William Fifield (1916–1987)

A novel on the Marquise de Brinvilliers should be intriguing from start to end, but just like Albert Smith’s “The Marchioness of Brinvilliers” (1846), and Edgar Maass’s “A Lady at Bay” (1953), this 1957 publication is a missed opportunity. Each of these three books have their own approach, but they’re all slow paced and largely *told*, not *shown*.

The opening chapter should’ve been cut. It recounts what Godin de Sainte-Croix – the Marquise’s partner in crime – has been doing. It in no way engaged me, and if it wasn’t for my long-term interest in the “real” story being novelised, I would’ve stopped reading after the first page.

The opening line has no hook to it whatsoever:

“Godin de Sainte-Croix – he had no right at all to the ‘de’ but had appropriated it as he did everything else he wanted – worked very indifferently at his business.”

It’s like the author wants the reader to understand a historical fact (the ‘de’ thing being true) and in doing so sacrifices the opening line. Info like this should be filtered in later at some point where it better fits into the story.

Sainte-Croix is a most interesting historical personage, but the author does nothing in the first chapter to show us this; it’s blatant telling, which is passive and tedious.

“Telling”, “passive”, and “tedious” are the main staples of this 500 pager. It’s bogged down with a third-person narrative with little dialogue to break things up. Lots of reported speech makes for a passive read. All the reported speech could’ve been made active by changing it into dialogue.

We have a fair amount of inner dialogue, mainly from the Marquise, but at times this fooled me into thinking she was speaking, as the author formats thoughts with quotation marks. This is annoying, plus presenting characters’ thoughts like this doesn’t appeal to me. It would’ve worked better as free-indirect speech, something Jane Austen was adept at in the early 1800s, but few historical writers use this effective style of conveying a character’s feelings.

To me, the real Marquise de Brinvilliers is a fascinating and compelling woman. Of the three novels I’ve read on her, I feel Maass characterized her the best. Fifield adds little colour to this aristocratic serial killer. I base these opinions on translated accounts of the Marquise’s testimony during her court case, plus the conversations she had with Pirot – the priest she spent her final hours with – who recorded her words and his impressions of her personality. The image I’ve drawn of her from factual accounts is of a cunning and clever woman who was slightly unhinged.

The author’s characterization of Sainte-Croix is also lacking. From the factual accounts I’ve read about him, I imagine he was charismatic. In this novel, he’s bland, devoid of charisma.

La Chaussée is another important character in the Marquise’s story, but in this novel he rarely appears. The real La Chaussée is another fascinating personage, but Mr Fifield hasn’t picked up on this. La Chaussée was Sainte-Croix’s servant and, through him, the marquise’s tool for poisoning (I won’t say whom in case anyone wanting to read this book is unfamiliar with the real events).

The image I have of La Chaussée – based on biographical accounts – is an arrogant, carefree man, who must’ve been quite a hardcase. While I had difficulty in accepting Edgar Maass’s version of La Chaussée, which is a cowardly little dwarf, I also find it hard to accept William Fifield’s version, namely a man who's borderline brainless. I do, however, like his physical description of La Chaussée, namely a tall and muscular hardcase, which is far more believable. Albert Smith’s version of La Chaussée is my favourite of the three novels mentioned at the start of this review.

Characterisation on the whole is unimpressive. Dry facts and details overwhelm the narrative. Although the facts are dry, most of the detail is vivid. Problem is, too much detail results in a snail-paced and static read, which is what we have in “The Devil’s Marchioness”.

Only three scenes/events stand out as being especially good, and it’s because of these that I’ve rated the novel two stars instead of one.

First, we have the Marquise visiting the Parisian hospital in which history says she murdered 50 people in the guise of a charitable woman. She wandered around the hospital, which was in appalling condition (six people with different illnesses cramped inside a bed meant for two, for example), and she tested her poisons via food and wine on patients.

In Maass and Smith’s respective novels, they omit any hospital scenes, therefore I read Fifield’s with interest. From the Marquise’s arrival outside the hospital door, which is frequented with “undesirables”, through to her tour inside, and finally to her chosen victim, we have a compelling scene. Here, the author’s tendency for excess detail is a plus point. All the senses are provoked.

Second, we have the marquise’s arrest and subsequent journey to Paris. I can’t elaborate too much or I’ll risk a spoiler, but it involves suicide attempts.

Third, I was impressed with a scene towards the end, so I can’t say much without giving things away, but it involves the water cure torture.

Again, without risking spoilers, the ending, which carries on a few pages after the “climax”, reads like a summing up of factual accounts. It’s not dramatic nor engaging, and although it relates to the “climax”, it doesn’t really belong in this novel. It could, therefore, be seen as a summary of another novel, based on an even worse Devil Woman, namely La Voisin, and other famous poisoners, like Madame de Montespan. Whilst their stories are fascinating in their own right, they don't belong as a bland add-on to a novel about the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

Historically, all these events are known as the Affairs of the Poisons, so it would've been fine to include info on La Voisin, etc., in an author's note, but not as part of this story.

La Voisin does appear about halfway through this book in a scene with Sainte-Croix but it feels totally out of place and does nothing to move the story along. I think the author includes La Voisin so as to feature as many facts relating to the Affairs of the Poisons as possible, but it’s irrelevant, as are other real people who are mentioned after the “climax” but play no part in the novel.

Furthermore, why fill the last half-dozen pages with dry facts on characters who have no relevance to the previous 500 pages instead of remarking on the actual main characters? For example, the Marquise’s husband and children. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say what happened to them? I know little info has come down on them through the years, but this is ultimately a work of fiction, so the author could’ve used his imagination. Better to have something fabricated yet relevant than to be presented with irrelevant (to this novel) historical facts.

Stylistically, the author is another who's too fond of adverbs, especially in dialogue attribution, and at one point uses three adverbs to describe how one character speaks to another. He also uses the passive voice and too many adjectives.

I’d been after a copy of “The Devil’s Marchioness” for two or three years, and therefore expected to have it read within a week, despite its length. Turned out it took me over five weeks because of the slow pace and severe lack of drama. Some paragraphs drag on for more than a page to little effect.

What should’ve been a pleasure turned out to be a chore and, as mentioned, I would’ve given up after the first page if not in hope of gaining something to inspire me with my own project on the Marquise. Luckily, it wasn’t a complete waste of time because of the hospital scene, for example, which has given me a clearer idea how to portray it in my own work-in-progress novel.

In short, “The Devil’s Marchioness” is a huge disappointment.… (mehr)