City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Guards led Voisin to a bench and placed each of her legs in brodequins. “You can impose whatever torments on me that you’d like, I will tell you nothing more than what I have already declared,” Voisin said. She looked to the heavens, asking aloud for God to grant her the strength to endure the suffering. The questioner began by urging her to tell the truth, to which Voisin responded: “God have mercy, I have told everything I know. I know nothing else.”

  The questioner signaled the first blow to the leg, then the second. Voisin’s emotionless resolve was replaced by screams: “Oh! My God! Ah! The Virgin! I will not tell anything more.” With the third strike she cried more loudly: “Have pity on me! I have told the truth. I did not bring powders to Saint-Germain and I know nothing else about Madame Soissons and Madame Alluye.”

  After another strike the questioning continued. The same questions were repeated over again with only brief pauses between each fall of the hammer. Did she know Madamoiselle des Oeillets? On the fifth strike: Did she bring powders to Saint-Germain? On the sixth: Was what she said about Mesdames Dreux and Leféron true? Between howls of pain she denied everything, swearing she had already told them all that she knew. After the seventh blow she pleaded for the pain to end.

  As the torturer held the mallet in the air ready for the next strike, the questioners asked: “You have nothing more to declare to us to relieve your conscience, then?” La Voisin moaned that she did not. Seconds later the hammer fell for the eighth and final time. The questioning was over.

  In the early morning of February 22, three days after her interrogation began, Voisin rested on a dirty mattress in the middle of the stone floor. Her body caked in dried blood, she mumbled something to the interrogators as they entered the room. They leaned in to listen. Her words were barely decipherable, but they understood that she wanted to share several more things before she was sent to her death: She had cheated Lepère and her daughter of much of their earnings due from abortions performed at Voisin’s house. She had provided poison to a neighbor who had fallen in love with a woodworker and wanted to rid herself of her husband. The details of these and other sins were plentiful, complete with addresses and descriptions of the accused. The revelations were hardly earth-shattering in comparison to the rest. But through cracked lips and with her voice fading, she said: “For the sake of my conscience, I must tell you everyone who came to me seeking death. Debauchery was always at the heart of it all.”

  After three days of brutal questioning, perhaps Voisin was indeed attempting to unburden her soul. Or perhaps she was attempting to postpone her inevitable death. In any case the investigators believed that she had nothing more of interest left to tell. If this was the best that Voisin could give, it was time for the execution.

  At noon that same day Voisin was transferred from the torture room to a small chapel inside the Bastille prison. She was forced to her knees and was once again read the death sentence that had been pronounced against her. A priest arrived to offer her a final chance for confession; she refused. She wanted to talk instead to the notary Sagot. A full accounting of her activities was more important, it seemed, than to make amends to God. Resigned to her fate, Voisin asked Sagot to record for posterity that she had never given Madame Leféron any sort of vial, nor had Leroux. It was true that, after the death of Leféron’s husband, a glowing and joyous-looking widow had come to see her. However, she swore adamantly that she had nothing to do with the husband’s death. With this Voisin was loaded into an open cart and taken out the gates of the Bastille prison.

  Despite the cold, Parisians who lived in homes along the rue Saint-Antoine leaned out their windows to catch a glimpse of the most notorious poisoner in Paris since the marquise de Brinvilliers. The horse-drawn procession stopped first at the doors of Notre-Dame, where Voisin was required to make her amende honorable. Intractable to the end, Voisin refused to kneel. The executioner shoved her to her knees. Still, she refused to give any sign of contrition.

  Crowds gathered in front of Notre-Dame watched Voisin loaded back into the cart and then taken out at the place de Grève. Offering no sympathy, the executioner chained her, seated, to a large pile of logs as she spat and swore. Howling, she tried six or seven times to duck away from the massive mounds of hay the guards dumped on top of her. But it was too late; the fire had been lit. Soon after, Voisin’s body was consumed in a ball of heat and smoke. Watching the execution, Madame de Sévigné commented wryly: “She gave her soul gently to the devil right in the middle of the fire. All she did was pass from one fire to another.”

