Reggie Oliver. History Today. Volume 51, Issue 3, March 2001.
In the archives of the Bastille there is a scrap of paper simply dated 1673 which marks the beginning of a scandal which was to reverberate widely touching Louis XIV himself. It reads:
The confessors of Notre Dame have given notice, without disclosing any name, that for some time a great proportion of those who confessed to them accused themselves of having poisoned someone. It is thought that Monsieur, the Lieutenant of Police, should regulate the ease with which poisons are sold and bought.
Most murders are acts of unpremeditated violence; poisoning requires calculation and forethought. History records only one time and place at which poisoning became the preferred means of despatch and in which its practice reached epidemic proportions. This was France—more particularly, Paris—in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
There were a number of sociological and scientific reasons for this. In the first place, forensic pathology was virtually non-existent. The Marsh Test (for arsenic) was not discovered until 1838. Death came naturally in many unknown guises, so that poison, though often suspected, could rarely be proved. At the same time poisoning may on occasion have been erroneously suspected, as was the case with ‘Madame’, Louis XIV’s beloved sister-in-law, Henrietta of England, who died in 1670 almost certainly of natural causes.
Chemistry was beginning to emerge from the dark ages of alchemy. It became a fashionable pursuit for the rich, and a lucrative one for some of the more disreputable elements of society. Small laboratories began to spring up everywhere, attracting the gullible and ill-intentioned in equal numbers. In these dens coining was practised, while quack nostrums, love philtres and poisons—wittily dubbed ‘Succession Powders’—were manufactured.
Arsenic, sometimes called mortaux-rats, was the principal poison used. It was available usually in the form of white arsenic (arsenic trioxide), which had the advantage of being tasteless, and the poisoner could further allay suspicions by administering it in small doses, thus inducing a slow, lingering death, similar to one brought about by natural causes.
Other poisons, more repulsive in their composition, were more dubious in their effects. There were powders compounded from bats, moles, horsehair, the urine and slime from a toad (only the latter possessing some genuinely venomous properties). Of vegetable poisons there was opium, aconite, hemlock, broom, the black morel and mandrake root. Cantharides, or powdered Spanish Fly (a kind of beetle), powdered bluebottles and groundsel were regarded as love philtres but were far from safe. An infusion of peach blossom was used to poison gloves and clothing. Nail clippings, blood, semen and excrement were also used. For the dispensers of these wares there was no clear demarcation between sorcery and toxicology, but the empirical science of poison was sufficiently advanced to sustain a considerable underground industry together with its large and generally satisfied clientele.
In the year that the confessors of Notre Dame made their disturbing report, another significant event occurred. The Comte de Soissons (1633-73), husband of Olympe Mancini (1639-1708), a former favourite of Louis XIV and niece of Cardinal Mazarin, died in circumstances that suggested poisoning. The Comtesse was later accused of causing his death. Meanwhile Paris was agog with a case which serves as a sort of prelude to the main event. The Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630-76) had been found to have poisoned her father and brothers and to have made attempts on other members of her family including her husband. The crimes were revealed when her lover Godin de Sainte-Croix died in 1672 leaving behind evidence incriminating both of them. Not only had the Marquise killed her relations but also several inmates of charity hospitals. Wishing to perfect her deadly arts she had toured these institutions in the guise of an angel of mercy, dispensing pates and tartlets spiked with arsenic.
In many ways Brinvilliers was typical of the poisoners thrown up by the affair. She was sophisticated, aristocratic and a woman, aware of the possibilities of the new age, frustrated by the restrictions it still imposed on her sex and status. She killed her father and brothers to gain and then increase her inheritance; poison was the only way by which she thought she could achieve independence, indulge her lover and pay off her gambling debts.
In 1672 Brinvilliers had fled to England, but she later returned to mainland Europe. Justice caught up with her in 1676 when she was apprehended at a convent in Lille and brought back to Paris. A search of her cell had yielded a written confession which she subsequently retracted. Her trial and execution aroused great interest, and was vividly described by Madame de Sevigne (1626-96) in her letters. The death of the Marquise de Brinvilliers was so exemplary in its piety that the crowds regarded her as a saint and scrambled for relics in the ashes of her pyre. Shortly before her execution she had said: ‘Half the nobility are at it as well. If I wanted to speak out I could destroy them.’
The following year, 1677, a plot was discovered to kill the King, needless to say by poison. It was believed to have been hatched by supporters of Louis’ disgraced minister Fouquet. A number of significant arrests were made in the Paris underworld.
