The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV
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Mme de Bachimont gave a detailed description of the way in which Vanens had performed this miracle. First he had boiled together bunches of vermicular, groundsel and broom and then, having sprinkled in a mysterious red powder, he evaporated the liquid, leaving behind a residue of white sulphate. Next he blended copper with arsenic and saltpetre, put this into a goatskin, and added the white sulphate and some mercury to the mixture. Then he filled a cauldron with vinegar, a little nitric acid and a secret ingredient which he called ‘oil of petroleum’. When this brew was boiling, he immersed the knotted goatskin in it. Once its contents had been thoroughly heated, Vanens removed the goatskin and allowed it to cool. When it was untied, it was found to contain grey powder. Having combined this with molten silver, Vanens fashioned an ingot. Bachimont took this to the mint in Paris, where the officials pronounced it to be pure gold and exchanged it for cash on that basis.19
Following this impressive demonstration, Bachimont had set about assembling the ingredients that Vanens said he needed to repeat the process. A man had been sent to Provence to find the bulbs called onions of Scylla, which Vanens listed among his requirements. However, it proved difficult to acquire one important item, for Vanens explained that the formula for the oil of petroleum was in the hands of a mysterious figure whom he referred to as ‘the author’.
Vanens told the Bachimonts that the author (whose real name was François Galaup de Chasteuil) owed him an immense debt of gratitude. According to Vanens, after leading a series of picaresque adventures Chasteuil had, some years earlier, become prior of a Carmelite monastery in Marseille. When the young girl he had kept as his mistress had become pregnant, Chasteuil had strangled her, but after being caught trying to bury the body in the abbey’s crypt he had been sentenced to death. Vanens, who was serving at the time on a galley in the Mediterranean, had been prevailed upon to rescue Chasteuil from the scaffold and smuggle him to safety. In return Chasteuil had taught Vanens how to make gold but, though he had given him a small quantity of oil of petroleum, he had never imparted the formula for it. Since Chasteuil was now living in Turin, where he served as a major in the White Cross Regiment,* Vanens suggested that they should all go there to see if Chasteuil would give them a fresh supply of this vital substance.
Vanens and the Bachimonts had travelled to Turin in the spring of 1675 and they stayed there nearly four months. Vanens declined to introduce the Bachimonts to Chasteuil, saying it was best if he had sole contact with him, but their patience was rewarded when Vanens told them that Chasteuil had handed over sufficient quantities of his precious elixir to enable them to return to France and resume gold production. While they were finalising their travel arrangements, the Duke of Savoy had fallen ill, but they had seen no reason to delay their departure on that account. On 10 June 1675 they had left Turin; two days later, the Duke of Savoy had died, aged only forty.
The Bachimonts only went as far as Lyon but Vanens journeyed on to Paris, promising to rejoin them shortly. In fact, he spent three months at their Paris house running up enormous bills, and then disappeared. Distraught, the Bachimonts contacted Chasteuil in Turin and were horrified when he told them that he knew nothing about the miraculous oil of which Vanens had spoken. He had, however, offered to help the Bachimonts, so in the autumn they had gone back to Turin in the hope of producing gold with Chasteuil’s aid. After all their experiments failed the Bachimonts had forlornly returned to Lyon. After a time they were driven by debt to leave the hotel where they had rented lodgings and to take up residence in Ainyé Abbey. There Bachimont had set up the furnaces and stills required for alchemical procedures and, ‘hoping to arrive at the secret through his own industry’, had continued his obsessive quest to make gold.20
Such, at least, was the story that the Bachimonts now unfolded but unfortunately their account was not accepted. Their description of their pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone was dismissed as ‘gibberish with which they are trying to cover up what they are doing’.21 To their interrogators it seemed highly significant that the Bachimonts’ first visit to Turin had coincided with the Duke of Savoy’s fatal illness. At the time, it was true, this had been attributed to a fever but with hindsight it seemed permissible to entertain the possibility that Vanens, Chasteuil and Bachimont – who admitted having visited the royal Palace as a tourist while in Turin – had poisoned him. If so, Bachimont’s second visit in the autumn could have been to try to secure a reward for his services.
