The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (27 page)

Then, at the beginning of October, an anonymous letter was found in a Paris church, which seemed to confirm that the King or the Dauphin was in danger. It was apparently written by a widow to an admirer who had told her of his intention to place a ‘white powder’ on the napkin of an important person. The writer feared this would be the undoing of them both, for she could not believe that such a deed would escape detection. She lamented that her own downfall would come about simply because she had been aware of her admirer’s plans, for while with all other crimes one had to be an accomplice before one could be punished, with ‘this one’, mere knowledge was sufficient to secure a conviction.
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Since this only applied in cases of treason, the implications were alarming.

Although there was obviously a possibility that the letter had been deliberately planted in order to ensure that Mme de La Grange’s warnings were taken seriously, dismissing it as a hoax might have fearful consequences. Accordingly, de La Grange and her clerical associate Nail were repeatedly questioned about the letter but they both insisted they knew nothing about it. Their denials made it pointless to delay their trial any further and later that autumn their case came before the Châtelet. Having been found guilty on all charges, Mme de La Grange and Nail were sentenced to torture and execution. However, as was normal in such cases, both defendants lodged appeals. While they were waiting for their case to be heard by a higher court, fresh developments occurred, which seemingly underlined that powerful figures were vulnerable to poisoning. Because it was arguably imprudent to execute two people who might hold the key to the mystery, de La Grange’s and Nail’s appeals were delayed.

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Matters had taken a new direction with the arrest of Louis Vanens, one of the most intriguing and enigmatic figures to feature in this affair. A thirty-year-old who originated from Arles, Vanens was of sufficiently high social status to be officially classified a ‘gentleman’, although he preferred to style himself the Chevalier de Vanens. He was not initially suspected of involvement with poison and even today it remains impossible to determine whether he was a killer or merely an accomplished conman.

On 5 December 1677 Vanens was seized in an early-morning raid. Louvois had ordered his arrest after receiving intelligence that after boasting he knew how to formulate gold, Vanens had been seen in possession of a bill of exchange worth the enormous sum of 200,000 livres. Various associates of Vanens were also taken into custody, including his manservant, Jean Barthominat (known as La Chaboissière) and a forty-year-old banker named Pierre Cadelan, in whose name the bill of exchange had reportedly been drawn.

When questioned about his dealings with Vanens, Cadelan explained that Vanens had come into his life by selling him some home-made medical remedies. Once they were acquainted, Vanens had persuaded him that he had a secret method of making gold. The manufacturing process involved the distillation of herbs on a massive scale, and Cadelan had assisted Vanens to obtain equipment for this and to set up furnaces. Cadelan denied that he had furnished Vanens with more than everyday expenses but he agreed that he had made arrangements whereby a large sum could be deposited in a bank account set up in his name at Venice. He said he had done this because Vanens had told him that another friend who knew how to make gold needed to transfer funds to Italy but, in fact, the money had never materialised. However, Cadelan’s interrogators were sceptical that ‘an intelligent man of business’ would have invested so much effort in so fanciful a scheme and were sure that ‘some other matter’ must be at the root of it.
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Cadelan’s story was undermined by the fact that Vanens was meanwhile maintaining that large sums had indeed been deposited in Venice and had then been withdrawn on Cadelan’s instructions. This seems unlikely to have been true: Louvois ordered the French ambassador in Venice to look into the matter and he could find no record of these transactions. Vanens also claimed that at the time of his arrest he had been carrying a bill of exchange for 20,000 livres from Cadelan, which he had destroyed in panic. While this was a much lesser sum than the 200,000 livres originally mentioned, it was still a significant amount. If Cadelan had been prepared to part with it, it was undeniably mysterious.

Meanwhile Vanens’s servant La Chaboissière was making alarming statements. On 13 April 1678 he told his interrogators that, provided he was offered a pardon, he had ‘important things to say which concerned the King’ and which might ‘save the life of fifty people a year’.
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It was an echo of the sort of thing that Magdelaine de La Grange had been saying and which had been considered so ominous.

