The Poison Drama at the Court of Louis XIV
I. The Sorceresses
The Dinner of La Vigoureux
The trial of Madame de Brinvilliers had just caused an immense sensation. The penitentiaries of Notre Dame, without naming any person, declared that ‘the majority of those who had confessed to them for some time accused themselves of poisoning somebody.’ The court and the city were still disturbed by the catastrophe which had at St. Cloud suddenly carried off the charming Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, by the sudden death of Hugues de Lionne, the great statesman, and by the startling fate which had just befallen the Duke of Savoy. A note found on September 21, 1677, in the confessional of the Jesuits in Rue Saint-Antoine denounced a plot to poison the king and the dauphin. On December 5 following, La Reynie, lieutenant of police, caused the arrest of Louis de Vanens, who said he had been an officer. The papers seized on him and on Finette, his mistress, brought to light an association of alchemists, coiners, and magicians, in which priests, officers, important bankers like Cadelan were associated with light women, lackeys, and vagabonds. The Parlement was investigating the matter, when La Reynie put his hand on a second association, like the first to all appearance, but soon to reveal itself to the eyes of the magistrates as an affair of much greater importance still.
Towards the end of the year 1678, an advocate in small practice named Maître Perrin was dining in Rue Courtauvilain with a certain Madame Vigoureux, wife of a ladies’ tailor—the trade, it will be seen, existed before to-day. The company was merry, and the wine flowed freely. Among the party was a ‘big, powerful, large-faced woman,’ who choked with laughter as she poured out for herself bumpers of burgundy that would have made a grenadier stagger. Her name was Marie Bosse, and she was the widow of a horse-dealer. She was further a well-known fortune-teller—‘devineresse,’ as they said in those days. ‘A fine trade!’ she cried, and spoke of the grand people who frequented her little rookery in the Rue du Grand-Huleu—duchesses and marchionesses and princes and lords. ‘Another three poisonings, and she would retire with her fortune made!’ At this remark the guests began to laugh still more loudly: this fat woman was irresistibly funny. Maître Perrin alone saw, by a sharp and rapid frown on the face of Madame Vigoureux, that there was something serious in it. He knew Desgrez, the police officer who had arrested Madame de Brinvilliers, and to him he related the incident. Desgrez did not laugh at all, and that very day he sent the wife of one of his archers to the fortune-teller with a complaint against her husband. The fortune-teller, at the first visit, promised her assistance; at the second, she gave her a phial of poison, which the wife at once carried home to her dumfounded husband. La Reynie forthwith ordered the arrest of Madame Vigoureux, of Marie Bosse, with her daughter Manon, and her two sons, one of whom was a soldier in the guards, and the other, a boy of fifteen, was just leaving the workhouse of Bicêtre, where he had been placed to ‘improve his morals and give him a taste for work.’ Marie Bosse was arrested at her own house on the morning of January 4, 1679, in bed with her two sons. Her daughter had just risen. ‘There was only one bed, in which they all slept together.’ The preliminary inquiry brought to light a crime, the news of which created a sensation almost as great as that evoked by the poisonings by Madame de Brinvilliers.
An order in council, dated January 10, instructed La Reynie to proceed against the women Bosse, Vigoureux, and their accomplices. On March 12 an officer set about the arrest of Catherine Deshayes, wife of Antoine Monvoisin, a peddling jeweller. This woman, usually known as La Voisin, was the greatest criminal of whom history has any record. She was arrested as she left the church of Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle after hearing mass. In her track La Reynie was to penetrate into a region of crime that the imagination can scarcely conceive. ‘Human life is publicly trafficked in,’ he wrote in utter consternation: ‘death is almost the only remedy employed in family embarrassments; impieties, sacrileges, abominations are common practices in Paris, in the country, in the provinces.’
Sorcery in the Seventeenth Century
To understand the facts and the characters of the persons we are going to study, we must dwell briefly upon the beliefs of that time—a time when beliefs were dominant influences in the life of men. We know what power religious sentiments had in the seventeenth century—sentiments of an intensity and a simplicity we know little of to-day, and the corruption of which could not but engender the most absurd superstitions. That was the epoch when the sweet Marguerite Alacoque, in her divine ecstasy, exchanged her heart with that of Christ, and wrote in her own blood, under dictation from on high, the contract which ascribed to God these words: ‘I constitute thee heiress of my heart and all its treasures for time and eternity; I promise thee that thou shalt only lack succour when I lack power; thou shalt be for ever the well-beloved disciple, the plaything of my good pleasure and the burnt-offering of my love.’ And that, too, was the period when Catherine Monvoisin, the terrible sorceress of Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, found numerous and ardent followers.
The beliefs in the action of the devil, and in the power of the sorcerers, so deeply rooted in the imagination of the seventeenth century, were summed up in 1588 in the Démonomanie des Sorciers of the famous Jean Bodin. He defined the sorcerer as one who ‘by devilish and unlawful means endeavours to attain some end’; but in his book he speaks for the most part of witches. As Sprenger, the German inquisitor, remarked, ‘We should talk of the heresy of the witches, and not of sorcerers, for these are of little account.’ In Bodin are to be found most of the practices in black magic still flourishing at the end of the seventeenth century. Sorcerers and witches formed a sort of vast fraternity. There were entire families whose formulae and whose customers were handed down as heritable property. Jeanne Harvillier, burnt to death on April 30, 1579, may serve as type. Her mother, a witch like herself, had been burnt to death thirty years before. Such a death was the natural end to her career, an end foreseen, and one that terrified those fascinated by the strange vocation much less than one would imagine. Jeanne was born about 1528, at Verberie near Compiègne. At the age of twelve she was presented by her mother to the devil, who appeared to her in the shape of a very tall dark man. Jeanne renounced God, and consecrated herself to the ‘Spirit.’ ‘At the same time she had carnal intercourse with him, which continued from the age of twelve to the age of fifty, when she was arrested. It sometimes happened that her husband, lying by her side, failed to perceive what was going on.’ This was the incubat. Jeanne Harvillier was brought to justice on the charge of causing the death of men and beasts by witchcraft. She confessed to it with the greatest frankness, and told the story of her last homicide: ‘She laid some powders, prepared for her by the devil, in the place where the man who had beaten his daughter was to pass.’ Another man came by to whom she wished no harm, and immediately he felt a sharp pain all over his body. She promised to cure him, and in fact took her place at the bedside of the sick man and tended him with the gentleness of a sister of mercy. She fervently besought the devil to restore life to the dying man, but the devil replied that it was impossible.
Bodin gravely recounts how witches on the Sabbath flew through the air on broomsticks. He adds: ‘What we have said of the travels of the witches, both in body and in spirit, and the frequent and memorable experiences of the same, show as in broad daylight, and bring to the test of touch and sight, the error of those who have written that the flights of witches are imaginary, and nothing but a trance.’ This last opinion had been maintained by John Wier, physician to the Duke of Cleves, in a book which is almost a work of genius for that period. Bodin devoted all his energy to its refutation, for to throw any doubt upon the fact that the devil transports witches from one place to another would be, he said, to bring gospel history into ridicule.
Coming to study the maladies attributed to the incantations of sorcerers—consumption, hysteria, melancholy, delusions, debility—John Wier found the remedies to consist in a regular life, in conformity with the laws of God, and in the skill of physicians. What an abominable doctrine! says Bodin. He had lost all respect, then, for anything. Bodin was beside himself. John Wier, he says, wrote under the dictation of Satan. Moreover, had he not himself confessed that he was a disciple of Agrippa, ‘the greatest sorcerer that ever was’? When Agrippa died in the hospital of Grenoble, a black dog which he called ‘Monsieur’ instantly went and sprang into the river. Wier declared, it is true, that this dog was not the devil, but there was not a single sensible person who believed him.
Without taking a side in this famous dispute between Bodin and John Wier, we are bound to state that the writings of the latter had no success, at any rate in France, while Bodin’s book became a classic. Bossuet, for all his powerful intellect, firmly believed in sorcery. At the close of the seventeenth century, Bonet was obliged to go to a Protestant republic to get his treatise on medicine printed, in which he spoke lightly of magic and demoniacal possession. We have to come far into the eighteenth century to find one Abraham de Saint-André—and he was physician to Louis XV—daring, in his famous Letters, to cast doubt on the magic and witchcraft of sorcerers.
The following case, tried at the period in which the events of our story occurred, and reproduced here after the archives of the Bastille, will enable us to understand the ardour of belief with which the sorcerers themselves were animated.
By sentence of the Tournelle on September 2, 1687, a certain Pierre Hocque was condemned to the galleys. He was a shepherd, skilled in magic, who had, as the judgment declared, caused the death, by a spell he cast over them, of 395 sheep, 7 horses, and 11 cows belonging to Eustache Visié, receiver of taxes at Pacy-en-Brie. Hocque was chained up with the other galley prisoners. Nevertheless, the cattle of Eustache Visié continued to die. He had no sooner bought a cow or a sheep and placed it in his farm than it perished. Clearly the only remedy was to get Pierre Hocque to remove the direful spell he had imposed. Visié won over, by a promise of money, the galley prisoner who was fastened to the chain next to Hocque—a man named Béatrix. He spoke to the shepherd, who replied that he had in fact cast a poison-spell over the cattle of Visié, and that, failing himself, only two shepherds named Bras-de-Fer and Courte Epée had the power to remove the fatal charm. At the urgent request of Béatrix, Hocque dictated a letter to be sent to Bras-de-Fer, but the letter was no sooner despatched than he fell into a horrible despair. He cried hoarsely that Béatrix had made him do something that would cause his death, which he would be unable to escape from the moment Bras-de-Fer began to raise the spell he had cast on the cattle. And the unhappy wretch writhed about in such dreadful contortions that the other prisoners would have murdered Béatrix but for the intervention of the guards. The despair and the convulsions lasted for several days, and then Hocque died. ‘And it was the exact time,’ says the official document, ‘when Bras-de-Fer began to exorcise the cattle.’ The judges add: ‘It is established that Pierre Hocque died because Bras-de-Fer removed the poison-spell from the horses and cows, and it is true that since that time no more of Eustache Visié’s horses and cows have died.’
The conviction of the unhappy sorcerer that he was bound to die as soon as his mate undid his work was so strong that he did die. Is it possible to imagine a more striking proof of the robust faith people then had in all these devilries?
The Practices of the Witches
To magic, black or white, the witches added medicine and pharmacy. They kept drugstores with phials innumerable: syrups, juleps, ointments, balms, emollients in infinite variety. They were old wives’ remedies, but their efficacy had been proved by experience, and their preparation was perfected from age to age. Paracelsus, the great Renaissance physician, burnt in 1527 the medical books of his time, declaring that nothing but the formulae of the witches was of any use. The old hags had soothing draughts for pain, healing ointments for wounds, and they acted on nervous maladies by suggestion. That was the serious side of their art. Most often the witch was a midwife too; but just as in that strange world the poisoner lurked behind the druggist, and the alchemist and the coiner were one, so the midwife played the part of baby-farmer. Finally, the witches were fortune-tellers, who cast one’s horoscope according to the drawing of cards or the lines of the hand.
What were the declarations of the witches arrested by La Reynie? Marie Bosse said that ‘nothing better could be done than to exterminate all that sort of people who examine the hand, because they are the ruin of many a woman, women of quality as well as others; the fortune-teller soon finds out their weak spot, and thereby knows how to take them and lead them wherever she will.’ She added that in Paris there were more than 400 fortune-tellers and magicians ‘who ruined a great many people, especially women, and of all conditions.’ She went on to speak of the money her cronies earned, telling how they bought places for their husbands and built houses, and that they did not realise such fortunes merely by looking at people’s hands. La Voisin said that nothing could be better than to hunt up all the people who looked at hands, that those engaged in the business ‘heard strange things when love intrigues were not prospering, that poisonings were an everyday occurrence, that many of them were paid as much as 10,000 livres’ (£2000 of our money). Similar declarations were made by Leroux, another witch, and by the magician Lesage. ‘It is extremely important,’ said the latter, ‘to get to the bottom of these wretched practices, and to fathom this mystery of iniquity which exists among all those who ostensibly are seekers after treasure, after the philosopher’s stone, and other like things, but who keep up their trade by very different means: abortions and other crimes are greater treasures than the philosopher’s stone and fortune-telling; the people who apply to the workers in mystery discuss usually the poisoning of a husband, or a wife, or a father, and even sometimes of babies at the breast.’ He went on to say that ‘these wretched people had obtained the protection of very powerful friends, so that they acted with perfect assurance and in almost perfect freedom.’ These statements are confirmed by the documents La Reynie was able to get together.
What the public asked of the witches was, first of all, to withdraw the veil from the future, and then to enable them to discover treasures. For this purpose various means were employed, all tending to the same end—to compel the ‘Spirit,’ that is the devil, by charms and incantations to present himself and reveal the mysterious spot where treasures lay hid. ‘A woman,’ writes Ravaisson, ‘usually a prostitute on the eve of accouchement, was placed at the centre of a circle drawn on the floor, and surrounded with dark candles; when the child was born, the mother gave up her son to be consecrated to the devil. After pronouncing filthy incantations, the priest cut the victim’s throat, sometimes under the very eyes of its mother; but more often he carried it away to sacrifice it elsewhere, because at the last moment outraged nature asserted her rights, and these unhappy creatures snatched their babes from death. At other times, they were content to cut the throat of a deserted child; of such there was no lack; imprudent girls, light women, gave the witches authority to dispose of the fruits of an unlawful love. There were even licensed midwives who did a large business in procuring abortion; the children after being baptized were put to death and carried at once to the cemetery; most often they were buried in the corner of a wood or consumed in an oven.’ And the witch Marie Bosse added: ‘There are so many of this sort of people in Paris that the city is choke-full of them.’
These were the practices, with others more abominable still, which caused La Reynie to write: ‘It is difficult to think merely that these crimes are possible; one can hardly bring oneself to consider them. Yet it is those who have committed them that themselves declare them, and these villains give so many particulars that it is difficult to harbour any doubt.’
The Alchemists
Alongside of the group of witches and magicians appears another group, that of the alchemists and ‘philosophers,’ represented by such people as Vanens, Chasteuil, Cadelan, Rabel, and Bachimont. We have mentioned the arrest of Louis de Vanens on December 5, 1677.
The origins of this association of alchemists and seekers after the philosopher’s stone were highly dramatic. François Galaup de Chasteuil, second of the name—he belonged to an illustrious family of Languedoc, which had produced men of the highest distinction in arms, religion, and literature—was its chief, or to use the cant expression of the cabala, its ‘author.’ His life had been more than ordinarily romantic. Born at Aix, on November 15, 1625, he was the second son of Jean Galaup de Chasteuil, attorney-general of the Exchequer Court of Aix. His elder brother Hubert, solicitor-general to the Parlement of the same town, was ‘renowned for the nobility of his mind and the profundity of his knowledge’; his younger brother Pierre was a poet, the friend of Boileau, La Fontaine, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry. After a successful student career, François was admitted doctor of law. In 1644 he became a knight of Malta. He did signal service to the Order, and Lascaris, the grand master, placed on his breast the cross of honour. He then became captain of the guards of the great Condé. In 1652 he retired to Toulon, fitted out a ship, and under the Maltese flag went privateering against the Mussulmans. Algerian corsairs captured him and led him into captivity. After two years of slavery he came to Marseilles, where he turned monk and became prior of the Carmelites. He smuggled into the convent a young girl—a slender, fair-haired child, with large, bright blue eyes; and there he kept her locked up in his cell. When she was on the point of giving birth to her child, Chasteuil, assisted by a lay brother, strangled her in her bed, and on a pitch-dark night carried her into the chapel of the convent, where he lifted several slabs of the floor and dug out a grave in which to bury her. The silence of the arches was disturbed by a dull sound. A pilgrim, lying asleep against a pillar, woke up, and saw the sinister toilers by the light of the moon which shone through the stained windows. Transfixed with fright, he remained hidden out of sight in a dark corner until dawn, when the chapel was opened, and he ran to inform the magistrates. Chasteuil was arrested, tried, and condemned. He was on the way to execution when, at the foot of the gibbet, up came Louis de Vanens, captain of the galleys, along with several soldiers. Chasteuil and Vanens were old friends. Chasteuil was rescued, and, taking his rescuer with him, he fled to Nice.
Hiding in a quiet spot, the two friends began working at the philosopher’s stone, that is, at converting copper into silver and gold. Chasteuil had some experience of alchemy, and fancied he was master of the famous secret. Full of gratitude for the service done him, he gave Vanens the secret so far as silver was concerned, but would tell him nothing about the gold, ‘not thinking Vanens prudent enough for that.’ Shortly afterwards we find Chasteuil in the service of the Duke of Savoy, captain of the guards of the White Cross, and—extraordinary fact—tutor to his son! While occupied with the education of the young Prince of Piedmont, Chasteuil continued his ‘philosophy,’ and discovered an oil, which, as he appeared convinced himself, would turn metals into gold. He also wrote translations of authors sacred and profane—the minor prophets, Petronius, the Thebaïd of Statius; and he dabbled in poetry. He had just passed his fortieth year. A contemporary gives us his portrait: ‘Middle height, very thin, always troubled with a nasty cough caused by a wound he received in the body, round-shouldered, slightly crooked, with a wry mouth, scanty beard, hair black and flat, complexion swarthy and sallow.’ Moréri adds: ‘Monsieur de Chasteuil was one of the most accomplished of gentlemen, and a perfect master of the platonic philosophy.’
Vanens and Chasteuil struck up an alliance with Robert de Bachimont, lord of La Miré, who had married a cousin of Superintendent Fouquet. Bachimont had at Paris a house near the Temple, with four smelting furnaces: a large one on the third floor, two smaller ones in an ante-room, and a large one in the cellar. He also had apartments at Compiègne in the Ecu de France, where there was nothing but crucibles, alembics, vessels of glass and of earthenware, cucurbits, philosophical stoves open and closed, grates and mortars, retorts and matrasses, sal-ammoniac and iron filings, and a thousand varieties of powders, pastes, and liquids. Finally, he had another establishment at the abbey of Ainay, near Lyons, completely fitted up for the fusion of metals, the distillation of herbs, and other practices of alchemy. Before long the association was enlarged by the addition of a person of some importance, Louis de Vasconcelos y Souza, Count of Castelmelhor, who had been practically the governor of Portugal for five or six years as the favourite of King Alfonso VI. Bachimont says that Castelmelhor taught him the secret of colouring glass red. After the death of the Duke of Savoy on June 12, 1675, Castelmelhor withdrew to England, where he gained the favour of Charles II., an ardent alchemist and astrologer. He was present at the death of the English king, and it was he that brought in the Catholic priest who gave him extreme unction.
Chasteuil and his partners spent their time in the quest for the philosopher’s stone, contact with which was to convert metals into gold; and, like the majority of alchemists, they believed that it was to be found in the solidification of mercury. ‘The hermetic philosophers,’ writes M. Huysmans, ‘discovered—and modern science to-day does not deny that they were right—that the metals are compound bodies of identical composition. Their varieties are due simply to the different proportions of the elements in combination; it is possible then, by the aid of an agent that would alter these proportions, to change these bodies one into another—to transmute mercury, for instance, into silver, and lead into gold. And this agent is the philosopher’s stone, mercury: not ordinary mercury, which, to alchemists, is only a bastard metal’ (M. Huysmans uses another expression), ‘but the mercury of the philosophers, called also lion vert.’
Among the papers of La Voisin was found an MS. poem in honour of the philosopher’s stone:
‘De l’or glorifié qui change en or ses frères.’
The secret consisted in an elixir, of which a single drop, cast
‘dans une mer profonde
Où couleraient fondus tous les métaux du monde,
Suffirait pour la teindre et fixer en soleil.’7
Chasteuil and his fellows did not merely seek the solidification of mercury, which was to produce the philosopher’s stone, but the liquefaction of gold by cold: this was to furnish a universal panacea. ‘Liquid gold restores health and strength, gives flesh to greybeards and colour to the cheeks of girls, cures the plague,’ and so on.
Solid mercury being unobtainable, they sought, for the transmutation of metals, those powders or oils about which we hear so frequently at that period; and, as we shall see, they had the best reasons in the world for believing that they had put their finger on the secret, at least as far as silver8 was concerned.
In 1676 our partners all established themselves at Paris, where they added to their company three collaborators, all important in different ways: the quack Rabel, a physician celebrated in his day; a rich banker of Paris named Pierre Cadelan, secretary to the king; and a young Parlement advocate named Jean Terron du Clausel. Du Clausel lodged with Vanens in the Rue d’Anjou, in a house which had for sign Le Petit Hôtel d’Angleterre. He was a valuable addition to the band, because he could distil at pleasure, being ‘licensed.’ Rabel seems to have been possessed of considerable real science. Rabel water, which he invented, is still used in our own day—a mixture of alcohol and sulphuric acid, which acts as an astringent in cases of hæmorrhage. Rabel had compounded another elixir, whose innumerable merits were celebrated in notices in prose and verse which the most glowing of modern advertisements have not surpassed. Cadelan supplied funds. Bodin speaks in very precise terms about the alchemists: ‘They extract the quintessence of plants, and make admirable and salutary oils and waters, and discourse subtly on the virtues and the transmutation of metals; but they also make false money.’ At the moment when Cadelan and his associates were arrested, he was on the point of farming the Paris mint. Was this in order to make false louis d’or, as historians have supposed? We believe rather that it was to find means of circulating the products of the alchemical experiments of his associates, for by that time they had no manner of doubt about the efficacy of Chasteuil’s formulae. A bar of silver cast by Vanens, and taken by Bachimont to the mint, had just been accepted there at a good price as pure metal. It is scarcely necessary to add that this could only have been due to an error of the mint official; this famous silver made out of copper by Vanens and Chasteuil was nothing but ‘white metal.’ Nevertheless, it was a success which opened before the eyes of our partners splendid vistas of future wealth.