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However plausible this theory seemed in the febrile atmosphere engendered by Mme de La Grange’s warnings, it is extremely hard to credit. There is no denying that Vanens was a suspicious character who may have used poison to settle personal vendettas, though the evidence for that is decidedly weak. He would later be linked with other poisoners who operated in Paris and it is clear that he regularly handled cantharides and other poisonous substances. As for Bachimont, he did not deny that at various times he had purchased arsenic and sublimate, and small quantities of these were found in his workshop in Ainyé. On the other hand these were standard ingredients used in chemical experiments, so possession of them was not in itself incriminating.
While there were some inconsistencies in Bachimont’s account of his activities, the effort of imagination required to accept that he poisoned the Duke of Savoy is truly stupendous. It must be emphasised that when the Duke had died no one had mentioned the possibility that he might have been a victim of foul play.* Furthermore, the symptoms of his last illness were not indicative of poisoning: having fallen ill on 4 June 1675, he had died eight days later after enduring bouts of fever and severe headaches.22
Even if one accepts the premise that Vanens and Bachimont could have poisoned the Duke, the identity of the person who commissioned them to carry out the crime remains a complete mystery. It is true that the Duchess of Savoy had often been irritated by her husband’s infidelities and was sufficiently ambitious to relish the prospect of becoming Regent. Once the Duke was dead she had several affairs, including a relationship with the Comte de Saint-Maurice. He was the person who in June 1675 was sent to France to convey news of the Duke’s death and the fact that he was then reported to have had dealings with La Chaboissière is certainly an arresting coincidence. However, it would be rash to extrapolate too much from this.
The only evidence that in any way corroborates the hypothesis that Charles Emmanuel of Savoy was murdered came from Bachimont’s manservant, Nicholas d’Hostel. He was arrested at the same time as his master and spent the next few months in prison. After being repeatedly questioned, he was asked whether he had ever heard his employers discussing the Duke of Savoy’s death. He obligingly replied that shortly before leaving Turin in June 1675, he had heard Vanens say that when the Duke had changed his clothes after becoming overheated out hunting, he had been given a poisoned shirt.23 Since we now know that in the seventeenth century it was not possible to kill someone using garments impregnated with poison, this is hardly conclusive.
The Bachimonts’ story was certainly strange, but it was not altogether incredible. As Bachimont himself belatedly came to realise, Vanens was ‘a great liar and a great actor’, and the prowess with which he tricked the Bachimonts into believing that he had fashioned a gold ingot from humble materials suggests that he was also an expert conjurer. For someone with skills of this order, convincing gullible individuals that he was an alchemical adept who had penetrated the secret of ‘the Great Work’ would not have posed an insuperable challenge. The dividends to be reaped could be considerable: Bachimont estimated that in the course of his association with Vanens he had spent 10,000 livres supporting him. Even after spending nearly two years in prison, Vanens was confident that he could use his powers of persuasion to extricate himself from trouble. In September 1679 he contacted Louvois and coolly offered to reveal to the King his knowledge of the Philosopher’s Stone.24
Obviously, today it seems crazy that anyone could have been duped into believing that a process which am
ounted to little more than extracting an essence from herbs could produce gold, but this was consistent with a theory current at the time that metals were living organisms, which could grow like plants. Ideas of this kind had considerable antecedents: in the fifteenth century Thomas Norton wrote in his Ordinal of Alchemy of a man who had ‘laboured in the fire’ for fifty years, using herbs, gums, roots, grass, wax, honey, wine, quicklime and other ingredients in his quest for his goal. Norton frankly admitted that most alchemical receipts better deserved the name ‘deceipts’, but the deluded nature of such activities has only become apparent in retrospect. At a time when the nature of matter was only imperfectly understood, the possibilities inherent in such processes as calcination, sublimation and purification seemed immense. Drawing on an impressive body of literature devoted to Hermetic lore, the alchemist sought, by repeatedly dissolving and reconstituting material, to free the ‘quintessence’ that resided within all objects and gain access to the ‘inner spirit’ at their core.25 Once this had been attained, the Philosopher’s Stone itself should be within his grasp, promising not only untold riches but the key to life itself.
