City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Despite its dangers, a vibrant city still beckoned. Some heeded the siren call of the city’s drinking holes. Most streets boasted at least two or three taverns of varying repute. They advertised themselves with colorful names like the Cradle, the Lion’s Ditch, or the Fat Grape—and they attracted neighborhood locals eager to eat, drink, or pick a fight.

  Paris did not have a centralized police force until the late seventeenth century. Instead policing responsibility for the city lay in the hands of just forty-eight commissioners—fewer than one commissioner for every fifteen thousand Parisians. In theory each commissioner maintained order in the quarter in which he lived, but the commissioners learned quickly that fighting crime did not pay. What did pay was the mountain of bureaucratic and legal tasks required after crimes were committed. A visit to a commissioner’s home, which served as his office, was the first stop in the long, and often expensive, process toward finding justice. The commissioner scanned each person who walked through the door for signs of his or her ability to pay. One commissioner, Nicolas de Vendosme, certainly made such an assessment when a local laborer came to lodge a complaint on behalf of his two sons, who worked as apprentices to a woodcarver. The agitated father declared that the woodcarver had pushed his sons into the muddy street and swung a mallet at one of them. It was sheer luck, the father explained, that the woodcarver did not break his son’s leg.

  Vendosme explained that a simple complaint against the woodcarver would set the father back fifteen sols, nearly three-quarters of a day’s pay. For this the woodcarver would receive formal notification that his actions were not acceptable. If the father wished to pursue the matter in court, there would be additional fees. To begin with, paper was not free. It cost well over one sol per page, and they would need plenty of it for letters and court filings. Witnesses also expected compensation for their testimony. Then there were the clerks who required payment when they filed the complaint with the court. All this would be in addition to the commissioner’s own honorarium, which would be determined by the complexity of the case. In all, the father would be facing at least three livres, the equivalent of three full days of the workman’s wages, to pursue litigation against the woodcarver. Still, this was reasonable in comparison to the seven livres in fees that the director of a royal textile factory paid, or the ten livres that a duchess paid for similar services. When it came to seventeenth-century justice, the more one was thought able to pay, the more one usually did.

  On the Left Bank of the Seine sat the castle-like Châtelet compound, which housed courtrooms as well as a prison where convicted prisoners languished following judgment. Châtelet was divided into two bureaucratic fiefdoms. One was the dominion of d’Aubray, the civil lieutenant, who served as the overall head of Châtelet. He decided disputes among individuals and groups that had implications for the public good of the city. The other was that of the criminal lieutenant, Jacques Tardieu, who had jurisdiction over most crimes committed in Paris. Like the commissioners, the lieutenants (and their staffs) were paid by the plaintiff for their efforts. Determining the jurisdiction of a case—especially high-profile ones that involved the wealthy—brought out bitter infighting. During much of the seventeenth century the legal system at Châtelet ground to a halt as the magistrates battled, often for months on end, for the right to hear certain cases.

  “Day and night they kill here, we have arrived at the dregs of all centuries,” wrote Guy Patin, a doctor at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. As if things could not be any worse, the city reached its boiling point on one hot August day in 1665, when the criminal lieutenant himself was murdered in broad daylight.

  René and François Touchet spent weeks spying on the home belonging to Criminal Lieutenant Jacques Tardieu, logging the comings and goings from the Left Bank household. Tardieu’s home was a classic example of the type of luxurious hôtels particuliers (city estates) that only the most affluent Parisians could afford. A tall, imposing wall separated the Tardieu family from the filth and noise of the streets surrounding it. A pair of twenty-foot-high wooden doors opened into a large courtyard, providing yet another buffer from the violent world outside.

  With each passing day the Touchet brothers became more convinced that a bounty of riches lay behind the high walls. The seventy-two year old Tardieu attended mass regularly at Notre-Dame, a short carriage ride away from his home on the quai des Orfèvres. René and François, both in their early twenties, lay in wait one Sunday morning until the large wooden doors of the compound opened to release several carriages and a stream of servants on foot. Believing the house to be empty, the brothers scaled the wall, entered the home through an open window, and began ransacking it for jewels, money, and other precious items.