It was in the year 1679 that the Poisons Affair erupted into a public scandal. A lawyer, Maitre Perrin, had been dining with his wife’s dressmaker, a Madame Vigoureux. (Why he should have been at the table of such a lowly member of society is a mystery.) At the table was a lodger of Vigoureux, Marie Bosse, whose tongue became loosened by drink. Perrin heard Bosse say: ‘What a marvellous job I have! What a superb clientele. Only duchesses, marquises, princes and lords. Three more poisonings and I retire, my fortune made.’ Perrin deduced from Vigoureux’s alarmed reaction that Bosse was not joking but had made a genuinely damaging admission.
Perrin reported the matter to Desgrez, the police officer who had been responsible for the arrest of Brinvilliers. Wishing to be absolutely certain of Bosse’s guilt, Desgrez sent the wife of one of his policemen (called ‘archers’) to Bosse, with the story that she had a troublesome husband whom she wished to eliminate. Bosse duly obliged by offering to sell her poison and on January 4th, 1679, by the order of Nicholas de La Reynie, Paris’s first Lieutenant General of Police, Desgrez and his men swooped on Vigoureux’s house. They arrested both her and Bosse whom they found sleeping in the same bed, together with Bosse’s son and two daughters.
Almost at once Bosse and Vigoureux began to incriminate others. The first arrest to be made among the upper echelons of society occurred on February 11th, 1679. This was Madame de Poulaillon, who had attempted to murder her rich elderly husband with a poisoned chemise supplied by Marie Bosse. Bosse and Vigoureux also informed on their own class, in particular naming a Catherine Monvoisin, known as ‘La Voisin’, a fashionable fortune teller. La Voisin was living with a man called Lesage (alias Du Coeuret and Dubuisson), a shady character already ‘known to the authorities’. On March 12th, 1679, La Voisin was arrested coming out of Mass.
Three days later, Louis XIV’s mistress, the superb Athenais de Montespan (1641-1707), suddenly left the court at Saint Germain for Paris without giving any explanation for her departure. Could it have been connected with the arrest of La Voisin?
By this time La Reynie must have known that the case had serious implications because La Voisin enjoyed the patronage—ostensibly in her capacity as a fortune teller—of some of the most illustrious names in France. She was discovered to be not only a poisoner but an abortionist (an ‘angel-maker’ in the euphemistic cant of the day) and a sorceress who could provide a renegade priest to celebrate a black mass for you.
Allegation and counter-allegation flew between Bosse, Vigoureux and Voisin. Others were arrested and also began to talk. Some very important names were being mentioned, among them the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Marechal de Luxembourg and the Marquise de Montespan’s sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Vivonne. From the start there were two distinct categories of accused: members of the criminal underworld such as Voisin and Bosse, and their clients, most of whom belonged to the nobility.
By this time the Marquis de Louvois (1641-91), Louis’ Secretary for War and, after Colbert (1619-83), his most powerful minister, had stepped in. He saw the scandal that would be caused if all these great names were to face accusations of poisoning and sorcery in open court. Four days before Voisin’s arrest he had proposed that a secret investigative tribunal be set up to look into the affair. This was the Commission of the Arsenal, better known as the ‘Chambre Ardente’ after the old inquisitorial chambers which were hung with black drapes and lit only by candles. Louis approved and the first session of the Chambre Ardente took place on April 10th, 1679.
The reason for its establishment was not only to preserve discretion, but to prevent the guilty escaping justice, for many of the accused were closely connected—some even married—to members of the main judicial body of the Parlement. In the event, the Chambre Ardente proved to be just as indulgent towards aristocratic defendants as the Parlement might have been. (Poulaillon, for example, was banished while her lowly suppliers were condemned to death.) At the time, however, its setting up aroused much indignation among the privileged classes.
By September 1679 Madame de Montespan was being mentioned in connection with the Poisons Affair. At first she was only obliquely implicated through her maid, Cato, and her lady in waiting Mademoiselle des CEillets who had bought love potions from La Voisin. (It was suggested that they had been bought for Montespan to retain the favours of the King, though des CEillets herself had also enjoyed the royal favours and borne Louis a daughter.) The situation had sufficiently alarmed Louis that on September 21st he wrote to La Reynie requesting that records of interrogations be written on separate sheets rather than in ledgers, presumably so that embarrassing items could be destroyed at a later date.
