The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (54 page)

La Reynie’s advice was followed. He was authorised to pursue his investigation and in the meantime the
Chambre Ardente
was suspended. This was envisaged as a purely temporary measure, for it was agreed that its sessions would resume as soon as La Reynie had brought some clarity to the situation. However, this proved much harder than anticipated. In the event the commission did not sit again until 11 May 1681, a gap of more than seven months in its proceedings.

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Doggedly La Reynie applied himself to the task that had been set him. On 23 October a confrontation was arranged between Marie Montvoisin and Guibourg.
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Though they differed on some minor details, in essentials their testimony accorded. Both described how a baby had been eviscerated during a black mass at la Voisin’s and Guibourg spoke too of the bizarre proceedings he had undertaken for Mlle des Oeillets. But although their accounts were graphic in their details, they did not provide La Reynie with fresh insights. To achieve a breakthrough, he concluded, it would be necessary to approach the subject from a different angle.

La Reynie believed he could do this by reopening an inquiry that had been closed years before. It will be recalled that in 1668 Lesage and a priest called Mariette had been tried for having committed impieties. At his trial Mariette had named Mme de Montespan as one of their clients and this had been noted in the court record without further comment. Lesage had been sent to the galleys, but Mariette had been treated more leniently. He had merely been sent to Saint-Lazare, a disciplinary establishment for delinquent priests. After a short time he had absconded and, with the aid of la Voisin, had escaped to the provinces. However, following la Voisin’s arrest in 1679, determined efforts had been made to locate him and in February 1680 he had been arrested in Toulouse. La Reynie now determined to find out more about what Mariette and Lesage had done for Mme de Montespan all those years before, hoping this would provide some enlightenment as to whether Athénaïs was capable of the sort of acts described by Marie Montvoisin and Guibourg.

Between 5 and 8 November La Reynie separately questioned Mariette and Lesage.
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It proved a fruitful exercise: Lesage appeared eager to revisit those distant events and Mariette at least partially corroborated his account. Both men agreed that by 1667 Mme de Montespan had become a client of la Voisin’s. At first Mme Voisin had arranged for Mariette to say conjurations for Athénaïs on his own, but then Lesage had been enlisted to act as his assistant. Soon afterwards, the pair had deserted la Voisin to set up business independently, taking with them Mme de Montespan’s custom. In early 1668 they had performed ceremonies for her in the apartment of her sister, Mme de Thianges, at Saint-Germain. These had consisted of Mariette intoning the gospels over her while Lesage burnt incense and Mme de Montespan read out a specially formulated incantation. In this Mme de Montespan had expressed her desire to secure the King’s good graces and Lesage testified that she had also sought the death of Louise de La Vallière. Mariette demurred at this, saying that Mme de Montespan had merely wished her rival to be sent away from court.

The two men concurred that Mme de Montespan had subsequently been present when Mariette had performed a mass on her behalf in a chapel at Saint-Séverin. As instructed, she had previously supplied the priest with two pigeons’ hearts, which he passed under the chalice during the service. Lesage claimed that a consecrated wafer had also featured in the ritual, but Mariette would not admit to having committed this much more serious act of sacrilege. They both agreed that two or three similar ceremonies had later been enacted in the same place. Lesage said that at one of these Mariette had performed a spell using dead men’s bones, the object being to bring about the death of Louise de La Vallière. Mariette denied this, reiterating that Mme de Montespan had never tried to harm Louise.

In La Reynie’s eyes, this constituted a powerful proof against Mme de Montespan. He considered that these latest disclosures tended to validate the other allegations against her which, for the sake of discretion, were now always referred to as ‘the particular facts’. Noting that it seemed extremely likely that Mme de Montespan had had several encounters with Mariette and Lesage, he argued that this in itself could be regarded as ‘one of the strongest conjectures and greatest presumptions of the truth … of the other particular facts’.
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It is reasonable to query this conclusion. For a start, caution is in order as to whether Mariette and Lesage were being truthful. The apparent conformity in their accounts is somewhat deceptive, for Mariette’s statement was far from independent. Instead, he was told what Lesage had said and then, ‘forced to declare it by the thing itself’, he gave his own version.
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On the other hand the fact that he contradicted Lesage on a number of key points does indicate that he was not merely endorsing things he knew to be untrue.

