City of Light, City of Poison

by Holly Tucker

  Not long after, the servant received new orders from her mistress. Madame de Poulaillon explained that, just before the dinner hour, she would distract her husband. Monstreux was to keep the doors to the dining room shut, so no one could watch her set the table. On Poulaillon’s signal the servant would pour the contents of the bottle into the husband’s wineglass. At the designated time Poulaillon summoned Monstreux and whispered, “Go, quickly, put it in his wine.” The servant reached into the folds of her dress and removed the bottle—and again poured the contents out the window. After dinner Monstreux entered Poulaillon’s bedchambers and surrendered the empty bottle, as deceptive proof that she had followed the woman’s orders. Yet again, much to his wife’s frustration, Monsieur de Poulaillon still failed to fall ill.

  Madame de Poulaillon asked the servant for her husband’s nightgown and the sheets on which he slept. Monstreux said that she had no idea what Poulaillon was doing with the items, but twice a week, on schedule, she provided her mistress with the items. Nor did the servant have any idea why Madame de Poulaillon had ordered her to catch toads in a nearby vegetable garden. All Monstreux knew was that she was to bring back as many as she could, and that she should take great care to ensure that they remained alive.

  La Reynie confirmed that Bosse used frogs in her potions and got them from one Anne Chéron. Hearing that the police lieutenant was questioning anyone suspected of collaborating with Bosse, Vigoureux, or Poulaillon, Chéron did all she could to evade arrest. She feigned a broken arm and went to an indigent hospital where few would think to look for her. The ruse did not work. She found herself in a small cell at Vincennes, where La Reynie made it clear that other, more painful fates awaited if she did not cooperate. Chéron confirmed that she had once delivered a toad to Bosse’s home, where she watched Bosse and a colleague named Belot perform a special ceremony to permanently poison a wineglass Poulaillon had given them. They force-fed the toad arsenic, then placed the creature in the glass, and beat it until it urinated. Thus fouled, “fifty people could drink out of the glass, even though it had been washed and rinsed, and every one of them will die.”

  La Reynie heard enough evidence from Monstreux, Bosse, and other witnesses to prove that the noblewoman Poulaillon had circulated among the poisoners. Recalling his frustrations with La Grange, La Reynie refused to let Bosse, Vigoureux, and Poulaillon—as well as a growing number of other suspects—slip out of his hands and into the jurisdiction of the parlement. To this effect he wrote a letter to Louvois, requesting that the king allow him to pursue the matter fully on his own for now, without the involvement of magistrates.

  While Poulaillon and her accomplices lingered in jail, La Reynie turned his attention to gathering some hard evidence against the noblewoman. Bosse’s home had been kept under seal since her arrest in early January. La Reynie knew from preliminary reports that mysterious powders, liquids, and other strange objects filled the house.

  On Saturday, March 11, 1679, at three in the afternoon, La Reynie accompanied two medical doctors and two apothecaries to Bosse’s home. Jean Sagot, La Reynie’s trusted notary, and Claude Robert, the chief royal attorney, documented the actions and discoveries of the forensics team. The experts began with a small pine box. The paper wrappers and twine, placed by police officers around the box, were still intact. After receiving permission from La Reynie, the apothecary Guy Simon broke the seals. Inside he found a small round glass container filled with a clear liquid. Reaching into his pocket, Simon pulled out a four sol bill and let a small amount of the liquid drip onto the currency. He also dripped a small bit onto the tiles near the fireplace where Bosse prepared her meals. Within seconds both the paper and the tiles turned black.

  One of Simon’s colleagues reached for an envelope made of green paper that was similarly wrapped in official police seals, and opened it. Two smaller envelopes sat inside. Fine white powder filled the first envelope, which was crafted from the death certificate of one Marguerite Hagunet. The apothecary collected a small amount of the powder and threw it into the fire. A thick smoke smelling like garlic filled the room.

