by Holly Tucker
Repeating what he had done at Sagot’s home, La Reynie looked around the space for the large box. With relief, he located it sitting inconspicuously in the corner of the room.
For his part Louis made it clear that the Crown considered the matter officially closed. “We do not speak at all of poison. The word is banned at Versailles and all of France,” declared Madame de Sévigné. In July 1682 the king had issued an edict vowing to punish severely all “fortune-tellers, magicians, witches, and poisoners.” In it he reflected publicly on the last three years: “We have employed all appropriate means possible to stop these detestable abominations in their track.” This experience “showed us how dangerous it is to accept the smallest transgression regarding such crimes, and how difficult it is to pull out their roots.”
The edict ordered anyone who persisted on engaging in fortune-telling or magic to leave the kingdom immediately. For those who did not heed his warning, the king promised that their punishment would be death. As for poisoners, it did not matter whether their crime killed their victim. Even in the absence of definitive evidence, all would-be poisoners would receive the death penalty. The king also outlawed the sale of any ingredient that could be used in poisonous mixtures, as well as the sale of any poisonous insects or reptiles, promising severe corporal punishment for those who refused to heed his orders. Formal approval would be required for formulations such as arsenic or mercury chloride, necessary ingredients for certain trades such as goldsmiths and jewelers. A royal register would track all such sales.
In 1682 Louis announced that Versailles would become his permanent home. The architect Mansard had almost finished the construction of the Hall of Mirrors and would soon leave it to the painter Le Brun to fill the ceilings with enormous murals lauding the king’s triumphs, both at home and abroad: from the War of Devolution in 1667, in which Louis gained new territories for France in the Spanish Netherlands, to the lighting of Paris with La Reynie at the helm. Colbert died less than a year later from a bladder stone, after spending years coordinating the construction of the château and worrying about its exorbitant price tag. Louvois remained minister of war until his death in 1691.
In June 1683 Marie-Thérèse fell suddenly ill, the result of an abscess under her arm. When she died not long after, Louis’s words of mourning were characteristic of the couple’s unexciting life together: “This is the first trouble she has ever given me.”
Following tradition, the king and close family members left the royal palace to mourn at the Château of Fontainebleau. Louis asked Madame de Maintenon to join them. When she hesitated, the duke of Rochefoucauld urged her to go. “This is not the time to leave the king,” he said. “He needs you.”
Three years older than Louis, she “was not young,” wrote one court observer. “But she had lively and bright eyes [and] a bubbly spirit.” While the increasingly devout Louis undoubtedly found her attractive, Maintenon believed that at their age piousness mattered more than passion. Whether he felt the weight of his age or the fatigue of spending the last two decades under the spell of Montespan, the king agreed. In a secret ceremony at Versailles in late October 1683, Louis and Françoise de Maintenon married.
Between her departure from court in 1677 and her death in 1687, Mademoiselle des Oeillets lived out her days comfortably in a large home not far from where her mother once lived in the Montorgeuil neighborhood. Athénaïs, too, continued with her life at court after the king’s marriage, though at the margins. To make room for Louis’s new wife, she was forced to move from her quarters near the king’s to the ground floor of the palace. The king continued to visit her on a regular basis, but the chaste visits served only as a bitter reminder that nothing remained of the passion, the love, or even the friendship that the couple once shared.
After eight more years at Versailles, Montespan asked Father Bossuet, the same priest who had chastised her for her moral failings sixteen years earlier, to inform the king that she would be leaving Versailles for good. Louis made no effort to dissuade her. Instead he ordered his servants to remove all traces of his former mistress from the palace the minute she walked out the door.
Athénaïs stepped into her carriage and left Versailles for the last time in 1691. Several days later she arrived at the Abbey of Fontevrault in the Loire Valley, where her sister was abbess, and thereafter divided her time between the austere abbey and her country home in southwestern France. Though the home was modest, she sumptuously outfitted one room, christening it the “king’s bedroom.” Until the end of her days Athénaïs never lost hope that the king would someday return to her. He never did.
