City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  As La Grange’s case wound its way through the legal labyrinth, La Reynie became increasingly agitated by the thought of the woman being executed before he could interrogate her, taking any knowledge she might have about the mysterious letter to the grave with her.

  Eschewing bureaucratic protocol, La Reynie secured several opportunities to question La Grange. Showing her a copy of the letter, he questioned her about what she knew. At every turn she denied adamantly ever hearing about it or having a hand in writing it. How could she? She was in prison when it was found, she said.

  The sentencing approached; La Grange’s story changed. Her accusations against Poncet had bought her additional time before her sentencing. Now La Grange hoped that the gift she was about to give La Reynie would do the same. She sent La Reynie two letters, both written and signed by the Abbé Nail as Launay. She claimed they had fallen out of the pocket of one of Launay’s close colleagues, a certain Chamois.

  In a letter to Colbert on November 19, 1678, La Reynie requested that the parlement provide him with handwriting samples from Nail, in order to research the matter. Colbert agreed and informed Monsieur de Harlay to obtain his approval of the request. The records are frustratingly silent on the results of La Reynie’s handwriting analyses, but they must have given the police chief cause for concern. One week later he wrote again to Colbert asking the king’s permission to torture Launay and La Grange before sentencing and have the questioning done, not by the parlement but by the police.

  Colbert’s response was prompt and unequivocal. “Monsieur,” he wrote. “I have not spoken to the King about your proposition regarding La Grange and Launay. I find it extraordinary that you feel it necessary to pursue a separate investigation and to presumably apply the two to the Question.” The minister was known for being humorless, but his use of the word “extraordinary” was at once wry and biting. “I feel that it is better,” Colbert continued, “that the Parlement enlighten us on the letter as they review the pending case.” If—and only if—the two were sentenced to death, he explained, would it be time to apply torture. La Reynie would have to be patient. “I believe strongly that there soon will be a time to begin the procedure you are proposing.”

  Colbert’s decision was frustrating but not at all surprising. Louis’s most powerful and trusted minister had a reputation for playing by the rules, for moving cautiously. La Reynie began to doubt whether he and Colbert shared the same priorities. La Reynie was not a man who was used to being told no. He also had little patience for those who stood in the way of his work—even men like Colbert. To force La Grange to reveal her secrets and expose the true depths of these poisonous plots, he needed to find a new ally.

  19

  Dinner Guests

  In December 1678, one month after Colbert rebuffed La Reynie, winter set in. The warm glow of candlelight bathed the street in front of Marie Vigoureux’s modest home on the rue Courtauvilain. Laughter and wine flowed easily as Vigoureux flirted with a Monsieur Perrin, a low-ranking lawyer at the parlement who frequently visited her. Perrin stopped by Vigoureux’s home with the excuse of wanting her colorful friend, Marie Bosse, to read his palm. The stout, forty-eight-year-old Bosse wore a man’s knee-length embroidered jacket (justaucorps) and earned her living as a fortune-teller. More often than not a quick visit often bled into a late evening. Perrin could always count on La Bosse and Vigoureux for uproarious stories—their tongues loosened by wine—about their adventures in duping unsuspecting nobles out of their money.

  Bosse bragged about her dealings with the beautiful and poised Marguerite de Poulaillon. Madame Poulaillon had sent a friend ahead of her to describe a ruse that she wanted the fortune-teller to perform on Poulaillon’s husband. When the married couple arrived, Bosse looked intently into the man’s palm as prescribed and shook her head slowly, letting out a quiet sigh. Monsieur Poulaillon would die soon, she explained. Both skeptical and shaken, the husband turned quickly toward the door of Bosse’s home and left. Giving the fortune-teller a subtle look of thanks, Madame Poulaillon deftly removed her expensive, blue-enameled bracelet, encrusted with precious jewels, and handed it to Bosse.

  Madame Poulaillon soon returned to ask Bosse to turn the feigned death pronouncement into a reality, so she could have full access to her husband’s fortune. She had fallen in love with a man named La Rivière, who—much like Brinvilliers’s beloved Sainte-Croix—preyed on wealthy women. He was swimming in debt and threatened to leave her if the noblewoman could not come up with a large sum of money. Madame Poulaillon vowed to do everything necessary to keep her lover, even if it meant murdering her husband.

