by Holly Tucker
Two weeks later Louvois reported to La Reynie that he had met with Oeillets and that she showed “inconceivable steadfastness” in asserting her innocence. She had admitted to having passed Voisin’s daughter on the street once during a visit to her mother, who also lived in the Montorgeuil neighborhood. Other than that, she vowed she never had any direct contact with the girl. To prove her innocence she challenged Louvois to take her to Vincennes so her accusers could have a look at her. Oeillets “swore on her life” that her accusers would not recognize her, provided they were not informed in advance who she was.
La Reynie met Louvois and Oeillets in a small room off the entry to the dungeon. They had the guards bring Marie-Marguerite, Lesage, and Guibourg down, one by one, from their cells. Both Lesage and Guibourg identified Oeillets immediately. However, Marie-Marguerite told Louvois and La Reynie she did not recognize the woman standing in front of her. Later she retracted what she said, telling La Reynie she knew very well who the woman was and had just felt uncomfortable saying her name aloud.
When Oeillets left the prison, she was terrified at the thought that she might soon be back. The next day she asked to meet again with Louvois at his home in Paris. She attempted to convince the minister that a marquise at court had a servant who resembled her “like two drops of water.” Oeillets later reiterated her innocence in a letter to the minister, this time expanding her claims to suggest she had been the victim of a conspiracy. Of the twenty women who gravitated toward Montespan, she said, eighteen of them made no secret of their loathing for her. She would not put it past any one of them to send the marquise’s servant to Voisin’s home, pretending to be her. For that matter, she could think of a handful of other servants at court who also had long chestnut hair and were about her height and build. Louvois told La Reynie he did not believe Oeillets one bit.
Following Oeillets’s visit to Vincennes and with Louvois, both the king and La Reynie struggled anew with the decision about what to do next. Louis ordered La Reynie to provide him with a report detailing who he believed was telling the truth and who was not, along with his personal recommendations.
The endeavor was enormous, given the mountain of documents before La Reynie. Undertaking the Sisyphean task, he began by grouping the interrogations chronologically by witness and by those whom they had accused, sorting them into piles that filled his desk, chairs, and every other surface in his study. Taking copious notes as he read and reread each one, La Reynie tried to make sense of the contradictory testimonies. On a regular basis he stopped and began moving his notes around like puzzle pieces on the floor, cross-referencing each claim in the hopes of knitting together even the smallest bit of truth.
As he reviewed his interrogations of Bosse, he noticed that on two different occasions the poisoner told him the king would do well to “exterminate” all those who dabbled in the business. By Bosse’s estimate there were upwards of four hundred people helping Parisians of all walks of life make good on their murderous intentions. Vigoureux agreed with Bosse’s assessment during a joint interrogation. Their count had not been off by much; by the time La Reynie was done, his own list of suspects totaled 442 people.
La Reynie tried to push forward, yet he despaired that the king was asking the impossible. On January 23, 1681, he began drafting a letter to Louvois explaining the difficulties he was facing. The letter did not come easily. His draft was full of crossed-out words and rewritten sentences. Eventually he settled on the following message: “I know that, as on the other occasions that I tried to [provide a summary], this was beyond my ability. Considering myself alone in the middle of 150 prisoners, all charged with extraordinary crimes . . . it is impossible to present all of the facts and to have them be understood in the most general of terms.”
Reaching for a new piece of paper, he continued his letter. After he filled the page, he reread what he had written and then drew a long vertical line through the middle, crossing nearly everything out. La Reynie conceded in one of the few sentences that remained: “I can only admit my own weakness in trying to describe the state of these sad affairs.” He then edited the sentence to say, “the state and the consequences of these sad affairs.”
Three pages later, his hand aching, the police chief paused to turn each messy page over to review: “The number of crimes mentioned here stuns the mind. . . . Monsieur, this is as far as I am able to go. All the rest is outside of my abilities and depends solely on God’s inspiration on the king for his glory and the public good.” Ending his letter, La Reynie offered the only suggestion he could think to make: Reconvene the tribunal. Once again the king refused.
Over the course of the weeks that followed, La Reynie scribbled three questions onto a piece of paper: Was Montespan behind the placet? Was she part of the efforts to provide Fontanges with poisoned gloves? And what about the black masses, the child sacrifices, and the other sacrileges that Filastre, Guibourg, and Voisin’s daughter described?
“It is difficult even to presume that these crimes are possible,” he wrote. “They seem . . . so strange that I can hardly make myself consider them.” Still, he forced himself to review the evidence once again, making note of all information that would support each question in the affirmative as well as in the negative. Filling sixty pages, La Reynie lamented: “It puts the mind in a strange agitation.”
La Reynie consoled himself with the thought that the final decision of guilt did not reside in his hands alone. His responsibility was to present the facts and let others do with them what they would: “This same responsibility obliges me to ask God to continue to protect His Majesty and to show him what should be done with these conjectures for his glory, his safety, and for justice.”
