The Pitaval Casebook. Frederick Schiller

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      “A couple of words still about Brinvillier”, she says in the following letters. “She has died, as she has lived, with resolution. As people brought her onto the place of execution where she should be tortured, she said by seeing the three buckets of water: I should presumably be drowning, for people cannot expect me to absorb all this. She listened to her sentence without showing any sign of emotion. In the end, she asked the same sentence to be read once again; for she said that since the beginning, the cart was so inappropriate to her that she could not pay attention to what was said. On the way to the execution place, she asked her confessor that she wanted to have the execution judge before her, “so that I”, she added, “do not have to see Corporal Desgrais who has captured me.” Desgrais accompanied the cart on horse. As her confessor showed her this arrangement, she replied: ”Oh God! I ask for your forgiveness! Spare me this strange moment!”

      She climbed on the scaffold alone, barefoot. It really took a quarter of an hour for the execution judge to prepare her; hence, the crowd started to be impatient. On the following day, people sought after her remains because they thought that she was a saint. Before her imprisonment, as she confided herself, she had two confessors. “The first one”, she said, “demanded that I must recognize everything, the other one, however, affirmed that I should not do so; and I,” she added with a smile about these contradicting opinions, “hence, can do whatever pleases me.” It was pleasing her not to say a word about her accomplices. Penautier came out even whiter than snow from the whole case. The public was not happy.

      “The world is always unfair,” says Lady Sévigné in the following letters, “it was unfair with Brinvillier. Never have people judged a gruesome act so hastily. People have not tortured this criminal; people even made her hope for a grace, and she certainly hoped to come out of the ordeal alive; and yet, on her way to the scaffold, she said: “Now, everything is in order”. In the meantime, her ashes have been dispersed in the air, and her confessor assured that she is a saint.”

      The Marquis of Brinvillier would not be embroiled in anything in his wife's trial, and no one knew whatever happened to him after her execution. Madame Sévigné wrote that he has indeed requested grace for his significant other. Presumably, he sought to bury his sorrow in loneliness and to remove from the public memory a name which now was synonymous with the most abominable crime.

      The pharmacist Glazer would also be dragged into this trial, because he has delivered to Saint Croix different substances, and it cost him all his efforts not to be accused.

      Mister Penautier would be at once interrogated about the letters which Lady Brinvillier has written to him from prison. People knew that he must have had a close relationship with this criminal, and his relationship with Saint Croix was already publicly known. Through the general rumour about Saint Croix's skills in poison preparations, it also came out that a certain Lady Vosser would now be accused of murdering her husband. She conceded that her spouse, Lord Saint-Laurent, general cashier of the clergy, has been poisoned by a servant who was recommended to her by Saint Croix, and affirmed that the poison has been prepared by Saint Croix from a request by Penautier with whom she has already for long agreed to remove her husband from his office forcefully; that Penautier, as Saint Croix's accomplice, has fled from him. She built her accusation mainly on this completely specific interest which Mister Penautier had in killing her husband; through whose death he, at the same time, satisfied his revenge on a hated rival and received one of the most rewarding office. That Saint Croix, however, participated in this poisoning, she sought to prove, above all, from the most narrow relationship which Penautier had with this horrible criminal.

      “Saint Croix,” she said, “received from Penautier enough money to maintain servants, waiters, coachmen; in a word, to have a glowing lifestyle. Such expenses, however, people do not easily care to make for another person just out of friendship; another, far more lively interest must be motivating it. What kind of interest could, however, Penautier have in covering Saint Croix with such benevolence, if it were not the rewards for services which he performed for him with his poison making skills? However, it was totally in line with such shameful plots that he demanded his share of the incomes coming from the office which he made vacant for his friend, running the danger of being condemned at the stake.

      The close connivance between these two men is, however, generally known; every one knew that the one could not live without the other, that they met together on a daily basis, and that when Saint Croix could not come himself to see him, at least, he would send him his Martin, the confidant of all his perversity. The declaration in his last will in which Saint Croix bequeathed this infamous small coffer to Mrs Brinvillier, is also a proof of the inner relationship between him and Penautier, for this will was addressed to him, it should have been brought over to him.” Finally, Lady Saint Laurent also affirmed that Saint Croix has received from Penautier as a reward for the service which he performed for him, a very considerable sum through a letter of payment; the last one, however, was astute enough to have this letter curtailed by the Inspector who made the inventory.

      These were, hence, the grounds from which people would show that Penautier was an accomplice of Saint Croix, and has used his poisoning skills into his advantage. But even if these grounds were enough to put his ambiguous behaviour and his good reputation into suspicion; hence, the judge could not possibly hold them as proofs to sentence him. The Parliament found these proofs insufficient, and freed him. In the meantime, the public condemned him. People affirmed publicly that he could not have avoided the deserved punishment, had he not dispensed a lot of money around.