Her alleged crimes were discovered after the death of her lover and co-conspirator, Captain Godin de Sainte-Croix, who saved letters detailing dealings of poisonings between the two.

[6] Upon marriage, the Marquise's father bestowed upon the couple a house at 12 rue Neuve St. Paul in Marais, an aristocratic district of Paris.

[1][3] The Marquise's father was displeased to hear of his daughter's sexual affair with Sainte-Croix (which if became public, could damage his reputation due to his high position in French society) and was further displeased that the Marquise was in the process of separating her wealth from that of her husband (who was gambling it away), which was almost akin to divorcing him, a major faux-pas in French aristocratic society.

[2][3] Due to her father's position as a prévôt, granting him a large amount of power and influence, in 1663 he instigated a lettre de cachet, against her lover, Sainte-Croix, which called for his arrest and imprisonment at the Bastille.

[2][7] While riding in a carriage with the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Sainte-Croix was arrested in front of her and thrown in the Bastille for a little under two months.

[2] He was imprisoned in the Bastille at the same time as the infamous Exili (also known as Eggidi), an Italian in the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, who was an expert on poisons.

[6][1] Other historians say that it is highly possible that Sainte-Croix was already an acquaintance of Christopher Glaser, a famed Swiss pharmaceutical chemist and had attended some lectures given by him.

[1][3][4] This theory comes from a report made by the lieutenant general of the Paris police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, who, in speaking of the Marquise, indicated that she, a pretty and delicate high-born woman from a respectable family, amused herself in observing how different dosages of her poisons took effect in the sick.

[1][4][7] Scholars who support and acknowledge this theory do so because the era in which the Marquise lived would have enabled a woman of her rank to get away with murder quite easily.

[3] Typical for the era, female members of French nobility would often visit hospitals to help care for the sick.

[1][7] She gave him multiple doses of "Glaser's recipe," a tried-and-true mixture of chemicals that would render him dead seemingly of natural causes.

[6] She quickly burned through the money, and needing more, decided to poison her two brothers, hoping to get their share of her father's fortune as she was, to the best of her knowledge, their next heir.

[1][3][4][6] La Chaussée's attempt at poisoning him there failed, but not long after, during an Easter feast, Antoine d'Aubray fell ill after eating a pie and never recovered, dying on 17 June 1670.

[6] The Marquise's poisonings were not discovered initially, and in fact continued to be unknown until 1672, upon the death of her lover and conspirator, Sainte-Croix.

[5] In 1676, she rented a room in a convent in Liège where authorities recognized her and alerted the French government who subsequently had her arrested.

[1][3][5][7] Madame de Sévigné, in a letter to her daughter, wrote that the Marquise's trial captured the attention of all of Paris.

[8] As she left the chapel, a crowd of aristocrats gathered to see the spectacle of her death march as she and the abbé travelled to the Place de Grève for her execution.

[3] On the way to her execution, they stopped at Notre Dame so that the Marquise could perform the amende honorable inside the packed Cathedral.

[14] After the beheading, the Marquise's body was burned of which Madame de Sévigné quotes that Brinvilliers (or, rather, her ashes) were "up in the air".

[4] Notable individuals implicated in the resulting affair include: Catherine Monvoisin, a fortune-teller better known as La Voisin, Madame de Montespan, a mistress of the king, and Olympia Mancini, the Countess of Soissons.

[2][4] Fictional accounts of her life include The Leather Funnel by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Marquise de Brinvilliers by Alexandre Dumas, père, The Devil's Marchioness by William Fifield, Intrigues of a Poisoner by Émile Gaboriau,[15] and The Marchioness of Brinvilliers: The Poisoner of the Seventeenth Century, by Albert Richard Smith.

In her 1836 poem, "A Supper of Madame de Brinvilliers", Letitia Elizabeth Landon envisages the poisoning of a discarded lover.

Her capture and burning are mentioned in The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle Riley, also the poisoning of the poor is echoed by the main character, Genevieve's, mother.

The plot of the novel The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr concerns a murder that appears to be the work of the ghost of Marie d'Aubray Brinvilliers.

An opera titled La marquise de Brinvilliers with music by nine composers—Daniel Auber, Désiré-Alexandre Batton, Henri Montan Berton, Giuseppe Marco Maria Felice Blangini, François-Adrien Boieldieu, Michele Carafa, Luigi Cherubini, Ferdinand Hérold, and Ferdinando Paer—premiered at the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1831.