City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  26

  “Beginning to Talk”

  “Voisin is beginning to talk,” Louvois wrote to Louis on September 16, the day of Dodée’s death. Voisin met with La Reynie at least three times as the news of Dodée’s suicide and other executions spread through the prison. “I don’t want to hide anything any longer,” Voisin said after requesting an audience with La Reynie. “I want to declare everything I know in order to unburden my conscience, leaving it in the care of God, and hoping that the King will have pity on me and my family.”

  For the first time Voisin admitted having dealings with Madame Leféron and Madame Dreux. Voisin explained that Leféron came to her for a palm reading and asked hopefully whether it looked as if her husband might die. Leféron explained how unhappy she was in her marriage and that she desperately needed a way out. Voisin then consulted with her associate, Madame Leroux, who gave her a small vial of what she said was arsenic. Voisin said that she transferred the vial to Madame Leféron, insisting that she was only a courier for Leroux’s poison business. Madame Leféron returned one last time to Voisin’s home to thank her. Dressed in black, the woman said, smiling, “It’s done, thank God.”

  Voisin told a similar story about Madame Dreux. It was true, Voisin claimed, that Madame Dreux wished to see her husband dead so she might marry her lover. Dreux even gave her a diamond-encrusted cross to encourage Voisin to take the job. She kept the gift, swearing that she did nothing in return. All Voisin could speculate was that either Bosse or Leroux had been responsible. In fact she heard that Madame Dreux offered Leroux two thousand écus and, soon afterward, she learned of the husband’s death.

  Voisin implicated herself as an accomplice in Leféron’s death and an acquaintance of Dreux, but she stopped short of admitting she had played a direct role in either of the poisonings. Still, Voisin knew that the longer La Reynie believed she had yet more secrets to share, the longer it would be before she found herself in front of the Arsenal judges and a certain death sentence.

  To put Voisin’s assertions to the test, La Reynie arranged for Madame Dreux and Madame Leféron to be brought for questioning in the presence of Voisin. The difference between the treatment that the noblewomen received at the prison compared with that of Voisin was evident. Whereas Voisin looked dirty and bedraggled, both Leféron and Dreux were still well dressed and rested.

  La Reynie allowed Voisin to have the first word. Stepping forward, she explained calmly that Madame Dreux had come to her home to discuss the woman’s desire to do away with her husband. They also met at the church on the city’s Île Saint-Louis.

  “You know you remember,” said Voisin, turning to Dreux with a stare. Dreux denied everything. Before she had a chance to say anything else, Leféron launched into her own accusations against Voisin.

  “Voisin is insulting me in my time of grief,” the noblewoman said pleadingly to La Reynie. “My husband died from a bone-wasting disease.”

  “I have no desire to insult you,” Voisin chided Dreux. “Even if you yourself are the main cause of your grief.” Turning toward the police chief, she added, “She knows I’m not saying anything that is not true.”

  The stress of the encounter proved more than Leferon could bear. “This woman has duped so many people,” she retorted, bursting into tears.

  Scoffing at her, Voisin said, “She’s not crying because I’m insulting her. She’s crying because she is guilty.”

  If Voisin was beginning to talk, so was Lesage. Much of what he had to say during La Reynie’s interrogations did little more than reinforce his disdain for his former business partner and lover. Lesage claimed that Voisin was at the heart of nearly every crime by poison in Paris, especially among the nobility. He said she was lying about her role in Leféron’s death. She did not obtain the poison from Leroux but distilled it herself from the seeds of rye grass, poppies, and mandrake root. She was also lying about having nothing to do with Monsieur Dreux’s death. She had gladly poisoned a bouquet of flowers that Madame Dreux brought her.

  One detail proved to be the most troubling to date and, once again, placed the king’s palace of Saint-Germain at the center of La Reynie’s investigation. Lesage recalled that four years earlier, in 1675, Voisin made regular trips to Saint-Germain to deliver cantharis to Mademoiselle des Oeillets, Montespan’s attendant and the king’s lover when Montespan was pregnant and “indisposed.” Money seemed to be flowing at about the same time. Voisin bragged of making more than one hundred thousand écus and had plans to leave the country. “I warned her husband that something bad would happen to his wife” from whatever she was meddling in.

