The Sun King

  To begin with, Athénaïs took the whole thing rather well; such a stupid little girl could never be a serious rival; she helped her to dress up for parties; and she was loving Mme de Maintenon’s disgust at this new infatuation. She wrote to Maréchal de Noaïlles, asking for some green velvet to line her coach and saying, casually, that the King was only visiting her twice a day but that it was better to see him less often in a friendly manner than all the time with quarrels. When Fontanges became a duchess, however, the rage of Athénaïs knew no bounds. She herself had never been able to receive that particular perquisite of the royal mistress because her husband, in order to tease her, had firmly refused to be made a duke. To keep her in a good temper, the King appointed her Intendant of the Queen’s Household, the most important Court job there was for a woman.

  On 13 March 1679, Mme Voisin was arrested in Paris as she came out of church. Athénaïs de Montespan precipitately left the Court.

  She was only away for a day or two and seems to have gone in order to see Mme Filastre, a particularly horrible witch who, having dedicated her own child to the Devil, murdered it herself. Filastre procured some more of Galet’s powders for Athénaïs who presumably wanted to lay in a store of them before the supply was cut off forever.

  6. POISON

  Le voilà donc connu, ce secret plein d’horreur.

  VOLTAIRE

  The years which immediately preceded the King’s official announcement, in 1682, that Versailles was henceforth to be the seat of government, were laden with events which were to influence his reign. Although he was having a last fling, Mme de Maintenon was slowly strengthening her hold on him. He was beginning to ‘convert’, in other words persecute, the French Protestants. A sinister connection between the lowest and the highest in the land was being brought to light.

  Poison was in the air. When the first Madame, Henrietta, had died in terrible pain, many people, rightly or wrongly, thought she had been poisoned. Then Daubray, chief of the Paris police, was poisoned by his wife; soon after that another policeman of high rank died mysteriously. In those days it was difficult to be certain that poison had been administered since there was no means of analysing it. A powder or liquid produced as evidence would be given to a dog and pronounced to be poisonous or not according to whether the dog died or lived. Doctors were always trying to invent reliable antidotes. These were sometimes tried out on prisoners under the death sentence; the experiment was only made with their consent and they were offered their freedom if they survived. They generally died in such appalling agony that even the doctors were sorry for them. In spite of the proved inefficiency of counter-poison everybody believed in it firmly and quite often it seemed to work — probably because the patient had not really been poisoned at all. The fashionable poisons were arsenic and antimony; they were often administered in enemas, a form of hygiene in general use to counteract gargantuan meals. Discontented wives were fond of impregnating their husbands’ clothes with arsenic, to produce the same symptoms as those of syphilis, sometimes, but not always, fatal. The man was then discredited whether he died or not. An object treated with arsenic could kill but only if the victim put his fingers in his mouth after touching it.

  In 1676 the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a gentle, mousey little person much given to good works, was brought to justice. As everybody in society knew her, the affair received enormous publicity. She had poisoned and killed her father over a period of eight agonizing months during which she nursed him devotedly; then she had done the same for her two brothers and had tried to polish off her husband. Luckily for him, her lover and accomplice had no wish to marry somebody as evil as he was himself, so every time the Marquis was given a dose by his wife the lover gave him an antidote; the result was that he survived, with a greatly impaired digestion. Mme de Brinvilliers had also killed people in hospitals, whom she used sweetly to visit and on whom she tried out various poisons. She confessed everything, repented and made a good end after suffering appalling tortures — probably no worse, however, than those she had inflicted. The whole of high society attended her trial and the execution; she was beheaded and then burnt, ‘so that’, said Mme de Sévigné, ‘we are all breathing her now’. Almost her last words were to say that it seemed rather unfair that she should be the only one to suffer considering that most people of quality did as she had done, when it suited them.

