The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (55 page)

Understandably, however, Mlle des Oeillets was extremely shaken by what had happened. She told Louvois in desperation that she must have been mistaken for one of her relations, for she knew that a cousin of hers regularly frequented fortune-tellers. Louvois received these protestations coldly. Having lost all faith in her, he told La Reynie that no reliance could be placed on her assurances.
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As La Reynie tried to sift dispassionately through the evidence, he found himself plunged into ‘a strange agitation’. He noted plaintively, ‘I have done what I could to assure myself and to remain convinced that these facts are true and I have not been able to achieve this. Conversely I have looked for anything which could persuade me that they were false, and that has been equally impossible.’
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La Reynie admitted that his zeal to protect the King may at times have clouded his judgement. Perhaps, too, he had been prejudiced by cases such as that of Mme de Brinvilliers, for being exposed to such evil may have predisposed him to see it where none, in fact, existed. However, while he knew he must guard against excessive credulity, he considered that it would be criminally irresponsible to be too dismissive of these terrible allegations.

La Reynie spent December 1680 and January 1681 reassessing the facts. In one memorandum he penned around this time
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he noted that it was almost incredible that an attempt could have been mounted on the King’s life with a poisoned petition but, on the other hand, he found it hard to accept that an ill-educated girl of mediocre intelligence such as Marie Montvoisin could have invented such a story. It was true that no other witness had corroborated her tale, but this could be explained by the fact that the protagonists would have known that if it was established they had been seeking to kill the King the penalties they faced were far more terrible than those inflicted for other capital crimes. In 1610 Henri IV’s murderer, François Ravaillac, had been tortured with red-hot pincers, then molten lead, boiling oil, resinous pitch and sulphur had been poured into his wounds. Once these preliminary agonies had been completed, he was pulled apart by wild horses, a process that lasted more than an hour.
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Even an unsuccessful attempt on Louis XIV’s life would have been punished with equal ferocity.

Other aspects of Marie’s story seemed fairly plausible to La Reynie. While it might strain the limits of credibility that Mme de Montespan could ever have contemplated murdering the King, she did at least have an obvious motive to try to eliminate Mlle de Fontanges. Taking this into account, La Reynie could accept that there might genuinely have been a scheme to poison the young woman using specially prepared material or gloves. While some might argue that this was not scientifically possible, La Reynie believed it had been independently established that Romani’s friend Blessis had mastered the technique. Above all, Romani’s admission that he had hoped to sell silks and gloves to Mlle de Fontanges was, in La Reynie’s view, immensely significant. He noted, ‘From that it follows that la Voisin’s daughter did not invent what she said about that’ and this led him to propound the dangerous syllogism that, if so, ‘everything she said on that matter can reasonably be presumed to be true’. Once this premise was accepted, other conclusions could follow for ‘if the plan of the stuffs and gloves is true, it is not impossible that that of the petition is true’.
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On the other hand, this went some way towards discrediting a claim made by la Filastre under torture. She had said that it was on the orders of Mme de Montespan that Mme Chapelain had instructed her to obtain a place in Mlle de Fontanges’s household in order to murder her. La Reynie noted that this would have meant that, following the arrest of la Voisin and the consequent collapse of the plan to kill Mlle de Fontanges with poisoned gloves, Mme de Montespan had sought out Mme Chapelain and coolly devised a new way to rid herself of her rival. It was difficult to believe she would have had the gall to do this at a time when la Voisin was in gaol and might at any time reveal the murderous plot concocted by the two of them.
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While admitting to doubts on this score, La Reynie was far from exonerating Mme de Montespan and it was at this point that he introduced another argument, which he had so far kept to himself. He noted that Marie Bosse, the first person to be convicted by the
Chambre Ardente,
had mentioned Mme de Montespan under torture but that, at the time, it had not been considered appropriate to take note of this.
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Unfortunately, this means that no record exists of her comments and, since La Reynie failed to specify the sort of accusations she made, it is impossible to assess their significance.

La Reynie believed there could be no question that at various times Guibourg had conducted black masses on naked women, which may have involved child sacrifice. ‘These scoundrels have given so many details … about them that it is very difficult to doubt it,’ he remarked. It did not automatically follow, of course, that Mme de Montespan had played any part in this and there were considerations that militated against the idea. It was difficult, for example, to believe that an upper-class woman would have been willing to visit so poor an area of Paris as Saint-Denis, where one of the masses had allegedly taken place.

Of one thing, however, La Reynie did feel reasonably confident, for he detected ‘a great appearance of truth’ in Guibourg’s claim that at la Voisin’s he had seen a pact drawn up in the name of Mme de Montespan.
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Once one accepted the existence of that, much else that Guibourg had said was arguably validated.

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On reading through these arguments it is hard to avoid the conclusion that by early 1681 La Reynie thought that, on balance, there was more reason to believe than disbelieve that Mme de Montespan had been engaged in a wicked criminal conspiracy. However, he shrank from recommending a definite course of action, for he remained painfully conscious that proceeding further would stir up a destructive controversy. On 26 January he wrote a memorandum for Louvois in which, having surveyed the evidence, he summarised his dilemma. He pointed out that accusations had been made relating to ‘
lèse-majesté
against the divine and human order. There is nothing greater, and nothing is more important than the complete and perfect elucidation of these crimes.’ However, while it was obviously desirable that such offences should not go unpunished, it was debatable whether it was conducive ‘to the glory of God, in the interests of the King – and consequently that of the state – or for the good of justice to apprise the public of facts of this kind’. On the other hand, inaction was fraught with peril, for ‘if these crimes are hidden, what other strange and unknown things will befall, if one does not dare to penalise crimes on account of their enormity?’

