The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (31 page)

As Mme de Scudéry commented, the formation of the commission constituted an implicit rebuke to
Parlement
for the way it had handled the cases of Mme de Brinvilliers and Pennautier. The Venetian ambassador heard that the President of the Paris
Parlement
protested to the King that the bypassing of the established legal system represented a slur on the ‘immaculate justice’ always provided by
Parlement.
Despite his pleas that this venerable institution be spared an unmerited affront, he could not prevail on the King to reconsider.
⁶

La Reynie was not yet ready to submit cases for judgement, so the letters patent which brought the commission into being were only signed on 7 April 1679. Countersigned by Colbert, in his capacity as the Minister with responsibility for the
département
of Paris, they stated that the commission should judge crimes of poisoning and other related offences committed in Paris and its environs.
⁷
It was agreed that the commission would hold its sessions at the Arsenal, near the Bastille. For this reason it was often called the
Chambre d’Arsenal,
but it was also referred to as the
Chambre Ardente,
or ‘Burning Chamber’. This was a throwback to the sixteenth century, when a similar special tribunal had been established to judge cases of heresy. It, too, had sat at the Arsenal, in a room hung with black cloth and lit with torches.

*   *   *

In the weeks before the commission assembled, La Reynie doggedly pursued his enquiries. It had not escaped his notice that in her depositions Marie Bosse had frequently mentioned another divineress, Mme Voisin. La Bosse said that she was the person who had first introduced her to Magdelaine de La Grange and that Mme Voisin had also been consulted by Mme Ferry, who was currently under arrest on suspicion of murdering her husband. La Bosse went on to say that Mme Voisin had been intimately acquainted with another imprisoned suspect, Mme Philbert, and when questioned about her own dealings with pregnant women she sought to divert suspicion by declaring that it was Mme Voisin who practised abortion. M. de La Reynie became still more interested when la Bosse stated that an unnamed ‘lady of rank’ had been to see Mme Voisin and that this woman – whose identity Mme Bosse had never discovered – had offered the divineress 6000 livres if she could bring about the death of her husband.
⁸

On 12 March 1679 Catherine Montvoisin, known as ‘la Voisin’, was arrested as she came out of her local parish church where, as was her custom, she had attended mass. Now forty-two years old, she had been honing her skills in astrology, palmistry and physiognomy from the age of nine. Having devoted herself ever since to ‘cultivating the knowledge God had given her’, she had pursued her calling with remarkable dedication and prided herself on providing an excellent service. On one occasion when she was having difficulty concluding a marriage desired by a widowed client, she fretted that this would deal such a blow to her reputation that she would have to leave the country. A colleague of hers had to point out that in view of the huge quantity of work she took on, the occasional setback was inevitable.
⁹

La Voisin appears genuinely to have believed in the power of magic but she combined this with an outward profession of piety. As the circumstances of her arrest suggested, she was a regular churchgoer, and her answers to her interrogators would abound with devout sentiments and respectful invocations of the ‘Good Lord’. When she finally began to make significant revelations she would claim that she was doing so ‘for the glory of God’, who had commanded her to heed His will as she knelt in prayer. Earlier in her career her readiness to imply that she was in tune with the workings of providence had stood her in good stead, for clients were comforted by her apparent belief that her professional activities were compatible with Christianity. It may be that Mme Voisin herself was scarcely aware of any contradiction. Once, having assisted at an abortion, she was said to have wept tears of joy when the midwife in attendance baptised the foetus. Far from being troubled at having terminated the unborn child’s existence, she exulted in having been instrumental in securing its salvation.
¹⁰

La Voisin’s renown as a divineress had made her prosperous. One acquaintance claimed that ‘all the world came’ to see her and Primi Visconti likewise believed that ‘most of the ladies in Paris had visited her’. Marie Bosse suggested that Mme Voisin had earned a total of 100,000 livres ‘from her evil dealings’; another estimate put her income at 10,000 livres a year. While it is impossible to know if these figures are accurate, she certainly lived in some style. Her house in the Rue Beauregard was in a suburb of Paris outside the city walls called the Villeneuve. When her clients came to visit, she saw them in a little pavilion in the garden. According to one account, she was never short of business. After noting that ‘la Voisin had as much money as she wanted’, an envious colleague described how ‘before she got up every morning, there were folk waiting to see her, and throughout the rest of the day she was with more people; after that, she kept open house in the evening, with violins playing, and was always making merry’.
¹¹