  They did not realize that the elderly Tardieu had chosen to stay at home that day. The thought of joining the crowds to celebrate the Feast of Saint Bartholomew was too exhausting. Instead he and his wife sent the other members of the family off, preferring to remain at home on their own.

  A frightening scream pierced Tardieu’s peaceful morning. It was the cry of his wife in an adjoining room. He scrambled from his bed as fast as his aging body allowed and shuffled down the long corridor in search of her. Moments later Tardieu heard a sickening series of sounds: the cocking of a pistol trigger, the earsplitting explosion of a bullet, followed by a dull thud. When he finally reached his wife’s room, he saw her sprawled on the floor, blood pooling around her lifeless body.

  With a strength that belied his age, Tardieu lunged at the thieves, battling the Touchet brothers for the gun. One of the brothers dropped the weapon and kicked it swiftly across the room. As Tardieu crouched to retrieve it, the second brother reached underneath his belt and removed a dagger. With four strokes to the neck, Tardieu crumpled to the floor.

  Servants discovered the couple’s corpses when they returned from church. Shocked, they ran into the streets screaming. The local guardsmen came and, after searching the home, they found the younger of the two brothers crouching on the roof. The elder, hiding in the cellar and covered in blood, eventually surrendered.

  The brothers were charged with murder and sentenced to death. In a public spectacle not far from Tardieu’s courtrooms, criminals were executed as Parisians crowded into the square to watch.

  Tardieu’s murder stunned the city’s nobility. If even the criminal lieutenant, the man responsible for sentencing violent criminals, was not safe in Paris, then who was? The answer arrived the following year when Tardieu’s counterpart and rival, Civil Lieutenant François Dreux d’Aubray, was also murdered. This time death came not by a gun or a dagger, but by poison.

  In the months following Tardieu’s murder, Dreux d’Aubray’s career had blossomed. The criminal lieutenant’s death left no question of who was in charge of legal affairs at the Châtelet. D’Aubray was an energetic man, whose lively eyes and wry smile belied a deep seriousness in both his professional and personal affairs. From dawn each morning until well into the late evening, d’Aubray could be found in his chambers in the heart of the Châtelet. Wearing a long, black robe and triangular cap, he decided the fates of Parisians.

  D’Aubray lived in an elaborately decorated estate on the rue du Bouloi, alongside many of the city’s other grand legal and financial families. D’Aubray was the father of two sons, each holding high-ranking positions in the royal government. The elder, Antoine, was in line to succeed him as civil lieutenant. His daughter, however, was another matter.

  Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray had been blessed with a petite frame and porcelain skin. Her intense blue eyes paired nicely with a striking air of confidence that she inherited from her father. Headstrong and passionate, she had been a precocious child with an uncanny ability to talk her way out of anything. So it came as a relief to her father when, at the age of twenty-one, Marie-Madeleine agreed to marry one of the most-sought-after bachelors in Paris, the wealthy and handsome Antoine Gobelin, the marquis of Brinvilliers.

  D’Aubray was initially optimistic ab
out the marriage, hopeful that his daughter would finally settle down. It seemed a good match with a promising future. The marquis owned an estate in the wealthy Marais quarter on the Right Bank of Paris, a gift from his family when he was just sixteen years old. With the intention that the young man would soon marry, the marquis’s parents decorated the house with the best furnishings that money could buy: mahogany consoles topped with marble, silk-upholstered chairs with painstakingly carved wooden legs, and more than enough silver place settings for the long table that filled the large dining room.

  The marquis’s wealth also caught the eye of Jean-Baptiste Godin, a man of “mean birth” who was biding his time in the army as a horseman until he could find a more profitable pursuit. Godin may have lacked money, but he did not lack guile and ambition. He had a lively and upbeat manner about him that was enticing, even seductive. With the flash of a smile, he could persuade just about anyone around him to yield, happily and willingly, to his wishes—especially when it came to money. Eschewing his past as an illegitimate child, Godin assumed the more noble and pious-sounding name of Sainte-Croix.

