City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Voisin prepared her own brand of exotic poisons in the same courtyard shack where she performed abortions. Toads were her ingredients of choice. All species of toads produce toxins in varying levels of potency, which are released as a defense mechanism against predators. When the venom is mixed with arsenic, as was often done in early modern Europe, it produces intense convulsions, vomiting, and death. Like arsenic, there was no definitive way to test for toad poisons.

  Another one of Voisin’s colleagues, named François Belot, claimed he had a foolproof way of poisoning his victims. First he force-fed arsenic to a frog and placed it in a silver goblet. Pinching the frog’s head, he made it urinate and then smashed it to death. Belot claimed that by coating the cup with the liquids produced, it was possible to ensure multiple deaths, even if the goblet were washed and rinsed between uses.

  Voisin preferred a different method. Her neighbor Madame Vautier delivered large pots full of toads to Voisin’s home on the rue Beauregard. Together the two women retreated to the secluded garden behind the house and lit a large fire, stoking it until the logs burned bright red. Once the fire was ready, Voisin reached her hand into the pot to grab one of the toads, which puffed up its neck in resistance. Holding it firmly in one hand, she milked the toad of its venom. Using her thumb and forefinger, she also squeezed the porous glands on the toad’s legs as well as at the base of its neck. A viscous white liquid oozed from each of the glands and dripped onto a glass dish. Within minutes the venom dried to form a thick, rubbery substance that could be easily scraped off and added to other ingredients to create a deadly mix.

  Once the toad had been milked, Voisin wrapped the animal tightly in muslin and tossed it, alive, onto the coals. Wearing a scarf around her nose and mouth to block the putrid smell, Vautier cooked the toads, turning them over and over until their bodies were crisp enough to be ground into a toxic powder, ready for their next customer.

  4

  To Market

  Catherine Voisin often sent her nine-year-old daughter, Marie-Marguerite, into the dangerous Montorgeuil neighborhood to run errands. Stepping out of the family’s house, the child joined the swirl of activity in the streets outside, a coin clutched tightly in her fist. Errands for her mother required her to hurry, otherwise she would suffer her mother’s wrath. She did not know kindness from her mother, who maimed just as easily with a sharp word as she did with a kick or a punch. Catherine did both, and often.

  Marie-Marguerite frequently made her way to the largest market in the city, Les Halles, a ten-minute walk south from her home. The same chaos that reigned in the city streets lived here, but with much greater intensity. Fruit and vegetable merchants competed with one another as they hawked their wares to the crush of shoppers who funneled into the market’s narrow rows from all parts of the city. Pickpockets and beggars roamed about, nipping a piece of fruit here, a cloak there, while prostitutes rubbed up against male customers to let them know that vegetables were not the only thing for sale.

  Marie-Marguerite ducked and elbowed her way through the stalls until she found the right vendor. Cages of birds—hens, quail, ducks, and pigeons—were stacked several layers high and lined the perimeter of the small space. Some of the animals were sold alive. The days of others were numbered, if the plucked birds hanging from the wooden beams were any indication.

  The child trotted toward the pigeon cages and scanned the clusters of bobbing heads until she found precisely what her mother wanted: a single white bird. Marie-Marguerite relinquished her coin and rushed home as quickly as she had come, holding the bird protectively under her arm. She did not know what her mother planned to do with it, but whatever it was, it would not be pleasant. Not much of what happened in her family’s run-down home ever was.

  Arriving home, she walked through the darkened entry hall and into the courtyard. Her mother waited there impatiently. Next to her stood an ugly, older man wearing a bright red wig and a gray cape. Without a word the man yanked the pigeon from her arms. In one deft move, he sliced the bird’s neck and collected its blood in a glass goblet. When there was nothing left, he tossed the pigeon onto the ground. With a gruff scowl, her mother told her to go, to get out. Marie-Marguerite ran from the courtyard.

  The name of the man who wore the red wig at Voisin’s house was Adam Coeuret. A longtime charlatan, Coeuret changed his name not once but twice: first to Dubuisson and then to Lesage (the wise one).