  An old ripped and folded letter had been used to create a second envelope. The medical inspectors could make out a few words on the recycled paper: “Sincerely yours, Marguerite Langlois.” Inside there was a much smaller quantity of white powder. It released the same thick smoke and the same rancid garlic smell when thrown into the fire. This confirmed that both envelopes were filled with arsenic, which oxidizes when heated, leaving an unmistakable odor.

  Continuing their work, the team of doctors and apothecaries opened envelope after envelope. Like Russian dolls stacked inside one another, each packet contained several smaller ones that contained some form of mysterious powder. In one set of six small envelopes, they discovered a grayish-brown powder mixed with a luminous blue-and-green substance. Each member of the team agreed that they were looking at the aphrodisiac cantharis. The third envelope contained small brown clumps that looked like dried blood, likely menstrual blood. Small bits of fingernails tumbled out of the fourth envelope. The last two contained more white powder that was smelly and smoky when thrown into the fire: more arsenic.

  The next day La Reynie interrogated Bosse again at Vincennes.

  “Is it true that Vigoureux referred several young women to you so you could give them drinks that would end their pregnancies?” he asked.

  Bosse shrugged. “She never talked about it in those terms, but yes, I went to Vigoureux’s house. But I only gave a smidgen of white wine to one woman, and I never saw her again.”

  “What you gave her was infused with sabine, wasn’t it?” La Reynie probed. Sabine, a member of the crocus family, was commonly used as an abortifacient in early Europe. Bosse did not answer.

  The lieutenant of police’s tone became more aggressive. La Reynie placed on the table in front of him the items that he had studied alongside the apothecaries the day before. He ordered Bosse to identify each of them. Bosse took a quick glance at the shimmering blue-green powder in the first envelope. “Cantharis,” she said. She did not use it as a love potion or a poison, explaining that it helped corns on her feet.

  The rust-brown powder was indeed menstrual blood. She did not intend to sell it as an aphrodisiac, as many people did. Instead she collected it from her youngest daughter, using it also for the rough spots on her feet. Again La Reynie knew better. Menstrual blood had long been a common ingredient in poisons.

  Bosse stared a little longer at the white powder in the envelope. Feigning confusion, she wondered aloud whether it was shrimp powder. As for contents of the last envelope, they were just fingernail clippings.

  Bosse admitted later, and only reluctantly, that several of the envelopes did contain arsenic, but that it was not hers. Chéron tried to sell it to her when she brought the toads. Surely Bosse knew someone who wished to get rid of a person, Chéron said at the time. Bosse swore that she did not, but Chéron insisted she keep the envelopes.

  “So how do you know Madame Langlois? The arsenic powder that was folded into the letter was not intended for her?” asked La Reynie.

  “No,” Bosse replied. Langlois had given her a small amount of money in the hope that she would come to Beauvais, a small town north of Paris where the woman lived, to help her with some personal matters. Bosse ignored the request.

  La Reynie shifted subjects, turning his focus to the accusations that Madame Poulaillon’s servant, Monstreux, had made against Bosse. “Is it not true, however, that it was you who prepared, by yourself, a clear liquid for Madame Poulaillon?”

  “It is not true.”

  The questioning continued for several more minutes, with Bosse refusing to concede anything else. La Reynie ended the interrogation abruptly and waited while the scribe read the transcript aloud to the prisoner. With a shaking and unpracticed hand, Marie Bosse signed an M at the bottom of each page. When the reading was done, Bosse composed her barely legible full name at the end of the text. La Reynie scrawled
his name quickly across the page and ordered the guards to take Bosse back to her cell.

  PART

  V

  “She Gave

  Her Soul Gently

  to the Devil”

  22

  Quanto

  Athénaïs spent hours at the betting tables trying to forget her troubles with Louis. In the claustrophobic world of the court, where daily life hinged entirely on the king’s desires, gambling provided noblemen and -women with an illusory sense that they could control, or at least anticipate and profit from, fate. Everything could be wagered upon: from cards, dice, and roulette to dog racing; and oddsmakers took bets on everything from who would be the king’s next sexual conquest to the number of bodies that would be found floating in the Seine the next morning.