More members of Vanens’s circle were now taken into custody. These included a thirty-five-year-old blind man named Dalmas, who had reportedly lost his eyesight conducting alchemical experiments, and his mistress, Louise Dusoulcye. La Chaboissière’s girlfriend Catherine Leroy was also arrested and, under questioning, these two women became extremely voluble. Catherine Leroy said she had seen La Chaboissière boiling up herbs in a great cauldron to which he had added mysterious powders. This had produced a solution which had been bottled in phials and sent abroad. La Chaboissière had later told Catherine that Cadelan had been well paid for this.

Still more worryingly, La Chaboissière had said that as a result of their activities ‘a big cheese’ from abroad ‘had gone to carry letters to the late King’.
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M. de La Reynie (who was co-ordinating the inquiry) deduced from this that Vanens and La Chaboissière had been commissioned to manufacture poison for Cadelan, who then sold it to foreigners so they could assassinate major political figures.

Further testimony suggested that, not content with being at the centre of an international poisoning network, Vanens had been in the habit of eliminating people who were unwise enough to cross him in daily life. A former employee of Vanens, Petit Jean, and another acquaintance named the Abbé Chapelle, had both died unexpectedly; in 1676 a former landlady of Vanens who had been indiscreet about his activities had perished, along with five members of her household, in an unexplained tragedy. When questioned about this Vanens protested that Petit Jean had died of the pox, while his landlady had poisoned herself by unwisely adding a secret solution to sour wine in the hope of making it drinkable. This failed to allay the suspicions against him.

According to Catherine Leroy, practically everyone who associated with Vanens had an equally cavalier attitude to the sanctity of human life. She claimed that La Chaboissière had been so fearful that she would betray his secrets that he had once tried to poison her by tricking her into taking some greyish and black grains, which had made her very ill. Despite that, she had not only continued to live with him but had herself murdered two women on his orders. The first was a seller of eau-de-vie named la Regnault whose dish of skate and eggs had been poisoned by Catherine Leroy when they dined together; the other was a Mme Carré, who died four days after Catherine had fed her poisoned wine and poisoned jam. Furthermore, at the behest of Dalmas, Louise Dusoulcye had killed a woman called la Levasseur by giving her plums dipped in poison.

It is certainly odd if Catherine Leroy was making all this up but on the other hand her testimony cannot be accepted uncritically. La Regnault had died three or four months after their dinner together, so it is by no means clear that poison was responsible. As for Mme Carré, she was a frail woman of eighty whose death was so clearly imminent that it was surely unnecessary to hasten it by poisoning. Yet to M. de La Reynie this did not seem significant. Instead, he was appalled by the glimpses he had gained of a world where poison formed part of the culture and where murder was routinely perpetuated without fear of retribution.

Catherine Leroy gave additional tantalising hints that in between doing away with these lowly individuals Vanens and La Chaboissière had targeted more eminent victims. She reported that after the death of Chancellor d’Aligre in October 1677 an unidentified relation of the Chancellor had paid La Chaboissière 300 livres. Could this have been a reward for hastening d’Aligre’s end? At the time d’Aligre’s death had been attributed to apoplexy and had not been considered suspicious – which was scarcely surprising as he had been aged eighty-five – but this new information aroused belated misgivings. Catherine Leroy also said that La Chaboissière had had meetings with the Comte de Saint-Maurice who in 1675 had been sent to France on a special embassy to announce the death of the Duke of Savoy. This strengthened the perception that Vanens and his band were engaged in commerce with important foreign clients.

To compound the unease, Catherine Leroy repeated several disquieting statements uttered by La Chaboissière. He had often declared that ‘la Brinvilliers was not dead … She had left behind heirs.’ He had also boasted that Vanens had the ability to kill people in a week, a fortnight or whatever period he chose. If time was at a premium, he could murder them very speedily with a bouquet of poisoned flowers.
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As concern mounted over Vanens’s activities, everyone known to have consorted with him came under scrutiny. Some years before, Vanens had spent a great deal of time with Robert, Seigneur de Bachimont, and his wife, Marie. On learning that this couple were now living at Ainyé Abbey, near Lyon, Louvois ordered their arrest. He believed there was ample reason to investigate them: not only had Mme de Bachimont’s first husband died in mysterious circumstances, but his mother and sister had followed him to the grave in quick succession. Besides this, Mme de Bachimont had been suspected (though never convicted) of coining false money.
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By 17 May Bachimont and his wife had been put in prison in Lyon, and there they were questioned intensively. Bachimont explained that he had befriended Vanens in 1674, drawn together by a mutual interest in alchemy. For years Bachimont (who then lived in Paris) had dreamt of attaining the Philosopher’s Stone, so he had been intrigued when Vanens had told him he had a secret formula to transmute copper into gold. Vanens had promised that if they worked together they would make 3 million livres and Bachimont had become convinced of this after he and his wife had been privileged to witness Vanens converting base metal into gold.

