by Holly Tucker
Louvois, on the other hand, made war for a living. He was bold and unapologetic. Colbert still remained bitter about the king’s decision to ignore his counsel and go to war against Spain and Holland in 1667 and again in 1672.
As much as the rivals vied for the king’s resources and support, Colbert and Louvois were actually more similar than they were different. “Louvois has a character,” remarked one court observer, “that is hard and violent with a gaze that is severe. Many say he mistreats people when he speaks, so much so that no one dares approach him. As far as Colbert, cold and dry with a sober air, he freezes out those who come to him.”
During the Franco-Dutch Wars, Louis put Colbert’s grand plans for Parisian construction to the side to pay for Louvois’s wars. If Colbert ever needed any sign of lingering rivalries between peace and war, the massive Hôtel des Invalides now dominating the Left Bank was it. Colbert had not proposed the Invalides, far from it. To his deep frustration, the hospital and military complex was Louvois’s doing. The minister of war played to the king’s deepest desires. He urged Louis XIV to indulge fully in “war, glory, dominion, and self-worship.” Louis’s unceasing wars meant great casualities. A soaring hospital and military complex would serve, Louvois argued, the dual purpose of attending to the troops all the while reasserting the king’s greatness—and Louvois’s own.
Still, as La Reynie’s concerns about poison plots deepened, the slow-moving legal mechanisms at the parlement were increasingly becoming an obstacle to his work. He needed Louvois, whom the court called the “King’s Creature,” on his side. In the wake of the Treaty of Nijmegen, Louvois was also looking for a way to remain prominent in the king’s circle at a time of relative peace.
Less than one day after receiving La Reynie’s letter, Louvois sent good news. At his urging the king put a stay on the executions in order to allow ample time for the Question. He further specified that if, during the Question, either La Grange or Launay revealed anything more than was already known, they would not be executed. Instead they would be transferred immediately to La Reynie for further investigation. This decision would be made entirely by the king, who wished to see transcripts of the Question after it was conducted.
La Reynie would not supervise or attend the Question himself; this would remain in the jurisdiction of the parlement. However, the decision reinforced the lieutenant of police’s important status in such matters. La Reynie now had Louvois’s full support, and thus the king’s. Both La Reynie and Louvois delighted, no doubt, in the fact that the king ordered Colbert to communicate these wishes, born of Louvois’s persuasion, to the parlement.
At six o’clock in the morning the following Monday, prison guards descended the narrow stairs to La Grange’s cell in the Conciergerie and escorted her to the same chamber where Brinvilliers had been tortured three years earlier. Three well-dressed men looked up from a small table around which they had been standing and gathered in a line in front of La Grange. Messieurs Boultz and Girault, the court officers leading the interrogation, joined Monsieur Amyot, the principal notary for the parlement. The questioning began with a series of inquiries about the forged marriage contract and La Grange’s role in the deception. While La Grange had been coldly calculating as a free woman and frustratingly inscrutable while in prison, her stoicism melted as Boultz and Girault took turns questioning her. “I swear on the heavens,” she blurted, pleading with her captors, “I know nothing about this letter. I have no idea what Monsieur de La Reynie has been told.”
“So you’re saying that you do not know [if] Launay wrote it?” the men asked, making no effort to hide their disbelief. La Grange swore that she knew absolutely nothing about a letter and had no idea who wrote it. “I already told Monsieur de La Reynie all of this,” she insisted.
The two interrogators did not believe her. She knew very well about the existence of a letter, they said, reminding La Grange that she had been the one to provide La Reynie with samples of Launay’s handwriting. Caught in her contradiction, La Grange remained silent.
“Have you ever meddled in poisons, Madame La Grange?” the questioners asked in a tone that confirmed their belief in her guilt. La Grange did not deny that she had, once, but never again. “Eight or nine years ago I made up a divine plaster, but never anything else, “she claimed. Emplastrum divinum (divine plaster) was a benign yet prohibitively expensive salve made of frankincense and myrrh, used for skin wounds and other ulcerous “corruptions.”
