City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Once again coming to Montespan’s rescue, Colbert helped the king calm down and dissuaded him from his decision. Louis agreed, but insisted that other court members be present so he would not have to spend time alone with her. To add to the insult, he stripped Athénaïs of her title as head of Marie-Thérèse’s entourage and the privilege of the tabouret, which had allowed her to be the only one to remain seated in the presence of the queen—and offered both to Fontanges, who was now pregnant with their first child. “And so, the king’s violent passion for Madame de Montespan is no longer,” wrote one contemporary observer. “She cries bitterly after conversations with the king. I’ve heard she would have fallen even farther without Monsieur Colbert.”

  Quietly gloating about Montespan’s fall from grace while nonetheless bristling at the marriage of Colbert’s daughter before his own, Louvois continued his ongoing efforts to broker a strategic pairing for his daughter. His rival, the duke of Luxembourg, also approached him, hoping that a marriage between their two children would bolster the duke’s military aspirations. Louvois flatly refused.

  Instead Louvois fixed his sights on one of the country’s most renowned noble families, the house of Soissons. The late count of Soissons hailed from a cadet branch of the royal Bourbon family. His widow, the former Olympe Mancini, also shared close ties to the monarchy through her uncle, the late prime minister Jules Mazarin, and now served as the queen’s highest-ranking lady-in-waiting. Louvois’s hopes ended, however, when his wife overheard rumors of the countess’s public reaction to the idea: “What an odd thing it would be to see a bourgeoise girl marry a prince!” The minister of war was outraged at the slight.

  The countess of Soisson’s dismissal of Louvois touched a sore point for the minister. Despite his privileged place in the king’s entourage, Louvois’s family did not have noble origins. Louvois hailed from the bourgeois Le Tellier family of Parisian merchants, which over the course of a century slowly entered public service. Louvois had done well financially and politically, but he did not suffer gladly any reminder of his family’s humble origins.

  Undeterred, Louvois shifted his paternal matchmaking efforts to the Rochefoucauld family. While the family is now best known for the Maxims of François de La Rochefoucauld, in the late seventeenth century the Rochefoucauld name signaled above all power and proximity to kings. Louis’s father, the late Louis XIII, solidified his close relationship to François’s own father by addressing his letters to “our dear and beloved cousin.” Like Soissons, François balked. Louvois reached out to La Rochefoucauld’s close friend, Madame de La Fayette, to argue his case. When that proved not enough, the king interceded.

  While still nursing his pride following the difficult marriage negotiations, Louvois was thrown from his horse and broke his leg. After over two months immobilized in bed, he wrote to his brother: “I [am] focused right now on learning how to walk . . . because I am working very hard, I am hoping that I will [soon] be very knowledgeable in it.” Although his leg would eventually heal, the minister proved less able to recover from the injuries imposed by the transgressions of Soissons, Montespan, and Vivonne. He would soon focus all his energies on finding ways to punish them. As his contemporary the abbé of Choisy once remarked, Louvois was “a dangerous enemy [who] looked for chances to strike anyone who offended him, always striking them in secret.”

  23

  Search and Seizure

  On the morning of March 12, 1679, François Desgrez arrived at the Châtelet headquarters. He held a warrant for Voisin’s arrest and an order to seize her property. Desgrez handed the search warrant to Camuset, the Châtelet commissioner on duty. Shortly after, La Reynie’s trusted sergeant left on horseback with three other officers for the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle, where Voisin attended mass. The officers waited outside until she emerged and arrested her on the spot.

  While guards escorted Voisin to the Vincennes prison, Camuset and his men made their way to the sorceress’s home. Voisin’s husband, Antoine, and their now twenty-one-year-old daughter, Marie-Marguerite, met them at the door.

  It did not take Camuset long to search the home, which was mostly empty save for a few pieces of furniture. It seemed that Voisin knew ahead of time that she would be arrested. The commissioner rummaged through an old and battered armoire in the first room, finding only linens and needlepoint inside. In the drawer of a table, he uncovered a few papers stuffed in a nightcap. He collected the papers, wrapped them in twine, and pressed a heavy wax seal onto the package.

