The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (10 page)

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The Brinvilliers murder case had been resolved but it had caused a lingering unease. Poisoning, which had previously been dismissed as the province of foreigners, no longer seemed an impossibly remote threat. Indeed, the danger it posed had penetrated the national consciousness to such an extent that it was close to becoming an obsession with the French. In one of the pamphlets written in his defence Pennautier had recalled how, after the execution of La Chausée, ‘All the public was stirred up; in Paris all the talk was of bizarre deaths that had been witnessed. Everyone … went over the circumstances in their mind, everything dreadful that happened was attributed to poison.’ In her pursuit of Pennautier, Mme de Saint-Laurens had done her best to exploit such fears, for she maintained that poisoners had claimed many victims without the cause of death being recognised. She confidently pronounced, ‘Between 1667 and 1672 poison, disguised under the name of apoplexy, ravaged the whole of France with sudden deaths.’
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It was not just that poisoning was now supposed to be more commonplace than previously imagined. Mme de Brinvilliers’s involvement meant that henceforth no one could be above suspicion, for her social position and female sex had not precluded her from committing the most iniquitous acts. While Mme de Brinvilliers was awaiting trial a lawyer named Maître Nivelle had written a pamphlet seeking to defend her; he had begun by urging that she must be innocent because her ‘advantages of birth, rank and fortune’ rendered it unthinkable that she could be ‘capable of the horrible and cowardly crimes of which she is accused’.
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The outcome of the trial, and Mme de Brinvilliers’s subsequent confession, meant that such comforting assumptions could no longer be sustained.

This gave rise to the nagging fear that other outwardly respectable persons were engaged in equally despicable deeds. Some years later Louis XIV’s Chief of Police in Paris, M. de La Reynie, would even claim that Mme de Brinvilliers had herself acknowledged this. He alleged that ‘she was the first to say … during the confrontations with witnesses and at other times, that there were many people engaged in this wretched trade of poison, including persons of high station’. La Reynie’s statements about the Brinvilliers case are not always reliable, but there were other reports of her making similar comments. It was rumoured, for example, that when she realised, just before her execution, that she would not be reprieved, she had exclaimed, ‘Out of so many guilty people must I be the only one to be put to death?’ Her confessor Pirot insisted there was no truth in the story but it continued to be widely believed. The gaoler who had tricked Mme de Brinvilliers into writing to Pennautier added his contribution: he said she had boasted that if she chose, she could ‘ruin half the people in town’, but that she was ‘too generous’ to betray them.
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If it was true that such wicked people were still at large, not even the King could regard himself as invulnerable to their machinations. The Brinvilliers case itself had raised concerns about his safety. Christophe Glaser had, of course, been the royal apothecary and it was undeniably frightening that a man alleged to have supplied Sainte-Croix with poisons should have been responsible for preparing drugs for the King. Furthermore, it had been reported that towards the end of his life Sainte-Croix had boasted that he had plans to become one of the King’s cabinet secretaries or, still more alarmingly, a royal cupbearer, serving the King drinks at meals. In her petition to the King Mme de Saint-Laurens implored him to consider the dangers he would have faced if such a sensitive position had been entrusted to a criminal of his calibre.
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To obtain one of these posts Sainte-Croix would have needed the support of an influential person at court and, predictably, Mme de Saint-Laurens was sure this had been Pennautier. Once Pennautier had been acquitted this theory no longer seemed tenable, but there was still a possibility that Sainte-Croix had had other powerful protectors within the court. If so, the King might even now be nurturing monsters who were plotting to destroy him. All this gave rise to fear and suspicion, and ensured that the satisfactory resolution of the Brinvilliers case was not looked on as a cause for congratulation. Instead, it created the perception that French society was menaced by hidden dangers, all the more perilous for being unfathomable.

