City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Fontanges died on June 28, 1681, at the age of twenty, after being bedridden for more than a year. Convinced to the end of the king’s continuing love for her, she whispered her final words: “I die happy because my eyes have seen the king cry.”

  Angélique’s death further fueled suspicions of foul play among the king’s mistresses. Louis’s sister-in-law, the princess of Palatine, speculated that Athénaïs had a hand in her death: “Montespan is the devil incarnate, but Fontanges was good and simple; both were beautiful. The latter is dead, they say, because the former poisoned her milk,” she wrote.

  Whether it was because he did not believe the accusations or he simply did not want to know, the king resisted cries for an autopsy. He wrote to the duke of Noailles on the day of his mistress’s death: “As for those who desire to open her body, if it is possible to avoid it, I believe this to be the best decision.” The autopsy took place anyway, with all six surgeons in attendance agreeing that Fontanges had died of natural causes.

  30

  Sacrifices

  Working to uncover whether there was truth behind the accusations against Athénaïs, La Reynie now turned his focus on the former servant of Montespan’s sister-in-law, the duchess of Vivonne. “Arrest Filastre. You will learn many strange things,” Lesage had said. The elder Voisin had also warned that Filastre had a “maliciousness of spirit . . . and is as dangerous with a sword as she is with poison.”

  In her first interrogation by La Reynie, Filastre confessed to having attended Father Guibourg’s black masses at his Saint-Denis church and having been a regular participant in séances led by Father Cotton, a priest at Saint-Paul. She claimed to have seen both Cotton and Guibourg bless snakes and heard them utter prayers backwards in their churches.

  The unmarried Filastre explained that, several years earlier, she became pregnant after being “debauched” by Chaboissière, the servant of François Vanens. La Reynie was more than familiar with Vanens and Chaboissière who, along with close to fifty of their accomplices, were sitting in the Châtelet prison awaiting trial for counterfeiting, alchemy and, La Reynie suspected, poisonings. A group of men had abducted Filastre while she was in the throes of labor and delivered her to the home of a witch named Madame Simon. Shoving her onto the floor, the witch lit candles and placed them in the form of a pentagram around her. She then gave Filastre a black candle in honor of Lucifer to hold and chanted “execrable” spells. After the birth Simon placed the placenta in a small sack and took it away, along with the newborn. Filastre claimed she never saw her child again.

  Simon denied Filastre’s charges when La Reynie questioned her two days later, saying that she was a midwife, not a witch, and certainly had not performed a black Sabbath. To the contrary, she had feared for the child’s soul when Filastre insisted that she did not want the baby baptized and insinuated to her that she had other plans for it. Simon claimed instead that she took the child from Filastre, placing it with another family to protect it from its evil mother.

  One of Guibourg’s colleagues, Father Leroyer, had yet another version of the story to tell. Simon and Filastre were both doing the work of the devil for profit. Following the birth, the women delivered the sack containing the placenta to Guibourg, who placed it on the altar of his church and performed a mass. According to Leroyer, Filastre and Simon then sold the placenta as an aphrodiasic. They put the newborn child up for sale as well, splitting the money. Leroyer could not say what happened next to the child.

  La Reynie immediately interrogated the elderly Guibourg, who stood unsteadily before the police chief. La Reynie minced no words, asking right away if the cross-eyed and ruddy-faced priest knew Filastre and whether he had performed a ceremony on the afterbirth. Guibourg nodded. La Reynie questioned the priest about the masses that Voisin’s daughter had claimed he had performed on the bellies of women and girls. Nodding again, he said: “I submit myself to the mercy of God and the King. It is true. I allowed them to take advantage of my weaknesses.”