  As Camuset approached a large wooden box, an expressionless Marie-Marguerite walked toward him and held out a key. He took the key and inserted it in the lock, opening the box just wide enough to see that it also contained papers. He placed those, too, under seal.

  In the second room, distillation equipment surrounded the space around the fireplace. Traces of a powderlike substance dusted the space on the floor where a large alembic rested. An unlocked wooden box sat next to it. Opening the box with caution, Camuset noted that it contained only baby clothes and a few blankets.

  If Camuset wandered into Voisin’s courtyard, he did not mention it. Had the commissioner entered the garden and the remnants of Voisin’s activities remained, he would have been unable to forget what he saw: the shack, the stove, the cauldron, tiny charred bones. But signs of the worst of Voisin’s crimes there had, no doubt, been already cleared away.

  After sealing the items and documents, Camuset delivered them to La Reynie. La Reynie examined the cache. Most of the documents looked to be little more than simple beauty recipes or were filled with astrological drawings and signs. A few more troubling ones consisted of letters to Voisin from women begging for her help in gaining “full power over the heart and mind” of their husbands or lovers. Promissory notes accompanied their pleas, indicating the payment Voisin would receive for her initial services and additional bonuses to be earned if her potions, elixirs, and spells produced the desired effect.

  Five days after Voisin’s arrest, La Reynie ordered the guards to bring the woman down from her cell for questioning. She looked at the police chief coldly. In a profession where intimidation and coercion were tools of the trade, if she felt anxious at all, she certainly had no intention of showing it to the police chief.

  La Reynie began by asking about Voisin’s husband. With characteristic pride, Voisin explained that Antoine was a failure who had been unable to support their family. In happier days he had made a modest living selling hats, fabric, and sewing supplies in one of the small stores along the Pont Marie. In 1658, around the time of their daughter Marie-Marguerite’s birth, a flood swept the bridge and its stores into the Seine. The Voisins lost everything. The family had no option but to rely on Catherine’s “chiromancy” skills.

  “This is why,” she boasted, “I insisted on cultivating the knowledge that God gave me. I learned about chiromancy and physiognomy when I was nine.” The law did not forbid palm reading, she reminded La Reynie, and she made no apology for earning a living from her talents.

  Quickly shifting topics, La Reynie asked Voisin if she knew Bosse. She did. Bosse had gone through a rough patch several years earlier, she explained. Being a charitable woman, Voisin invited Bosse to live at her home for a little while. “But I have no idea what she has been up to since.” Insisting she had nothing more to say about Bosse, Voisin told La Reynie, “I certainly would not wish to do any harm to anyone, no matter what harm others are doing to me.”

  La Reynie asked next about Vigoureux. Voisin claimed she had heard about the woman but had never met her personally. La Reynie remained skeptical. He knew from Bosse and Vigoureux that the three women traveled in the same circles. Picking his battles, he changed the subject. The lieutenant of police trusted his abilities to sense—through a suspect’s movement, breathing, or a subtle shift in tone of voice—where the most productive lines of questioning lay.

  He asked Voisin about rumors that she had been paid to make novenas in church on behal
f of several women. In Catholic tradition, novenas were, and still are, prayers repeated for nine consecutive days either as part of mourning rituals, a personal petition to God, or as penance for sins. La Reynie suspected that Voisin performed novenas for less devout purposes.

  “You’ve never performed any novenas for women with husband problems, or for husbands who had problems with their wives?” he inquired. Voisin claimed she had not, saying that she always told them to do it themselves at Montmartre.

  In the late seventeenth century the rural village of Montmartre sat high above Paris and outside the city walls. A small chapel capped the top of the hill, which was a pilgrimage site dedicated to Saint Ursula, who had refused marriage to a pagan prince and was later killed by the Huns. In Voisin’s time unhappily married women swarmed Montmartre carrying their husband’s chemises so they could be blessed by the chapel’s priest under a painting of Ursula—no doubt in hopes that the saint would see fit to change their fates.