Again Boultz and Girault made no effort to hide their disbelief. “So having talked so much before about poisons and counterpoisons, you have never once used poison or have composed them with others?” they asked.
“Never,” she insisted. “Faurye used to talk a lot about poisons, he said that he had once been poisoned by Collart, his servant. But I never made poisons by myself or with anyone else for that matter, and it never even once crossed my mind.”
Boultz and Girault changed the subject. “Who wrote the letter?” La Grange asserted she had nothing to do with the letter. Someone else wrote it. In fact, she was convinced that the only reason she now found herself in front of the two men was that she had fallen victim to a conspiracy intent on seeing her punished for sharing information with Louvois and La Reynie.
Shifting topics once again, the questioners pushed La Grange to admit her guilt. “Do you know Bosse; you gave her poison, didn’t you? The two of you worked together to make poison, didn’t you?”
La Grange insisted that she had not seen Bosse for more than ten years, contradicting what Bosse had told La Reynie in earlier interrogations. “But I never once spoke to her about poison. I don’t even know what poison is.”
La Grange’s claim that she knew nothing about poison was so preposterous that Boultz and Girault pretended not to have heard it. “So you don’t know that Bosse gave poison to many people?
“No.”
Nodding to the guards, Boultz and Girault declared to La Grange’s horror that it was time to begin the torture. The guards quickly tied her wrists to a large metal ring built into the chamber’s thick stone walls before noticing that the buckets of water they planned to use had frozen. At Boultz and Giraud’s direction, the guards untied La Grange from the metal ring and shoved her onto a sturdy bench nearby.
Working one on each side, the guards put her legs between two thick pieces of wood, wrapped them with leather straps, and pulled the straps as tightly as they could. Hands tied behind her back, she was ready. She cried, “I swear on the heavens . . . !”
The notary Amyot moved the desk close to La Grange, tucked his long jacket under him, and sat upright, ready to make careful note of each word that the prisoner uttered under torture. Boultz and Girault stepped forward to begin the interrogation anew.
“Have you told us the truth in all matters?” the interrogators intoned somberly. La Grange did not respond. Girault looked up at Amyot: “Note that she refused to answer.” He then turned toward the guard: “First corner.” The guard took a wedge and pounded it into the corner of the torture boots, between the plank of wood and the strap. La Grange cried out in pain.
Again, “Have you told us the truth in all matters?” La Grange looked at them pleadingly and said that she had nothing more to say. “Second corner.” The guard raised the heavy mallet over his head and forced a second wedge of wood into the torture boots. “Have you told us the truth in all matters?” they asked once again. La Grange howled in agony but did not speak.
Boultz and Girault waited for the notary to record the woman’s refusal to speak and then signaled: “Third corner.”
Shouting over her cries, the questioners demanded: “Have you told us the truth in all matters?” La Grange whimpered that she had.
“Fourth corner,” Boultz and Girault ordered.
“Do you, Madame La Grange, know anything about a plot against the King’s life?” She was sobbing now, praying for the pain to end. “Do you, Madame, know anything about a plot against the King?” No, no, sh
e did not, she moaned.
Girault looked at Boultz in frustration: “Why won’t you admit the truth and tell us everything that we need to know about the letter?” The guard reached for a fifth wedge, and with the thud of the mallet, forced it into her other leg. Broken and bleeding, La Grange cried desperately: “May a million devils suffocate me if I am not telling the truth. I’ll tell you whatever you need me to say! If you want me to tell you I wrote the letter, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything you want me to. But I’m telling the truth.”
“Tell us the truth!” the men yelled over La Grange’s pleas: “I have nothing more to tell you.” Six, seven, and then eight blows to the legs. Pale and nearly unconscious from pain, La Grange remained steadfast in her denials. Untying her, the guards carried her to her prison cell to await execution.
