City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  The chestnut-haired prisoner Madeleine de La Grange was one such person. She had been married to a man who trafficked goods on the black market and was hanged on the gallows. All of the family’s belongings had been confiscated, and La Grange risked spending the rest of her days on the street.

  In the end, however, La Grange proved to be just as enterprising as her late husband. The brown-haired beauty discovered a talent for attracting wealthy men who enjoyed taking care of her. Jean Faurye, an elderly lawyer, was one of them. It is not clear whether Faurye knew about La Grange’s checkered history. Sparing no expense, Faurye treated his mistress “like a queen,” providing her with dresses made of the finest silks and the most luxurious of carriages.

  La Grange embraced her lover with a careful eye on his wallet and his life span. With his every sneeze or cough, she moved into a deeper state of fear and could be found weeping preemptively at his bedside like the most devoted of lovers. To La Grange’s consternation, Faurye did not seem interested in marriage.

  In recent months Faurye’s health had declined rapidly. A calculating realist, she knew that the minute Faurye took his last breath, her good fortune would come to an abrupt end. La Grange needed to take matters into her own hands.

  The previous summer La Grange had arrived at a notary’s office with a “short and somewhat ugly man” with graying hair who claimed to be Faurye. The man showed the notary what looked like a legitimate marriage certificate and requested that his entire estate be transferred to La Grange in the event of his death. Conveniently enough, Faurye died just a few days later.

  The man’s only surviving nephews were distraught at the news of his passing, but their grief did not prevent them from staking their claim to the estate. La Grange greeted them at Faurye’s palatial home. Despite the somber mourning clothes she wore, little else suggested a grieving woman. She listened impatiently to the family’s demands that she vacate the house and relinquish all claims on the estate. When they finished, she triumphantly brandished not only the notarized transfer of the man’s estate, but also a marriage certificate signed by one Father Léonard Nail.

  Faurye’s nephews were as skeptical as they were stunned. Their elderly uncle certainly would not have married a much younger woman with no noble pedigree to speak of. Moreover, a lawyer of his stature certainly would have made sure that any decision to transfer his estate to La Grange would have been solidified through a detailed will naming her as beneficiary. They filed a formal complaint at Châtelet.

  It did not take long for investigators to concur with the nephews’ assessment that La Grange was a con artist. The “husband” had not only been an impostor but also a priest. Forsaking his vows, the Abbé Nail had been making a living as a scam artist under the name of Launay. In the fall of 1676, La Grange was arrested and taken to the Châtelet prison to await a court hearing in the civil tribunals of the parlement. The priest was transferred to the Conciergerie prison to await review by ecclesiastical officials.

  The legal system moved slowly in France, and many prisoners lived in squalid conditions while in detention. Space was tight, so detainees were separated by sex and held in group cells, where they slept as a pack on the floor with little more than hay for a bed. Prisoners strolled together in the courtyard several times a day as well, sharing knowledge and forming alliances.

  In early February 1677, La Grange wrote a lengthy letter to the king’s minister of war, the marquis of Louvois. She claimed that she had gleaned information about the ongoing conflicts in the Low Countries from a fellow prisoner, who happened to be a spy for the enemy. Louvois took the woman’s claims seriously and ordered the guards at Châtelet to transfer her to his home for questioning.

  The marquis of Louvois did not suffer fools. He was also convinced that social graces were a waste of time. His favorite weapon was not a rifle, a cannon, or a bomb. Instead Louvois had a gift for making others shudder with the simple violence of his words. A master of veiled threats, Louvois once quietly intimidated a neighbor whom he caught hunting on the grounds of his country estate. “I am persuaded of your honor,” he wrote to the man, “but, as often happens when one shoots ducks on another’s property, something else sometimes gets shot. It would give me great pleasure, then, if you would keep your children off my property.”

  Still, La Grange’s convincing show gave the pugnacious minister of war concern. In their lengthy meeting she explained that a group of spies—led by a man named Nicolas Poncet—operated at the Châtelet prison. Poncet shared information with La Grange, allowing her to predict, long before anyone else, that the French would lift the siege on Maastricht and reclaim the town of Aire. She also said she knew an even darker secret: There was a plot afoot to poison Louis XIV.

  La Grange refused to reveal anything more, insisting on an audience with the king in order to share all that she knew. For as scandalous as her accusations were, both La Reynie and Louvois demonstrated great skepticism. The woman was, after all, a proven liar, a scam artist and criminal.

  Louvois left for the front the next day. In his absence he instructed La Reynie to transfer La Grange immediately from the Châtelet prison to the Bastille, where suspects could be held in greater secrecy and security. “His Majesty has commanded me to tell you that he expects you to attend to this affair with diligence and that you will do all that is necessary to enlighten him on it,” Louvois told La Reynie.

  La Reynie interrogated Poncet first. In order to discover the truth behind La Grange’s claims, he needed to get a sense of whether Poncet was actually the spy that the woman claimed he was. If La Grange had lied about this, then she was also lying about the king.

