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

by Anne Somerset

  Lesage now also elaborated on his earlier claims about the Duchesse de Vivonne, insisting she was guilty of the foulest abominations. He not only stated that Mme de Vivonne had told him she had witnessed the sacrifice of la Filastre’s child but he went further, declaring that the Duchesse had subsequently persuaded la Filastre to terminate an unwanted pregnancy of her own. La Filastre had agreed to help her on condition that she was permitted to say a black mass on Mme de Vivonne’s body while the abortion was carried out and then to offer up the foetus to the devil.16

  When these claims were put to la Filastre, she insisted there was no truth in them. She did, however, agree that the Duchesse de Vivonne had been a client of hers. She even said she had visited her at home and that on one occasion she had been invited into the Duchesse’s bedroom. Having copied out a paper Mme de Vivonne had written containing a list of demands, la Filastre had taken this to Cotton, the priest who had helped her on other occasions. Once he in turn had transcribed the document, Cotton was required to perform spells in the hope of prompting some malign spirit to grant Mme de Vivonne’s wishes.17

  In due course Cotton was interrogated about this and he admitted having copied out the paper. When asked what it contained, he became vague and then said that, as far as he could remember, Mme de Vivonne had offered to give her soul to the devil in return for receiving a monthly sum from him. She had also wanted a certain person sent away from court and to be rid of her husband, whom she disliked.18

  To add to the confusion, on 30 August Magdelaine Chapelain made a new accusation against the Duchesse de Vivonne.19 She alleged that in 1676 it was Mme de Vivonne who had sent la Filastre to see Galet in Normandy. Mme de Vivonne had commissioned la Filastre to buy love powders and aphrodisiacs, which were to be given to the King to make him fall in love with her. Furthermore, the Duchesse had ordered la Filastre to obtain poison, which she could administer to Mme de Montespan so as to eliminate her as a rival for the King’s affections.

  By putting forward this explanation Mme Chapelain presumably hoped to dissociate herself from la Filastre’s visits to Galet, despite the fact that la Filastre herself had claimed that she had gone to see him on the orders of Mme Chapelain. In a bid to establish the truth, on 5 September a confrontation was arranged between la Filastre and Mme Chapelain. At this la Filastre vehemently denied that she had been acting on Mme de Vivonne’s behalf when she had gone to Normandy, but Mme Chapelain stuck to her story and La Reynie was inclined to believe it.20

  * * *

  By this time a new set of horrors was under investigation. On 29 July la Filastre had alleged that Guibourg had sacrificed several of the children he had had by Jeanne Chanfrain, a forty-eight-year-old woman who had been his mistress for the past twenty years. Jeanne Chanfrain was accordingly taken to Vincennes and when questioned on 9 August her answers suggested that there might be some truth in this. Of the seven children she had borne Guibourg, four could be accounted for, but the whereabouts of three were a mystery. Jeanne Chanfrain admitted that soon after she had given birth to her third child fathered by Guibourg, the priest had taken it away and she suspected he had murdered it. She claimed that at the time she had been so upset that she had attacked her lover, screaming, ‘You wicked man, you’ve killed my child.’ Guibourg had merely retorted that ‘it was no business of hers and she would not be burdened with the sin of it.’ Despite this callous rejoinder, Jeanne had not broken off her relationship with Guibourg. The twins she bore him next had also disappeared after being entrusted to his care.21

  M. de La Reynie found it all too easy to believe that the missing infants had been sacrificed to the devil. He noted solemnly that such practices had been known since biblical times, while the researches of Jean Bodin, the great sixteenth-century French expert on witchcraft, had established that witches believed it would enhance their evil powers if they offered up children to their master.22

