When the marquise had tested the strength of 'Glaser's recipe,' and had noted the inability of the surgeons to discover traces of poison in the corpses, the poisoning of her father was resolved on. As Whitsuntide drew on in the year 1666, Antoine Dreux d'Aubray, who had been suffering for some months from strange disorders, set out for his estates at Offémont, a few leagues from Compiègne. He asked his daughter to bring her children and spend a few weeks with him, and when she arrived he scolded her affectionately for having been so long in coming. On the day after her arrival his sickness was redoubled; 'he had great vomitings, continuing with increasing violence till his death,' which occurred at Paris, whither he had himself transported in order to secure the services of the best physicians, and whither his daughter had not failed to accompany him. Madeleine de Brinvilliers confessed afterwards that she had poisoned her father twenty-eight or thirty times with her own hands, and at other times by the hands of a lackey named Gascon, presented to her by Sainte-Croix. The poison was given both in water and in powder, and the process lasted eight months. 'She could not manage it,' she said. It is clear that the poison she employed was simply arsenic. When in the course of time the facts were known, all Europe clamoured with indignation at the thought of this woman heaping caresses on her dying father, and responding to his embraces by pouring poison into the medicines she handed him with her engaging smile. 'The greatest crimes,' said Madame de Sévigné, 'are a mere trifle in comparison with being eight months poisoning her father and receiving all his caresses and tendernesses, to which she replied by doubling the dose. Medea was nothing to her.' D'Aubray died at Paris on September 10, 1666, aged sixty-six years. The physicians who made an autopsy of the body attributed death to natural causes; but the rumour at once got abroad that he had died of poison. The elder brother of the marquise, whose name was the same as his father's, succeeded him in the family estates and the office of civil lieutenant.