Town Hall Square

Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, was executed by decapitation in Paris on July 16, 1676, after which her body was burned at Place de Grève (now Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville). She was officially convicted of the murder of three family members: her father, Antoine Dreux d’Aubray (poisoned in 1666), and her two brothers, Antoine and François d’Aubray.

Additionally, she admitted to having also attempted to poison her husband, daughter, and sister, although without success. Some later sources alleged that she tested her poison on patients in Parisian hospitals, which supposedly led to as many as thirty deaths, although this has never been proven and is likely exaggerated.

Her father, Antoine Dreux d’Aubray, had her lover, Officer Godin de Sainte-Croix, arrested based on a royal "lettre de cachet" (an order for imprisonment without trial), as the relationship was deemed scandalous.

When Sainte-Croix was released after a year of imprisonment in the Bastille, he and the marquise devised a revenge plan against her family, in which she learned to use poison from a fellow prisoner of Sainte-Croix, the Italian poisoner Exili. Besides revenge, financial gain played a central role. Through the death of her father and two brothers, she hoped to inherit their possessions so that she and Sainte-Croix could live financially independent. She indeed received an inheritance after her father's death, but quickly squandered it and then repeated the pattern with her brothers.

Pascal Brackman