It was one more frustration for the King of France. More than five years after his affronted pride had led him to attack the United Provinces, there was still no sign of peace. Louis had been forced to make concessions, handing over conquered towns in the Spanish Netherlands in exchange for several southern territories. There had been victories: the previous year, the great Dutch admiral Ruyters had been vanquished at Stromboli, and France’s armies had gained 15,000 Hungarians, eager to brandish their own exotic swords at their hated Habsburg Emperor. And in April 1677 Louis’s brother, the flamboyant Monsieur, had beaten the Prince of Orange at Cassel, despite having come late to the battle—when the first shots were fired, “he was still sitting in front of the mirror, adjusting his wig.” This had been a bittersweet victory, all the same. “The people of Paris went wild with joy,” wrote Primi Visconti. “They really love Monsieur. But at court they’d rather he’d lost the battle for the King’s sake…since the King’s never been in anything but sieges. They say he’d give ten million to have been at the crossing of the Rhine in person…”
But neither Stromboli nor Cassel nor any number of poorly defended Dutch towns had been enough to give France a final victory, and put an end to the fighting for good. Spreading far beyond the Netherlands, Louis’s second unprovoked game of soldiers had metamorphosed from a promenade militaire into a series of tough campaigns lasting six years, costing tens of thousands of livres, laying waste to towns and farmlands, and, crucially, breeding a deep mistrust of Louis himself that would, in due course, bring his kingdom to near ruin.
In August 1678, peace negotiations began at last in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. They continued until the end of the year, and involved not only France and the United Provinces but also England, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, six German states, and the Holy Roman Empire. The French were confirmed in their possession of some conquered territories, including rich Flanders and the much-desired Franche-Comté.
On the strength of this, Louis unilaterally declared the war a complete victory, and to commemorate it, he presented his premier architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, with a commission of unexampled magnificence: la Galerie des Glaces, the Hall of Mirrors, at Versailles. The elaborate ceiling, painted by Charles Le Brun, was to convey the glory, such as it was—or rather, such as it was to be considered—of Louis’s military conquests in the Netherlands. The palace of Saint-Germain was declared too modest to house the court and the person of Louis le Grand. The principal royal residence in future years was to be Versailles, and to this end, orders went out for tens of thousands of workmen to rebuild and extend and embellish the “little hunting lodge” to the required level of splendour.
The brazen throat of war had ceased to roar;
All now was turned to jollity and game,
To luxury and riot, feast and dance…
With peace come at last, the court returned to its customary ways. And for the figure at its shining centre, almost all was well. On September 5, 1678, the King celebrated his fortieth birthday, receiving an excellent report from his physicians, at least. “This year had been exactly as one would wish for a life so precious as his own,” they recorded, though one malicious princess, rejected, it seems, after a brief affair, had found the King’s “sceptre” rather smaller than it might have been.
“The Queen of Spain is weeping and wailing,” wrote Madame de Sévigné a year and a week later, in the middle of September 1679. But, though she had hardly less reason to weep and wail, it was not to the neglected Spanish Marie-Thérèse that Madame de Sévigné was now referring. The kingdom of Spain itself had just gained a new queen, by courtesy of the King of France, and on the last day of August, at the château of Fontainebleau, she had endured a prolonged ceremony of official congratulations on her ascension to the rarefied ranks of the crowned heads of Europe.
“The Spanish ambassador arrived in a magnificent coach,” wrote Primi Visconti, “but it was the same one he’d arrived in ten years before: Paris was scandalized…His wife spoke a mixture of Roman, Genoese, Milanese, Spanish, and French. No one could understand it.”