The following day La Grange’s coconspirator Launay faced the questioners. The questioning followed more or less the same rhythm as that of the day before, as documented by the interrogation record:
First corner: “Ah! My God! May God help a poor innocent wrongly accused.”
“Tell us the truth.”
“You can kill me, you can do what you will with me, but I’m telling the truth.”
Second corner: “If you didn’t write the letter, how do you know what it says?” Launay refused to answer. Moments later his body slumped forward.
The interrogators called over Pierre Rainssant, the doctor assigned to witness the torture. Doctors were not there to prevent injury or help heal the wounds inflicted by the interrogators. Instead they let interrogators know how much more torture a prisoner could take without risking death.
Rainssant walked briskly over to Launay and lifted his limp body up, motioning to the guards to untie him. The man’s pulse was racing, he was too weak to speak, and his ability to tell the truth was clouded by his weakened state. The doctor explained that if the torture continued “there would be great danger of Launay, his patient, dying from the force of the torments.”
The guards immediately moved Launay in front of the fireplace without releasing him from the brodequins and gave him some wine to help him regain his strength. Once he began to move and speak again, they continued the interrogation as if nothing had happened.
With a loud thud they pounded the third wedge into the man’s leg. “So you never wrote the letter?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. Let me die,” Launay pleaded.
Fourth corner: “I don’t know anything!” Launay howled. Fifth corner: “Nothing,” he moaned.
Amyot and Girault repeated the question once again, as the sixth wedge brought new screams of pain. “I will never see my Creator if I tell you that I know about the letter.” Seventh corner. Eighth. “I will never know God,” he mumbled in a barely audible voice, “if I tell you that I know about the letter.”
The guards removed the torture boots, blood flooding the floor. “Everything I’ve told you,” Launay moaned, “is the truth. I promise in front of God, it is the truth.”
La Reynie read the transcript of the interrogation with frustration. He was convinced that they had let La Grange and Launay off too gently. The king disagreed. Two days after the interrogation, Colbert’s son Seignelay informed La Reynie that the king had read the interrogation records. Louis saw no need for the criminals to be transferred to the Châtelet for further questioning by La Reynie. Remembering the frenzy Brinvilliers’s death had caused, the king seemed ready to put the entire matter to rest, and quickly. La Grange and Launay, he declared, were to be executed without delay and without crowds or spectacles. As a public demonstration of his acceptance of the king’s will, La Reynie was ordered to attend the execution.
Later that evening, as darkness settled in, La Grange and Launay were taken together, legs bleeding and broken, to the steps of the Sainte-Chapelle. There Amyot and Girault waited for them with torches in their hands, the light reflecting the brilliant blue of the stained-glass windows above. The magistrates asked each of them again whether they knew of “anyone else who had undertaken or planned to undertake any evil actions against the king and the royal family by powders, poisons, or similar things.” After they both answered no, the criminals were transferred to a priest. Their fate was now in God’s hands.
Launay and La Grange made their last prayers in the chapel and were then placed in the care of the executioner, who stood at the main gates of the Conciergerie. La Grange and Launay followed the same path Madame de Brinvilliers had taken in her last hours three years earlier. This time, however, there were no crowds. In the quiet of the night, the pair was transported in a cart to the main entrance of Notre Dame; each wore a muslin chemise and had a noose tied loosely around the neck as was customary for soon-to-be-executed criminals, regardless of the method actually used. The executioner shoved them to their knees for another round of prayers.
Once the prayers were finished, Launay and La Grange were pushed back into the cart, which rumbled across the narrow bridge to the Right Bank. Amyot and Girault awaited them at the place de Grève alongside La Reynie. The three men stood together on a small platform adjacent to the larger one where the execution would take place. In the flickering light of the guards’ torches, Amyot read aloud the execution order and turned the rest over to the priests and the executioner. After two rounds of the Salve Regina, the ax fell. Launay and La Grange met their end, nooses still around their necks.
