The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (29 page)

Sometimes a client would admit that she longed for her husband to die and the divineress was invariably sympathetic. A young woman called Mme Vertemart told the notorious divineress Mme Voisin that she wanted to be rid of her husband so that she could spend more time with her lover, and la Voisin assured her that this could be brought about by prayer. When Mme Vertemart said she found it difficult to believe that God would grant such a request, Mme Voisin told her that to achieve this it was ‘necessary to live like her and to have as much experience as she had in this kind of thing’. Mme Vertemart remained sceptical, pointing out that since her lover had a wife, she would not be able to marry him even if she were widowed, but Mme Voisin promised to take care of everything. ‘Don’t pry!’ she chided her client, ‘I don’t like little women who are so penetrating; suffice to say that for me nothing is impossible … I’ve made other women happy; just bring the money.’
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Mme Vertemart accepted these assurances but other women who came to Mme Voisin with similar problems were not content to rely on prayer alone to resolve their difficulties.

Sometimes magic and spells were used to assist clients. Drawing on old superstitions, the divineress might perform a ritual such as ‘burning the faggot’, in which an incantation was chanted over a flaming log. The log was said to represent the body, blood, soul and mind of a named person, who would enjoy no peace till he had accomplished the celebrant’s desires. There were other forms of magic employed to incite love. When that doyenne of divineresses, Mme Voisin, was requested by a M. de Prade to bring about a marriage between him and the wealthy widow, Mme Leféron, la Voisin fashioned a wax figurine of de Prade and buried it in Mme Leféron’s garden. With a woman called Mme Cottard, who wanted her lover Forne to marry her, la Voisin took a different approach. She supplied Mme Cottard with a powder to smear over her hand and said that when she next touched Cottard he would be unable to resist her.
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Marie Bosse believed that burying used bed sheets or samples of menstrual blood was a good way of promoting love, while urine specimens were better suited to harmful spells. Mme Voisin apparently concurred with this: when a woman called Mme Brunet applied to her in hopes that she would rid her of her husband, la Voisin instructed her to supply her with some of his urine, as well as the discarded shells of eggs that he had eaten.
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It was only when spells using these items failed to have any effect that la Voisin adopted more extreme measures.

Pigeons’ or sheep’s hearts could feature in spells and sometimes even parts of the human body were used as adjuncts to sorcery. The magician Lesage admitted employing a dead man’s bone in one ritual, while the formidable la Trianon went further. Not content with having a human skeleton hanging in her consulting room (when questioned about this she would claim it enhanced her piety to have an image of death constantly before her) she asked Mme Voisin to obtain the fingertips of a hanged man from her neighbour, the public executioner. La Voisin declined to carry out the errand, whereupon la Trianon herself allegedly cut the hand from a felon who had been broken on the wheel and whose decomposing corpse had been exhibited on the highway. When her house was inspected following her arrest, its contents included not only poisons such as arsenic and cantharides but also ‘the finger of a dried hand’.
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In theory those who engaged in occult practices were subject to the severest penalties, but the law was seldom enforced. An eminent lawyer noted that ‘in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and other quarters of Paris’ one did not have to look very hard to see people who ‘publicly professed’ that they knew ‘secret ways of attaining success at gambling and good luck in lawsuits and love matters’. He commented that anyone who saw these people about their business would surely conclude that their activities were not ‘worthy of reprehension’, as for a long time now they had operated ‘with impunity … in full sight of the magistrates’.
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It was true that if sacrilege was deemed to have been committed it was regarded as a very serious matter. In August 1677 a priest named Bernard Tournet had been burnt alive after being convicted of ‘sacrileges and profanation of the holy sacrifice of the Mass itself, invocation of the devil and the seduction of several persons whom he abused under false pretexts of making them find treasure by means of evil spirits’.
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However, provided they were not suspected of defiling the holy mysteries, the majority of those in Paris who preyed on the superstitions of others were able to do so without encountering much harassment.