  Daubray was succeeded as chief of police by La Reynie, the right person in the right place, one of those men, brilliant, rich, urbane, who were a feature of Louis XIV’s administration. Such was the total confidence placed in him by the King that he turned the Lieutenancy of the Police into a sort of extra ministry; he was in a position to do an infinite amount of good or evil to the highest in the land, while humble folk were in his power. He did as little harm as possible to anybody and instead of being loathed, as policemen generally are, he was universally esteemed. During the thirty years of his office he wrought miracles in Paris, cleaning it physically and morally; he found a filthy medieval town, a cesspool of vice and left the best administered city in the world. He took the part of sad people such as beggars and vagabonds and did what he could to help them; he made arrangements for the numerous foundlings who were dumped in churches, or in open spaces, and had often hitherto been left to die of exposure. Before the Revocation, he protected Protestants and their churches against the persecution of their Catholic neighbours; even after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he went as far as he dared to save them from the worst. He was a bibliophile, he collected and collated Greek and Latin manuscripts.

  Before the Brinvilliers case, La Reynie had been warned by a priest at Notre Dame that people were confessing, in greater and greater numbers, to murder by poison. The priest had hesitated before disclosing secrets of the confessional, even though he named nobody; but he was worried by this state of affairs — it preyed on his mind. La Reynie tried in vain to find out more; the last words of Mme de Brinvilliers seemed to confirm what the priest had told him and he was beginning to suspect that a lot of sinister things were going on. He arrested one or two suspicious sort of people but made no headway until a young lawyer, by chance, went to dinner with a certain Mme Vigoureux. It has never been explained why a presumably respectable man was keeping such company — it must have been pretty obvious, even on the slightest acquaintanceship, that Mme Vigoureux was the scum of the earth. One of the party, Mme Bosse, got drunk during the evening and in her cups she suddenly declared: ‘What a lovely trade! What customers! Duchesses and princes! Only three more poisonings and my fortune will be made — I shall be able to retire.’ The lawyer might have thought she was joking had he not observed an expression of alarm on the face of his hostess. He went to La Reynie with the interesting story; a stool pigeon, sent to Mme Bosse, easily obtained a bottle of poison with which to despatch a cruel husband. Mme Bosse, Mme Vigoureux, the latter’s son and two daughters were arrested as they slept, all in the same bed, and sent to the prison of Vincennes.

  Pandora’s box was opened. Vigoureux and Bosse were most loquacious, anxious to help the police in any way they could. They said they were fortune-tellers and that there were at least four hundred members of this profession in Paris, or lurking in the shadow of the Court — lodging with people such as game-keepers and washer-women, of easy access to the King’s various residences. When asked for names they made no difficulties and among many others they mentioned Mme Voisin. They said she had joined them in experimenting with chemicals. A client of theirs, whose fortune they had often told, was Mme de Poulaillon. These two names sufficed to warn La Reynie that he was now on the track of a complicated and sinister business which might have embarrassing ramifications. Everybody knew about Mme Voisin and her circle of highly placed clients; pretty Mme de Poulaillon was of a noble Bordelais family; she had been shut up in a convent by a rich old husband who suspected her of trying to murder him in several different ways.

  La Reynie told Louvois where he had got to in his investigations a
nd Louvois went to the King. The three of them held a consultation. They decided that it would be better not to have this affair dealt with by Parlement (the supreme judicial assembly), for two reasons. One, from every point of view the less publicity there was the better. Two, Parlement, while ready to pursue humble citizens with the utmost rigour, had recently shown itself loth to punish people, especially women of quality. If the practice of poisoning was really as widespread in Paris high society as La Reynie was beginning to think, it must be wiped out at whatever cost to the nobility, not only that of the sword (the ancient landed families) but that of the robe, or magistrature, to which the Parliamentarians themselves belonged. The two classes had become so much intermarried since — as old and disapproving people often remarked — the French had stopped putting birth before money, that they were beginning to be inextricably mixed up. Society was small and there were few people belonging to it who were not connected in some way with the Parlement. So a special tribunal, called the Chambre Ardente, was set up under the presidence of the respected M. de Boucherat, a future Chancellor. He chose the magistrates who were to help him; they included such well-known names as Breteuil and d’Ormesson.

