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Conan Doyle -- The Leather Funnel

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www.oldstyletales.com

Illustrations are from Lot No. 249 and Other Horrors: The Best Weird Fiction and Ghost Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle Illustrated and Annotated.
    
www.amazon.com/Lot-No-249-Othe…

     

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RD-DD1843's avatar
Ah yes, the end of the murderous career of the Marchioness de Brinvillier, in the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV.  She was beheaded and her body burned in 1677.  She and her lover (who was an early amateur chemist) made poisons that killed her father, and two brothers, and many poor people in alms houses, whom the Marchioness brought food to (she was testing the poisons out on them).  The lover died in an accident (he wore a mask while creating the poisons, and it slipped off so he breathed in the poisonous fumes).  She fled when the police found the lover's letters from her about the murders - got to a convent outside of France, but was tricked back into returning. Her trial and execution were described memorably in the famous letters of Madame Sevigne. 

Doyle is coy in this story.  He does not mention how the leather funnel was used in the case.  In the 1670s torture was used frequently to get answers.  Modern readers figure the water torture through the leather funnel was through the throat.  Not really.  It was through the vagina.