The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV
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In the end she met her death in exemplary style. In May 1707 she had just arrived at Bourbon to take the waters when she was suddenly taken ill. Her condition worsened after the Maréchale de Clairambault gave her an overdose of emetic and it became apparent she would not survive. Saint-Simon recorded that ‘nothing could have been more edifying than her final hours’. She called her servants to her and proclaimed her regret for her sins, apologising for her bouts of ill temper and the scandal she had caused. Betraying no sign of the dread of death from which she had suffered in the past, she received the final sacraments evincing a serene confidence in the mercy of God.23
The news was at once sent to the King at Marly. Saint-Simon maintained that the King appeared callously indifferent to her death and that when the Duchesse de Bourgogne expressed surprise at this, he told her that Mme de Montespan had been dead to him ever since her departure from court. It seems, however, that the news did not fail to move him, for the diarist Dangeau recorded that on that day the King broke his usual routine by walking in his gardens till nightfall. As for Mme de Maintenon, much as she had detested Mme de Montespan, the news of her death left her strangely shaken. Ever since Athénaïs had left court, Mme de Maintenon had resolutely severed all contact with her, making it clear she did not want to receive even an occasional letter. Yet, on learning of her death, she secluded herself on her chaise percée to have a good weep and she told her confidante the Princesse d’Ursins that she had inevitably been affected by the loss of a person who had always excited strong emotions in her.24
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Two years later, on 14 June 1709, the former Lieutenant-General of the Paris Police, Nicolas de La Reynie, died at the great age of eighty-four. Civic-minded to the last, he left instructions that his body should not be interred in a vault within a church, as he did not want ‘the rotting of my body to contribute to the corruption and infection of the air in the place where the holy mysteries are celebrated’.25
In 1686 the King had demonstrated his continuing high regard for La Reynie by making him a Councillor of State, a post to which he had long aspired. For some years, however, he had also remained in charge of the Paris police, only relinquishing the position in 1697. By then he was ‘worn out by age and work’ but even so, Saint-Simon had so high an opinion of his abilities that he was sad the King did not appoint La Reynie to succeed M. Boucherat as Chancellor when the latter died in 1699.26
During La Reynie’s lifetime the King had relied on his fidelity and discretion to prevent the public from discovering that Mme de Montespan had been linked with the Affair of the Poisons, even though others had thought that more stringent precautions were necessary. In 1681 Colbert’s legal adviser, Duplessis, had recommended that the records of the Chambre Ardente’s proceedings should be burnt as they were filled with ‘execrable impieties and abominable filth whose memory … should not be conserved’.27 At the time this course had not been followed, perhaps because the King thought La Reynie would have interpreted such action as an implicit criticism of his conduct of the case. However, now that La Reynie could raise no objection, the King sought to obliterate all the evidence implicating Mme de Montespan.
In 1681 the documents relating to ‘the particular facts’ about Mme de Montespan had been entrusted to Sagot, Recorder of the Chambre Ardente. Then, nine years later, they were transferred into the custody of the King’s secretary, Gaudion. On 13 July 1709, a month after the death of La Reynie, the King sent Chancellor Pontchartrain to retrieve the coffer containing the documents from Gaudion. When it was brought to him in the council chamber, Louis unlocked the coffer with a key which had belonged to La Reynie. Having perused the documents it contained, he methodically burnt them.28
Presumably the King believed that by doing this he would protect Mme de Montespan’s reputation for ever and, for a remarkably long time, he succeeded. None of Mme de Montespan’s contemporaries were aware of the accusations that had been levelled against her and for 150 years after her death the same secrecy was preserved. However, it turned out that La Reynie had kept other copies of the documents Louis XIV had burnt in 1709 and in the second half of the nineteenth century these came to light. François Ravaisson devoted four volumes of his work Les Archives de la Bastille to reproducing the records of the Chambre Ardente and when these were published in 1870–4 the black legend that Mme de Montespan was a murderer and worshipper of the devil at once came into existence.
Those who did not find the available evidence absolutely convincing still hesitated to exonerate Mme de Montespan, for it was assumed that some of the documents destroyed by the King might have contained irrevocable proof of her guilt. However, this is most unlikely. Colbert had access to all the documents detailing the accusations against her and in his searching analysis of them he never refers to any evidence that cannot be found either in Ravaisson’s work or in various Paris archives. Although there are areas of the Affair of the Poisons which are not fully documented (for example, the records relating to the trial of the Maréchal de Luxembourg are incomplete), we can feel reasonably confident that nothing damaging to Mme de Montespan has been hidden from us.
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In late June 1681, when the Chambre Ardente was at its most active, one of its commissioners boasted to an acquaintance, ‘You cannot imagine the good this Chamber has done.’ It is questionable, however, whether his pride in the Chamber’s achievements was justified. The commissioners would no doubt have argued that their greatest service lay in having safeguarded the life of the King, which had been shown to be menaced by poisoners. Yet from what we know of the plots against Louis XIV uncovered by the Chamber, it is hard to believe that his life had ever been in any danger. There is, of course, no disputing that, as the Marquis de Sourches approvingly noted, during its three years of existence the Chamber ‘purged France of several monsters’.29 Marie Bosse and Mme Voisin, for example, were each responsible for more than one murder and merited severe punishment. On the other hand there was no need to set up a special commission to bring them to justice, for they could have been satisfactorily dealt with by the normal course of law.
