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

by Anne Somerset

  When Luxembourg had been exiled from Paris the President of the Chambre Ardente had remarked, ‘We only pass judgement on proofs, but the King needs nothing more than indications.’119 At the time the King had evidently decided that though it was not possible to convict Luxembourg, there was good reason to believe he had been involved in shameful activities. Now he apparently thought otherwise, having perhaps concluded that nothing Lesage said could be relied upon. However, this did not save others who remained in gaol as a result of being denounced by the magician.

  Although the King never regarded Luxembourg with real warmth, he always treated him graciously after his restoration to court. In 1688 Luxembourg was appointed Governor of Champagne and in March 1690 he received a still greater mark of royal esteem when he was put in command of the army of Flanders. Aware of the continuing rift between Luxembourg and Louvois, the King informed the Maréchal that when on campaign he could bypass the Minister of War and communicate directly with him. In the next few years Luxembourg justified the King’s faith in him by winning a string of victories, although some of his opponents alleged that this owed nothing to his military skills. Instead, they preferred to believe that his successes were due to his having leagued himself with his old ally the devil.120

  Though Luxembourg never tried to revenge himself on Louvois for his conduct during the Affair of the Poisons, his resentment towards La Reynie never abated. In 1691 he asked the King for permission to bring a legal action against La Reynie ‘for prevarications in the exercise of his charge’ eleven years earlier. The King flatly forbade it, insisting that he did not want to revive matters which were ‘finished and fallen into oblivion’.121

  In 1695 Luxembourg – who ‘at the age of seventy-seven had been living the life of a twenty-five-year-old’ – fell mortally ill of double pneumonia. He made a pious end, attended by the great preacher Père Bourdaloue, who remarked that whereas he would not have liked to live as Luxembourg had done, he would be proud to die like him. However, despite his edifying end and the military honours he had won for France, Luxembourg never quite shook off the sinister reputation that had attached itself to him as a result of the Affair of the Poisons. His death was greeted by a rash of illegally printed pamphlets, suggesting that the devil had finally come to claim him as one of his own.

  * * *

  In May 1680 all this lay far in the future. Following the humiliating collapse of the case against Luxembourg it was widely assumed that the Chambre Ardente was completely discredited and that there was no likelihood of further prosecutions being brought. M. Brayer prophesied that the Chamber would soon be dissolved and that the cases of any prisoners remaining at Vincennes (whom he described as mere ‘rabble’) would be dealt with at the Châtelet in the normal way. In a fit of rancour Mme de Sévigné reported that La Reynie was now abominated by all right-thinking persons and snorted that the fact that he was still alive ‘proves there are no poisoners in France’. Utterly exasperated, she demanded whether anyone had ever heard of a story which began and ended in such an extraordinary manner,122 but, contrary to her belief, the Affair of the Poisons was by no means over. The King had issued instructions that enquiries should be continued and in weeks to come the prisoners still detained at Vincennes would manage to cast aspersions on yet more eminent people.

  EIGHT

  ACCUSATIONS AGAINST MME DE MONTESPAN

  Contrary to general expectation, the Chambre Ardente was not on the point of being disbanded, for M. de La Reynie was sure that it still had important work to do. In particular, there were outstanding questions about the conduct of the Duchesse de Vivonne, Mme de Montespan’s sister-in-law, and he considered it essential that these should be resolved.

  The Duchesse de Vivonne had married Mme de Montespan’s only brother in 1655. She had been endowed with a sizeable fortune, but she and her husband lived so extravagantly that the money was all dissipated by the time Vivonne died in 1688. In one respect they had been an ideally matched pair: the Duchesse had ‘a wit of such high quality that it well befitted her to marry into the Mortemarts’. Unfortunately, they proved incompatible in other ways. Saint-Simon heard that ‘they did not often meet and cared little for one another’, and he understood that Mme de Vivonne had not remained faithful to her husband. Saint-Simon implied that M. de Vivonne accepted the situation without protest, though there was an awkward moment when his putative eldest son lay dying. Coming to the bedside, M. de Vivonne gazed at the young man and then remarked thoughtfully, ‘Poor fellow! He will not recover. I remember seeing his father die in just the same way.’ According to Saint-Simon, Vivonne believed that the boy’s real father had been one of his grooms.1