  The priest described the first mass he performed, which took place near Montlhéry, a small village not far from Paris. He did not recognize the woman who offered herself on the mattress; her long hair had obscured her face. Voisin had told him it was the king’s mistress Madame de Montespan. His words echoing off the high ceilings of the Vincennes’s interrogation room, he recited the spell he had cast on behalf of the woman whom he believed to be Athénaïs: “Astroth, Asmodée, princes of darkness, I conjure you to accept the sacrifice that I now offer you in the form of this child. I request that the king’s love as well . . . be continued to be bestowed upon me, as well as the favor of the court, and that the king deny me nothing that I should ask of him, both for myself, my family, and my servants.” Guibourg performed the spell again at a second mass on the same woman, which took place not long after the first at the base of the ramparts of the city, just steps away from Voisin’s home. The woman’s hair once again covered her face.

  In later interrogations Guibourg also confessed to La Reynie that he performed a different kind of ceremony for Mademoiselle des Oeillets. Wearing a priestly robe, he met Oeillets and an unknown man at Voisin’s home. He understood at the time that the man was serving as a proxy for the king, for whom the effects of the mass were intended. Holding a chalice, Guibourg instructed the couple to fill the vessel with their sexual fluids. Oeillets, who was menstruating, asked if she might make an offering of her blood instead. Guibourg agreed. The man slipped behind the bed and masturbated, ejaculating into the chalice. Then the priest stirred powder of dried bat into the semen to form a thick paste. After Guibourg blessed the concoction, he put the paste in a small dish and gave it to the couple to administer inconspicuously to the king as a love potion. Guibourg did not offer any suggestions about how this might be done, nor did the couple mention how they intended to do it, nor did Oeillets share her plans in this regard.

  Louis exploded in “indignation” when he heard of the “blasphemies” and demanded that La Reynie continue his investigations, emphasizing again that the police chief should not share any records with the tribunal judges that made reference to his mistresses, both former and present. La Reynie urged the king to reconsider the decision to withhold evidence, feeling strongly that the tribunal needed to be allowed to hear the burgeoning evidence against Oeillets and Montespan. Louis promptly denied the request.

  In an unusual show of resistance against the king’s wishes, the police chief wrote Louvois the same day, putting forth once again his conviction that the tribunal should reconvene. Rather than stress the need to try Oeillets, Montespan, or their accusers, La Reynie explained that the prisoners at Vincennes, who now numbered more than 150, were on edge while they waited in their dank cells, not knowing when, if ever, their trials would take place. The king denied Louvois’s request as well, explaining he had plans to travel through the northern provinces and wanted to be nearby, just in case matters got out of hand. He counseled the police chief to let the prisoners know he would be back in a few months and would reopen the tribunal on his return. The following day Louvois also sent word to the warden, Ferronnaye, to provide more and better wine to the inmates.

  As promised, the king reconvened the court three months later. The tribunal swiftly sentenced the priest Cotton and Filastre to death, to be preceded by the Extraordinary Question. On September 30 La Reynie joined the notary Sagot, Doctor Vezou, and the executioner in the Bastille torture room to question Filastre. Standing in full view of bloodstained brodequins, hammers, and various straps and pulleys, Filastre answered La Reynie’s initial questions nervously. She explained that only the welfare of her family lay behind her efforts to secure a position in Fontanges’s well-paying household, adding in indignation that Cotton and Guibourg had not been tried. They had performed spells on behalf of Madame de Montespan, as well as for a nobleman who had designs against Colbert. “Those people will not be brought to justice,” she asserted. “Yet you punish me for having attended just one mass.”
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  If the initial questioning on September 30 proved short and painless, the session that followed the next day made up for it. By the time guards strapped Filastre into the torture boots, her belligerence had disappeared. La Reynie ordered her to reveal everything she knew. The woman nodded with trepidation. On the police chief’s signal, the torturer raised the hammer above his head. The dull sound of the weapon meeting flesh reverberated against the stone walls, intersecting with Filastre’s high-pitched cries. A second strike followed, then a third.

  “It’s true,” she howled. “I offered my child to the devil. I gave it to [the witch] Simon.” A fourth blow, then a fifth. Between moans of pain, Filastre said Montespan wanted Madamoiselle de Fontanges poisoned and also needed stronger magical powders to make the king love her again. This was why, Filastre confessed, she had tried to secure a place in Fontanges’s household, and it was also why she made a pact with the devil while she was in labor.