  Voisin’s death did not bring closure. Instead it brought a sense of dread among many that this was only the beginning. Watching the execution, the painter Antoine Coypel predicted correctly that “many things are still yet to come that will surprise us all.”

  PART

  VI

  Wicked Truths

  29

  The Poisoner’s Daughter

  As crowds watched the flames consume Voisin, her daughter awaited questioning at Vincennes. Having spent months interrogating the elder Voisin, La Reynie knew all too well what a mean-spirited and abusive woman she was. He could hardly imagine what it must have been like for the quiet and somewhat skittish Marie-Marguerite to have been raised by such a vile mother.

  On March 28, 1680, Marie-Marguerite sat with La Reynie in the interrogation room, unaware of her mother’s execution. As she warmed herself in front of the fireplace, the police chief eased his way into the questions, asking what it was like to grow up in the Montorgeuil neighborhood. She said that she welcomed the opportunity to “unburden herself” of her memories.

  What she remembered most was the smell of incense hovering in the air and the quiet chanting in the courtyard at odd hours of the day and night. She had once plucked up the courage to spy between the boards of the small shed in the courtyard. She saw a man in priest’s clothing uttering a prayer in front of a large cross as he held a communion host in his open palms. She watched in fear and fascination as her mother and a red-wigged man stood next to him, chanting in an odd language. Placing the host on an altarlike stand, the priest next raised a strange wax figure above his head, wrapped it in a cotton cloth, and put it in a metal box.

  Overcome by curiosity, Marie-Marguerite went back later that night to retrieve the figure and brought it to her father. He explained, unconvincingly even to a child, that it had been a harmless religious ceremony. Then he grabbed the wax figure from Marie-Marguerite, threw it to the ground, crushed it under his feet, and tossed the pieces into the fire. Marie-Marguerite stood transfixed as she watched the wax melt and disappear.

  Another memory—one of the rare good ones—was a visit she made to a rich family’s house with her mother and a burly woman who wore a man’s overcoat. A servant brought Marie-Marguerite fresh apricots on a porcelain plate while her mother and her companion met with the noblewoman out in the garden. As she ate her apricots, she watched the women chant as they walked around a fire and then buried a wax figure in the ground.

  As more childhood memories floated toward her, Marie-Marguerite told La Reynie about the elderly woman named Madame Pelletier who often came to the house. She usually carried a basket heavy with glass flasks, many containing a ruby-colored liquid, as well as small pouches made of taffeta, each filled with mysterious powders. Marie-Marguerite once asked her mother what they were for. “They bring happiness,” her mother said dismissively. Marie-Marguerite asked if she could have some of the happiness powder. “It will do nothing for you,” Madame Pelletier snapped. A few days later, however, Pelletier poured her a small glass of white wine, into which the old woman added some of the powder. Not long after drinking the wine, Marie-Marguerite became “sick in extremity.” Her mother later told her she got what she deserved.

  Of all of the visitors to her mother’s home, she liked the Woman with Two Tails the most. Marie-Marguerite had given her this nickname for the long, elaborate dress fabric that draped in front and trailed behind her,
swishing with each step she took. The dark-haired woman was kind when so many of her mother’s other clients and business partners barked orders or, worse, took advantage of her in ways she had tried to forget.

  La Reynie surmised from the details that the girl had witnessed the colorful charlatan Lesage and the priest Mariette casting spells in the shack. It had also been Bosse and the noblewoman Leféron whom Marie-Marguerite had visited with her mother while she snacked on apricots.

  However, La Reynie could not place the Woman with Two Tails. The girl told La Reynie that she once made the mistake of uttering the woman’s real name aloud: Mademoiselle des Oeillets. Marie-Marguerite told him that she received a beating from her mother for her indiscretion.

  Marie-Marguerite’s memories moved closer to the present. She remembered a man named Romani, whom she had seen at her mother’s house around Christmastime a year earlier. Fond of disguises, Romani changed his appearance with every visit. One thing, however, remained constant: the way he eyed her greedily, telling her at every opportunity that he wanted to make her his bride. Marie-Marguerite wisely kept her distance.

