The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV

by Anne Somerset

  FIVE

  LA VOISIN

  Following the arrest of Mme Vigoreux and Marie Bosse in early January 1679 their houses had been searched. Substances discovered there were taken away to be analysed and suspicions mounted against Marie Bosse when a casket belonging to her was found to contain not only disturbing items such as nail clippings and samples of menstrual blood, but also arsenic, cantharides and nitric acid.

  Things looked even worse when Mme Vigoreux disclosed that Mme Marguerite de Poulaillon was a client of hers and la Bosse. La Vigoreux maintained that this lady, who came from a good family in Bordeaux and was married to a well-to-do bureaucrat, had come to them to have her fortune read and to borrow money. However, it seemed likely there had been more to it than that, for Mme de Poulaillon had recently been put in a convent by her husband after he had been warned that she was trying to kill him.

  Further interest was aroused when Mme Vigoreux revealed that la Bosse was on friendly terms with a woman called Mme Philbert. The latter was now the wife of a court musician, but some years ago her first husband, M. Brunet, had died in suspicious circumstances. La Vigoreux also provided the first intimation that people at court might be implicated in the affair when she mentioned that the Marquis de Feuquières had asked her to devise a way of protecting him against being wounded in battle. Sensing that this would be the forerunner of more significant disclosures, on 6 January 1679 M. de La Reynie requested the King’s authorisation to take personal charge of the inquiry. This was speedily granted.

  On 1 February Mme de Poulaillon was arrested and taken to Vincennes. A former servant of hers, Perrine Delabarre, was also taken into custody and before long poured forth a wealth of compromising information about her employer. It emerged that Mme de Poulaillon had been having an affair with the self-styled Marquis de La Rivière, an immensely charming adventurer who supported himself by preying on susceptible women. People had attempted to alert M. de Poulaillon to what was going on, but he did not listen, for he doted on his attractive young wife to such an extent that ‘one kind word’ from her was enough to keep him happy.1

  Unfortunately, M. de La Rivière was so expensive to maintain that Mme de Poulaillon had found herself in constant need of money. If her husband gave her a new dress, she at once pawned it to raise cash for her lover, but the sums raised in this way were soon dissipated. Desperately she had formed plans to break into her husband’s study to steal a valuable pair of hangings and even had a key cut to enable her to take money out of his strongbox. However, after a series of farcical mishaps, all these schemes had come to nothing.

  By now Mme de Poulaillon had begun having consultations with Mme Vigoreux and, after hearing her plight, la Vigoreux sent her to see Marie Bosse. Matters had then taken a grimmer turn. After paying several visits to Mme de Poulaillon’s country house, la Bosse had instructed her to furnish her with one of M. de Poulaillon’s shirts, together with some arsenic which Mme de Poulaillon had originally purchased to use as rat poison. La Bosse had then combined the arsenic with soap and washed the shirt with it, claiming that when M. de Poulaillon next wore the shirt his lower parts would become painful and inflamed. Mme de Poulaillon may have been led to hope that the effects would prove fatal, although she later claimed that she had simply intended to rob her husband’s strongbox while he was bedridden with this complaint. It is, in fact, doubtful that M. de Poulaillon would have been harmed by wearing the shirt (though la Bosse assured her client that she had achieved excellent results in the past) but in the event this was never put to the test. After being treated by la Bosse, the shirt acquired such a noticeably brownish tinge that Mme de Poulaillon decided it was impossible to use it.2

  However, far from giving up altogether, Mme de Poulaillon twice gave her servant Perrine Delabarre phials of liquid and ordered her to add the contents to her husband’s wine. On both occasions the frightened servant poured the liquid away, so M. de Poulaillon came to no harm. But towards the end of 1678 he received several anonymous warnings that his wife had attempted to murder him and this eventually persuaded him that his own safety demanded that he should place her in a convent.

