by Hilton, Lisa
In 1679, La Voisin was the principal suspect in a police investigation into crimes of poisoning among the upper classes. The inquiry unearthed a scandal which, through the person of the King himself, threatened the security of the nation. The “Affair of the Poisons” was compared to an outbreak of plague within the most elevated section of French society, and its potential effects were perceived as even more catastrophic. It became an international event, the most alarming revelation of corruption within the aristocracy ever known in the courts of Europe. Something was rotten in the state of France, something which had slithered from the slums of Paris into the drawing rooms of Versailles; something which threatened to taint indelibly all the power and prestige the Sun King had labored to achieve. The Affair of the Poisons was the stuff of political nightmare, and Athénaïs de Montespan was implicated at its very heart.
It began quietly, with Mme. de Sévigné indulging in a macabre little joke about the most notorious scandal of 1676. “Well, it’s all over and done with,” she wrote. “Brinvilliers is in the air. Her poor little body was thrown after the execution into a very big fire, and the ashes to the winds, so that we shall breathe her, and through the communication of the subtle spirits, we shall develop some poisoning urge which will astonish us all.”3 The Marquise de Brinvilliers, an obviously deranged woman with a sad history of sexual abuse, had been executed for poisoning her father, along with numerous other victims, and for attempting to poison her husband. She had perfected her murderous skills by practicing them on the unfortunate inmates of Parisian hospitals during her charitable visits. Conspiring with her lover, one Sainte-Croix, she aimed to dispatch her husband in order to free herself to remarry, but her intended fiancé, reflecting on the risks of marriage to such a black widow, lost his nerve and began to administer a course of secret counterdoses. Much to the delight of the chattering classes of Paris, who reveled in black humor, the poor Marquis de Brinvilliers had lingered for months, never knowing whether he was dying or recovering, until he was finally saved by his wife’s arrest. With the dissipation of the Marquise’s ashes, the affair seemed finished, a shocking crime to be sure, but one of little real consequence. It appeared, however, that the Marquise de Sévigné’s grisly joke contained a germ of truth, since before her death Brinvilliers had claimed that “there were many people engaged in this miserable traffic of poisons, and people of condition, too.” In 1676, it was still possible to dismiss such an allegation, but the following year, the Parisian chief of police, Gabriel-Nicolas la Reynie, found himself investigating another case of poisoning which appeared to threaten the King himself.
Among Colbert’s many excellent innovations during his long service to Louis XIV was the establishment of a police force in Paris. The city then bore no resemblance to the sanitized metropolis created by Haussmann in the nineteenth century, but remained largely medieval, a noxious cat’s cradle of narrow streets where criminals ruled unmolested by the law. “Day and night they rob and kill here...We have reached the dregs of the centuries,” wrote one despairing commentator before the Fronde wars.4 Thanks to Colbert and his lieutenant-general of police, crime in Paris was greatly reduced by the end of the reign. La Reynie’s job was in fact more akin to that of a modern American mayor than to that of a policeman. He was responsible for street lighting and refuse collection as well as law enforcement, and had jurisdiction over the trade guilds, public sanitation and new buildings. Colbert believed in a relationship between public order and the development of industry, so La Reynie was given carte blanche to intervene in trade, for example, by forcing tailors to use silk buttons to promote the Lyons silk market. He was also granted the powers of a magistrate to investigate and prosecute his own cases.
In 1677, with the successful prosecution of the Marquise de Brinvilliers behind him, La Reynie turned his attention to the case of a young woman known as Mlle. la Grange. A widow from Anjou, she had been set up in some style as the mistress of a wealthy Parisian lawyer, who tired of the relationship after eight years and talked of retiring to the country. This plan was thwarted by his sudden death, whereupon La Grange presented herself to his relatives in the role of grieving widow. The family were suspicious, especially as the household servants reported signs of poisoning, and they demanded an investigation. It was discovered that La Grange had fraudulently married her lover, a corrupt priest named Nail, who had impersonated the late lawyer in the marriage ceremony in a plot to gain his fortune.