The passionate liaison between the King and Madame de Montespan was over. The King, now forty-one, had begun to show interest in the exquisite, empty-headed eighteen-year-old Mademoiselle de Fontanges (1661-81). But Montespan was still a very important figure at court since she had given birth to seven children by the King. The six that survived beyond infancy Louis had legitimised as his own. In April 1679 Montespan was made Superintendent of the Queen’s Household, the most important job for a woman at court. Her predecessor in the post had been the same Comtesse de Soissons who was suspected of poisoning her husband. The latter had fled to Brussels in January 1680. She had been about to be arrested when she was tipped off just in time, almost certainly by Louis himself.
In February the following month, La Voisin was interrogated under torture and then burned to death in public. Contrary to the evidence of Lesage, a criminal associate and former lover, she denied all connection with Montespan, though, according to one memoirist, ‘she promised Louvois sensational revelations if her life was spared’. Then, in June of that year, a still more sinister figure made his appearance on the scene. This was the hideous old priest, the Abbe Guibourg, who had celebrated black masses in the course of which children had been sacrificed. When interrogated he, together with La Voisin’s daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin and another woman, Madame Filastre, began to implicate Montespan in their dark doings.
The allegations against Montespan were fourfold: that she had bought love potions to retain her hold over the King; that she had allowed Guibourg to cut the throats of children at a black mass using her naked belly as an altar with the same purpose of retaining the King’s favour; that she had attempted to kill her rival Mademoiselle de Fontanges using a pair of poisoned gloves (or, according to other reports, with poisoned milk); that she had attempted to have the King himself killed by means of a poisoned letter.
It is now generally believed that these allegations were cooked up by Guibourg, Marguerite Monvoisin and Lesage to save their own skins, calculating—accurately as it turned out—that because the King would not bring the full rigour of the law to bear on the mother of his legitimised children, he could not bring it to bear on her guilty accusers. (Though, in the event, their fate of life imprisonment was scarcely more desirable than the death penalty.) That the statements of these three (which survive to this day in the Bastille archives) were full of self-serving exaggerations is clear; what seems to be equally certain is that there must have been enough substance to at least two of the charges for them to be taken seriously. The smearing of Montespan was a risky strategy, but it would have been utterly foolhardy had there been no facts whatever to back it up.
Indeed it appeared there were. In the Bastille archives there is a resume by La Reynie of an earlier interview with two acquaintances of La Voisin, the Abbe Mariette and the same Lesage, dated September 1668. It refers to various ‘ceremonies’ and ‘conjurations’ which they performed for Montespan ‘for the purpose of causing the death of Madame de La Valliere.’ This was at the time when Montespan was bidding to take over as the King’s chief mistress from Louise de La Valliere. Following the interview the Abbe Mariette was banished and Lesage condemned to the galleys, though Voisin used her influence to obtain his release in 1672. It is odd that nothing was done about Montespan at the time, but there is no reason to doubt that the Abbe Mariette and Lesage were telling the truth. Montespan was not a power in the land, as she was in 1680, and mentioning her did not benefit them.
On October 1st, 1680, following the execution of Madame Filastre, Louis decided to suspend sessions of the Chambre Ardente. This course was taken, according to clerk of the court Sagot, on the specious grounds that a continuation of the enquiry ‘would denigrate the nation in the eyes of foreigners’. The real reason was that, under torture, Filastre had made damaging allegations against Montespan. La Reynie tried to insist on continuing the work of La Chambre Ardente, but more powerful counsels prevailed. As a result Guibourg, Lesage and Marguerite Monvoisin among others escaped trial and condemnation.
Between May and July 1681 the process wound down. Some of the minor players were condemned to death or sent to the galleys. It seems peculiarly unjust that Jeanne Chanfrain, Guibourg’s mistress and surely more victim than culprit, should have been tortured and condemned to death in June 1681, while the odious Abbe lived on in solitary confinement at Besancon until January 1686. In April 1682 the Chambre Ardente was officially disbanded and in December Louis ordered fourteen people (including Marguerite Voisin, and Guibourg) to perpetual imprisonment in various castles and convents. The end of the affair was more whimper than bang. In the three years of its existence the Chambre Ardente had passed judgement on 104 cases. Thirty-four of the accused were executed; two condemned in absentia and four sent to the galleys; thirty-four sentences involved banishment or financial amends and thirty were acquitted. But many more had been involved in some way or other.
There were at least some beneficial consequences to the Poisons Affair in that it led on August 31st, 1682, by a special decree of the Parlement, to the first legal restrictions on the sale of poisons. This decree still forms the basis of present day French legislation on poisons. A ban was also placed on private laboratories and stills.