  The marquis of Brinvilliers found a kindred spirit in Sainte-Croix and invited him to live in his sprawling Marais home. Sainte-Croix did not question his luck in attracting such a profitable friendship. Instead he immediately looked for a way to exploit it, which did not take long.

  Despite his family’s wealth, Brinvilliers seemed incapable of managing his own finances. With the encouragement of Sainte-Croix, the marquis denied himself and his friends nothing at the gambling tables or for their mistresses. Soon the only assets that remained were the house in which the couple lived and the marquise de Brinvilliers’s generous dowry from her father. Dreux d’Aubray worried that this too would disappear.

  Protective of both his reputation and what was left of his fortune, d’Aubray used his connections to make a legal arrangement that disentangled his daughter’s wealth, and that of the d’Aubray family more generally, from the couple’s marital property. Now nearly penniless and made a social outcast by the more powerful d’Aubray, the marquis de Brinvilliers had little choice, if he wanted to maintain a semblance of wealth, but to allow the marquise de Brinvilliers to live her life exactly as she wished. To her father’s dismay, she became swept up in a passionate affair with her husband’s best friend, Sainte-Croix.

  It did not matter to Sainte-Croix whether the marquise’s interest in him was born of spite for her husband’s reckless infidelity or whether it came from a font of untapped desire. In the marquise of Brinvilliers, Sainte-Croix saw a bounty of riches he could exploit. Playful flirting soon turned into regular romantic interludes, often in her own home. “I am,” the marquise confessed to Sainte-Croix, “yours with all my heart.”

  No amount of shaming or threats from her father could separate the marquise de Brinvilliers from the man she claimed to love. Her two brothers, Antoine and François, also made similar entreaties to their sister, all to little effect. Seeing no other choice, the elder d’Aubray turned to the king for help.

  Members of the nobility could, and frequently did, petition the king for a lettre de cachet (letter of the signet). For well-connected members of court, it took just a strategic whisper and an offending person would quickly be ushered away, never to be heard from again. The letters were a convenient means for dysfunctional noble families to settle scores. As one aristocrat wrote in support of lettres de cachet, “The honor of a family requires that anyone who, by vile and abject morals, brings shame be made to disappear.” These letters were executed on the simple signature of the king or his scribe, perfunctorily countersigned by a royal minister, and then folded and sealed with wax and embossed with the royal insignia. Letters of the signet were used so often that the king’s secretary designed preprinted arrest requests in which a name and a date need only be inserted.

  In March 1663 d’Aubray received notice that the king approved his request to separate Sainte-Croix from his daughter. A group of royal guards on horseback surrounded the marquise’s carriage as it made its way across the Pont Neuf. The bridge had a reputation for drawing some of the city’s most unruly crowds, and it did not take long before gawkers, drunks, and cutpurses swarmed around the carriage to watch the show. Ignoring the marquise’s loud protests, the guards pulled Sainte-Croix from the coach and carted him off to the Bastille.

  The marquise de Brinvilliers never forgave her father for his actions. Still, she had little choice but to rebuild her relationship with him, as she relied on his largesse to finance a noble lifestyle that her husband could now ill afford. Also, her father was getting on in years. There would be more money to come in the future if she made peace with him.

  Three years after Sainte-Croix’s arrest, d’Aubray felt relief that his daughter seemed to have come to her senses. Not only were they on speaking terms again, but also by the end of June 1666, they embarked on a trip to the family’s country estate together.

  D’Aubray had been unwell for several days. He fought bouts of nausea and fatigue that came in unpredictable waves, but he resolved to undertake the journey. There were important matters that he needed to discuss with the farmers at his estate. The château in Offémont sat in a densely wooded region about fifty miles northeast of Paris. It took a full day of traveling to get there, and d’Aubray was eager to leave as early as possible. The journey did not start well, however. The marquise arrived late at their meeting point and refused to allow a large leather vanity case to be strapped to the top of the carriage with the other valises. She insisted it must remain at all times in her sight, even if it meant less room in the carriage for the two of them.

