The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV

by Anne Somerset

  On 23 June Lesage had announced that he had ‘important things to declare … which he was ready to do for the discharge of his conscience’, as it was ‘a question of duty, above all regarding the King’. What he had to say related to Louis Vanens and Cadelan, who had never been charged since their arrest in 1677 but were still in prison on suspicion of serious offences. Without advancing any proof, Lesage stated that he knew Cadelan had poisoned his wife’s first husband, a rich man named Rondeau. More worrying still, he revealed that Vanens, Cadelan and Bachimont had entered into a grand conspiracy with a pirate captain named Baix and Dr Rabel, a fashionable physician who was currently living in England. Lesage remained vague as to their objectives, though he hazarded it had something to do with making gold, and that there was some Italian link, as all the protagonists had travelled extensively in that country. Lesage stressed that it was of ‘great consequence for the King’s service’ that Baix should be located, as he was ‘very dangerous’. Lesage was far from clear as to the privateer’s whereabouts, suggesting that he might now be living in Dunkirk, Sweden or even Transylvania; nevertheless, urgent (though unsuccessful) efforts were at once made to find Baix.25

  Since so much of Lesage’s information was ill defined and insubstantial it is curious that he commanded so much attention. Strictly speaking, indeed, no account whatever should have been taken of his evidence, for the law stated that as a convicted criminal he was ineligible to testify against others. Yet Louvois made it clear that he considered him a particularly valuable witness, enthusing that despite the fact that Lesage himself had never been implicated in any poisonings, he knew all about those committed in recent years. Lesage did not fail to take advantage of such twisted logic and was determined to exploit every opportunity afforded him of talking his way out of trouble. Articulate and wily, and highly attuned to what his interlocutors wanted to hear, he was able to play upon their fears in the most masterly fashion. Possessing those essential attributes of the skilled liar, a fertile imagination and a retentive memory, he had the knack of enlivening his stories with such vivid detail that even his most brazen inventions acquired a spurious verisimilitude. Encouraged by the reception accorded to his words, he soon progressed from making accusations against former colleagues to attacking the reputation of much more eminent persons and it was largely due to him that the scope of the inquiry became so much wider. Having been put on trial as a result of Lesage’s denunciations, the Maréchal de Luxembourg would bitterly point to him as the true ‘author of this whole web of perfidy and iniquity’.26

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  On 15 September la Voisin had suggested that Lesage knew damaging things about the Duchesse de Vivonne. For a time Lesage dodged responding to this directly but two days later he counter-attacked by alleging that la Voisin herself had had links with people at court, which merited investigation. Precisely what he said cannot be established, but from the notes La Reynie jotted down it would seem Lesage indicated that in 1675 Mme Voisin had paid frequent visits to the royal palace of Saint-Germain. She had delivered powders to clients there and Lesage said these had contained cantharides. At the time she had been engaged in some project which her husband had considered extremely risky and had prophesied would bring disaster on her. La Voisin, however, had expected it would make her rich and had plans to leave the country once she had been paid the enormous sum of 100,000 écus. Several associates of la Voisin had been privy to the conspiracy, including Latour, Marie Bosse, la Vigoreux and the divineresses la Petit and la Bergerot.27

  What was more, la Voisin had had some form of connection with Mme de Montespan’s household. According to Lesage, one of Mme de Montespan’s servants, a woman named Cato, had secured her job through la Voisin’s influence. In addition the flighty young Mme Vertemart, who had originally consulted la Voisin in the hope of being freed from her husband, had also asked la Voisin to obtain for her a position with Mme de Montespan. More worrying still, Mlle des Oeillets, who had formerly occupied a position of some importance in Mme de Montespan’s service, had had frequent dealings with la Voisin. Though Lesage probably did not appreciate the full significance of what he was saying, this was a devastating allegation, for Mlle des Oeillets had been a sexual partner of the King’s, as well as an employee of Mme de Montespan’s.