During these convivial evenings she developed a pronounced fondness for wine and several witnesses described occasions when she became visibly inebriated. Alcohol was apt to make her garrulous and in company she would sometimes speak more frankly of her activities than was wise. Perhaps because her interrogators hoped to take advantage of this tendency, she was not forced to moderate her intake in prison. In fact, Primi Visconti heard that she was drunk whenever she was interrogated.
¹²

La Voisin’s husband, Antoine Montvoisin, had at different times been a silk merchant and a jeweller, but his businesses had all gone bankrupt. Consequently la Voisin had to support him and all her children, and perhaps it was the pressure of having ‘ten mouths to fill’ that spurred her into crime. When a midwife she employed had expressed qualms about performing another abortion, Mme Voisin had retorted, ‘You’re mad! Times are too hard! How do you expect me to feed my family and children?’
¹³

Her husband showed scant gratitude for the way she kept him, for she complained he became vicious when drunk and treated her badly. La Voisin had never made a secret of the fact that she longed to be rid of him. One of her admirers later recalled that upon encountering la Voisin, the standard form of polite greeting was to enquire whether her husband had yet died.
¹⁴
La Voisin herself would later tell M. de La Reynie that numerous people had urged her to kill Montvoisin, while maintaining that she had rejected their advice. Abundant evidence would eventually suggest that she had, in fact, made several attempts on his life, though none had succeeded. Perhaps she had been constrained by the need for caution, for her husband was on good terms with Samson, the public executioner. He had told Montvoisin that in the event of his dying suddenly he would arrange for an autopsy to be carried out on him.
¹⁵

Mme Voisin’s marriage may have been unhappy, but an active love life afforded some solace. Despite the homely features portrayed in the only known engraving of her, she clearly exerted a powerful sexual allure. Her lovers included magicians and alchemists such as Lesage, Blessis and Latour, as well as the tavern keeper M. Herault, who promised to marry her if her husband died. She even had a brief affair with a member of the aristocracy, the Vicomte de Cousserans, to whom she had given lessons in palmistry.
¹⁶

At one point Mme Voisin had operated in partnership with Marie Bosse and had sent clients to her when she judged it appropriate. However, no trace remained of their former friendship for, years before, they had quarrelled over money. As would ultimately become clear, la Voisin had suspected that Mme Bosse had denied her a full share of the proceeds deriving from the murder of M. Brunet, for which his widow had paid generously. The antagonism between the two women now proved helpful to M. de La Reynie, for each proved anxious to denigrate the other.

*   *   *

Mme Voisin was interrogated for the first time on 17 March.
¹⁷
Her strategy was to deny that she had ever done any harm, while throwing as much suspicion as possible on Marie Bosse. She admitted that several years earlier (the date was probably 1673) the then Mme Brunet had come to her complaining about her husband. Mme Voisin had sent her to see Marie Bosse and (so she claimed) from that time the pair had conducted their business without any reference to her. La Voisin said that, knowing that Mme Brunet had a great aversion for her husband, she had urged la Bosse to do nothing detrimental to ‘the glory of God and their salvation’, but she feared Mme Bosse had not heeded her words. This was because she knew that la Bosse had asked Mme Brunet to supply her with one of her husband’s shirts and she said she was also aware that in the years since Brunet’s death his widow had made regular payments to Mme Bosse.

La Voisin continued that her anxieties had increased when, in 1676, Brunet’s widow – by this time remarried to the flautist M. Philbert – had come to see her. Mme Philbert had confessed that something was preying on her mind and, when la Voisin had read her hand, what she saw had been far from reassuring. La Voisin had told her client that she could tell that many disappointments were in store for her, and had then unsettled her further by remarking that the late M. Brunet’s strange demise had inspired a lot of adverse comment.