  Saint-Simon claimed that Mme de Montespan and her sister Mme de Thianges both did their best to remain on good terms with Mme de Vivonne, but the latter was apt to be impatient with them, resulting in ‘disputes and excellent scenes’. In 1675 the Savoyard ambassador reported that Mme de Montespan was trying to persuade her sister-in-law to spend more time with her, partly because she hoped in this way to repair relations with her brother, who had previously made clear his disapproval of her relationship with the King. Until that point the King had not known Mme de Vivonne well, but he found he enjoyed her company enormously. However, Mme de Vivonne proved unwilling to come to court too often, ‘for she was haughty, independent and capricious, caring very little for favours and privileges, and seeking only her own amusement’.2

  * * *

  In October 1679 Lesage had claimed that some years before the Duchesse de Vivonne had come to him in a state of panic. She had pleaded with him to recover a pact which she and the Duchesses de Vitry and d’Angoulême had all signed, and which had been drawn up for them by a divineress named Françoise Filastre. Lesage said that although he could not discover the exact text of the pact, it was clear that it contained ‘terrifying things’, which in some way related to the King.3

  Confirmation of a sort was provided by the testimony of another divineress named Martine Bergerot, whom la Voisin had described as one of the most famous palmists in Paris. In November 1679 la Bergerot declared that about five years before Françoise Filastre had read her the text of a pact in which she gave herself, body and soul, to the devil. In return la Filastre hoped that the devil would empower her to grant the wishes articulated by high-ranking clients. La Bergerot claimed she had been startled to hear Mme de Vivonne mentioned by name in the pact for, some years before, Mme de Vivonne had been a client of hers. Around 1667 Mme de Vivonne had consulted her about ‘divers curiosities’ and she had once come to see her after quarrelling with Mme de Montespan. La Bergerot had sent Mme de Vivonne to see the man who had taught her to read palms and Mme de Vivonne had written down a list of demands for him. However, the Duchesse had subsequently become concerned that this document would compromise her if it fell into the wrong hands and she had been much relieved when she managed to regain possession of it.

  On learning in 1675 that Mme de Vivonne was in contact with la Filastre, la Bergerot had thought it proper to caution the Duchesse against becoming more closely involved. She went to see Mme de Vivonne and warned her that la Filastre was making free with her name. The Duchesse, however, had appeared displeased to receive this unsolicited advice and since that time la Bergerot had not seen her.4

  La Reynie had naturally been anxious to question la Filastre herself about all this but for some months she remained at liberty, having left Paris in September 1679 to travel to the Auvergne. In December she was located in Cusset and, having been taken into custody there, she was brought back to Paris and confined in Vincennes. Various associates of hers were also arrested. These included Mme Magdelaine Chapelain, who at one time had employed la Filastre as her maid and who had paid for her journey to the Auvergne. A peasant named Philippe Galet was also detained after it was discovered that on several occasions in the past la Filastre had travelled to see him in Normandy and that she had purchased powders from him. When first questioned about this Galet
had explained that the powders were meant to bring success in love and at the gaming table, and they contained breadcrumbs, iron filings and ‘a little pinch of powdered cantharides’.5

  At her first interrogation la Filastre disclosed that she had taken steps to secure herself employment in the household of the King’s mistress, Mlle de Fontanges. To bring this about she had enlisted the aid of a young soldier named Lafrasse who boasted of having good contacts at court. Lafrasse was immediately arrested, even though at this stage it was not considered particularly worrying that la Filastre had cherished this ambition. Six months later, however, concerns mounted on this score after la Filastre mentioned she had been so determined to obtain a job with Mlle de Fontanges that she had been ready to poison an acquaintance who was seeking similar employment. La Filastre had feared that unless she took such action, this woman might jeopardise her own chances of advancement. The fact that la Filastre had been prepared to be so ruthless was undeniably alarming, and her interrogators began to wonder whether her eagerness to attach herself to Mlle de Fontanges was motivated by a deeper purpose than a mere desire to further her career.