TWO

LOUIS XIV AND HIS COURT

In July 1676, a week after she had seen the Marquise de Brinvilliers go to her execution (or rather, after waiting for hours on the Pont Notre-Dame in order to glimpse the tip of the condemned woman’s hood) Mme de Sévigné paid a visit to Versailles. Despite the fact that France was at war, she found the court immersed in pleasure. Although his armies remained in the field against the Dutch and their allies, at the beginning of July King Louis XIV had taken a break from campaigning in order to enjoy a summer holiday at his favourite residence, Versailles. To mark his return, a succession of entertainments were devised, in which his courtiers enthusiastically participated. Every evening there were plays, concerts or carriage rides or, alternatively, a nocturnal gondola trip on the newly enlarged canal to the palace’s western side might be followed by a torchlight picnic supper. In the afternoons the courtiers were kept amused by gambling sessions in the King’s upper apartment, an imposing suite of rooms, which had only recently been completed. In these ornate surroundings they hazarded their luck at the newly fashionable game of
reversis
and, since the minimum stake was 500 louis, huge sums were won and lost.

Prominent at the gaming tables was the Marquise de Montespan, who had been the King’s mistress for the past nine years and had already borne Louis five children. She was universally agreed to be a great beauty, but Mme de Sévigné noted that she had never seen her look better. She had recently lost weight after a visit to the spa town of Bourbon and was dressed in the height of fashion, wearing a gown lavishly adorned with exquisite lace. Her blond hair was arranged in a mass of curls, becomingly topped by black ribbons, and at her throat she wore jewels that might have been borrowed from the Maréchale de l’Hôpital, but which were finer than any the Queen possessed. ‘In a word, a triumphant beauty’ was Mme de Sévigné’s admiring verdict. Concluding her description of her visit Mme de Sévigné reported, ‘The court has never been so agreeable and everyone very much wants this to continue.’
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Seemingly, at least, the scene could not have been further removed from the grisly events enacted a few days earlier in the Place de Grève. Mme de Sévigné certainly had no inkling that within four years a significant number of the elegant and well-connected figures who graced the afternoon reception would face disgrace and ruin following allegations of poisoning. Still less did she imagine that the radiant and resplendent Mme de Montespan would herself be touched by the same scandal after she too was accused not just of poisoning but also of sacrilege, Satanism and infanticide.

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In some ways the France of Louis XIV was an unlikely setting for the events that form the subject of this book. At the time, France was an assertive, self-confident nation, proud of its status as a great power and convinced of its superiority to its neighbours. The Affair of the Poisons challenged these assumptions and proved a humbling experience for a country accustomed to being the focus of envy and admiration.

It would also undermine the prestige of the court, which hitherto had been famed for its splendour and sophistication. The shocking and distasteful revelations that were a feature of the affair stripped the court of some of its lustre and made it seem decadent and tawdry. Members of the French aristocracy, proverbially arrogant and assured, were accused of terrible crimes and depicted as twisted and perverted. Even when it was impossible to prove that these people were truly wicked, the affair exposed them as being superstitious, backward and deluded. The story of the Affair of the Poisons is strange by any standard, but it becomes still more bizarre when placed in context.

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In August 1678 the war with Holland, which had lasted six years, was ended by the signing of the Treaty of Nymwegen. With hindsight people saw this as the apogee of Louis XIV’s reign. Abbé Choisy declared in his memoirs, ‘In making the Peace of Nymwegen King Louis the Great had attained the summit of human glory.’ Another courtier described Louis as ‘master in Europe … the arbiter of all in this part of our hemisphere’. After Louis’s death Voltaire would echo this assessment, identifying this as the moment when ‘the king was … at the height of his grandeur’ and noting that having been ‘the terror of Europe for six years running’, Louis had now established himself as the most commanding figure on the continent.
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The King could justly pride himself on having transformed France in less than twenty years, for it was only in 1661, following the death of Cardinal Mazarin, that he had assumed personal direction of his affairs. Since that time he had been aided in his task by a group of powerful and capable ministers, but though much responsibility was delegated to these individuals, final decisions rested with the King. By the end of the Dutch War, France possessed the most powerful army to have been seen in Europe since Roman times, numbering 200,000 men even in peacetime. The navy, which had been negligible in 1661, had been fashioned into a formidable fighting force. Between 1661–72 the King’s net revenues had more than doubled, thanks largely to the efforts of his Controller-General of Finance, Colbert, although not even the crippling taxation imposed on France’s peasant population had been able to prevent debts accumulating during the Dutch War. Colbert had also worked tirelessly to improve communications within France, to promote foreign trade and encourage manufacturing. Particular importance had been attached to the production of luxury goods for the court, partly because Colbert wanted to reduce imports but also because he believed that in themselves these high-quality goods promoted the ‘grandeur and magnificence’ of France.