  La Reynie communicated the details of Lesage’s most recent interrogations to the king, via Louvois. Louis received the news with “grave concern,” instructing La Reynie to continue his investigations but to keep all documents confidential, “to be used only and according to how I order them to be used.”

  The following day La Reynie questioned Voisin about Mademoiselle des Oeillets. Voisin denied knowing her. Again Lesage contradicted Voisin’s account. He said that she had been in regular commerce with Oeillets as recently as three years earlier. He believed that Voisin’s goal was to help one of her clients, Madame Vertemart, find employment as a servant in the household of Madame de Montespan. All the negotiations were handled by Mademoiselle des Oeillets.

  Without delay La Reynie arrested Madame Vertemart and interrogated her. Where his tone with Lesage and Voisin remained calm and measured in the hopes of teasing as much information from them as possible, he flew into Vertemart when she denied knowing Oeillets, Montespan’s lady-in-waiting and Louis’s former mistress: “You are lying. . . . you even offered her a pearl necklace so you could get a job with Madame de Montespan.” Though shaken, Vertemart stood firm in her assertion.

  As the intensity of La Reynie’s investigation into the possible involvement of Oeillets increased, Louvois did his best to calm the king. He explained that Mademoiselle Oeillets’s intentions were good. If she were involved in some way with the accused criminals, it was surely nothing more than a sottise (a trifle, something for fun).

  Louvois did little to downplay other accusations, however. When he learned that Bosse, Lesage, and Voisin had all implicated the duke of Luxembourg, the minister of war could barely contain his delight. According to Lesage, Luxembourg had hoped desperately for Louvois to reconsider his rejection of a marriage between his son to the minister’s daughter. With this in mind, the duke sought Lesage’s help. As usual, Lesage pretended to communicate to the devil by casting Luxembourg’s written request into the fire. Lesage later read the duke’s list of wishes, which included the death of his difficult wife, hardships to befall his rivals, and his son’s marriage into Louvois’s family. On learning this, Louvois wasted no time in reporting Luxembourg’s alleged transgressions to the king: “Everything that Your Majesty has against Monsieur de Luxembourg up to now is nothing compared to [evidence acquired] in this interrogation.”

  Though still recovering from his riding accident, Louvois made plans to travel to Vincennes to interrogate Luxembourg personally. It was an odd move. While Louvois involved himself in every detail of the investigations, he had not once set foot in the Tower of Vincennes since the interrogations began—preferring instead to leave them to La Reynie. But on October 7, 1679, Louvois slowly limped toward a private holding area on the ground floor of the dungeon. Prior to his meeting with Lesage, Louvois and La Reynie had agreed that the minister would feign a deal with the prisoner. Whatever Louvois said to Lesage must have been convincing: Lesage promised to cooperate fully with La Reynie.

  To ensure that Lesage made good on his oath, Louvois sent La Reynie a letter to show the prisoner. In it the minister of war pretended to be responding to a report by La Reynie that Lesage was not sufficiently forthcoming: “It seems the hope that I gave to Lesage for his release served only to reinforce his opinion to say nothing of what he knows. . . . You may nullify all that I told him and begin his trial w
hen you wish, if he does not change his behavior.”

  Their strategy worked. A few days later Lesage asked to meet with La Reynie to discuss something he had “forgotten” about the duchess of Vivonne. Sister-in-law to Madame de Montespan and mother of Colbert’s son-in-law, the duchess had been directly embroiled in Louvois’s frustrations as he tried to marry off his daughter. Moreover, Louvois was still smarting after having been obliged to “apologize” in front of Athénaïs for his “error” in leaving Vivonne’s husband off the list for the post of galley general.