  Even this did not stop the determined Mme de Poulaillon. In December she left her convent to visit Marie Bosse and Mme Vigoreux in Paris, and they agreed that a final effort must be made to poison Poulaillon. Accordingly, Mme Bosse had enlisted the services of a fruit seller, Anne Cheron, and François Belot, a member of the royal guard. Belot had boasted that he had a secret way of poisoning silver cups, so infallible that ‘if fifty people drank out of it, even after it had been washed and rinsed, they would all die’. At the very beginning of January 1679 la Cheron had supplied Belot with the live toad he said he needed, and at la Bosse’s house they had together set about torturing the poor animal to render it in the right condition for their purposes. After it had been beaten, they forced arsenic into its mouth on the assumption that if the creature urinated during its death throes, its piss would prove highly toxic.3 A cup supplied by Mme de Poulaillon was then treated with this noxious fluid. However, before the utensil could be used, Marie Bosse and Mme Vigoreux had been arrested on 4 January.

  * * *

  As La Reynie amassed more information, so the number of people in custody grew. François Belot and Anne Cheron joined Marie Bosse at Vincennes. On 1 March orders were given for the arrest of Mme Philbert, for there were now strong suspicions that she had murdered her first husband, M. Brunet. A woman called Mme Ferry, whose husband had died shortly before la Bosse’s arrest, after an illness lasting three weeks, was also detained.

  By 8 March it seemed clear that there would have to be numerous trials to bring these and other malefactors to justice. After consultation with Louvois, the King decided to form a special commission to hear all the cases. Fourteen commissioners from the higher ranks of the legal hierarchy were chosen by the King to serve as judges on this tribunal, which had its own president, attorney-general and recorder. M. de La Reynie was named as one of the commissioners, but besides this judicial role he also remained in charge of the investigation into poisoning. In addition he was appointed rapporteur to the commission, which meant that once he had amassed evidence against defendants he outlined the case to his fellow commissioners. In effect, therefore, he acted as a detective, prosecutor and judge.

  Another commissioner, Louis Bazin, Seigneur de Bezons, was selected as an auxiliary rapporteur. This former Intendant had already established a fruitful working relationship with La Reynie when he had served alongside him on the commission that dealt with the Chevalier de Rohan’s treason. The Marquis de La Fare later alleged that Bezons had trapped Rohan into admitting his guilt by falsely promising him a pardon. There would be claims that during the poisons inquiry, Bezons would be equally unscrupulous about obtaining convictions, and Primi Visconti went so far as to call him ‘the Judas of the assembly’.4

  One reason for forming the commission was that the King did not want the regular courts – which were overburdened with business as it was – to become clogged up with poisoning cases. Besides this, however, Louis wanted to prevent details of the investigation from becoming public and he strongly urged the commissioners to divulge nothing about their proceedings to outsiders.5 It is clear that although no high-ranking people had yet been implicated as poisoners, it was anticipated that this would be an inevitable outcome of the current inquiry. When that happened, the King wanted secrecy to be preserved as far as possible. It was also assumed that in such circumstances a special commission would prove less vulnerable to pressure from interested parties than would be the case if the matter came before Parlement.

  As Mme de Scudéry commented, the formation of the commission constituted an implicit rebuke to Parlement for the way it had handled the cases of Mme de Brinvilliers and Pennautier. The Venetian ambassador heard that the President of the Paris Parlement protested to the King that the bypassing of the established legal system represented a slur on the ‘immaculate justice’ always provided b
y Parlement. Despite his pleas that this venerable institution be spared an unmerited affront, he could not prevail on the King to reconsider.6

  La Reynie was not yet ready to submit cases for judgement, so the letters patent which brought the commission into being were only signed on 7 April 1679. Countersigned by Colbert, in his capacity as the Minister with responsibility for the département of Paris, they stated that the commission should judge crimes of poisoning and other related offences committed in Paris and its environs.7 It was agreed that the commission would hold its sessions at the Arsenal, near the Bastille. For this reason it was often called the Chambre d’Arsenal, but it was also referred to as the Chambre Ardente, or ‘Burning Chamber’. This was a throwback to the sixteenth century, when a similar special tribunal had been established to judge cases of heresy. It, too, had sat at the Arsenal, in a room hung with black cloth and lit with torches.

