During the next ensuing days, Madame de Sévigné’s letters brim with details of the wretched woman’s latest hours. “At six o’clock on the morning of her execution,” she writes, “la Brinvilliers was carried in a cart, stripped to her shift, with a cord about her neck, to the church of Notre Dame, to perform the _amende honorable_. She was then replaced in the cart, where I saw her lying at her length on a truss of straw, only her shift and a suit of plain head-clothes, with a confessor on one side and a hangman on the other. Indeed, my dear, the sight made me shudder. Those who saw the execution say she mounted the scaffold with great courage.” Threatened with the question, it was not applied; since she said at last that she would confess everything, and an appalling confession it was. Repeatedly she had tried to poison her father, brother and several others, before she succeeded; and all under the appearance of the greatest love and confidence. Finally, Madame de Sévigné writes— “At length all is over—la Brinvilliers is in the air; after her execution, her poor little body was thrown into a great fire, and her ashes dispersed by the wind. And so we have seen the end of a sinner. Her confessor says she is a saint!!” After the death of Queen Maria Théresa, which occurred some little time before the fall of Madame de Montespan, the ascendency of the royal governess increased rapidly. Madame Arnoul was now no longer the indispensable friend of Madame Scarron. She had come, in fact, to be so nearly an encumbrance, that Françoise had handed her over in marriage to a gentleman of Marseilles, with a portion of twenty thousand crowns, after having profited so excellently by the example of the intriguing skill of that past-mistress in the art, that she was quite capable henceforth of acting for herself.