  Despite her wariness of Romani, Marie-Marguerite could not help eavesdropping on her mother and her business partner. From what she could make out, the pair was plotting to have Romani dress up as a foreign clothier and sell gloves and silks for a tidy profit to women at court. As part of their plans, Romani and Voisin also talked at length about a placet, a note, that her mother would deliver to the king. Once a week the king allowed subjects to present their placets to him in person at a table set up at the entrance of his palace. The petitioners waited long hours for a chance to submit their entreaties.

  While Romani wandered Saint-Germain with his wares, her mother joined the crowds in hopes of getting their note into the king’s hands. Neither Marie-Marguerite nor her father had any idea of what the note contained. All they knew was that it was urgent: “My father asked my mother what kind of business was so important. She told him over and over that she would either accomplish the task or die trying. He said, ‘What, die? That’s a lot to say all for a piece of paper.’”

  After two months and many trips, her mother returned from Saint-Germain. Having failed in her mission to deliver the placet, she was in a foul mood. La Reynie asked Marie-Marguerite if she knew what the note contained. She said she did not, nor did she ever find out because her mother was arrested two days later.

  With this La Reynie returned the girl to her cell. There would be another time for more questions, and he had other, more important prisoners to focus on. Louvois had just sent word that the king wanted to put the noblewoman Leféron, Dreux, and Philbert on trial. The trials, which took place on April 7 and 8, concluded swiftly. Reinforcing the importance of class status in the proceedings, the court spared the women from the fiery fate of Voisin. Instead Madame Leféron was banished from Paris for nine years and fined fifteen hundred livres for having plotted the death of her husband. Dreux and Philbert’s cases were dismissed entirely.

  In the course of the days and weeks that followed, Marie-Marguerite learned about her mother’s death through furtive whispers from other prisoners. The next time she met with La Reynie, the reticent young woman had been replaced by an outspoken and agitated one. Finally released from her mother’s hold, Marie-Marguerite appeared eager to talk openly for the first time. Apologizing for withholding the truth from the police chief, she launched into a lengthy inventory of her mother’s sins.

  Marie-Marguerite explained that Romani and her mother had actually been employed to kill Mademoiselle de Fontanges, and to do it they planned to sell the king’s mistress a pair of poisoned gloves. The placet intended for the king was also laced with poison. Her mother boasted to her that no one would be suspicious if they timed the deaths well. Everyone would assume the king’s mistress had died of a broken heart following the death of the king, or vice versa.

  After the elder Voisin learned of her impending arrest, she handed Marie-Marguerite the note for safekeeping. She then set to work emptying the house of all traces of her criminal activities, including the courtyard furnace filled with tiny charred bones. Just before Inspector Camuset arrived at the house, Marie-Marguerite had burned the note without opening it, lest she accidentally poison herself.

  Before La Reynie had a chance to ask who had hired her mother to poison Fontanges, the young woman volunteered the name without hesitation: Athénaïs de Montespan. “Every time something new happened to Madame de Montespan that left her to worry about the king’s diminishing good graces toward her, she came to my mother for some remedy,” Marie-Marguerite explained. Over the years, however, Montespan had become frustrated that the spells had seemed to diminish in their effect. “My mother told me that Madame de Montespan wanted to take everything to the extreme. She hired my mother to do disgusting things.”

  According to Marie-Marguerite, Voisin had shared the details of the plot with Catherine Trianon, a close friend and fellow fortune-teller. “Disappointment in love is a beautiful thing,” Marie-Marguerite heard her mother say to Trianon, listing aloud all she had done for Montespan over the last five or six years. Voisin told her friend she had concocted love potions, cast spells, and arranged for the services of Lesage, Mariette, and the Prayer Man, Guibourg. Marie-Marguerite also recalled that, when Montespan’s wishes did not come true, her mother prepared a wax effigy of the king, which Montespan stabbed with angry delight.