  La Reynie signaled to the torturer to rest for a moment as he let what Filastre told him sink in. He then leaned in toward Filastre, urging her to confirm that what she had said about Montespan was the truth. It was absolutely true, she said. Then she dropped her head and fell silent. On La Reynie’s signal, the torturer swung the mallet for the fourth time. Throwing back her head in agony, she screamed, “Oh God!” Mustering every bit of strength she had left, Filastre told La Reynie that Guibourg also worked with Madame de Montespan. “But except for what I just told [about] Madamoiselle de Fontanges, I never heard anything else about [a plot] against the king,” she stammered through the pain.

  Blood spilled from her legs as guards released her from the brodequins and carried her to a dirty mattress on the floor nearby. Moaning, she promised that everything she just said was true. La Reynie allowed Doctor Vezou and his surgeon to dress the women’s wounds and administer sips of wine to help her regain her strength.

  When they were done, La Reynie looked down at the half-dead woman and asked calmly, “Is what you said about the plot against Madamoiselle de Fontanges true?” He took a breath, then added, “Look deeply into your conscience.” If she was not telling the truth, he said, she would find herself in an even more miserable state when she had to justify her actions to God. Voice fading, she vowed once again that she had told the truth.

  Recovering in her cell before her execution later that afternoon, Filastre must have conversed again with her conscience. She begged the guards to let her talk to La Reynie. The broken woman told the police chief that everything she had said during the Question had been a lie. She had done it to “liberate herself from the pain and suffering of torments,” fearing that if she did not say what she thought he wanted to hear, he would impose another round of torture. “I don’t want to die with charges against [Madame de Montespan] on my conscience,” she admitted.

  Her avowals did not change her fate. Over the next hours, Filastre followed the standard, well-traveled route to her death: a confession in the prison’s chapel, then to Notre-Dame for the amende honorable, with a final stop at the place de Grève. There, the executioner led the woman onto a hay-filled pyre, tied her to a chair on top of it, and lit the pyre with a torch.

  Filastre’s child had not been the only one to go missing. Under torture the poisoner Debray, an acquaintance of Guibourg, claimed that at least one of Jeanne Chanfrain’s children had also disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Chanfrain, an aging prostitute whom Guibourg frequented for more than twenty years, later confirmed it was true when La Reynie interrogated her.

  She had been pregnant seven times, she said, explaining that she had given birth to one child just outside the village of Montlhéry. Guibourg accompanied her and her newborn to the village, where she rested at the priest’s home while he tended to the baby girl. When Chanfrain awoke, there was no sign of the child. Guibourg told her he had entrusted the baby to the care of an acquaintance, Monsieur Froquié, a local gardener. When she saw the man several weeks later, she inquired about her baby. He claimed that the infant had fallen ill and died five days after the birth, but he would not tell her where he had buried the baby’s body. Suspicious, Chanfrain confronted Guibourg, asking what he knew. When the priest refused to answer, she screamed: “You killed my child!” The priest merely replied, “It is none of your business.”

  La Reynie shuddered at the thought of what likely happened to the baby. His concerns intensified after learning from Marie-Marguerite that her mother and the midwife Lepère kept a side business selling powders and potions made from the placentas, intestines, and mangled limbs of babies they had either aborted or abducted. La Reynie also recalled Marie-Marguerite’s story of the day her mother came in from the courtyard and shoved a newborn child into her hands. Marie-Marguerite put the child in a basket and waited for her mother to tell her what to do.

  Later that evening Voisin instructed her daughter to come into the room where she and Guibourg held their masses. There, Marie-Marguerite said she saw a woman stretched out nude on a mattress, the same one she had seen them use for Mademoiselle des Oeillets. Chalice in hand, the elderly Guibourg hovered over the woman in his priestly robe, chanting.

