In the year 1676 Madame de Brinvilliers was executed in Paris for the murders of her father, her two brothers and a sister. It was known that she had procured the mysterious poison that she had employed through the agency of one Sainte-Croix, who, in his turn, had received it from an Italian, Exili, whom he had met when both these scoundrels had been imprisoned in the Bastille for minor offences.This affair caused an extraordinary sensation in Paris, but, with the death of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, it was considered closed. When this female “monster,” as she was termed, had expiated her crimes, public interest in the matter waned and police investigations into the question of poisons ceased.Shortly after the execution of Madame de Brinvilliers, however, the priests who were in charge of Notre-Dame, the most fashionable church in Paris, informed the police that “an enormous number” of their penitents, when in the sanctity of the confessional, accused themselves of poisoning their husbands. The active and intelligent Chief of Police, M. de La Reynie, refused to give any importance to this information; he thought that these women were so affected by the Brinvilliers case that they had become hysterical and that these painful derangements were better ignored.

In the large room of a house in a certain quiet city in Flanders, a man was gilding a devil.The chamber looked on to the quadrangle round which the house was built; and the sun, just overhead, blazed on the vine leaves clinging to the brick and sent a reflected glow into the sombre spaces of the room.The devil, rudely cut out of wood, rested by his three tails and his curled-back horns against the wall, and the man sat before him on a low stool.On the table in front of the open window stood a row of knights in fantastic armour, roughly modelled in clay; beside them was a pile of vellum sheets covered with drawings in brown and green. By the door a figure of St. Michael leant against a chair, and round his feet were painted glasses of every colour and form. On the white-washed wall hung a winged picture representing a martyrdom; its vivid hues were the most brilliant thing in the room. The man was dressed in brown; he had a long dark face and straight dull hair; from the roll of gold leaf on his knee he carefully and slowly gilded the devil. The place was utterly silent, the perfect stillness enhanced by the dazzle of the blinding sun without; presently the man rose and, crossing to the window, looked out. He could see the sparse plants bordering the neglected grass-grown paths, the house opposite with its double row of empty windows and the yellowing vine-leaves climbing up the tiled roof that cut the polished blue of the August sky.

There was very little for her to see as Mrs. Sacret closed the mean door on her empty home. There was no one in the street of small, ugly houses, the sky was a fleckless and pallid blue, the highroad that closed the vista showed cheap shops that were shuttered against the bleak Sunday, wisps of straw and paper lay in the gutter.Mrs. Sacret paused and contemplated her surroundings with resentment that was the more acute as she realized that she was not more attractive than her neighborhood. A slight woman, thirty years of age, with ordinary features, hazel-colored hair and eyes and a subdued bearing, her graceful figure and feet were hidden under the shabby bombazine of a widow’s mourning. Wrinkled cotton gloves concealed her hands; a black straw bonnet was tied by black ribbons under her chin and a crape veil concealed her face; she wore a silver brooch from which hung a cross twisted with a spray of ivy. Her pretty feet were deformed by trodden-over boots, their elastic sides were revealed as she bunched up her long skirts, awkwardly full in the gathers, under her mantle; her clothes had been made in meek and resigned imitation of the fashions worn by gentlewomen.

Laura hesitated. She moved from her brother and looked out from the tall window across the landscape that she found so distasteful. At the bottom of the gentle slope on which the house stood the grey waters of the Avon, gleaming from between the dull leaves of the willows, flowed smoothly by with, to her, an air of sad monotony.She tried to control herself, for the young brother to whom she had spoken was her master and might easily be, she knew, her tyrant. She had to play the game that women have learned during the ages to be so skilful at, to watch her opportunity, to cajole; if need be, to deceive. She was not yet very clever at any of these slavish arts and she had to bite her lip now and to clench her hands in her palms before she had sufficient control to reply in the soft tone she wished to assume.

“You look as if you was going to cut your throat.”“Funny, Min, I was thinking of it.”“Got any beer or gin — a mouthful of the real ‘knock me down’?”“No, I haven’t.”“Oh, ain’t it shocking. Any luck for the pantomime?”“No — I’m not sure—”“I’ve had an offer for one dance and the chorus — but only twenty-five shillings.”“I can’t get that, I don’t think. Well, what did you come in here for? I’m thinking of suicide, I tell you; a pity you disturbed me. Oh, I’m tired.”“Who isn’t?”Minnie Palmer flopped on to the broken stool inside the dressing-room underneath the stage; her dirty white muslin skirts and the tarnished spangles on her tattered bodice were crudely fashioned to represent the petals and calyx of a lily, a torn wig was pulled over her head, her small features were heavily outlined in cheap greasepaint.