The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (39 page)

On 16 June la Voisin had mentioned that she had introduced Lesage to her husband’s confessor, Gilles Davot, who was a priest at her local church. Lesage had asked him to bless the hazel wands he used when performing spells and also to supply him with wax from candles burnt on the altar while mass was celebrated. Davot had complied, saying he saw no harm in this, but his readiness to help Lesage had led to his arrest on 12 July.
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On 28 November Lesage made a statement indicating that Davot had done much more for him than had earlier been alleged.

Lesage admitted he had suborned Davot to say masses for clients of his, some of whom wanted to conclude advantageous marriages, whereas others were hoping for the death of a designated person. To bring this about Davot would pass a note under the chalice as it was elevated during the consecration of the sacraments. Lesage did his best to underplay the significance of this. He stressed that doing such things had been ‘in no way his idea’ but were rather ‘in the old style of la Voisin’ who, together with Mariette, had first conceived of this procedure.

To try to distract attention from the services that Davot had rendered him, Lesage now alleged that the priest had engaged in far worse acts in conjunction with la Voisin. He said he had it on their authority that la Voisin had frequently prevailed on Davot to say mass in her lodgings ‘for various affairs’. On one such occasion the ceremony had been performed in la Voisin’s house ‘on the stomach of a girl … and Davot also said that he had had carnal knowledge of her and that, while saying mass, he kissed her private parts’. Lesage said he believed there were witnesses to this incident (though for the time being he could not think of their names) and that Davot was not the only priest who had committed such outrages. In particular, he believed a priest named Gerard had done similar things.
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As Lesage had calculated, these new allegations propelled the inquiry into a fresh dimension of horror.

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At his own request the King had been kept fully informed of the progress of the inquiry. His initial shock on learning of the allegations against Luxembourg and Feuquières had only been compounded when he had been informed that several ladies with whom he was well acquainted had subsequently been implicated in the investigation. On 16 October, after Lesage had made his attack on the Duchesse de Vivonne, Louvois noted that the King had ‘listened … with horror’ when the latest reports sent by La Reynie had been read to him. Nevertheless, far from concluding that it would be best to draw a veil over such matters, the King had instructed that the inquiry must be pursued with the utmost vigour in order to obtain ‘all possible proofs against those named’ by Lesage and la Voisin.
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Nothing he had learned in the intervening weeks had shaken his resolve. Instead, each successive revelation had merely convinced him that the depths of iniquity had not yet been plumbed and that with further probing more evidence would emerge that people at his court had been involved in acts that were truly shameful. By 3 December some of the commissioners of the
Chambre Ardente
were anxious to proceed with la Voisin’s trial on the assumption that she had now told them everything of importance and was therefore expendable. The King, however, still considered this premature. He denied permission for the trial to start, evidently believing that la Voisin would yet prove a valuable source of information.
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For the remainder of the month the King pondered what action to take against those high-ranking persons who had been implicated, and after Christmas he reached his decision. On 27 December he summoned La Reynie, Bezons and MM. Boucherat and Robert, who were respectively the President and Attorney-General of the Chamber, to an audience at Saint-Germain. La Reynie later recorded that at this meeting the King urged them ‘in extremely strong and precise terms’ to uphold the law and do their duty, for it was essential that they ‘penetrate as far as possible into the wretched traffic of poison in order to cut it off at the root’. He assured them that nobody, no matter how grand, would be immune from prosecution, declaring solemnly that in the coming weeks he required them to exercise ‘an exact justice, without any distinction of rank, sex or person’.
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SEVEN

A COURT IN CHAOS

There were many people who believed that in 1670 the King’s English sister-in-law, Henriette-Anne, Duchesse d’Orléans, had been killed by poison. Her death had been officially ascribed to natural causes, but the distressing nature of her final hours, during which she herself declared she had been poisoned, ensured that this verdict had been received with widespread scepticism. It is impossible to know the King’s views on the matter. He certainly professed to accept the doctors’ findings but he may still have experienced occasional nagging doubts that poison had been involved. However much he tried to dismiss such fears, it would be understandable if the incident had made him more receptive to the idea that poison plots could pose a risk even to members of the royal family.