Reflecting afterward on the events, La Reynie explained that he felt no relief. In the pit of his stomach he sensed that this episode was only the beginning of something much deeper, something much darker.
21
Monsters
La Reynie had wasted no time in arresting Bosse and Vigoureux after learning that they had bragged about their exploits to the lawyer Perrin. Still, he was more circumspect when it came to their alleged accomplice Madame de Poulaillon. He finally arrested her a full month after Bosse and Vigoureux and then waited several more weeks before confronting her. Sensing that his actions could set off another frenzy like the one surrounding the Brinvilliers case, he wanted to make sure he had the facts straight before questioning a member of the nobility.
He began first by interrogating Poulaillon’s former servant, a woman named Monstreux, who explained to La Reynie that Poulaillon had a strong “aversion” to her husband. That said, Poulaillon took advantage of his “strong weakness” for her. All it took was for Madame to direct a smile or other form of feigned affection to get him to give her anything she wanted.
Madame de Poulaillon’s lover, Rivière, had the same effect on her as she did on her husband. Poulaillon sold off the couple’s belongings in order to support Rivière, who was perennially in debt. Each time her husband bought her a new dress, she immediately sold it, claiming that it had to be sent away for alterations. Once, when Monsieur Poulaillon was on a trip to Normandy, his wife instructed Monstreux to find someone who could sell some of the couple’s opulent furniture, but there were no takers.
Monstreux further explained that Poulaillon even broke into the locked room in which her husband kept his money. Poulaillon never let the key out of his sight, so she waited until he was asleep to steal it. She tiptoed down the hallway, slid the key into the lock, and raided her husband’s fortune.
The next morning Poulaillon’s husband noticed that the key was missing. He confronted his wife, demanding to know if she had entered the room without his permission. She insisted with disdain that she had not. As Monsieur Poulaillon searched the house for the key, his wife sneaked the key out of her pocket only to discover with a start that a portion of it had broken off. Later that evening she tiptoed again to the locked room with a pair of small scissors in her hands, and looking nervously over her shoulder, used them to remove the bits that remained in the lock. She pressed the two parts of the key into a block of soft wax and instructed Monstreux to take the imprint to a locksmith to have a duplicate made. Poulaillon later left the new key for her husband to find.
&
nbsp; Relieved to be once again in possession of his precious key, Monsieur Poulaillon entered the room. He noticed immediately that substantial amounts of money and silverware were missing. Convinced that the servants were stealing from him, he added a second lock as well as a thick padlock.
Monstreux recalled seeing a “strong and ugly fat woman” come to the house every day. From the description, La Reynie knew it was the fortune-teller Bosse. After one of Bosse’s visits, Poulaillon handed her servant a small glass bottle, no bigger than a finger. Inside there was an even smaller amount of red liquid. “Put it in my husband’s wine,” Poulaillon instructed her. “It will put him to sleep.” Monstreux agreed to do as she was told. However, come suppertime, she took the small bottle from the folds of her dress, uncorked it, and then discreetly dumped its contents out the dining-room window and into the street below.
Visibly frustrated that the elixir did not have the intended effect, Poulaillon handed her servant another small glass bottle a few days later. This time the vial contained a clear liquid that looked like water. “Put this in my husband’s wine,” she instructed Monstreux once again. When Poulaillon asked later that evening whether she had completed her work, Monstreux said that she had not had the chance. Not long after, the servant retreated to her tiny quarters on the top floor of the Poulaillon’s home. Before undressing for bed, she placed the vial on the mantel of the room’s small fireplace.
Monstreux became sick a few days later. Her doctor prescribed a bloodletting. Arriving in her room to perform the blood letting, the barber-surgeon noticed the bottle and asked her what it was. When Monstreux explained that it belonged to her mistress, he opened the bottle inquisitively, took a sniff, and poured a few drops of its contents into the palm of his hands. “You’d better be very careful,” he said somberly. “You could find yourself in trouble.”