The unhappy new Queen of Spain was Marie-Louise d’Orléans, a lively, attractive, and accomplished girl, the elder daughter of Monsieur by his first marriage to the famously beautiful English princess Henrietta Stuart. Like her mother, who had been obliged to marry her own cousin, and her uncle, who had been obliged to marry his, Marie-Louise was being sacrificed for the sake of fair diplomatic winds—in this case for French envoys travelling to the Spanish court at the severe monastery-palace of El Escorial near Madrid. For them, despite a residual splendour, the imperial capital was a definite hardship post, isolated, backward, “horribly muddy in winter and unbearably dusty in summer.” The court itself was no more pleasant: the food was bad and the government worse, the economy stagnant, the provinces rebellious; obscurantist priests blocked every new idea, while a horde of black-clad grandees, like ravens clawing at a battle carcass, despoiled what was left of a once great empire.
For a century, Spain had been the greatest power on earth. Its extraordinary empire had spanned the globe, from the Netherlands to West African Guinea, the Philippines far to the east and farther to the islands of the Pacific, and, above all, half the continent of America, captured, astonishingly, by fewer than a thousand conquistadores. No other nation had ever achieved half so much. But soldiering and plundering had not been enough to manage such vast territories, nor even, in the end, to maintain prosperity at home. A rigid social order, a marked disdain for trade, and a “soporific mental climate” had slowed all progress in the land, then gradually turned it backwards. By 1679, even in the populous capital of Madrid, there were “very few tradesmen or merchants, but an extraordinary number of monks and nuns.” For thirty or forty years already, Spain had been declining.
For seventeen-year-old Marie-Louise, this had all been as nothing compared with the horror of her impending marriage to the Spaniards’ wretched King, a pitiful specimen of humankind who had so far hobbled and scrabbled his way through nineteen years of “living death.” Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, was the ghastly result of generations of inbreeding—such a lost cause, even within his own family, that he had never been taught even to keep himself clean. “The King of Spain is shorter than average, rather thin, and he limps a bit.” So the French ambassador had begun his report, diplomatically, before getting into his stride. “He has received no education, has no knowledge whatsoever of letters or of science, and indeed can barely read or write. His face is extraordinarily long and narrow and fleshless, and his features all out of proportion, so that he looks quite bizarre…By nature and by upbringing, he has no understanding of anything, no feeling for anything, and no inclination to do anything.” Thus poor, drooling Carlos, “the centre of so many hopes,” uncombed and unwashed, his speech impeded by an abnormally large tongue, his bones crippled with disease, “a rachitic and feeble-minded weakling, the last stunted sprig of a degenerate line.” His Spanish subjects had dubbed him El Hechizado (The Bewitched), attributing his many maladies to sorcery. Carlos himself believed the same, confusedly submitting to exorcisms in an attempt to make himself whole.
“A daughter must obey her father, even if he wants to give her a monkey for a husband,” says Molière’s Dorine to her despairing young mistress in Tartuffe. In fact, Marie-Louise’s own father might have relented, or at least Madame de Sévigné thought so: “The people are saying, Oh, Monsieur is too kind-hearted; he’ll never let her go; she’s too distressed.” But for once, paternal authority had not proved supreme. The father now was brother to a King; it was for the King to dispose of all his subjects, and by no means least a strategically useful princess. A fortnight after the celebrations at Fontainebleau, Marie-Louise was “still pleading for mercy, throwing herself at everyone’s feet.” Two days later: “The Queen of Spain was an absolute fountain today…I don’t know how the King of Spain can maintain his pride in the face of such desperation.” The King of France, at le
ast, had remained unmoved, and before the month was out, Marie-Louise was sent on her way. “Madame,” her uncle had said to her, “I trust this is farewell forever…They say she wept excessively…” Liselotte, her stepmother, was kind enough to accompany her for part of the journey.
“The Queen of Spain was rather too thin when she lived in France, but she’s started to fill out since she’s been in Spain,” wrote the French ambassador a few months afterwards. It was only too truly spoken: the formerly vivacious Marie-Louise had begun a sad descent into deepest depression and a morbid obesity. And in the end, Louis’s wish for his niece was to be granted: Marie-Louise would never set eyes on France again. She was to die at the age of just twenty-seven, reputedly poisoned by her mother-in-law because of her childlessness, but in fact more probably through the appalling effects of grief and distress on her once lovely young body. More than a decade later, Carlos would demand that her corpse be exhumed for him to gaze upon, and he would do so, lost in tears and, very possibly, near to madness.