  Lesage claimed to be able to communicate with the devil. For a fee, clients wrote their most secret wishes and desires on a small slip of paper. After noting that he had not read what was written on the paper, Lesage crumpled it up into a tiny ball, rolled the ball in wax, and tossed it into the fireplace. Together Lesage and his client watched it smoke, catch fire, and turn to ashes. A few days later, when the client returned for an update on the status of their request, Lesage produced the original, unburned piece of paper. It was a sure and favorable response from Satan, he claimed: Their request would be granted. Unknown to the fee-paying dupe, Lesage had switched the original request for a fake, and by sleight of hand, burned that one in the fire.

  Always on the prowl for new avenues of income, Lesage decided it was time to create a small partnership among similar-minded entrepreneurs who traded in making dark desires come true. He heard rumors that Voisin’s clientele had become decidedly more illustrious in recent months. Some speculated that many of her customers even moved in the same orbit as the Sun King himself. As Lesage knew firsthand from his ruses, there were plenty of people for whom Voisin’s earthly interventions would not be enough. Some wishes could be fulfilled only with the help of otherworldly forces. What Voisin’s network needed, Lesage calculated, was someone who could take her clients’ desires to a higher power—not to God but rather his hellish counterpart.

  Lesage believed there was no better person for the job than a priest. Like many people in the early modern period, he believed if religious ceremonies allowed one to commune with God, their perversion could conjure up the devil instead. With this in mind, he partnered with a Father Mariette, a priest at the Church of Saint-Séverin, to expand his range of services.

  Hopeful that they might merge their client lists, Lesage called on Voisin at her home with Mariette at his side. Voisin was not a trusting person by nature or profession, but she found Lesage strangely seductive, and it did not take long for the two to become lovers. Deciding she had found a kindred spirit, she revealed to Lesage that several high-ranking women of Louis XIV’s court were regular customers, and they wanted to do everything within their means to ensure that they took a place in Louis’s heart and bed.

  Voisin showed Lesage and Mariette an envelope containing some herbs that she prepared for one of her royal customers. Unable to hide his enthusiasm, Lesage explained to Voisin that he knew a way to make the herbs even more powerful and to increase her profit margins—for a cut. He took the package from her and handed it to Mariette. The priest nodded. A silent pact had been made. To seal the arrangement, Voisin brought out a bottle of strong alcohol, eau-de-vie [aquavit], and handed it to Mariette. The priest lifted a pouch from under his cassock and removed a small chalice. Murmuring prayers, he solemnly poured the liquor in the chalice, and they took turns drinking from the holy cup.

  A few days later Voisin ventured across the Seine to the narrow and twisting streets of the Latin Quarter. Her destination was the hulking Church of Saint-Séverin, which stood across the river from its more elegant sister, Notre-Dame. Scores of gargoyles stared down as Voisin and Lesage lumbered up the five stone steps and entered the fourteenth-century church. Once inside, the pair knelt in the direction of the altar and made the sign of the cross. It did not take long for Voisin to spot Father Mariette. He was now dressed in religious vestments and preparing for Holy Communion at the altar.

  Despite its colorful and delicate stained-glass windows and Gothic flourishes, there was something ominous about the church, making it the perfect home for a man like Father Mariette. Its
twisting pillars, meant to evoke palm trees and the Christian symbolism of peace and eternal life, looked instead like gnarled arms crawling their way through the stone floor. The dim light of the nave and the murky shadows cast by the small chapels heightened its strange ambience. The priests who presided over this church lived not in the light, but twilight.

  With somber focus, Mariette prepared the sacrament in front of the faithful. Voisin watched as he carefully lifted the chalice and intoned prayers in Latin. She joined the other worshippers in the long line that snaked toward the altar to receive the sacrament. She knelt in devotion when it was her turn, and made the sign of the cross. She then looked up knowingly at Father Mariette, who blessed the host and laid it into Voisin’s open hands. Placing it in her mouth, she then reached both hands toward the chalice to sip the wine that Mariette offered her. As she did, she felt the priest’s hands slip a small package into her palm. It was the packet of herbs. Nodding toward the altar, he signaled that they received the same blessing as the host and the wine.