  Seven separate royal ordinances between 1632 and 1666 attempted to regulate the voracious appetite of the French for games of chance. In his first months as lieutenant of police in 1667, La Reynie took aim at Parisians’ love of gambling, requiring all gaming to take place in public parlors, where activities could be monitored. Dictating that gambling was a manifestion of “the depravation of good morals [and] causes the ruin of families,” La Reynie levied hefty punishments on private gambling parties in homes. First-time offenders paid a hefty fine of fifteen hundred livres, of which one-third would go to the person who reported the transgression to the police. The other two-thirds went to royal coffers as well as the main Parisian hospital, which housed debtors as well as the sick and infirm. For the second offense the gambler’s hand would be cut off.

  The laws against gambling clearly did not apply to Louis XIV’s court. In 1671 Louis learned that the marquis of Cessac used a set of marked cards to cheat at the royal gaming table. The king punished the marquis by dismissing him from his position as superintendent of the king’s robes and exiled him to French Guiana. It was, according to some, an unusually lenient punishment, given that Cessac’s cheating netted him close to two million livres in stolen winnings.

  The Cessac scandal did little to reduce gambling in the king’s palaces, however. Some of the court’s most prominent members, including and especially Athénaïs, spent the bulk of their days gaming. The king’s mistress preferred a card game called hocca, or bassette, which dominated late-seventeenth century betting tables. Originating in Italy, hocca integrated both strategy and chance. A “banker” distributed a single card to each player and laid it face up. Using a deck of fifty-two cards, each player worked to complete a full run of a single suit, making a wager or deciding to fold on each turn. In a fast-paced game where one could win or lose “fifty or sixty times in a quarter hour,” the potential for remarkably high winnings as well as devastating losses was stunning.

  Athénaïs often did not leave her seat for hours, playing until the sun came up. After one long day and night of gaming with the king’s brother Philippe at her table, the banker wanted to retire. Athénaïs refused to let him leave. She needed to recoup her exorbitant losses. By the time she gave up, it was eight in the morning. Philippe was past due for his brother’s morning rising rituals. When he arrived late and looking rumpled, Louis decided once and for all to ban hocca from the court.

  Louis’s resolve did not last for long. At Athénaïs’s begging, Louis allowed her to set up a private gaming table in her quarters a few months later, making her promise she would show some restraint. If anything, however, Athénaïs’s predilection for gaming only increased. She organized and participated in lotteries and even went so far as to organize one in a nearby Carmelite convent.

  Athénaïs’s behavior enraged pious members of court, especially Madame de Maintenon. “Never has the sovereign influence of Quanto been so well established. She believes herself to be above all things,” Maintenon wrote to her priest.

  Though Louis may have been less than approving of Montespan’s gambling predilection, it did provide a convenient cover for his own extracurricular activities. The forty-six-year-old king still craved the thrill of sexual conquest. Mademoiselle des Oeillets had been an excellent surrogate for Athénaïs when passion still remained between the couple. Oeillets had quietly held out hope that the king would make her his official mistress. However, Louis had quickly tired of her once she became pregnant. Either by choice or at the king’s encouragement, Oeillets left the court in 1677, disappointed and bitter.

  In late 1678 Louis set eyes on the seventeen-year-old chestnut-haired Marie-Angélique de Scorailles. He met the teenage girl—twenty-three years his junior—at his brother’s home, where she served as maid of honor to Philippe’s second wife, the princess of Palatine. Marie-Angélique was originally from the Auvergne province, and the court mocked her rustic ways, considering her “as stupid as a basket.” The princess of Palatine concurred: “[She is] a stupid little creature, but she [has] a very good heart.”

  On a crisp fall night Athénaïs settled in at the gaming table. The king called for his carriage to transport him to the Palais-Royal, which sat directly behind the Louvre. As instructed, Marie-Angélique waited in private quarters there. The king left shortly after his desires were satisfied, taking care not to be seen. Over the following months he continued his affair with Marie-Angélique, who dutifully awaited Louis in a remote wing of the palace.