  Following his meeting with Louvois, Lesage claimed for the first time that Montespan’s sister-in-law the duchess of Vivonne had come to him three years earlier in a panic to request his help to retrieve a letter from Françoise Filastre, her servant. She did not say what it was about, but the tears in her eyes confirmed that it was something “dreadful.” Lesage understood from “certain words” that it had something to do with the king. Despite the duchess of Vivonne’s pleas and promises to pay him well for his services, Lesage was unable to persuade Filastre to part with the paper. When La Reynie pressed Lesage for additional information, he refused to offer anything more than: “Arrest Madame la Filastre. You will learn many strange things.”

  The king received the details of Lesage and Voisin’s most recent accusations of connections to Montespan’s family “with horror” and once again ordered La Reynie to “acquire every possible proof against those named.”

  Over the weeks that followed, Voisin, too, shared several other shocking details about “persons of quality.” In particular Voisin implicated Olympe Mancini, now the countess of Soissons and the target of Louvois’s ongoing ire. In her youth Olympe had been one of Louis’s first mistresses. She never fully recovered from his decision to abandon her in favor of her younger sister and, later, for Louise de La Vallière. Voisin claimed that the countess had come to her house years earlier, when Louis and Louise were still together. She wanted Voisin to read her palm and tell her whether the king’s love for her might return. Before Voisin could tell her fortune, however, Olympe spat out that she wanted to see Louise de La Vallière dead for having stolen the king from her and, if that was not possible, she would take her vengeance “even farther up.”

  The story rang true. Olympe had a reputation for outrageous behavior. Upon learning of the king’s love for La Vallière, she once concocted a plan to expose the king’s infidelities to his wife. While attending to the queen, the countess quietly slipped a letter that Marie-Thérèse received from Spain into the folds of her dress and replaced it with another that she had written (in Spanish to be sure the queen understood), describing the king’s love for La Vallière. Olympe arranged for the letter to be delivered to Marie-Thérèse’s chambermaid, but the servant became suspicious and brought the letter to the king. When Louis learned several years later that Olympe was behind it, he exiled her to the provinces.

  In the end the countess of Soissons inadvertently rendered Louis a service, which the king acknowledged when he allowed her to return to court a few years later. In the wake of rumors, the king decided to reveal his affair to Marie-Thérèse—and began seeing La Vallière openly, often in the company of his wife. Soissons returned to her position as superintendent of Marie-Thérèse’s household until she was replaced by Athénaïs and later by Fontanges.

  As early as 1673, there had also been whispers that the death of the count of Soissons, Olympe’s husband, had been caused by poison. The count had been found dead in his carriage on the Westphalian battlefield. Noting that Olympe had vowed at the time of her wedding that she would feel only an “inconceivable aversion” to whatever man she eventually married, the count’s mother demanded an autopsy. Unable to prove that poison was at play, surgeons simply recorded “internal abscess” as the cause of death.

  Voisin swore that she met with Olympe only once and this only to read the woman’s palm. She insisted however that Olympe’s sister was one of Lesage’s regular clients. Unlike Olympe, her sister Marie Anne shared no past romantic history with the king and harbored no interest in gaining his affections. Instead she wished simply to discard a husband she did not love.

  The plump and lively thirty-one-year-old duchess of Bouillon was no stranger to scandal. A passionate woman, the married Bouillon often found herself attracted to men who should have been off limits. She created a stir after flirting openly with her husband’s brother, a cardinal. For this the family exiled her to a convent to reflect on her sins.

  She clearly did not reflect enough. Not long after her return, she set her eyes on her nephew, the duke of Vendôme, five years her junior.

  Over the past several months, Bouillon’s name had come up often in La Reynie’s investigations. Trying to understand the depths of the accusations against her, he reviewed the interrogation records. While Bosse and Vigoureux rarely agreed on much, they both stated that Bouillon had to come to them hoping that they could help her get rid of her husband. Voisin also claimed that Bouillon and the duke of Vendôme accompanied Lesage and her in the courtyard of her home on the rue du Beauregard. Voisin said she watched Bouillon write something on a slip of paper and hand it to Lesage.

  In a description that corroborated Voisin’s, Lesage confessed having performed services for the duchess in Voisin’s courtyard, while her lover, Vendôme, watched. Lesage also said Bouillon’s intent was clear: She wanted her husband to die.