It might be that the allegations against Mme de Montespan were baseless and her reputation would be damaged unfairly if they were made known to the commission. On the other hand, refraining from bringing these cases to court on that account raised the appalling prospect that ‘villains and monsters’ would escape justice by virtue of having ‘taken it into their heads … to accuse persons of high rank, to speak of the King, and to invent all these abominations’. Yet while it was clear that progress of any kind was impossible without resuming the judicial process, La Reynie recognised that this course was not without serious drawbacks.
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In this memorandum La Reynie raised another point to which he wished to draw attention. He said he found it curious that the eminent people named in the more recent phase of the enquiry had made no attempt to defend themselves from the aspersions that had been cast on them. He noted darkly, ‘This silence surprises me; it even makes me suspicious.’
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In fact, there is no reason to think that either Mme de Montespan or Mme de Vivonne had any idea of the sort of things that had been alleged against them. La Reynie himself noted in the same memorandum that although la Filastre had alluded to both ladies at her trial, not a whisper of this had reached the public. Counting La Reynie and Bezons, ten people had been present when la Filastre had been tortured, but they had preserved absolute silence as to what they had heard on that occasion.
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Unless, therefore, the King himself had informed Mme de Montespan, there is no way she could have learned of the extraordinary attacks on her character. Everything indicates that he had not chosen to enlighten her about this.

When the King had returned from his travels in September 1680, Mme de Montespan had also gone back to her apartment at Versailles. By now it was assumed that Louis no longer had a sexual relationship with her, but neither had he completely abandoned her. With his usual unfailing courtesy, the King continued to pay her afternoon visits although, to avoid awkwardness, he was usually accompanied by someone else such as his brother, who could act as a buffer between them.

By now the poor Duchesse de Fontanges had also lost her attraction for the King. Her health was in terminal decline and, though the King had the good manners to spend an hour a day with her, her sickliness had killed his passion. He still derived his greatest pleasure from his meetings with Mme de Maintenon, whose favour was undiminished. In the autumn of 1680 it was noted that the King appeared to be in an introspective mood,
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and this may have owed something to Mme de Maintenon’s influence. The strain of wondering whether Athénaïs was guilty of unspeakably foul practices doubtless also contributed to his pensive frame of mind.

While there can be no question that this was a difficult period for Mme de Montespan, she was clearly unaware of the horrors that were threatening to engulf her. Indeed, what is positively chilling is that throughout these months the King gave not the slightest indication that her conduct was under scrutiny, while all the time encouraging La Reynie to pursue enquiries against her. Far from betraying that he had any cause for disquiet, in November 1680 the King bestowed on Mme de Montespan a gift of 50,000 livres, ‘as a gratification in consideration of her services’.
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Reassured by such gestures, by late 1680 Mme de Montespan was adapting fairly well to her changed circumstances. Her ambitions were now focused on securing the future of her children and throughout these months she devoted considerable effort to persuading the unmarried Duchesse de Montpensier to confer her vast inheritance on the Duc du Maine, Athénaïs’s eldest son by Louis. In her memoirs the Duchesse recalled that whenever Mme de Montespan came to call on her at this time, she was as amusing and entrancing as ever; it is inconceivable that Athénaïs could have conducted herself in this fashion had she realised the vile suspicions that were currently entertained of her. In February 1681 she appeared as oblivious as ever to the threat that was hanging over her: an observer reported that she was busy setting up a lottery in which, at a price, everyone at court could participate.
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No one else at court had any conception that Mme de Montespan had been implicated in the Affair of the Poisons. Since the acquittal of the Maréchal de Luxembourg, interest in the proceedings of the
Chambre Ardente
had subsided. There was an awareness that the enquiry was still in progress, but now that no cases were pending against court notables the subject no longer dominated the consciousness of Paris society.

It is difficult to credit the claim by M. Sagot, Recorder of the
Chambre Ardente,
that following the suspension of the Chamber, several courtiers urged the King to dissolve it altogether. Sagot noted sourly that they put forward various ‘different pretexts, of which the most specious was that a longer research into the question of poisons would discredit the nation in foreign countries’.
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However, Sagot was correct in saying that another important person made pleas to this effect, for it was at this point that the Controller-General of Finance, M. Colbert, became involved in the affair.

Back in the spring of 1679 it had been Colbert who had signed the letters patent establishing the special tribunal, but despite the fact that he was the Minister with responsibility for Paris he had since then kept himself aloof from the
Chambre Ardente
’s proceedings. Now, however, his advice was sought because, with the inquiry at stalemate, it was felt that wider consultation was desirable. Instead of leaving everything in the hands of Louvois and La Reynie, the King decided to obtain the opinion of Louvois’s father, M. Le Tellier (who was Chancellor of France) and Colbert. Accordingly, a full dossier on ‘the particular facts’ relating to Mme de Montespan was compiled. In early February 1681 one set of these documents was sent to Louvois on the understanding that, once he had read them to the King, he and Louis would examine them in detail. Copies of the papers (which filled three caskets in all) were also sent to Colbert and Le Tellier.
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Colbert had had misgivings about the
Chambre Ardente
for some time. According to Primi Visconti, ‘Colbert looked unfavourably on this tribunal for, besides the fact that it was costing the King a great deal, he recognised that it was defaming the nation.’
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The fact that most of the eminent people who had been summoned before the commission were affiliated to Colbert in some way, whereas no one close to Louvois had been affected, can only have intensified Colbert’s disenchantment.