It was the accidental death of her lover, in 1675, which exposed and brought the vengeance of the law on La Brinvilliers. Sainte-Croix was conducting some experiment with poisons in his laboratory, when the glass mask with which he had covered his face suddenly broke, and he fell dead on the spot. Letters of Mme. de Brinvilliers were amongst the suspicious objects found in the laboratory by the police, and she fled to London. One of Sainte-Croix' servants was put to the Question, and his confession did not improve the situation of the Marquise. Leaving London, she hid by turns in Brussels and Liège; and in a convent in the latter town she was discovered by the detective Desgrais, who got her out by a ruse, and brought her back to Paris. Her appearance in the torture chamber of the Conciergerie was not long delayed. All her fascinations failed her with those bloodless cross-examiners, and as she persisted in denying one charge after another, she saw the executioner and his attendants make ready the apparatus for the torture by water. She summoned a little shew of raillery: "Surely, gentlemen, you don't think that with a figure like mine I can swallow those three buckets of water! Do you mean to drown me? I simply cannot drink it." "Madame," replied the examiner-in-chief, "we shall see"; and the Marchioness was bound upon the trestle. For a time her courage sustained her, but, as the torture grew sharper, avowals came slowly, which must have amazed the hardened ears that received them. "Who was your first victim?" "M. d'Aubrai—my father." "You were very devout at this time, attending church and visiting hospitals?" "I was testing the powers of our science on the patients. I gave poisoned biscuits to the sick." "You had two brothers?" "Yes ... we were two too many in my family. Lachaussée, Sainte-Croix' valet, had instructions to poison my brothers; they died in the country, with some of their friends, after eating a pigeon-pie which Lachaussée used to make to perfection." "You poisoned one of your children?" "Sainte-Croix hated it!" "You wanted to poison your husband?" "Sainte-Croix for some reason prevented it. After I had administered the poison, he would give my husband an antidote." Before she was released from the trestle, Madame's confession was complete. Sainte-Croix, imprisoned in the Bastille, on a _lettre-de-cachet_ obtained by M. de Brinvilliers, had there made the acquaintance of an Italian chemist, named Exili, who had taught him the whole art and mystery of poison. Exili's cell in the Bastille was the first laboratory of Sainte-Croix, who proved afterwards so apt a pupil that, as his mistress and accomplice avowed, he could conceal a deadly poison in a flower, an orange, a letter, a glove, "or in nothing at all."