The arts, too, were cultivated assiduously. The written word flourished to such a degree that Voltaire could declare of the period, ‘In eloquence [and] in … literature … the French were the legislators of Europe.’ As well as being a generous patron to artists and composers within France, the King signalled his devotion to the arts by conferring pensions on distinguished writers throughout Europe, establishing himself as the Maecenas of his age. However, art was not merely valued for its own sake, for it was expected to serve the purposes of the state by reminding observers of the King’s power and prestige. When the King set up a school in Paris to provide instruction in painting and sculpture he did so not merely because he held both disciplines in ‘singular esteem’ but also because he believed that these were ‘two arts which should pre-eminently contribute to the establishment of his fame and the transmission of his name to posterity’. Those who received royal patronage were mindful of their obligations. In 1677, when touring the workshops set up for the manufacture of Gobelins tapestries, John Locke was impressed by the ‘very rich and good figures’ in the designs, but he noted ‘in every piece Louis
le grand
was the hero, and [in] the rest the marks of some conquest etc.’.
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As befitted a monarch who prided himself on ruling a modern and progressive state, the King took an interest in promoting science. At a time when the mysteries of the universe were being shown to operate in conformity with the laws of geometry and mathematics, it was feasible to assume that a similar logic and consistency underlay much of human existence. The results that could be attained through observation and experimentation were incalculable, and the King was determined that France would be well placed both to take advantage of recent scientific advances and to make new discoveries. In 1666 the Royal Academy of Sciences was founded in Paris with the aid of generous financial support from the Crown. The previous year the world’s first scientific journal, the
Journal des Savants,
had appeared, enhancing the claim of Paris to be regarded as the scientific capital of the world. In 1667 work was started on a magnificent observatory, equipped at royal expense with a superlative telescope and other intruments designed to facilitate the study of astronomy and cartography. The King’s personal enthusiasm for scientific enquiry was demonstrated in 1681 when the elephant in the menagerie at Versailles died and Louis was present when its vast corpse was dissected by the Academy of Sciences.
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According to Voltaire it was under Louis XIV that ‘human reason in general was perfected’, and the King himself was sure that his conduct as a ruler was consistently shaped by rational thought. He told his son that in discharging his responsibilities ‘I … governed myself in accordance with reason’, ‘using good sense’ to resolve problems.
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The Affair of the Poisons would nevertheless demonstrate that despite Louis’s enthusiasm for technological progress and his avowed espousal of modernity, Reason was not so firmly in the ascendant in seventeenth-century France as its King liked to think.

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The King believed that the enhancement of his
‘gloire’
– a potent word which encompassed ‘reputation’ as well as its literal translation of ‘glory’ – was his overriding priority. He told his son that all else must be subordinated to this, for the acquisition of
gloire
was rightfully ‘the governing and dominant passion’ of all princes. In his eyes it was not enough merely to maintain France’s position in the world; instead, it was incumbent on him to take every opportunity to increase his kingdom’s power and prestige. As he explained, ‘A reputation cannot be preserved without adding to it every day. Glory, finally, is not a mistress who can be neglected, nor is one ever worthy of her first favours if he is not always wishing for new ones.’ This conviction had grave implications for the stability of Europe, for Louis was clear that ‘war is undoubtedly the most brilliant way to acquire glory’. Because of Louis’s ‘thirst for
gloire
’, France enjoyed only fleeting interludes of peace between 1661 and the King’s death in 1715. A German diplomat would indeed claim that it was this ‘boundless and inordinate passion for glory … which dominates and possesses him even to excess’ that lay at the root of ‘the fatal events of our times’.
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