  Such facts did not emerge until la Filastre had been imprisoned for some time. For the first few months of 1680 the energies of La Reynie and Bezons were concentrated on preparing for the trials of la Voisin and the Maréchal de Luxembourg. It was only once these cases had been concluded that the commissioners turned their full attention to la Filastre. Then – as Lesage had predicted when he had urged that la Filastre should be arrested – it was not long before they began to learn ‘strange things’.

  When la Filastre was interviewed on 26 May 1680 she admitted with remarkable frankness that she had been involved in sinister practices. In particular, she recalled the part she had played in a black magic ceremony, which had been performed six or seven years earlier when she had given birth to her lover’s child. At the behest of another divineress, la Simon (who had taught la Filastre much of what she knew about occult lore), parturition had taken place in a circle of burning candles while la Filastre recited incantations renouncing the holy sacrament, mass and her baptism. The fate of the child remains unclear. La Filastre said la Simon had taken it away and she feared that it had been killed and offered up to the devil. However, when la Simon herself was questioned she said that, fearing that la Filastre intended to harm the baby, she had taken it to a foundling hospital for its own protection.6 Others were prepared to testify that la Filastre had sacrificed the child herself, though proof was never forthcoming.

  La Filastre also admitted that she had attended several black masses. At one that had taken place about five or six years earlier the officiating priest had been named Jacques Cotton and la Filastre explained that during the service he had invoked ‘three demon princes’ who could aid her to conclude a pact with the devil in order to enhance her magical powers. Another similar ceremony had been performed at dead of night in a cellar at Melun while a thunderstorm raged outside.7

  Cotton was promptly arrested and, when interrogated, made no attempt to deny all this. He agreed that as well as celebrating these two masses he had conducted other services at the request of la Filastre. Sometimes wax figurines had been placed on the altar as he celebrated mass and, though la Filastre later maintained that the purpose was merely to aid clients in the conduct of love affairs, Cotton confessed that on at least one occasion he had understood that it was intended to bring about a death.8 Besides this, la Filastre had arranged for Cotton to say masses on the powders which she had obtained from the Norman peasant, Philippe Galet, for it was thought that this process rendered them more potent. La Filastre kept some for her own use but passed others on to her former employer, Mme Magdelaine Chapelain. Since the latter was herself a successful divineress she in turn sold the powders to her own clients.

  * * *

  Magdelaine Chapelain, who like la Filastre was arrested in December 1679, remains a somewhat mysterious figure, for the records of many of the interrogations and confrontations she underwent are missing. La Reynie would later declare that as well as being ‘suspected of several poisonings’, she had engaged in ‘a continual practice of impieties, sacrilege and malefice’, but precise details are hard to establish. Though aged only twenty-eight she had accumulated a respectable fortune from her activities, enabling her to purchase a bureaucratic post for her husband, a former coachman. She was also a woman of property and at one time had let one of her houses to Louis Vanens, whose arrest in 1677 had precipitated the Affair of the Poisons. Vanens’s servant La Chaboissière claimed that she was more than just a landlady, for she and Vanens had done distillations together.9

  Mme Chapelain had earned her money by offering a wide range of services. As she herself admitted, when a man named Courville came to her because his wife was sick, she had looked into a glass to predict whether the woman would recover. In May 1680 tests were done on powders found at her home and, though Mme Chapelain initially tried to pretend they were medications for asthma, she later acknowledged they were aphrodisiacs, which the priest Cotton had blessed for her.10

  It would seem, too, that Mme Chapelain had tried to harness the powers of darkness to her own advantage. Believing that the inhabitants of the spirit world could guide her to hoards of buried treasure, she had contemplated sending a woman named la Bellière to the Caribbean, after hearing that the people there ‘talked very frequently to the devil’. Mme Chapelain had also conceived a desire to forge her own pact with the devil. La Filastre deposed that when in 1676 her employer had sent her to Normandy on her first visit to Philippe Galet, she was supposed not only to buy powders from him, but also to ask him for advice about how to enter into a satanic pact.11