  Lesage burned the paper in front of the woman and told her to return in a few days. However, according to Lesage, the duchess insisted on repeating the ritual at her home as well. Lesage accompanied the woman to her estate, where they burned a second request. As he left, Bouillon handed him a sack of money. He said he refused to take it, but accepted a few coins for his trouble.

  As the evidence mounted against the duke of Luxembourg, the king convened La Reynie and other members of the Arsenal tribunal to Saint-Germain. Two days after Christmas, La Reynie’s carriage arrived at the palace gates. Fellow tribunal members Messieurs Boucherat, Bezons, and Robert accompanied him. All came on the orders of the king, who had read the latest interrogation records and wished to speak to the men after supper.

  It was well past ten o’clock, and the halls of Saint-Germain buzzed with activity. Louis rarely took his meals alone, preferring instead to be surrounded by members of his court as they stood in deference and fascination, watching the monarch’s every bite. As the court dispersed, the king’s servants ushered La Reynie and the other men into the king’s private counsel room. The meeting did not last long. Louis expressed his wishes succinctly: “For the good of the public, I want you to penetrate as quickly as possible this unfortunate business of poison in order to cut it off at its roots.”

  Louis empowered La Reynie and his colleagues to impose justice, “without any personal distinction, of social status or of gender.” With this the men were dismissed. Reflecting on his brief audience with the king, La Reynie wrote, “It is impossible to doubt his intentions in this regard and not to understand his commitment to justice.”

  27

  Fortune-Teller

  On the evening of January 9, 1680, the duchess of Bouillon arrived at the Guégénaud Theater on the Left Bank of Paris to attend a sold-out performance of The Fortune-Teller.

  An enthusiastic supporter of the arts, Bouillon regularly gathered poets and playwrights at her home, where she provided them resources and a ready audience. The duchess pressed Jean de La Fontaine to create a steady stream of fables, which he read aloud to her delight. Molière, too, made regular appearances at her home. When Jean Racine staged his masterpiece, Phèdre, Bouillon bought every available ticket for six different performances, distributing them to friends as well as strangers who promised to whistle appreciatively during the play.

  The talk of Paris, The Fortune-Teller was something that neither Bouillon nor any other self-respecting theater lover could afford to miss. The society gossip and enterprising journalist Jean Donneau de Visé had partnered with play
wright Thomas Corneille, younger brother of the legendary Pierre, to craft a play that capitalized on public interest swirling around the Arsenal trials. Loosely based on the Voisin case, the comedy starred the male actor André Hubert playing Madame Jobin, a fortune-teller. She preys on the gullibility of her clients by pretending to conjure up spirits and cast spells to attract lovers. In contrast to Voisin’s macabre world of abortions and poison, Jobin turns out to be little more than a ridiculous charlatan.

  The “machine play” included elaborate special effects requiring scores of stagehands to operate the noisy cranks, wheels, pulleys, and levers that allowed humans to fly in the air and that animated creatures with glowing eyes and gaping mouths. In the final scene Jobin waves her arms wildly to cast a spell. The stage filling with smoke, a monster-size Lucifer appears and attacks the marquis. Extracting a pistol from his pocket, the marquis stands his ground against the otherworldly force and exposes the devil as Jobin’s brother in disguise.

  On the floor closest to the stage, it was standing room only. Spectators elbowed one another as they tried to dodge splatters and sparks emanating from the oil lanterns on stage as well as the pickpockets and prostitutes who wove through the crowd looking for their next targets. In upper loges the elite watched the shows both onstage and in the crowd with both disgust and fascination.

  As part of his ongoing efforts to reform the moral failings of Parisians, La Reynie kept a careful eye on public theaters, which had long been associated with disorder and vice. Lackeys attending during their off-hours from their noble masters proved most troublesome. While La Reynie’s earlier ban on weapons and firearms kept the streets somewhat safer during their drunken brawls, it did little to keep the men from fighting with one another during showtime. Eventually they were prohibited altogether from theaters and the Opéra.