  La Reynie also recalled a curious episode that had taken place in Paris in 1675.* That summer the stability of the city had been threatened after the populace became gripped by panic that children were being abducted and murdered on the orders of an ailing noblewoman. At the time, an English observer had reported, ‘They speak here of some great princess who … is sick of leprosy and employs … armed men to steal away and catch off the streets little children not exceeding two years of age to make a bath of their blood, it being, they say, the best remedy against that disease.’ There had been riots and assaults on suspected kidnappers, and order had only been restored when a woman who had played a leading role in the tumult had been sentenced to death, though she had later been reprieved on account of being pregnant. At the time La Reynie had regarded the incident as an outbreak of hysteria, but he was gradually coming to think that ‘this extravagance could have been founded on fact’.23

  * * *

  La Reynie’s readiness to contemplate the possibility that some noblewoman might have orchestrated a wave of infanticide owed much to the fact that the name of a court lady who occupied a far more prominent position than the Duchesse de Vivonne had now started to feature in the inquiry. By the end of the summer of 1680 La Reynie had grounds for believing that the King’s mistress, Mme de Montespan, had had dealings with both Abbé Guibourg and Françoise Filastre. Worse still, there was a possibility that her activities had jeopardised the safety of the King himself.

  The first indication of this had come on 10 August, when la Filastre had caused consternation by suggesting that Mme de Montespan had had links with Guibourg, which went back a long way. La Filastre had already testified that when she had first met Guibourg, seven or eight years before, he had shown her a pact with the devil that he had devised himself. Now she added the important detail that Guibourg had told her he wanted to conclude this pact so as to be better equipped to gratify the wishes of his influential clients. He had gone on to say that these clients included not only a man who wished to kill the Controller-General of Finance, Colbert, but also Mme de Montespan herself. Guibourg had further confided that when he had conducted a black mass on a prostitute in a humble dwelling in Saint-Denis, he had been acting for the benefit of Mme de Montespan.24

  Informing Louvois of this development, La Reynie sounded a note of caution. He conceded that even if la Filastre’s account was truthful, Guibourg might simply have been bragging in hopes of duping her into believing that his services were sought by the cream of Paris society. Yet although this was a possibility, La Reynie did not consider dismissing the story on that account. On the contrary, indeed, it filled the Police Chief with considerable unease.

  While la Filastre was doing her best to convince her interrogators that Guibourg was acquainted with Mme de Montespan, others were suggesting that la Filastre herself had done business with the royal mistress. On 12 August a divineress called la Bellière alleged that before leaving Paris in September 1679, la Filastre had said something curious to her. She had told la Bellière that when she returned from her travels she wanted la Bellière to take some sort of love aid to Mme de Montespan, promising that in return she would pay her 10,000 écus. Quite why la Filastre should have been prepared to pay this vast sum to an intermediary was never established, but La Reynie could only think it ominous. He grew more worried when la Bellière said that despite the cash incentive she had been reluctant to undertake an errand she feared would bring her to the gallows. La Reynie’s concern deepened when la Bellière added that la Filastre had said she wanted to enter Mlle de Fontanges’s service in order ‘to restore Mme de Montespan to the good graces of the King’.25

  That same day la Filastre was interrogated again and, in a desperate bid to force admissions from her, trickery was employed. She was told that in earlier interviews she had confessed that her former employer Mme Chapelain had worked for Mme de Montespan, although in reality la Filastre had never said anything of the kind. Understandably bewildered, la Filastre responded that she must have been confused at the time, for she and Mme Chapelain had never talked of
Mme de Montespan.26

  A few weeks later la Bellière repeated her claims during a confrontation with la Filastre. La Filastre repudiated her description of their exchange, conceding only that she had once remarked she wished she knew Mme de Montespan, as she would have been able to exploit the connection by earning herself 10,000 livres. She also denied she had ever discussed her plan to enter Mlle de Fontanges’s household with la Bellière.27

  Nevertheless, suspicions that Mme de Montespan had been a client of la Filastre’s were strengthened when Galet, the Norman peasant who had supplied la Filastre with powders, was questioned on 1 September. He stated that when la Filastre had first come to him in 1676 she had asked him to sell her a poison that was undetectable. Galet said he had pretended to oblige, though in fact none of the powders he had handed over had been harmful. In addition la Filastre had asked him for love powders for a lady at court. According to Galet, this person was none other than Mme de Montespan who, la Filastre had said, was upset because the King no longer treated her as well as she desired. Galet had accordingly given her some powdered aphrodisiac containing cantharides.28 Hearing this, M. de La Reynie began to wonder whether the headaches and ‘vapours’ that had bothered the King at the time had been caused by his having unwittingly ingested this alarming concoction.

