The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (34 page)

She then provided a much more detailed account of her dealings with Mme Leféron. She described how Mme Leféron had come to her to have her palm read and had almost at once wanted to know if there was any likelihood that she would soon become a widow. Once ‘accustomed to talking on this subject, little by little’ Mme Leféron had progressed to asking whether it might be possible to poison her husband. She and la Voisin had then discussed the feasibility of sending someone to Italy to obtain powdered diamonds, or a perfume with a deadly fragrance, but ultimately these options were dismissed as impractical. Instead, la Voisin had obtained from Magdelaine de La Grange a phial of arsenic and distilled sublimate, which was delivered by a third party, a woman called la Leroux. When the phial was given to Mme Leféron she protested that it would be difficult for her to put it in her husband’s broth as his servant was suspicious of her and watched her closely. However, it seems that an opportunity had presented itself for, three weeks later, M. Leféron had died. Subsequently the joyous Mme Leféron had paid a visit to la Voisin, saying that it was a relief to see someone with whom it was unnecessary to feign grief at her bereavement. Initially she had maintained that she had not given the liquid to her husband but she had soon dropped this pretence. When la Voisin had asked if she believed it was the effect of the poison that had killed him, Mme Leféron had cheerfully replied, ‘Effect or no … she was rid of him thank God!’

Having unburdened herself about Mme Leféron, la Voisin next turned her attention to Mme de Dreux. She confirmed that Mme de Dreux had given her a diamond ring as a down payment for poisoning a bouquet of flowers. These were to be sent to a woman who had made Mme de Dreux jealous, though la Voisin insisted she had not carried out the commission. Mme de Dreux had also discussed procuring the death of her husband and had indicated that she would pay la Voisin 2000 écus on completion of the task. However, though she was impatient to be rid of him, she was fearful of being prosecuted for murder. She therefore hoped that his death might be effected by occult means rather than poison. She had suggested that la Voisin should arrange for a Novena to be said, praying for the death of M. de Dreux, but she had made difficulties when la Voisin said that for that she would need one of M. de Dreux’s shirts, which his wife said would be hard for her to obtain.

Mme Voisin declared that she herself had never actually supplied Mme de Dreux with poison. However, she did not fail to point out that Mme de Dreux had had separate dealings with Marie Bosse and she made it clear that she could not answer for what had been agreed between them. Furthermore, la Voisin alleged that Mme de Dreux had told her she had already poisoned two men whom she had once loved but had grown to hate, although she was vague about the identity of the two victims.

As a result of these revelations a confrontation was arranged between la Voisin and Mmes de Dreux and Leféron.
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In the face of their indignant denials, la Voisin repeated all she had earlier said, refusing to withdraw any of her accusations. Mme Leféron insisted that she had been slandered, recalling that when la Voisin had first told her she saw death marked in her hand, she had assumed it was her own demise that was imminent rather than her husband’s. She raged that now la Voisin was taking advantage of her misfortune to insult her and was not at all mollified when la Voisin began weeping. Furiously Mme Leféron sneered that la Voisin was only crying in the hope of investing her claims with a spurious credibility. With dignity la Voisin answered that she had been moved to tears because God had excited in her an awareness of her faults.

La Voisin had declared that it pained her to betray her clients in this way, but her revelations did not end here. On 16 September 1679 Louvois excitedly informed the King, ‘La Voisin’s really beginning to talk.’
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The statements she had made the day before precipitated the inquiry into a new phase as, for the first time, she had mentioned the name of the Duchesse de Vivonne, sister-in-law of Mme de Montespan. The precise allegations la Voisin made against her are unclear, as the record of that interrogation is missing. However, from Louvois’s account it would seem la Voisin stated that Mme de Vivonne had wanted to kill her husband and that she had applied to the magician Lesage for help with this matter.

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La Voisin’s allegations ensured that attention focused more closely on Lesage who had been arrested on 17 March after Marie Bosse had described him as a dangerous man who put ‘wholly pernicious’ ideas in women’s minds.
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Initially he had been regarded as a figure of secondary importance but now this extraordinary individual assumed a much more prominent role in the inquiry. At times, indeed, he came close to dominating it.