  Bosse did not say what happened afterward, but turning to Vigoureux and Perrin with a knowing glance, she bragged that the job had paid well and that Madame Poulaillon had been a very satisfied customer. By Bosse’s calculations, she needed only three more clients like Poulaillon to be a rich woman. Perrin nervously asked what Bosse meant by three more clients. Bosse confirmed that she had literally made a killing by selling poison to men and women who wished to prune their family trees.

  As Perrin left Vigoureux’s dinner party, his head reeled—not from the wine, but from what he had heard. He gave his coachman directions to the home of Desgrez. Perrin knew the man only by his reputation as La Reynie’s trusted officer who had returned Brinvilliers to France. As Desgrez listened to Perrin’s account, he devised a plan to confirm the truth behind the lawyer’s accusations. He pressed the wife of one of his guards into service. Dressed in her finest clothes, the woman made her way to Bosse’s house. The guard’s wife knocked on the door of Bosse’s modest home and launched into a story about an abusive husband. She pleaded with Bosse to make the problem disappear. Bosse agreed to help her—for a price—and instructed the woman to come back two days later. When she did, she left with a vial of poison.

  In the early hours of January 4, 1679, archers quietly surrounded Bosse’s home. On a signal they stormed the building, kicking in doors and breaking anything that got in their way in the search for Bosse. They found her sleeping in the family bed, in the company of her adult children. At the same time another group of archers arrested Madame Vigoureux.

  A carriage flanked by guards on horseback rumbled along the well-traveled gravel path toward the fortressed entrance of the Château of Vincennes. The castle’s keep rose in the distance. Standing over 170 feet tall, the tower had once been home to some of the most illustrious kings of France’s medieval past. Three hundred years earlier, Charles V met with his grand council under high Gothic arches painted in rich hues of blue and embellished with gold-leaf fleurs-de-lis. Sculptures of prophets and the evangelists, whose robed bodies looked as if they were soaring in the air, anchored each vaulted arch. The king kept his collection of illuminated manuscripts, the finest in all of Europe, on the second floor, protected by the keep’s ten-foot-thick walls.

  A turret wrapped each corner of the tower. One housed the central, windowless, and winding staircase; two others held small rooms for the king, his ministers, and his staff. The fourth turret functioned as a communal latrine—among the first of its kind in medieval construction—that flowed odorously through the turret and into the tower’s moat.

  After the monarchy abandoned Vincennes for Paris, Charles’s magnificent tower transformed into one of the darkest, most infamous dungeons in all of Europe. The small rooms in the turrets became prison cells. An interrogation room replaced the king’s library. A military compound, which Louvois oversaw as minister of war, now surrounded the tower. In his choice of prison for Bosse and Vigoureux, La Reynie made his intentions and his alliances clear.

  Marie Bosse looked at the tower with trepidation through the curtains of the police carriage. Armed soldiers emerged from the guardhouse. They took the prisoner’s paperwork from the driver and inspected the interior of the carriage. Assured that all was well, they signaled to the troops to lower the heavy drawbridge. Several minutes later Bosse’s carriage rattled across the moat and into the
belly of the dungeon complex.

  Once inside and in the company of more soldiers, the portly Bosse labored up a set of dark, twisting stone stairs. Her breath made white puffs in the cold air as she panted with every step. Once on the upper floors of the tower, the guards escorted her to her cell. The metal door groaned as it shut behind her. The guards slid a heavy bar across the door and locked it in place. Knowing that there was no chance of escape, she took inventory of her new surroundings.

  A battered mattress sat askew on the stone floor of the small, hexagonal room. Medieval archery slits in the walls let slivers of light into the cell, illuminating swashes of indigo-blue and burgundy-red paint, traces of the royal past of the three-hundred-year-old tower. Now the walls were mostly covered in graffiti by the room’s former inhabitants: hash marks counting the days, pleas to God asking for release from suffering, and obscenity-laden missives directed against the wardens.