When Louis de Vanens was arrested on December 5, 1677, Louvois believed that he had seized a spy. But he had put his hand on an alchemist, and soon the whole band—Terron, Cadelan, Monsieur and Madame Bachimont, Barthomynat (known as La Chaboissière), de Vanens’ valet—were laid by the heels, some in the Bastille, the others at Pierre-en-Cize. Chasteuil had just died quietly at Verceil. Rabel had escaped into England, where Charles II lodged and fed him, gave him a pension, and loaded him with presents. Later he returned to France, and was incarcerated in his turn.
We regarded it as essential to say something of this band of alchemists and ‘philosophers’ by way of introduction to Louis de Vanens. This young noble of Provence, ‘a man of well-knit and graceful figure,’ had brilliant connections at court, where he was on a footing of intimacy with the king’s dazzling mistress, Madame de Montespan. On the other hand, he was an assiduous visitor to La Voisin, and was even for some time her ‘author.’ Vanens was the link between the alchemists and the witches. He was devoted to demoniacal practices. His valet, La Chaboissière, declared that one night he had to accompany his master and a cleric into the woods on the outskirts of Poissy, where they searched for treasures with incantations and invocations to the ‘spirit.’ Vanens was a diabolical character. He was confined at the Bastille in the same room with other prisoners, as the custom was. He had with him a sort of white and tan spaniel. As midnight approached, he recited some prayer over the body of the dog, and went through the ceremony of consecration. Then he took a prayer-book containing a picture of the Virgin, and laid the picture on the back of the dog, saying, ‘Avaunt, devil! Behold thy good mistress!’ To the remarks of his companions in captivity, he replied: ‘Neither God nor the king shall prevent me from doing what I have done.’ To gauge the strange and passionate vigour of these superstitions, we must remember that Vanens was in the Bastille, quite aware that these practices might bring him to the stake.
We shall see in the sequel the importance of Vanens when we recall the following lines found in the notes of Nicolas de la Reynie: ‘To see La Chaboissière again about his reluctance to have written down in his statement, after hearing it read, that Vanens had been concerned in giving Madame de Montespan counsel which deserves that he should be drawn and quartered.’
La Voisin
To the portraits of Chasteuil the alchemist and of Vanens, we must add that of the most famous of the witches, Catherine Deshayes, known as La Voisin. It was of her that La Fontaine wrote:
‘Une femme à Paris faisait la pythonisse.’
La Voisin stated to La Reynie: ‘Some women asked if they would not soon become widows, because they wished to marry some one else; almost all asked this and came for no other reason. When those who come to have their hands read ask for anything else, they nevertheless always come to the point in time, and ask to be ridded of some one; and when I gave those who came to me for that purpose my usual answer, that those they wished to be rid of would die when it pleased God, they told me that I was not very clever.’ Margot, La Voisin’s servant, said that the whole world came there, adding: ‘La Voisin is to-day dragging a great ruck down with her—a long chain of persons of all sorts and conditions.’ The Parisians used to go in companies to the house of the fortune-teller: they were quite pleasure parties. The merry crew would overflow into the garden lawns surrounding the cottage at Villeneuve-sur-Gravois. This was the district, but sparsely inhabited, between the ramparts and the St. Denis quarter.
The sorceress was brought into the city drawing-rooms as nowadays fashionable singers are brought. ‘At that time, La Voisin had as much money as she wanted. Every morning, before she rose, people were waiting for her, and she had visitors all the rest of the day: after that, in the evening, she kept open house, engaged fiddlers, and enjoyed herself thoroughly; this went on for several years.’ This life had little resemblance, it will be seen, to that of her ancestress, the witch described by Michelet: ‘You will find her in the most dismal places, isolated,—in houses of ill-fame and ruined huts and hovels. Where could she have lived except on wild heaths—the hapless wretch who was so hunted down, the accursed, proscribed, hated poisoner?’
La Voisin earned in a year as much as £2000 or even £4000 in English money; but her gains were spent in revelry. She entertained her lovers in princely style, for she would have thought it unworthy of her if they were not comfortable; and her lovers were many. We find in the first rank of them André Guillaume, the executioner of Paris, who beheaded Madame de Brinvilliers, and who, by a horrible coincidence, only just escaped executing La Voisin herself: among them also the Viscount de Cousserans, the Count de Labatie, Fauchet the architect, a wine merchant of the neighbourhood, Lesage the magician, the alchemist Blessis, and others.
We must add that Blessis and Lesage spent much money on her, ostensibly in connection with the philosopher’s stone, for La Voisin had a sincere faith in alchemy. She subsidised great enterprises, and helped to establish manufactures, being much interested in scientific and industrial progress; but in regard to industrial undertakings she fell mainly into the hands of sharpers who swindled her out of her money.
However, La Voisin, proud of her trade as sorceress, which brought persons of the highest rank to bend before her in obsequious and suppliant attitudes, did not stick at any expense that seemed likely to augment her glory. She delivered her oracular sayings clothed in a robe and a cloak specially woven for her, for which she paid 15,000 livres (£3000 of English money). The queen herself had no finery more beautiful than this ‘imperial robe,’ which ‘was the talk of all Paris.’ The cloak was of crimson velvet studded with 205 two-headed eagles of fine gold, lined with costly fur; the skirt was of bottle-green velvet, edged with French point. Even her shoes were embroidered with golden two-headed eagles. The mere weaving of the eagles on the cloak cost 400 livres (£80 to-day). We possess the bills of the maker.
But under the glittering shows of wealth La Voisin had preserved most dissolute manners. She was constantly drunk. She indulged in fishwife’s brawls with Lesage. Latour, who was her ‘great author,’ used to thrash her. She fought with Marie Bosse and tore her hair out. ‘One day, Latour being with her on the ramparts, she got him to give her husband fifty blows with a stick, while she held Latour’s hat.’ On that occasion, Latour bit poor Monvoisin’s nose. But on the other hand, the sorceress regularly attended the church of the Abbé de Saint-Amour, rector of the University of Paris, an austere Jansenist; and Madame de la Roche-Guyon stood god-mother to her daughter.
The husband whom La Voisin so brutally got beaten, appears to have been a decent man. In those days there was at Montmartre a chapel dedicated to St. Ursula, who enjoyed the power to ‘improve’ husbands. The procedure was to carry there, some Friday morning, a shirt of the wicked spouse. Our sorceress had the most implicit faith in the efficacy of this practice, and we must do her the justice to state that she always began by sending to Montmartre women who came to her with tales of their troubles. She availed herself of the remedy on her own account, and poor Monvoisin had to march to the place carrying his shirt under his arm. He was a husband for whose improvement St. Ursula does not appear to have been required to spend much effort.
Lesage, the witch’s lover, advised her to get rid of Monvoisin. A sheep’s heart was bought, ‘to which Lesage did something,’ and then it was buried in the garden behind the gate. Lo and behold, Monvoisin was seized with severe pain in the stomach. He cried out that if there was anybody who wished to do for him, he had better shoot him at once instead of letting him linger. La Voisin, struck with remorse, hastened to the Augustines to confess and obtain a general absolution; she took the sacrament, and on her return compelled Lesage to undo his wicked charms.
She related very simply and frankly to La Reynie the first steps of her career. Her husband, at that time, was doing nothing, but he had been a hawking jeweller, and then a shopkeeper on the Pont-Marie. He had lost his shop, and then, seeing her husband ruined, ‘she had devoted herself to cultivating the powers that God had given her.’ ‘It was chiromancy and face-reading that I learnt at the age of nine. I have been persecuted for fourteen years: that is the work of the missionaries’ (these were the members of a community established by St. Vincent de Paul, then very popular, who were actively occupied in converting sinners and removing scandals of all kinds). ‘However,’ she continued, ‘I gave an account of my art to the vicars-general, the Holy See being vacant, and to several doctors of the Sorbonne to whom I had been sent, and they found nothing to object to.’ Marie Bosse also spoke of the time when her friend went to the Sorbonne to argue on astrology with the professors.
Thus La Voisin set up as fortune-teller in order to restore order and comfort to her household. One of her friends, La Lepère, told her sometimes that she ought not to engage in such great crimes. ‘You are mad!’ cried the witch, ‘the times are too bad. How am I to feed my family? I have six persons on my hands!’ And in fact, until her arrest, La Voisin had been the constant support of her old mother, to whom she gave money every week.
La Voisin’s claim that her art was founded on face-reading was quite genuine. She had made a profound study of physiognomy. We find innumerable references to this subject in the documents of her case, and also a ‘Treatise on physiognomy, supported on six immovable columns: (1) sympathy between body and mind; (2) relations between rational and irrational animals; (3) the differences between the sexes; (4) national diversities; (5) physical temperaments; (6) diversities of age; not depending on a single sign, for men are often attacked by some defect which force of mind, aided by grace, can assuredly overcome.’ When the Countess de Beaufort de Canillac came to consult the fortune-teller, ‘the lady wishing to give me her hand without unmasking, I told her that I did not know physiognomies of velvet, whereupon the lady removed her mask.’ La Voisin confessed that she read much more in the features than in the lines of the hand, ‘it being no easy thing to conceal a passion or any considerable disturbing emotion.’ She was not merely a physiognomist, but an expert psychologist, and that was how she gave a real foundation to her sorcery. We may cite the following incident among many others.
Marie Brissart, widow of a Parlement counsellor, tenderly loved and handsomely supported a captain of guards named Louis Denis de Rubentel, Marquis de Mondétour, who became lieutenant-general in 1688. He was a personage of whom Saint-Simon, a severe censor, speaks thus: ‘He had been able to contemn basenesses, and to withdraw into his virtue, which was beyond his wealth.’ Madame Brissart used to send him money when he was on service, after having equipped him from top to toe on his departure. It happened that the cavalier displayed some coldness towards his mistress, with the idea of getting her purse to open still more generously. The widow, seeing nothing of her captain, became alarmed, and hastened to La Voisin. She began her incantations, with the assistance of Lesage. The magician walked up and down the garden with a wand, with which he struck the earth, repeating the words, Per Deum sanctum, per Deum vivum! Then he said: ‘Louis Denis de Rubentel, I conjure thee in the name of the Almighty to go find Marie Miron (Madame Brissart’s maiden name): she to possess thee wholly, body, soul, and spirit, and thou to love none but her!’ On another occasion, he put into a little ball of wax a paper on which the names of Rubentel and Madame Brissart were written, and in the presence of the latter threw the ball into the fire, where it burst with a loud noise. These fine charms were still without result, when one morning La Voisin, with the intuition of a clairvoyant, said to her weeping client: ‘You write every day and send your maid to Rubentel, but he pays no attention to you; it is mad conduct to write and send every day’; and the lady having ceased to write and send, Monsieur de Rubentel, who in turn began to be afraid lest so precious a fount should dry up, returned to her ‘without anything else having been done; yet the lady, believing that La Voisin had done some extraordinary thing, gave her twelve pistoles.’
The witch heard all sorts of confessions. There were wonderful dreams of adoring affection told her by lovers of twenty years, who came to her red with emotion, or wrote thrilling letters in order to bring their torment to an end, begging her to soften the hard hearts of their mistresses, or to bend the opposition of a cruel father. Or it was the fierce carnal love of mature women obstinately clinging to the lovers who were neglecting them for fresher girls. There were also the passions of ambitious women, greedy for money and honours, which bring us to the horrors of the ‘black mass.’
La Voisin was assisted in these monstrous rites by a priest ‘squint-eyed and old,’ with bloated face, and prominent blue veins forming a network on his cheeks—the terrible Abbé Guibourg. Formerly chaplain to the Count de Montgommery, he was at this time sacristan of St. Marcel, at St. Denis. He used to say mass, according to the proper rites, wearing the alb, stole, and maniple. ‘The women on whose bodies mass was said were laid stark naked, without even their chemise, upon a table which served as altar; their arms were stretched out, and they held a taper in each hand.’ Sometimes they did not actually undress themselves, ‘but only tucked up their garments as high as the throat.’ The chalice was placed on the bare belly. At the moment of the offertoire, a child had its throat cut. Guibourg usually stuck a long needle into its neck. The blood of the expiring victim was poured into the chalice, and mixed with the blood of bats and other materials obtained by filthy means. Flour was added to solidify the mess, which was thus made to resemble the Host, to be consecrated at the moment when, in the sacrifice of the mass, transubstantiation takes place. The scene is reconstructed by La Reynie according to the testimony of the accused.
Black masses were not the only sorceries whose rites required the sacrifice of children. La Voisin and her fellow-witches perpetrated a terrible slaughter of them. Children deserted by their unmarried mothers, others bought from poor women, did not suffice: several sorceresses were convicted of having killed their own children for these atrocious proceedings. Here, for instance, is a horrible detail: the daughter of La Voisin, on the very eve of her trouble, not trusting her mother, fled the house, and only returned after placing her infant in safety. The witches ran off with children in the streets. La Reynie wrote to Louvois: ‘Remember the great disturbance in Paris in 1676, when there were seditious gatherings and mobs and runnings to and fro in several parts of the city, through the rumour that people carried off children to cut their throats, though no one then understood what the cause of the rumour could be. The mob, however, proceeded to various excesses against the women suspected of being child-stealers. The king ordered an inquiry. Proceedings were taken (against those who rose against the witches), and a woman who was guilty of violence was condemned to death, but obtained a special pardon.’
La Voisin, like all the sorceresses, practised medicine. Among her papers were found recipes for the cure of pimples, a remedy for headache, the prescription for ‘a quintessence of hellebore which kept the Dean of Westminster alive for 166 years.’ She was a midwife, and especially a procurer of abortion. ‘Above the room (where she gave consultations) there was a sort of loft in which she procured abortions, and behind the room there was a recess with a stove, in which were found the charred remains of small human bones.’ Little children were burned in this stove. One day, in an effusive moment, La Voisin confessed that ‘she had burnt in the stove, or buried in the garden, the bodies of more than 2500 children prematurely born.’ Here again we come upon surprising particulars. The witch was very insistent that children thus brought into the world should be baptized before death. One evening La Lepère, a midwife friend of La Voisin, happened to be in the famous room with the witch’s husband. La Voisin, who was in the loft, came down suddenly in joyous haste and with radiant countenance, crying: ‘What luck! the child has been dipped!’
Such was the strange and horrible creature—the last of the great sorceresses who haunted the imagination of Michelet—the extraordinary woman whose crimes sent a shudder through the man who had heard the confessions of the most redoubtable criminals of his time—Nicolas de la Reynie.
We have a portrait of La Voisin by Antoine Coypel. She is represented on the way to execution in the linen shift of condemned criminals. Contemporaries depict her as a small stoutish woman, rather pretty, owing to her eyes, which were extraordinarily bright and piercing. The artist has given her a froglike expression, but no doubt he sketched her under the influence of a preconceived idea. Madame de Sévigné, who had a singular taste for this sort of spectacle, saw her mount to the stake: ‘La Voisin,’ she wrote, ‘very prettily surrendered her soul to the devil.’ The confessor of the sorceress has given his testimony to her edifying end: ‘I am loaded with so many crimes,’ she said with simple and profound emotion, ‘that I could not wish God to work a miracle to snatch me from the flames, because I cannot suffer too much for the sins I have committed.’
The Magician Lesage
La Voisin’s principal coadjutor was the magician Lesage. He was one by himself in this world of sorceresses, alchemists, and magicians. A sceptic among believers, he duped the women with whom he worked as well as the fashionable ladies who came to avail themselves of his art.
Originally from Venoix near Caen, his real name was Adam Cœuret. His portrait is sketched by La Vigoureux: ‘he wore a ruddy wig, was ill formed, clothed as a rule in grey, with a cloak of homespun.’ He was a wool merchant. Though he had a wife in Lower Normandy, he promised La Voisin that he would marry her if she became a widow. The first alias he chose was Duboisson. In 1667 he was arrested, condemned to the galleys for dealings with the devil, and liberated in 1672 through the kind offices of La Voisin. The galley in which he rowed was lying in sight of the port of Genoa when the pardon reached him.
Set at liberty, Cœuret returned to Paris, where he renewed his relations with the witches.
His whole art consisted in a remarkable talent for jugglery, by which he deceived the witches themselves, persuading them that he possessed ‘all the science of the cabala.’ They adopted him as partner in their lucrative operations. The reports of the examination of La Voisin give curious information on this head. ‘Lesage took a live pigeon in the Vale of Misery (on the quay of La Mégisserie, where poultry was sold) and burnt it in a warming-pan. Having then sifted its ashes, he put them in his room. It was the beginning of Lent, during which he used to recite the Passion of our Lord daily, with his feet in water, though it was freezing hard. Then he put a white cloth on the table, lit two tapers, and sent for three crystal glasses, with which having performed his “mystery,” which was Greek to La Voisin, he shut them up in a cupboard with a twig of laurel, and then, though he retained the key, he asked her for the three glasses and the laurel twig which he had locked in the cupboard. They were not found there; and then he said that he would give her nothing else to keep, and having sent her into the garden, she found them all three in a row in the summer-house. And when she asked him how he did that, Lesage said that he was one of the apostles and of the company of the Sibyls.’
At other times Lesage celebrated a sort of mass, got up as a priest. At the moment of the offertory he would break two pieces of ordinary bread, and after having made La Voisin and her husband kneel down, he gave them each a piece of bread ‘just as if they were at communion, and then made them drink some holy water which, as he said, he had turned into wine, and it was a liquid of an extremely pleasant taste.’ ‘A sergeant having come to La Voisin’s house to distrain on her at the instance of an upholsterer named Lenoir, La Voisin sent for Lesage, told him that she was ruined, and that there was something in the cupboard which must be taken away, namely, a consecrated wafer; and at the same time Lesage sent away the Marquise de Lusignan, who happened to be in the house, and told her to go home, and when she got there to put a white napkin on her bed, for something he was going to send her. And in fact the wafer was found by the marquise at her own house, without any one seeing who had taken it there.’
The pretended sorceries of Lesage thus consisted simply of clever conjuring tricks. They sufficed to amaze his clients. He made them write, for instance, requests to the devil in notes which he then pretended to throw in the fire, enclosed in balls of wax; and some days after he gave them back to them, saying that the devil, who had received them through the flames, had returned them.
Lesage was arrested for the second time on March 17, 1679, and we shall see the importance of the statements he made to the magistrates.
The ‘Chambre Ardente’
The consternation of Louis XIV, his ministers, and the lieutenant of police at the discovery of such crimes may be imagined. The terror was all the intenser because chemists and able physicians were then powerless to discover traces of poison in a corpse. The matter was intrusted to a special commission, in the hope that by a more expeditious and energetic procedure than that of the ordinary courts, it would succeed in cutting the evil at the root. This was the famous Chambre Ardente.
The president was Louis Boucherat, Count de Compans—an amiable man, says Madame de Sévigné, and of much good sense. Later, he became Chancellor of France. Louis Bazin, Lord of Bezons, nominated to act as judge-advocate along with La Reynie, was a member of the Academy. The office of clerk was filled by Sagot, La Reynie’s confidential secretary and ordinary clerk of the Châtelet. ‘The Commission,’ writes Ravaisson, ‘was composed of the élite of the councillors of state, and all these magistrates have left a high reputation.’ The court was called the Chambre Ardente, because in former days tribunals specially constituted to deal with great crimes sat in a chamber hung with black and lit by torches and candles.
The court met for the first time on April 10, 1679, and decided to keep its proceedings secret, so as to withhold details of these practices from the knowledge of the public. The magistrates themselves had no doubt of the efficacy of these dealings with the devil, nor of the formidable composition of the poisons.
The method of procedure was as follows:—
The individuals regarded as suspicious by La Reynie, the examining magistrate, were arrested by royal warrant, that is, by a lettre de cachet, which took the place of the modern magistrate’s warrant. The first depositions were submitted to the attorney-general, and it was only on his requisition that the officials proceeded to the confrontation of the prisoners, after which the commissaries submitted a detailed report to the court. The attorney presented to them his general conclusions, and the court decided whether the accused person should be ‘recommended,’ that is, remain a prisoner in virtue of a warrant issued by them. In that case the investigation followed its course. When this was ended, all the documents concerning the accused were read to the judges, the king’s attorney delivered his address in favour of acquittal or condemnation, the accused was heard for the last time, and the court pronounced judgment, which was without appeal.
The Chambre Ardente sat in the hall of the Arsenal. From April 10, 1679, the day of its first meeting, to July 21, 1682, when it closed its doors, it held 210 sittings, after having been suspended, for reasons that will be explained later, from October 1, 1680, to May 19, 1681.
