Athenais: The Life of Louis XIV's Mistress, the Real Queen of France

by Hilton, Lisa

  Some of the trials provided high comedy. The unfortunate Duchesse de Foix was most embarrassed at the revelation of a note she had written to La Voisin complaining about a breast-enhancing potion — “The more I rub, the less they grow!” The third Mancini sister, the Duchesse de Bouillon, was accused of buying poison from La Voisin to dispatch her boring old husband so that she could marry her lover, the King’s young cousin the Duc de Vendôme. All Paris was thrilled as she arrived insouciantly in the courtroom with her lover on one arm and her patient husband on the other. She was quite unabashed about her consultations with La Vigoureux and La Voisin, claiming that she had visited the latter “to see those Sibyls she had promised me, a company well worth the journeys.” The judge asked her if she had also seen the Devil. “Yes,” she replied, “and he was small, dark and ugly, just like you.” She was acquitted, and left the court gaily, remarking, “Really, I would never have believed that wise men could ask so many silly questions.”7 Her sauciness delighted Mme. de Sévigné but irritated Louis, and the impertinent Duchesse had to spend several years in the country as punishment for contempt of court. As the trials continued, art inevitably imitated life as record audiences gathered to watch the marvelous special effects of Corneille’s smash hit The Fortune-Teller, which featured plenty of sulphur and explosions.

  La Voisin’s trial proceeded, and there were suggestions of even more skeletons in the cupboard. Once again, Athénaïs de Montespan was linked with the circle of poisoners. La Voisin was accused by other prisoners of having delivered “love potions” to Athénaïs’s sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Vivonne, at the palace of St. Germain, where they had been placed into the hands of one of Athénaïs’s personal maids, Mlle. des Oeillets. It was of course no crime to procure harmless charms from a fortune-teller, but the thought that so serious a criminal as La Voisin had been able to come so close to the King was troubling. Wary that the mention of Athénaïs’s name in the context of the trials would provoke a furor, Louis had rather compromisingly written to La Reynie in September 1679: “I herewith instruct you to proceed as speedily as possible with such interrogations, but to make transcripts of these responses on separate folios, and to keep these folios apart from the official records of the rest of the investigation.” When the arrests began early in 1680, with the Duchesse de Vivonne under suspicion thanks to the confessions of the prisoners at Vincennes, Louis stayed her arrest, since she was effectively a member of his family. To deviate quite so obviously from his public declarations in his private actions was not typical of Louis, and suggests that he was already afraid of what the public inquiry might reveal.

  Finally, Lesage made a concrete accusation against Athénaïs. He claimed to have assisted La Voisin in 1667 when Athénaïs had supposedly consulted her for a spell to get rid of Louise de La Vallière and ensure her own place as favorite. Lesage also alleged that La Voisin had attempted to present a poisoned document to the King, and that she and Mme. de Montespan had plotted to murder Mlle. de Fontanges, who had been at the height of her favor the previous year. Although La Voisin confessed to numerous serious crimes, including that of helping the distinguished writer Racine to murder his mistress, the actress Mme. du Parc (Racine was cleared of the charge), she consistently denied any connection with Mme. de Montespan, or any attempt on the King’s life. Interrogated by Louvois himself, she insisted that she had had no commerce with Mme. de Montespan’s maid, Mlle. des Oeillets. She did admit to saying a blasphemous novena at the request of a girl named Cato, who wished to enter Mme. de Montespan’s service as a maid, but claimed that the spell had failed and that she had never seen the girl again, and had no idea whether she had in the end joined Mme. de Montespan’s household. The “petition” she had tried to present to Louis had been an innocent request, such as every French subject had the right to put to him on certain special days. La Voisin, a more skilled practitioner than Lesage, would in any case certainly have known that percutaneous poisoning, whereby the chemical enters the body through the skin, was largely an ineffective fantasy, producing at best an irritating rash which could become infected. La Voisin spent her last few days in prison drinking and carousing, unrepentant, and even when put to the “question extraordinary” she refused to name Mme. de Montespan.

