s who had eaten it felt indisposed after the meal,
and the three who had not taken it were perfectly well. Those on whom
the poisonous substance had chiefly acted were the lieutenant, the
councillor, and the commandant of the watch. He may have eaten more, or
possibly the poison he had tasted on the former occasion helped, but at
any rate the lieutenant was the first to be attacked with vomiting two
hours later, the councillor showed the same symptoms; the commandant and
the others were a prey for several hours to frightful internal pains; but
from the beginning their condition was not nearly so grave as that of the
two brothers. This time again, as usual, the help of doctors was
useless. On the 12th of April, five days after they had been poisoned,
the lieutenant and his brother returned to Paris so changed that anyone
would have thought they had both suffered a long and cruel illness.
Madame de Brinvilliers was in the country at the time, and did not come
back during the whole time that her brothers were ill. From the very
first consultation in the lieutenant's case the doctors entertained no
hope. The symptoms were the same as those to which his father had
succumbed, and they supposed it was an unknown disease in the family.
They gave up all hope of recovery. Indeed, his state grew worse and
worse; he felt an unconquerable aversion for every kind of food, and the
vomiting was incessant. The last three days of his life he complained
that a fire was burning in his breast, and the flames that burned within
seemed to blaze forth at his eyes, the only part of his body that
appeared to live, so like a corpse was all the rest of him. On the 17th
of June 1670 he died: the poison had taken seventy-two days to complete
its work. Suspicion began to dawn: the lieutenant's body was opened, and
a formal report was drawn up. The operation was performed in the
presence of the surgeons Dupre and Durant, and Gavart, the apothecary, by
M. Bachot, the brothers' private physician. They found the stomach and
duodenum to be black and falling to pieces, the liver burnt and
gangrened. They said that this state of things must have been produced
by poison, but as the presence of certain bodily humours sometimes
produces similar appearances, they durst not declare that the
lieutenant's death could not have come about by natural causes, and he
was buried without further inquiry.

It was as his private physician that Dr. Bachot had ask