  The Chambre Ardente assembled on 10 April 1679 and decided to sit in secret so that the details of devilish practices and the composition of poisons should not be publicised. The procedure was that those whom La Reynie thought suspect should be arrested and their interrogation submitted to the procurer general. He would decide if they were to be confronted with other accused — if so, a detailed report of the confrontation would be sent to the judges of the tribunal who would then decree either the liberation of the suspects or their continued questioning. If the latter, the interrogation, carried to its conclusion, would go once more to the judges who would decide either to acquit or to continue the examination. Those not acquitted were to be heard again, under torture, and on the result of that hearing the judges would judge and pass a sentence which would be final, with no possibility of appeal. It may be imagined that Parlement was displeased by this arrangement; the King, however, disregarded the complaints of its President. He was probably right. That very few criminals were in fact brought to judgment was not the fault of the Chambre, as we shall see.

  The Chambre Ardente went to work without delay. Bosse’s house was searched and quantities of arsenic, cantharides, nail cuttings, crayfish powder and other things too filthy to mention (supposed to be aphrodisiacs) were found there. Mme Voisin was arrested and her interrogation began. She said she was a harmless fortune-teller which she had been since the age of nine when she realized that she had second sight. She advised the police to concentrate on real criminals like Bosse. When the two women were confronted with each other Bosse declared that Voisin had poisoned her own husband as well as those of Mesdames Dreux and Leféron. Sensation! Mme Dreux was a cousin of M. d’Ormesson, one of the judges, while Mme Leféron was the widow of a President of the Parlement and was now married to the man who had been her lover. Mme Dreux, according to Bosse, was crazily in love with the Marquis de Richelieu and had not only tried to poison Dreux but also Richelieu’s wife and all his many mistresses. She, Mme de Poulaillon and Mme Leféron were arrested, to the horror of the Paris bourgeoisie, and sent to join the other prisoners at Vincennes.

  More and more interesting names were coming out every day at the interrogations: Comtesse du Roure, Vicomtesse de Polignac, Duchesse d’Angoulême, Duchesse de Vitry, Princesse de Tingry, Comtesse de Gramont, Comte de Cessac, Comte de Clermont. Most horrifying of all, the witches spoke of Mme de Montespan’s own maid Mlle des Oeillets who was known to have a child by the King, the Duchesse de Vivonne, Athénaïs’ sister-in-law, and two members of the King’s intimate circle, nieces of Mazarin, Marie-Anne, Duchesse de Bouillon and Olympe, Comtesse de Soissons. The Soissons were members of the French (Bourbon-Condé) and the Savoy royal families — the only surviving Comte de Soissons having been killed in action, his sister was allowed to take the title; she married a cadet of Savoy and their son married Olympe Mancini. The head of this family was known at Court as M. le Comte. The present Mme la Comtesse was an old love of the King’s; she was an intellectual, had a salon, and had done much in his youth to civilize him, encourage his taste for works of art and teach him manners. They had remained on the sort of terms, an amorous intimacy, which led people to suppose that the affair had never quite come to an end. The Comtesse de Soissons had a young son, Prince Eugène, who was supposed to be a very bad hat indeed; he never came to Court but lived with a gang of other young reprobates who spent half their time dressed as women.

  In spite of the fact that all the members of the nobility who were mentioned by the prisoners at Vincennes were his friends, the King firmly told the tribunal to proceed with its enquiries. Poisoning, he said, must be stopped. When Voisin’s interrogation was complete, La Reynie, horrified, said he had lost all faith in human nature. ‘Men’s lives are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is the only remedy when a family is in difficulties. Abominations are being practised everywhere — in Paris, in the suburbs and in the provinces.’ All those who knew, by the rumours flying round Paris or through acquaintances on the tribunal, what had been going on, were appalled. A friend of Bussy-Rabutin’s wrote to him: ‘In spite of the worldly life I have led I can’t get over the horror of what you tell me.’