The once great empire of Spain was mired in troubles, but there was something rotten, too, in apparently healthy France. If Louis was concerned about the disorder in his own adulterous “personal house,” in his house of state the trouble was only just beginning.
Twelve
The Poisons Affair
It began with an ordinary execution, the grim public beheading, after multiple tortures, of a convicted murderess, killer of her father and two brothers, would-be killer of her sister, her husband, her daughter, and her lover. So skilful had she been that it had taken ten years for her crimes to come to light, and so skilful was the executioner now that the stroke of his sword seemed to pass her by, so that for a moment her head still stood on her shoulders, before toppling slowly sideways. The body of this petite and blue-eyed “enemy of the human race” was subsequently burned on the scaffold, and her ashes scattered to the winds; spectators later returned to steal her bones as souvenirs of the day. “It’s over at last, la Brinvilliers is in the air…and we’re breathing her in, so that we’ll all catch the poisoning fever and astound ourselves.” Thus Madame de Sévigné to her daughter in Provence, writing with more prescience than she knew.
The victim and culprit now “in the air” was Marie-Madeleine Gobelin d’Aubray, marquise de Brinvilliers, wife of Colonel Antoine Gobelin, heir to the tapestry fortune, and daughter of Antonin Dreux d’Aubray, Counsellor of State (deceased). The marquise’s high birth and her many noble connections had inflated public interest in an already gripping case, and though it might have helped her—preliminary interrogations had had to be held outside Paris, since the accused was related to half the city’s magistrates—the enormity of her crimes and the King’s personal interest in the case ensured that all was pursued to the ghastly end. Though wealthy by birth and marriage, the hedonistic marquise had been perennially short of money; this, and a lover’s revenge, and in the end little more than habit, had been her apparent motives.
Worse than any other factor was her chosen method of dispatch, more frightening than any other to the seventeenth-century mind: the marquise had murdered by poison, an ever-present weapon, or so it was believed, since in an era of dirty water and tainted food, and fevers and infections of every kind, most poisons were exceedingly difficult to detect. A few remedies existed, provided the problem was identified in time—even lemon juice or a beaker of milk could prevent the working of some concoctions—but many supposed antidotes were worse than the poison itself. Physicians were next to useless, a later than last resort; though now and then an autopsy might satisfy the lawyers by proving guilt, nothing at that stage could help the victim.
The marquise had poisoned her elder brother with “an elaborate raised pie…filled with cocks’ crests, sweetbreads and kidneys in a rich cream sauce,” her younger brother through simple bread and wine, and her father through some thirty doses of various powders and fluids administered by a servant accomplice. Monsieur d’Aubray’s subsequent “extraordinary fits of vomitings, inconceivable stomach pains and strange burnings in the entrails” had evidently not been uncommon ailments at the time; at any rate, his death had at first been attributed to the gout.
By tradition, the most sophisticated poisons came from Italy, as did the most sophisticated poisoners. The marquise had been no exception in this respect; she had had her Italian, too, a former inmate of the Bastille whose nationality alone would have been enough to convict him, in public opinion if not in law. The investigators had dismissed this man, but had been alarmed to uncover a connection between the marquise and the King’s own apothecary, who had been sent to Italy, or so the marquise had said, at the instruction of Nicolas Fouquet, the King’s former surintendant, to study the making of poisons. Though the marquise had admitted this under savage torture, the police had accepted it as perfect truth, and from it they had deduced a plot to kill the King and liberate Fouquet from his long imprisonment in the fortress of Pignerol. From this point, one overly suspicious misconstruction had led to the next.