  The lieutenant of police asked Poncet about the various pseudonyms he had used over the years: Sainte-Presse, Orvilliers, Romano. La Reynie made a point of showing Poncet that he could hide nothing from the police. It worked. Poncet admitted to being a former captain in the king’s army. Following a short stint in a Lille jail, he had made his way to England. There, he had a “little love affair” with the wife of an English official, but he was not a spy.

  The lieutenant of police shifted tone quickly, his questions becoming more forceful: “Did you receive any letters written in code from the wife?”

  “No,” said Poncet.

  La Reynie gave Poncet a look of incredulity and launched into a strategic accusation. “Yes, you did. And to keep anyone from knowing what you were saying to her, you also wrote them in code.”

  Unsettled by these unanticipated questions, Poncet denied the accusations once again. La Reynie shifted topics. Speaking in staccato bursts, the police chief peppered the man with questions, each more incriminating than the previous one: “How long did you serve in Flanders? . . . You received some letters from acquaintances there as well, no? . . . What about Holland, what acquaintances do you have there? . . . What letters did you receive from them?”

  After Poncet denied knowledge of everything, La Reynie finally revealed the source of his information. “What do you know about Mademoiselle de La Grange, prisoner at Châtelet?” he asked.

  Relieved to take the focus off himself, Poncet said without hesitation that the two had met four months earlier in prison. He rescued La Grange from unwanted advances by a fellow prisoner by dumping a large pot of water on the man’s head. A friendship between the two quickly developed, and La Grange told him her entire story. Poncet recounted to La Reynie her efforts to dupe the late Faurye out of his fortune. La Grange had been primarily motivated by greed and also “a deadly hatred” toward Faurye for having mistreated a little dog that La Grange adored more than anything or anyone.

  He was not the spy, Poncet asserted once again; La Grange was. “The woman is very dangerous,” he said. Everything he knew about foreign intelligence he had learned from her. “She claims to have very beautiful secrets, some of which are about what is happening from one country to another and in one army to another. But that’s all she will say, because she wants to meet the king. She wants to
tell her secrets directly to His Majesty.”

  It was not clear whether Poncet or La Grange was telling the truth. Nor was it clear which of the two, or if both, were spies. Because of this La Reynie described his encounter with Poncet in an urgent letter to Louvois, recommending they both be kept under prison surveillance. The minister concurred and asked if “it was not impossible that La Grange is only trying to delay judgment in her criminal trial?”

  Two days later La Reynie wondered the same thing after interrogating La Grange for the first time. La Reynie disliked La Grange, whom he called “the sneakiest and meanest woman in the world,” from the moment he met her. In contrast to Poncet, who resisted vociferously all accusations, La Grange seemed almost too willing to talk, and what she said often seemed highly improbable. She claimed that Poncet gave her two of the letters that he had received from his contacts in England. He burned the rest of them in front of her—while they were in prison, no less. When La Reynie asked to see the letters, La Grange demurred. “I’ll produce them, I don’t have them on me. But I won’t tell you precisely where they are.”

  La Reynie interrogated her again over the weeks that followed. With each session, her answers became increasingly verbose and increasingly cryptic. By April, La Reynie was losing patience. He entered her prison cell and waited impatiently for the notary to complete the standard routine requiring prisoners to state their name, age, place of birth, and to make a pledge to tell only the truth.

  “Where are the letters written in code that you told us about?” he spat out the moment the notary finished with the formalities. La Grange explained that the letters were still in the Châtelet prison tucked in the sleeve of a dress that she had entrusted to the safekeeping of another prisoner.

  “Where at the Châtelet? With whom did you leave them?” La Reynie demanded.

  “I can’t remember her name,” La Grange insisted.

  La Reynie quickly tired of these futile exchanges. Convinced more than ever that La Grange had no access to military secrets or knowledge of any plot to kill the king, La Reynie concluded she was merely a desperate woman trying to postpone her inevitable court trial and sentencing.

  The political climate had changed substantially in the time between La Grange’s arrest and La Reynie’s latest interrogations, making her feigned claims of espionage less interesting. In summer 1678, Louis signed the Treaty of Nijmegen, which announced France’s victory in the six-year-long Franco-Dutch Wars. Gaining control of the Franche-Comté region and claiming portions of the Spanish Netherlands, Louis could not have been more pleased. He crowed, “I fully rejoice in my clever conduct whereby I was able to extend the boundaries of my kingdom at the expense of my enemies.”

  After reading accounts of the interrogations, Louvois, La Reynie, and Louis XIV concurred with the police chief’s assessment. Two weeks later the king’s secretary of state, Michel Le Tellier—Louvois’s father—instructed La Reynie to return La Grange to the Châtelet prison, where she would again await trial so that “we can proceed against her as we would have had she not been transferred to the Bastille.”

  La Grange’s case was now back in the formal court system, which was overseen by the parlement rather than by La Reynie’s Châtelet. The police chief may have hoped he had seen the last of La Grange, but it was only the beginning. The next time he found himself in an interrogation room with her, the threats she foretold had become only too real.

  18

  “Burn after Reading”

  In fall 1678 a carriage rumbled to a halt in front of the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis in the elegant Marais quarter of Paris. A well-dressed woman stepped out and briskly ascended the imposing stone steps. Once inside, she made her way to one of the confessionals. Taking a seat in the box, she waited uncomfortably for her turn.

