City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  In one of his daily reports to the king, La Reynie shared the case of a man named Orléans who had shouted “execrable blasphemies” after being hit, in his tender parts, during a handball match. Witnesses reported his actions to a local commissioner, who forwarded the case to La Reynie. Knowing that their friend was in trouble, several men raced to La Reynie’s headquarters at Châtelet to offer excuses on the man’s behalf. La Reynie said he would take the matter to the king. However, the man’s fate was by then all but sealed. In his letter La Reynie recommended “a long stay in prison, ordered by His Majesty, [to] allow the man to recognize his error and give him an opportunity to repent.” No record of the ultimate outcome survived, but the odds are very good that the king approved the recommendation.

  As part of his effort to address Parisian morality, La Reynie similarly showed no sympathy for the homeless. The earliest forms of hospitals—the hôtels-Dieu (houses of God), as they were called—had originally been established to heal tired and sick Christians traveling on religious pilgrimages. Now, the hôtels-Dieu provided a convenient place to incarcerate the poor, the mentally ill, and prostitutes in order to “reform” them. Living in cramped and unhygienic spaces, they received only minimal sustenance and were threatened with beatings if they did not obey the rules. To ensure full police involvement, La Reynie appointed himself to the board of directors overseeing hospitals, public charities, and orphanages.

  Despite some grumbling about La Reynie’s heavy-handedness, the early years of his work as police chief earned him much praise and goodwill throughout the city. “Thanks to your talents,” an appreciative Parisian wrote La Reynie, “everyone feels more secure in Paris . . . we don’t hear ‘Catch that thief’ anymore. Valets, who are sometimes so insolent, don’t carry swords, don’t insult anymore, and don’t hit people. The number of assassins, poisoners, prostitutes, and blasphemers has decreased, and the streets are much less muddy.” The Mercure Galant, France’s most influential society paper, also praised La Reynie: “Monsieur de la Reynie attempts nothing that does not pass; he has done things since he has been Lieutenant of the Police that were thought impossible, and which many ages attempted in vain. No judge could be more equitable, uncorrupt, or zealous in the service of his King. The populace is so obliged to him, they ought to contrive a way to eternalize his memory.”

  Louis XIV agreed, making his own contributions to the praiseworthy propaganda of La Reynie’s work. Two years after the police chief’s appointment, he commissioned a commemorative medal. It featured a woman, the allegorical representation of Paris, holding one of La Reynie’s lanterns in her hand, with the inscription: “Security and Clarity of the City 1669.”

  3

  The Street at the End of the World

  As much as La Reynie’s efforts transformed daily life in Paris, many things remained frustratingly out of his control. The Montorgueil quarter was one of them. The most impoverished and godforsaken place in Paris served as home to a violent network of criminals who catered to every dark desire imaginable.

  Meaning literally “mount pride,” Montorgeuil sat at the northern outskirts of the city. Ramshackle homes leaned precariously against one another in the tangled network of alleyways and narrow streets. Inside, families took turns sleeping on a single, shared mattress in their crowded quarters.

  For the even less fortunate, the streets were home. Men, women, and children made gaunt from hunger roamed the neighborhood dressed in dirty and tattered clothing that barely covered their skeletal frames. Some had found ways to fashion makeshift shoes from odd pieces of leather gathered from a nearby tannery, wrapping the leather around their feet with twine. Others trudged barefoot through the rank-smelling, ankle-deep mud as they pleaded with passersby for a coin or a scrap of bread. The desperation of the situation was captured in the very name of one of the quarter’s streets: la rue au Bout du Monde (the Street at the End of the World).

  In a darkened cul-de-sac steps from the Street at the End of the World lay the Court of Miracles. A place of legend, it inspired both fear and curiosity in onlookers. An old and rotting house half buried in the ground served as the only entry point to the most notorious den of organized crime in Paris. To get there, visitors descended a steep and winding bridge that led to the front door. Inside, the shack opened into a large subterranean network of tunnels extending all the way to the city’s ramparts. Rumor had it that more than five hundred men, women, and children lived together “without faith and laws” in these squalid underground caverns.