  As they left the church Lesage reassured Voisin that, because Mariette had now performed his “conjurations” on the packet, the herbs would have the full and intended effect. “Indubitably,” he added.

  Ostensibly pleased with the results of the spell, a few months later Voisin’s customer contacted Lesage and Mariette directly to request additional services from the priest. The men traveled by coach to the King’s château in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, his main place of residence from 1666 to 1682.

  Perched on the banks of the Seine to the west of Paris and surrounded by a thick forest, Saint-Germain had long been one of the favorite residences of French kings when they wanted to escape from daily life in the more centrally located Louvre. Saint-Germain held an especially important place in Louis XIV’s life. He had been born at the palace and, during the Fronde, found safety there when residence in the Louvre proved too dangerous for the young king.

  The men were escorted discreetly to the woman’s quarters. Once there, Mariette pulled a small bottle filled with holy water from a pouch and sprinkled it on the woman’s head. A few steps away, Lesage lit incense in a small thurible and began swinging it with smooth motions through the richly decorated room. Handing the woman a small scrap of paper, Mariette instructed her to read the incantation aloud. When the short ceremony ended, the woman provided the men with a small package containing two pigeon hearts, recently excised.

  The next time the two men saw their client, it was in the private sacristy of Saint-Séverin. Taking a chalice in one hand and holding the pigeon hearts in the other, the priest recited prayers in Latin as he passed the offering under the sacred vessel. Lesage held open a gold box. Mariette placed the pigeon hearts inside. He then added the paper with the incantation, a drawing of a pentagram, and a consecrated host. Closing the box and handing it to the woman, the two men sent her back on her way to the Château of Saint-Germain.

  Over the weeks that followed, Lesage and Mariette bragged too loudly about the demand for their services, and word of their deeds traveled quickly. “There is much talk about a priest at Saint-Severin,” The doctor, Guy Patin, wrote. “They say he is a magician, but I don’t believe it.”

  Lesage and Mariette were soon arrested. Accused of impiety, they were put on trial in the criminal courts of Châtelet, which lay in La Reynie’s jurisdiction. Both Mariette and Lesage admitted to participating in mystical ceremonies, with the priest going so far as to give the name of their noble client. No one paid much attention to the two men, or to their ridiculous-sounding claims that a member of the king’s entourage had employed them to cast magic spells. When the two men found themselves on the stand three months later, they wisely chose to make no further mention of their client. Preferring to put the matter quietly to rest, the court exiled Mariette from Paris for nine years and sent Lesage to the galleys.

  PART

  II

  King of Hearts

  5

  Agitation without Disorder

  In June 1667, two months after La Reynie’s appointment as lieutenant general of police, Louis XIV traveled through the Low Countries in a gold-encrusted coach drawn by six Andalusian horses. A regiment of 3,200 soldiers, three hundred carriages, and a swarm of noblemen on horseback accompanied the king. By one count the procession included more than thirty thousand horses.

  The sound of horse hooves could be heard from miles away as Louis XIV’s cortege snaked its way through the countryside. Peasants working in the fields raced to the main road to witness a spectacle unlike anything they had seen in their lives—and likely never would again. “Everything you have ever read about the magnificence of King Solomon or the grandeur of the King of Persia,” wrote one observer, “is nothing compared to all of the pomp that accompanies the king on this trip.”

  The army of carriages rocked back and forth along the pockmarked dirt road. The noblewomen in the entourage wore sumptuous, décolleté dresses with sleeves that dipped low off the shoulder and opened widely just below the elbow. Even on an extended rural expedition, their hair was piled high on their heads, meticulously coiffed, and adorned with lace bows. Alongside the carriages, their sons and husbands rode stiff-backed on fine horses, handsome in their knee-length jackets, brocade pants, and wide silk victory belts tied around their waists.