  The procedure followed by the Chambre Ardente was that La Reynie would submit the names of suspects to the prosecutor-general, after which they would be arrested, interrogated and perhaps paraded before other prisoners to be identified. Then they would either be freed or progress to a second examination. If they were still under suspicion, they could be put to torture, on the result of which “extraordinary” questioning the final sentence would be delivered. At each stage of the investigation, the findings of the preliminary questioning and the questions ordinary and extraordinary were put to the judges, who would decide whether to acquit or to continue the trial. Various revolting forms of torture were used, such as forcing gallons of iced water into the gullet to cause the victim to burst, the rack and branding irons. La Voisin was condemned to interrogation with les brodequins, a process in which the legs were crushed between wooden planks and systematically broken with hammers. One source of the confusion surrounding the testimonies of the accused of the Chambre Ardente is that confessions extracted during such appalling agonies were often subsequently retracted by condemned prisoners unwilling to die with a lie on their consciences. La Voisin, it was claimed, held firm, but a note from La Reynie shows that in her case the authorities merely went through the motions of applying the dreadful brodequins, causing no real damage. Why? Only Louvois or Colbert could have ordered such a special dispensation. Was this evidence of favor in high places, suggesting that La Voisin’s silence was a loyal one, and that she was hopeful of a last-minute reprieve? Or was the torture countermanded through fear of what she might reveal under duress? Whatever the case, La Voisin followed her colleagues La Bosse and La Vigoureux to the fire drunk and defiant, although some witnesses claimed that as smoke began to engulf the pyre in the Place des Grèves, she whispered urgently to her confessor that “a great number of persons, of all sorts of conditions addressed themselves to me to ask for death and the means to procure it ...it’s debauchery which is the first cause of all this disorder.” If this is true, was it a reference perhaps to the King and his famous double adulteress?

  La Voisin’s death on 4 February 1680 seemed to liberate the tongues of the witches imprisoned at Vincennes. Suddenly, they began to pour forth a flood of accusations against Mme. de Montespan. The first to speak up was Marie Monvoisin, La Voisin’s daughter, who claimed she had been too terrified of her mother to confess previously, and who had already tried to commit suicide in her cell. Her charges against Athénaïs fell into three categories, first, that she had used on the King “powders” obtained from La Voisin, second that she had conspired to murder Mlle. de Fontanges and the King, and third that she had participated in black Masses to gain the Devil’s help in keeping the King’s love.

  With regard to the “powders,” Marie said:

  Every time something new happened to this lady and she feared the good graces of the king were diminishing, she advised my mother of it so she could bring a remedy. My mother therefore said Masses over these powders destined for the King. They were powders for love. There were black ones, gray ones, and white ones. My mother mixed them. Some were passed beneath a chalice by a preacher. Yes, it happened that I carried these powders to the lady myself. The first time, if I remember properly, was two and a half years ago [this would place the events in 1678, around the time of the birth of the Comte de Toulouse]. The lady came to my mother’s house and, after having spoken together, my mother brought me to the lady and said to her, “Madame, will you be sure to recognize this girl?” The lady said, “Yes, if we arrange some signal.” It was arranged that day, a Thursday, I think, that the lady would come the following Monday to the Petits-Pères, and that I would have a mask, that I should kneel and pretend to pray, when I saw the lady I would r
ise and, without stopping, put into her hand the hidden packet of powder which my mother had given me. Another time, it was between Ville d’Avray and Clagny . . . that I met this lady to put into her hands a powder that had been passed beneath the chalice.

  Marie also maintained that on another occasion she had gone with her mother and a group of others to Clagny to deliver fifty louis’ worth of powders, though she herself had not gone inside. At every one of their supposed meetings, “Mme. de Montespan” had been masked. Most of the powders had been delivered to the maid Mlle. des Oeillets, and Marie had only learned the name of this mysterious, cloaked brunette through a slip of the tongue by her mother.

  The conspiracy against Mlle. de Fontanges was developed, according to Marie, at the end of 1679. Marie’s former fiancé, a man named Romani, was to gain entry to La Fontanges’s house by posing as a silk merchant. Romani’s brother was the priest who confessed Mlle. des Oeillets, so access was to be arranged through her. Romani’s testimony corroborated these details. The plan was to poison La Fontanges with silks impregnated with arsenic, and for good measure La Voisin was said to have provided a pair of poisoned gloves as well. Marie also claimed that Athénaïs de Montespan, in a rage at having been discarded for La Fontanges, had plotted against the King. “My mother told me that the lady wanted at that time to go to extremities, and tried to induce her to do things for which she had much repugnance. My mother gave me to understand that it was against the King, and after hearing what took place at Trianon’s, I had no doubt about the matter.”

