The Marais is split in two by Rue Saint-Antoine. The northern half is the better known one, thanks to sites like Place des Vosges and the Musée Carnavalet. But it’s actually the southern half that holds a few buildings tied to the “juicier” side of Parisian history. The first building I wrote about before is Hôtel de Beauvais, where the woman who took Louis XIV’s virginity was rewarded with a mansion, and the second is Hôtel de Sens, where Queen Margot’s last love affair came to a tragic end. Today we’ll walk a short distance from Hôtel de Sens to Hôtel de Brinvilliers, on Rue Charles V at number 12. Don’t let its beauty and elegance fool you, because dark murders were plotted within its walls, and it gave birth to the most famous scandal of the reign of Louis XIV.
The house was built in 1620 by Antoine de Gobelin (a descendant of Jean Gobelin, who invented the tapestries that bear his name) and his wife, Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, the Marquise de Brinvilliers. Her husband couldn’t keep up with his wife’s sexual appetite, and their marriage soured. The marquise took many lovers, the last of whom was a cavalry officer named Godin de Sainte-Croix. When her father found out, he had the officer locked up in the Bastille, where he met Exili, a chemist with whom he shared a cell during his imprisonment.
The marquise poisons her family
Exili had studied the art of poison in Italy and had served a long list of famous figures, including Olimpia Maidalchini, the all-powerful mistress of Pope Innocent X, and Queen Christina of Sweden. After the two men were released from prison, they set up a secret poison laboratory together in the Impasse Maubert, and once they had concocted several kinds of poison, they told the marquise about it. The news couldn’t have come at a better time, since the marquise had just finished spending the generous dowry she had received from her father and was looking for a way to take control of the family fortune to avoid bankruptcy.
To test how effective the poisons were, the marquise began volunteering at the famous Hôtel-Dieu hospital, where she tried the poisons on the sickest patients without arousing suspicion. Once she thought she’d found the right dose, she tried poisoning her father, but it didn’t come easily. It took her ten attempts before she succeeded in 1666. Her two brothers were easier, and they died shortly after each other. Emboldened by her success, the marquise turned to poisoning her husband, but to her surprise, he showed no signs of poisoning at all, even as she kept increasing the dose in his food. The reason was that her partner in crime, the officer Sainte-Croix, kept removing the poisoned food, since he had no interest in marrying the marquise after her husband’s death…
The whole business blew up when the Chevalier de Sainte-Croix died (of natural causes) in 1672 and left behind a pile of incriminating letters, which somehow made their way to the authorities. The marquise fled France for a convent near Liège, where she hid until the French police found her and brought her back to Paris. On July 17, 1676, the marquise was taken to the Place de Grève (today’s Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville), and in front of an enormous crowd, she was beheaded and her body was burned (her high social standing spared her from being burned alive). “At last it’s all behind us. I think the affair is over,” wrote Madame de Sévigné to her daughter. But truth be told, the real affair had only just begun.
By the way, one of the people the marquise implicated during the investigation was the financier Pierre-Louis Reich de Pennautier (1635-1711), who spent thirteen months in prison before being released. Around that time, he rented a house in the Marais that is now home to the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature.
A witch hunt
The marquise’s trial got people thinking back on a string of suspicious deaths among the courtiers of Louis XIV, and rumors began to spread that they, too, had been poisoned. The king, fearing he might be next, appointed the chief of police, La Reynie, as an investigating magistrate and gave him full authority to arrest and interrogate anyone suspected of poisoning, no matter how high their rank. Before long, a witch hunt was underway in Paris, and many women who practiced fortune-telling, performed abortions, or sold aphrodisiacs were arrested.
Under torture, they confessed to supplying plenty of women from high society not only with the 17th-century equivalent of Viagra, but also with “inheritance powder”, in other words, poison meant to get rid of inconvenient relatives. As the investigation progressed, more and more women from high society were arrested, and the fire began creeping toward the very top of Louis XIV’s court. The investigation reached its peak in 1681, when testimony surfaced claiming that the king’s own mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, had taken part in black masses, mixed aphrodisiacs into the king’s food, and poisoned his younger mistress, the Duchesse de Fontanges (1661-1681).
Just before the chief of police was forced to bring in the royal mistress for questioning, the King of France decided to shut the witch hunt down to avoid a scandal, and the investigative team was disbanded. Over the course of the investigation, 367 suspects were arrested, and 36 of them were executed for poisoning and sorcery (at least some of them for crimes they never committed, having confessed under brutal torture and died entirely innocent). It’s no surprise, then, that the French still regard this affair as one of the darker chapters of their history. And to all the married men reading this blog: learn the lesson, and check your coffee cup carefully if you’ve upset your wives…
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