What are we to make of the Affair as a whole? Some historians have alleged that Louvois exploited the Poisons Affair to discredit his great rival Colbert, but while it is true that some of the accused (such as Soissons) were enemies of Louvois and friends of Colbert, it is not true of Montespan, who was on good terms with both. Besides, La Reynie, the man in charge of the day to day conduct of the enquiry, was once a protege of Colbert’s and all the evidence shows him to have been both astute and incorruptible.
The most conclusive proof that the affair was not pumped up for political purposes comes from La Reynie’s own surviving memoranda. He was aware of the extreme sensitivity of the case where Montespan was concerned and was constantly wracked by doubts. In a surviving memorandum he agonises:
I have done all I can … to convince myself that these acts [i.e. crimes attributed to Montespan] were committed, but have not reached a conclusion. By contrast, I searched for everything that could persuade me that they were not done, and this proved equally impossible.
Nicholas de La Reynie, father of the Paris police, retired in 1697 and died on June 13th, 1709. One month later, almost to the day, Louis had all the papers in his possession relating to ‘L’Affaire des Poisons’ burnt. What these papers contained no one can say for certain, but unknown to Louis, La Reynie’s memoranda on the affair survived. The attempt at a cover-up, if such it was, failed.
The period of the Poisons Affair marked a change in Louis’ character from the sensual amoralist of the Montespan era to the more strait-laced, pious character he became after he married Madame de Maintenon secretly in 1684. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Affair was what made him the austere figure of his later years, but it surely hastened the transition. It must also have strengthened his suspicions of the aristocracy and his inclination to rule absolutely without their mediation. His high-born mistress had been implicated in acts of monstrous impiety, even of attempted regicide. He had seen the consequences of license and toleration.
Throughout this period the Huguenots of France were being put under increasing pressure to convert to Catholicism. 1682 saw the height of the notorious ‘dragonnades’ in which, on the orders of Louvois, dragoons were billeted on obdurately Protestant families. Finally on October 18th, 1685, the Edict of Nantes was revoked and with it the last vestiges of religious toleration. Heresy was suppressed and uniformity was imposed. Catholics rejoiced in the religious zeal of a reformed character; only a few saw the Revocation as a moral and political blunder.
But how guilty was Montespan? The general consensus these days is that she did little more than perhaps have La Voisin tell her fortune. Certainly the chief witnesses against her—Marguerite Voisin, Guibourg, Lesage, Filastre—were tainted, but there is no reason to believe that everything they said was untrue.
Did she poison Fontanges and attempt to kill Louis? No. She had no compelling motive to do either. She had nothing to gain by killing the King and, angry as she was at Fontanges’ arrival on the scene, Montespan had every reason to believe that her rival’s ascendancy would not last long. This proved to be the case. Fontanges fell from grace in June 1680 and died the following year. The autopsy showed death to be due to natural causes.
Did she buy love philtres either directly or through des (Eillets to preserve the King’s ardour? Almost certainly. La Reynie in a memorandum conjectured that others may have attempted to kill the King through Montespan by supplying her with poisoned aphrodisiacs.
Did she take part in infanticidal black masses to retain the King’s favour? The evidence for this is more doubtful, but I would say, on balance, yes. It is incontestable that she knew La Voisin from 1667 and that she was a party to sacrilegious ceremonies conducted by the Abbe Mariette at that time. Marguerite Voisin’s and Guibourg’s mutually corroborating accounts of the Montespan black masses convinced La Reynie.
Those who believe Montespan innocent of the black masses point to the fact that she remained at court until 1691, no longer Louis’ mistress, but still an important and influential figure. Did Louis then believe her innocent? I think he believed what it was in his interests to believe. It did not suit him for the mother of his legitimised children, of whom, especially in the case of the Duc du Maine, he was extremely fond, to be openly disgraced.
Psychologically, Montespan was capable of it. She was a haughty, reckless character who played for high stakes. She was pious, yes, but still committed the mortal sin of adultery with Louis. Her faith may have been like that of La Voisin who would recommend her clients say an ordinary mass to obtain their ends, and only proposed the black variety if that failed.
Montespan’s penitential piety towards the end of her life was extreme to the point of morbidity. According to Saint-Simon, she became afraid of the dark and slept with two women in her room who had always to be playing cards or eating or enjoying themselves if she happened to wake up in the middle of the night. She was terrified of death, though she faced it serenely at the end which came in 1707. All this suggests that she was atoning for a more sinister crime than adultery.
Finally, if there were no substance to the allegations made against his former mistress and mother of his children, why did Louis take personal charge of all the papers relating to the Affair, and burn them, in 1709?