  * * *

  In the weeks before the commission assembled, La Reynie doggedly pursued his enquiries. It had not escaped his notice that in her depositions Marie Bosse had frequently mentioned another divineress, Mme Voisin. La Bosse said that she was the person who had first introduced her to Magdelaine de La Grange and that Mme Voisin had also been consulted by Mme Ferry, who was currently under arrest on suspicion of murdering her husband. La Bosse went on to say that Mme Voisin had been intimately acquainted with another imprisoned suspect, Mme Philbert, and when questioned about her own dealings with pregnant women she sought to divert suspicion by declaring that it was Mme Voisin who practised abortion. M. de La Reynie became still more interested when la Bosse stated that an unnamed ‘lady of rank’ had been to see Mme Voisin and that this woman – whose identity Mme Bosse had never discovered – had offered the divineress 6000 livres if she could bring about the death of her husband.8

  On 12 March 1679 Catherine Montvoisin, known as ‘la Voisin’, was arrested as she came out of her local parish church where, as was her custom, she had attended mass. Now forty-two years old, she had been honing her skills in astrology, palmistry and physiognomy from the age of nine. Having devoted herself ever since to ‘cultivating the knowledge God had given her’, she had pursued her calling with remarkable dedication and prided herself on providing an excellent service. On one occasion when she was having difficulty concluding a marriage desired by a widowed client, she fretted that this would deal such a blow to her reputation that she would have to leave the country. A colleague of hers had to point out that in view of the huge quantity of work she took on, the occasional setback was inevitable.9

  La Voisin appears genuinely to have believed in the power of magic but she combined this with an outward profession of piety. As the circumstances of her arrest suggested, she was a regular churchgoer, and her answers to her interrogators would abound with devout sentiments and respectful invocations of the ‘Good Lord’. When she finally began to make significant revelations she would claim that she was doing so ‘for the glory of God’, who had commanded her to heed His will as she knelt in prayer. Earlier in her career her readiness to imply that she was in tune with the workings of providence had stood her in good stead, for clients were comforted by her apparent belief that her professional activities were compatible with Christianity. It may be that Mme Voisin herself was scarcely aware of any contradiction. Once, having assisted at an abortion, she was said to have wept tears of joy when the midwife in attendance baptised the foetus. Far from being troubled at having terminated the unborn child’s existence, she exulted in having been instrumental in securing its salvation.10

  La Voisin’s renown as a divineress had made her prosperous. One acquaintance claimed that ‘all the world came’ to see her and Primi Visconti likewise believed that ‘most of the ladies in Paris had visited her’. Marie Bosse suggested that Mme Voisin had earned a total of 100,000 livres ‘from her evil dealings’; another estimate put her income at 10,000 livres a year. While it is impossible to know if these figures are accurate, she certainly lived in some style. Her house in the Rue Beauregard was in a suburb of Paris outside the city walls called the Villeneuve. When her clients came to visit, she saw them in a little pavilion in the garden. According to one account, she was never short of business. After noting that ‘la Voisin had as much money as she wanted’, an envious colleague described how ‘before she got up every morning, there were folk waiting to see her, and throughout the rest of the day she was with more people; after that, she kept open house in the evening, with violins playing, and was always making merry’.11

  During these convivial evenings she developed a pronounced fondness for wine and several witnesses described occasions when she became visibly inebriated. Alcohol was apt to make her garrulous and in company she would sometimes speak more frankly of her activities than was wise. Perhaps because her interrogators hoped to take advantage of this tendency, she was not forced to moderate her intake in prison. In fact, Primi Visconti heard that she was drunk whenever she was interrogated.12

  La Voisin’s husband, Antoine Montvoisin, had at different times been a silk merchant and a jeweller, but his businesses had all gone bankrupt. Consequently la Voisin had to support him and all her children, and perhaps it was the pressure of having ‘ten mouths to fill’ that spurred her into crime. When a midwife she employed had expressed qualms about performing another abortion, Mme Voisin had retorted, ‘You’re mad! Times are too hard! How do you expect me to feed my family and children?’13