  At the request of the king’s mistress, she had also once scribbled Montespan’s name on a slip of paper and tossed it into a fire. Reciting for Trianon the accompanying incantation, her mother intoned: “Burn, fire. This is the body, the soul, the spirit, the heart, the understanding of Louis of Bourbon. May he neither go nor come, rest nor sleep until he fulfills the wishes of the woman whom I name.”

  La Reynie’s head reeled as he listened to Marie-Marguerite weave her tales. In earlier interrogations Voisin and Romani had acknowledged the existence of a placet. However, neither had indicated in such clear terms what its true purpose was, preferring instead to claim it contained only a plea to release a colleague from jail. Lesage had hinted, but only obliquely, that the letter was dangerous. Voisin’s daughter now provided the missing pieces of the story.

  “Why didn’t you say [all of this earlier]? That you knew about plots against the king?” La Reynie asked. Marie-Marguerite paused for a moment and then replied: “I couldn’t put Trianon or my mother at risk based just on hearsay.” True, the bulk of what she had told La Reynie was grounded on furtive snippets of conversations overheard by a child years earlier. The police chief wondered for a moment if perhaps Marie-Marguerite’s story had been made up. But La Reynie found himself inclined to trust the girl, who seemed so earnest and convincing. “It is difficult to conceive how Voisin’s daughter, who appears to be smart and who understands the dangers to which she exposes herself, would want to invent and to put forward such strange and unbelievable things,” he wrote following their meeting.

  La Reynie reminded Marie-Marguerite that it was a crime to add even the smallest unproved detail to what she claimed to be facts. “I have understated rather than overstated,” Marie-Marguerite replied. “Having no reason to fear anything anymore in regard to my mother, I have no thought other than to declare the truth.”

  Taken together, the testimonies of Lesage, Guibourg, Marie-Marguerite, and Filastre provided ample reason to believe that Athénaïs had been in contact with the poisoners, witches, and priests of Montorgeuil at some point during her long affair with the king. However, the extent of her direct involvement remained unclear. La Reynie felt certain that a trial was not only the best way to uncover the truth, it was also the right thing to do.

  The king disagreed, refusing adamantly to believe the accusations against his former mistress. Louis had always remained loyal to those women who had figured importantly in his life. Even the elderly one-eyed woman to whom he lost his virginity lived comfortably until her death in the château he had bui
lt for her. Despite his marital infidelities, he also rarely missed a night in bed with his wife, Marie-Thérèse. Contradicting everything he said publicly in regard to justice without concern for rank, he had even given the countess of Soissons, whom he also bedded, advance notice so she could flee to safety. When her sister, the duchess of Bouillon, chose to stay and fight, he allowed her to push back against the tribunal without retribution.

  Louis’s decision to keep details about Athénaïs out of the public eye, however, did not mean that his relations with his former mistress had thawed. In fact they had gotten worse long before the king first became aware of the accusations against her. “Madame de Montespan has fallen . . . to an unbelievable point,” wrote the court observer Roger de Bussy-Rabutin. “The king does not look at her, and you can bet the court follows his example.”

  As Montespan’s favor at court diminished, the reputation of Madame de Maintenon was on the rise. Eager for a break from the Torrent, the king found refuge in the calm friendship of the devout governess, whom he visited in her chambers every evening before dinner. “She is showing the king a completely new country, by that I mean, the exchange of friendship and conversation, without chicanery or contrariety,” wrote Madame de Sévigné. “He seems charmed by her.” Playing on the homophony of her name, courtiers whispered their confirmation that Maintenon had become “Madame Now” (Madame de Maintenant”).

  Fate had also not been kind to Angélique Fontanges, Louis’s teenage mistress. In early January 1680 she suffered severe hemorrhaging while giving birth to Louis’s child, which arrived stillborn. “Injured in the service of the king,” Sévigné had put it. Over the three months that followed, Fontanges had still not recovered and remained bedridden, was feverish, and had a swollen face. Rumors had circulated briefly at court that poison was involved, but they had been quickly dismissed. Still, the prognosis for the once beautiful Fontanges looked as uncertain as the future of her relationship with Louis. The king had signaled as much when he gave her a generous pension, his standard parting gift.