For almost three years, the investigations had remained, for the most part, underground, with the police, aided by paid informants known as mouches (flies), tracking down ever more suspected poisoners. In March 1679, a Parisian woman named Catherine Montvoisin, alias La Voisin, had been arrested in a second spectacular murder case. She had been betrayed by one of her accomplices, one of the many suspects, among them several wealthy people, who were by now being held in the Bastille. The King, though not seriously alarmed for his own safety, was concerned nonetheless at the amount of “evidence” being turned up, particularly against prominent people, including some who frequented the court. Convinced that “no man with four millions to his name would ever be found guilty,” he had set up a special commission, la Chambre d’Arsenal, to investigate and try all the cases—Parisians quickly dubbed it la Chambre ardente, “the burning commission,” a reference to the inquisitional courts of the previous century where doubtful Catholics had been tried for heresy. At its head, the King had placed his energetic police commissioner, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, introducer of the city’s “mud” and “light” taxes, tracer of unfaithful Parisian wives, and warrior against general debauchery and corruption. His duties included “the repression of blasphemers and the sacrilegious, divines, witches, alchemists, [and] the fight against abortion,” a wide remit in an age of little discernment between religion, magic, and natural science.
Among the high-born and the educated, as among the poor, the same mixture of mud and light prevailed. The Queen herself, deeply devout in the Spanish mould, loved having her fortune told. Her cousin, the less devout duchesse de Montpensier, la Grande Mademoiselle, was currently consulting an astrologer for advice about marriage. The beautiful Princess of Würtemberg had allegedly prostituted herself to gain the ultimate alchemical secret of the philosopher’s stone, with hundreds of serious proto-scientists devoting life and fortune to the same search. And “every person in Lyon believed,” as Jean de Segrais reported, “that the abbé Brigalier had made the devil appear, and among people of quality, too.”
Medical practice was hostage to the same muddle of beliefs. “Madame de La Fayette is drinking soups made of viper stock,” wrote Madame de Sévigné to her daughter in that summer of 1679. “They’re absolutely bringing her back to life; you can see it just by looking at her. She thinks they’d be very good for you. You take a viper, cut off its head and tail, cut it open, skin it, and it’s still moving. Even after an hour or two, you can still see it moving.” Françoise, avoiding viper stock, took her medical woes instead to the prior Trimont de Cabrières, a famed healer of the incurably sick. He had been brought to court under the dual protection of the devout Cardinal de Bouillon and the brutally cynical Minister of War, the marquis de Louvois, both of whom believed in his powers unreservedly.
And there were poisons everywhere, not just in kidney pies and wine, but available, for very little money, at any number of shops and booths all over the city. Tox
ic substances were sold and indeed produced by all kinds of people: by chemists and apothecaries, of course, but also by grocers, midwives, perfume-sellers, gardeners—anyone, in fact, who had a mind to do so, since there was no regulation to speak of. There were hundreds of poisons in circulation, in small doses barely considered poisons at all, lotions and potions and powders, some supposedly for external use on skin or hair only, some to be used internally, to induce abortions, or for les clystères—colonic purges, the favoured panacea of all Molière’s stage physicians and every other medical man besides. Most were variants of stock substances: the sulphuric acid vitriol, silver-white antimony, corrosive sublimates, bits and pieces of toad or snake, certain plants, and, of course, arsenic.
La Reynie’s battle was consequently being fought uphill, with the public by no means necessarily on his side. A pair of boulevard playwrights had taken advantage of the tremendous interest in the whole affair to present a lively new play on the subject: La Devineresse ou les Faux Enchantements had opened in September 1679 at the Hôtel Guénégaud, home of the late Molière’s still active troupe. The rumour ran that La Reynie himself had had a hand in the writing of it, but if so, he signally failed to take its message to heart. The play tells the story of the wily Madame Jobin, who makes a fortune by duping the ladies and gentleman of Paris with fortune-telling, love potions, and charms. “In my job,” says Madame Jobin, “chance is the most important thing. All you need is presence of mind, a bit of boldness, a taste for intrigue and a certain knowledge of the world, and you need to have people of quality seen visiting you, and keep abreast of what’s going on, especially all the little love affairs, and above all, you need to talk a lot to the people who come to see you. You’re bound to say something that’s true, and you only need to get it right once or twice to find yourself the latest fashion.”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 24