The Chambre Ardente deliberated on the fate of 442 accused persons, and ordered the arrest of 367 of these. Of these arrests, 218 were sustained. Thirty-six prisoners were condemned to the extreme penalty, torture ordinary and extraordinary and execution; two of them died a natural death in jail; five were condemned to the galleys; twenty-three were exiled; but the most guilty had accomplices in such high places that their cases were never carried to an end. We must add the prisoners who committed suicide in prison, such as La Dodée, a sorceress aged thirty-five, still very pretty, who was arrested with La Trianon, and cut her throat at Vincennes after her first examination; ‘she covered the wound with her chemise, in which the greater part of her blood flowed, and was found dead when her room was opened in the morning to take her her breakfast.’
Among the many cases which came before this court one or two will serve as types.
Madame de Dreux was the wife of a Parlement maître des requêtes. She was not yet thirty, and was endowed with much grace and beauty, a delicate and dainty beauty, with infinite charm and distinction. She was so fond of Monsieur de Richelieu, declared La Joly, one of the sorceresses tried by the court, ‘that as soon as she knew that Monsieur de Richelieu was even looking at any one else, she thought of doing away with him.’ She had further poisoned ‘Monsieur Pajot and Monsieur de Varennes and many others,’ and, in particular, one of her lovers, to avoid, as she said, the bother and annoyance of a rupture. She had also tried to poison her husband, and to get rid of Madame de Richelieu by sorcery. All these details were widely known in Paris, where society, difficult as it is to believe it, was wonderfully amused by them. The husband was riddled with epigrams, which Madame de Sévigné declares ‘divinely diverting.’ Madame de Dreux was too pretty, really!—and besides, she was a cousin of two of the judges of the Chambre Ardente; the result was that on April 27, 1680, the judges contented themselves with admonishing her. ‘Monsieur de Dreux and her whole family,’ writes Madame de Sévigné, ‘went to the court to meet her.’ Set at liberty, the young woman was fêted and petted by the whole world of fashion. ‘There was joy and triumph and kisses from all her family and friends. Monsieur de Richelieu did wonders in this business.’ A fact which will appear incredible is, that after she left prison, Madame de Dreux returned to the sorceresses, met La Joly in the Jesuits’ church, and asked and obtained from her powders to poison a lady whom Monsieur de Richelieu was ‘considering.’
Truth to tell, La Joly was arrested while this was going on, and, as a result of her revelations, a fresh warrant was issued against Madame de Dreux; but she was warned, and escaped. She was proceeded against for contumacy. Her husband and Monsieur de Richelieu were then seen pleading for her in company. On January 23, 1682, Madame de Dreux was condemned to banishment beyond the kingdom, but the king allowed her to remain in France provided she lived in Paris with her husband.
Madame Leféron, who also belonged to judicial society, was less pleasant in appearance. The daughter of a Parlement counsellor, her maiden name was Marguerite Galart. Her husband, president of the first court of enquêtes, is represented in the Tableau du Parlement of 1661 as ‘a good judge, of solid judgment and firm opinion, never changing except on good grounds, unprejudiced, loving rule and order, a good and disinterested man.’ He had given proof of independence of character at the time of Fouquet’s case, by showing clemency to the superintendent. Madame Leféron found him a bore, avaricious, and further—how can one say it?—insufficient. Yet the fair dame had passed her fiftieth year. But she was madly smitten with one Monsieur de Prade, who on his side was in love with her money. She asked La Voisin for poisons to kill her husband, and de Prade went to her for charms to help him win the heart of his mistress. La Voisin gave them all they wanted: phials to the lady, and to the gallant a mask of virgin wax representing the face of Madame Leféron. This, enclosed in a zinc box, was to be warmed every now and then, which would warm the heart of the lady. De Prade gave La Voisin a note for 20,000 livres—£4000 to-day.
The phials produced their effect, and Leféron died on September 8, 1669. The waxen mask was equally successful, and Madame Leféron married de Prade. On February 20, 1680, as she went to the stake, La Voisin said to Sagot, clerk to the court: ‘It is quite true that Madame Leféron came to see me, most joyous at being a widow, and when I asked her if the phial of liquid had taken effect, she said, “Effect or not, he is done for!”’ De Prade appeared no less happy. He scoured the city in a brand-new carriage, ‘with three or four lackeys behind.’ His joy was short. The lady saw that her new husband thought chiefly of getting ‘donations’ out of her, and the husband soon saw that his wife was trying to poison him in his turn. He fled to the Turks. On April 7, 1680, Madame Leféron was condemned to banishment beyond the borders of the viscounty of Paris and to a fine of 1500 livres, though there were, as Louvois wrote to Louis XIV, thirteen or fourteen witnesses of her crime.
Madame de Dreux and Madame Leféron owed this remarkable indulgence to Madame de Poulaillon. Born Marguerite de Jehan, of a noble Bordeaux family, she had come to Paris when very young to associate with the alchemists, having a passion for the occult sciences. She had married Alexandre de Poulaillon, much older than herself, but very rich. Contemporaries are unanimous in praising the pretty face, the delicate and keen intelligence, and the exquisite distinction of the young lady. Unhappily for herself, she met a certain La Rivière, who had a wonderful talent for getting money out of ladies. As we know, in the seventeenth century, a talent of this sort was not the discreditable thing it is to-day. Her excellent husband, becoming suspicious, drew his purse-strings tight and locked his safes. Madame de Poulaillon had recourse to various expedients. She sold the house furniture, chairs, sofas, ‘the big gilded bed upholstered in English watered silk,’ the plate, and even the clothes of her husband. He, in a furious temper—we may suppose so, at least—ceased to give his wife even money for her toilet, and bought her dresses and ribbons himself.
In despair, the young woman opened relations with La Vigoureux: she required money for her lover, and the riddance of her husband. With this intent she planned the most audacious strokes. Two or three hired bravoes would do: ‘While one held Poulaillon by the throat in his study, the other would throw bags of money out of the window, and she would open the study door herself.’ Another time she thought of getting her husband kidnapped alive. She was quite ready herself for the enterprise, but failed to find men to assist her. At last she saw Marie Bosse, who from the first appeared to her more plucky. However, Madame de Poulaillon displayed so furious a haste to get rid of her ‘old goodman,’ that Marie Bosse, hardened as she was, fairly took fright. She would not give her in one dose the powder necessary for the poisoning, for fear that the lady, by giving it all at once, would create a scandal. The sorceress was prudent enough to begin with the shirt, one of the most horrible of these hags’ inventions. The shirts of the husband were washed in arsenic. This left no trace. Whoever put them on was before long attacked by a violent inflammation in the limbs and the lower part of the body. And every one sympathised with the wife whose husband was suffering from a disgraceful malady caused by debauchery! Arsenic was put also into the injections, which in those days were in common use. The contents of a phial poured into the wine or soup hastened the operation.
The negotiations between Madame de Poulaillon and Marie Bosse were carried on in the church of the Carmelites. The young woman gave 4000 livres (£800) for the phial and the preparation for the shirts. Poulaillon was warned by an anonymous letter; moreover, his wife could not obtain the necessary assistance from her servants. Then in her rage she applied to some soldiers, and asked them to wait for her husband at the corner of a road she pointed out to them, where it would be the easiest thing in the world, she said, to do for him. The soldiers took her money and hastened to inform Poulaillon, who now lost all patience, shut his wife up in a convent, and laid an information before the Châtelet. It was at this time that the lady had a writ issued against her by the Chambre Ardente.
As soon as he saw the storm threatening, La Rivière, to whom Madame de Poulaillon had sacrificed everything, fled to Burgundy, where he hid behind the skirts of Madame de Coligny, daughter of the famous Bussy-Rabutin, and widow of the Marquis de Coligny. She fell in love with La Rivière, who, kept informed of the progress of the trial, joked pleasantly with his new flame on the misfortunes of his old mistress. She, though madly in love with the gallant, was shocked. ‘If the misfortune of the lady who has so much merit, I hear, and who loves you and has loved you so passionately, no longer touches you, what reason have I to flatter myself I shall keep you always?’ This brilliant cavalier, who insisted on being called the Marquis de la Rivière, Lord de Courcy, was really a bastard son of the Abbé de la Rivière, Bishop of Langres.
Madame de Poulaillon was finally examined on June 5, 1679. The attorney-general had demanded the penalty of torture and death on the Place de Grève; but the memory of the edifying and touching end of Madame de Brinvilliers was still strong in the minds of the judges, and had almost stricken them with remorse. Madame de Poulaillon displayed before her judges even more grace, more submission to the hand of God, more sweet and tranquil resignation. So strongly were these men of law moved, that they could not bring themselves to order the severing of that charming head. ‘This lady, who had infinite spirit,’ notes Sagot the clerk, ‘cared little about death, and though she did not expect to escape, showed during her whole examination an extraordinary presence of mind, which won the judges’ admiration and pity.’ La Reynie writes that the judges were touched ‘by her spirit, and by the grace with which at the last she explained her unhappiness and her crime.’ ‘The commissioners,’ says Sagot, ‘remained in deliberation for four whole hours, all of them, especially those who had some interest in these ladies, being prepared for anything which might serve, if not for the discharge of Madame de Poulaillon, at any rate for the mitigation of the facts they could not dispute, in so far as that could be done without a manifest miscarriage of justice. Monsieur de Fieubet was the one who dilated most on this view, employing all the power of his natural eloquence; and he it was who saved the life of Madame de Poulaillon, having brought round to his way of thinking three of the six judges who had previously decided for death. This was a precedent fortunate for Mesdames de Dreux and Leféron and other prisoners, and in fact it was through this that the court lost credit.’
‘The great difficulty,’ adds La Reynie, ‘was afterwards to console Madame de Poulaillon when she found that she was only condemned to exile instead of the death she had herself pronounced in presence of the judges, after having declared the joy she had in thus expiating her crime, and at the same time winning deliverance from all her other woes.’ On the demand of the young lady herself, her punishment was increased by royal warrant to detention with the Penitents at Angers. Meanwhile La Rivière, after making Madame de Coligny a mother, married her without a trace of compunction. True, shortly afterwards, Bussy-Rabutin and his daughter, undeceived about the man, endeavoured to dissolve the union; but the gay spark resisted, and Madame de la Rivière was forced to pension him off at a very high figure before he would agree to desert her.
The best society applauded the acquittal of Madame de Poulaillon, while the middle classes murmured, with so much the more reason that soon afterwards a certain widow lady named Brunet was condemned with the greatest harshness, though no more guilty than Mesdames de Poulaillon, de Dreux, and Leféron.
She had been the wife of a wholesale tradesman in the city. Monsieur and Madame Brunet entertained very largely, for they provided excellent music. The fashionable flutist, Philibert Rébillé, musician to the king, was constantly to be heard there. Brunet worshipped the flutist for his delightful skill, and Madame Brunet for his charming person. As the excellent people kept a good table, and the wife was charming, the artiste responded with great enthusiasm to this double passion. It was perfect bliss, which might have lasted for a long time to the melodious sounds of the flute, if Brunet, with the idea of permanently attaching to himself so pleasant a musician, had not taken it into his head to offer him his daughter with a handsome dowry, and if Philibert, delighted with the ducats and the daughter, had not accepted them with alacrity. Madame Brunet uttered a cry of horror! Philibert explained to her that he had consulted apostolic notaries, and that for a consideration it would be possible to obtain canonical letters which would set things right; and festivities were got up for the betrothal. In desperation Madame Brunet confided in La Voisin: ‘If she had to do penance for ten years, it was necessary that God should carry off Brunet, her husband, for she could not abide to see Philibert, whom she loved passionately, in the arms of her daughter.’ She even took her lover to the sorceress. Philibert deposed at the trial that, under pretext of showing him a garden, Madame Brunet took him to see a woman who proceeded to look at his hand: ‘I know not who she is, for the woman was so drunk that she could not say a word.’ La Voisin, on being questioned, related the proceedings of Madame Brunet, adding: ‘There are other details which I would not tell for anything in the world, I would rather have a dagger thrust into my heart: that is kept for confessors, not for judges.’ François Ravaisson, in publishing this dramatic declaration, thus comments on it: ‘These details were imparted by La Voisin to La Reynie later; they did honour to Philibert’s disposition. The details given by the judges brought this flute-player into the height of fashion, and ladies of the court and the city scrambled for him when he came out of prison.’
Meanwhile, Marie Bosse undertook the operation, for 2000 livres—£400 to-day.
Brunet was poisoned in 1673, and Philibert married the widow.
‘My friends advised me,’ he declared naïvely before the judges, ‘to wed the mother rather than the daughter, which I did, under the good pleasure of the king, who signed the contract.’
The flute-player’s wife was condemned on May 15, 1679. She begged in vain to be allowed to see husband and children for the last time. Her hand was cut off while she was still alive, then she was hanged, and her body cast into the fire. Louis XIV, who was fond of his flutist, advised him to leave France if he was conscious of guilt. But Philibert was a man of mettle. He went like a gentleman and gave himself up as a prisoner at Vincennes. He was acquitted on April 7, 1680.
Louis XIV and the Poison Affair
Meanwhile the Chambre Ardente was extending its prosecutions over an ever-widening circle and into higher and higher ranks of society, and by degrees a singular disquietude awoke, an astonishing uneasiness: it was no longer the poisoners whom people dreaded, but the magistrates. People talked about a lady of the highest rank who was declaring everywhere that the judges and all their proceedings ought to be burnt. La Reynie asked for the protection of an escort when he went to Vincennes, where the principal accused persons were. Madame de Sévigné, speaking of the great lieutenant of police, wrote: ‘His life is a proof that there are no poisoners now.’ On February 4, 1680, Louvois wrote to the president of the court:—
‘His Majesty, having been informed of what was said in Paris in regard to the decrees issued a few days ago by the Chamber, has commanded me to acquaint you with His Majesty’s desire that you should assure the judges of his protection, and let them understand that he expects them to continue dispensing justice with firmness.’
Louis sent for Boucherat, the president, the two examining commissioners, La Reynie and Bezons, and the attorney-general, and they went out to Versailles. ‘On rising from dinner,’ writes La Reynie, ‘His Majesty recommended us to do justice and our duty, in extremely strong and precise terms, indicating to us that he desired, on behalf of the public weal, that we should penetrate as deeply as possible into the terrible traffic in poisons, so as to cut its root if this were possible; he commanded us to do strict justice, without distinction of person, rank, or sex; and this His Majesty told us in clear and vigorous terms.’
The determination so vigorously expressed by the king filled La Reynie with confidence and zeal; it encouraged him in the accomplishment of the arduous task imposed on him. And such courage was necessary: what frightful revelations he heard! Was it due to these revelations that, suddenly, the intentions of the court of Versailles underwent modification? La Voisin had just been condemned to suffer torture. She was subjected to it, but only as a matter of form. ‘La Voisin was not tortured at all,’ writes La Reynie in indignation, ‘and this means not having been applied, has naturally produced no effect.’ It was feared that the sorceress, whose discretion had been so remarkable hitherto, might say too much in the agony of torture, and, independently of La Reynie, the torturers had received their orders. The judges had also received independent orders, and their reluctance to interrogate the accused woman was such that, at the moment of her execution, La Voisin, struck with remorse, conceived it her duty to confess spontaneously before being handed over to the confessor: ‘She felt obliged to say, to ease her conscience, that a large number of persons of all ranks and conditions had applied to her for means to procure the death of many persons, and that debauchery was the chief motive of all these crimes.’
But after the execution of La Voisin, the examinations of her partner Lesage, of her accomplice the Abbé Guibourg, and of her daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, were proceeded with. On August 2, 1680, Louis XIV wrote from Lille to La Reynie:—
‘Having seen the declaration made on the 12th of last month by Marguerite Monvoisin, prisoner at my castle of Vincennes, I write you this letter to inform you of my intention that you should devote all possible care to elucidate the facts contained in the said declaration—that you should take care to have written down in separate reports the examinations, confrontations, and everything concerning the inquiry that may be made of the said declaration, and that meanwhile you defer reporting to my royal Chamber sitting at the Arsenal the depositions of Romani and Bertrand.’
Romani and Bertrand were two prisoners with whom we shall have a good deal to do by and by.
Thus Louis XIV gave orders for the declarations of the girl Monvoisin, and those of Romani and Bertrand, to be detached from the documents submitted to the court. On the other hand, Louvois had had the imprudence to promise Lesage his life if he revealed all he knew. Lesage related most horrible things. Word then went round not to listen to any more; he was a liar. But on September 30 and October 1, 1680, these narratives were confirmed in the most precise manner by the sorceress Françoise Filastre while under torture. The declarations of Filastre struck on the ears of Louis XIV like a clap of thunder. In the registers of the royal council we read as follows:—
‘The king, having had shown to him the official report of the torture of Françoise Filastre, being unwilling to permit, for good and just considerations important to his service, that certain facts should be inserted in the copies made for the convenience of the Court of the Arsenal, His Majesty in Council has commanded that the minutes and originals of the said proceedings be laid before the chancellor by the clerk to the commission, and that the said clerk draw up in his presence a summary of the said proceedings, in which the said facts shall not be inserted. Given by His Majesty in Council held at Versailles, May 14, 1681.
(Signed) Le Tellier.’
Thus the king for the second time intervened, and withdrew from the court certain documents containing new declarations. He saw now, moreover, that these were in accordance with the truth, and that if the examinations were continued, it would be impossible to prevent them from being divulged. On October 1, 1680, the sittings of the court were suspended.
The documents which the king had thus caused to be separated from the rest were locked and sealed up in a casket, which was deposited with Sagot, the clerk, who lived in the Rue Quincampoix. When Sagot died, on October 10, 1680, the casket was removed to Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, to the house of his successor in the clerkship to the Châtelet and the Chambre Ardente, Nicolas Gaudion. On July 13, 1709, the casket was taken to the king’s private room, where, in the presence of Chancellor Pontchartrain, Louis XIV burnt the papers in his grate: ‘His Majesty in Council, after having looked through and examined the minutes and proceedings laid before him by the chancellor, and having had them burnt in his presence, commanded that Gaudion should then be wholly and formally discharged of the same.’
Louis XIV had just suffered a cruel blow, not only in his deepest affections, but in his dignity as sovereign, by the declarations of obscure and infamous criminals made before the Chambre Ardente. The very throne of France was befouled by them. Colbert and Louvois were for a moment in dire alarm. The all-powerful monarch, aided by his two great ministers, believed that he had buried in unfathomable darkness the terrible story of his shame and grief. But one flame had not been extinguished. It had not been noticed. But it has continued to burn, and grown larger, and thrown its blaze widely around. It is in the full daylight glare that the facts are about to appear before our eyes.
II. Madame de Montespan
The Marquise Françoise Athénais de Montespan was born in 1641 at the castle of Tonnay-Charente, the daughter of Gabriel de Rochechouart, Duke de Mortmart, lord of Vivonne, and of Diane de Granseigne, daughter of Jean de Marsillac. She was called Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente until her marriage. ‘Her mother,’ says Madame de Caylus, ‘was anxious to imbue her with principles of sound piety.’ The piety of Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente was violent and inflammatory. Appointed in 1660 maid of honour to the queen, ‘she gave her an extraordinary opinion of her virtue by taking communion every day.’ In 1679, when she had been for several years the king’s mistress, she much astonished the Princess d’Harcourt by sending her on January 1, as a new year’s gift, a hair-shirt, a scourge, and a prayer-book adorned with diamonds.
Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente married, on January 28, 1663, a noble of her own province, L. H. de Pardaillan, Marquis de Montespan, who was a year younger than herself. If she ever loved him, it was not for long. As a lady-in-waiting to the queen, she was fascinated by the magnificence surrounding Louise de la Vallière, the favourite of Louis, who had become, in spite of her reserve and her timid and gentle bearing, the object of intense and widespread jealousy, hatred, and wrath. Madame de Montespan especially displayed her spiteful envy in malicious gibes and insulting irony. Everybody knows it was not long before she replaced her.
Louise de la Vallière had kept in the shade, shunning publicity and honours; Madame de Montespan in her pride wished to dazzle all eyes. ‘Thunderous and triumphant’ is Madame de Sévigné’s description of her in her radiant glory at Versailles. She draws elsewhere a picture of the court in which the king’s favourite shone: ‘At three o’clock the king and queen, with Monsieur, Madame, Mademoiselle, all the princes and princesses, Madame de Montespan, all her suite, all the courtiers and ladies, in a word, all that is known as the court of France, were found in these handsome apartments of the king. They are divinely furnished, everything is magnificent. Madame de Montespan was dressed in point de France, her hair done in a thousand curls, two hanging from her temples very low upon her cheeks; black ribbons on her head, with her pearls as maréchale of the Hospital, and embellished with earrings and pendants; in a word, a triumph of beauty that threw the ambassadors into admiring wonder. She knew that people were complaining how she prevented all France from seeing the king; she has restored him to us, as you see, and you would not believe what joy it has given everybody, and what beauty it has given the court.’