Mme de Bachimont gave a detailed description of the way in which Vanens had performed this miracle. First he had boiled together bunches of vermicular, groundsel and broom and then, having sprinkled in a mysterious red powder, he evaporated the liquid, leaving behind a residue of white sulphate. Next he blended copper with arsenic and saltpetre, put this into a goatskin, and added the white sulphate and some mercury to the mixture. Then he filled a cauldron with vinegar, a little nitric acid and a secret ingredient which he called ‘oil of petroleum’. When this brew was boiling, he immersed the knotted goatskin in it. Once its contents had been thoroughly heated, Vanens removed the goatskin and allowed it to cool. When it was untied, it was found to contain grey powder. Having combined this with molten silver, Vanens fashioned an ingot. Bachimont took this to the mint in Paris, where the officials pronounced it to be pure gold and exchanged it for cash on that basis.
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Following this impressive demonstration, Bachimont had set about assembling the ingredients that Vanens said he needed to repeat the process. A man had been sent to Provence to find the bulbs called onions of Scylla, which Vanens listed among his requirements. However, it proved difficult to acquire one important item, for Vanens explained that the formula for the oil of petroleum was in the hands of a mysterious figure whom he referred to as ‘the author’.

Vanens told the Bachimonts that the author (whose real name was François Galaup de Chasteuil) owed him an immense debt of gratitude. According to Vanens, after leading a series of picaresque adventures Chasteuil had, some years earlier, become prior of a Carmelite monastery in Marseille. When the young girl he had kept as his mistress had become pregnant, Chasteuil had strangled her, but after being caught trying to bury the body in the abbey’s crypt he had been sentenced to death. Vanens, who was serving at the time on a galley in the Mediterranean, had been prevailed upon to rescue Chasteuil from the scaffold and smuggle him to safety. In return Chasteuil had taught Vanens how to make gold but, though he had given him a small quantity of oil of petroleum, he had never imparted the formula for it. Since Chasteuil was now living in Turin, where he served as a major in the White Cross Regiment,
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Vanens suggested that they should all go there to see if Chasteuil would give them a fresh supply of this vital substance.

Vanens and the Bachimonts had travelled to Turin in the spring of 1675 and they stayed there nearly four months. Vanens declined to introduce the Bachimonts to Chasteuil, saying it was best if he had sole contact with him, but their patience was rewarded when Vanens told them that Chasteuil had handed over sufficient quantities of his precious elixir to enable them to return to France and resume gold production. While they were finalising their travel arrangements, the Duke of Savoy had fallen ill, but they had seen no reason to delay their departure on that account. On 10 June 1675 they had left Turin; two days later, the Duke of Savoy had died, aged only forty.

The Bachimonts only went as far as Lyon but Vanens journeyed on to Paris, promising to rejoin them shortly. In fact, he spent three months at their Paris house running up enormous bills, and then disappeared. Distraught, the Bachimonts contacted Chasteuil in Turin and were horrified when he told them that he knew nothing about the miraculous oil of which Vanens had spoken. He had, however, offered to help the Bachimonts, so in the autumn they had gone back to Turin in the hope of producing gold with Chasteuil’s aid. After all their experiments failed the Bachimonts had forlornly returned to Lyon. After a time they were driven by debt to leave the hotel where they had rented lodgings and to take up residence in Ainyé Abbey. There Bachimont had set up the furnaces and stills required for alchemical procedures and, ‘hoping to arrive at the secret through his own industry’, had continued his obsessive quest to make gold.
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