Those who confined themselves to practising astrology could do so without fear of the consequences, for drawing horoscopes had never been outlawed. This was in spite of the fact that in 1586 and again in 1631 Papal bulls had been issued condemning astrologers. Even the most eminent French churchmen had blithely overlooked the bull of 1631, while that of 1586 had been completely misinterpreted. It had been stated there that any attempt to predict the future was the work of the devil, but in 1640 no less an authority than the General of the Paris Oratory produced an officially commissioned study in which he assured his readers that the Pope condoned some forms of astrology. It is true that more recently, churchmen like Bossuet had openly condemned astrologers on the grounds that their work was impious. However, the Church was powerless to enforce sanctions against astrologers, for since 1628 responsibility for policing their activities had been entrusted to the secular authorities.
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The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had had surprisingly little effect on belief in astrology. By the second half of the seventeenth century few men of learning still subscribed to Ptolemy’s theories regarding the disposition of the planets, but the full implications of a heliocentric universe were imperfectly understood. Hardly anyone disputed that the stars had an effect on people’s physical well-being and on the earth’s climate, and in consequence astrology was still taught in faculties of medicine and even Jesuit training colleges.
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It is true that there was some attempt to differentiate between ‘natural’ astrology – which studied the effect of the stars on terrestrial bodies – and ‘judicial’ astrology – which sought to predict the future. Several authorities condemned this as undesirable, but even here astrologers enjoyed some latitude. Provided they maintained that the stars merely influenced men’s behaviour, rather than controlling their destiny (which smacked too much of the Calvinist theory of predestination), objections to their activities were muted.
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The distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘judicial’ astrology was not enshrined in law. Legislation concerning astrology had not been updated since 1628, when predictions relating to states and important people had been outlawed. Since that time only one astrologer had been prosecuted under this law, and this was on purely political grounds, for he had come dangerously close to committing
lèse-majesté
by prophesying the death of the King.
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Since even learned opinion was hesitant to condemn astrology and the law was rarely invoked against it, it is hardly surprising that it still had a huge following. However, while astrologers could try to read the heavens without fear of molestation, divination through the use of magic was plainly condemned as diabolical. There can be no doubt that some of the activities practised by divineresses in Paris could be defined as witchcraft, and in theory this remained a capital offence. Quite apart from the fact that the divineresses carried out their ceremonies in secret, though, the legal position regarding witchcraft was confusing. In Paris, at least, the crime of sorcery was no longer actively persecuted. The last witch to be executed by decree of the Paris
Parlement
had been Catherine Bouillon in 1625. Since that date the
Parlement
had overturned all death sentences imposed on witches by subordinate courts that came within its jurisdiction, though usually the penalty had been commuted to banishment rather than being waived altogether.
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There were other sovereign courts in France such as the
Parlement
of Rouen, which took a less lenient approach to witches. At Rouen death sentences for witchcraft continued to be upheld throughout most of the seventeenth century. However, in 1670 the modernising First President of the Rouen
Parlement
had asked Colbert to intervene after numerous people sentenced to death for witchcraft by lower courts in Normandy had their cases referred to Rouen. He told Colbert that the evidence against them was unsatisfactory and that there was no proof they were guilty of any wrongdoing, and a decree was accordingly sent out altering the sentences from execution to exile. Indignant at this infringement of their prerogatives, the Rouen
Parlement
protested to the King, reminding him that the evil effects of sorcery included deaths and mysterious illnesses. They insisted that there could be no doubt as to the existence of witchcraft, for it was referred to in the Bible, and phenomena such as people flying were attested to by numerous eyewitnesses.
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As late as 1718 the Duchesse d’Orléans reported that in Rouen people still feared witches, though she added that in Paris nobody now believed in them. However, it had taken a long time to reach that point and too much significance should not be attached to the absence of formal legal proceedings against witches. In particular, one must beware of assuming that the reluctance of the Paris
Parlement
to burn witches stemmed from a refusal to accept their existence. In 1643 a member of
Parlement
noted that he disliked convictions for witchcraft because the standard of proof in such cases tended to be unsatisfactory. When it could be demonstrated that witches had done verifiable harm it was better to prosecute them for those crimes, without becoming embroiled in uncertainties. But he added that while he suspected that some of his colleagues ‘believe neither in God nor the devil’, for his part he had no doubt that ‘the Church and holy scripture teaches us … that there are magicians and sorcerers.’
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In the intervening years attitudes had changed further, but a remark of the Comte de Bussy’s at the time of the Affair of the Poisons shows that even then, educated people had an ambivalent attitude to witchcraft. After the Maréchal de Luxembourg was arrested in 1680 on suspicion of having forged pacts with the devil, Bussy reported that Luxembourg’s friends were ridiculing the charges and reminding everyone that the
Parlement
of Paris no longer condemned people to death for the crime of witchcraft. Bussy commented, ‘It’s true; but … Monsieur de Luxembourg
would
be put to death if he has killed anyone through sorcery.’
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The fact that even a cynical sophisticate like Bussy believed that Luxembourg might have been able to harm anyone in this way is indicative of the state of opinion at the time. Although no one tried during the Affair of the Poisons was charged with sorcery, there can be no doubt that a residual fear of witchcraft was partly responsible for the scale of the persecution and the way matters escalated.

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While not extinct, by 1679 belief in witchcraft was on the decline in sophisticated circles, but perceptions of the devil remained extremely vivid. To the preacher Bossuet, for example, the reality of the devil was very evident. In one of his sermons he stated firmly that it was a universally acknowledged truth, upheld by scripture, that there ‘are in the world certain sorts of malicious spirits whom we call demons’. On another occasion he declared that the devil had always had his own ‘altars, temples, mysteries, sacrifices’ where his disciples congregated. Bossuet thundered that the evil one gloried in the ‘impure ceremonies’ that were celebrated by his ministers and which, though based on Christian forms of worship, were really a foul parody of it.
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The devil dominated people’s consciousness in a way that today we can hardly grasp. More than one of Louis XIV’s contemporaries wrote of the way his ‘fear of the devil’ influenced his behaviour
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and the dread inspired by Satan was all-pervasive. The counterpart to living in an age of faith, when religion afforded comfort to so many, was that the devil was not conceived of as some remote entity, but rather as a malign being who could be visualised with horrible clarity.

Therefore, when it emerged that divineresses and other members of the Paris underworld were offering to conjure up evil spirits for clients or to forge pacts with the devil, it did not seem entirely fanciful to accept that communications of this sort might be possible. In 1680, when numerous people were arrested at court because they had consulted divineresses, the Maréchal de Villeroi commented ‘These gentlemen and ladies believe in the devil and do not believe in God.’ Perhaps he was right, but it does not follow that the two were mutually exclusive. Certainly, Louis XIV’s faith in God did not preclude him from being ‘dreadfully afraid of the devil’.
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Even people who were not particularly superstitious, and who would have repudiated the notion that spells and sorcery could yield results, harmful or otherwise, would have been open to the idea that those who dabbled in the occult could represent a menace to society. Through the ages witchcraft and poisoning had been held to be naturally affiliated, with many authorities maintaining that the devil enhanced witches’ power to do harm by supplying them with deadly powders. Mme de Brinvilliers’s confessor had told her that the two activities were so inextricably intertwined that in the Bible the word ‘witch’ was synonymous with ‘poisoner’.
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The Affair of the Poisons would reinforce the perception that a strong connection existed.