Although the Bachimonts’ interrogators expressed scepticism that they could really have believed that Vanens was engaged on a legitimate enterprise, the couple were far from unique in subscribing to the sort of ideas he promulgated. The quest for the Philosopher’s Stone remained a widespread obsession: in England alone it numbered Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton among its adherents, and it has been shown that more books on alchemy were published there in the years 1650–80 than at any period before or since. As for Paris, a Sicilian visitor to the city said that as many alchemists lived there as cooks. Among those taken in by these charlatans were some surprising people. In 1664 the Sieur de Louvet informed Colbert that he knew of a surgeon who had successfully turned copper into gold and suggested that ‘it would enrich his Majesty’ if he made use of this expertise. In 1708 one of Colbert’s successors as Controller-General of Finance, Michel de Chamillart, had such faith in a man who claimed to have found the Philosopher’s Stone that he furnished him with a furnace and all the materials he said he needed to perform this feat. It was only after this individual had lived in comfort for two months that he was exposed as a fraud and sent to prison. Anecdotal evidence confirms that other well-educated and wealthy persons fell victim to the craze. Saint-Simon claimed that the Dauphin’s physician Boudin spent a fortune seeking the Philosopher’s Stone and the Comtesse de Gramont’s father was said to have ruined himself by his addiction to alchemy.26
Against this background it would not have been impossible for a man of Vanens’s ingenuity to exploit the prevailing credulity and entice rich men to invest in his schemes. Deception on such a scale required guile, audacity and inventiveness, but Vanens possessed these qualities in abundance. While not entirely free of risk, this would certainly have offered an easier way of making a living than co-ordinating an international murder ring specialising in assassinating heads of state.
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The probe into Vanens’s activities, coupled with the mystery of the anonymous letter, had left Louvois and La Reynie full of trepidation. At the end of 1678 a new development occurred, which convinced them that they were right to be concerned. In December a lawyer named Maître Perrin attended a dinner party given by Marie Vigoreux, the wife of a ladies’ tailor. Now aged forty, she had at one time been a wet-nurse to members of the aristocracy, but had abandoned that trade to set herself up as a fortune-teller. She had done very well at this and had acquired a sizeable clientele from every stratum of Paris society. Primi Visconti had come across la Vigoreux when the Marquise de Vassé had engaged her to tell fortunes at one of her parties and he had been very impressed by her powers. Describing her as ‘very knowledgeable about palmistry’, he insisted that when she read his hand, the most learned of men could not have given such a well-reasoned exposition on his future.27
The other guest at Mme Vigoreux’s dinner party was a stout and powerfully built woman in her forties named Marie Bosse. The widow of a horse dealer, she had been briefly imprisoned for coining three years earlier but had been thriving ever since her release. As the meal wore on she became somewhat drunk and astonished Maître Perrin when she suddenly declared that things were going so well for her that once she had poisoned three more people, she would be able to retire.
Maître Perrin reported this conversation to the police, with the result that orders were given for the two women’s arrest. On 4 January 1679 Mme Vigoreux and Mme Bosse (together with la Bosse’s two sons and a daughter) were seized. They were taken to the Chateau de Vincennes, a royal fortress on the eastern edge of Paris. There they were confined in the fifteenth-century keep, which would be the place of custody for all suspected poisoners arrested in Paris over the next three years.
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The arrest of la Vigoreux and la Bosse focused scrutiny on the numerous fortune-tellers and ‘divineresses’ who were currently active in Paris and who for the most part had been carrying on their activities without any interference from the authorities. Mme Vigoreux herself suggested that in the capital there were more than 400 people (the majority of them women, for fortune-telling remained a predominantly feminine occupation) who made their living in this way,28 and her estimate was probably on the low side.