‘Her beauty is marvellous,’ writes Madame de Sévigné on another day, ‘and her get-up is as wonderful as her beauty, and her gaiety as her get-up.’ Greater still was the renown of her wit. ‘She was always the best of company,’ says Saint-Simon, ‘with graces which palliated her high and mighty airs, and were indeed suited to them. It was impossible to have more wit, more fine polish, more striking expressions, eloquence, natural propriety, which gave her, as it were, an individual style of talk, but delicious, and which by force of habit was so communicable that her nieces and the persons constantly about her, her women, and those who, without being her servants, had been brought up along with her, all caught the style, which is recognisable to-day among the few survivors.’
She surrounded herself with a brilliant luxury. Here is one of her dresses as described by Madame de Sévigné: ‘Gold upon gold, gold embroideries, gold edgings, and, over all, gold crimpings, sewed with one sort of gold blended with another sort, which makes up the divinest stuff imaginable: it was the fairies who made this masterpiece in secret.’
In her estates at Clagny, with their immense park, a second Versailles was to be seen alongside Versailles itself. The king had first had built there for his mistress a bijou residence—a country villa. ‘She said that that might do for an opera girl.’ The house was pulled down and the château erected, after the plans of Mansard. At Versailles the favourite had twenty rooms on the first floor; the queen occupied eleven rooms on the second. Dangeau notes that Madame de Montespan’s train was borne by the Maréchale de Noailles; the queen’s was carried by a simple page.
The influence of the young favourite spelled fortune, hope, and honour to ministers, courtiers, and generals. Her father became governor of Paris, her brother a marshal of France. In her drawing-room, frequented by all the most distinguished persons in rank and literature, a quite unique style of wit came into existence, which her contemporaries often refer to—a wit at once choice and subtle, natural and pleasant. It must be added that, by a wonderful coincidence, her reign, which lasted thirteen years, exactly corresponded with the zenith of the age of Louis XIV.
Madame de Montespan used to go about escorted by royal bodyguards. As she journeyed throughout the whole length and breadth of France, governors and lord-lieutenants offered her their homage in great ceremony, and cities sent deputations to her. She passed through the provinces in a six-horse coach, followed by another coach also drawn by six horses, in which sat six ladies of her suite, and then came the baggage-wagons and six mules and a dozen cavaliers. It is like a fairy tale from Perrault.
She had by Louis XIV seven children, whom the Parlement was to legitimatise and declare royal children of France. The oldest, the Duke de Maine, received the principality of Dombes and the county of Eu; in 1675, when five years old, he was appointed to the infantry regiment of Marshal Turenne; in 1682, the king gave him the governorship of Languedoc; on September 15, 1688, the office of general of the galleys and the lieutenant-generalship of the Levant. The elder of the daughters, Mademoiselle de Nantes, married the Duke de Bourbon; the second, Mademoiselle de Blois, made a still more brilliant match. ‘The king,’ says Saint-Simon, ‘determined to marry Mademoiselle de Blois to the Duke de Chartres; this was the king’s only nephew, and far higher than the princes of the blood.’
Madame Palatine9 said of the Marquise de Montespan: ‘She is more ambitious than dissipated.’ There is justice in the saying. She had an immeasurable pride. Mademoiselle de la Vallière loved the king as a mistress, Madame de Maintenon as a governess, Madame de Montespan as a tyrant.
It was in 1666 that historians note the first signs of Madame de Montespan’s ambition. She was then aspiring to the king’s love, and it is precisely at this time that La Reynie, in commenting on the proceedings of the Chambre Ardente, places her first visits to the sorceresses.
Marguerite Monvoisin, La Voisin’s daughter, spoke thus before the judges: ‘Every time that anything fresh happened to Madame de Montespan, or she feared any diminution in the favour of the king, she told my mother, so that she might provide a remedy; and my mother at once had recourse to priests whom she got to say masses, and gave my mother powders to be given to the king.’ La Voisin’s daughter explained that these powders were for love, composed now in one way, now in another, according to the various formulae of witchcraft. Among the ingredients were cantharides, the dust of dried moles, blood of bats, and other vile substances. Of these a paste was made, which was placed under the chalice during the sacrifice of the mass, and blessed by the priest at the moment of the offertory. Louis XIV swallowed this compound mixed with his food.
‘My mother,’ said the girl, ‘several times took to Madame de Montespan at Saint-Germain, Versailles, and Clagny, these love-powders to give to the king—some which had passed under the chalice and others which had not; my mother sent some to Madame de Montespan by the hand of the demoiselle Desœillets (one of her waiting-maids), and I myself gave her some in the church of the Petits Pères, and another time on the road to St. Cloud.’
The depositions of Marguerite Monvoisin are important. She had never been mixed up with her mother’s sorceries, but she had known about them. La Reynie observes that her declarations exhibit ‘a certain air of ingenuousness, or else, if they are false, every one is mightily deceived.’ He adds that ‘she mentions so many circumstances and so many different transactions which are not self-contradictory, that it is morally impossible for them to have been invented, in addition to which she is not clever enough to invent and to follow up what she has invented. Several of these facts are proved genuine; she mentions living people.’ The examining judge says further, that the very denials of the sorceresses accused by Marguerite of complicity with Madame de Montespan, their embarrassment, their contradictions, their refusal to answer when they were conscious of being hard pressed, confirm her testimony.
When Marguerite Monvoisin made her depositions, her mother had been dead for several months. In the examination of July 12, 1680, we read:—
‘Why did you not sooner give information of these evil designs against the person of the king?’
‘I could not tell what I had heard without ruining my mother; I did not believe myself obliged to tell; I asked advice of no one, and have declared all I know on the matter.’
‘Did you not know you were bound to tell, and that it would be a great crime to hide anything concerning this matter?’
‘I knew well enough the importance of the things I have stated; I knew it before I told them, and was sure of it after I had done so; and I knew there was nothing but was of great importance.’
‘Did you know it would be a great crime to make the slightest addition to the facts which you have declared?’
‘Yes, and those of whom I have spoken can tell you a good deal; I think I have diminished rather than increased; I had no other idea but to state the truth, having nothing more to fear in regard to my mother; if I remember any other circumstance, or if any is recalled to my memory, I will confess the truth.’
Several writers have thought that the sorceresses compromised the greatest names in France before the judges in the hope of saving their lives, by connecting themselves with personages so high in station that no one would dare to lift a hand against them. Quite the contrary. We see La Voisin concealing, up to the very moment of her execution, her relations with the king’s mistress, for her greatest fear was that the horrible punishment meted out to regicides might be applied to her. In an expansive moment, she said to her guards at Vincennes: ‘I fear, more than anything else that I am asked about, a certain journey to court.’ We shall have much to do presently with this journey the sorceress made to court on behalf of Madame de Montespan. It was at the last moment, after hearing her death-sentence, against which there was no appeal, that Françoise Filastre made her startling depositions of September 30 and October 1, 1680, as the result of which Louis XIV, in terror, caused the sittings of the Chambre Ardente to be suspended.
The statements of Marguerite Monvoisin were confirmed in detail by those of the Abbé Guibourg, with whom she had no means of communicating after her arrest. Thus, as La Reynie says, they were proved ‘according to the rules of justice.’
To-day, history furnishes still further proofs. We have just heard the daughter of La Voisin: ‘Every time anything fresh happened to Madame de Montespan, or she feared some diminution in the favour of the king, she told my mother.’ Now, if we follow in the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné and the court chronicles the checkered story of the relations between Madame de Montespan and the king from 1667 to 1680, and compare it further with the depositions made before the Chambre Ardente, we find a precise confirmation of the declarations of Marguerite Monvoisin. It was several times observed by La Reynie that ‘the time mentioned by the accused is of consequence to Madame de Montespan.’
How, and by whom, was the haughty favourite led to the haunts of the witches? Historians have put forth many hypotheses on this subject. They were not acquainted with the declaration of La Chaboissière, the valet of Vanens, whom we have already mentioned: ‘that the chevalier de Vanens deserved to be drawn and quartered for the counsel he had given to Madame de Montespan.’ La Chaboissière had scarcely let this confession escape him than he wished in great agitation to retract it, and begged that the words might not be written down in the report of his examination. La Reynie disentangled this confession from the chaos of official documents, and sharply underlined it as the starting-point of the drama.
The relations between the favourite and the sorceresses began, then, at the very time when her dawning love for the king was noticed. In 1667 we find her in Rue de la Tannerie, in the company of the magician Lesage and the Abbé Mariette, priest of St. Séverin. The latter belonged to a good Parisian family; he was tall and well made, with a very pale complexion and black hair. At one end of a little room an altar was erected: Mariette, in sacerdotal vestments, uttered incantations, Lesage sang the Veni Creator, then Mariette read a gospel on the head of Madame de Montespan, who knelt before him and recited exorcisms against Louise de la Vallière. She added—the very words are found in one of Lesage’s declarations—‘I ask for the affection of the king and of the Dauphin, that it may be continued, that the queen may be barren, that the king leave her bed and table for me, that I obtain from him all that I ask for myself and my relatives; that my servants and domestics may be pleasing to him; that, beloved and respected by great nobles, I may be called to the councils of the king and know what passes there; and that, this affection being redoubled on what has existed in the past, the king may leave La Vallière and look no more upon her; and that, the queen being repudiated, I may espouse the king.’
On another occasion, in the church of St. Severin, the Abbé Mariette, in the presence of Madame de Montespan, recited charms over the hearts of two pigeons which had been consecrated in the names of Louis XIV and Louise de la Vallière during the sacrifice of the mass.
Early in the year 1668, Mariette and Lesage had the audacity to proceed to Saint-Germain, the headquarters of the court, and in the very château itself, in the portion occupied by Madame de Thianges, Madame de Montespan’s sister, they resumed their sorceries. Aromatic fumigations filled the room with a bluish vapour, with which was mingled the pungent scent of incense. Madame de Montespan formulated the incantation. ‘This,’ declared Lesage, ‘was to obtain the favour of the king, and to cause Mademoiselle de la Vallière’s death.’ Mariette said it was merely to get her sent away. Now it happened that, not long after these proceedings, in that very year 1668, Madame de Montespan realised her dream and was taken to the king’s heart. The star of La Vallière rapidly paled. In 1669 Madame de Montespan was brought to bed of the first of the seven children she gave to Louis. If she had ever doubted the efficacy of these dealings with the devil, confidence would have dated from that day.
An incident, which might have had terrible consequences, ruffled this happiness so long desired. Mariette and Lesage owed to La Voisin the lucrative connection with Madame de Montespan. But they showed base ingratitude, and proceeded to perform incantations for the marquise, no longer with the assistance of La Voisin, but with that of a rival sorceress, La Duverger. La Voisin was indignant, and as La Reynie says, ‘made a to-do about it. The matter became known, and the king, having learnt that these people were accustomed to perform impious and sacrilegious rites, ordered the arrest of Mariette and Dubuisson (the name taken by Lesage at this period), and they were sent to the Bastille in March 1668.’ From the Bastille they were brought before the Châtelet on the charge of sorcery. The court chroniclers, though ignorant of her reasons for so doing, note that Madame de Montespan at this time suddenly left Paris. But Mariette and Lesage had too much interest in holding their tongues to inform against her. ‘Besides,’ writes La Reynie, ‘the first judge who heard the case being a cousin-german of Mariette through his wife, La Voisin being at large on the credit of interested persons with whom she had dealings, and these wretched practices being then unknown, investigation was not carried very far. It was solely a question of seeing how the matter could be dealt with in such a way as to save Mariette on account of his family.’ The little that could not be concealed brought Lesage condemnation to the galleys and Mariette banishment. The king increased the sentence of the latter to imprisonment; but the prisoner escaped from St. Lazare, where he had been confined. As to Lesage, La Voisin, thanks to her connections, was not long in getting him set at liberty. In a memorandum addressed to Louvois, La Reynie exhibits the conclusions to be drawn from the trial of 1668. After very appositely calling attention to the fact that the statements of the accused were the less suspicious because, dating from a period when as yet there could be no question of the scarcely dawning relations between Louis and Madame de Montespan, the lieutenant of police says that Mariette and Lesage could only have known of those relations through Madame de Montespan herself, and adds: ‘It appears from the trial of Lesage and Mariette in 1668, that Madame de Montespan had been dealing with La Voisin at any rate since 1667, and that about that time she was by her introduced to Lesage and Mariette; that Mariette, in his room and in the presence of Lesage, used to read the Gospels over the head of Madame de Montespan.
‘So early as that, then, a scheme was on foot.
‘When I questioned the two surviving accomplices on the matter, they said, separately, that this scheme was to secure the favour of the king; that for that purpose La Voisin then gave some powders which were placed under the chalice given to Madame de Montespan, and that she recited an incantation in which her own name and the king’s occurred; that she performed other ceremonies at Saint-Germain; that she had masses said on the hearts of pigeons at St. Séverin, and other impious and sacrilegious rites performed in Mariette’s room, for this purpose, and as the one says, to slay, the other merely to get rid of, Madame de la Vallière.’ (These enchantments to procure the death of Mademoiselle de la Vallière were made upon human bones.)
‘Lesage and Mariette said nothing about it until the former, urged by explicit commands to tell the truth, and Mariette, impelled by the facts themselves to reveal them, both, separately, established these facts.’
La Reynie observes further that Lesage and Mariette mentioned certain details, afterwards proved to be accurate, of which they could have got information from Madame de Montespan alone.
We have already mentioned the reasons why the declarations of Marguerite Monvoisin inspired confidence; the corresponding depositions of Lesage deserve equal attention. On October 8, 1679, Louvois wrote to Louis XIV: ‘Monsieur de la Reynie showed me his conviction that, if I spoke to Lesage, he would in the end make up his mind to tell me all he knew, and he believed this to be the more important because this man has not up to the present been convicted himself of poisoning any one, but has a perfect knowledge of all the poisonings effected in Paris for the last seven or eight years. I went yesterday to Vincennes, and spoke to him in the way Monsieur de la Reynie desired, giving him to hope that your Majesty would pardon him provided he made the declarations necessary for bringing to the knowledge of justice all that has happened in regard to the poisons. He promised to do so, and told me that he was much surprised at my urging him to tell all he knew.’ In a letter of October 11, 1679, Louvois renewed his pressure on Lesage to induce him to speak fully and in entire frankness. The magician hesitated, tried to dissimulate, repeating to all who urged him how vastly he was astonished at their persistence; but this reluctance only stimulated the ardour of La Reynie. He returned to the charge; like Louvois, he gave hints of a royal pardon. At last Lesage spoke. His principal declarations were written among the papers which Louis had burnt in the fireplace of his study, as we have said; hence we no longer possess them in their entirety; but from the notes left by La Reynie, as well as from the fragments of the magisterial examination which were preserved and will be found in part reproduced below, we know that the revelations of Lesage entirely confirmed those of Marguerite Monvoisin.
The scandal of the amours of Louis XIV was only the more intense because the young Marquis de Montespan was by no means a complaisant husband, a singular fact at that period and in that society. ‘He was an extravagant and extraordinary man,’ says Mademoiselle de Montpensier, ‘who complained to everybody of the friendship of the king for his wife.’ There were scenes between the spouses, and he struck her. He provoked scenes with the king. ‘When Montespan went to Saint-Germain sermonising thus, Madame de Montespan was in despair. He used to come to see me very often,’ says Mademoiselle de Montpensier; ‘he is a relative of mine, and I scolded him. He came one evening and repeated to me an harangue he had delivered to the king, in which he quoted innumerable passages of Scripture, about David, for instance, and finally used strong terms to induce him to give back his wife and fear the judgment of God. I said to him, “You are mad!” I was at Saint-Germain next day and said to Madame de Montespan: “I have seen your husband in Paris, and he is madder than ever; I sharply scolded him and told him that if he didn’t hold his tongue he would deserve to be locked up.” She said to me: “He is here telling his tales at court; I am ashamed to see that my parrot and he are amusing the mob.”’
Louis XIV was naturally irritated by the attitude of this surprising husband. Almighty as he was, he resorted to the tricks and subterfuges of a vulgar lover. His anxiety was redoubled when his mistress became a mother. The king was very fond of his children, particularly those he had by Madame de Montespan. In the eyes of the law these children belonged to the husband; and Louis trembled with fear lest Montespan, out of vengeance or irony, should come and take from him his son and daughter.
Montespan found a supporter in his uncle the Archbishop of Sens. ‘When the king’s passion was known,’ says the Abbé Boileau, brother of the poet, ‘the archbishop sentenced to public penance a woman of the town who lived as the marchioness, his niece, was living, in open concubinage, and he caused the publication in his diocese of the old canons against the violation of the religious law.’ The diocese of Sens included Fontainebleau, where the court was then held. Madame de Montespan was compelled to take her departure in confusion. She felt that it was she who was being pointed at. She dared not return into the jurisdiction of the archbishop until after the prelate’s death in 1674.
When the Marquis understood that his efforts were vain, and that from the height of his throne Louis would reply only with lettres de cachet, he put on mourning, clothed all his household in black, and drove to the court in a coach draped in black, to take leave in great ceremony of his relatives, friends, and acquaintances. On that day the husband in his costume of black was not the butt of ridicule; jests were silenced, and the king on the throne was scorned and despised. A man of genius lent the monarch his aid. Molière wrote his Amphitryon. The play was represented in this year 1668, and the mockers resumed their places in the royal camp.
‘Un partage avec Jupiter
N’a rien du tout qui déshonore.’10
Viscounts and marquises on gilded benches applauded the taunt and punctuated the cruel railleries with bursts of laughter. Yet the king was injured, especially in the opinion of the Parisian middle class. He was conscious of it; and one day said himself to his mistress that if she had left house, children, and husband to follow him, he had neglected the care of his reputation, which was much blighted through his having loved a woman whom he had such good reasons for not regarding as he had done.
Montespan set out for his country seat. Some men of the company he commanded fell a-quarrelling with the under-bailiff of Perpignan; the fact was of no importance, but it came to the knowledge of the ministers, and Louvois wrote at once to the Lord Lieutenant: ‘September 21, 1669. I cannot express my surprise that a thing of the nature of that which Monsieur de Montespan has done should have passed without my learning of it. I send you a despatch from the king for the supreme council of Roussillon, in which His Majesty commands the council to hold an inquiry. In whatever manner you may employ it, it must not be forgotten, whether in the informations of the sub-bailiff of Perpignan or in that about the disorders that occurred at Illes, to implicate the commander of the company (Montespan) and the largest possible number of cavaliers, so that they may take fright and the majority desert, especially the commander; after which it would not be a difficult matter to bring about the ruin of the company. If you have the names of the cavaliers who insulted the sub-bailiff, they must be arrested at once, to make an example of them, and so that you may have, from their depositions at the time of their execution, more proof against the captain—to try in some way or other to implicate him in the informations, so that he may be cashiered with an appearance of justice. If you could manage that he is accused sufficiently for the supreme council to have grounds for pronouncing some condemnation on him, it would be a very good thing; you will guess the reasons well enough, however little you may be informed of what is going on in this part of the world.’ The cynicism of Louis and his minister passes all bounds. Montespan had to flee for refuge to Spain; but from that day Louis’ position in regard to the injured husband, so far from improving, became sensibly worse. Abroad, Montespan could more boldly and independently press his claims on the children of the king, and provoke a scandal in the eyes of all Europe.
Louis got a demand for separation a mensa et thoro, formulated by Madame de Montespan, brought before the Châtelet. Notwithstanding the pressure exerted by king and ministers, who bullied the judges, the matter remained in suspense. The judges could not bring themselves to commit the iniquity demanded of them. They gave way at last, partly under pressure from the First President de Novion, who had been won by a promise of the Great Seal. The separation was declared on July 7, 1674, by Procureur-Général Achille de Harlay, assisted by six judges. The judgment adduced the wasting of the property of the commonalty by the Marquis de Montespan, the domestic discord between the marquis and his wife, and the ill-treatment of which the marchioness complained on the part of her husband. This decree pronounced against Montespan was a monstrous proceeding. After having dishonoured his crown, Louis dishonoured justice; but there was a higher justice which, as we shall see, he was not to escape.
The decree of July 7, 1674, did not assure the king peace of mind. In 1678 Montespan had to return for a short time to Paris on account of a lawsuit. Louis XIV wrote to Colbert (June 15): ‘I understand that Montespan is indulging in indiscreet talk; he is a madman whom you will do me the pleasure to have closely watched; and so that he may have no pretext for remaining in Paris, see Novion so that the Parlement may hurry. I know that Montespan has threatened to see his wife, and that he is capable of it, and that the consequences might be formidable (the question of the children again); I rely on you to prevent him speaking. Do not forget the details of this matter, and especially see to it that he leaves Paris at the earliest moment.’ Such were the jobs to which the Colberts and the Louvois had to stoop; but such also were the annoyances and troubles beneath which Louis bent his brow—a brow already reddened with shame, and soon to be furrowed with grief.
Louis XIV loved his mistresses, not for their own sakes, but for his. The new passion lasted three years. Perhaps some one will say that that is a good while. In 1672, jealousy, which perpetually ravaged the proud soul of Madame de Montespan, burst out in storms of which Madame de Sévigné speaks thus: ‘She is in inexpressible rages; she has seen no one for a fortnight; she writes from morning till night, and when she goes to bed tears it all up. Her state makes me quite sorry. No one pities her, though she has done good turns to many people.’ Madame de Montespan returned to La Voisin; and it is not without emotion that we see this wonderful woman, with her matchless grace and her superior intelligence, after having stepped into crime, sinking into it lower and lower. From the hands of the Abbé Mariette, who recited the Gospels over her head and made incantations on the hearts of pigeons, she comes into those of the Abbé Guibourg, who said the black mass.