  As Bosse was being transported to the jail, La Reynie’s officers collected evidence from her home. They found a small pine box containing glass flasks filled with what looked like clear water. Nearby there were several envelopes with white powder inside; one envelope had been made out of the death notice of a Marguerite Hagunet, signed March of the year before. The inspectors also discovered packets containing fingernail clippings and something that looked like dried blood, as well as six other, smaller packets filled with a luminous, bluish-green powder. After all the suspicious-looking materials had been collected, the inspectors wrapped the pine box and the packets with thick cord. They sealed both with thick red candle wax and delivered the items to a team of apothecaries for testing.

  Bosse and Marie Vigoureux spent the night in different cells, shivering in the January cold. The next morning, Nicolas de La Reynie made the first of many trips from Paris to Vincennes to interrogate the prisoners. Earlier that morning he questioned Bosse’s son, François, who had been detained at the Bastille prison. François confirmed that his mother spent time with Perrin, the lawyer who reported the woman’s ominous boastfulness. The son also said he heard his mother speak of a Madame de Poulaillon, who sought help in killing her husband.

  The name caught La Reynie’s attention. The particule—as the de (of) is called—marked high social standing, a sign of nobility. A century later, during the French Revolution, nobles would make every effort to erase the de from their names in the hopes of escaping the guillotine’s vengeance. But now, in this era of Louis XIV and Versailles, the particule gave the investigation a new level of seriousness—and one that La Reynie knew he could not ignore.

  La Reynie ordered the prison guards to bring Madame Vigoureux down for questioning first. The warmth of the interrogation room provided welcome relief from her frigid cell. La Reynie’s chief notary, Jean Sagot, stood alongside the lieutenant general while a scribe held a quill, ready to capture every word said.

  La Reynie began the interrogation. After confirming Vigoureux’s name, age, and address for the record, La Reynie moved directly to questions about Bosse. The forty-year-old Vigoureux confirmed that she had met Bosse about three years earlier, when she was released from the Châtelet prison for counterfeiting. Bosse needed a place to stay until she found something more permanent, so they lived together for about five or six weeks.

  “So what is Bosse up to?” he asked. “Does she tell fortunes?”

  “I don’t know if she tells fortunes,” Vigoureux replied dismissively. “It’s true that she often reads palms and tells people whatever comes to her mind . . . people in the neighborhood believe that she is a fortune-teller, at least that’s what Bosse says.”

  Fixing his gaze intently on his prisoner, La Reynie asked whether Vigoureux also told fortunes himself. “To be truthful, I have a few times,” Vigoureux conceded, qualifying her statement immediately afterward. “I haven’t done it for years, not since I moved to Paris from the provinces.”

  Without prompting, Vigoureux launched into a detailed description of Bosse’s dealings with Madame de Poulaillon. She confirmed that the noblewoman was having an affair with a man named Rivière and consulted Bosse regularly about how to make her husband disappear.

  “Do you know who prepared the potions and drugs that Bosse distributed to people who came to her home?” La Reynie asked. Vigoureux claimed not to know. She never actually saw Bosse give her clients any poison. “Bosse told me once that if she had something to do that she didn’t want anyone to know, she would never tell me anyway because I cannot keep a secret.”

  Vigoureux seemed uncomfortable directly accusing her associate of dispensing poison, but she had no problem making insinuations. “I did hear her say a few times that two or three women who were having problems with their husbands had come to her house to ask them if they would die soon. And Bosse, knowing what their intentions were, always answered as they wanted her to.” Their husbands always died not long after, she said.

  La Reynie turned his focus to the details of the dinner that led to the arrest of Bosse and Vigoureux. Vigoureux acknowledged that she knew Perrin and that he had come by her house five or six times. “Is it true that, in the warmth of the meal, Bosse said that she would be rich if she could help poison three people?” Vigoureux said she could not remember.

  La Reynie reframed the question. “Have you heard rumors that Bosse was involved in three jobs? The first involved the home of a Monsieur de Valentinay, the second Monsieur de Poulaillon, and the third somewhere else?”