Having finally accepted that the king was not interested in reopening the tribunal, La Reynie devised the next-best strategy. Louis’s “most faithful” advisers, Louvois and Colbert, could review the most incriminating documents and decide, in consultation with the king, whether the women were guilty. In effect La Reynie was proposing a secret court within a secret court.
This time the king agreed. Over the days that followed, La Reynie sifted through the piles of papers he had sorted months earlier, pulling out all references to Oeillets and Montespan. The records from Trianon and Filastre alone totaled nearly two hundred pages. By the time he was done, he had filled an enormous black leather box with manuscript records. To secure the sensitive documents, he locked the box, keeping the key. He then ordered Desgrez and his men to take it to the Château of Saint-Germain, with La Reynie sending the key by armed guards in a separate delivery. Louvois and Colbert took turns reviewing the documents over the months that followed.
From the first investigations, the king had made it clear that he preferred Louvois and La Reynie at the helm of the inquiries rather than Colbert. Though frustrated, Colbert largely kept his distance. However, after reviewing the accusations against Athénaïs, Colbert could not remain complacent. Montespan had recently become a member of his family by marriage: Her disgrace would also mean his own. The fact that his nemesis Louvois played a leading role in the process also made it all the more urgent that he intervene.
With the assistance of his legal adviser, Claude Duplessis, Colbert denounced the evidence against Athénaïs as “execrable calumnies.” While he did not deny that Athénaïs likely did visit Voisin years earlier, it had been long before any “small jealous worries that her affection [for the king] produced in Madame de Montespan’s mind.” Colbert argued indignantly that the idea that Athénaïs would seek to kill the king was preposterous, given everything she would have stood to lose. “What! To believe there was a plot to poison her master, her benefactor, her king, a person that she loves more than life! To know that she would lose everything in losing him . . . ! These are things that one cannot conceive of, and His Majesty knows Madame de Montespan deep in her soul and will never be convinced that she could be capable of such abominations.”
Colbert took aim at Athénaïs ’s primary accus
ers. Morally corrupt, not a single one of them could be a reliable witness, he said. Focusing most especially on Voisin’s daughter, Colbert insisted that everything she had said was a lie, made up as a way to avoid being put to death. This explained the inconsistencies in her stories and why she did not say anything until her mother was dead. Her mother would have exposed her as a liar.
The minister also chastised La Reynie and Louvois for the way they handled Oeillets’s visit to Vincennes. They should have presented Oeillets with four or five other people. By bringing her in individually, it had been too easy for Lesage and Guibourg to guess whom they were about to meet, given what they had heard from other prisoners. Colbert was convinced that Voisin’s daughter had never seen the woman, which is why she was unable to identify Oeillets.
In a cunning move, Colbert asked whether there could be a witness more reliable than the monarch himself. “His Majesty . . . saw all of [Montespan’s] behavior, knows her mind, everything she does all the time and in every occasion. [His] mind is so penetrating and all-knowing and [he] never noticed a single thing or had even the slightest suspicion.” He urged the king to trust his God-given wisdom in this matter.
At Colbert’s request, the lawyer Duplessis followed the minister’s letter with an analysis of the legal basis for the special tribunal. Duplessis explained that while the original charge of the court was to try only crimes of poison, the scope of the tribunal had expanded to include a host of other crimes, including witchcraft. “This is contrary to the spirit of all [existing] ordinances . . . which regulate the jurisdictions and the powers of judges in criminal matters.” Whether or not the continued existence of the court could be justified legally, Duplessis noted that the amount of time that accused prisoners had remained in jail also went against the spirit of the king’s original ordinance, which stressed expediency as a reason for moving the cases out of the parlement. Walking a fine line, Duplessis added: “But, of course, all of this depends on the desires of the king.”
To find a way out of the “embarrassment,” Duplessis offered four suggestions. First, the king could disband the tribunal entirely and exile all those in prison or otherwise under suspicion. He dismissed this option immediately, saying, “The chamber would be terminated, but the Affair would not end.” Some criminals, like Guibourg, were too dangerous to let back into the public. Moreover, their return to society could inspire more crime once they shared their stories of imprisonment.
A second option would be to disband the tribunal and return the cases to the parlement, which was not practical. It would be too much work for the judges to get caught up on all that had already taken place in regard to each case. The third possibility would be for the court to determine which of the inmates had committed the most egregious crimes and sentence them to life in prison. Duplessis explained that the disadvantage of this approach would be that it also did not bring closure to the Affair.
Finally, the king could remand all the inmates to the tribunal and sentence each swiftly, based on the extent of the accusations made against them to date, conducting no additional investigations. Under no circumstances should the Question be administered, in order to make sure no new accusations surfaced that would require investigation. Whatever the king decided to do, both Colbert and Duplessis recommended strongly that he destroy the contents of the black box given “all of the execrable impiety and abominable trash in [it], it is important that no memory of it remains.”