  Every day a motley army emerged from the Court of Miracles and fanned out across the city in search of loot. It ranged from elderly men and women who stood hunchbacked and quivering on crutches to children whose deformed limbs required them to be carted around in wheelbarrows: The more dramatic the show of suffering, the easier it was to profit from the guilty charity of the bourgeoisie and nobility. Indeed, the Court of Miracles got its name from the beggars, for whom the show of their infirmities was mostly an act. At the end of the day, wrote one observer, “they clean themselves up and become healthy and jolly in an instant—without any miracles.”

  Senior members of the Court of Miracles devised a system for training neophyte criminals in the fine art of petty theft. An apprentice thief began by practicing cutting a purse suspended from rafters—while standing precariously on an unstable platform. If the apprentice stole the purse but fell off, he was beaten—and made to repeat the drill until successful. Once the apprentice passed the first test, his mentors took him to a public place—a market, a church exit, a busy passageway—and told him to steal something. To teach him how to “maintain his sangfroid” his elders would yell into the crowd without warning: “Stop thief!” While the apprentice was being beaten by the victim and other witnesses, the older thieves used the distraction to steal cloaks, jewelry, money, and whatever else they could get their hands on.

  Nothing that took place at the Court of Miracles, however, could compare with the strange and troubling things that occurred a few streets away. At the heart of Montorgeuil stood the house of Catherine Voisin, palm reader, fortune-teller, and poison maker. Every day, women dressed in elegant clothing arrived at Madame Voisin’s door. They teetered precariously in their silk-covered high-heeled shoes as they exited their carriages. With one hand the women held a fan in front of their faces to protect their identity; with the other they hoisted their skirts to protect their dresses from the mud and the filth.

  Voisin dressed the part of the mysterious and powerful witch she claimed to be. She wore a long embroidered tunic over a green velvet robe, which she topped off with a flowing crimson cloak. Like most people of her day, Voisin believed in the power of herbs, charms, and spells. The intervention of otherworldly forces, whether God or the devil, determined all things in early European culture: success and failure, love and loss, health and sickness, life and death. Despite centuries-long efforts by the Church to tamp down superstitious practices, the distinctions between religion and magic were far from clear. Illiterate peasants and well-educated nobles alike consulted astrologers and believed in their prognostications. An astrologer had even been present at Louis XIV’s birth to draw up the new king’s chart. Silver and gold charms inscribed with protective symbols, called sigils, dangled from the necks of those who could afford them; and grimoires, or spell books, containing incantations to ensure achieving desires from clear skin to winning at cards, were often nestled among household remedy manuals.

  The women seeking Madame Voisin’s mystical help chased after the same dreams: love, passion—and when it all fell apart, coldhearted revenge. In whispers they confessed their deepest secrets to Voisin. But it was when words failed that Voisin demonstrated her uncanny ability to guess what troubled the distressed woman who sat across from her: unrequited love, an unfaithful lover, an illegitimate pregnancy, a miserable marriage, an abusive husband.

  Many of Voisin’s best clients were women of the nobility. Marriage, especially among the upper class
es, was rarely based on love. Instead it served to merge political and economic interests between families. A seventeenth-century priest reportedly told one of his penitents that loving one’s husband was something better left to the lower classes: “It is only six months since the sacrament joined you, and you still love your husband? I dare say your dressmaker has the same weakness for her own [spouse], but you, Madame, are a marquise.”

  During her initial meeting with a client, Voisin often shrugged as the woman shared her woes, telling her to take her troubles up with God. In fact there was a church right next door where she could pray and make confession. It was usually after Voisin’s perfunctory first dismissal that the desperate woman quickly got down to business and pressed Voisin for her assistance, the payment offered increasing with each rebuff.