  The more La Reynie pressed Voisin with questions about her own actions, the more she talked about Bosse. Passing blame to her rival, she revealed that Bosse performed the novenas that Voisin refused to do. Bosse did them for Madame Philbert, the widow of Jean Brunet, whose death freed her to marry a court musician. Then there was Madame Ferry, whose husband languished for weeks before dying. Bosse, Voisin hinted, had infused his shirt with poison.

  La Reynie added Ferry and Philbert to his arrest rolls. However, he was most troubled by the rumors of two noblewomen whose names he could not compel Voisin to reveal. From what he could tell, one of the women had offered Bosse a large sum of money to perform incantations over a small fire. Another had asked Voisin to poison a bouquet of flowers, which she adamantly swore she refused to do—but insinuated that Bosse had been less principled and been paid a handsome price for her services. While the police chief felt far from knowing the full story, one fear grew: Madame de Poulaillon was not the only court member tangled up in this network of poisoners, sorceresses, and thieves.

  He continued to forge ahead, homing in on the little evidence he had of Voisin’s own potential crimes: “What were you doing with the distillation equipment we found at your house?”

  Shrugging off the question, Voisin responded that it was just an ordinary alembic; she used it to make face-whitening waters. “And you never used arsenic for any reason,” La Reynie said curtly, phrasing it less as a question and more as an accusation. Never, she answered.

  “And you never sent any women who thought they might be pregnant to the midwife Lepère.” Never, she replied again, shaking her head.

  Sensing there was little more to learn for now, La Reynie ended the interrogation. In the days that followed, he ordered his guards to bring Bosse and Voisin down to the interrogation room together. He wanted to pit the two rivals against each other to see if that would help loosen their tongues.

  The hostility between the two women was palpable as they stood before the lieutenant of police and listened to a reading of the transcript from Voisin’s interrogation a day earlier. La Reynie let Bosse speak first. Bosse snortled that if she earned as much money as Voisin did, “I would be a very wealthy woman.” Without wasting time, the stout woman turned her focus on each of Voisin’s accusations against her, knocking them down one by one. Voisin, not she, sold poison to Madame Philbert. Bosse said she witnessed Voisin give diamond powder to the woman inside Notre-Dame Cathedral. Reputed to be one of the deadliest and most expensive forms of poison available, the sharp shards of diamond crystal entered the digestive system, where they supposedly made tiny deadly, yet imperceptible, perforations in the intestines.

  Madame Philbert, the daughter of a jeweler, knew better. She could tell it was not real diamond powder. According to Bosse, Voisin protested that whatever it was, she could count on it working. Bosse said Voisin had first tested a small amount of the powder on her husband, Antoine, making him violently ill. Voisin denied all accusations.

  Bosse also claimed that Madame Leféron, the widow of a wealthy judge at the parlement, had visited Voisin years earlier for help in killing her husband. Defending herself, Voisin did not deny that she knew Madame Leféron but had played no part in the husband’s death. Instead Leféron confessed to Voisin that she intended to kill her husband. The noblewoman had already purchased diamond powder for her husband and bought tainted perfumes and gloves from someone in Italy. On hearing Leféron’s plans, Voisin said she prepared two vials of opium water to calm the woman’s nerves and tried to persuade her not to make good on her macabre plot. Obviously Leféron did not listen, she said.

  “Surely,” Bosse interrupted, “Voisin can’t forget another woman of quality who brought flowers to the house to be poisoned.” Bosse recalled that a noblewoman named Madame de Dreux offered Voisin six thousand livres to rid her of her husband. Once the deed was accomplished, Madame Dreux met Voisin at Notre-Dame to pay her.

  Over the two weeks that followed, La Reynie set in motion orders for the arrest of more than thirty new suspects, whose names had surfaced during the interrogations. Among them were the abortionist Madame Lepère and the widow Philbert. He had little hard evidence against either. But their involvement in poison was the only thing on which Voisin, Bosse, and Vigoureux seemed to agree. For now it was evidence enough.