The real name of the self-styled Lesage (‘the wise one’) was Adam du Coeuret and he came from Normandy. Now aged nearly fifty, he was physically a far from imposing figure. He habitually wore grey, with a reddish wig providing the only touch of colour,
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but his drab appearance did not detract from his charisma. He described himself as a wool merchant, but though he had occasionally invested money in speculative ventures in the cloth trade, his primary means of making a living had never been commerce.

Lesage had already had an eventful career. He had first come to Paris in the late 1660s, though at that time he called himself Dubuisson. Before long he had met up with la Voisin and become her lover, forming such a close attachment to her that he had even attempted to send her husband into a fatal decline by burying a sheep’s heart in her garden. In 1667 la Voisin had introduced him to François Mariette, a twenty-seven-year-old priest who proved a willing collaborator. For a time the trio had worked in partnership, with la Voisin providing the two men with a steady flow of customers. After a bit, however, Mariette and Lesage had decided they could make more money by operating independently. To la Voisin’s chagrin, her business began to suffer as they enticed clients away from her. Furious at this betrayal, la Voisin engaged in angry recriminations, but this merely attracted unwelcome attention to the activities of Mariette and Lesage, and in March 1668 the pair were arrested.

That June they were tried at the Châtelet and the following September their appeals were heard by
Parlement.
They were charged with the serious offence of committing impieties but unfortunately the records of their trial are not very informative about the evidence gathered against them. Lesage was asked whether he had said prayers over the corpses of flayed frogs, but he denied this, saying he had only ever used frogs to create an oil to whiten the complexion. Mariette admitted that clients had visited him in his lodgings and that he had recited extracts from the gospels over their heads as they knelt before him. While this sounded innocuous, the suspicion may have been that he was quoting scripture backwards, an inversion of holy writ that was thought to be pleasing to the devil. He confessed, too, that he had conferred benedictions on certain books and perhaps this included a volume of incantations called the
Enchiridon,
which featured as an exhibit at Lesage’s trial. Mariette was also asked whether he had passed notes under a chalice, another way in which orthodox Christian ritual could be adapted for illegitimate purposes.
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At the time he said he had not but years later, when these events came under fresh scrutiny, he agreed that he had performed that and other deviant practices. With hindsight, however, the most striking thing to emerge from the hearings was that Mariette told the court at the Châtelet that the Marquise de Montespan (who had either just embarked on her affair with Louis XIV, or was on the verge of becoming his mistress) was a client of his.

At the time it is true that no one seems to have shown any interest in this statement, for no steps were taken against those named as customers by Mariette and Lesage. The two men were both found guilty, but there was a wide disparity in their punishments. Mariette was a cousin of the magistrate who had first investigated the case
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and this family connection ensured that when sentence was passed he was condemned only to nine years’ banishment. Even this was not properly enforced, for after a short spell in a corrective institute for wayward priests he left without permission and then withdrew to the country. Lesage fared much worse. Lacking Mariette’s influence with the judges, he was sentenced to the galleys in perpetuity.

Serving in the galleys was a dreadful fate imposed on many convicts at a time when the expansion of the navy and the demands of war had created an insatiable demand for slaves to man the Mediterranean fleet. Because of the high mortality rate caused by harsh conditions and overwork, vacancies had constantly to be replenished and orders had been sent out that perpetrators of offences such as bigamy, which previously had incurred a mandatory death sentence, should instead be punished by being forced to man the galleys. Life in the galleys was deemed such an appalling prospect that some prisoners preferred to incapacitate themselves by mutilating limbs. In a bid to stamp out this vexatious practice a royal decree was issued in 1677 declaring that in future anyone who adopted this ‘easy method’ of evading service would be put to death.
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Even when offenders were sentenced to a fixed term in the galleys, it was common practice not to free them at the end of their time and they usually remained chained to their oar until death released them from enslavement. Most untypically, however, Lesage was freed after serving only a few years in the Mediterranean. This caused great puzzlement when he again came to the notice of the authorities. It was conjectured that an influential client of his must have interceded on his behalf, securing his early release. In 1679 Mme Leféron was asked if it had been she who had performed this feat, but she denied this, and other enquiries by Louvois failed to reveal who was responsible. There has been speculation that, in fact, it was Mme de Montespan who exerted herself to free Lesage, so that she could resume her consultations with him, but this now seems unlikely. Research by Jean-Christian Petitfils has shown that in June 1673 the Minister for the Marine sent instructions to the
Intendant
of the galleys to free fifteen French galley slaves who had distinguished themselves in an action against the Genoese. Lesage was probably among this contingent.
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Lesage (as he now called himself) promptly returned to Paris and, apparently undeterred by the frightful punishment he had received, resumed his former line of business. He soon re-established himself as ‘a very great magician’ who was held in the highest repute by others who practised his trade. Despite their earlier disagreement, Mme Voisin had missed him during his absence and had regretfully told one client that it was unfortunate he was not on hand to aid her.
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Upon his return she settled her differences with him and was soon offering him fresh employment.