On the morning of May 28, 1707, as he prepared for a hunt in the royal forest of Marly, Louis was told of Athénaïs’s death. Nodding in acknowledgment, the elderly Louis climbed into his carriage and set off for the day with the usual crowd of nobles and courtiers following behind. Upon the group’s return early that evening, the king held a public dinner with Maintenon at his side. After the meal he rose with his guests and headed toward the gardens. Waving everyone away, the king wandered alone among the carefully tended hedges, trees, and parterres of late spring flowers until the early hours of the morning.
As for La Reynie, the four long years he spent during the Affair of the Poisons investigating the darkest facets of human nature had taken a toll. As early as 1689, Colbert’s successor, Pontchartrain, argued that La Reynie should be replaced and that he was too old and too “used up” to continue in his post. La Reynie offered his resignation to the king without protest. Louis refused it, insisting that La Reynie continue in his work.
Over the decades between the end of the Affair of the Poisons and his death in 1709, La Reynie kept watch over the king’s most precious secrets. Long before his last breath, he arranged to have the key to the black box and a letter delivered to the king on his death. There would have been every justification for him to have an elaborate funeral followed by a sepulcher burial inside a church, given his long service to the king and his steadfast faith. Instead he made sure in his will to specify that every effort be made to keep his “rotting cadaver” from corrupting the air. La Reynie was buried in a simple grave just outside the walls of Paris, as attentive in death to keeping his city clean as he had been in life.
Epilogue
The numbers are staggering: Between April 1679 and July 1682, the Arsenal tribunal met 210 times, questioned 442 people, put 218 of them in prison, executed 34, and sentenced another 28 to life in prison or the galleys.
We have La Reynie to thank for this final accounting. When Louis XIV burned the records of the Affair of the Poisons on that hot summer day in 1709, he hoped to keep one of the greatest scandals in French history from posterity. The very fact that I was able to write this book is a testament to the king’s miscalculation.
Unknown to the king, the police chief kept a separate set of documents—more than eight hundred manuscript pages in all—containing his personal notes, summaries of interrogations, drafts of written reports, and even his personal to-do lists. In addition to La Reynie’s writings, there are several thousand extant manuscripts of judicial records, police interrogations, signed confessions, death notices, inventories of seized property, drawings, doodles, astrological charts, magic spells, and poison recipes—all of relevance to the Affair of the Poisons.
How these documents survived is almost as fascinating as the story they tell. It begins nearly fifty years before that fateful day in front of the fireplace. In 1660, a few months before Louis began his personal reign, a small archive at the Bastille was created to house the ever-growing number of lettres de cachet and other documents related to the general administration of the prison and its inmates. It was located in a large room deep in the prison, just off a well-protected courtyard.
After Louis declared the end of the Affair of the Poisons in 1682, La Reynie placed the most incriminating records under seal, storing them at Sagot’s and then Gaudion’s homes. These were the documents that Louis destroyed twenty
-six years later, following the police chief’s death. Fortunately for historians, La Reynie did not include his personal notes in those boxes, keeping them instead at his home and headquarters on the rue de Bouloi.
In his will La Reynie entrusted all his papers and correspondence to his wife, Gabrielle de Garibal. It is likely that, as had Sagot’s widow, Gabrielle kept the bulk of his belongings at the couple’s Paris estate. When she died in 1714, La Reynie’s successor, Marc René de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, would have taken responsibility for them.
In 1716, the year following the king’s death, his grandson Louis XV expanded the archive to include all police correspondence, notaries’ papers, commissioners’ reports, and administrative documents, as well as any personal papers found in the headquarters and private home of all lieutenants of police, past and future, at the time of their death. The edict came just two years before Argenson retired from his post in 1718, which suggests that concerns were brewing about the fate of confidential police records in anticipation of a leadership change. Located deep in one of France’s most secure prisons and protected by two guards who stood watch at all times, the Bastille archive proved a most logical choice to store these sensitive documents.