Guibourg claimed to be an illegitimate member of the family of Montmorency. He was seventy years old; his complexion was that of a confirmed toper. He had a horrible squint. In these monstrous ceremonies he cut the throats of his own children by his mistress, a fat ruddy wench named Chanfrain.
To obtain the desired result from the black mass, it was necessary that it should be celebrated three times in succession. The three masses were said in 1673, at intervals of a fortnight or three weeks—the first in the chapel of the Château of Villebousin, in the village of Mesnil, near Montlhéry. Mademoiselle Desœillets, the maid of Madame de Montespan, was intimately connected with Leroy, governor of the pages of the Petite Ecurie, who owned a house at Mesnil. Guibourg had lived in the château as almoner of the Montgommerys. It has been described by M. J. Lair: ‘A building of the fourteenth century, and well chosen for sinister incantations, the château, situated half a league from the road from Paris to Orleans, was surrounded by deep moats, filled with running water.’ Leroy betook himself to St. Denis, where he saw the Abbé Guibourg. He promised fifty pistoles, that is, about £20, and a living worth 2000 livres. At the day fixed there met at Villebousin Madame de Montespan, the Abbé Guibourg, Leroy, ‘a tall person’ who was certainly Mademoiselle Desœillets, and a person of name unknown who is said to have been a retainer of the Archbishop of Sens. In the chapel of the chateau the priest said mass on the bare body of the favourite as she lay across the altar. At the consecration, he recited his incantation, the words of which he gave later to the commissaries of the Chambre Ardente: ‘Ashtaroth, Asmodeus, Princes of Affection, I conjure you to accept the sacrifice I present to you of this child for the things I ask of you, which are that the affection of the king and my lord the dauphin for me may be continued; and that, honoured by the princes and princesses of the court, nothing be denied me of all that I shall ask the king, as well for my relatives as my servitors.’ ‘Guibourg had bought for a crown (12s. 6d. to-day) the child who was sacrificed at this mass,’ writes La Reynie, ‘and who was offered to him by a fine girl; and having drawn blood from the child, whom he stabbed in the throat with a penknife, he poured it into the chalice, after which the child was taken away and carried to another place.’
The details of the mass at Mesnil were revealed by Guibourg, and further confirmed by the deposition of La Chanfrain, his mistress.
The second mass on the body of Madame de Montespan took place a fortnight or three weeks after the first, at St. Denis, in a tumbledown hut. The third took place in a house at Paris, whither Guibourg was conducted blindfold, and from which he was brought back in the same way as far as the arcade of the Hôtel de Ville.
At this time the journal of the health of the king, drawn up by D’Aquin, the chief physician, states that Louis suffered from violent headaches. Towards the end of this year, 1673, he was attacked by dizziness of such a kind that at times his sight became clouded and he felt on the point of collapse. ‘Is it rash,’ observes Monsieur Loiseleur very justly, ‘to see in these headaches and faintnesses the effect of powders provided by La Voisin?’ The hypothesis of Monsieur Loiseleur will be sustained in detail by a declaration of the magician Lesage which will be found below.
It remains to inquire how Madame de Montespan contrived to get the powders prepared by the sorceress into the food of the king, surrounded as he was by officers of the buttery. Two revelations, both of November 8, 1680, made, the first by Lemaire, locked up at Vincennes with the Abbé Guibourg, the second by Lesage, will give the indication we desire.
We read in the notes La Reynie took for his personal guidance by way of memoranda: ‘November 8, 1680, Lemaire asked to speak to me; told me that being in the same room with Guibourg and another man, Guibourg told them such strange things, especially in regard to Madame de Montespan, that he does not know what to make of it, and that if there was any officer who ought to be suspected, it would be Duchesne, the butler; that Duchesne was a footman in the house of Madame d’Aubray, that he has since served Monsieur Bontemps, and then Madame de Montespan, who was very kind to him, and made him officer of the buttery, and that he is always at Madame de Montespan’s service.’ Further: ‘From the last examinations of Lesage, and that of November 8 particularly, it appears that Gilot, also an officer of the buttery, was involved in the impious trade in 1668, and that he sought Lesage’s assistance for the designs of Madame de Montespan.’
The crisis of the year 1675 was more serious. Louis XIV suddenly had great fits of devotion. People with their eyes open saw that he was tiring of his mistress. Madame de Montespan, on the Thursday in Holy Week, had been refused absolution by a priest of her parish. Much put out, she hastened to the curé of Versailles, and spoke to him hotly, but the curé approved of his subordinate’s action. And the great voice of Bossuet, which had consistently been upraised against the double adultery, resounded with a new force. ‘When we were at Versailles, one fast day, about Easter, Madame de Montespan went away,’ writes Mademoiselle de Montpensier. ‘Every one was vastly astonished at this retreat. I went to Paris, and saw her in the house where her children were. Madame de Maintenon was with her. She saw nobody. As everybody was on the alert about her return, although nobody seemed to pay any attention to it, it was known that M. Bossuet, then tutor to the dauphin, and at present bishop of Meaux, went there every day muffled in a grey cloak.’ We have other information from Bossuet’s private secretary, the Abbé Le Dieu. Louis XIV ordered his mistress to retire. When Bossuet went to see the exiled lady, she ‘loaded him with reproaches; she told him that his pride had urged him to get her driven away, that he wanted to make himself sole master of the king’s mind.’ Then, when she understood that her wrath smote in vain against the serene firmness of the prelate, ‘she sought to win him by flatteries and promises; she dangled before his eyes the chief dignities in Church and State.’
This exile lasted from April 14 to May 11. On the other hand, the magician Lesage, in an examination held on November 16, 1680, declared that ‘if he were in the last torments, he could tell nothing except that in 1675, at the beginning of summer (the exact date), when Madame de Montespan was trying to maintain her position, La Voisin and La Desœillets worked or pretended to work for her; but in reality, powerless to keep for her the love of the king, they merely gave her powders which, taken in certain doses, would have acted as poison.’ So Lesage said; and the declarations of the girl Monvoisin, summed up by La Reynie, are identical: ‘The powders her mother sent to Madame de Montespan were love powders to be given to the king. Once when her mother took some powders to Clagny she was accompanied by the magician Latour, her eldest brother, a servant named Marie, since dead, and Fernand, a good friend of Latour, and La Vautier; but these did not enter Clagny. She could not say if Latour went in with her mother, but they all came back together, and had lunch at the sign of the Heaume, near the Bois de Boulogne, with violins; they made some noise among them. Her brother, who told her about it, told her that her mother brought back fifty louis-d’or. Her mother, besides the powders she gave to Madame de Montespan, did not send any except by Mademoiselle Desœillets, who was the go-between for that purpose. As to the powders which had passed beneath the chalice, they came from a priest called the Prior (the Abbé Guibourg). As to the others which had not been under the chalice, her mother kept them in the drawer of a cabinet of which she had the key. There were black ones, white, and grey, which she mixed in the presence of Desœillets. Her father once wanted to break the cabinet where the powders were kept, saying that some harm would come of it.’ And the result of these practices was, once more, of such a nature as to give confidence in the power of sorcery: Madame de Montespan regained her position with the king. It is true that Madame de Richelieu said, ‘I am always there as a third party.’ In spite of this ‘third party,’ Madame de Montespan became the mother of the Comte de Toulouse and Mademoiselle de Blois. Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter on June 28, 1675: ‘Your idea about Quantova (Madame de Montespan) is very good; if she cannot recover the old ground, she will push her authority and her greatness beyond the clouds; but she must make sure of being loved all the year round without scruple. Meanwhile her house is filled with the whole court, and her consideration is unbounded.’ On July 31, Madame de Sévigné writes again: ‘The attachment for Quantova is always extreme: it’s pretty much in order to vex the curé and everybody else.’
In 1675 Madame de Montespan had been dismissed, from religious scruples; in 1676 she was to be sent away for reasons which furnished her with quite another ground for irritation. The king was then suddenly seized with a terrible hunger for a multiplicity of amours, soon over, sudden, and varied. Madame de Sévigné characterises this strange condition in a picturesque phrase: ‘There’s a scent of new game in the land of Quanto.’11 At short intervals the Princess de Soubise, Madame de Louvigny, Mademoiselle de Rochefort-Théobon, Madame de Ludres, and no doubt others, succeeded one another in the affections and the bed of the king.
Madame de Soubise makes an amusing appearance in the gallery of royal mistresses. She loved Louis out of love for her husband. After collecting for him all the honours and dignities, the offices and the hard cash that he desired, Madame de Soubise struck her tents and retired in good order. She had made the least possible stir and went back to her husband, who was enchanted with the adventure. The Prince of Soubise thought, with the poet, that a share with Jupiter had no dishonour so long as Jupiter could pay a good price.
These intrigues find a double echo, in the writings of Madame de Sévigné and in the records of the Chambre Ardente. On September 2, 1676, Madame de Sévigné writes: ‘The vision of Madame de Soubise has passed quicker than a lightning-flash: they have made it up again. Quanto the other day at cards had her head resting familiarly on her friend’s shoulder, and we fancied that piece of affectation meant “I am better than ever.”’ But on September 11 the position has changed. ‘Everybody believes that the star of Madame de Montespan is paling. There are tears, unfeigned disappointments, affected cheerfulness, sulks; at last, my dear, it is all over. Some tremble, others rejoice, some wish for immutability, the majority for a dramatic change; in a word, we are all eyes and ears for what the most clear-sighted say.’ ‘Every one thinks that the king loves her no longer,’ we read in a letter of September 30, ‘and that Madame de Montespan is embarrassed between the consequences which would follow the return of his favours and the danger of no longer enjoying them—the fear that they are being sought elsewhere. Apart from that, she has not very nicely accepted the position of friend: so much beauty as she still has, and so much pride, find it difficult to come down to second place. Jealousies are keen. Have they ever stopped anything?’ Again, on October 15, 1676: ‘If Quanto had packed up her traps at Easter the year she returned to Paris, she would not have been in her present distress; it would have been sensible to adopt that course, but human weakness is great; one wishes to make the most of the remains of one’s beauty, and this economy brings ruin rather than riches.’ Madame de Ludres had just succeeded Madame de Soubise.
The anxieties of Madame de Montespan were further enhanced by the brilliance, increasing every day, of a new star in the sky of Versailles. At its rising it had shed a pale, discreet, modest light, but a light which twinkled with little mocking scintillations. The widow Scarron, now become Madame de Maintenon, had been chosen as governess of the children of the king and Madame de Montespan. What strides the governess’s fortune had taken in a few years! ‘But let us speak of the friend’ (Madame de Maintenon), writes Madame de Sévigné on May 6, 1676: ‘she is still more triumphant than the Montespan. Everything is submitted to her dominion. All the chamber-women of her neighbour are hers: one hands her the rouge-pot on her knees; another brings her her gloves; a third puts her to sleep; she salutes no one, and I fancy that really she laughs in her sleeve at this servitude.’
Madame de Sévigné thus tells us what was passing at court; Marguerite Monvoisin will tell us what was going on among the sorceresses. ‘The daughter of La Voisin,’ writes La Reynie, ‘says that she has seen this sort of mass celebrated over the body by Guibourg in her mother’s house. She helped her mother to get things ready: a mattress on seats, two stools at the sides, on which were candlesticks with candles; after which Guibourg came out of the little side-chamber clothed in his chasuble—white, spotted with black fir-cones—and after that La Voisin brought in the woman on whose body the mass was to be said. Madame de Montespan had this sort of mass said three years ago (i.e. in 1676) at her mother’s house, where she came about ten o’clock and only left at midnight. And when La Voisin told her that it was necessary for her to fix a time when the other two masses might be said, which were necessary if her affair was to be successful, Madame de Montespan said that she could not find time, that La Voisin would have to do what was necessary to assure success, which she promised her and did, and the masses were said on La Voisin herself by Guibourg.’ (This again shows the sincerity of the sorceress in the carrying out of these practices.) ‘The girl Voisin having notified all the circumstances of the proceeding, the arrangement of the place, that of the person—she knew Madame de Montespan—the preparations of the priest clothed in his sacerdotal vestments, the terms of the incantation, in which the documents show that the names of Louis de Bourbon and Madame de Montespan were mentioned—the girl Voisin adds that a child had its throat cut at the mass said for Madame de Montespan at her mother’s.’
‘When I was grown up,’ said Marguerite Monvoisin, ‘my mother was no longer reluctant to trust me, and I was present at this sort of mass, and saw that the lady was stark naked on the mattress, with her head hanging down, supported by a pillow on an overturned chair, the legs too hanging over, a napkin on the belly, a cross on the napkin, and the chalice on the belly.’ She adds that this lady was Madame de Montespan. ‘At the mass of Madame de Montespan,’ said Marguerite in the course of another examination, ‘a child was presented which apparently had been prematurely born, and it was put into a basin. Guibourg cut its throat, poured the blood into a chalice, and consecrated it with the wafer, finished his mass, then proceeded to take the child’s entrails. My mother next day carried the blood and wafer to Dumesnil to be distilled, in a glass vessel which Madame de Montespan took away.’ These facts were confirmed on October 23, 1680, by the confrontation of Marguerite Monvoisin with Guibourg—with this variation, that Guibourg tried to shuffle on to La Voisin the butchery of the child.
‘Guibourg said that it was not true that he had opened the child, because it would have stained his alb: he found the child already opened.
‘The girl Voisin, on the contrary, declared that he cut open the heart himself, took out some clotted blood, and put it into the vessel into which the other blood and the rest had been put, which Madame de Montespan took away; and that to make the clotted blood go in, a common glass was broken, which, with its foot knocked off, was made to act as a funnel.
‘Guibourg said that he did not open the child’s stomach, but that having found it open, he did in fact draw out the entrails and open the heart to get out the blood that was in it, and that he put it into a crystal vase with some portions of the consecrated wafer: the whole was carried off by the lady on whose body he had said mass; and that he always believed the lady was Madame de Montespan.’
This picture is fraught with so much horror that we could not bring ourselves to admit its authenticity if the evidence of Marguerite Monvoisin and the Abbé Guibourg were not corroborated by confessions extorted from other accomplices of these crimes, who were arrested at different dates and examined separately—Lesage, Lacoudraye, Delaporte, Vertemart, Françoise Filastre, the Abbé Cotton—confirmed by the declarations of several witnesses who had picked up, before the trial, fragments of talk which escaped the accused. La Reynie emphasises the fact that the declarations of Lesage and the girl Monvoisin were made at an interval of sixteen months, and without their having had any opportunity during those months of communicating with each other.
On October 11, 1680, La Reynie writes to Louvois, who wished to save Madame de Montespan while prosecuting the charges against the other persons, and proposed, with that end, to withdraw from the case the declarations made under torture by Filastre and the Abbé Cotton, which contained the gravest charges against the favourite: ‘It is certain, even if we found a legitimate expedient for concealing from the judges for the present the facts which it would be well to keep secret, even for the sake of justice itself, that these very facts would crop up again from the woman Chappelain, from Guibourg, Galet, Pelletier, Delaporte, and perhaps from several more when under trial.’
On the subject of the deposition made by Guibourg, La Reynie writes: ‘It is morally impossible that Guibourg has deceived us in his declaration, and that he invented what he tells about the incantations said in course of the masses on the women’s bodies. His mind is not active or consistent enough for such continuous thought as would have been necessary to invent what he had said on this subject, because, even supposing he were capable of such application, he has not enough acquaintance with what goes on in the world, and could not have devised so consistent a story in regard to Madame de Montespan.’ Elsewhere he writes: ‘Guibourg and the girl Monvoisin have corroborated one another about circumstances so particular and so horrible that it is difficult to conceive two persons being able to imagine and fabricate them unknown to each other. It seems that these things must have occurred, or they could not have been described.’
The illustrious magistrate adds the following reflections:—
‘1. The time of the relations of La Voisin with Latour, the journeys to Saint-Germain, and the powders which she made him work at, was the year 1676.
‘2. The time of the abominations described by Guibourg and the girl Monvoisin fits the same period.
‘3. Two years ago Lesage spoke of Latour, the poisons, Desœillets, and the journeys of La Voisin in 1676.
‘4. It was established at the trial that two or three years before Lesage was taken, he testified that he feared the business would ruin him. They said at that time that the king had the vapours. He declared that he wished to leave La Voisin on that account, and because of the dealings she had with Desœillets.
‘From the beginning of these inquiries, these same facts have been spoken of; La Bosse, the first to be tried, gave the first inkling of them; she spoke of them under torture; but, because the king had not yet allowed this sort of facts to be collected in regard to persons of consideration, and because there was nothing to make us pay the least attention to them, no mention was made in the report of the torture of La Bosse of what she had said about Madame de Montespan.’
In this year 1676, Madame de Montespan not only had recourse to the incantations of the black mass; at her instigation, the sorceresses sent La Boissière and Françoise Filastre to Normandy to a certain Louis Galet, who had ‘fine secrets’ in regard to poison and love. Galet gave them powders. As soon as his name was uttered by the prisoner before the Chambre Ardente, an order was given for his arrest. He was flung into prison at Caen on February 23, 1680. While still far away from the other prisoners, detained at Vincennes or the Bastille, he was put through interrogations, and the depositions made by him and the others coincided with remarkable accuracy. And La Reynie’s conclusion is: ‘Guibourg and Galet having confessed after the torture of La Filastre, they gave between them a complete proof of these facts.’
It must be confessed that Madame de Montespan would have been of a singularly incredulous nature if she had not retained a blind confidence in the influence of the devil as invoked by the magicians and sorceresses. Madame de Ludres was discarded, and Louis fell at Madame de Montespan’s feet again. On June 11, 1677, Madame de Sévigné wrote to Madame de Grignan: ‘Oh, my daughter, what a triumph at Versailles! what redoubled pride! what a re-entry into possession! I was in the room for an hour. She was in bed, decked out, with her hair done: she was resting for the medianoche (supper about midnight). She launched shafts of contempt at poor Io (Madame de Ludres), and laughed at her having the audacity to complain of her. Imagine all that an ungenerous pride could make her say in triumph, and you will get near the truth. It is said that the little woman (Madame de Ludres) will resume her ordinary duties about Madame. She went off to walk in perfect solitude with La Moreuil in the garden of the Marshal Du Plessis.’ On June 18, Madame de Sévigné wrote to Bussy-Rabutin: ‘Madame de Montespan wanted to strangle her (Madame de Ludres), and makes her life terrible.’ On July 7, to Madame de Grignan: ‘Poor Isis (Madame de Ludres) has not been to Versailles. She has remained in her solitude. When a certain person (Madame de Montespan) speaks of her, she says, “that rag.” The event makes everything permissible.’
‘Quanto and her friend Louis XIV are together longer and more eagerly than ever they were. The ardour of the first years has returned, and all fears are banished, all restraint removed, which persuades us that never was empire seen more firmly established.’ And a little later: ‘Madame de Montespan was the other day covered with diamonds; the brilliance of so blazing a divinity was more than one could bear. The attachment seems greater than ever: they are all eyes for one another: never has love been seen to resume its sway like this.’
Yet, courted and victorious as she was, the favourite appeared a prey to torment; she was agitated, in a terrible fever. On January 13, 1678, the Comte de Rébenac wrote to the Marquis de Feuquières: ‘Madame de Montespan’s gambling has reached such a pitch that losses of 100,000 crowns (£60,000 to-day) are common. On Christmas Day she lost 700,000 crowns; she staked 150,000 pistoles (£280,000 at the present day) on three cards, and won.’ She lost her head in her triumph—her last triumph, dazzling but ephemeral, and about to be followed by days of cruel anguish.
In March 1679, Madame de Maintenon asked the Abbé Gobelin ‘to pray and to have prayers said for the king, who is on the brink of a deep precipice.’ This ‘precipice’ was the heart of Marie Angélique de Scoraille, demoiselle de Fontanges. She was eighteen years old, fair, with glossy flaxen hair; her large eyes, with their look of childish wonderment, were a light grey, deep and limpid; her skin was white as milk, her cheeks a lovely rose-pink; and in disposition, said her contemporaries, she was a genuine heroine of romance. She lived at Court in the capacity of maid of honour to Madame, as Madame de Ludres and Mademoiselle de la Vallière had done before her. ‘Mademoiselle de Fontanges,’ says Madame Palatine, ‘is lovely as an angel, from head to foot.’ If we may trust Bussy-Rabutin, ‘her relatives, seeing her beauty and grace, and having more love for their fortune than for their honour, clubbed together to fit her out for Court, and to provide her with means corresponding to the position she was entering.’