  La Trianon was another “artist in poisons” who had been arrested on the evidence of Marie Bosse. She had often worked with La Voisin, and the alleged attempt to assassinate Louis was supposedly formed at her house in the Rue Beauregard in Paris, where the witches decided that Trianon would prepare a poison-soaked petition, which La Voisin would put into the King’s hands at St. Germain. Marie Monvoisin was under the impression that her mother and La Trianon would be paid 100,000 ecus for the task.

  Marie’s third series of accusations concerned the black Masses Athénaïs was alleged to have commissioned, and in which it was claimed she had also participated, in 1673. The ceremonies were performed using the naked body of a woman as the “altar,” and “communion” was celebrated from a chalice containing wine mixed with the blood of a newborn infant. Three or four babies had purportedly been sacrificed on Athénaïs’s behalf. Marie claimed that she had seen “the lady lying on a mattress, her head hanging, a napkin on her stomach and on the napkin, a cross, at the base of the stomach, and the chalice on the stomach.” The first Mass had taken place, she said, at the chapel of Villeboursin, near the château of Montlhéry. The woman Marie believed to be Athénaïs de Montespan had recited the incantation for the ceremony: “Astaroth, Asmody, Princes of Friendship, I conjure you to accept the sacrifice of this infant I present to you for the things which I ask, which are that the friendship of the King and Monseigneur the Dauphin should continue towards me, that I should be honored by the princes and princesses of the court, that nothing I demand from the King should be denied to me, as much for my relations as for my household.” After this Mass, Marie claimed, her mother had decided that two more would be necessary, but Mme. de Montespan had said she really did not have the time, and so they had been conducted on her behalf, with a witch substituting for her. The second had been held at St. Denis and the third at La Voisin’s house, several weeks apart.

  The priest who performed the ceremonies was the Abbé Guibourg, who had also been arrested. Marie Monvoisin added that Guibourg had told her he had performed a similar Mass in 1674, on a woman “whom he did not know and who everyone always told him was Mme. de Montespan.” Guibourg had served as chaplain at Montlhéry since 1664. The château was owned by M. Leroy, a relation of Mlle. des Oeillets, governor of the pages of the Petit Ecurie, a significant court post. The château, with its high, dark walls and deep moats, was an appropriate setting for Guibourg, whose face was so hideous that it terrified people and who, if the accusations against him were only partly true, was an appallingly evil man. He broadly confirmed Marie’s accusations, but said that the first Mass had taken place in 1667 or 1668, in the rooms of Mme. de Thianges at St. Ger-main. He quoted the incantation from memory: “I ask for the friendship of the King and that of Monseigneur the Dauphin, and that it should continue towards me, that the Queen should be sterile and that the King should leave her table and her bed for me; that I should obtain of him all that I ask for myself and for my relations; that the King should leave La Vallière and look at her no more, and that, the Queen being repudiated, I can marry the King.” Guibourg also supported the contention that Mlle. des Oeillets had been the go-between for La Voisin and Mme. de Montespan.

  This was all unimaginably horrible. La Reynie might overlook some imprudent fooling with love potions, but sorcery, child murder, treason? What would happen if it became known that the mother of the King’s legitimized children had been dealing with witches and conducting satanic ceremonies within the walls of a royal palace? Was it conceivable that the legendary beauty who had governed the court with such spirited tyranny was capable of such repugnant crimes? Evidence from the other prisoners at Vincennes seemed to suggest that this was so.