Following Argenson’s death in 1721, still more records flooded into the archive. In 1725 and 1755 the prison warden at Vincennes requested that all prisoner records be stored at the Bastille in order to free up more space for inmates. Ten years later Argenson’s successor transferred all the documents, including those from the secret trials, to the Bastille from the Arsenal, which was slated for demolition.
By the 1770s, however, the Bastille archive had outgrown its space. In 1775 prison administrators began plans to enclose the courtyard to make room for a large library worthy of the Enlightenment. But any such thoughts of construction came to a halt July 14, 1789, when revolutionaries ransacked the prison and set it on fire, using bundled papers as kindling and tossing what remained into the dry moat surrounding the prison.
Once the violence quieted and the flames were extinguished, Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon, a prominent librarian and bibliophile, went to the Bastille to survey the damage. Fearing the worst as he made his way deep into the prison and toward the archive, he was relieved to find everything intact once he arrived. Only the documents stockpiled after 1775, the ones cluttering more accessible spaces, had been destroyed. Nearly everything before that, including the records from the Affair of the Poisons, had survived. Ameilhon placed them in the basement of the nearby Saint-Paul Church.
In 1799 Ameilhon was appointed director of the newly constructed Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, built on the very same site where the Chambre Ardente held its secret trials. The librarian transferred the documents to the new library, where they sat for another forty years in the corner of an abandoned storage area until Ameilhon’s successor, the lawyer-turned-librarian François Mollien-Ravaisson, rediscovered them.
Over the next thirty years Ravaisson undertook the massive task of sorting, cataloguing, binding, and transcribing the more than five hundred thousand manuscripts contained in the archive. He stopped working only once, shifting his focus from cataloguing to keeping both the archive and the Arsenal library safe from uprisings during the four-month siege of the Paris Commune in 1871.
Before his death in 1884, Ravaisson organized the manuscript collection into 2,271 bound volumes, each at least six inches thick. He also transcribed and published sixteen books, integrating selections from the archive with primary texts from other library collections. Four of the books focus specifically on the Affair of the Poisons and include excerpts from sixteen of the manuscript volumes (Archives de la Bastille, mss. 10338–10354). In 1892 the historian Frantz Funck-Brentano continued Ravaisson’s work and published an inventory of the collection in 1892, without which it would be nearly impossible to make one’s way at all through the massive Bastille collection.
Ravaisson’s transcripts are invaluable to any researcher investigating the Affair of the Poisons. However, his volumes are in no way exhaustive and are, at times, riddled with mistakes. Especially unnerving is Ravaisson’s tendency to truncate interrogations without noting that he has done so, or to leave out key documents altogether. As Funck-Bretano had no trouble pointing out, “Ravaisson was not a learned man by trade.” For this reason I worked as much as I could with the original manuscripts from the Bastille archives. This was especially important in regard to La Reynie’s personal notes, which Ravaisson cut and pasted to give a sense of coherence and clarity to the police chief’s writings that undermines their actual complexity.
Over the course of the four years I spent researching this book, I often found myself identifying with La Reynie in his quixotic search for the truth. I had access to a corpus of primary documents that was so copious as to be at times overwhelming. Each eyewitness report, interrogation record, and torture “confession” corroborates or contradicts another document—or, frustratingly, does both at the same time. At one point I filled a long wall in my office with index cards secured by masking tape, which I moved around for hours at a time, much as La Reynie did with his own notes, trying to make sense of the testimonies and to create a timeline of events.
To retrace the paths of the prisoners, I made several trips to the Château of Vincennes. There I climbed the tower’s cold and twisting staircases and counted the hours with each loud chime of the eleventh-century church outside. I spent months at the Arsenal library reading thick manuscript pages, my eyes straining to decipher the often illegible handwriting of magistrates, prison guards, and notaries. Studying these volumes felt like being on an exhilarating treasure hunt, exploring pages with astrological drawings, poison recipes, instructions for magic spells, appeals from desperate clients to the witches and poisoners, the shaky signatures of frightened prisoners, and the doodles of bored scribes.
