The enormity of this crime rivalled that of the recorded murder already narrated, of the Duchesse de Ganges, some score years earlier, these both being rivalled by the series of murders, perpetrated by poison, of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers. It is recorded in her connection, that “In the plaster-cast shop is a small, delicate, plump little hand, dimpled and beautiful, which is sold to artists as a model. You take it in yours, handle it, admire it, almost fancy you are shaking hands with the good-humoured and festive little personage to whom it must have belonged. You ask whose it was, and are told that it was that of Madame de Brinvilliers, the notorious poisoner. You recoil as if you had been handling an asp.” Marguérite d’Aubrai was the daughter of one Monsieur d’Aubrai, lieutenant-civil of Paris, and she was married at an early age to the Marquis de Brinvilliers, to whom for a while she was devotedly attached. In time her affection waned in favour of a Gascon officer named St Croix, a worthless adventurer. Monsieur d’Aubrai, discovering his daughter’s infatuation, obtained an order for the imprisonment of St Croix in the Bastille. During the year he was confined there, he contrived to make acquaintance with an Italian named Exili, who was an adept in the art of toxicology, and possessed the secret of the concoction of the terrible _Aqua Toffana_—to call it by its best-known name, and as it was in its later form called by “la Toffana,” the Neapolitan woman who got possession of the recipe from the reputed witch, la Sphara, the hag of a hundred years earlier, who was in the pay of the Borgias. In course of time the secret of the hideous brew—originally styled by la Sphara, “The Manna of St Nicolas of Bari”—had leaked out through the confessional, the father-confessors, appalled probably by the many penitential revelations made, had in course of generations given vent almost unwittingly to the disclosures of so many crimes at so many different hands; for it is said the “Manna,” had poisoned over six hundred persons, and Exili had learnt the secret of the ingredients of the subtle mortal poison, which was a tasteless colourless drug. On the release of St Croix, the marchioness’s mad love for him had only waxed greater, and when she had extracted from him this recipe for death, they planned together to poison her father, her sister, and two brothers successively, all in the same year of 1670, the marchioness, meanwhile, being apparently a most charitable and pious visitor of the sick in the Hôtel Dieu, and other hospitals of Paris, but suspected later of trying the effects of her potions on the various patients.