  The many beauty products that Voisin sold from the ground floor of her home represented the most benign aspect of her profitable business. She offered fake eyebrows made of mouse hair and moleskin. She distilled herbs, such as argentine, known for removing red marks and sunspots. Voisin also mastered recipes for skin-whitening waters and washes, using traditional ingredients such as eggshells, milk, oil of poppy, or the juice of white melons.

  If beauty alone was insufficient to capture the heart of a potential lover, Voisin offered a wide range of love potions. She sold lip balms infused with special herbs that would make any man fall in love with the woman who kissed him while wearing them. She also crafted creams and perfumes made of the powder of dried moles, roosters’ combs, and menstrual blood—all of which were believed to have aphrodisiac properties. Another of Voisin’s arcane techniques involved taking pigeon hearts, drying them, and then crushing them into a love powder that the wishful client could then sprinkle onto the man’s dinner plate.

  It was, however, the shimmering powder of cantharis that was most prized as an aphrodisiac. Also called Spanish fly, cantharis came from an iridescent green beetle found on olive trees and honeysuckles. The beetle secretes a substance called cantharidin, which when ingested could cause a person’s blood vessels to swell—including and especially those in the genital area.

  Cantharis was usually administered as a powder or in a tincture mixed with other substances known for their aphrodisiac properties. An early treatise on sex and venereal disease offers the following recipe: “Take of civet, eight grains; amber-grise, six; the best musk, five; Indian oil of cinnamon, eight drops; distilled oil of nutmegs and mace, each four drops; tincture of cantharis, ten drops . . . with which anoint the nut of the yard and perineum before engaging with your wife, which will be of extraordinary efficacy for procreation for it stimulates and mightily prompts venery, causes titillation and delight.” Mixtures such as these apparently worked so well that the sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Paré reported the case of a man who suffered from a perpetual erection (the “most frightful satyriasis”) after swallowing a mixture of ground cantharis and nettles.

  Despite its presumed libidinous attributes, Spanish fly could also be poisonous if administered in too high a quantity, which it often was. An overdose of cantharis produced stomach ulcers followed by a “burning fever, vertigo, madness, restlessness, the brain being disturbed by . . . vapors lifted from the corroded and burnt parts of humors.”

  While Voisin was smart enough not to sample her own elixirs, she liked to drink. In those moments when alcohol numbed her discretion, she sometimes bragged about what happened in the shack in the courtyard of her home. It was here that Voisin frequently escorted women of all ages who worried about protecting their honor, their marriage, or both. “Voisin could make a lady’s bosom more bountiful or her mouth more diminutive,” wrote one contemporary familiar with what happened at the woman’s house. “She also knew just what to do for a nice girl who had gotten herself into trouble.”

  In the small dirty shack Voisin gruffly instructed her nervous clients to hike up their heavy skirts and lie on a bloodstained wooden table. Next came an order to take a deep breath and remain still. Some moaned, others stifled screams. But in every case, entrance to the shack was invariably followed by pain and loss.

  A lodger in Voisin’s home claimed to have discovered the remnants of her procedures. Finding himself alone in the courtyard, he lifted the stained fabric curtain that served as a door to the small wooden hut. Inside he saw something he would never forget. Countless fragments of tiny bones sat charred in piles of ash: a miniature skull here, a tiny jawbone there. Perhaps Voisin had not been exaggerating, the lodger later recalled, when she estimated with pride that she had burned the corpses of more than 2,500 aborted children.

  In theory, abortion was a crime punishable by death. In 1660 the noble classes of Paris were abuzz about the death of Mademoiselle de Guerchi, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Finding herself pregnant with the child of her married lover, Monsieur de Vitry, she turned to a midwife for help. While it is not exactly clear what type of procedure the midwife performed, Guerchi died in her care several hours later. A court case followed. Under intense interrogation the midwife admitted that she had helped Guerchi abort her unwanted child. For the crime of killing an unborn fetus, the midwife was sentenced to death by hanging. Denied a Catholic burial, her body was burned publicly on a funeral pyre as a cautionary tale for other women.