Then there were the times when history became all too real. I will never forget the moment when I stumbled on the medical report of Dodée’s suicide, which I describe in chapter 25. Reading the detailed and heart-wrenching description, I let out a gasp loud enough to startle the librarian in the quiet reading room of the Arsenal library. It gave me shivers when I realized that, just days earlier, I had been in her cell. As I lingered in the tiny room to study the graffiti that filled its walls, I had no idea that I was standing in the very spot where she had killed herself in desperation.
My book would have been impossible to write had it not been for the work of the researchers who have gone before me: Pierre Clément, Antonia Fraser, Arlette Lebigre, Lynn Mollenauer, Georges Mongrédien, Jean-Christian Petitfils, Julia Prest, Jacques Saint-Germain, and Anne Somerset, among others. These and other scholars have not always agreed on the events, characters, and motivations behind what was arguably the greatest social and political scandal in early French history. I have indicated in the notes where my interpretation of events differs from theirs, without intending to diminish in any way the rigor and significance of their work.
I share the belief of Somerset, Mollenauer, and Prest that we will likely never be able to resolve with certainty all that took place in the dark years between 1667 and 1682—particularly in regard to extent of Athénaïs ’s participation in the horrific, almost unimaginable, crimes of which she was accused. Taking a cue from Natalie Zemon Davis’s groundbreaking work Fiction in the Archives, I have chosen, however, not to tell this story from the goal of uncovering indisputable “truths.” My sense is that no historian can provide a definitive account of a scandal so complex using a historical corpus that is at once vast and dense, and yet so oddly limited.
Still, there are a few things we can know with reasonable certainty. I share La Reynie’s conviction that Montespan, like so many of her contemporaries, employed Voisin and her colleagues at least to some degree. In a letter to Louvois in 1680, La Reynie affirmed his belief that Montespan was “in the hands of Voisin” beginning in 1667. However, La Reynie could not be sure of the exact nature of Voisin’s conta
ct with the king’s mistress, particularly in later years (1671, 1673, 1675, 1676, and 1679). After much research I am also confident that the events that I describe in parts 1 and 2 did take place as Marie-Marguerite witnessed them. I base my trust on multiple sources of corroborating testimony by other witnesses.
To facilitate my analysis of interrogations and other primary texts, I coded the documents using qualitative data-analysis software (NVivo). Coding allowed me to locate and place side-by-side overlapping testimonies. From there I performed a second level of coding to determine not only where accounts confirmed, or deviated from, one another, but also where there were potential lexical and syntactic similarities. When in doubt, I also looked for instances of self-incriminating testimony, with the thought that few witnesses would offer details of their crimes if they did not actually commit them, even if they embellished some details in the telling. However, I did look skeptically at confessions made under torture. Filastre’s post-torture retraction provides an excellent example of the perils of interpreting claims made in these contexts.
Unlike La Reynie, I have a hard time indulging many of the horrific claims made by Voisin’s daughter, Lesage, and Guibourg regarding Montespan’s participation in child sacrifices and attempts to kill the king. I am inclined to agree with Colbert and Duplessis that Athénaïs had nothing to gain and everything to lose if the king were to die, especially since her status was already in peril at the time the worst of her alleged crimes happened. As Antonia Fraser reminds us in her history of Louis XIV’s loves, Montespan herself once said in regard to her marital infidelities and other moral lapses: “Just because I commit one sin [that is, adultery] it does not mean that I commit them all.”
From the first days of my research, I found Voisin’s daughter Marie-Marguerite to be a fascinating enigma. My sense is that she was a troubled young woman, the product of a difficult childhood in which secrets, lies, and violence formed the fabric of her daily life. Yet I think it would be a mistake to see her only as a pathos-inspiring victim, which is what I did during much of my early research. When in the course of my research I learned that she admitted to La Reynie that she had given the infant to Guibourg for sacrifice, my sense of her character as a young woman shifted. In her own way I believe she proved herself to be as cruel and heartless as her mother.