  Without a pause, Vigoureux answered yes. From what people were saying, she explained, Valentinay was preparing to marry a young woman from the provinces. His fiancée hired Bosse to cast spells to prevent the marriage. “I saw a letter from this Demoiselle [Valentinay’s unwilling fiancée] in which she demanded that the marriage be canceled, and that Bosse would not receive payment until that happened,” Vigoureux explained.

  La Reynie changed the subject and asked if Vigoureux visited Bosse’s home in the days preceding their arrest. She confirmed that she saw both Bosse and Madame de Poulaillon there. Poulaillon had come to talk to Bosse about the possibility of finding someone who could cast a spell to protect a friend, the marquis of Feuquières, while he was on the battlefields. La Reynie ended the questioning shortly afterward.

  The next day La Reynie returned to Vincennes, this time to question Bosse. Before launching into questions about Bosse’s poisonous activities, La Reynie inquired about Bosse’s dealings with La Grange.

  “Do you know Madame de La Grange, who lived with Monsieur Faury?”

  “No,” Bosse replied. She must have sensed La Reynie’s skepticism. Within moments she retracted her answer and launched into a detailed account of her interactions with the woman. She had met La Grange a few years earlier at the home of Catherine Voisin, a fortune-teller who lived in the Montorgueil quarter. She had since heard that La Grange was in the Conciergerie prison, awaiting trial.

  “How do you know that La Grange is in prison?” La Reynie asked.

  “All of Paris knows it,” Bosse replied matter-of-factly.

  La Reynie returned the questioning back to Bosse’s own activities. He asked what she had been doing with the various powders and liquids found in her home. She explained without hesitation that she had simply been dabbling in alchemy. “I was silly, just like so many others. Voisin was the one who put the idea in my head.”

  When the police chief targeted his questions specifically to the wine-filled dinner with the lawyer Perrin that had led to the women’s arrest, Bosse suddenly became less forthcoming in her answers.

  “What did you mean the other day that you’d be rich for the rest of your life if you could have three more clients of consequence?” La Reynie asked. Attempting to hide her nervousness, Bosse replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Is it true that you intended to poison three more people?” he persisted.

  “No,” she replied tersely.

  La Reynie did not believe her. He ended the interview and sent Bos
se back to her cold cell.

  The following day La Reynie sat at his desk at Châtelet and reviewed the official minutes of the interrogations. Once each session was over, a scribe reread the testimony aloud to the prisoners, who initialed each page. The shaky and uncertain handwriting of both Bosse and Vigoureux suggest that neither woman could read or write well. Bosse said as much to La Reynie when he asked if she had any alchemy or poison books in her home: “I do not know how to read,” she answered.

  As La Reynie reviewed the minutes, he noted the names mentioned by Vigoureux and Bosse during their interrogations. He had never heard of Madame Voisin before, but he added her to Desgrez’s arrest list.

  20

  The Question

  Late on a Saturday evening in February 1679, without advance warning, the parlement condemned La Grange and her accomplice Launay to death. Upon hearing the news, La Reynie raced to his writing desk. The police chief worried that the two criminals could be executed over the weekend before he had a chance to question her once again. He wrote two letters: one to the marquis of Seignelay, Colbert’s son and assistant; the other to the marquis of Louvois.

  La Reynie intended to play Colbert and Louvois against each other, betting that Louvois would win. As police chief, La Reynie reported to Colbert. Paris remained the quasi-exclusive domain of Colbert, who viewed the city as a means to enhance the glory of the king. La Reynie had long enjoyed the support of Colbert, who led the original commission to enact the lieutenancy of police and who supported the police chief unflaggingly in his efforts to change Paris from the eyesore of Europe to a jewel in Louis’s crown.

  Still, Colbert had proved himself reluctant when it came to the poison investigations. He put up roadblocks to La Reynie’s efforts to pursue investigations outside the normal judicial process, even those that La Reynie felt strongly were for the security of the monarchy. This should have not been surprising. Colbert had oversight over the economy, the legal system, the promotion of beaux arts and royal architectural projects—all matters that functioned best in the context of peace, order, and a smoothly functioning bureaucracy.