  If la Filastre was to be believed, Mme Chapelain had been involved in worse things than this. She claimed that Mme Chapelain had once asked her to use magic to kill a miller named Leroy, whose wife wanted to marry her lover. La Filastre said that when she had refused, Mme Chapelain had performed a spell herself, using human bones and excrement. La Filastre suggested that Mme Chapelain had also poisoned her former lover, Abbé Charpy, and that she had had at least one abortion. Mme Chapelain was also somewhat loosely linked to other mysterious deaths, which had recently come under scrutiny. At one point it was alleged she had poisoned Racine’s late mistress, the actress Mlle Du Parc. How she did this was never specified, though one witness claimed that she had quarrelled with the actress and had killed her ‘either out of resentment or to get her money’. There were even vaguer claims that Mme Chapelain had been in some way responsible for the death of the last President of the Paris Parlement, M. de Lamoignon, though the grounds for this are too hazy to warrant serious consideration.12

  On 5 June la Filastre mentioned another priest who had aided her experiments in black magic. She said that, having heard this man was knowledgeable about such matters, she had gone to him seven or eight years earlier to ask for guidance about the best way of drawing up a pact with the devil. He had obligingly shown her one that he had composed for his own use, and had then told her that he had performed black masses in a cellar in the presence of two men and a woman.13

  Orders were at once issued for the arrest of this priest, whose name was Étienne Guibourg. Now aged seventy, he was a hideous figure, with a pronounced squint and a dark red complexion. For the past twenty years he had shared his bed with a concubine but neither his flagrant disregard of his vows of celibacy nor his violation of every other priestly tenet had prevented him from finding employment as a sacristan or curate in numerous parishes in Paris and its outskirts.

  M. de La Reynie would later remark that at times Guibourg appeared ‘touched’, and certainly some of his evidence is so rambling and incoherent that it suggests he was suffering from the onset of senility. At times he would deny knowing people with whom he was incontestably well acquainted and his sense of time was also hopelessly defective. When describing events he proved incapable of fixing them in specific years and instead shifted his chron
ology in the most disconcerting fashion. Yet in other respects his memory appeared remarkably vivid, for the accounts he supplied of the crimes he acknowledged committing (including poisoning, sacrilege and child sacrifice) were chillingly detailed. Whether he told the truth in doing so or whether he exaggerated in the belief that he would not be brought to trial for such horrific offences is not easy to evaluate.

  When interrogated on 26 June14 Guibourg at once disclosed that, after la Filastre had given birth to her child, he had celebrated mass on the afterbirth. He was then asked if he had ever performed mass on women’s stomachs, a crime to which none of the priests arrested in the course of the inquiry had yet admitted. With a dreadful show of humility Guibourg referred himself to God’s mercy before whining that others ‘had taken advantage of his weakness’ and prevailed upon him to commit such obscenities.

  Guibourg then declared that he had first used the stomach of an unknown woman as an altar when he had celebrated a black mass at a Chateau near Montléry. He had done this at the request of a former official in the royal stables called Leroy. (This man was never arrested; if he had indeed existed, he may have since died, or Leroy may have been a pseudonym.) Four years ago the divineress la Pelletier (already in custody after la Voisin had named her as a seller of poisons) had arranged for him to enact a similar mass in a hovel in Saint-Denis. It was attended by a man who had hoped to summon up the devil in order to conclude a pact with him. Guibourg said he did not know the identity of the woman whose body had served as an altar, but he had understood she was a prostitute enticed off the streets by la Pelletier.

  * * *

  La Reynie now turned for further information to Lesage who, oddly enough, was still considered an authoritative witness, despite the manner in which his testimony had been rejected by the Maréchal de Luxembourg’s judges. Lesage had never mentioned Guibourg in his earlier depositions, but he now claimed to know all about him. He said he had heard of other occasions when Guibourg had performed black masses and, for the first time, he linked Guibourg with la Voisin, claiming that some of these masses had taken place at her house. More controversially still, he claimed that the woman whose body had been profaned during the black mass in Saint-Denis was no common streetwalker but a lady of rank who was a client of la Voisin’s.15