This was a thunderbolt for Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. We read in the Précis historique de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, by Lorot and Sivry: ‘Madame de Montespan left Saint-Germain suddenly because of the jealousy she has conceived for Mademoiselle de Fontanges.’ But the royal lover did not allow his mistresses to leave him at their own whim. He had imposed on Louise de la Vallière the bitter martyrdom of following as an expiatory victim the triumph of Madame de Montespan; he now compelled Madame de Montespan to witness the triumph of Mademoiselle de Fontanges. The proud marquise resigned herself to it, at least in appearance. On March 30, 1679, she wrote to the Duke de Noailles: ‘All is very quiet here; the king only comes into my room after mass and after supper. It is much better to see each other seldom but pleasantly, than often with embarrassment,’ Soon even this apparent satisfaction was withdrawn from her. The desertion was public and complete.
According to Madame de Sévigné, ‘there was a ball at Villers-Cotterets, at Monsieur’s place. There were masques. Mademoiselle de Fontanges appeared there in great brilliance, and adorned by the hands of Madame de Montespan.’ Bussy rejoiced at the disgrace. ‘Madame de Montespan has fallen, the king regards her no more, and you may be sure the courtiers follow his example.’
On April 6, Madame de Sévigné wrote: ‘Madame de Montespan is enraged; she cried a good deal yesterday, and you may guess the martyrdom her pride is suffering.’ On June 15, she replies to her daughter: ‘It is an infernal position, as you say, that of her who goes four paces ahead’ (alluding to Madame de Montespan).
She launched out into epigrams against her fortunate rival, just as she had satirised Louise de la Vallière. ‘Madame de Montespan,’ writes Bussy-Rabutin, ‘seeing that the great Alcandre (Louis XIV) was drifting away from her more and more every day, became so choleric that she began publicly to abuse Mademoiselle de Fontanges. She told every one that the great Alcandre was surely not very fastidious to love a creature who had had her little love affairs in the country; that she had neither wit nor education; and that, properly speaking, she was only a beautiful painting. She said a thousand other things about her equally irritating. Indeed, she always displayed the same proud spirit which nothing had been able to quell.’
Mademoiselle de Fontanges responded by loading her predecessor and all her children with costly presents. She had just been proclaimed a duchess with an annuity of 20,000 crowns. The fury of Madame de Montespan broke out. She had a violent scene with Louis, and when the king reproached her with her pride, her domineering spirit, and other defects, she replied with haughty scorn, concentrating all the violence of her wrath in one of those hard and bitter words which had made her so much feared in the time of her reign; she answered, ‘that if she had the imperfections of which he accused her, at any rate she did not smell worse than he.’
‘My mother,’ said the girl Monvoisin, ‘told me that Madame de Montespan wanted at that time to go to extremities, and tried to induce her to do things for which she had much repugnance. My mother gave me to understand that it was against the king, and after hearing what had passed at the house of Trianon (a sorceress, partner of La Voisin), I could not doubt it.’ The deserted mistress resolved to put an end to Louis and Mademoiselle de Fontanges. She applied to the sorceress of Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, and had no difficulty in getting together four accomplices in the terrible room in the Rue Beauregard: these four were La Voisin and La Trianon, who undertook to put Louis out of the way, and Romani and Bertrand, ‘artists in poisons,’ who promised to kill Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Madame de Montespan gave them money.
The king was to be poisoned first. La Voisin and her associates intended at first to put magic powders, prepared according to the formulae of the conjuring books, on the clothes of the king, or in some place where he was to pass, ‘which Mademoiselle Desœillets, the companion of Madame de Montespan, said could be done easily.’ The king would die of decline. But after reflection, La Voisin decided on means, the execution of which struck her as more certain. In conformity with the ancient custom of the kings of France, Louis XIV used to receive in person on certain days the petitions presented by his subjects. Everybody was introduced to his presence without distinction of rank or condition. It was resolved to prepare a petition and steep it in powders that had gone under the chalice; the king would take it in his hands and get his death-blow. La Trianon undertook the preparation of the paper, and La Voisin to place it in the hands of the king.
The petition was drawn up. The king’s intervention was asked in favour of a certain Blessis, an alchemist whom the Marquis de Termes was keeping confined in his château. La Voisin betook herself to her friend Léger, a valet de chambre of Montausier, and asked of him a letter of recommendation to one of his friends at Saint-Germain, who would get her passed in among the first to an audience with the king, so that she might herself hand him her petition. Léger replied that it was unnecessary for her to go to Saint-Germain, as he would undertake to forward the petition by a sure route; but the sorceress insisted on presenting it herself.
The boldness of La Voisin terrified the most courageous of her companions. The majority of them feared, not death, but the horrible tortures reserved by the law for regicides. In order to frighten her, La Trianon cast her horoscope. This document was found among the papers seized on the sorceress by the Chambre Ardente. La Trianon foretold that La Voisin would be implicated in a trial for a crime against the state. ‘Bah!’ she replied, ‘there are 100,000 crowns to be gained.’ That was the price agreed upon by La Voisin and Madame de Montespan for the poisoning of Louis XIV.
La Voisin set out for Saint-Germain on Sunday, March 5, 1679, accompanied by Romani and Bertrand. She returned on Thursday, March 9, very much put out: she had not been able to approach the king so as to give him the petition. She could have put it on the table placed near the king for that purpose, but the paper was useless unless it were placed in the king’s own hands. She said that she would return to Saint-Germain, and when her husband asked her what the urgency was, she replied: ‘I must accomplish my design or perish in the attempt!’ ‘What! perish!’ exclaimed Monvoisin, ‘that’s a good deal for a piece of paper.’
On Friday, March 10, the ‘missionaries’—priests of a community founded by St. Vincent de Paul, which has already been mentioned—paid a visit to the sorceress. La Voisin took fright, and gave the petition to her daughter to burn, which Marguerite did at dawn on Saturday morning. It is needless to say that the paper had always been kept in an envelope, for to touch it, said the sorceresses, would be certain death. On Sunday, March 12, La Voisin was arrested; it was on Monday the 13th that she had meant to return to Saint-Germain. News of the arrest got abroad, and on Wednesday, March 15, Madame de Montespan fled from Court.
In a succession of hasty notes—the sentences are not even completed, and we have filled them out for greater clearness—La Reynie builds up a proof of the attempt on the life of Louis XIV, planned by La Voisin as the instrument of Madame de Montespan:—
‘By the depositions of the girl Voisin, Romani, and Bertrand, it is proved that the journey of La Voisin to Saint-Germain was to present the petition: Bertrand wrote it out, went to learn from La Voisin what she had done, learnt that she had been there since Sunday without being able to present it, had brought it back, and was going to return. From this it is evident that the ultimate object of the journey of La Voisin to Saint-Germain was to present the petition.
‘La Trianon and La Vautier agree as to the journey. La Trianon noted in her horoscope the state affair, the crime of high treason; when questioned she gave bad answers; among the facts confessed to, denies the petition; if it were an unimportant matter, would have no interest in denying it: must have had an object, which can be nothing else than what the girl Voisin says.
‘The journey to Saint-Germain is the more suspicious in that La Voisin, questioned as to her various journeys, has never mentioned that one, and would have made no ado about mentioning it if there were nothing in it.
‘To which must be added the confession made by Voisin to her guards in prison, about the fear she had that she would be asked to explain her journey. She said, “God has protected the king!”’
La Reynie adds: ‘La Trianon agrees that she told the girl Voisin that the journey to Saint-Germain was the cause of her mother’s arrest, that this journey would do her harm, that she would be involved in some affair of state. At the same time, La Voisin did not appear to be pleased with Blessis (and consequently had no reason to make any efforts to secure his liberty). What is still more considerable, La Trianon and the girl Monvoisin agree that the state crime mentioned in the horoscope was the journey to Saint-Germain.’ ‘Finally,’ observes La Reynie, ‘this petition has been mentioned at the trial, long before the girl Monvoisin was arrested.’ On September 27, 1679, Louvois wrote to Louis XIV: ‘Your Majesty will find in this packet what Lesage has said about the journey of La Voisin to Saint-Germain; he cites so many people as witnesses to his allegations that it is difficult to believe he invented them.’ And La Reynie gives confirmation: ‘Before making her declaration, the girl Monvoisin said something about it to two prisoners who are with her. Finally, she tried to do away with herself by strangling before making these same declarations.’
The assassination of the Duchess de Fontanges was intended to crown the vengeance of Madame de Montespan. La Voisin exclaimed, in regard to this, when dining with La Trianon: ‘Oh! what a fine thing is a lover’s spite!’ Romani and Bertrand were engaged to poison the young lady at the same time that La Voisin was killing Louis XIV; but the poisons employed against her were to be less rapid, so that ‘she might die a lingering death,’ said the accomplices, ‘and that it might be said that she had died of grief at the death of the king.’
Romani had planned to disguise himself as a cloth merchant. Bertrand was to follow him as a valet. They were to present their wares to the duchess, and even if she did not take any cloth, ‘she would not refrain from taking gloves,’ said Romani, ‘because those he would bring from Grenoble would be very well made, and ladies never failed to take some of them when they were well made, and the gloves would have the same effect as the piece of cloth.’ They actually sent to Rome and Grenoble for gloves of the finest quality, and Romani ‘prepared’ them according to the recipes of the magicians.
We find among La Reynie’s papers a series of little notes which clearly prove the plot against the life of Madame de Fontanges.
A last feature in the case is not the least surprising.
We have just seen that Madame de Montespan fled from Court when she learnt of the arrest of the sorceress and her accomplices. Her terror, and, above all, her fury were extreme. At the moment when her fortune was for ever ruined, when she felt that she herself was lost, she wished at least to have the terrible joy of seeing the Duchess de Fontanges perish at her hands. The sorceress who had been the chief instrument of her passions was about to be interrogated, and would undoubtedly disclose to the attentive eyes of the judges the horrible practices in which the king’s mistress had been concerned. It was at this very moment that Madame de Montespan, burning to realise her designs, entered into relations with Françoise Filastre, the friend of La Voisin, and after her the most terrible sorceress in Paris. Filastre was one of those who had devoted their children to the devil, and murdered them immediately after birth. She went to Normandy to find Galet, who has already been mentioned, then went to Auvergne to obtain secrets for ‘poisoning without any sign appearing.’ Returning to Paris, she took steps to win an entrance to the house of Madame de Fontanges; but her arrest prevented her from carrying her scheme into execution.
Nature gave to Madame de Montespan the terrible satisfaction she had sought to obtain from magic and poison. On June 28, 1681, the Duchess de Fontanges died at the age of twenty-two, in the abbey of Port Royal. She was carried off by pleuro-pneumonia, tubercular in origin, the action of which was hastened by loss of blood following an accouchement. The young woman died convinced that she had been poisoned, and suspecting her rival. Louis XIV, who had the same idea, feared that the autopsy might reveal the crime, and sought to prevent it; but the relatives insisted on it. The physicians concluded that it was a natural death. But the opinion was still held that Madame de Fontanges had succumbed to poison administered by Madame de Montespan, an opinion echoed by Madame de Caylus, Madame de Maintenon, Madame Palatine, and Bussy-Rabutin.
Before the commissioners of the Chambre Ardente the magician Lesage had allowed the following remark to escape him: ‘If Filastre were captured, they would learn some strange things.’ She was taken: she denied everything before the commissioners; but on October 1, 1680, while under torture, she confirmed in the most precise manner the revelations made by the prisoners at the Bastille and Vincennes; and on that very day Louis XIV in terror ordered the sittings of the Chambre Ardente to be suspended. On October 17, 1680, Louvois wrote to La Reynie: ‘I have received the letters you have done me the honour to write to me, and the king heard them read with pain.’ Louis, then, ordered the closing of the Chambre Ardente, and when on May 19, 1681, the sittings were resumed at the entreaty of La Reynie, the judges were forbidden ‘to take any steps in regard to the declarations contained in the reports of the torture and execution of La Filastre.’ From that day Louis had no further doubts as to the guilt of his mistress. One more proof was to be furnished him.
The name of Mademoiselle Desœillets, Madame de Montespan’s maid, recurs on every page of the proceedings. She was continually going backwards and forwards between her mistress and the sorceresses. The prisoners almost all knew her: they spoke of her in the most positive manner. The girl Monvoisin pointed out her house, where she had been several times. Mademoiselle Desœillets had a friend named Madame de Villedieu, who frequently visited the sorceresses, but for her own private ends. When La Voisin was arrested, the two friends talked about the incident.
‘How can you be easy in mind when you have been so often to the sorceress?’ asked Madame de Villedieu.
‘The king will not allow me to be arrested.’
The remark was voluntarily reported by Madame de Villedieu to the detective Desgrez. And, in fact, when La Reynie on October 22, 1680, wrote to Louvois: ‘What has been said in regard to Mademoiselle Desœillets at the beginning and repeated at the end is so strong that it is impossible to prevent her from being confronted with the people who have spoken about her,’ his words fell on deaf ears at Versailles. When Madame de Villedieu was taken to Vincennes, she said: ‘It is astonishing that I am being imprisoned when I went only once to La Voisin, while you leave Mademoiselle Desœillets at liberty, who has been there more than fifty times.’
Louvois at last decided to order Mademoiselle Desœillets to appear, not before the judges, but before himself in his private room. On November 18, 1680, he wrote to La Reynie:—
‘Mademoiselle Desœillets declares with marvellous assurance that not one of those who have named her know her, and, to assure me of her innocence, she charged me to urge the king to allow her to be taken to the place where those who have deposed against her are confined. She stakes her life that no one will be able to tell who she is. His Majesty has therefore been pleased to decide that I shall take her to Vincennes next Friday, and bring down Lesage, the girl Voisin, Guibourg, and the other persons who, as you inform me, have spoken of her. The person of whom I have just spoken will enter and show herself to them, and I will ask them if they know her, without naming her to them.’
The result did not justify Louvois’ hopes. La Reynie showed at that time that, unknown to him and in spite of his vigilance, some one was holding communication with the prisoners in Vincennes, who were receiving information from without. This ‘some one’ was Madame de Montespan. No doubt the lieutenant of police took greater precautions on this occasion. The prisoners were not able to receive preliminary coaching, with the result that one and all immediately recognised the favourite’s maid.
Mademoiselle Desœillets, moreover, was under great illusions as to the impunity that would be assured to her. Louis XIV did not allow her to appear before the judges, nor even to be confronted with the prisoners, but he had her shut up for the rest of her days in close confinement. The wretched woman died on September 8, 1686, in the general hospital of Tours. And poor Madame de Villedieu, whose only crime was that she was for a moment in the confidence of Mademoiselle Desœillets, was visited with the same fate, because of the necessity of keeping the great secret.
When he learned suddenly of all the crimes with which the woman he had most loved was stained—the woman whom, in the eyes of Europe, he had made queen of the French Court, who was the mother of his favourite children—what were the sentiments and the attitude of King Louis? What passed in his soul, immured, for posterity as for his contemporaries, in that ‘terrible majesty’ of which Saint-Simon speaks?
About the middle of August 1680, Louvois, who in this dreadful business devoted all his intelligence and all his influence to protect Madame de Montespan, arranged a tête-à-tête with the king. Madame de Maintenon anxiously observed them from a distance. ‘Madame de Montespan at first wept,’ she says, ‘threw reproaches upon him, and at last spoke with pride.’ At the first moment, under the shock of the king’s declarations, Madame de Montespan had been utterly crushed, had burst into tears of confusion and humiliation; then, regaining command of herself, the masterful woman had risen to the height of her pride, with all the force of her passion and her hatred for her rivals. If it was true, she declared, that she had been driven to great crimes, it was because her love for the king was great, and great also were the harshness, cruelty, and infidelity of him to whom she had sacrificed everything. And the king might strike at her, but he could not forget that he would, with the same stroke, injure in the eyes of France and Europe the mother of his children—children who had been made legitimate children of France. Madame de Montespan left this interview irrevocably ruined, but at the same time definitively saved.
We must remember the rank to which Louis had raised his mistress. It was of the utmost importance to him to avoid a scandal. Even by exiling the fallen favourite, thus absolutely disgracing her, he would run the risk of unloosing storms. La Reynie, who, thanks to his genius for reading the hearts of men, knew Madame de Montespan’s character thoroughly, warned Louvois: ‘We cannot but fear extraordinary scandals, the consequence of which cannot be foreseen.’ Louvois, Colbert, and Madame de Maintenon herself united their efforts to soften too violent a fall. Colbert had just betrothed his younger daughter to Madame de Montespan’s nephew. We know, moreover, how much the famous statesman had at heart the national greatness to which he had so arduously contributed, and which in his view could not be dissevered from the greatness of the king. Madame de Maintenon had tenderly trained the children of Madame de Montespan, and retained a real affection for them all her life long. Let us add that Louis, with all his faults—his selfishness, his coarseness, his lack of feeling, his mediocre intellect—had at least a high sentiment of the royal dignity, and that in this awful crisis he did not for a moment depart from that calm and tranquil majesty at which all who approached him never ceased to wonder. Madame de Montespan was not driven from Court. She left her splendid apartments on the first floor for apartments remoter from the centre of the king’s life. Louis continued to receive her in public, and publicly paid her visits which deceived careless observers; but practised eyes perceived the profound change which had taken place beneath these external appearances. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter that Louis treated Madame de Montespan with harshness; Bussy-Rabutin wrote that he treated her with scorn. Thus began the expiatory martyrdom which lasted for twenty-seven years.
On March 15, 1691, Madame de Montespan retired to Paris, going into the community of St. Joseph which she had founded. Louis granted her a right royal pension, 10,000 pistoles—£20,000 of to-day—a month; but when, in 1692, the double marriage of Madame de Montespan’s children, Mademoiselle de Blois and the Duke de Maine, was celebrated with the Duke de Chartres and Mademoiselle de Charolais, Louis did not allow their mother to appear at the ceremony or to sign the contract.
In the early days of her retirement Madame de Montespan had the greatest difficulty in accommodating herself to the calm monotony of her retreat at St. Joseph’s. ‘She aired her leisure and anxieties,’ says Saint-Simon, ‘at Bourbon, at Fontevrault, at her estate at Antin, and for years was quite unable to regain repose of mind.’ What were these anxieties? Saint-Simon could not explain them; but we are acquainted with them to-day.
Madame de Montespan was much distressed at abandoning the glory of the world; but from the day when the renunciation was made, she threw herself with as much passion into penitence as she had displayed in ambition and love. ‘From the moment of her retirement to St. Joseph’s,’ says Saint-Simon, ‘till her death, her conversion never belied itself, and her penitence continually augmented.’ She might have been seen then, in the Carmelite convent in the Rue du Faubourg St. Jacques, imploring from her old rival, whom she had so harshly persecuted—the gentle and saintly Louise de la Vallière, Sister Louise de la Miséricorde—the words which give ease of mind and forgetfulness of the past. Though she tenderly loved those of her children whom she had borne to Louis XIV, it was towards the Duke d’Antin, the son she had by the Marquis de Montespan, that she diverted her solicitude, from a sense of duty, and, as Saint-Simon tells us, ‘she occupied herself with enriching him.’ ‘The king had no manner of dealings with her,’ writes the great chronicler, ‘even through their children. Their attentions were discouraged, they thenceforth saw her only rarely and after having asked permission. The Père de la Tour wrung from her a terrible act of penitence, namely, to beg her husband’s pardon and place herself again in his hands. She wrote herself in the most submissive terms, offering to return to him if he would deign to receive her, or to repair to whatever place he pleased to command. To any one who knew Madame de Montespan, this was a sacrifice of the most heroic kind. She had all the merit of it without undergoing the experience. Monsieur de Montespan sent word that he would neither receive her nor lay any commands upon her, and that he never wished to hear her name mentioned for the rest of his life.’
She had no further relations with the Court, the ministers, intendants, or judges; she asked nothing of any man, either for her or hers, and employed the vast income she owed to the king in doing good all around her, bestowing alms with ceaseless and unparalleled generosity, and endowing religious foundations. ‘Beautiful as the day,’ says Saint-Simon, ‘till the last hour of her life; though she was not ill, she always fancied that she was, and that she was going to die.’ This anxiety encouraged a taste for travelling, and in her travels she always took with her seven or eight persons as a suite. Between her outbursts of piety and the blossoming forth of her charity, incessant remorse thus made its appearance, as well as the continual need she felt of deadening her thoughts. Only Louis XIV, Louvois, and La Reynie could have explained the following page borrowed from Saint-Simon:—
‘Little by little she proceeded to give all that she had to the poor. She worked for them several hours a day at humble and rough tasks, to wit, making shirts and other such-like things, and she made those about her work at them too. Her table, which she had loved to excess, became particularly frugal; her fasts were multiplied, her piety interrupted her entertaining and the harmless little card-play at which she amused herself, and at all hours of the day she would leave everything to go and pray in her closet. Her mortification of the flesh was constant: her chemises and sheets were of the roughest and coarsest unbleached linen, but they were concealed under ordinary sheets and underwear. She continually wore steel bracelets and garters, and a girdle of steel which often wounded her; and her tongue, formerly so terrible a member, had its penance also. She was further so tortured by horror of death that she paid several women whose sole employment was to watch her. She lay at night with all the bed-curtains thrown back, with many candles in her room, her watchers around her, and whenever she woke up she wished to find them chatting, playing cards, or eating, to make sure that they did not fall a-nodding.’