  On the other side of the confessional, the priest steeled himself for another sinner. In this ever-growing capital of lost souls, a day’s work in the confessional brought an overflowing river of tales of passion and desire, of young virgins who had tested too far the limits of their purity as they bantered with lovers in the nearby place des Vosges. Then there were the shopkeepers whose abilities to cheat their clientele were as limitless as their creativity. A mismeasured gram of flour here, a counterfeited product there. No matter how small or large the transgression, they all came to Saint-Paul for the same reason: to be spared in the afterlife. In turn, the priest meted out forgiveness and penances in equal measure.

  The Church of Saint-Paul stood just down the street from the Bastille prison, whose fortressed turrets had towered over the city since the fourteenth century. Much of what took place at the Bastille remained unseen by average Parisians. However, the priests of Saint-Paul witnessed firsthand many of the activities at the fortress that were meant to take place under the cloak of secrecy, sometimes presiding over last-minute confessions or offering up last rites. Other times they watched from the main church doors as doleful prisoners were led down the rue Saint-Antoine.

  The well-dressed woman in the confessional said nothing to the priest. Instead she slid a rolled and crumpled piece of parchment through the wooden lattice slats that separated them. He had barely begun to scan the document when the woman blurted out that she had found it in the public gallery of the Palais de Justice and did not know what else to do with it. Located just steps away from Notre Dame, the Palais housed the parlement, the criminal appeal courts, and the treasury. For hundreds of years shopkeepers hawking every type of merchandise had also set up shop under the covered galleries that wrapped the interior courtyards, serving thousands of lawyers, judges, notaries, and others who passed daily through the compound. The shops ranged from cheap to upscale, from hand-stitched clothes to artisanal clocks. The sellers and their customers also traded in gossip, both spoken and written. Lovers sent friends or household staff to the gallery to hand passionate letters and other signs of affection to their beloved. Other letters were “lost,” in order to stir rumors or inflame the heart of a jealous lover.

  From the first sentence of the letter, the priest understood that more than simple matters of the heart were at play. “You have made me a confidant of a secret that I wish only too well that I could forget for my own peace of mind, or at the very least I pray that what you are plotting will never come to fruition given the horror the simple idea gives to me. That white powder that you want to put on the handkerchief of you know who could very well have the same effect. Either you will forget such criminal plots, or you will lose me forever.”

  If the identity of “you know who” was not clear to the priest, it would soon be from the reference to treason that followed. “I fear in the extreme that our letters will be found, and that they will believe that I am the guilty one, even though I am entirely innocent. All other crimes, one has to be an accomplice to be punished, but for this one, it is enough to know only of the intent.” There was no crime more serious in early France, and no form of treason more ghastly than an attempt, real or intended, on the life of the king or a member of his family. In early France treason by association—or the mere knowledge of a plot against the king’s life—was enough to merit the death penalty, which the writer knew.

  “Do you remember [who] we both saw in front of the Bastille? This example is still fresh enough that you should tremble.” The letter writer referred to the execution of the chevalier of Rohan, a colonel of the king’s corps of bodyguards, who was convicted of treason and decapitated—not at the place de Grève, where Parisian executions normally took place—but outside the gates of the Bastille prison. The gallant Rohan made the mistake of trying to court several of the king’s former and current mistresses, most notably Madame de Montespan. Louis XIV dismissed Rohan from his post, leaving him penniless. In retaliation Rohan plotted with France’s enemy, the Netherlands, to kidnap the king’s eldest son and hold him for ransom in exchange for Quillebeuf, a strategic town in Normandy near the Dutch border. At Louvois’s orders La Reynie’s guards arrested Rohan on Se
ptember 11, 1674. The reference to Rohan suggested a treasonous plot was afoot to poison the king.

  The priest turned again to peer at the woman, the bearer of this most unwelcome letter, but she was gone. Looking down once more at the piece of paper in his hand, he read the last sentence: “Burn after reading.”

  A brilliant sun painted on the ceiling loomed over the priest. It signaled the omniscient presence of the Sun King. From the prisons to the holiest of spaces, the king was everywhere. All who transgressed his laws would be punished. The priest transferred the letter immediately into the care of Father François de La Chaise, archbishop of Paris and eventual namesake of the largest cemetery in the French capital. As the king’s personal confessor, Père La Chaise had a duty to inform the king, lest he also be accused of treason.

  La Chaise shared the letter with Colbert, who in turn forwarded it to La Reynie. The king had been informed of the threat, Colbert explained, and instructed his police chief to spare no effort in uncovering its author.

  La Reynie’s first instinct was to question La Grange again. While he had dismissed her stories as pure fabrication, the timing of the letter’s discovery seemed more than coincidental. Unfortunately La Grange’s case had been remanded back to the parlement’s courts, which were the domain of the attorney general, Achille de Harlay, who was unlikely to appreciate any meddling from La Reynie. Harlay had taken the lead in the Brinvilliers case, at Colbert’s orders. The police had not been invited to participate in the process then, and they certainly would not be now.