Lesage was nothing if not versatile. He dabbled in alchemy, hinting that he knew how to convert silver into gold and that he had found a way of solidifying mercury. He also sold skin preparations and beauty aids, making lotions to his own recipe. As he modestly put it, he also ‘knew something about the stars’ and drew up a chart for one client trying to select an auspicious day on which to undertake an important enterprise.
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These, however, were the sort of skills which numerous other members of the Paris underworld were ready to offer their clients, whereas Lesage had additional talents that made him unique.

Lesage set out to convince his clients that he could communicate with the spirit world and could mediate on their behalf with its inhabitants. In order to promote this illusion he had perfected a conjuring trick of his own invention, which he performed – as he himself proudly noted – with incomparable ‘subtlety and skill’. No one else in Paris knew how he did this and Lesage jealously guarded the secret, being careful to leave no clues that might reveal his technique. When clients came to him he would ask them to set down their desires in writing, then to fold and seal the list without showing it to him. Having embedded the paper in a wax ball, Lesage would cast this into the fire. As soon as it touched the flames the ball would explode with a resounding noise, disintegrating so completely that not even tiny fragments could be retrieved. In fact, however, Lesage had cleverly substituted the original ball with another, filled beforehand with saltpetre so that it would detonate on contact with fire. He then took the first ball away so he could extract the paper and, having read what his clients had written, he decided how to proceed. Sometimes he returned the paper to the clients, who were invariably amazed that a document they had seen destroyed before their very eyes should be restored intact and undamaged. Lesage would then tell them that their wishes had been made known to the spirits and that, if he was suitably rewarded, there was a good chance their desires would be granted. Alternatively, if Lesage saw that the client had written something compromising, he would indicate that he now had the paper in his possession and that they must pay him generously if they did not want its contents revealed.
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Lesage was considered to be unrivalled when it came to concluding marriages. He claimed he could invoke supernatural forces to bring about events he desired and if la Voisin had a case that was proving particularly intractable she was apt to enlist his aid. For instance, when a well-to-do widow named Mme Desmaretz came to la Voisin in a panic after being impregnated by her lover, M. Gontier, la Voisin assured her that Lesage would have no difficulty ensuring that Gontier honoured his earlier promise of marriage. Sure enough, Lesage’s intervention proved decisive. He began by pronouncing orisons in Mme Desmaretz’s bedchamber and followed this up with a variety of unconventional procedures. Chanting
‘Per Deum Vivum, Per Deum Verum, Per Deum Sanctum’,
Lesage repeatedly tapped a hazel wand on the bed the couple had shared, assuring Mme Desmaretz that this would have the effect of unleashing Gontier’s love for her. On another occasion when la Voisin was present Lesage enacted a more sinister ritual with overtones of Satanism. He had instructed Mme Desmaretz to provide him with a pot of Gontier’s urine and to this he added pigeon’s blood and the heart of a sheep. Then, as Mme Desmaretz knelt before him, he again flourished his wand and called on Lucifer, Beelzebub and Astaroth to help her. Having done this he assured Mme Desmaretz that if she deposited the pot with its stinking contents in her cellar, Gontier would not enjoy a moment’s repose until he had pledged himself to her’.
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