The hour so much dreaded at last struck. She had a singular presentiment of it a year beforehand. At the first attack of illness she saw that her end was near. It came on May 27, 1707, at Bourbon.
‘She profited by a brief respite from pain to confess and receive the sacraments. Previously she had all her servants, even the humblest, brought in, made public confession of her public sins, and besought pardon for the scandal she had so long given, and even for her fits of temper, with a humility so real and deep and penitent that nothing could have been more edifying. She then received the last sacraments with ardent piety. The dread of death which all her life had so continually troubled her suddenly vanished and troubled her no more. She thanked God in the presence of them all for permitting her to die in a place where she was far away from the children of her sin, and during her illness spoke of them only this once. She was engrossed in the thought of eternity, in some hope of a cure with which they tried to flatter her, and in her condition as a sinner whose fear was tempered by a steady confidence in the mercy of God, with no regrets, solely intent on rendering to Him the sacrifice most pleasing to Him, with a gentleness and peacefulness which accompanied all her actions.’
The courtiers were surprised at the indifference Louis displayed on learning of the death of his sometime mistress. To the Duchess of Burgundy, who remarked on it, he replied that, since he had dismissed her, he had counted on never seeing her again, and that she was from that time dead to him. He openly reproved the grief manifested by Madame de Montespan’s children; and, to the stupefaction of the Court, he forbade them to wear mourning, a circumstance the more incomprehensible because at that same date the Princess de Conti, daughter of Louis XIV and Louise de la Vallière, was wearing mourning for Madame de la Vallière her aunt.
It would be unjust to judge Madame de Montespan solely by what has been here said. We have spoken only of the crimes to which she was driven by the violence of her passions. We have not recalled the wealth she distributed with as much liberality as discretion, or the brilliance given to the Court by her grace and wit, or the enlightened protection which the greatest writers and artists found in her, the radiant kindliness with which she sweetened the declining years of the great Corneille—in a word, the innumerable deeds of kindness she performed with as much intelligence as affection, the fruits of some of which remain to this day. It would require a Racine, with his penetrating mind, his ability to reconcile opposite extremes in one and the same character, and the harmonious majesty of his language, to speak of Madame de Montespan. Bright and radiantly beautiful, of queenly elegance, charming by the distinction of her manners and the delicate wit of her conversation, light-hearted and joyous, she dominated the whole Court of France—this horrible client of the Abbé Guibourg, of La Filastre and La Voisin.
III. A Magistrate
Lieutenant of police Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie was the mainspring of the proceedings against the poisoners. He alone carried through the vast operations, bristling with difficulties. And it would be impossible to find any point of his administration in which his genius and his character appear in a more striking or complete manner. It is thanks to him, and to the careful notes he took daily on the cases of the prisoners, that we have been able to discover the facts of which Louis XIV believed he had destroyed every trace when he ordered the burning of the various documents in his private room.
Saint-Simon, who has utterly shattered reputations which seemed firm as rock, pauses with respect before Nicolas de la Reynie, though the functions with which he was endowed were a subject of genuine abhorrence to him. ‘La Reynie, councillor of state,’ he writes, ‘so well known for having been the first to lift the office of lieutenant of police from its natural low estate, and for making it a sort of ministerial office; a man of great importance too, because of the king’s direct confidence in him, his constant relations with the Court, and the number of things in which he is concerned, and in which he has infinite powers of serving or harming in innumerable ways people of the greatest importance, obtained at length in 1697, at the age of eighty, permission to resign so arduous an employment, which he had for the first time ennobled by the equity, moderation, and disinterestedness with which he had fulfilled it, without swerving from the greatest scrupulousness, and doing the least possible injury as seldom as possible; he was, moreover, a man of great virtue and capacity, who in an office which he had, so to speak, created, and in which he was bound to draw upon him the hatred of the public, nevertheless won universal esteem.’
We have a portrait of La Reynie by his friend Mignard, and an admirable etching of the painting by Van Schuppen. Engraving has never reproduced human features with more clearness, colour, and lifelikeness. The face bespeaks a clear, powerful, and well-balanced intelligence; the eyes express a firm and thoughtful kindliness. Such was the La Reynie who investigated the great poison cases.
Though Bazin de Bezons of the French Academy had been associated with him in the Chambre Ardente as examining commissioner, it was the lieutenant of police who did all the work. The number of depositions, interrogatories, confrontations, pleadings, and other documents which he collected is enormous; and we see the magistrate with sure hand cutting a way through this tangled forest, guided by his experience, his knowledge of the human soul, and his clear intellect.
The memorials he has left on questions of the greatest difficulty are useful and interesting to study, because of the method of work they reveal. It is exactly the method which our old professors of rhetoric used to teach for the orderly arrangement of a French dissertation or an historical essay. The principal and fundamental fact is noted down about the middle of the left-hand page, with a large bracket embracing sub-divisions; each of these sub-divisions is in turn accompanied by a bracket embracing sub-divisions of these sub-divisions; and so on to the end of the right-hand page, which is filled from top to bottom with minute and close writing: there you have a multitude of slight facts following one another in methodical order, all focussing on the principal fact, found, as we have said, in the middle of the left-hand page. There is no college student but has built up his schemes for French essays on this model. But there is no question, in La Reynie’s portfolios, of rhetorical dissertations or Latin compositions; he deals there with irrevocable sentences about to be pronounced ‘on the flesh and blood of men,’ to use his own phrase. And if we go from these bracketed plans to the memoirs and reports to which they guided the magistrate’s thought, we find ourselves in possession of marvels of clear thinking and judging.
During the long poison case, La Reynie showed himself indefatigable in work. He had no other concern than right and the triumph of justice. And in proportion as the number of criminals increased, and the greatest names in the French nobility and Parlement were found to be compromised by his inquiries—in proportion as relatives, friends, all who feared for themselves, and nobility and Parlement fearing for their honour and their privileges, were up in arms against him, his courage grew, his activity redoubled; he pushed on his inquiries, urging the king, urging the ministers, demanding new warrants, fresh arrests, seeking permission to extend his formidable investigations over an ever-widening circle.
Sorceresses and magicians thronged about the royal Court like swarms of wasps about a hive of honey. In this monstrous hive were concentrated the wealth and honours which awoke and stimulated the ambitions and passions in which the sorceresses found their booty.
The sorceresses had little lodgings at Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Versailles, around the palaces. They won admission to the Court as fruit-sellers or dealers in perfumes distilled by the magicians; they offered pastes for softening the skin and waters for improving the complexion. They allied themselves with the domestics of great houses, and domiciled themselves with the laundresses connected with them. They were intimates of those persons who hung about the Court with the curious profession of presenters of petitions. They sometimes even entered the service of a duke or a marchioness. La Chéron was with Monsieur de Noailles and Monsieur de Rabaton in succession. La Vigoureux was actively engaged in finding places for serving-maids and lackeys. We have seen the relations between the fortune-tellers and Leroy, governor of the pages of the Petite Ecurie. Girardin, governor of the dauphin’s pages, was connected with the magician Belot. Blessis, a crony of La Voisin, was presented to the queen by Madame de Béthune, by the queen to the dauphin, and by the dauphin to the king.
Among the bourgeoises of Paris who were struck at by the depositions of the fortune-tellers we have indicated the principal ones, and then, coming to the Court ladies, the most illustrious of all, Madame de Montespan. But how many others La Reynie had to deal with! The beautiful Duchess of Orleans, Henrietta of England, was accused, not without the greatest probability, of having had a mass said against her husband, with the incantations of sorcery, in the Palais-Royal itself. Madame de Polignac and Madame de Gramont tried to get Louise de la Vallière poisoned. The Countess de Soissons, Olympe Mancini, who had inspired Louis XIV with his first passion, was compromised so deeply that, warned by the king, she fled into the Netherlands. Louis XIV said to the Princess de Carignan, Madame de Soissons’ mother: ‘I was determined that the countess should escape; perhaps some day I shall render an account therefor to God and my people.’
When Madame de Montespan was at the height of her power, rivals, jealous of her good fortune, applied to the sorceresses for formulae and powders to ‘send her packing,’ just as she had done with the idea of getting rid of La Vallière. These were the Duchess of Angoulême, Madame de Vitry, and her own sister-in-law, Antoinette de Mesmes, Duchess de Vivonne. The practices to which this last had recourse were precisely the same as those with which the secret life of Madame de Montespan has acquainted us. She applied to La Filastre and La Chappelain, who were also employed by the dazzling mistress of the king. The sorceresses did not hesitate between the two sisters-in-law, thinking to come off well either way: if the one wished to retain the affection of the king, the other sought to possess herself of it, and in either case money would fall into their purses. Louis did not allow the Duchess de Vivonne to be proceeded against, related so closely as she was to Madame de Montespan. It is probable also that he was dissuaded from it by Colbert, who had married one of his daughters to the Duke de Mortemart, son of the duchess.
We may imagine the emotion, agitation, and anxieties aroused at Court and in Paris by the prosecutions directed by the Chambre Ardente against so large a number of persons belonging to the most distinguished families: the arrests of Mesdames de Dreux and Leféron, of Poulaillon and the Abbé Mariette, relatives of the chief magistrates; the warrants issued against the Duchess de Bouillon, the Princess de Tingry, the wife of Marshal la Ferté, the Countess de Roure; the hasty flight out of the kingdom of the Marchioness d’Alluye, the Viscountess de Polignac, the Count Clermont-Lodève, the Marquis de Cessac, the Countess de Soissons; the imprisonment in the Bastille of the famous Marshal de Luxembourg, who had employed magicians to beg the devil to remove his wife. ‘Every one is agitated,’ wrote Madame de Sévigné, on January 26, 1680, ‘every one is sending for news and going into houses to pick them up.’
Further, the public imagination was impressed; crimes were the stock topic of conversation. The most trifling accidents were attributed to poison. Every husband was accused of poisoning his mother-in-law. Terror reigned in Paris.
Then there was a reaction. Nobles and lawyers displayed equal irritation at the Chamber’s daring to push its investigations the length of them. Were rank and name no longer a rampart high enough against the inquisitions of a lieutenant of police? There was an end to society. The result was, that ere long the only person in the whole matter who appeared really criminal in the eyes of people of importance was La Reynie himself. ‘To-day,’ says Madame de Sévigné, ‘the cry is, the innocence of the accused and the horrid scandal! You know this sort of parrot cry. Nothing else is talked about in any company. There is scarcely another example of such a scandal in any Christian court.’ And some days later, playing sedulous echo to the general gossip, the charming marchioness said it was a shame to haul up people of position for such a pack of nonsense. ‘The reputation of Monsieur de la Reynie is abominable,’ she wrote to her daughter on May 31, 1680; ‘what you say is exactly to the point; his being alive proves that there are no poisoners in France.’ La Reynie had just discovered, indeed, a plot to murder him.
The reader will remember the demonstration organised against the lieutenant of police at the time of the liberation of Madame de Dreux, who was carried off in triumph between her husband, the maître des requêtes, and her lover, Monsieur de Richelieu. The nobility got up a similar demonstration when Marie Anne Mancini, Duchess de Bouillon, appeared before the Chambre Ardente. She had done her best to find means of quickly ridding herself of her husband, so that she might marry the Duke de Vendôme. The Duke de Bouillon was informed of it by Louis himself. Yet the duke accompanied his wife on January 29, 1680, to the Arsenal, giving her his right hand, while the Duke de Vendôme gave her his left: an exact repetition of the scene when Madame de Dreux left the Chambre Ardente between her husband and Monsieur de Richelieu.
Madame de Sévigné has noted down the details of this merry frolic. Madame de Bouillon arrived in a coach drawn by six horses, seated between her husband and her lover, followed by twenty other coaches, packed full of the smartest noblemen and daintiest ladies of the Court. The Marquis de la Fare confirms this account: ‘The Duchess de Bouillon made a proud and confident appearance before the judges, accompanied by all her friends, who were in large numbers, and a most distinguished crowd.’ ‘Madame de Bouillon entered the Chambre like a little queen,’ says Madame de Sévigné; ‘she sat down on a chair prepared for her, and instead of replying to the first question, she asked that what she wanted to say might be written down: which was, that she only came there out of respect for the king; she had none at all for the Chambre, which she did not recognise; and that she did not mean to allow any derogation to the ducal privilege.’ (This privilege consisted in the right of not being tried except by all the courts united in Parlement.) ‘She would not say a word till that was written down, and then she took off her glove and showed a very beautiful hand. She replied honestly enough until her age was asked.
‘“Do you know La Vigoureux?”
‘“No.”
‘“Do you know La Voisin?”
‘“Yes.”
‘“Why do you wish to do away with your husband?”
‘“I do away with him? Why, you have only to ask him if he thinks so; he gave me his hand to this very door.”
‘“But why did you go so often to La Voisin’s house?”
‘“I wanted to see the Sibyls she promised to show me; that company would be well worth all my journeys.”
‘She was asked if she had not shown the woman a bag of money. She said “No,” and for more than one reason, and this she said with a very mocking and disdainful air.
‘“Well, gentlemen, is that all you have to say to me?”
‘“Yes, madam.”
‘She rose and said aloud as she went out, “Really, I should never have believed that clever men could ask so many silly questions.”
‘She was received by all her friends and relatives with adoration, she was so pretty, naïve, natural, bold, so pleasant in appearance and so quiet in mind.’ One of the replies she made to La Reynie, who asked her if she had really seen the devil at the sorceress’s, was: ‘I see him now: he is ugly, old, and disguised as a councillor of state.’ This soon got abroad outside the Chambre, and set all Paris and the Court in good humour.
The charges against the Duchess de Bouillon were, nevertheless, very serious. It was proved to the commissioners that she had asked the sorceresses to poison the Duke de Bouillon or to procure his death by witchcraft. Madame de Sévigné thought the matter of little importance. ‘The Duchess de Bouillon,’ she wrote to her daughter, ‘went and asked La Voisin for a little poison to get rid of an old husband who was boring her to death, and an invention to marry a young man who wanted her, without any one knowing it. This young fellow was Monsieur de Vendôme, who took her to the Arsenal holding one hand, Monsieur de Bouillon holding the other. When a Mancini only commits a folly like that, it is winked at; these sorceresses do the thing seriously, and horrify all Europe about a trifle.’ Louis XIV took a more severe view of it, and decided that Madame de Bouillon should be confronted with La Voisin. The pretty face of the young duchess became graver when she heard this, and she begged to be spared this indignity. The king complied, but exiled her to Nérac, whence he would not allow her to return, in spite of the entreaties of her many friends.
The revelations which ensued before the Chambre struck a more cruel blow at La Reynie’s soul than the anger of the world. Wrapped in his consciousness of rectitude, he heard cries and threats only as the faint murmurs of a distant mob.
Three sentiments dominated him and guided his whole life: the religious sentiment, which declared itself in a strong, sane, simple piety, the piety of a man possessing a quiet conviction of the truth of his faith; love for his king, a love composed of respect and admiration, with shades of affection like that of a son for a father, and allied also to a religious veneration; finally, a high sentiment of his judicial office with an immovable respect for justice. His worship of the king extended to all that concerned and surrounded him, to all that he loved and honoured. The greatness of Louis XIV is easily explained, in spite of his personal mediocrity, when we see with what passion and by what men he was served. The revelations about Madame de Montespan, the mother of the king’s children, the woman who had almost won a seat on the throne of France, were anguish to La Reynie. It is touching to see his grief becoming more keen, more poignant, as evidence accumulated and conviction forced itself upon his mind. ‘Private facts,’ he writes at the head of a memorandum in which the charges against Madame de Montespan are summed up, ‘which were painful to listen to, the idea of which is so grievous to recall and which are still more difficult to relate.’ In the light of these revelations his judgment, usually so clear, precise, and sure, became confused, and being unable to believe what he saw, he fancied that his own vision was becoming imperfect. ‘I recognise my weakness. In spite of myself, the nature of these private circumstances (those concerning Madame de Montespan) impresses my mind with more fear than is reasonable. These crimes scare me.’ Then he recurs to the documents with judicial composure. ‘These are the very deeds we must look upon and draw our inferences from.’ But it was just the inferences deduced from these actions that his mind could not admit. ‘I recognise that I cannot pierce the thick darkness with which I am surrounded. I ask for time to think more about it; and perhaps it will happen that, after much thinking, I shall see even less than I see now. After well considering everything, I have found no other course to suggest than to seek for further enlightenment, and to await the aid of Providence, which has drawn from the feeblest imaginable beginnings the knowledge of this infinite number of strange things it was so necessary to know. All that has happened hitherto leads us to hope (and I do hope with great confidence) that God will at length reveal this abyss of crime, that He will at the same time show the means to escape from it, and inspire the king with all that he ought to do in a matter of such importance.’
In studying these reports of La Reynie to Louvois, we discover a circumstance as impressive as curious. In the course of his memoranda, the magistrate clearly and logically unfolds the reality of the charges against the favourite, but when in closing it falls upon him to draw practical conclusions, his mind shrinks from the task, his thought takes fright like a horse shying before an unexpected obstacle. ‘I have done what I could, when I examined the proofs and the presumptions, to assure myself and remain convinced that the facts are genuine, and I could not succeed. I have sought, on the other hand, everything that might persuade me that they were false, and that too has been impossible.’
His distress was augmented by the conflict which arose in his conscience between the duties he owed to justice and those he owed his king. ‘At that time when my mind was so cast down,’ he wrote, ‘I besought God in His mercy to permit me to preserve the fidelity I owed to my office, and to enable me to walk sincerely in all that it pleased the king to command me.’ Louis XIV ordered that a portion of the case should be withdrawn from the cognisance of the judges. The blow was so hard to La Reynie that his strength of mind wellnigh failed under it. ‘I hope,’ he wrote to Louvois on October 17, 1681, ‘that his Majesty in his favour and goodness will have compassion on my weakness when he considers that, with the fear and respect I could not fail to be in, occupied moreover and filled with the idea of a judge who, in giving a decision contrary to the truth, should judge and be a party to a judgment involving the life of men, I could not at the moment recognise the false position in which I was, nor represent to his Majesty that the affair in question was in the nature of the case not susceptible of the proposed expedient.’
For a moment his resolution seems to have been taken: he would put himself blindly and unreservedly in the hands of the king who had received from God, he writes, higher lights than those of other men; but the next instant the judge reappears in him and determines him, alone, unaided, subordinate official as he was, to enter into a struggle against the powerful ministers supported by the will and favour of the king.
At this moment his character reveals itself in all its greatness.
He went straight to Louis XIV and laid before him the charges against his mistress; then he wrote energetically to Louvois: ‘In spite of all the care that has been taken, all these facts (against Madame de Montespan) have cropped up so often, in so many different quarters, and with so many details, that the king has been obliged to allow the interrogation of the prisoners about the favourite, but in private.’
Louvois, one of the most intimate and well-liked friends of Madame de Montespan, did everything he could to save her. Madame de Maintenon, indeed, was hostile to her, and he feared her growing favour. Besides, as the Venetian ambassador observes, Louvois ‘worshipped the French monarchy, to which everything seemed to him subordinate.’ He felt bound to protect the prestige of the crown against the injury which the condemnation of the favourite would do it. Finally, in defending her, he thought he would ingratiate himself with Louis.
Louvois endeavoured to bring La Reynie over to his views, to persuade him, at first gently, that it was important that the examining judge should find Madame de Montespan innocent. Louvois spoke, urged, demonstrated: La Reynie listened, but did not heed. The minister then changed his tone. He sought to prove to the magistrate that Madame de Montespan must really be innocent. He went to Paris on February 15, 1681, to explain the matter to him. Had not Mademoiselle Desœillets, the favourite’s maid, written that ‘she was not guilty, and that what he (La Reynie) had been told about her dealings with La Voisin could not be true; that there were twenty women about Madame de Montespan, of whom eighteen hated her, and that they might be asked for information about her, but she thought that the Countess de Soissons had two maids, one of whom was almost her own height, and that the countess might well have taken her name (the name of Mademoiselle Desœillets), to injure both her and Madame de Montespan, whom she hated.’
La Reynie replied that all that was wanted was to confront the young lady with the prisoners at Vincennes. We have already shown that the confrontation took place and that Mademoiselle Desœillets was recognised. Louvois had perforce to devise another defence, to which the inflexible La Reynie made answer: ‘After reflecting on what Mademoiselle Desœillets said to Monsieur de Louvois at Vincennes, about her having a niece who was very often with the sorceresses, and who might easily have been mistaken for her, I think it doubtful, because she only said so after having been recognised by the prisoners, and because Madame de Villedieu her good friend, who is at Vincennes, and had had warnings, tried to mislead us in the same way; it appears a concerted plan; and when I asked her what Mademoiselle Desœillets was like, she told me that she was small, short, and well-developed, which is a false description and exactly fits the niece.’
When it was pointed out to La Reynie that La Voisin had denied all knowledge of Mademoiselle Desœillets, he replied: ‘The denial of La Voisin, persisted in till her death, must be the more suspicious in that it was so obstinately kept up, because it is now proved that they had dealings together. If Mademoiselle Desœillets herself denies these dealings, that itself can only increase the suspicion.’