  To offset the herculean amount of work associated with the increased number of arrests, Louvois agreed to compensate Desgrez for coordinating so many arrest warrants over such a short period. The warden at Vincennes, Monsieur de La Ferronnaye, also received additional resources and guards to ensure the security of the prison as it filled. Meanwhile La Reynie’s resolve intensified: He would not stop until he had uncovered every truth.

  24

  A Noble Pair

  As detailed as La Reynie tended to be in his communications to Louvois and the king, he proved nonetheless cautious when it came to the noblewoman Dreux. Instead he offered a very brief summary of the accusations that Bosse and Voisin made against Leféron and an unnamed “woman of quality.” Like Leféron, Dreux’s husband was a judge at the parlement. However, unlike Leféron, Dreux’s family and personal connections linked her to some of the most prominent and powerful men in the royal court, including the king.

  Frustrated by La Reynie’s unusual circumspection, Louvois wrote back that the king demanded to know the woman’s name. The next day La Reynie divulged his suspicions that Madame de Dreux had poisoned her husband. Louis expressed “shock” in learning that a woman of such high standing was allegedly part of the cabal of poisoners. On the king’s orders the minister of war instructed La Reynie to continue his investigations but to be sure of all accusations before bringing Dreux and Leféron in for questioning.

  The latest set of arrests, along with rumors of suspects among the nobility, triggered a wave of panic among Parisians across all social ranks. “The smallest of accidents are being attributed to poison,” wrote an Englishman visiting Paris at the time, “so many people remain in a stupor over the fear [the arrests] are causing.” A seventeenth-century equivalent of a tabloid newspaper reported that “fathers are suspecting their sons [of poison] and are observing closely all of their movements; and mothers are cautious around their daughters. Children are taking precautions against their parents; brothers and sisters don’t dare to eat or drink anything one of their siblings gives them.”

  Where La Reynie was once able to move without notice, his departures from his home headquarters now drew mobs seeking a glimpse of him and guessing whom he would arrest next. Hearing of the chaotic crowds, Louvois increased the number of guards accompanying the police chief.

  Between March 20 and April 7, La Reynie conducted scores of interrogations. He centered his efforts on Voisin, whom he questioned seven times, and her coconspirator, the eccentric Adam Coeuret, otherwise known as Lesage. When La Reynie’s chief officer took Lesage into custody, Desgrez discovered a small quantity of gray powder folded inside a paper bill while frisking the suspect. By all indication
s it was diamond powder.

  Twelve years earlier Lesage had been sentenced to the galleys for life for tricking customers into believing that he could communicate with the devil. He was freed just five years later, after a “lady of quality” successfully petitioned the king for his release. Lesage would never learn the identity of his benefactor, nor does history leave any indication of whom it might have been. She was likely one of his grateful female clients, of whom there were many.

  Rumors swirled that he and Voisin had once been lovers—rumors that, during interrogations, neither denied. Although Voisin was married and lived with her husband, Lesage had moved into Voisin’s house and remained there until just before her arrest. But whatever affection there might have been between the two of them was gone now.

  “Voisin is a nasty woman. May God punish her,” Lesage told La Reynie. “Bosse is even worse,” he continued. “That one is a very nasty woman.”

  La Reynie asked Lesage about Voisin’s dealings with Madame Philbert, the window of the court musician Brunet. Lesage explained without hesitation that Voisin and Bosse started working with Philbert about three or four years earlier, in 1675 or 1676, selling whitening powders and other beauty elixirs to noblewomen at Saint-Germain.

  “Did you ever hear either Voisin or Bosse say anything about the death of Brunet?” La Reynie inquired, trying to understand the pair’s links to Madame Philbert.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” replied Lesage with flair, “I will ponder it. The question takes me a little by surprise. Yes, I’ll have to think about it.”

  It looked as if Lesage’s cooperation was going to be short-lived. La Reynie leaned in toward Lesage and told him to work harder to remember.

  “Don’t ask me any more about it right now. Ask me about something else,” he said, waving La Reynie away.