevilier was carried off to her execution

(25:29):
in a cart meant for livestock. Her hair was still
brown and extraordinarily thick. Her eyes were blue. Her skin
was bone white and almost translucent, and everyone could see
her from the back of the cart. When she reached
the execution platform a rough knife, sheared off her hair

(25:51):
to give the blade a clear path to her neck.
She was facing the sun when the executioner lowered a
mask over her eyes. The marquis peace began to pray,
but the axe cut her off mid sentence. Usually after executions,
the corpses were stripped, but the Marquise's body remained clothed.

(26:12):
A distant relative had bribed some one or another to
preserve her dignity or the reputation of their family. In
that one small, final way, the corpse, still fully clothed,
was placed on a pyre and burned to ash. History,
especially modern history, tends to have a problem with glamorizing

(26:34):
female murderesses. Allow me to make it clear that I
think the Marquise is a villain, But perhaps you'll also
allow me to tell you the story, maybe apocryphal, of
what supposedly happened when the magistrate had finally caught her
in that nunnery, and Marquise immediately tried to swallow glass.
You wretched, The policeman shouted at her, you want to

(26:56):
kill yourself. You already poisoned your father and your brothers,
And the Marquise responded with a bon mo. So beautifully
modern it seems impossible to believe, like it should be
the final line in a Billy Wilder film. Supposedly, the
magistrate confronted her with her murders, and the Marquise looked
back at him, and she said, we all have our

(27:19):
bad moments. That's the end of the Marquise de brine
Villier's life. But it's not the end of the story.
Keep listening after a brief ad break to hear how heard.
Case shook the French aristocracy to its core. Enthralling as

(27:48):
the Marquise de brine Villiers murders and gruesome as her
torture and execution were, her life was nothing compared to
the chaos that was about to hit the French court
of Louis the four teeth, Because while Brinvillier was being tortured,
she didn't give up the names of any co conspirators,
but she did say something that left law enforcement reeling.

(28:11):
Between bouts of water torture, while choking on the funnel
they pulled from her mouth, Brinvillier managed to say something
truly chilling. So many of us are doing it, she remarked,
But only I get caught. The terrifying thing was she
was right. The Affair of the Poisons, as this frenzy

(28:31):
of enforcement would come to be known, led to three
hundred and nineteen arrests and thirty six individuals sentenced to death. Poisoning,
especially among the upper class, had become modus operandi for
eliminating enemies and rival airs. Self styled witches ran back
alley apothecaries where they made tonics and powders and potions

(28:55):
to sell to women willing to pay any price. Once
to woman, it seemed, was Madame de Montespa, the official
mistress of King Louis. It isn't known for sure if
Montespan bought poisons, although there are rumors that she attempted
to do in the newer younger women that threatened to

(29:16):
steal King louise attention away. What we do know is
Madame de Montespan did almost everything else in her power
to make sure that the King's attention didn't leave her.
After all, losing her position as official mistress meant losing
everything in the world. Montespas snuck love potions into the
King's food and wine, drops of menstrual blood and sperm,

(29:40):
iron filings, and the iridescent green wings of the Spanish
fly beetles ground into fine powder, and, according to the
most damning rumors against her, she engaged in black mass.
They say she watched a baby butchered before her in
a dim palace basement, and then extended her tongue to

(30:02):
accept a communion waper dotted with the dead infants blood.
When the affair of the poisons reached Madame de montespan
Louis the fourteenth cooled down proceedings. He spared her a
criminal investigation, but from that point on her position diminished,
then dwindled, until she was left with nothing. For most

(30:25):
of recorded history, women have been excluded from overt, mainstream
political participation. They're shoved into drawing rooms and forced to
steal whatever shreds of power they can with restrained smiles
and unrestrained cunning. And it's no secret that people become
desperate when they have no control, when their spectators to

(30:47):
their own lives, seeing themselves becoming boxed in like human prey.
For the cost of a small vial of powder and
her soul, a woman could become the architect of her
own life, or at least she could try to be temporarily.

(31:09):
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana
Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,

(31:32):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.