It is worth querying exactly how much poisoning was going on in France prior to the establishment of the Chamber, even though it is difficult to give a precise answer. La Reynie, for one, had no doubt at all as to the scale of the problem. In a memorandum penned in early 1682 he asserted, ‘Human life is publicly up for sale; [poisoning] is practically the only remedy used in all family troubles; sacrilege, impieties and abominations are commonly practised in Paris, the provinces and the countryside.’ This was certainly an exaggeration but others who were not altogether uncritical of the Chambre Ardente did believe that poisoning was becoming more widespread and that firm action was needed to suppress it. The Marquis de La Fare, for example, recorded in his memoirs that it was right to have set up a commission ‘to punish culprits and to halt the progress of this crime which increased every day’.30
However, if one tries to give figures for cases of poisoning which occurred in the fifteen years before the Chamber was set up, the numbers do not appear very significant. Besides the three victims of Mme de Brinvilliers, one can put forward the names of M. Faurye (who was probably poisoned by Magdelaine de La Grange), M. Brunet, M. Leféron, the Marquis de Canilhac, M. Lescalopier and M. Ferry. It is possible, too, that Mme Anne Carada poisoned the wife of her lover. There were others who could be said to have been fortunate to have escaped with their lives. If Mme de Dreux had been left at liberty she might have progressed to poisoning her husband or the Duchesse de Richelieu; Mme Poulaillon might have succeeded in harming her husband. Had Mme Voisin continued to operate, the toll of victims would doubtless have continued to mount and may indeed have been higher than can be proved. Both Marie Montvoisin and Lesage named numerous other clients of la Voisin who allegedly sought her help in murdering individuals, but it is impossible to ascertain whether this was so.
In the absence of efficient forensic techniques, establish
ing that a long dead person was a victim of poisoning was highly problematic. As Colbert’s legal adviser, Duplessis, noted at one point, it was difficult to attain the truth in an instance where ‘for example, a man has died several years ago in the arms of his family; poison has not been suspected; he has been buried and his body has not been inspected; later on, an accusation of poison occurs. In this case, how can one convict the author of the crime, when one cannot really prove that a crime has been committed?’31 It is improbable, however, that large numbers of poisonings went undetected. On the contrary, indeed, the problem tended to be overstated for in the absence of scientific proof, all too often deaths that did not deserve to be considered suspicious were wrongly attributed to poison. During the Affair of the Poisons it was alleged that Chancellor d’Aligre, M. Lionne, the former Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the late President of the Paris Parlement, Guillaume Lamoignon, had all been poisoned, but there is no evidence to suggest their deaths were anything other than natural.
Disproportionate fears as to the prevalence of poisoning excited irrational panic. One source claimed that following the revelations of the Brinvilliers case, ‘Every father suspects his son and closely watches his movements … Children take precautions against their parents; a brother or sister does not dare eat anything brought by another brother or sister.’ Primi Visconti recorded that at the time of the Affair of the Poisons, ‘Almost no one trusted his friends any more … As soon as someone felt ill from having eaten too much, he believed he had been poisoned.’ Commonplace cases of gastroenteritis and stomach upset resulted in chefs and servants being arrested, prompting one wag to remark that if all the bad cooks in Paris were seized, the prisons would soon be overflowing.32
Nerves were overstretched at court as elsewhere and in the autumn of 1680 the tendency to leap to unfortunate conclusions was illustrated when a servant of the new Dauphine’s named Bessola fell ill and poison was assumed to be the cause. Two scullery boys were immediately taken into custody, even though there was no proof they had committed any crime, and they were only released when Bessola recovered. It was then grudgingly acknowledged that her illness had not been caused by anything untoward but, as the Comte de Bussy commented, ‘In the era of the Chambre Ardente, anything a bit out of the ordinary passes for poison.’33
Fears of this kind were naturally exacerbated by the fact that when unexpected deaths occurred, medical science was often not sufficiently far advanced to establish the true cause. Few people displayed the caution of the Marquis de Sourches who in 1689, when others at court were confidently asserting that the Queen of Spain had been poisoned, noted soberly, ‘It would be dangerous to reason in this way about all sudden deaths … as young people die just as often as old ones.’34 When the Affair of the Poisons was at its height those capable of bringing such a measured judgement to bear were scarcer still.