When clients came to them asking to have their futures foretold, the divineresses sometimes made predictions after drawing up a personal horoscope. They also practised physiognomy (the art of telling someone’s destiny by examining their facial features) and palmistry. Though some had no education to speak of (Mme Bosse only knew how to write her name, while the divineress la Bergerot was completely illiterate), others were remarkably erudite in their approach. The redoubtable la Trianon, for example, was said to have more learning ‘in the tip of her finger’ than others could hope to acquire in a lifetime. She prided herself on being expert in ‘magical science, following the natural magic calendar’ and, upon her arrest, was found to possess a library of twenty-five manuscript volumes on occult subjects.29
However, their activities were much more diverse than this for, as la Vigoreux herself pointed out, ‘Reading palms is not all they do.’ In many cases the divineresses also acted as pharmacists and beauticians. They supplied their clients with home-made remedies for minor ailments such as corns and toothache. In addition they sold cosmetics such as ‘talc’ and herbal lotions for the complexion, made according to their own recipes.
They might also offer to use their powers of divination to locate lost or stolen property. They did a brisk trade attempting to direct clients towards hoards of abandoned treasure, which had supposedly been buried long ago and never reclaimed. A surprising number of people had great hopes of growing rich in this way and one divineress was under the impression that ‘all Paris is searching for treasure’.30
One could argue that, while utterly futile, all this was essentially harmless, but M. de La Reynie came to have a different view of the matter. At the end of the Affair of the Poisons he looked back over what he termed an ‘abyss of crime’ and declared that these ‘apparent simplicities of mind’ invariably had a pernicious outcome. Clients who approached divineresses on such ‘vain and ridiculous pretexts’ as wanting to know what the future held, or seeking buried treasure, went on to raise other matters. Then, by an inevitable progression, ‘terrible bargains were concluded’.31
Oddly enough, in taking this harsh view he was merely echoing the words of Marie Bosse, who at one point surprised her interrogators by uttering a sweeping condemnation of all the fortune-tellers who worked in Paris. She insisted that the best course would be to exterminate them all, for they had brought ruin on women of high and low rank. She explained that they could wreak such harm because clients revealed their weaknesses during palm-reading sessions. Having exposed themselves in this way, they were easier to manipulate.32
Much of the divineresses’ time was taken up by advising their clients on love matters.
They were consulted by ladies whose lovers were proving reluctant to marry them, or whose families were preventing them from making a match of their choice. A large proportion of their clientele, however, was comprised of unhappily married women who came to them for counsel. A few of them hoped that some way might be found to make their husbands treat them more kindly. Sometimes the divineress recommended rubbing one of their husband’s shirts against an image of St Ursula or, alternatively, the client might be enjoined to embark on a nine-day cycle of prayer known as a Novena. If the client considered this too arduous, poor women could be found who, for a fee, would perform the orisons for them.
A significant number of clients despaired of ever finding happiness with their husbands. Discontented wives would often want to know whether their husbands would die in the near future and it did not require a gifted clairvoyant to know that they were hoping for an affirmative answer. For example, when an unhappily married woman called Mme Darsis had her palm read by Mme Vigoreux she queried hopefully whether the fortune-teller could see ‘the mark of a coffin in her hand’. Much to her disappointment, la Vigoreux told her she could not.33
Sometimes a client would admit that she longed for her husband to die and the divineress was invariably sympathetic. A young woman called Mme Vertemart told the notorious divineress Mme Voisin that she wanted to be rid of her husband so that she could spend more time with her lover, and la Voisin assured her that this could be brought about by prayer. When Mme Vertemart said she found it difficult to believe that God would grant such a request, Mme Voisin told her that to achieve this it was ‘necessary to live like her and to have as much experience as she had in this kind of thing’. Mme Vertemart remained sceptical, pointing out that since her lover had a wife, she would not be able to marry him even if she were widowed, but Mme Voisin promised to take care of everything. ‘Don’t pry!’ she chided her client, ‘I don’t like little women who are so penetrating; suffice to say that for me nothing is impossible … I’ve made other women happy; just bring the money.’34 Mme Vertemart accepted these assurances but other women who came to Mme Voisin with similar problems were not content to rely on prayer alone to resolve their difficulties.