It is a curious fact that most of the notorious poisoners in mediæval times were women, and, indeed, in later years the frail sex seem to have retained a special predilection for this form of crime. In the year 1659, a secret society of women, most of whom were young wives belonging to some of the best and wealthiest families of Rome, was discovered in that city, the sole or chief object of which was to destroy the lives of the husbands of the members. They met at regular intervals at the house of one Hieronyma Spara, a woman reputed to be a witch, who provided her fellow associates and pupils with the required poison, and planned and instructed them how to use it. Operations had been carried on for some time, when the existence of the society was discovered and, says a chronicler, "the hardened old hag passed the ordeal of the rack without confession; but another woman divulged the secrets of the sisterhood, and La Spara, together with twelve other women implicated, were hanged." Many others who were guilty in a lesser degree were publicly whipped through the streets of the city. In the seventeenth century the mania for poisoning seems to have spread to France, and great interest was excited by the disclosures which followed the discovery of Exili's conspiracy to poison a number of persons. Madame de Montespan, one of the favourites of Louis XIV, a woman of great beauty, died very suddenly at the age of twenty-six, on June 30, 1672, and it was generally believed she had been poisoned. The rumour seems to have been set on foot by one of her husband's old servants, who professed to know the individual who had administered the fatal dose. "This man," said he, "who was not rich, withdrew immediately afterwards into Normandy, where he bought an estate, on which he lived with grandeur a long time; the poison was powder of diamonds, mixed, instead of sugar, with strawberries."