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If it is difficult to estimate whether poisoning was on the increase at this period, it is impossible to know whether children had really been sacrificed in black magic ceremonies in Paris. Obviously, at a time when poverty and lack of contraception ensured that there were many unwanted babies, finding infant victims would not have presented an insuperable problem and, given the strength of people’s belief in the devil, one cannot rule out that such horrors took place. One must, however, be wary of being too credulous. La Reynie took the view that the descriptions of child sacrifice supplied by Marie Montvoisin and Etienne Guibourg were so detailed and vivid that they must have been present at these events, but his reasoning was flawed. History abounds with cases where ‘witches’ have confessed to participating in atrocities and abominations, which we know to be fictitious.35
A recent authority has suggested that under relentless interrogation witches ‘engaged in a peculiar kind of dialogue with their interlocutors, adapting their responses to meet expectations’ and it is now recognised that under extreme stress individuals will ‘mingle themes from their cultural milieu with elements derived from dream and fantasy to generate self-incriminating narratives which have their own psychological significance’. Even in Britain today, allegations that children are being ritually murdered by Satanists are regularly made, but when such claims have been investigated by the police, horrific eyewitness accounts of cannibalism and infanticide have invariably been shown to be imaginary. On the other hand the recent discovery in the River Thames of the body of a male child who is thought to have been murdered so that his body parts could be used to make black magic medicines does make one cautious about asserting that similar things could not have happened in France more than 300 years ago.36
Fears that children were being kidnapped and murdered for such purposes provoked bouts of hysteria in Paris long after the Chambre Ardente had been disbanded. In 1701 the Royal Attorney at the Châtelet reported that fresh rumours that a high-ranking person was having children butchered in order to bathe in their blood had led to widespread disorder. The Attorney remarked wearily that this was an all too familiar phenomenon. ‘These fancies and movements of popular fury are not new; I have seen some happen which were carried to such excess that in various quarters of Paris there were women who were almost beaten to death … because they were accused of being abductors of children’.37
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In the wake of the Affair of the Poisons, practical measures were instituted to reduce the incidence of poisoning. On 31 July 1682 a royal edict was registered in the Paris Parlement tightening up that area of the law.38 Having noted that poisoning was ‘not only the most dangerous and detestable [crime] of all but also the most difficult to discover’, it decreed that henceforth anyone convicted of supplying poison for murderous purposes, whether or not it resulted in fatalities, would be liable to the death penalty.
Because poison could be fabricated in laboratories supposedly devoted to the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, alchemy was now placed under scrutiny. The edict prohibited the private ‘preparation of drugs or distillations under pretext of [finding] chemical remedies or [doing] experiments … or searching for the Philosopher’s Stone’ unless those engaged in such research obtained an official permit to set up a workshop.
Furthermore, since in the past it had been too easy to obtain all forms of arsenic and mercury sublimate, restrictions were now placed on their sale. In future these substances could only be sold to professional men who were authorised to use them in the course of their work, such as doctors, apothecaries, surgeons, goldsmiths, dyers and blacksmiths. Whenever a purchase of poison was made by a legitimate person, the shopkeeper was required to inscribe the transaction in an official register kept for the purpose.
This was a sensible measure, which was later emulated by other countries. Bizarrely, however, it does not seem to have greatly diminished the fear of poison within France, for people there continued to display what Voltaire called their ‘unhappy propensity to suspect natural death of being occasioned by violent means’. In 1689 there were even renewed fears that the King himself was being targeted by poisoners after an anonymous letter was found referring to ‘a certain great tree, which must be felled’. To deal with the threat a new Chambre Ardente was set up in the Arsenal and La Reynie once again served as its rapporteur. On 27 June the Marquis de Sourches noted that there was a lot of talk in Paris about the executions ordered by this body. A carpenter who had posed as a physician had recently been put to death ‘for having poisoned several persons and carried out abortions for a large number of women.’ It was surmised that he had had some design against the King’s person and had been in secret communication with some exiled Huguenots, but this was not really proven.39
There was an irony in the fact that two years later Louvois, who had formerly been so active in persecuting poisoners, was himself believed to have fallen victim to poisoning. On 16 July 1691 he was in conference with the King when he suddenly felt unwell. Realising he was ill, Louis suggested that he withdraw, but soon after reaching his own apartments, the Minister collaps
ed and died in the arms of his doctor.40
An autopsy was carried out, which makes it plain he had suffered a pulmonary embolism that had impeded the flow of blood to the heart. Nevertheless, the fact that Louvois was known recently to have drunk from a pitcher of water that was kept constantly replenished in his study led to suspicions that he had been poisoned; these were much exacerbated when the King’s physician, D’Aquin, said he had been killed by ‘that sort of poison which blights the heart and suddenly blocks the circulation of the blood’. A floor polisher who had had access to the Minister’s study and who came from Savoy (with whom France was currently at war) was immediately arrested, though he was freed not long afterwards.41
Despite the lack of supporting evidence, people at court continued to believe Louvois had been poisoned. The Duchesse d’Orléans held typically robust views on the subject. Having toyed with the possibility that the Minister had been killed by his own sons, she next propounded the theory that he had been poisoned by her bête noire, Mme de Maintenon, who she claimed had long ago mastered ‘the art of Mme de Brinvilliers’.42 Within a few years, however, it would be brought home to Madame how horrible it was to cast such aspersions.
In April 1711 the King’s only legitimate son, the Grand Dauphin, died of smallpox. As usual the Duchesse d’Orléans believed he had been killed by ‘a terrible poison’. ‘I was told yesterday that after his death a black vapour was seen to rise from his mouth and his face turned as black as pitch and remained that colour,’ she breathlessly informed a correspondent.43