Marie-Madeleine d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers (French: [bʁɛ̃vilje]; 22 July 1630 – 16 July 1676) was a French aristocrat who was convicted of murdering her father and two of her brothers in order to inherit their estates. After her death, there was speculation that she tested her poisons on upwards of 30 sick people in hospitals and street dogs, but these rumours were never confirmed. Her crimes were discovered after the death of her lover and co-conspirator, Captain Godin de Sainte-Croix, who saved letters detailing dealings of poisonings between the two. After being arrested, she was tortured, forced to confess, and finally executed. Her trial and death spawned the onset of the Affair of the Poisons, a major scandal during the reign of Louis XIV accusing aristocrats of practising witchcraft and poisoning people. Components of her life have been adapted into various media including short stories, poems, and songs to name a few.
The Marquise was born in 1630 to the relatively wealthy and influential household of d'Aubray. Her father, Antoine Dreux d'Aubray (1600–1666), held multiple important governmental and high-ranking positions such as the Seigneur of Offémont and Villiers, councillor of State, Master of Requests, the Civil Lieutenant and prévôt of the city of Paris, and Lieutenant General of the Mines of France. Her mother, Marie Olier (1602–1637) was the sister of Jean-Jacques Olier, who founded the Sulpicians and helped establish the settlement of Ville-Marie in New France, which would later be called Montreal. In her confession, the Marquise acknowledged being sexually assaulted at the age of seven, though she did not name her assaulter. Further admitted in her confession is that she also had sexual relations with her younger brother Antoine, whom she would later poison.
Though the eldest of five children and loved by her father, she would not inherit his estate and was thus expected to marry into another. Coming from a family of such wealth, whomever she married would inherit quite a large dowry from her, 200,000 livres, in fact. At the age of 21, in 1651, she was married to Antoine Gobelin, Baron de Nourar, and Chevalier in the order of Saint Jean of Jerusalem and later Marquis de Brinvilliers, whose estate was worth 800,000 livres. His wealth came from his ancestors' famed tapestry workshops. His father was the President of the Chamber of Accounts. Upon marriage, the Marquise's father bestowed upon the couple a house at 12 rue Neuve St. Paul in Marais, an aristocratic district of Paris. With the Marquis de Brinvilliers, she soon had three children, two girls and a boy. She had a total of seven children, at least four of whom are suspected of being illegitimate children from the Marquise's various affairs. The Marquis befriended a fellow officer, Godin de Sainte-Croix, and introduced him to the Marquise; she would later have a long-lasting affair with Sainte-Croix.
The Marquise's father was displeased to hear of his daughter's sexual affair with Sainte-Croix (which if became public, could damage his reputation due to his high position in French society) and was further displeased that the Marquise was in the process of separating her wealth from that of her husband (who was gambling it away), which was almost akin to divorcing him, a major faux-pas in French aristocratic society. Due to her father's position as a prévôt, granting him a large amount of power and influence, in 1663 he instigated a lettre de cachet, against her lover, Sainte-Croix, which called for his arrest and imprisonment at the Bastille. While riding in a carriage with the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Sainte-Croix was arrested in front of her and thrown in the Bastille for a little under two months. The Marquise later commented that perhaps if her father had not had her lover arrested, she might have never poisoned her father.
Many historians say that it was during his time in the Bastille that Sainte-Croix learned much about the art of poisoning. He was imprisoned in the Bastille at the same time as the infamous Exili (also known as Eggidi), an Italian in the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, who was an expert on poisons. Exili was imprisoned in the Bastille not because he had committed a crime, but rather because Louis XIV was suspicious of his presence in France because the courts of Sweden and France were not on the best of terms at the time. Other historians say that it is highly possible that Sainte-Croix was already an acquaintance of Christopher Glaser, a famed Swiss pharmaceutical chemist and had attended some lectures given by him. Yet, other historians doubt that Sainte-Croix came into contact with either and might have just been using their well-established names to sell his poisons for a higher price.
Upon his release from prison, Sainte-Croix married but remained in close contact with the Marquise. Sainte-Croix started an alchemy business to allow him to work with poisons, about which he now knew a lot from his time in prison, by obtaining the necessary license to use certain equipment in order to distil his poisons. It was under his tutelage that the Marquise de Brinvilliers started to experiment with poisons and concoct ideas of revenge.
It has been suggested by many researching the Marquise that before poisoning her father she tested out her poisons on unsuspecting sick hospital patients. This theory comes from a report made by the lieutenant general of the Paris police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, who, in speaking of the Marquise, indicated that she, a pretty and delicate high-born woman from a respectable family, amused herself in observing how different dosages of her poisons took effect in the sick.
Scholars who support and acknowledge this theory do so because the era in which the Marquise lived would have enabled a woman of her rank to get away with murder quite easily. Typical for the era, female members of French nobility would often visit hospitals to help care for the sick. Because many of these patients were already ill, it provided the means for the Marquise to test out her poisons without much suspicion. She tested out her poisons at the Hôtel Dieu hospital close to Notre Dame. Furthermore, because Hôtel Dieu was not a very well-managed hospital, as it was overflowing with patients, and was more concerned with saving souls than saving lives, deaths, even those under suspicious circumstances, often went unnoticed. She also started to experiment on her servants, giving them food tainted with her experimental poisons. The Marquise was not tried for these crimes, however, because they were only attributed to her after her execution.
In 1666, the Marquise started to slowly poison her father, who died on 10 September. She placed a man, Gascon, in her father's household to slowly administer poison to him. In the week before his death, her father invited the Marquise and her children to stay with him. She gave him multiple doses of "Glaser's recipe," a tried-and-true mixture of chemicals that would render him dead seemingly of natural causes. Antoine Dreux d'Aubrey died with the Marquise at his side. An autopsy was performed on his body which concluded that Dreux d'Aubrey died of natural causes, exacerbated by gout. After the death of her father, the Marquise inherited some of his wealth. She quickly burned through the money, and, needing more, decided to poison her two brothers, hoping to get their share of her father's fortune as she was, to the best of her knowledge, their next heir.
Her two brothers lived in the same household, but the Marquise was not on the best of terms with either of them, making them harder to poison slowly than her father. She thus employed Jean Hamelin, more commonly known as La Chaussée, to work as a footman in her brothers' household. La Chaussée went to work straight away. Antoine d'Aubray actually suspected that he was perhaps a target of attempted poison when he noticed that his drink had a metallic taste to it. La Chaussée's attempt at poisoning him there failed, but not long after, during an Easter feast, Antoine d'Aubray fell ill after eating a pie and never recovered, dying on 17 June 1670. The second brother was poisoned soon after, dying in September of the same year; their subsequent autopsies would hint at poison due to the fact that their intestines were suspiciously coloured; nevertheless, the conclusion was that they had both died of "malignant humour". Numerous individuals around the inquest into the brothers' deaths were suspicious that they had been poisoned, especially because their deaths occurred so close to one another and in such similar circumstances, but La Chaussée was never suspected; in fact, he was so well-loved by the younger Dreux brother that, upon his death, he bequeathed one hundred écus to La Chaussée.