The case took a serious turn when La Grange wrote to the war minister, Louvois, from the Châtelet prison, claiming to possess crucial information indicating that the King’s life was in danger. Such claims were not uncommon, but since Louis had been suffering in recent years from violent headaches and fits of the “vapors,” for which he took tea, Louvois was sufficiently alarmed to have La Grange brought to his house in Paris for interrogation. She clearly revealed something of consequence, as she was immediately removed to the Bastille prison, largely reserved for political prisoners. Louvois then authorized La Reynie to begin a thorough investigation into poisoning cases, at the King’s request: “His Majesty has commanded me to tell you that he expects you to pursue this affair with application, and that you shall omit nothing in bringing it to light.” Something in the case was giving the highest authorities in France cause for concern.
In September 1677, a Jesuit priest at the church of St. Antoine, near the Bastille, handed in a piece of paper he had received from an unknown woman at the confessional, which she said she had found in the walks at Palais-Royal, Monsieur’s Paris residence. Via the King’s confessor, Père la Chaise, it arrived at La Reynie’s office. It appeared to be a letter from a woman to her lover and accomplice. In it she cautioned him about “this white powder that you wish to put on the napkin of we-know-who,” then warned him that she would marry his rival if he did not succeed. Further on, she wrote: “I am extremely frightened that our letters are seen and that people will think me guilty . . . Because in all other crimes one has to be an accomplice to be punished, but with this one it is necessary only to have known.” The sole crime for which knowledge amounted to complicity was lèse-majesté — treason. So was “we-know-who” perhaps the King, or maybe the Dauphin? Had the letter been planted by La Grange in order to substantiate her claim to secret knowledge of a plot against Louis, or was it genuine, and was La Grange acquainted with the writer? Despite twelve hours of interrogation and torture, La Grange denied all knowledge of the letter, as did her lover, Nail, and they were both condemned to death. Only in the cart on the way to the scaffold did they admit to understanding the mysterious references, but they still refused to make a formal statement, and were hung without revealing whatever knowledge they had.
Just after La Grange’s arrest, La Reynie apprehended another group of suspected poisoners, the “Vanens gang,” a miserable troupe of forgers, “alchemists” and other charlatans led by Louis Vanens, an adventurer with aristocratic pretensions who styled himself “Chevalier.” Vanens, a known criminal, was suspected of having been involved in the death by poison of the Duc de Savoie some years earlier. La Reynie felt certain that this group was in some way connected with the La Grange case, a belief reinforced by the testimony of a maidservant in Vanens’s house, who maintained that her master had known La Grange. One member of the gang, Marie Bosse, who had been arrested for trafficking in toads, a well-known ingredient of poisons, also claimed to have been acquainted with the mysterious letter-writer, but when pressed, she defended herself saucily by asking La Reynie why he didn’t leave petty people like herself alone and concentrate on what was happening “high up.” She bragged that she knew the names of several upper-class people who had bought “charms” to use against the King. Curiously, she added that one particular woman had done so. The identity of this aristocratic customer was provided by Vanens’s valet, Jean Barthominat, who said that his master knew Mme. de Montespan, and furthermore that Vanens “ought to be torn apart by four horses” for the advice he had given
the Marquise.5 But since he immediately retracted this extraordinary claim, La Reynie dismissed it as bravado. Still, it must have been highly disconcerting to hear the name of the King’s favorite in such a context. He continued his inquiries, hoping to establish a connection between La Grange, the mysterious letter and the increasingly repeated assertion that poisoning was occurring among the aristocracy.
Trawling through the layers of petty criminals, sorcerers and poison-sellers who bubbled in the rank stews of St. Denis, La Reynie turned up several cases of poisoning, as well as strange tales of baby-snatching. Infants, it appeared, were disappearing. Horrible rumors of child murder, satanic rites and sacrifice were suddenly everywhere. Paris seemed to be swimming in a hysterical sea of poison, swarming with stories of murders, kidnappings and black Masses. Mme. de Sévigné’s son Charles describes the atmosphere in a letter to his sister: “Here I am back again with our darling maman, but so far no one has accused me of trying to poison her, which, I can assure you, the way things are going presently, is no small tribute to my reputation for filial devotion!”6 Yet until the end of 1678, La Reynie’s investigation seemed to be making little headway.