La Reynie considered it significant that Mariette seemed to know a great deal about the steps taken by Mme de Montespan to secure her father the Governorship of Paris. Mariette described how anxious she had become when it appeared that the King was going to award the place to another candidate and her delight when the appointment was finally made. La Reynie noted that she had evidently kept nothing back from Mariette about this, confiding to him all her hopes and fears.
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Yet La Reynie should have spotted that there was something wrong here, for the Duc de Mortemart was not appointed Governor of Paris till January 1669, nine months after Mariette’s arrest. It was therefore impossible for Mariette to have witnessed Athénaïs’s joy at her father’s triumph.

Despite this discrepancy one cannot rule out the possibility that in 1667–8 Mme de Montespan was availing herself of the services offered by la Voisin, Lesage and Mariette. Even if one discounts Lesage’s more serious allegations and instead relies solely on Mariette’s testimony, this would mean that Athénaïs had participated in ceremonies verging on the sacrilegious and which probably contravened the law. Her actions would not have been so very different from those allegedly committed by the Vicomtesse de Polignac, and when those had come to light orders had at once been given for Mme de Polignac’s arrest. Nevertheless, to deduce from this that Athénaïs subsequently progressed to much worse crimes was surely tendentious.

La Reynie seemed to think that, having acquired a taste for dubious practices, Mme de Montespan would not have been able to renounce them, and that once Mariette and Lesage were no longer active in Paris she had reverted to being a client of Guibourg and la Voisin. There was, however, a good reason why this was unlikely. By the summer of 1668 Mme de Montespan’s freedom of movement had become greatly circumscribed, for fears that her husband might abduct her had led the King to provide her with an armed guard who usually accompanied her when she rode in her coach. Although it does seem there were occasions when she travelled more discreetly,
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she was not truly independent during these years. The idea that she could have visited la Voisin regularly without anyone having the least notion of her whereabouts verges on the absurd.

In one respect, at least, the evidence of Mariette and Lesage can be used in defence of Mme de Montespan. They both agreed that in the ceremonies performed in 1668, pigeons’ hearts had figured prominently. Yet Guibourg had testified that prior to this she had participated in black masses where babies had been slaughtered. If she had already offered live human sacrifices to the devil, it would surely have been eccentric of her to think that on subsequent occasions he could be propitiated by an oblation comprised of the vital organs of small birds.

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Having once again secured La Reynie’s attention, Lesage did not confine himself to the subject of Mme de Montespan. He now offered an astonishing explanation as to why la Voisin had believed herself to be on the verge of acquiring 100,000 écus. It turned out, amazingly, that Mlle des Oeillets had promised to pay her this huge sum if la Voisin aided her to kill the King. Initially it had been hoped that this could be effected by magical means and some years before, Lesage had been brought in to perform spells which supposedly would send the King into a fatal decline. However, when this had had no effect, la Voisin had turned to two other male associates, Vautier and Latour, in the belief that they would achieve the desired results. This pair of ruffians had prepared deadly powders, which were handed over to Mlle des Oeillets. She had then devised an ingenious way of administering these to the King without being directly involved. When Mme de Montespan purchased love powders from la Voisin, it was Mlle des Oeillets who usually collected them for her. The next time Mlle des Oeillets was asked to do this, she substituted the aphrodisiacs with poison and gave it to Mme de Montespan. Mlle des Oeillets then waited for Mme de Montespan to give this to the King and thus unintentionally kill him.
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If Lesage could be believed, Mme de Montespan was not herself an assassin, but rather the unwitting dupe of her employee Mlle des Oeillets. To La Reynie this story seemed eminently plausible. He mused that there was at least one historical precedent, for Charles II of Navarre had poisoned his brother-in-law using a similar stratagem.
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It also tallied with the Delphic warnings issued as far back as 1677 by Magdelaine de La Grange, who had intimated that the King was in danger of being poisoned by powders.