When asked about Mme Ferry, la Voisin adopted similar tactics. She said that shortly after the arrest of Mme Bosse, Mme Ferry had paid her a visit. She was wearing mourning for her husband, who had died not long before. The young widow was obviously in a state of great anxiety, prompting la Voisin to ask ‘whether she had done something unfortunate on la Bosse’s advice’. Mme Ferry had denied this, but when her hand was read by la Voisin she kept asking nervously if there was any indication that she would soon be embroiled in legal proceedings.

Mme Voisin had done her best to deflect suspicion on to her rival, but her composure was shaken when she was asked about the lady who had offered her 6000 livres in order to be rid of her husband. It was also put to her that one of her grander female clients had sent her a bouquet of flowers to be treated in some unspecified manner. Plainly disconcerted, la Voisin blustered that she had often received flowers from people of rank.

Worse was to come, for the following day Mme Voisin and Marie Bosse were brought together for a confrontation.
¹⁸
Furious at la Voisin’s attempts to blacken her, Mme Bosse made a series of strident accusations. Refuting Mme Voisin’s claim to have had only minimal dealings with Mme Brunet, la Bosse insisted that la Voisin had met regularly with that lady in Notre-Dame Cathedral. She alleged that la Voisin had once tried to sell Mme Brunet a powder supposedly consisting of finely ground diamonds which, if ingested, would shred the intestines. However, the price had been exorbitant and since Mme Brunet did not believe that the powder was really made of diamonds she had declined the offer. Nevertheless, the pair had continued to meet and Mme Brunet had paid for la Voisin’s services by giving her 400 livres in cash and a diamond cross.

La Bosse repeated her earlier claim that an unidentified lady of rank had offered to pay la Voisin 6000 livres if she killed her husband. It was this same lady who had asked la Voisin to poison a bouquet of flowers. Once the flowers had been treated, they were to be sent to another woman who had made the client jealous. Furthermore, la Voisin had been involved with another well-born lady, whose name la Bosse had never managed to discover, and she too had lost her husband after enlisting the aid of Mme Voisin. As soon as the period of mourning was over the gratified widow had visited la Voisin and given her the black clothes she had been wearing in memory of her husband.

La Bosse continued that Mme Voisin had repeatedly tried to murder her own husband. More than ten years before, she had tried to bewitch him with the aid of the magician Lesage. Lesage, who himself planned to marry la Voisin once her husband was out of the way, had buried a sheep’s heart in la Voisin’s garden. This, he said, would have a fatal effect on Montvoisin, although in the end the intended victim had realised that Lesage and his wife were up to something and had threatened retribution. As a result, Mme Voisin had lost her nerve and had forced Lesage to dig up the heart.

For her next attempt la Voisin had obtained some black grains from a sinister figure called the Chevalier d’Hannyvel. Having steeped them in wine to obtain an infusion, she gave a phial of it to Marie Bosse. She asked la Bosse to pour its contents into her husband’s wine, but in the event la Bosse was overcome by ‘some sort of scruple’ and had only added a few drops. Even so, Montvoisin had fallen sound asleep once he had drunk the doctored wine. Mme Bosse had no doubt that if she had put in the entire phial it would have killed him.

La Bosse concluded her attack by claiming that the remains of countless aborted infants could be found buried in la Voisin’s garden. The terminations had been carried out by a midwife named Mme Lepère, who used a metal tool for the purpose.

Clearly flustered by this comprehensive indictment, Mme Voisin protested that she had never sought to sell ground diamonds to Mme Brunet. She did, however, go some way towards acknowledging the truth of other allegations. She conceded that on more than one occasion she had been given powders by acquaintances who knew how wretched she was with her husband, though she insisted she had always thrown these away. Furthermore, she confirmed la Bosse’s story about Lesage burying the heart in her garden. La Voisin explained that soon after the interment, her husband had been struck down by a stomachache and this had troubled her conscience. Accordingly, she went to church and, having confessed and received absolution, she had instructed Lesage to undo his spell on Montvoisin.