Then Marie Bosse reappeared. The police had a visit from one of their mouches, undercover agents, who had dined at the house of a fortune-teller called La Vigoureux, where Marie had been among the guests. Obese and drunken, she had boasted between slugs of wine: “What a marvelous trade it is! What a clientele I have — duchesses, marquises, princes! Only three more poisonings and I can retire with my fortune made!” From the obvious fury of the hostess, the agent realized that this was more than mere braggadocio. A policeman’s wife was sent incognito to Mme. Vigoureux for a palm-reading, and easily obtained a vial of poison for the proverbial “troublesome husband.”
La Reynie moved quickly now, and on 4 January 1679, La Vigoureux, La Bosse and her three children were captured at the fortune-teller’s house, where they were all asleep in the same bed, and imprisoned in the Bastille. They swore that their activities were no more than harmless quackery, and the semiliterate La Bosse insisted, implausibly, that she used the laboratory equipment found in the lodgings for her “chemistry studies.” As well as acids and mercury, the police recovered a small vial of menstrual blood, which La Reynie, who had begun to study texts on witchcraft such as the Malleus Maleficarum, knew to be an ingredient used in black magic practices. The connection between poisoning and witchcraft was thus established in the case, and if La Bosse was to be believed, the Marquise de Brinvilliers had been proved correct. “People of condition” were apparently employing witches, and a trail of sorcery was being revealed that La Reynie feared might rise as high as the King at Versailles. Hoping to procure themselves a degree of leniency, La Bosse and La Vigoureux began to name names. It was they who produced the list of over 400 fortune-tellers, from which La Reynie made over a hundred further arrests.
On 12 March, the infamous La Voisin was arrested, in a neat irony, just as she was returning from Mass. The police searched her house and found tiny human bones in the little oven in the garden, as well as a whole laboratory of poisons and an elaborate treatise on physiognomy, along with all the hocus-pocus paraphernalia of fortune-telling. Three days later, Athénaïs de Montespan left the court, precipitately and inexplicably, for Paris. Bussy-Rabutin attributed her sudden departure to a quarrel about Mlle. de Fontanges. “They are saying that there has been some quarrel in the household, and that this comes from jealousy that she has of one of Madame’s maids, called Fontanges, with whom the King, it is said, has already taken his pleasure.” Athénaïs returned only after the arrest of one of La Voisin’s lovers on 17 March. Together, La Voisin and this man had provided a full range of services, from abortions to curses and interviews with Satan. His name was Adam Coueret, alias Athénaïs’s old friend Lesage.
As soon as they were both at Vincennes, La Voisin and Lesage began a desperate process of mutual accusation, each hoping to escape blame for the heinous crimes of the other. La Reynie now had over a hundred witches in prison, of whom the most important were Lesage, La Voisin, La Bosse, La Vigoureux, a woman named La Trianon, Lesage’s former accomplice Mariette and another priest named Guibourg. All of them were jabbering the names of their clients and the horrible services they had demanded, and La Reynie’s ears were ringing with some of the most famous names in France. Poison had become a fact of life in every strand of society. “Men’s lives,” he wrote despairingly, “are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is the only remedy when a family is in difficulties. Abominations are being practiced everywhere — in Paris, in the suburbs, in the provinces.”
On the same day as Lesage’s arrest, Louis informed La Reynie that he intended to establish a special court to deal with what appeared to be a veritable epidemic of poisoning. The Chambre Ardente, as it became known, was inaugurated by letters patent of 7 April 1679 and held its first sitting three days later. An extraordinary tribunal seemed necessary firstly because of the large number of cases to be tried, and secondly because it appeared that many of the suspects were drawn from the upper echelons of society; if there was going to be a scandal, Louis wanted to have as much control over it as possible. The court was to sit for three years, issuing 319 subpoenas, arresting 194 people and sentencing 104 of them. Thirty-six prisoners were condemned to death, four to the galleys, thirty-four banished or fined and thirty acquitted. Mme. de Sévigné commented: “There is no other topic of conversation. No such scandal as this has ever been known in a Christian court.”