  It might be considered bizarre that La Reynie could attach such significance to this miscellany of uncorroborated and often contradictory assertions, but there was a reason why he dared not reject them out of hand. However unlikely it might seem that Mme de Montespan had maintained her position as royal mistress by recourse to black magic, poison and sexual stimulants, such claims tallied alarmingly with the evidence of another suspect detained at Vincennes who had recently become a key figure in the inquiry.

  * * *

  The name of this informant was Marie Marguerite Montvoisin, and she was the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the late Mme Voisin. She was now an orphan: by an irony her father, who had survived la Voisin’s numerous attempts to poison him, had died of natural causes in May 1679. It is not quite clear why Marie had been arrested in the first place. Perhaps it was simply thought that since she had lived with her mother and had been constantly in her company, she must inevitably know a great deal about her activities. At any rate, by 16 January 1680 it had been decided that it would be worthwhile to take her and two of her brothers into custody, and formal warrants were issued for their arrest ten days later.29

  The Controller-General of Finance, Colbert, would later seek to discredit Marie’s testimony by arguing that, having realised she would inevitably face execution if brought to trial, she had sought to avert this fate by adopting a desperate stratagem. ‘In this position, she felt all the terrors of torture and death. One is naturally ingenious in these extremities,’ he observed. Yet, in fact, until she herself suggested otherwise, there was little reason to think that Marie had been more than peripherally involved in her mother’s activities. At one point she herself pleaded she had never been anything other than a helpless bystander and that, though it had not escaped her that women were asking la Voisin to rid them of their husbands, ‘as an unmarried girl devoid of wealth and without any means of subsisting away from her mother’, she could do nothing to prevent this.30 However, this attempt to portray herself as a passive observer conflicted with other accounts she gave suggesting she had been at the centre of a treasonous conspiracy masterminded by her mother.

  One of the few compelling reasons to accept Marie’s evidence as truthful is that her revelations damaged her own prospects. Had she been more circumspect there is a good chance that she would ultimately have been discharged, but once she had spoken out that became unthinkable. Perhaps she simply failed to assess the situation correctly and assumed she was in worse trouble than was, in fact, the case. It is unlikely, however, that fear provided the sole motive for her startling declarations. Reading her evidence, it is hard to escape the suspicion that she relished being the centre of attention and enjoyed depicting herself as a person of consequence whom her mother had entrusted with fearful secrets.

  It was not, perhaps, surprising that Marie was a far from stable character. La Reynie described her as impulsive and fiery, ‘with a strange cast of mind’, and when first imprisoned she had tried to commit suicide by self-strangulation. Her background could hardly have been more unsettling, for even as a child she had been aware that ‘strange things’ went on in her mother’s house.

  At the time, care had been taken to conceal their exact nature, but the sense that things were being kept from her had merely stimulated her inquisitive nature and encouraged her tendency to fantasise. She possessed a vivid imagination as well as being an accomplished liar and by the time she reached adulthood she was – as Colbert put it – ‘cunning and ingenious to an extent that is inconceivable in one of her age and condition’.31