  Among her other crimes Voisin seemed to have performed at least two thousand abortions and to have done away with many unwanted babies. Live babies had been sacrificed to the Devil, having been kidnapped from poor districts (indeed disappearances of small children had often, of late, been registered by the police). Voisin’s daughter had kept her baby hidden away for fear of what might happen to it. Voisin mentioned many names, but never, even under torture, that of Mme de Montespan. This omission has been explained in two ways. Either Mme de Montespan was involved in nothing worse than a few harmless spells or Mme Voisin, terrified of the appalling death reserved for whoever even made an attempt on the King’s life, did not want to seem to have been involved with anybody so close to him.

  The three witches, Voisin, Bosse and Vigoureux, were condemned to death. Vigoureux died under torture; the other two survived it and were burnt alive. Mesdames de Poulaillon, Dreux and Leféron got off, but not scot free; these pretty ladies were sent to end their days repenting in convents in the Low Countries. The tribunal of the Chambre Ardente had proved to be quite as weak-minded, when it came to its own kith and kin, as Parlement would have been.

  La Reynie’s enquiries had been proceeding for about a year when (1680) the real bombshell burst in Court circles and the unbelievable news went round that there was a warrant out for the arrest of the Comtesse de Soissons for the murder of her husband; the Duchesse de Bouillon for poisoning a valet who knew about her loves and for trying to poison her husband; the Marquise d’Alluye for poisoning her father-in-law; the Princesse de Tingry (one of the Queen’s ladies), said to have murdered her own baby; the powerful and popular Maréchal de Luxembourg and several others of the same sort. When the police came for the Comtesse de Soissons, she was nowhere to be found. The King, against his own better judgment, had sent her a message. He told her that she could choose between going to the Bastille and standing her trial, or permanent exile from France. She did not hesitate, she fled to Brussels, taking with her Mme d’Alluye. Safely on foreign soil, she began to bargain. She said she would come back, if she need not await her trial in prison and if it could take place at once. The King replied that she would have to go to prison like everybody else and he could not guarantee speed. She was never seen in France again and there is little doubt that she was guilty. The King told her mother-in-law that, for allowing her to escape from justice, he would have to account to God and to his people. Two more of those on La Reynie’s list, M. de Cessac and Mme de Polignac, also managed to fly, the others were duly arrested.

  The trials were dramatic. The Duchesse de Bouillon arrived at the court room, lovely, ros
y, smiling, surrounded by adoring relations, hand in hand with her husband and the lover, the Duc de Vendôme (a cousin of the King’s) for whose sake it was alleged that she had tried to murder him. The Duc de Bouillon worshipped his wife. His brothers were always urging him to shut her up because of the scandal she made with all her love affairs — he said that he didn’t mind in the least so long as he had his share. She freely admitted that she and Vendôme had often been to Mme Voisin’s together ‘to see the Sibyls’. When the judge suggested that she had tried to murder Bouillon she laughed and said ‘Ask him!’ Boucherat enquired whether she had seen the Devil and if so what was he like? She replied: ‘Small, dark and ugly, just like you.’ There was no proof against her and she was acquitted. She then sat down to invent many other witticisms, with which she was supposed to have floored the judges, and had them privately printed for her friends. The King had no intention of putting up with that sort of nonsense — he banished her for contempt of court and her esprit de l’escalier cost her several weary years in the provinces.

  Maréchal de Luxembourg’s trial lasted fourteen months. He was accused, not of poisoning, but of using spells in order to get rid of the guardian of a widow whom he wanted to marry; to cause the death of his own wife; to make his sister-in-law, the Princesse de Tingry, fall in love with him and to give him victories in the field. He was not a clever witness and talked too much, but was finally exonerated on every count, though his secretary was sent to the galleys. Luxembourg then retired to the country for a week. When he came back to Court, the King never mentioned the trial; he gave him great commands with which he won great victories for France.