Louvois dwelt also on a retractation made by La Filastre after her conversation with her confessor at the moment of going to execution; but the lieutenant of police replied: ‘The declaration made by La Filastre exonerating Madame de Montespan applies solely to the poisoning of Mademoiselle de Fontanges. There are two other facts: that of the mass said over her by Guibourg, and further, the agreement between them in regard to the powders prepared by Galet for the king, in which Madame de Montespan was named; and the charges founded on these two facts do not depend wholly on what was said under torture, but were confirmed afresh by the same declaration in which La Filastre retracted the first charge.’
La Reynie thus defended himself and justice, and soon, strong in the rights of the law, he went on from defence to attack. He revealed to the minister the relations which several of the Vincennes prisoners who were mixed up in Madame de Montespan’s affair had had with persons of the Court.
These had given instruction and counsel. La Reynie condemned these manœuvres before the very minister who, at the instigation of the king, had been their author.
‘And several of these prisoners of rank,’ he added courageously, ‘have found means of having some of the charges brought against them withdrawn.’
La Reynie was not satisfied with denying the innocence of Mademoiselle Desœillets; he told Louvois: ‘It is difficult for her to be left at liberty after such charges. Apprised of all that has been said against her, she is busy taking measures to render her conviction impossible, and she will take these measures along with other ill-disposed persons.’
In case he should not be authorised to arrest her, La Reynie asks that he may at least be permitted to proceed to her examination; and he sketches for Louvois a very skilful plan, showing the ingenious and subtle means by which, without violence or scandal, the confidante might be induced to reveal the truth.
It is hardly necessary to say that these propositions were rejected by Louis and his minister. The magistrate, nevertheless, persevered in the path he had marked out for himself, even after Louvois, to overcome his scruples, had enlisted the assistance of Colbert, the second of the all-powerful ministers.
Boileau once said: ‘I admire Monsieur Colbert’s inability to endure Suetonius because Suetonius had revealed the infamy of the emperors.’ There we have the explanation of his conduct, apart from the personal interest he had in the innocence of Madame de Montespan.
Colbert had only followed at a distance the work of the commissioners of the Chambre Ardente, and he knew only vaguely the charges brought against the king’s mistress. He applied to a celebrated advocate of the time, Maître Duplessis, for a statement establishing the innocence of Madame de Montespan, and indicating means of quashing the unhappy proceedings. Colbert even did his best to supply him with arguments.
Duplessis drew up the statement desired. Colbert acknowledged its receipt on February 25, 1681: ‘I have seen and examined with care the memorandum you have sent me; I have to receive another to-morrow on the second charge (the attempted poisoning of Mademoiselle de Fontanges), which is no less serious than the first (the attempt on Louis XIV by means of the petition), and the disproof of which is, in my opinion, more complete and perfect.’ And Duplessis sent him a second statement with these words: ‘Have the goodness to look at the general observation at the beginning, because it may provide answers to many things which appear sufficiently well proved.’ The memorials of Duplessis, backed up by Colbert, had no more effect on La Reynie than the arguments of Louvois. The advocate and the minister asked that the prisoners should be dealt with summarily by the Chambre, that torture should not be applied so that they might not reveal the gravest facts, and that as soon as the case had been rapidly despatched, all the documents should be burnt forthwith. But La Reynie said that it was impossible not to follow the rules of justice, and that the Chambre could only judge according to custom and law.
The Chambre Ardente was in a quandary. On the one hand it saw the necessity of yielding to the absolute refusal of Louis to authorise the reading in court of the documents in which Madame de Montespan was concerned; on the other, there was the no less absolute refusal of La Reynie to allow the judges to pronounce a sentence in which all the guarantees custom gave the accused were not respected. It seemed a complete deadlock. The king had gradually allowed himself to be led very far from the resolutions of rigorous equity which he had at first displayed. He had violated the secrets of the documents so far as to communicate to persons of note such parts of the reports of the investigations as concerned them; he had connived at the flight of the Prince de Clermont-Lodève, the Countess de Soissons, and many others. He had trembled at the thought of what revelations La Voisin might make: ‘I explained to the king,’ wrote Louvois to Bazin de Bezons on December 3, 1679, ‘of the reasons you and the commissioners have for beginning the investigation of La Voisin’s case, but his Majesty did not give his approval; and this evening I shall give orders to Boucherat and La Reynie not to bring it into court.’
On July 18, 1680, Louvois wrote to La Reynie from Montreuil-sur-Mer: ‘The king has not thought fit to give the order you request that the commissioners may be authorised to give judgment in case of necessity, his Majesty not regarding it as seemly that the Chambre should judge prisoners in his absence.’ In spite of the efforts made to enwrap the sittings at the Arsenal in impenetrable secrecy, public opinion was not deceived, and we find evidence in many private letters that the king was preventing the prosecution of ‘people of the Court.’ ‘You are aiming at riff-raff,’ exclaimed Lalande, one of the prisoners, in open court on July 31, 1681, ‘and you ought to aim higher.’
At length, as we have seen, after the declaration of La Filastre on October 1, 1680, the sittings of the Chambre were suddenly suspended.
‘This day, October 1, 1680, in execution of the decree of September 30 of the said year, which condemned Françoise Filastre and Jacques Joseph Cotton to death, they have been put to torture ordinary and extraordinary; but the said Filastre having made, both at and apart from torture, declarations of great importance, and the king having seen the report containing fresh declarations made by her in the chapel of the said château of the Bastille before going to execution, his Majesty, for considerations important to his service, was unwilling that the said matters should be laid in gross before the Chambre, and gave orders to Monsieur Boucherat, President of the said court, to close the sittings.’
From that day there was open conflict between the lieutenant of police on the one hand and the ministers supported by all the ladies and courtiers on the other. ‘The king,’ wrote La Reynie’s secretaries, ‘was strongly urged by the courtiers, and even by persons in high places, to close the Chambre entirely, under various pretexts, the most specious of which was that a longer investigation of the poisoning cases would bring the nation into discredit abroad.’ La Reynie pleaded in answer the respect due to justice, the duty incumbent on the king to have the greatest criminals who had ever appeared in his kingdom brought to trial and punished, and finally, the necessity of purging France of these appalling practices in poison and sacrilege, which had taken in a few years proportions that no one would have conceived possible. He went to Versailles and talked to the king for four days in succession, and for four hours each day. It is a pity that we have no record of the words he addressed to the king and his ministers. Single-handed, he vanquished them all.
‘Monsieur de la Reynie having been heard by the king in his cabinet, in presence of the Chancellor and Monsieur de Colbert and the Marquis de Louvois, on four different days, and for four hours each day, his Majesty at length resolved on the continuation of the Chambre, and ordered Monsieur de la Reynie to continue his ordinary investigations; nevertheless, to take no steps on any of the declarations contained in the reports of the torture and execution of La Filastre, which his Majesty, for considerations relating to his service, does not wish to be divulged.’
The court sitting at the Arsenal resumed its labours on May 19, 1681, but on the condition laid down by the king that nothing further should be done in regard to the declarations in which Madame de Montespan had been involved. On December 17, the facts which he had wished to keep from the knowledge of the judges reappeared with new force at the examination of La Joly. Louvois at once wrote to Bazin de Bezons, the fellow-commissioner of La Reynie, instructing him to be careful to put all these declarations into separate portfolios not to be shown to the judges. La Reynie in fact perceived that the difficulties of the Court, in regard to a regular performance of its duties, were increasing from day to day, and it was not long before he understood, and made his colleagues see also, that the mere fact of the suppression of the report containing the replies of Filastre under torture rendered it impossible to investigate legally the cases of the principal prisoners. This he clearly demonstrated in notes really admirable in their outspokenness and sound judgment. And to measure their dignity and courage, we must remember that his words were addressed directly to Louvois and Louis XIV. But Louis’ character was not great enough to allow him to sacrifice his pride to the public good, to consent to such a humiliation in the eyes of his subjects and of Europe. He adhered to his veto on the communication of the Montespan documents to the Chambre. On his part, La Reynie remained inflexible, refusing to allow a case to be tried in which the whole of the documents were not submitted to the court. Yet something had to be done: a Chamber must be either open or shut.
After having done everything possible to enable justice to follow its course in complete independence, so as to reach the guilty however high-placed they were, La Reynie indicated the only solution which would permit the magistrates—since they were not allowed to fulfil their duty to the full—not to fail in so much of their duty as lay in the limited field still open to them.
There were at that time in France tribunals in which judges sat, and lettres de cachet which operated without legal formalities, at the mere command of the king. Elsewhere we have shown how, almost at the same period, d’Aguesseau, the most illustrious of French judges, asked for lettres de cachet in the course of a case in which he was engaged. Like d’Aguesseau, La Reynie might have said: ‘I am not accused of a fondness for extraordinary ways and a hatred of the forms known to justice, yet I find here many reasons for having recourse to orders from the king’ (lettres de cachet).
‘His Majesty being unwilling to give the Chambre cognisance of certain facts,’ he wrote on April 17, 1681, to Louvois, ‘or that it should try certain prisoners and certain accused parties, reserving them to himself because of their importance, to deal with them through his own justice and the other means he proposes to make use of, it seems to me that we can arrive at the end the king is aiming at by very simple methods, and there can be no objection since the commissioners of the Chambre will have no knowledge of the matters concerning which they are not to be judges.’
What was required, according to La Reynie, was to give up the investigation of the cases of those who had knowledge of facts implicating Madame de Montespan; and since it was impossible to try them according to the rules of justice, to be satisfied with imprisoning them under lettres de cachet in the royal fortresses. In face of the attitude taken up by La Reynie in refusing to proceed to a judgment which would violate the traditional forms and the securities they granted to the accused, the king and his ministers had perforce to yield.
La Reynie enumerates a long list of the criminals charged with monstrous crimes who hoped by this means to escape the rigour of trial, the anguish of torture and death by the stake or the gibbet, and he adds:—
‘There are 147 prisoners at the Bastille and Vincennes; of this number there is not one against whom there are not serious charges of poisoning or dealings in poison, and further charges of sacrilege and impiety. The majority of these criminals are likely to escape punishment.
‘La Trianon, an abominable woman, in regard to the nature of her crimes and her dealings with poison, cannot be tried, and the public, in losing the satisfaction of an example, is no doubt losing also the fruit of some new discovery and the total conviction of her accomplices.
‘Nor can the woman Chappelain be tried, because La Filastre was confronted with her: a woman of large connection, long devoted to the study of poisons, suspected of several poisonings, continually practising impieties, sacrilege, and sorcery; accused by La Filastre of having taught her the practice of her abominations with priests; deeply implicated in the case of Vanens.
‘For the same reasons, Galet cannot be tried; although a peasant, a dangerous man, and dealing openly in poisons.
‘Lepreux, a priest of Notre Dame, engaged in the same practices as La Chappelain, accused of sacrificing the child of La Filastre to the devil.
‘Guibourg—this man, who cannot be compared to any other in regard to the number of his poisonings, his dealings with poison and sorcery, his sacrilege and impiety, knowing and known by every notorious criminal, convicted of a great number of horrible crimes—this man, who has mutilated and sacrificed several children; who, apart from the sacrilege of which he is convicted, confesses to inconceivable abominations; who says he has practised by diabolical means against the life of the king; of whom we hear every day new and execrable things, and who is loaded with accusations of crimes against God and king—he, too, will assure impunity to other criminals.
‘His concubine, the woman Chanfrain, guilty with him of the murder of some of her children, who has shared in some of Guibourg’s sacrifices, and who, according to appearances and the turn the case was taking, was the infamous altar on which he performed his ordinary abominations, will also remain unpunished.
‘There is also a large number of other accused persons who will remain free from punishment for their crimes. The girl Monvoisin cannot be tried, nor Mariette, whatever may come to light about him. Latour, Vautier, and his wife will not only remain unpunished, but, for considerations prompting to the concealment of their secret crimes, their case will not be heard through.’
La Reynie says further, not without a touch of melancholy: ‘In all this there is reason to wonder at the providence of God. If Mariette had been captured before the trial of La Voisin, and they had spoken about the business of Madame de Montespan, this monster (La Voisin) would have escaped justice, and La Filastre also, if she had put forward what she said at her torture.’
It remained to close the Chambre without too great a shock to public opinion, or leading people to believe that after so much noise the whole thing was to be smothered. ‘We must wind up the Chambre,’ writes La Reynie, ‘but we must avoid doing so with an appearance of weariness and disgust combined, so that the large number of persons interested may not find occasion to discredit justice, and so that the wicked people who remain, known or unknown, may not cease to be in terror, or, losing their fear, recommence their ill-deeds with the same freedom as they had before.’
The magistrates who composed the Chambre were themselves keenly desirous that its closing should be announced. Among other reasons, the lieutenant of police gives their reluctance and aversion to condemn, ‘a reluctance which good men cannot help feeling,’ and their sorrow at not being able to try the principal offenders.
It was important, then, not to appear to close the Chambre from any feeling of weariness, and above all not to awake any suspicion of the real causes at work. The public was already murmuring. Compelled as they were, on account of the complicity of Madame de Montespan, to allow all the accused who had had dealings with La Voisin to go scot-free—to wit, the Abbé Guibourg, Lesage, and other guilty persons—the judges took up again the case of Vanens, which had lain dormant. But here again the principal actor, Vanens, escaped the rigour of the law through his connection with the favourite. The commissioners of the Chambre had the good luck to find unexpectedly, in one of the reports, a denunciation against a certain Pinon du Martroy, a councillor to the Parlement, who had been involved in the disgrace of Fouquet. At the time when judgment had been passed on the financiers after the fall of Fouquet, the goods of Pinon had been seized, and Guibourg said that, to wreak vengeance and secure Fouquet’s release from prison, he had performed incantations against the king, as well as practised sorcery. Pinon was dead, but he was said to have had a confidant in Jean Maillard, auditor to the exchequer. This man was secured, and as he occupied a prominent position, his case created a great sensation. He was condemned on February 20, 1682, for having ‘known and not revealed the detestable designs formed against the person of the king.’ The councillor denied everything at his torture, and adhered to his denial till the moment of his death. It is certain that among the various accusations brought before the commissioners of the Chambre Ardente, those directed against Maillard are among those that were least fully proved. The execution took place on February 21, and, contrary to custom, at midday.
It was followed on July 16, 1682, by that of La Chaboissière, Vanens’ valet. This wretch was condemned to be hanged after preliminary torture. He was less guilty than Vanens, of whom he had only been the tool; but his low rank had put him beyond the pale. Then the proceedings were brought to a close in due form, without any appearance of a serious miscarriage of justice in the eyes of the crowd. The Chambre Ardente was finally closed by a lettre de cachet of July 21, 1682.
La Reynie did not consider that his work was yet done. In his correspondence with Louvois, he had constantly harped on the idea that they should profit by the experience gained during the long investigations of the court to avoid the recurrence of such crimes. He was intrusted, along with Colbert, with the drafting of an order. On August 30, 1682, appeared the famous edict against soothsayers and poisoners, which was the joint work of these two great men; magicians and sorceresses were driven from France, the manufacture and sale of poisons necessary in trade and medicine were regulated by ordinances which have triumphed over time and revolutions, and after two centuries are still in force to-day.
The numerous prisoners whose connection, close or remote, with the machinations of Madame de Montespan safe-guarded them from trial, were transferred under lettre de cachet into different fortresses—those which appeared the safest in the kingdom. With excessive precaution, Louvois ordered that each of them should be fastened to his prison by an iron chain, one link of which was to be imbedded in the wall and another fixed to the person of the prisoner.
All these unhappy creatures remained in this condition till their death, some of them for more than forty years. The minister sent the most rigorous instructions to prevent them from holding communication with anybody outside, and to secure that the staff employed in providing for their material and spiritual wants should be reduced to the lowest possible number and composed of persons in whom entire confidence might be placed. And to destroy in advance any effect which the revelations of the prisoners might make on the minds of the governors of citadels and fortresses, Louvois sent these officers word that their new guests were villains who had invented infamous calumnies against Madame de Montespan, the falsity of which had been proved before the Chambre, and that if any of them happened to open his lips on the subject, he was to be answered at once with a sound flogging.
The most important of the prisoners—Guibourg, Lesage, Galet, and Romani—were conveyed to the citadel of Besançon. Guibourg died there three years after his entrance.
Fourteen women were taken to the castle of St. André de Salins. Louvois wrote in regard to them on August 26, 1682, to the lord-lieutenant of Franche-Comté:—
‘The king having thought fit to send to the château of St. André de Salins some of the people who were arrested in virtue of warrants of the court that dealt with the matter of the poisons, his Majesty has commanded me to inform you that his intention is that you prepare two rooms in the said château, so that six of these prisoners may be kept safely in each of them, the which prisoners are to have each a mattress in the place arranged for them, and to be fastened either by a hand or a foot to a chain which shall be fastened to the wall, the said chain however to be long enough not to prevent them from lying down. As these people are criminals who deserve extreme penalties, the intention of the king is that they be thus fastened for fear they should injure the people set to guard them, who will go in and out to bring them food and attend to them generally. His Majesty’s intention is that you prepare two similar rooms in the citadel of Besançon, so that twelve of the prisoners may be kept securely there. You will observe that these rooms are to be so situated that no one can hear what these people say.’
Auzillon, one of the staff of the provost of the Isle de France, escorted the principal sorceresses, Pelletier, Poulain, Delaporte, the girl Monvoisin, and Catherine Leroy, to the citadel of Belle-Isle-en-Mer.
La Chappelain, the companion of La Filastre, was imprisoned in the castle of Villefranche, where she died forty years later, on June 4, 1724. She lived there in company with another sorceress who, like her, had been withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Chambre Ardente, and for the same reasons—namely, La Guesdon.
The governor of Villefranche wrote in August 1717, that ‘of two old prisoners of state for poison, the survivors of four who had been locked up there for thirty-six years, La Guesdon died on the 15th instant, leaving forty-five livres in silver, which she had saved during that time out of her eight sous a day for food: of these she instructed her surviving companion to take what she needed for her personal use, and to use the balance in paying for prayers for her—this is one pensioner the less for the king. The woman was seventy-six years old; the survivor (La Chappelain) is no younger. They were in the same room.’
Finally, a few prisoners at the Bastille and Vincennes, wholly ignorant of the poison affair, and others whose innocence was recognised by the commissioners of the Chambre Ardente, had been shut up, unluckily for themselves, in the same room with prisoners implicated in the crimes of Madame de Montespan. This chance meeting condemned them to perpetual confinement.
‘Manon Bosse,’ writes La Reynie, ‘was sent to the nuns of Baffens, at Besançon, under the name of Mademoiselle Manon Dubosc, where the king pensioned her to the tune of 250 livres; she was never liberated, because she had been locked up with the daughter of La Voisin, who had told her everything.’
La Gaignière, under the same circumstances, was put in the common workhouse. Nanon Aubert also had been placed with La Voisin’s daughter: ‘This was the reason that she was not set at liberty, but in 1683 she was placed with the Ursulines of Besançon, and afterwards with those of Vesoul, with orders to say that she was detained for dealings with a lady of quality accused of poison, and she was made to pass for a young lady of rank. The king payed a pension of 250 livres per annum.’
The most characteristic example is that of Lemaire, brother of the woman Vertemart. His complete innocence was absolutely proved. There was no possible charge against him but his having been shut up with the Abbé Guibourg, who ‘had told him everything.’ On August 4, 1681, Louvois wrote to La Reynie: ‘At present Lemaire is not to be set at liberty. I have written to Desgrez what will enable him, if he shows him my letter, to endure his long detention with less pain.’ Louvois and Louis XIV were struck by the revolting iniquity of this detention. In August 1682, Louvois sent to Lemaire the considerable sum of 150 pistoles, promising to forward an equal sum every year on condition that he took himself out of the kingdom, never set foot in it again all his life, and spoke to nobody in the world of what he had heard while at Vincennes. If he ever broke one of these engagements, the king would have him seized and incarcerated for the rest of his days.
La Reynie died on June 14, 1709, at the age of eighty years. In his will there is a touching clause which depicts this excellent man to the life. He asks that his body may be interred in the parish cemetery, and not in the church, ‘being unwilling that my corpse should be laid in a spot where the faithful assemble, and that the decay of my body should increase the pollution of the air, and thereby endanger the life of ministers and people.’ The lieutenant of police, who had devoted a part of his life to the sanitation and good government of the great city confided to his administration, gave an excellent practical lesson on his death-bed, doubtless to the wounding of his dearest sentiments as a Catholic and a believer.
Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie was in fact a character of rare worth. In our account of him, we have not had to show him as the man of fine culture, the scholar in constant correspondence with Baluze, purchasing and collecting Greek and Latin manuscripts, the skilled patron of the printing-press, the bibliophile to whom we owe the preservation of the original text of Molière. He was a worthy representative of his period, the great epoch in French history. The seventeenth century attained the furthest extremes in good as in evil. It was then that France produced her greatest captains, her greatest statesmen, her most illustrious judges; it was then that the greatest names in literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship dazzled the world; then that the ‘daughters of charity’ displayed their devotion; that Madame de Chantal diffused around her the sweet perfume of her virtues; but it was then, too, that a Marquise de Brinvilliers extended the boundaries of crime, and an Abbé de Guibourg murdered children upon an altar, over the bare body of a Marquise de Montespan.