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  By 1679 Claude de Vin des Oeillets was in her early forties and was no longer resident at court.28 The daughter of a successful actress, she had decided against emulating her mother’s stage career and instead, at some time prior to 1669, had begun working for Mme de Montespan. Exactly when she became one of the King’s casual sleeping partners is not clear. In January 1670 the King awarded her the estate of a foreigner whose wealth had been forfeited to the Crown and, almost three years later, this was followed by a more substantial endowment when he gave her a plot of property in the vicinity of Clagny, conveniently close to Versailles. There she built a house, which she rented out, though she retained a pavilion at the site for her own use. One might deduce from this that she had already shared the King’s bed but if so, this does not seem to have created difficulties between her and Mme de Montespan.

  In 1675 Mlle des Oeillets came to see Primi Visconti, who was at that time highly esteemed as a clairvoyant. She asked him to elucidate a dream Mme de Montespan had had about losing all her hair, though whether she was acting at the request of her employer or was curious on her own account is unclear. Visconti described her as a ‘trusted chambermaid’ of Athénaïs, apparently seeing no contradiction in the fact that Mlle des Oeillets also informed him that she had slept with the King on several occasions. Utterly unruffled by this perplexing state of affairs, Visconti commented serenely in his memoirs that Mlle des Oeillets was ‘not beautiful but the King quite often found himself alone with her when her mistress was busy or ill’.29

  Mlle des Oeillets indicated to Visconti that she had already had children by the King and we know that he was the father of a baby girl she produced around 1675–6. The child was given the name Louise de Maisonblanche and was probably raised by foster-parents. When she grew up the fiction was maintained that she was the daughter of a cavalry captain and his wife but, although elaborate precautions were taken to ensure that her real parentage remained secret, the King did not disown her entirely. Upon her coming of age she was provided with a modest dowry and married to Bernard de Prez, Seigneur de La Queue. For the most part she lived a retired existence in the country, but there were occasions when she was permitted to hover on the fringes of the court. One account mentions that she and her husband at one point occupied a house near the stables of Versailles, though before being allowed to come there she had to give an undertaking that whenever she went outside she would be veiled. Presumably this was to prevent her resemblance to the King from being noted.

  Since Mlle des Oeillets did not leave Mme de Montespan’s service till 167730 one can only assume that she either successfully concealed from Athénaïs that the King had fathered a child by her or else that Mme de Montespan was not put out by her intermittent liaison with Louis, deeming it of no importance. When Mlle des Oeillets finally did retire, she settled in rented accommodation in Paris. Her circumstances appear to have been comfortable for she accumulated a respectable collection of furniture, paintings and tapestries. One source does suggest, however, that having foolishly cherished hopes that the King would one day make her his acknowledged mistress, she was embittered that he had abandoned her.31 Whether or not there was any truth in this, she would soon be accused of having plotted to enact a spectacular revenge on him.

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  Increasingly disquieted by the direction the inquiry was taking, the King took steps to ensure that unless he desired otherwise, knowledge of what was happening need never reach the public. On 21 September he issued orders that when certain prisoners were interrogated on matters summarised in an adjoining memorandum (unfortunately not preserved), their answers were to be written down on separate sheets of paper, rather than being insc
ribed as usual in bound volumes. Already, therefore, Louis was making contingency plans, which would facilitate the removal of particularly sensitive pieces of information from the official record.32

  On 22 September la Voisin was interrogated once more. She did her best to dispel the notion that she had ever been involved in some sinister enterprise, which had entailed frequent visits to Saint-Germain. She also denied having exerted her influence to place clients in Mme de Montespan’s service. She agreed that Cato had once asked her to secure her a position in Athénaïs’s household, but said that she had done nothing more than to offer up prayers that the young woman might be taken on as a servant. When Cato was, in fact, given a job by Mme de Montespan, she had sent la Voisin an écu and a cheap ring by way of thanks. Since then, la Voisin had not seen her.

