When the prayer was done and the doctor raised his head, he saw before him the executioner wiping his face.  “Well, sir,” said he, “was not that a good stroke?  I always put up a prayer on these occasions, and God has always assisted me; but I have been anxious for several days about this lady.  I had six masses said, and I felt strengthened in hand and heart.”  He then pulled out a bottle from under his cloak, and drank a dram; and taking the body under one arm, all dressed as it was, and the head in his other hand, the eyes still bandaged, he threw both upon the faggots, which his assistant lighted.

“The next day,” says Madame de Sevigne, “people were looking for the charred bones of Madame de Brinvilliers, because they said she was a saint.”

In 1814, M. d’Offemont, father of the present occupier of the castle where the Marquise de Brinvilliers poisoned her father, frightened at the approach of all the allied troops, contrived in one of the towers several hiding-places, where he shut up his silver and such other valuables as were to be found in this lonely country in the midst of the forest of Laigue.  The foreign troops were passing backwards and forwards at Offemont, and after a three months’ occupation retired to the farther side of the frontier.

Then the owners ventured to take out the various things that had been hidden; and tapping the walls, to make sure nothing had been overlooked, they detected a hollow sound that indicated the presence of some unsuspected cavity.  With picks and bars they broke the wall open, and when several stones had come out they found a large closet like a laboratory, containing furnaces, chemical instruments, phials hermetically sealed full of an unknown liquid, and four packets of powders of different colours.  Unluckily, the people who made these discoveries thought them of too much or too little importance; and instead of submitting the ingredients to the tests of modern science, they made away with them all, frightened at their probably deadly nature.

Thus was lost this great opportunity—­probably the last—­for finding and analysing the substances which composed the poisons of Sainte-Croix and Madame de Brinvilliers.