  Yet if Voisin’s constant stream of clients was any indication, she was willing to take the risk. Voisin worked in partnership with a midwife named Catherine Lepère. When a woman worried about late periods, Voisin sent her first to Lepère’s home. The elderly widow, who wore all black and looked the image of a witch, usually sold her a small bottle filled with ruby-red liquid in exchange for money, splitting the profits with Voisin. “Take this,” the old woman would say, “You’ll see soon enough if you’re with child.” In those cases where the client was visibly pregnant, Lepère would nod to her adult daughter, Madame Leclerc, to retrieve a large clay pot from a high shelf filled with bottles, jars, and other containers. Setting the pot onto the table, Leclerc scooped a bit of powder into a small sachet and handed it to the woman, instructing her to add it to her next meal or glass of wine.

  The partnership between Lepère and Voisin had been lucrative, but Lepère groused on slow days that she was not making enough money. With a smile, her daughter bantered back, “So what you really want is that all women and girls be whores?” The mother never answered, but her silence was as good as a resounding yes.

  When Lepère’s powders did not work, the woman’s next stop was Voisin’s courtyard shack. “The secret [to a successful abortion],” Voisin later revealed, lay in “a little hollow syringe with a button that has a lot of holes in it.” The syringe was filled with warm water mixed with “a white substance” and injected into the woman’s uterus. The historical record does not indicate what Voisin and Lepère’s various powders and potions contained and how they worked. However, there was no dearth of “recipes” to end a pregnancy circulating in herbal manuals and in oral tradition. Plants such as celery, fern, juniper, and parsley were long believed to stimulate menstruation; and marjoram, peony, marigold, and pennyroyal were also lauded for being “wonderful for the womb.” Knowledgeable practitioners knew exactly what that meant, especially given that pennyroyal was most frequently used in a tincture or through intrauterine injections for abortions.

  In early modern Europe, both lay and learned people alike were convinced that the bodies of newborns—whether stillborn, aborted, or murdered immediately after birth—had mystical properties. Placentas were used as aphrodisiacs when dried into a powder or a cure for infertility when eaten raw, practices the Church condemned. Tradition also had it that the fat of children was what made witches’ brooms airborne, and dried umbilical cords served as wicks in the candles that illuminated their black Sabbaths.

  So as not to be accused of witchcraft, Voisin made a show of baptizing the aborted fetuses, sending her servant, Margo, to the church next door to fill a small pewter pot with holy water from the font. She also burn
ed the evidence of her business in a small oven in the garden.

  While some women came to Voisin for help with love and its consequences, others came looking for revenge. The priestess who could make a love potion could also, if she were so inclined, make a poison. And Voisin was always so inclined, for a good price.

  To help a client determined to get rid of her husband, Voisin asked for the man’s shirt. She would then bid adieu to her guest and pass the shirt to a trusted laundress, who washed it thoroughly with an arsenic-based soap. (In a pinch, the man’s shoes were also an option.) Buttoning his freshly pressed chemise, the husband unwittingly sealed his own fate. The rash appeared a few hours later, followed by blisters, nausea, vomiting, and finally death. For the husband whose skin resisted the poison, a second shirt would be ordered up nine or ten days later. In the meantime the family physician would diagnose the man with a pernicious case of syphilis, whose telltale sores earned the wife, his murderer, the sympathy of friends and family.

  In early Europe arsenic had long been the poison of choice. Also called mort-aux-rats (death to rats), it was easy enough to acquire in local apothecary shops for domestic purposes. Colorless, odorless, and tasteless, it could be used on clothing, in food, or via an enema (a staple in early household medicine) without detection. When administered in small doses over a long period of time, arsenic—as well as other common poisons such as opium, sulfur, antimony, and quicksilver—proved difficult to pinpoint with certainty in criminal investigations. Its symptoms were frustratingly similar to those of common illnesses, such as food poisoning, gastric ulcers, and dysentery. It would not be until the mid-nineteenth century that a British chemist, James Marsh, discovered a way to test for the presence of arsenic in liquid by creating a yellow precipitate (arsenic sulfide).