  La Voisin conceded that Mme Vertemart had once told her that if she succeeded in placing her in Mme de Montespan’s household, she would reward her with a pearl necklace. La Voisin said she had declined to act on the proposal as she considered Mme Vertemart to be such a loose woman that she was unfitted for such advancement. As for Mlle des Oeillets, la Voisin insisted that she had never had any contact with her at all.33

  Nevertheless, when Lesage was questioned again on 26 September, he not only stuck to his story but even expanded it. He urged that a divineress named Françoise Filastre should be taken into custody for, once she was interrogated, ‘one would learn some strange things’. After repeating that Mlle des Oeillets was well known to la Voisin, he made the new allegation that la Voisin’s attempts to install Mme Vertemart in Athénaïs’s household had come about in consequence ‘of an affair which la Voisin had undertaken for Mme de Montespan’.34 Thus, for the first time it had been hinted that Mme de Montespan was in league with la Voisin.

  The following day Louvois wrote to the King. He made no mention of Lesage’s imputation against Mme de Montespan, but he made it clear that other aspects of Lesage’s testimony had worried him. He remarked that Lesage appeared confident that other witnesses would verify what he had said about la Voisin’s visits to Saint-Germain and it was therefore hard to believe that the whole story was invented. On the other hand, in view of the fact that la Voisin had taken so many people into her confidence, it seemed unlikely that she had gone there to carry out some fearsome criminal enterprise. Louvois was more inclined to think it would ultimately turn out that la Voisin had been engaged in some superstitious nonsense, which need hardly be taken very seriously. Furthermore, the War Minister was sceptical that Mlle des Oeillets could have been guilty of grave wrongdoing. Obviously well aware of the King’s fondness for her (and clearly discounting the possibility that she had harboured any kind of grudge against Louis), Louvois suggested that if Mlle des Oeillets had ever consulted la Voisin the likelihood was that it had been for some innocuous purpose.35

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  Lesage had created quite a stir by impugning the name of comparatively menial figures, but his next targets were far grander. Since the very beginning of the inquiry the name of the Marquis de Feuquières had featured on a number of occasions. He had been spoken of as a client of la Vigoreux, and Marie Bosse’s son had said that Feuquières had expressed interest in ‘talking with a spirit’. Under torture Marie Bosse herself had gone further, alleging that M. de Feuquières and his cousin, the Maréchal-Duc de Luxembourg had wanted to communicate with the devil.36

  Following his arrest Lesage had intimated that he had recently been working on Luxembourg’s behalf, though he stopped short of claiming to have been personally acquainted with him. Instead, he said merely that a servant of M. de Luxembourg had come to him in the hope that Lesage would aid him to recover some papers, which were of great importance to Luxembourg. Lesage had been pressed to say more about this, but as recently as 13 September he had declined to say anything to Luxembourg’s detriment.37

  At the end of the month, however, Lesage showed signs that he was prepared to abandon his earlier caution. He made a statement alluding to the fact that the Marquis de Feuquières had had an attachment with a married woman and, when news of this was relayed to Louvois, it threw him into a frenzy of excitement. Urgently he wrote to La Reynie that Lesage must be pressed to provide more information on this point as, not long ago, the husband of a woman whom Feuquières had often visited had died.38 When called upon to elaborate, Lesage did so in spectacular fashion, casting aspersions not just on Feuquières but also on Luxembourg, by far the most distinguished person to have been embroiled in the inquiry.

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  Now aged fifty-one, the Maréchal-Duc de Luxembourg was one of France’s foremost generals. Physically he was extremely unprepossessing, being cursed with what Saint-Simon described as ‘an astonishingly repulsive exterior’. He was a diminutive hunchback whose body was so twisted and deformed that it was said of him that ‘if he were to lose an arm or leg in the war one would hardly even notice’.39 His face was dominated by a pair of bushy eyebrows, while his thin lips were renowned for sardonic comments, for Luxembourg possessed in full measure the malice and wit proverbially ascribed to hunchbacks. Though far from ideally formed for love, Luxembourg was a man of considerable sexual appetites. As well as pursuing court ladies with surprising success, he had a liking for prostitutes; in addition, there are hints that he was not averse to homosexual debauch.

