Murderer. The Marquise De Brinvilliers will be remembered as a beautiful ambitious woman seeking riches and power in 17th century France. Her evil ambition and pure greed led her to a life of crime. She was found guilty of conspiring with her lover, army captain Godin de Sainte-Croix, to poison her estranged father Antoine Dreux d'Aubray in 1666 and two of her brothers, Antoine d'Aubray and François d'Aubray, in 1670; each murder done to inherit their estates. While in a prison, Sainte-Croix had learned many year earlier the art of mixing poisons and upon being released, built his own in-house laboratory. According to evidence from the trial, the couple poisoned fifty hospital patients as an experiment to find the right slow-acting concoction that would not be recognized as a poison before giving it to her father. She was born into an upper-class family as her father was a wealthy landowner and the enforcement lieutenant of Paris. In 1651 she married an army officer, Antoine Gobelin de Brinvilliers, received the title of marquise for his war efforts, and became the mother of three children. Not happy with her life, she developed a life-style with her lover that required much money, hence the murders to receive their inheritances. When she became a person of interest in the deaths of her father and brothers, she ran for three years first to England, then Germany and finally to convent where the France authorities arrested her. She refused to name any her helpers who were later compromised in a scandal that even touched the court of the French King Louis XIV. Her trial and conviction were the beginning of the “Affair of the Poisons”, which was a spree of murders using poison that engulfed France. The story of her downward spiral from pious bride to a sinister mistress of seduction and corruption has been used, with the author’s liberties taken, for many literary pieces and theatrical presentations: A short story, “The Leather Funnel” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1902; the 1844 poem, “The Laboratory” by Robert Browning; “The Marquise de Brinvilliers” by Alexandre Dumas; “The Devil's Marchioness” by William Fifield in 1957; and “Intrigues of a Poisoner” by Émile Gaboriau in 1886. An opera “La marquise de Brinvilliers” opened in Paris in1831. More recently were the 1994 novel, “The Oracle Glass” by Judith Merkle Riley and the musical comedy and "Mimi - A Poisoner's Comedy" by composer Allen Cole and actors Melody A. Johnson and Rick Roberts which premiered in Toronto, Canada in September 2009. “The Marquise of Darkness”, which was a film released in 2010, told yet another version of her story. Sainte-Croix died before her with, depending on the source, the cause of his death being natural causes, suicide, or poisoned by his lover’s hand. Her sentence for her crime was tortured by forcing to drink sixteen pints of water, and then beheaded with her body was burned at the stake.