  By midday d’Aubray and his daughter reached the small village of Senlis, where they planned a short rest at the Pewter Kettle. Their arrival at the auberge caused a stir, as it was not often that such an elaborate carriage was seen in these parts. Several locals leaned out of the inn’s upper windows to catch a glimpse of d’Aubray and his daughter as they regained the road to Offémont.

  When they arrived at the estate late that night, the exhausted d’Aubray collapsed into a chair. Despite his lack of appetite, he took comfort in the kindness of his once-estranged daughter, who ordered the servants to prepare her father a warm and soothing broth. She even spooned the liquid into his mouth. He did not eat much, just enough to restore him before announcing that he was ready to retreat to his room in the hope of getting a good night’s sleep. The marquise joined her father as he made his way upstairs. She took her vanity case with her.

  Hours later d’Aubray screamed in pain, which woke the servants. Running to their master’s room, they found him clutching his stomach and moaning about “strange heat in his entrails.” He began to vomit violently.

  In better days the isolation of the family estate within the wooded forests of the Oise region provided respite from the busy world of Paris. Now its remoteness brought only panic. The civil lieutenant seemed to be near death, and there was no doctor nearby. The marquise stayed by her father’s side as the servants carried him down the stone stairs of the château and into the main courtyard, where a carriage waited. Once they were settled inside, the driver raced back to Paris.

  For two months after his return, d’Aubray languished in bed, his days marked by pain. Friends, family, and doctors rotated in and out of his home to offer care and support. No amount of bloodletting seemed to improve his condition. Nor did efforts to strengthen him through wine, broth, or herbal tinctures. The civil lieutenant refused to eat, and when he did he was often not able to hold the food down. With every day that passed, hope dimmed.

  Barely able to speak but practical to the end, d’Aubray dictated his last will and testament on September 7, 1666. He divided his assets among his daughter and her two brothers. D’Aubray’s son François traveled from Orléans, where he worked as a lawyer, to be at his father’s bedside. “You cannot know,” he wrote at six o’clock in the morning on the day before his father died, “just how difficult and upsett
ing it is to see a person who is so dear to me in such extreme peril.” At eleven o’clock the next morning final rites were administered; by that evening d’Aubray was dead.

  Friends and family speculated whether poison had been to blame. D’Aubray’s symptoms suggested it. But as quickly as they brought forward the possibility, they also dismissed it. D’Aubray had been ill before the trip to Offémont. Moreover, the only person close enough to poison d’Aubray at Offémont was the marquise. The very idea was preposterous. Surely a woman “raised in an honest family, who had such a pleasant face and complexion, and appeared so good natured” could not be capable of poisoning her own father. Equally reluctant to pursue the question, the civil lieutenant’s doctors declared that the sixty-six-year-old man had died of a sudden return of gout, an illness he had battled several years earlier.

  It would take another ten years for the full truth of d’Aubray’s death to be uncovered. Once it was, no one could have imagined the many more murders still yet to emerge from the shadows.

  2

  City of Light

  Paris was an embarrassment to Louis XIV. The criminal lieutenant had been murdered, and the civil lieutenant lay dead under suspicious circumstances as well. The king knew that a ruler who was unable to control his capital could be perceived as inefficient or, worse, weak.

  He charged Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his trusted minister and controller-general of finance, with the gargantuan task of reforming the police. Nicknamed “le Nord” (the North) for his icy demeanor, Colbert had proved his unwavering dedication to the king when he uncovered a large stash of hidden assets that his predecessor, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, had left behind following his death. Not long after, the king appointed the financially cautious Colbert superintendent of buildings, giving him responsibility for all construction efforts in Paris and at Versailles. A year later, in 1665, his portfolio expanded to include the Ministry of Finance. Colbert had dominion over every area of royal administration except the military—a restriction that would eventually cause much infighting between Colbert and the marquis de Louvois, the minister of war.