  Jeanne Chanfrain, one of Guibourg’s mistresses, testified that she had given birth to seven children by him, of whom three or four had been sacrificed to the Devil. Madeleine Gardey, the wife of François Chappelain, chief almoner to the King, claimed to have participated in a black Mass at St. Sulpice, where a note saying that Mme. de Montespan “wished to be loved by a person of consideration” had been passed beneath the chalice. Two of her servants, Françoise Filastre and La Dumesnil, had also been arrested. Dumesnil said that she had distilled the entrails of a baby whose throat had been cut to prepare a potion on behalf of Mme. de Montespan. Françoise Filastre had a lover named Coton, yet another corrupt priest, who had also taken Marie Bosse and Madeleine Gardey as mistresses. Coton had performed abortions and sacrificed his children by Françoise Filastre. Filastre maintained that she had practiced poisoning, and that, with Madeleine Gardey and Guibourg, she, too, had sold powders to Mme. de Montespan. Furthermore, she confessed under torture that Madeleine Gardey had asked advice on Mme. de Montespan’s behalf as to how to murder La Fontanges and remain in the King’s good graces. Together, they had provided a poison for Mme. de Montespan to give to her rival, and planned to try to smuggle La Filastre into Mlle. de Fontanges’s household. They had also intended to poison Colbert.

  The other witnesses were Bertrand, who admitted to being part of the conspiracy with Romani to kill Mlle. de Fontanges; Delaporte, a witch who claimed to have witnessed a black Mass said by Guibourg for Mme. de Montespan, and La Duverger, yet another witch, who was the mistress of the Abbé Mariette. She lodged in the same house as Lesage, and testified that her room in the Rue de la Tannerie had been used for a black Mass said for the death of Louise de La Vallière in 1667. Mariette reiterated the evidence that had been suppressed at the Châtelet investigation in 1668, which La Reynie summarized:

  Mariette, wearing his surplice and stole, sprinkled holy water, and read a Gospel over the head of Mme. de Montespan, while Lesage burned incense, and Mme. de Montespan recited an exorcism, which Lesage and Mariette had given her in writing. The name of the King occurred in this exorcism, and that of Mme. de Montespan, as well as that of Mme. de La Vallière. The exorcism was intended to obtain the favor of the King and the death of Mme. de La Vallière: Mariette said it was merely to get her sent away.

  Mariette also explained that they had taken away two pigeons’ hearts, given by Mme. de Montespan, which were passed under the chalice at a Mass said by Mariette at St. Severin some days later, attended by Mme. de Montespan.

  Such an incestuous labyrinth of corruption and murder might, in the following century, have sprung from the imagination of the Marquis de Sade, but there is no doubt that La Reynie, at least, took the witches at their word. From this c
omplex web of evidence, it was possible to build up a picture of witchcraft that corresponded with the crises of Athénaïs’s relationship with the King over twelve years, from 1667–8 when she had consulted Lesage and Mariette about retaining the King’s love and disposing of Louise, to the apparent triumph of La Fontanges in 1679.

  Had Athénaïs really resorted to black magic, infanticide even, in desperate pursuit of her ambition? An examination of the evidence suggests that Athénaïs was as innocent of the major crimes of which she was accused as she was guilty of the minor ones, and it is therefore surprising that a good many historians have chosen to accept the words of the witches as truth, and to paint Athénaïs as black as her accusers. It is not, however, difficult to exonerate her of the charges of murder and satanism if the testimonies of the prisoners are examined alongside the circumstances of Mlle. de Fontanges’s death, the involvement in the case of Louvois and the ever-present Mlle. des Oeillets, and finally the reaction of Louis himself. The Affair of the Poisons, and the relative degree of Athénaïs’s part in it, is crucial to any understanding of her life as maîtresse en titre, and the historical significance of her role at Louis’s court would be compromised without confirmation of her innocence.

  The use of torture must cast doubt on many of the confessions. Marie Monvoisin was not tortured, but she was suicidally depressed, and the years she had spent as her mother’s assistant must surely have distorted her grasp on reality, a supposition borne out by her hysterical belief that her mother could attack her with spells from a separate prison cell. With her mother dead, there was no one to dispute her evidence. Françoise Filastre retracted her entire confession, elicited by the terrible brodequins, on the way to the scaffold, saying that she did not wish to die with such a vicious lie on her conscience. One theory as to the epidemic of confessions that emerged after La Voisin’s death was that the prisoners attempted to prolong their lives by mentioning Mme. de Montespan, as the investigations this would necessitate would keep them from the pyre. Although it has been proved that the security at Vincennes was not sufficiently lax for this to have been a collective plan — and indeed the coherence of many of the testimonies suggests that a lot of the prisoners believed themselves to be speaking the truth — it is notable that not one witness was able to swear that he or she had actually seen Mme. de Montespan, in spite of their eagerness to bring up her name.