Henriette-Anne was aged only twenty-six at the time of her death. Married in 1661 to the King’s younger brother ‘Monsieur’, she was on very bad terms with her homosexual husband, who blamed her for the banishment of his favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, and was jealous of the fact that the King was using her as an intermediary to forge closer links with England. She had been in ill health for some time (the Duchesse de Montpensier said that in the weeks before her death she looked like a corpse with rouged cheeks) but even so, the suddenness and speed of the attack which carried her off meant that her demise came as a terrible shock to the court.

Shortly after drinking a cup of chicory water on the evening of 29 June 1670 Henriette-Anne had suddenly clutched at her side and collapsed in agony.
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Having been helped to her bed she lay there in terrible pain, repeatedly insisting that she had been poisoned. The devoted lady-in-waiting who had prepared the chicory water protested that she had drunk some herself without ill effect while Monsieur (who appeared as alarmed as everyone else and who betrayed no signs of guilt) demanded that some of the liquid should be tested on a dog to see if it was harmful. The physicians summoned to treat Madame stubbornly maintained that she was merely suffering from colic and gave her purgatives and emetics. They also administered oil to settle her stomach and various other dubious remedies such as powder of vipers. Despite their efforts Madame’s pains did not lessen and as she grew steadily weaker it became apparent that she would not survive the night. Towards midnight the King had an emotional last meeting with her, bidding her farewell with tears in his eyes. Subsequently the English ambassador came to her bedside and asked her directly if she still thought she had been poisoned. At this the confessor who was in attendance sharply intervened, urging, ‘Madame, accuse no person but make your death an offering of sacrifice to God.’ Dutifully Madame ‘made no other answer than by shrugging up her shoulders’, but this hardly allayed the ambassador’s suspicions.
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Only with her death in the early hours of the morning of 30 June did Madame’s torment finally cease.

The Savoyard ambassador, the Marquis de Saint-Maurice, claimed that after seeing Madame on her deathbed the King swore that, should it emerge that she was a victim of foul play, the crime would not go unpunished. ‘He said out loud that if this princess was poisoned … all those who could have had any part in it would be put to death with the harshest tortures. It is even said that he mentioned the Chevalier de Lorraine and protested that if he had been involved in this death through poison he would perish and his family would feel the effects of it.’
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However, no one else mentions such an outburst on the King’s part and it would certainly have been out of character for him to utter something so inflammatory at this sensitive juncture.

Because of the suspicious nature of her death an autopsy was performed on Madame, attended by doctors nominated by the English ambassador. When the first cut was made such an ‘insupportable smell’ emanated from the body that for a time it was impossible to proceed, but on resuming their task the doctors found that Madame’s liver and intestines were badly decayed, and that her lower belly, duodenum and gall bladder contained a great quantity of ‘extremely offensive’ bile. They found no evidence of poison: the King’s physician Vallot observed that if Madame had been poisoned the lining of her stomach would have been livid, but this was not the case. Instead, the doctors pronounced that ‘it was very boiling bile, very corrupt and malign and very impetuous which caused all the disorders in the aforesaid parts and gangrened them’.
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The English in theory accepted these findings but their ambassador still had reservations. He was not alone in this, for he noted that it was generally accepted at court that Madame had been poisoned and that the populace was also ‘riveted in this opinion’. According to the Marquis de Saint-Maurice, Queen Marie-Thérèse was among those who remained convinced that poison was responsible. Monsieur’s second wife, the German princess Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, would also subscribe to this view. She later alleged that her husband’s equerry, the Marquis d’Effiat, had poisoned the cup containing chicory water, though she believed he had done this without Monsieur’s knowledge.
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Less than two years after Madame’s death the King agreed that the Chevalier de Lorraine could come back to court. The English ambassador was furious, observing in a despatch, ‘If Madame was poisoned, as is believed by most, all France look upon him as the person who did it.’ However, the fact that the King permitted Lorraine’s return indicates that he was satisfied the Chevalier had played no part in Madame’s death. One can dismiss Saint-Simon’s absurd claim that a senior member of the late Duchesse d’Orléans’s household had already told the King that Lorraine had sent poison to France from his exile in Rome. Without consulting Monsieur, the Marquis d’Effiat had then enabled the Comte de Beuvron, Captain of Monsieur’s guards, to poison the jug of chicory water. According to Saint-Simon the King was so relieved to learn that his brother had been ignorant of the plot against his wife that he decided to take no action against the culprits,
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but it is surely beyond belief that this could be so.