  Marie’s mental equilibrium cannot have been aided by the emotional turmoil she had experienced within the past two years. Prior to her mother’s arrest she had become pregnant by a lover who had seduced her on promise of marriage and then abandoned her. Fearful of what her mother might do, Marie had turned for help to the midwife Mme Lepère. The latter had either carried out an abortion or delivered Marie of a child that had failed to survive. In the spring of 1679 the shocking arrest of Marie’s mother (towards whom Marie’s feelings are hard to define) was followed in quick succession by the death of her father and this can hardly have failed to have affected her. It is true that Lesage once indicated that Marie had been aware of her mother’s attempts to poison Montvoisin and he implied she had not minded in the least. On the other hand Marie herself gave the impression she had been fond of her father. According to her, far from conniving at her mother’s attempts to murder him, she had only narrowly avoided dying alongside him. She claimed that she had been poisoned on at least two occasions, once accidentally, when she drank some soup prepared for her father and once after she had displeased her mother by talking too freely.32 It is difficult to assess the truth of all this but at the very least it would be fair to say that Marie’s family life had been unusually disturbed. It was particularly unfortunate that La Reynie’s investigation would come to hinge so much on this highly strung and manipulative young woman.

  * * *

  La Reynie hoped that Marie would be able to clarify various matters which had remained unresolved at the time of la Voisin’s execution. It particularly worried him that la Voisin had admitted that at the time of her arrest she had been planning to present a petition to the King. The petition had related to a lover of la Voisin’s named Denis Poculot, Sieur de Blessis. This man, who at one time owned a business that manufactured artificial marble, had met la Voisin in 1676 when she had drawn up his horoscope. After that they had continued to meet secretly at the house of the divineress la Delaporte.33

  La Reynie believed there was ample evidence that Blessis was an extremely dangerous man. Prior to her execution Marie Bosse had said that he knew how to poison gloves, while Lesage had related that la Voisin’s husband had once burst out that it was ‘that bugger of an apothecary’ Blessis who had taught her to poison shirts and handkerchiefs. La Voisin herself never confirmed that he had such expertise, though under torture she conceded he knew how to make some kinds of poison. She acknowledged, too, that Blessis had once offered to arrange for her husband to be poisoned and recalled that he had once referred to orpiment as ‘the father of poisons’.34

  It is clear, however, that Blessis’s abiding interest was alchemy. He had persuaded la Voisin and others that a dying Italian in Perpignan had given him the formula for a ‘projection powder’, which would enable him to convert base metal into gold. La Voisin became convinced that Blessis would make her fortune after he pulled off the remarkable feat of making silver using goat’s fat, though he was never able to repeat the procedure.35

  Unfortunately, word of Blessis’s prowess soon reached others, with the result that he became a victim of his own propaganda. Hear
ing that he could convert copper into silver, a cousin of M. de Montespan’s named Roger, Marquis de Termes decided he would exploit Blessis’s knowledge for his own enrichment. In late 1678 Blessis was abducted and detained in Termes’s chateau. Two furnaces had been installed in one of the towers and it was made clear to Blessis that he would not be permitted to leave until he had performed the miracle required of him.

  La Voisin had been dismayed to be deprived of her lover, who she had hoped would bring her fabulous riches. After she had consulted with various friends of Blessis, it was agreed she should submit a petition to the King, requesting that he order the Marquis de Termes to release Blessis. Despite the difficulties of gaining access to the King, la Voisin had been determined to present this document personally to Louis.

  When people wished to petition the King, the normal procedure was for them to place their written request on a table set up every Monday in the guardroom of whichever palace the King currently occupied. At the beginning of the reign the King himself had sat behind the table as the petitions were laid there, but in recent years he had delegated this task to Louvois. The petitions submitted in this way were generally returned about a week later, marked to indicate whether they would be granted, rejected or given further consideration.36

  On occasion individuals were still able to hand petitions personally to the King, though to do so they had to gain the assistance of someone who could facilitate an approach to him. In 1678 an English visitor to Versailles saw a poor woman present a petition to the King as he sat at dinner and was impressed by the graceful manner in which Louis received it, ‘with abundance of sweetness mixed with majesty’. Two years earlier the Comte d’Armagnac had introduced François Grandet to the King as the latter made his way to mass and Grandet had seized the opportunity to present Louis with a petition from the townspeople of Angers. Their request was subsequently granted though, in fact, this was an unusual outcome. Grandet was later told that petitions presented in this way were generally left in the King’s pocket when he changed his coat and Louis tended to forget all about them.37