  At the outset of the King’s personal rule Luxembourg had been out of favour, for he had sided with the rebels during the civil wars of the Fronde that had overshadowed Louis’s minority and at one point had even fought with the Spanish army against France. When peace had come he had been given an amnesty but his earlier disloyalty was not easily forgotten. However, the King was aware that he had considerable military ability and during the Dutch War Luxembourg came to prominence. In 1672 he was made Governor of the occupied province of Utrecht and in this capacity he inflicted terrible cruelties on the civilian population who came under his control. The houses of all those who were deemed to have contributed insufficiently towards the upkeep of the army of occupation were ruthlessly burnt and later in the year Luxembourg devastated the surrounding countryside when his army had to retreat. Although his reluctance to restrain his men from pillage made him popular with the troops, the bestial treatment meted out to local inhabitants in these months was a permanent stain on France’s reputation. The King, it is true, does not seem to have been concerned by this. On 11 February 1673 Luxembourg was appointed one of the four Captains of the Royal Bodyguard, a position described by the English ambassador as one of ‘the chiefest places in trust about the King’s person’.40 Two and a half years later his services received still higher recognition when in July 1675 he was made a Marshal of France.

  The following year Luxembourg had experienced a severe setback when he proved incapable of relieving the besieged city of Philippsburg, which fell in September 1676. Luxembourg seems to have felt that Louvois had let him down by failing to provide him with adequate reinforcements, but others blamed him for the reverse, and at court and in Paris he became the butt of much mockery. Although the King insisted that he personally did not consider Luxembourg to have been at fault, the Duc felt his loss of reputation keenly. Despite the fact that he had since taken Valenciennes and played a prominent part in victories at Cambrai and Cassel, Luxembourg did not consider that he had managed to recover his lost esteem. The end of the Dutch War had deprived him of opportunities to redeem himself with further feats of valour for, as he himself remarked ‘in peacetime men of war are well and truly despised’.41

  Although the King respected Luxembourg’s gifts as a soldier he had never had much personal affection for him. When the King had greeted him warmly after Luxembourg’s return to court following the campaign of 1674, this cordial reception excited surprised comment from observers. At that stage of his career, however, the Maréchal was on good terms with Louvois. On many occasions they had enjoyed convivial dinners together and the letters Luxembourg sent the Minister from Utrecht testify to the good un
derstanding that existed between them at that time. Admittedly, these missives scarcely redound to the credit of either man: in them Luxembourg merrily describes the ravages caused by troops under his command and how they incinerated the houses of recalcitrant Dutch peasants with women and children inside. In one he concludes teasingly, ‘Knowing how compassionate you are I thought of not telling you this for fear of causing you distress, but I have not been able to withhold it, for one must tell things as they are.’42

  Louvois’s support of Luxembourg had been considered a crucial factor in Luxembourg’s promotion to Maréchal in 1675. However, the fall of Philippsburg had caused tension between them, for Louvois declared that by this failure Luxembourg had ‘made the finest French army which was ever in Germany entirely useless’. Luxembourg responded by drawing closer to Colbert. The German diplomat Ezechiel Spanheim noted that whereas initially Luxembourg and Louvois were so close that Luxembourg was regarded as being ‘entirely of his dependence’, this was no longer the case after the Treaty of Nymwegen.43 Admittedly, he wrote this in 1690, with the benefit of hindsight, and in 1679 few people were aware that a rift had developed. Nevertheless, the eager way in which Louvois seized on the claims Lesage now made, and the manner in which the War Minister encouraged the magician to proceed further, make it clear that Louvois had become alienated from his former ally and was thrilled that an opportunity had presented itself to destroy him.

  The Marquis de Feuquières was a staunch adherent of his cousin, the Duc de Luxembourg, whom he had served as an aide-de-camp during several campaigns. Arrogant and haughty even by the standards of the French aristocracy, he was disliked by many of his contemporaries. Saint-Simon wrote that he would have gone far ‘if only his supreme spitefulness had allowed him to hide, at least a little, that he had neither heart nor soul’. The normally more charitable Primi Visconti was equally scathing: he described Feuquières as Luxembourg’s ‘damned soul’ and noted he had the ‘fatal physiognomy’ of a man who deserved to be hanged.44