Though many people at the time could not accept that Madame had died from natural causes it is no longer feasible to entertain doubts on the matter. While the exact cause of death cannot be established definitively, there is no shortage of explanations for her symptoms, but no evidence has ever emerged to support the idea that she was poisoned. It has been plausibly argued that she died of peritonitis caused either by a ruptured appendix or a burst stomach or duodenal ulcer. Peritonitis could equally have resulted from bile causing minute perforations in the pancreas and seeping through it; if so, the doctors who at the time attributed her death to excess bile were, in essence, correct. Alternatively, an ectopic pregnancy or intestinal blockage could have killed her. It has also been suggested that through her great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, Madame had inherited porphyria, a genetic disease which often proves fatal when it manifests itself for the first time.
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The controversy surrounding Madame’s death demonstrated the readiness of people at court to suspect poisoning even if firm proof was lacking. Hugues de Lionne, the King’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs who died in 1671, was also thought by some people to have been a victim of poisoning, though it would seem that the belief only became current ten years after his death. At the time his demise was variously attributed to a poor diet, the ill effects of a fistula, or to his doctors prescribing him emetic wine, ‘the passport of those who long to pass to the next world’.
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In 1678 the mysterious death of the Princesse de Monaco, who was believed to have had an affair with the King, prompted fresh rumours. She had been assailed by an undiagnosed disease, which left her formerly beautiful features blackened and shrivelled, and it was assumed she had been poisoned. Her husband was the obvious culprit but Mme de Scudéry reported that, despite the fact that he was Italian, he was not thought to be responsible as he had treated his wife with great kindness during her final illness. The Comte de Bussy, however, did not accept this reasoning, for in his view the husband’s nationality settled the matter. He declared he had no doubt that Mme de Monaco had been poisoned simply because ‘she deserved to be, and her husband is Italian’. He added that the Prince de Monaco’s considerate behaviour towards the dying woman merely confirmed his suspicions, and had been nothing other than a deliberate ploy to conceal his crime.
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Despite the widespread belief that there had been instances of poisoning at court, at the beginning of 1680 people there were blissfully unaware that several of their number had been linked with the prisoners currently being held at Vincennes. The agitation caused by the arrest of Mmes de Dreux and Leféron (who were both still awaiting trial) had long since subsided and the courtiers were preoccupied by other matters. Interest centred on the King’s infatuation with Mlle de Fontanges, which was currently at its height. In mid-January it became known that she had suffered a miscarriage but this was not deemed especially significant, for no one foresaw that it would irretrievably damage her health.

There was also great excitement about the marriage of the King’s illegitimate daughter by Louise de La Vallière with the Prince de Conti. The wedding, which took place on 16 January, was a very splendid affair. The bride wore a white dress sprinkled with diamonds and pearls while the groom was dressed in straw-coloured satin, embroidered in black and enriched with jewels. After the ceremony in the chapel at Saint-Germain there was a ball at the palace, where four temporary staircases had been erected outside first-floor windows to ensure that the 600 guests could gain easy access to the festivities. A table fifty-four feet long had been set up in the gallery, supporting nineteen silver and gold baskets filled with anemones, hyacinths, jasmine and tulips. Such a profusion of out-of-season blooms – which some of the guests at first assumed were artificial – made it ‘difficult to remember that it was the sixteenth of January’. After the dancing, a ‘superb repast’ of many dishes was served, including 16,000 livres’ worth of ortolans, small birds regarded as an exquisite delicacy.
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