City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Undeterred, La Reynie asked Lesage about La Grange. Lesage replied curtly that, of course, he had heard about the “cabal” from Voisin. “But I know little else about it.” La Reynie asked about Leféron. Lesage replied, “I know very little.” La Reynie asked if he had ever heard Voisin talk about how Leféron’s husband died. “I have not.”

  Clearly the interrogation was going nowhere. La Reynie announced that he planned to leave Lesage in his cell for several days to see if the discomforts of Vincennes might prompt a change of heart. The police chief’s notary then read the transcript of the interrogation aloud. Lesage initialed each page with bravado.

  Five days later La Reynie tried again. A disheveled and gaunt man had replaced the confident and cocky one. Cold nights spent on a stone floor with only bowls of thin broth and stale bread to eat had had the desired effect. Lesage proved more forthcoming this time. He admitted providing amateur alchemists with supplies to turn base metals—metal sulfate, ammonia, lye, talc, and rock salt—into pure silver. He said he knew how to transform them into gold as well, but wanted to keep the secret to himself. In truth his “secret process” was little more than what we know today as metal plating.

  The police chief next laid two pieces of paper on the table. Each was filled with numbers and symbols carefully written inside geometrical shapes. “Those are astrological charts. They chart the movement of the sun and the planets,” Lesage explained. He used those, for a price, to counsel clients about ideal times to enter into business dealings or to court a love interest.

  Multiple interrogations of Lesage, Voisin, and Bosse eventually brought forward more names of nobles who had “commerce” with the poisoners, astrologists, and magicians of the Montorgeuil neighborhood. Additional arrests followed, leaving the warden Ferronnaye once again scrambling to find places for the new prisoners in the Vincennes tower. While the questioning netted few new revelations about Dreux and Leféron, the stories Lesage, Voisin, and Bosse shared about the noblewomen’s activities also overlapped enough for La Reynie to make a convincing case to the king that the two noblewomen should be arrested. Madame Leféron was taken to the Vincennes prison on April 9, 1679, with Madame Dreux following her there two days later.

  Involved as always in every aspect of the investigations, Louvois wrote privately to the Ferronnaye to ensure that Madame Dreux be kept safe and comfortable in the tower. It was not appropriate for ladies “of quality” to be treated like the rest of the prisoners, who slept on dirty mattresses or piles of hay and were given little to eat and drink. Like Madame Poulaillon and Madame Leféron, Dreux received a modest but clean bed, a small desk, a few candles, and warm meals. Louvois also instructed the warden to take particular care to protect the noblewomen from the other prisoners, who might try to hurt them out of jealousy or in an attempt to keep them from revealing their secrets.

  In the week after their arrests, La Reynie questioned Leféron and Dreux. Unusually deferential, he listened instead of probing, asking just one or two questions. The elegant and poised sixty-nine-year-old Leféron admitted to La Reynie that she went often to Voisin for palm readings. She was unhappy in her marriage, so much so that she and Monsieur Leféron had slept in separate beds for more than fifteen years. Nonetheless Leféron insisted that her husband did not die of poison, claiming instead that his death had been “up to nature.” Older and weaker than she, he had fallen victim to smallpox. With this La Reynie politely dispatched the woman back to her cell.

  La Reynie’s interactions with Madame Dreux were similarly nonconfrontational and short. The police chief asked if she knew Voisin. Dreux answered without apology that Voisin read her fortune for years, saying sheepishly that she knew it was all a ruse to get otherwise smart people to part with their money. Still, she had gone to her all the same.

  Now with three noblewomen in prison for consorting with accused poisoners from Paris’s den of crime, the public’s interest became insatiable. To minimize the impact of the scandal on his court, the king established a special tribunal to try the ever-increasing numbers of prisoners at Vincennes accused of dispensing poisons. Louis justified his decision to move the trials out of the public eye by claiming that the Parlement had so many duties already, it would be overwhelmed and not able to expedite these extra trials. This met with consternation in the parlement, but the king did not yield. Justice would be done quickly and on his own terms.