It is important to establish, however, that the Chambre Ardente was not intended to be a “secret” court. The precedent for the creation of special tribunals had existed in French law since the Middle Ages, and the use of such a tribunal in the Affair of the Poisons was not in itself an attempt by the authorities to hush up the cases by removing them from conventional jurisdiction. It is likely that the investigators were initially unaware of the potentially explosive nature of the business in hand. In bypassing Parlement, with which most of the aristocracy, of both the sword and the robe, were connected, it was in fact more likely that unbiased judgments could be passed on the upper classes. At a conference at Versailles on 27 December 1679, Louis personally instructed La Reynie to administer “absolute justice” to anyone found guilty, “regardless of rank or sex or position,” a public declaration of impartiality which would be sorely tested and swiftly compromised.
In January, the scandal broke. Arrest warrants were issued for some of the most prominent members of Louis’s court, among them the Maréchal de Luxembourg, the Princesse de Tingry, the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Comtesse de Soissons (Louis’s former lover Olympe Mancini), the Marquis de Cessac, the Vicomtesse de Polignac and the Marquise d’Alluye. The Duchesse d’Angoulême was accused, as well as the Comte de Gassily, the Duc de Vendôme and the Marquis de Raffetot. Of these, the Comtesse de Soissons and her accomplice, the Marquise d’Alluye, were certainly guilty. Louis, out of tenderness for his old love, warned her secretly in time to allow her to escape with the Marquise d’Alluye into exile, but on the condition that if she ever returned to France she would have to stand trial. The Comtesse had already been suspected of causing the death of her husband in 1673, but La Voisin claimed that Mme. de Soissons had originally approached her to ask how to recover the King’s love, which she had lost to his first maîtresse en titre Louise de La Vallière. La Voisin had read her fortune and found it was connected with that of a “great prince” who, to the fury of the Comtesse, would never return to her. The lady was provoked to declare that “if she could not get revenge on Mlle. de La Vallière, then . . . she would do away with both one and the other.” Louis’s leniency, given this reported intention to murder him, testifies to an occasionally dangerous sentimentality, for he was in no doubt of the Comtesse’s guilt and well aware that he would have to answer for her escape to God and to his people. The Comtesse’s reputation was so damaged that when she arrived in Flanders with the Marquise d�
��Alluye, the towns of Antwerp and Namur closed their gates against them and the people pelted them with squalling cats. Later, when Marie-Louise, the young Queen of Spain, was poisoned in Madrid, no one was at all surprised to learn that the Comtesse had recently paid a visit there.
The Marquis de Cessac also compromised himself by fleeing into exile, as did the Vicomtesse de Polignac, who made a dramatic escape from her country house just minutes before the royal guards arrived. The trials of those aristocrats who were innocent or arrogant enough to remain in France were, naturally, a huge sensation. The Duc de Luxembourg dutifully accepted his prison sentence, determined to obey the King in every way, and passed his time between interrogations in prayer, much to the disgust of Mme. de Sévigné, who felt he had compromised his ducal dignity by accepting trial in a bourgeois court rather than by his peers in Parlement. He was accused of using witchcraft to dispose of his wife and the guardian of a woman he wanted to marry, and, rather greedily, to make his sister-in-law, the Princesse de Tingry, fall in love with him into the bargain. Other accusations were ridiculous and melodramatic, involving orgies with dozens of naked women, satanic sabbats and the procuration of abortions for the Princesse. After fourteen months the Duc was acquitted, as was the Princesse, and after a week’s exile in the country, he returned to Versailles, where everyone behaved as though he had never left. Louis rewarded his stoicism with various important commands, in which the Duc gained enormous credit for himself and significant victories for France.