  In public the king pretended not to know her. Privately he moved Marie-Angélique to quarters closer to his and ordered a closet on the floor above his to be transformed into a small bedroom that both he and Marie-Angélique could access through a shared staircase.

  It did not take long for Louis to tire of such machinations and begin openly flaunting his new dalliance. For her eighteenth birthday the king gave Marie-Angélique a house in the country and appointed her duchess of Fontanges. The play on the girl’s first name, Marie-Angélique, which evoked the word ange (angel), in her new title did not go unnoted by the court. Nor did the pearl-gray carriage drawn by eight horses, also a gift from the king.

  The court watched, and commented on, Fontanges’s every move. One evening she accompanied the king on a hunt. A strong wind blew her hat off, leaving Fontanges to tie up her curly locks with a ribbon. The new look pleased Louis so much that he forbade her to change her hairstyle. Much to the consternation of Athénaïs, the “Fontanges” hairstyle was christened, and soon noblewomen spent hours as their servants heated iron rods in the fireplace to replicate Fontanges’s trademark curls.

  Between Montespan, Oeillets, and now Fontanges, Madame de Maintenon continued to pray for the king’s soul. On January 18, 1679, she wrote to her priest, the Abbé Gobelin: “I ask you to pray and to have others pray for the king, who is on the edge of a high precipice.”

  While Maintenon prayed, Athénaïs did all she could not only to regain her place in the king’s heart but also to solidify her political status just in case he abandoned her altogether. Since her early days at court, she had found clever ways to place family members and supporters in positions of authority. She succeeded in having her father named governor of Paris, her sister as abbess of Fontevrault, her cousin d’Albret as governor of French Guiana, among others.

  Athénaïs’s insistence that her elder brother, Louis-Victor de Vivonne, be named as general of the galley prisons pitted Louis’s mistress against his most powerful minister, Louvois. In concert with Louvois, the king had drafted a list of candidates for the galley post. After Louvois mentioned in passing that they had completed their task, Montespan demanded to see the list. When Louvois refused, she dug through the minister’s pockets to retrieve it. She flew into a rage when she did not see her brother, a celebrated military commander, on the list and went immediately to Louis to complain. To pacify her, the king blamed the error on Louvois.

  “Call him immediately,” Athénaïs ordered. When Louvois arrived, the king compelled him to take responsibility for the mistake, which he did. Vivonne was added to the list and, shortly after, officially named general.

  Louvois did not suffer this humiliation well. Moreover, the fact that Athén
aïs seemed forever “at knives” (aux couteaux) with him was all the more enraging given what he had done to help Montespan silence her extravagant husband. At the height of Monsieur de Montespan’s theatrics at court, Louvois had threatened him with a military trial, causing him to flee to Spain. His “abandonment” of his wife later facilitated the formal separation of the couple’s assets, allowing Athénaïs to continue her adulterous affair with the king.

  The animosity between Montespan and Louvois intensified later, in 1678, when the minister announced he was seeking a husband for his eldest daughter, Madeleine-Charlotte. Athénaïs boldly proposed her nephew Louis de Rochechouart, Vivonne’s son, to the minister. Louvois did not refuse the offer; he ignored it all together. Enraged by the slight, Montespan turned immediately to Louvois’s rival, Colbert, who readily agreed. Montespan’s nephew and Marie-Anne Colbert married a few months later, in February 1679.

  Montespan’s renewed alliances with Colbert proved useful only months later following a series of ongoing public spats between Athénaïs and the king. In an attempt to regain her beauty, Athénaïs often spent entire afternoons stretched out nude on her bed as servants rubbed her with pomades and perfumes. One day as the king and queen stepped into their carriage at Saint-Germain, Louis made a face and turned toward Athénaïs. He complained that she smelled too strongly of perfume, saying it made him feel sick. The embattled mistress flew into an argument with the king, who matched her anger with profanity. Another explosive fight followed less than a week later. In return the king announced that he would no longer make private visits to Athénaïs’s quarters, which had once been filled with passion and were now little more than brief and dispassionate greetings.