  Her husband showed scant gratitude for the way she kept him, for she complained he became vicious when drunk and treated her badly. La Voisin had never made a secret of the fact that she longed to be rid of him. One of her admirers later recalled that upon encountering la Voisin, the standard form of polite greeting was to enquire whether her husband had yet died.14 La Voisin herself would later tell M. de La Reynie that numerous people had urged her to kill Montvoisin, while maintaining that she had rejected their advice. Abundant evidence would eventually suggest that she had, in fact, made several attempts on his life, though none had succeeded. Perhaps she had been constrained by the need for caution, for her husband was on good terms with Samson, the public executioner. He had told Montvoisin that in the event of his dying suddenly he would arrange for an autopsy to be carried out on him.15

  Mme Voisin’s marriage may have been unhappy, but an active love life afforded some solace. Despite the homely features portrayed in the only known engraving of her, she clearly exerted a powerful sexual allure. Her lovers included magicians and alchemists such as Lesage, Blessis and Latour, as well as the tavern keeper M. Herault, who promised to marry her if her husband died. She even had a brief affair with a member of the aristocracy, the Vicomte de Cousserans, to whom she had given lessons in palmistry.16

  At one point Mme Voisin had operated in partnership with Marie Bosse and had sent clients to her when she judged it appropriate. However, no trace remained of their former friendship for, years before, they had quarrelled over money. As would ultimately become clear, la Voisin had suspected that Mme Bosse had denied her a full share of the proceeds deriving from the murder of M. Brunet, for which his widow had paid generously. The antagonism between the two women now proved helpful to M. de La Reynie, for each proved anxious to denigrate the other.

  * * *

  Mme Voisin was interrogated for the first time on 17 March.17 Her strategy was to deny that she had ever done any harm, while throwing as much suspicion as possible on Marie Bosse. She admitted that several years earlier (the date was probably 1673) the then Mme Brunet had come to her complaining about her husband. Mme Voisin had sent her to see Marie Bosse and (so she claimed) from that time the pair had conducted their business without any reference to her. La Voisin said that, knowing that Mme Brunet had a great aversion for her husband, she had urged la Bosse to do nothing detrimental to ‘the glory of God and their salvation’, but she feared Mme Bosse had not heeded her words. This was because she knew that la Bosse had asked Mme Brunet to supply her with one of her husband
’s shirts and she said she was also aware that in the years since Brunet’s death his widow had made regular payments to Mme Bosse.

  La Voisin continued that her anxieties had increased when, in 1676, Brunet’s widow – by this time remarried to the flautist M. Philbert – had come to see her. Mme Philbert had confessed that something was preying on her mind and, when la Voisin had read her hand, what she saw had been far from reassuring. La Voisin had told her client that she could tell that many disappointments were in store for her, and had then unsettled her further by remarking that the late M. Brunet’s strange demise had inspired a lot of adverse comment.

  When asked about Mme Ferry, la Voisin adopted similar tactics. She said that shortly after the arrest of Mme Bosse, Mme Ferry had paid her a visit. She was wearing mourning for her husband, who had died not long before. The young widow was obviously in a state of great anxiety, prompting la Voisin to ask ‘whether she had done something unfortunate on la Bosse’s advice’. Mme Ferry had denied this, but when her hand was read by la Voisin she kept asking nervously if there was any indication that she would soon be embroiled in legal proceedings.

  Mme Voisin had done her best to deflect suspicion on to her rival, but her composure was shaken when she was asked about the lady who had offered her 6000 livres in order to be rid of her husband. It was also put to her that one of her grander female clients had sent her a bouquet of flowers to be treated in some unspecified manner. Plainly disconcerted, la Voisin blustered that she had often received flowers from people of rank.

  Worse was to come, for the following day Mme Voisin and Marie Bosse were brought together for a confrontation.18 Furious at la Voisin’s attempts to blacken her, Mme Bosse made a series of strident accusations. Refuting Mme Voisin’s claim to have had only minimal dealings with Mme Brunet, la Bosse insisted that la Voisin had met regularly with that lady in Notre-Dame Cathedral. She alleged that la Voisin had once tried to sell Mme Brunet a powder supposedly consisting of finely ground diamonds which, if ingested, would shred the intestines. However, the price had been exorbitant and since Mme Brunet did not believe that the powder was really made of diamonds she had declined the offer. Nevertheless, the pair had continued to meet and Mme Brunet had paid for la Voisin’s services by giving her 400 livres in cash and a diamond cross.