Word: 1670s
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...1670s poisoned her father and two brothers for the family fortune. Even though she was tortured, beheaded and cremated, her methods inspired so many imitators that 17th Century alchemists were soon earning their main income from selling "powders of succession...
...idea in France. During the 17th Century one of the principal sources of income for France's alchemists was the sale of arsenic, or "succession powder," as it was happily known, to ambitious members of the upper classes. In the 1670s Paris was so beset by an epidemic of poisonings that a special court, the Chambre Ardente, was set up to handle this type of crime. One of its most fabulous accused was the glamorous and charitably-minded Marquise de Brinvilliers (a "much courted little woman," according to one source, "with a fascinating air of childlike innocence"), who, assisted...