  The hearings took place at the sprawling Arsenal fortress, which stood between the Bastille prison and the Seine on the Right Bank of the city. Fortified in the sixteenth century, the Arsenal served as the primary arms depot for France. Inside its thick stone walls, soldiers melted iron to create cannons and manufactured gunpowder. In the heart of the Arsenal were also several large rooms where military leaders held court-martial hearings for intransigent soldiers. The Arsenal tribunal was called, in more familiar terms, the Chambre Ardente (Burning Chamber). It harkened back to similar ad hoc courts of much earlier eras, where black curtains lined the walls, blocking all light, while judges tried criminals by torch- and candlelight. Now those rooms would be used to try charlatans, poisoners, and witches.

  Although he had ministerial oversight of the French judiciary, Colbert also had no choice but to accede to the king’s wishes to establish the special court in Louvois’s territority. He had lost again to the minister of war.

  Louvois left no doubts about his influence on the court. Louis Boucherat, a close friend of Louvois’s father, chaired it. The king’s chief attorney, Robert, also shared family connections to Louvois. Then there was La Reynie, who had amply demonstrated his allegiance to Louvois. In addition to serving as judge, La Reynie served as rapporteur. In this role he presented the evidence gathered against each of the defendants and made a case for their conviction—which meant he served at once as detective, prosecutor, and judge. Joining him as assistant rapporteur was Louis Bazin de Bezons, who similarly had close ties to Louvois and who had been interrogating prisoners alongside La Reynie.

  Several times a week the police chief traveled by carriage to the Arsenal complex. There he and Bezons guided the twelve other judges through the stacks of evidence that they had collected. The judges made note of their questions during the review, requesting additional arrests and encouraging La Reynie and Bezons to conduct further interrogations to fill in missing information. By early May, with well over fifty people in prison to be judged by them, the court completed its review of evidence and settled in for the trials.

  25

  The Burning Chamber

  Marie Bosse was among the first to meet her fate in the secret court. Once large and prideful, she now looked weak and fearful. She sat on a small sellette, a wooden stool traditionally used to question the accused in early French court proceedings. For two days, the judges loomed over her from a high, long table and took turns peppering her with questions. The court also put Vigoureux and a woman named Madame Ferry, another resident of the impoverished Montorgeuil neighborhood and one of Vigoureux’s clients, on the stand.

  When the judges finished questioning the three women, they confirmed one by one, with “due diligence and conviction,” their agreement that Bosse, Vigoureux, and Ferry were guilty of murder. Ferry was sentenced to death on the gallows, after first having one of her hands cut off. Bosse and Vigoureux were to be burned alive and their “ashes thrown to the wind”—but not before they each received the Question.

  On May 9, three days later after the conviction, Vigoureux was dealt the first of what was intended to be two rounds of torture at the nearby Bastille prison. Few details remain about what method was used or what was said. The fragmented report acknowledges only Vigoureux’s death at the hands of her torturers: “Dead at four o’clock in the morning, from a head wound.”

  Moments after guards dragged Vigoureux’s lifeless body out of the torture chamber, they brought Bosse in to face the same tormentors. Several large buckets of water sat at the foot of a long, sturdy table. A guard filled the pitche
r he would use to pour the water down the woman’s throat. However, after taking a look at the corpulent Bosse, the torturer recommended brodequins instead. Vigoureux’s unexpected death had clearly given rise to caution. It also likely inspired Bosse to confess to every charge against her, including poisoning the husbands of Poulaillon, Philbert, Dreux, and Leféron.

  On May 10 Desgrez transported Bosse and her former client Madame Ferry from the Bastille prison to Notre-Dame. Accompanying them was Bosse’s daughter, who was forced by decree to witness her mother’s death. The two women recited prayers for forgiveness and made an amende honorable, which included paying a fine to the church before execution. The executioner then escorted Ferry a short distance away from the main door of the cathedral. With an efficient blow of the sword, he lopped off one of the woman’s hands. Desgrez helped load the bleeding Ferry back into the cart and toward the place de Grève, where she was hanged. The executioner and his assistants then set to work preparing a towering pile of hay and firewood. When they were done, they placed a chair in the middle and tied Bosse to it. With one touch of a torch, the hay burst into flames—taking Bosse screaming along with it.