  Moments later the wild-eyed priest looked over at Marie-Marguerite, who lifted the newborn from the basket and brought it over to Guibourg. Handing the chalice to Voisin to hold, Guibourg took the child in one hand. Marie-Marguerite described how the priest reached into his cassock and pulled out a small knife with his other hand. Ignoring its cries, he swiftly cut open the child’s neck. Marie-Marguerite’s mother held the chalice under the baby, collecting its blood. They all watched dispassionately as the life drained from the child. In a hellish imitation of the Eucharist, he blessed the blood and dipped a host in it. Marie-Marguerite told La Reynie that “during the consecration, he said the King’s name as well as that of Madame de Montespan.”

  In the wake of Filastre’s trial, the police chief had been eager to deliver swift justice against this deadly cabal of poisoners, witches, and priests. Several days earlier La Reynie agreed to provide a redacted record to the court at Louvois’s request. This last interrogation with Marie-Marguerite, however, made him change his mind.

  La Reynie wrote to Louvois, voicing his hesitations about the best path forward. On one hand, the king had been right in his decision to suspend the court. “I am far from believing that we should allow the public to be aware of [the crimes],” he wrote. La Reynie worried that exposing “all of the horrors” would serve as an admission that the king could not control even his own mistresses, which could inspire even more crime among his subjects, who would begin to doubt the king’s strength. On the other, abandoning his investigations did not seem be a viable option either. “If the course of justice is stopped, the majority of these wicked people will go unpunished,” he worried. “The greatest cause of evil and excess comes from justice’s failures.”

  Concluding his letter, La Reynie lamented, “My mind is confused. . . . I cannot pierce the thick darkness that surrounds me.” He asked Louvois and the king for more time to continue his investigations, hoping that “God will help [me] make sense of this criminal abyss and will show me ways to find a way through it, as well as inspire the king to do everything that he must do at such an important time.” The king agreed, urging La Reynie to do whatever he felt necessary.

  31

  “A Strange Agitation”

  In order to gauge the truth behind Marie-Marguerite’s horrific accusations, La Reynie made her repeat in front of Guibourg what she had told him about the child sacrifice. The old man stood quietly as he listened to Marie-Marguerite’s story, interrupting only to make quiet grunts of agreement. When she was done, Guibourg told La Reynie that everything she had said was true. The only point up for debate between the two prisoners was who had eviscerated the child’s body after the ceremony. Wishing to keep his robes from getting dirty, Guibourg claimed, he had had nothing to do with it. Marie-Marguerite countered, saying she had watched him do it. In the end Guibourg
conceded he cut the child’s heart open and put it into a crystal vase that Madame de Montespan took with her, after the priest had blessed it. Voisin later delivered the child’s entrails, which Guibourg also blessed, to Lepère to be dried, powdered, and delivered later to the king’s mistress.

  When La Reynie pressed Guibourg to tell him how he knew the woman had been Montespan, the priest conceded he could not be sure it was her. The woman’s hair covered her face at all times during the séances, he maintained. He only knew it was the king’s mistress because it was what others had told him. Marie-Marguerite insisted it was Montespan. She knew because she had met her in person twice: once when she delivered powders to her during mass at a church near the Palais-Royal and again on the road to Versailles.

  La Reynie knew he needed to hear the other side of the story if he had any hopes of uncovering the truth about Montespan. Interviewing her even informally was out of the question: She was still unaware of the charges against her. Approaching her too soon could put her on guard, or worse, make her desperate. The risk was too great.

  Oeillets was a safer choice. She had left the court three years earlier, in 1677, after the king had made it clear he had no further need of her services as a sexual surrogate for Athénaïs. Out of the public eye, Oeillets could be questioned more discreetly. After discussing the matter with Louvois, the men conspired for the minister to arrange a meeting with the woman at his home in Paris.

  La Reynie prepared a detailed memo for Louvois describing the approach he should take and the questions he should ask Oeillets, whom he referred to simply as “you know who.” The police chief suggested that the minister should put Oeillets at ease by asking her how life had been since her departure from court. Midway through the conversation Louvois should catch her off guard by telling her that Voisin’s daughter and others at Vincennes had accused her of buying powders from them, and then watch her reaction. “But it is critical,” he warned, “not to say a word about the masses, the sacrifices, or other abominations.” Doing so could put the investigation in jeopardy if Oeillets shared what they knew with anyone at court.