  Yet the most interesting show was the one the thousands of onlookers could not see. It took place in the sumptuous interior of the king’s coach, where Louis sat next to his wife, Marie-Thérèse. Louis’s brother Philippe and his wife, Henrietta Anne, joined the royal couple, as did two of Louis’s mistresses: Louise de La Vallière and Athénaïs de Montespan.

  The king and his court were on their way to declare victory over the Spanish in the first major military campaign of his reign. It was not so much a war as an incursion, a bold attempt by the king to assert claims over Spanish-controlled territories in what are now Belgium and the Netherlands. The previous fall, some fifty thousand French troops had massed along the border, near the river Somme. They had little trouble overtaking the towns of Douai, Tournai, Charleroi, and eventually Lille.

  Louis declared ownership of the territories in the name of his Spanish-born wife. Curious observers could catch a glimpse of the twenty-nine-year-old as she sat next to her husband in the royal coach. If they were looking for a woman of style and sophistication, they were sorely disappointed. Marie-Thérèse was a plump woman, whose bottom lip jutted out from her round face. She lacked the sense of elegance that had long defined life in the French court. Following instead the Spanish style, she wore her hair in tight curls and had not yet abandoned her enormous and outmoded hooped skirts, so large that they made climbing into a carriage or passing through doors a challenge.

  The death of Marie-Thérèse’s father, King Philip IV, eighteen months earlier had put the ownership of the Low Countries in question. Louis did not dispute that Spain now belonged to Marie-Thérèse’s eldest brother, Carlos. However, he argued that according to the local laws of the contested territories, Marie-Thérèse’s rights as Philip’s firstborn child from his first marriage took precedence over those of Carlos, Philip’s son from his second marriage. In other words, the Spanish Low Countries actually belonged to Marie-Thérèse—and thus to her husband, the Sun King.

  Marie-Thérèse was hardly the type of wife one might have imagined for a handsome and gallant young king. The marriage, arranged some seven years earlier, made great political sense, offering “peace as a dowry” at a time when Spain and France seemed forever at odds. Anne of Austria, Louis’s mother, who was also Marie-Thérèse’s Spanish-born aunt, orchestrated the match.

  It was not the first time that Anne had inserted herself into her son’s love life. She coordinated the young king’s initiation into the world of physical pleasures when he was sixteen. A practical woman, the queen regent knew that sex and love were often easily confused, especially in the young. She did not want Louis to become so enchanted with his first sexual experience that
he would fall in love with a girl who would not be suitable, socially and politically, for the monarchy.

  To thwart this Anne hand-selected one of her servants to educate her son. The young king lost his virginity to forty-year-old Catherine Bellier. One-Eyed Kate (Cateau-la-Borgnesse), as she was called, was “old, short, ugly, . . . fat, and round all over.” Rumor had it that the woman had taken the handsome youngster’s virginity one day as he was getting out of his bath, and that there had been many more encounters between Cateau and her pupil. The experience must not have been entirely unpleasant, as the king was said to owe his impressive repertoire of sexual skills to Cateau. For her services Anne’s servant received the title baronne of Beauvais, a house, and a pension.

  No doubt heartened by her success with Louis and Cateau, Anne worked on finding an appropriate bride for her son. Twelve years earlier, in 1655, she had set her sights on Henrietta Anne of England, the youngest daughter of the English king Charles I and his French-born queen, Henrietta Maria. Louis would have none of it. Instead Louis tested his mother’s patience with his affections for not one but two of Cardinal Mazarin’s five nieces. Olympe Mancini, the second eldest, caught his attention first. They were both the same age and shared a deep love of the theater and ballet. The possibility of a marriage between Anne’s son and the niece of her prime minister did not go overlooked. “It would be a shame to not marry two young people who get along so well,” Queen Christina of Sweden declared during a visit to the French court. As much as Anne appreciated Mazarin, she rejected the idea of uniting their families and refused to hear another word about an unworthy pairing for a king. A realist, however, when it came to her son’s increasingly obvious sexual needs, Anne did not stand in the way of letting Louis make Olympe his mistress.