La Reynie was sure that the mysterious ‘foreigner mixed up in all this’ with Mlle des Oeillets was the key to the conspiracy,
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for the assumption was that it was he who had provided her with the lavish funding that had enabled her to promise la Voisin such generous payment. It was true that La Reynie had not a clue as to this man’s identity, still less did he have any idea about where his money came from or what his motive was for seeking to murder the King. Nevertheless, La Reynie saw no reason to doubt his existence on that account.

The story about the obscene ceremonies devised by Guibourg using semen and menstrual blood also appeared horribly convincing to La Reynie. He noted that when Guibourg and Marie Montvoisin had described this incident, ‘they accorded with each other on circumstances which were so specific and so horrible that it is difficult to conceive that two people could have imagined and fabricated things so exactly alike without each other knowing’.
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It was obviously essential to find out more about all this and accordingly it was agreed that Louvois should question Mlle des Oeillets. La Reynie cautioned him that this must be done with the utmost sensitivity. He did not consider it imprudent to try to frighten her into volunteering information by hinting that prisoners in Vincennes had incriminated her. Alluding to love powders in the hope that this would evoke an unguarded response was also an acceptable risk. However, La Reynie advised Louvois that it would be dangerous to touch on subjects such as black masses and child sacrifice. Since Mlle des Oeillets remained at liberty, mentioning such things to her would fatally compromise secrecy and might alert others involved in similar activities.
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On 18 November Louvois interviewed Mlle des Oeillets. He was very impressed by the way she conducted herself, for she displayed ‘inconceivable steadfastness’ when questioned. She did not deny all knowledge of la Voisin, but was adamant that she had only ever visited her on a single occasion. That had been more than ten years earlier when she had gone to la Voisin’s house accompanied by several female friends who had thought it would be fun to consult the celebrated fortune-teller. When Louvois informed her that several prisoners in Vincennes knew things to her discredit, she declared robustly that that was quite impossible. She added that, if brought before her, they would not even recognise her.
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Louvois passed all this on to La Reynie, who grudgingly admitted that Mlle des Oeillets’s confident demeanour could be interpreted as ‘a very favourable presumption’ of her innocence. However, he did not fail to add that perhaps she was only calm because, knowing that la Voisin had died without incriminating her, she believed herself untouchable.
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Since Mlle des Oeillets had said she was willing to exhibit herself to the prisoners, she was taken at her word. On 22 November she was taken by Louvois to Vincennes, and there Guibourg, Lesage and Marie Montvoisin were separately led in to see her. Disconcertingly for Mlle des Oeillets, Guibourg and Lesage both identified her correctly. On the other hand Marie Montvoisin, who had said she would recognise Mlle des Oeillets with ease, initially failed to do so. A little later, however, she rectified this, saying she had been well aware who she was and had only pretended not to know her to spare her embarrassment. Since Marie had been under oath when she had initially said that Mlle des Oeillets was unknown to her, this in itself proved her readiness to perjure herself when it suited her.
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There can be no doubt that these three encounters had been a severe setback for Mlle des Oeillets. Nevertheless, the fact that Guibourg and Lesage had named her correctly should not be regarded as conclusive, for the identity parade had not been properly conducted. The way in which she had been shown to the prisoners on her own meant that the procedure was fatally flawed, for it would have been preferable if her accusers had been required to pick her out from among a group of women. As it was, it would not have been difficult for them to guess that this was Mlle des Oeillets who stood before them. All of them had been questioned extensively about her, and Marie Montvoisin had even been asked outright whether she would be able to recognise her.
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