Louis, Colbert, Louvois, and La Reynie met for four four-hour sessions to discuss next steps. It had been a long time since the rivals Colbert and Louvois had been forced to spend so much time together. For both men the stakes were high. Should Louis decide to continue the investigations and trials, it would be a sign of his confidence in Louvois. If the king took one of Duplessis’s recommendations, he would reaffirm Colbert’s role as head of the parlement and his control over legal matters more generally in Louis’s administration.
Siding with Colbert, the king reopened the tribunal on May 18, 1681. He also ordered the black box containing all sensitive documents to be returned to La Reynie for safekeeping until further notice. The police chief resealed the box and entrusted it to Sagot, who stored it in his home just steps away from La Reynie’s headquarters.
The tribunal reconvened on May 19, 1681. The court was instructed to try only those cases that could be disposed of easily without jeopardizing public safety. Working with redacted records, the judges remained unaware of accusations against Oeillets and Montespan. By the early spring of 1682, 88 of the 194 people who had been arrested had been tried. In the final days of the hearings, the court selected a handful of prisoners—most of whom were charged with relatively minor crimes and unknown to the public—for execution to serve as a lesson to those who might consider following in their path.
Once the docket was “cleared,” Louis disbanded the tribunal for good in May 1682 and ordered La Reynie to begin emptying Vincennes and the Bastille of their remaining prisoners arrested in the Affair. Of the 106 inmates remaining, La Reynie and Louvois determined that 61 were benign enough to be released and exiled for life from France. The remaining 35—including Lesage, Guibourg, and Marie-Marguerite—were too dangerous to be let out of sight.
On La Reynie and Louvois’s recommendation, the king ordered them to be sent in clusters to far-flung citadels, castles, and work camps, where they would spend the rest of their lives in isolation. Voisin’s best friend and business partner, Trianon, killed herself in prison before the transfer. Others may have later wished they had done the same.
Voisin’s daughter, Marie-Marguerite, was taken with eleven other women, including Bosse’s daughter, to an abandoned abbey on Belle-Isle-sur-Mer, a remote island off the coast of Brittany. Writing to the governor of the island, Louvois insisted that no one should ever know their names. The women should also be spared no mercy: “His Majesty orders you to . . . treat them very severely.” Condemned to harsh labor on the desolate and windswept island, they struggled to survive on meager rations of bread and water. Clad in threadbare sack dresses and denied access to firewood or even blankets, two of the women died not long after their transfer. The fate of the others, including Marie-Marguerite, remains unknown.
Lesage, Guibourg, and Romani spent their final days in the citadel of Besançon, near the Swiss border, where their hands and feet were shackled together by chains just long enough to allow them to sleep uncomfortably on the floor. “[These men] have said crazy things about Madame de Montespan that are without foundation,” Louvois informed the governor of the citadel. “Threaten them with the cruelest punishment if they dare make the smallest noise.” Guibourg died four years later, in January 1686. The dates of Lesage’s and Romani’s deaths are lost to history.
32
Lock and Key
La Reynie’s trusted notary Sagot died in the early fall of 1682, just months after the tribunal was disbanded. Immediately after hearing the news, the police chief sent Desgrez and his officers to place a seal on Sagot’s study to protect the documents stored there until arrangements for a transfer could be made with the notary’s successor, François Gaudion.
Shortly after Sagot’s death, his widow arrived at the police chief’s home, asking that the seals be removed. It was less a question of convenience and more one of financial urgency. Sagot had left his wife penniless, which meant she had no choice but to move from the home the couple rented on the rue Quincampoix, just a few houses down from La Reynie’s. She begged La Reynie to arrange for the transportation of the mountains of documents and boxes that lingered at her home so she could transfer the lease.
A few days later Gaudion met La Reynie and Desgrez in front of Sagot’s home. Madame Sagot escorted the group to her husband’s study. The door was locked, the keyhole sealed with wax. After confirming that the wax had remained undisturbed, La Reynie ordered Desgrez to unlock the door.
Stepping into the room, La Reynie took a visual inventory. His eyes scanned the bookcases w
ith shelves bowed under the weight of Sagot’s letters and notes; his gaze moved across Sagot’s desk, blackened with ink, and paused at the mantel of the chimney, where a number of spare quills lay. Finally he spotted the precious black box containing the king’s secrets.
La Reynie instructed Desgrez to deliver the black box to Gaudion’s home in the Marais, as well as the many other boxes and parcels in the home of the deceased notary. There were eighty-five boxes in all: twenty-nine from his study and another fifty-six from a room on the second floor. Each was wrapped tightly with cord, and a large mass of melted wax imprinted with La Reynie’s official police seal encased the places where the cord had been cut and tied.
La Reynie made it clear to Gaudian that he was not to touch any of the materials unless the police chief was there. As for the black box, it was also off-limits. In any case La Reynie was the sole owner of the key needed to open it.
Several months later, La Reynie arrived at the new notary’s home. Gaudion had been waiting for him. He led the police chief to what had once been servants’ quarters on the fourth floor. The staircase was narrow, the ceilings low, and the rooms drafty and cold from the January air. La Reynie’s only concern was whether there were any signs of human activity—past or potential—in or near the rooms. He saw nothing worrisome.