  Anxieties ran high in Vincennes as news of the deaths were whispered by inmates passing one another in twisting staircases or on their way to the latrines. These rumors, intensified by the stress of captivity, proved unbearable to the noblewoman Madame Leféron. She pounded her head repeatedly against her cell wall.

  Showing concern for Leféron’s well-being, La Reynie sent a request to Louvois for permission to send a doctor to Vincennes. Unlike at the Bastille, where nobles were generally held, there was no regular medical care at Vincennes. Louvois responded without delay by assigning one to the prison to take care of any sick prisoners.

  Eager to get to the heart of what Lesage and Voisin knew about the activities of Leféron and the other noblewomen, La Reynie arranged for the two to meet in person for the first time since their arrests. Standing in front of the police chief, they eyed each other angrily. After being asked for the record whether they knew each other, Voisin snarled that she knew him too well, saying he was an unfaithful ingrate. Lesage spewed his own insults, protesting that Voisin was the one who had been unfaithful. Eager to settle scores, the two volleyed accusations. The confrontation confirmed La Reynie’s suspicions that the two had once been romantically involved. But other than that, the joint interrogation yielded no new insights.

  The atmosphere was much calmer on June 5, 1679 when the tribunal met to question Madame de Poulaillon. Although she had spent the last several months in prison, she held her coiffed head high as she was escorted into the chamber. Monsieur Robert, the lead prosecutor, announced their finding that she had attempted to kill her husband in order to marry Monsieur de La Rivière. Initially, the report asserted, she had tried to end his life with small doses of poison with the help of her servant, Monstreux, so that his death would appear to have been caused by illness. Unsuccessful in her efforts, she then hired two “assassins”—Bosse and Vigoureux—to do the job for her.

  La Reynie spoke next, explaining to Poulaillon that Bosse had been condemned to death, and Vigoureux was already dead. Instead of showing fear, Madame de Poulaillon sat quietly, with “great self-containment,” as she waited for her own judgment to come. In fact, her demeanor so impressed the notary that he wrote at the bottom of the court transcript: “During the entire interrogation, this woman had an extraordinary and admirable presence of mind.” Still, the lead judge, Robert, ruled that Poulaillon would be put to the Question and then beheaded.

  As gruesome and violent as beheading may seem, the decision to behead Madame de Poulaillon was an act of deference. Beheading was thought more fitting to noble ranks than hanging or being burned alive. Nonetheless, one of the committee members, Monsieur de Fieubet, disagreed vehemently with the sentence. During the committee’s deliberations, he had made a vocal show of support for clemency for Poulaillon. It was inconceivable, he argued, that a woman as well mannered and well bred could be guilty of attempted murder. La Reynie argued forcefully against leniency, but the majority of the judges changed their minds. Instead Poulaillon would spend the rest of her life in a jail outside of Angers, in western France.

  Despite La Reynie’s dissatisfaction with the outcome of the proceedings, the police chief could not disagree that she had carried herself in a manner befitting of her status. Recalling the event years later, he wrote: “Madame Poulaillon is from a very good and honorable family . . . and was even more well put together when she was judged and sentenced. She was very polite.”

  Though Poulaillon had been spared, most were not. In a matter of a few months, dozens of men and women faced trial for having collaborated with Bosse, Vigoureux, Voisin, Lesage, and others. They questioned Madame Chéron, the fruit vendor who provided Voisin with toads and who feigned a broken arm to avoid prison. Bosse had claimed that a small package of powder confiscated in a raid on her home belonged to Chéron and had been bought at the Château of Saint-Germain. Chéron conceded that she traveled frequently to Saint-Germain, where she rented a small fruit and vegetable stand, but she rejected all accusations of buying and selling poison at the king’s palace, insisting that the powder was little more than finely crushed horse dander that she used in plasters to soothe her injured arm. “I never committed any crimes . . . and that is all I can tell you for my defense,” Chéron asserted. Convinced otherwise, the judges sentenced her to the Question by brodequins and then to be burned alive.

  Chéron was transferred immediately into the hands of the torturer, who was accompanied by Monsieur Vezou, a physician, and Monsieur Terode, a surgeon. Vezou wore the long black velvet gown of a university-trained doctor and strode in quietly before taking his place among the magistrates in the room. Wearing a bloodstained apron, Monsieur Terode carried a wooden box filled with bandages and sutures. The doctor was there to provide counsel to the torturers about how far they could go without killing Chéron, while the surgeon stood at the ready with bandages and sutures to make sure the woman lasted long enough afterward to face execution.

  Before the brodequins the interrogators asked Chéron once again whether she sold poisons at the Château of Saint-Germain. “I swear to the heavens,” she pleaded. “I don’t know anything about poison at Saint-Germain. I will tell you whatever you want, but I will not lie.”

  The torturer shoved Chéron onto the nearby bench and placed her legs into the boots. Lifting her eyes toward the ceiling, she cried: “My Jesus! Have pity on me.” Three bone-breaking blows later, she screamed: “Ah! My God! I am dying.” Her face ashen, Chéron slipped toward unconsciousness.

  Doctor Vezou ordered the guards to untie her and lay her on a nearby mattress, worrying aloud about the possibility of a “deadly accident” should the torture continue. He brought a bottle of wine to Chéron’s mouth. After a few sips, she turned her head slowly toward her tormentors: “Ah, messieurs. I die innocent. If by the grace of God, I remember anything else, I will tell you at my execution.” She revealed nothing more before being burned alive on the place de Grève.

  The judges sentenced the elderly midwife Lepère to death as well, despite her claims that every abortion she performed was at the orders of Voisin. She also swore that she never knew the names of her clients and that Voisin handled all transactions. Although Lepère received the Question following the trial, Vezou decided that no torture should be applied given her advanced age. Leniency proved short-lived, however. Lepère was hanged the following day.

  The court also tried François Belot, who helped Bosse poison the chalice with toad poison that she later gave to Poulaillon with toad venom. Without lengthy debate or deliberation, the court sentenced him to death by hanging followed by a public burning of his corpse at the place de Grève.

  Before his execution, guards transferred Belot to the nearby Bastille prison. At precisely seven the next morning, they escorted him into a small room in one of the prison towers. In the presence of La Rey
nie, Bezons, and the notary Sagot, Belot was placed in brodequins and questioned under torture for the next four hours. With each painful hammer to his legs, he denied all wrongdoing. After much torment, he was released from the heavy ropes restraining him and carried to a nearby mattress. As Belot lay bloody and writhing in pain in the hours before his death, he repeated the words: “Saint-Germain. Saint-Germain.”

  Where La Reynie’s Arsenal tribunal once served as a circuslike distraction for the populace, it now struck concern in the hearts of Parisians of all social ranks. “Everyone is scared,” wrote Madame de Sévigné. “Thank God, I never bought any makeup or had my fortune read.” Others like the court doctor Pierre Bourdelot noted drily that “if they are going to punish [everyone involved in magic and poison], all of the valets and servants of Paris are at risk.”

  Stories circulated about horrific activities that were taking place under the cloak of secrecy in the Arsenal’s military compound. For some prisoners the mere possibility of facing the committee seemed a fate worse than any death penalty that might be served. Not long after Poulaillon’s sentencing, a guard entered the cell of one Madame Dodée to deliver breakfast, which consisted of little more than a few scraps of bread and a small tumbler of water. The thirty-five-year-old woman, who had been in prison for several months, had been accused of poisoning her husband as well as running a business selling charms. Her initial questioning in the Chambre Ardente had been “light”; La Reynie and his colleagues were not convinced that she meddled in poisons, concluding the accusations to be neighborhood hearsay. The committee chose not to hold her for questioning by the larger tribunal, but had not yet released her.

  The next morning Dodée did not stir from her straw bed on the floor when the guard turned the key in the lock. Suspecting something amiss, the guard kicked Dodée with his foot. She did not move. He then flipped the motionless woman onto her back. Thick rust-brown blood covered the woman’s ashen face. She had slit her neck with a small knife hidden in the folds of her dress. Present at Vincennes when the guards discovered Dodée’s body, La Reynie ordered it buried immediately.