The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (58 page)

It was in December 1680 that Guibourg had set things in motion by telling La Reynie that, five years earlier, a man called M. D’Amy had come to see him. This had been at the suggestion of Jacques Deschault, an unsavoury character who was said to be willing to carry out contract killings for the tiny sum of thirty sols. D’Amy was an officer in the Chamber of Accounts in Provence and he had conceived a grudge against Colbert after losing money on a sale of timber to the navy. After he had told Guibourg that he wanted to poison Colbert, Guibourg had sent D’Amy to purchase drugs and had then arranged for these to be distilled to make them stronger. At the outset D’Amy had given Guibourg a promissory note for 1000 livres and, on receiving the drugs, he had made a cash down payment of 200 livres.
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Hearing this, La Reynie sent an agent to the notary’s office where Guibourg had lodged the promissory note. He found that, just as Guibourg had said, the advance of 200 livres was recorded there, with the balance of 800 livres still outstanding. In La Reynie’s opinion this showed incontrovertibly that Guibourg was telling the truth. ‘It is a silent witness, an irreproachable written proof,’ he enthused, although it is, in fact, possible that D’Amy had approached Guibourg not because he wished to kill Colbert, but because he hoped the priest would help him win at gambling.
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The truth was difficult to establish, for D’Amy himself had since died.

However, Deschault was still alive and was arrested with a confederate of his named Debray, who Guibourg claimed had supplied people with cantharides. When they were questioned, nothing further emerged about the plot against Colbert, but evidence did accumulate suggesting that they were purveyors of poison. Their services had been enlisted by a widow named Anne Carada, who was passionately in love with a married man. Hoping that their union could be legalised, she had asked Deschault to engineer the removal of her lover’s wife. Incantations were said to effect her wishes and Deschault had performed spells with wax figurines designed to bring about the death of the inconvenient spouse. The woman had subsequently died and, though Mme Carada herself maintained when questioned that she had only sought to hasten her end by using magic and had never had recourse to poison, it was regarded as a case of murder. Having been tried and found guilty, Mme Carada was beheaded for this on 25 June 1681.
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Debray and Deschault should in theory have preceded her to the scaffold, but there had been a new development on 19 June, the day scheduled for their execution. When both men had been tortured, nothing of interest had been gleaned from Deschault, who insisted he knew nothing whatever of poison. Debray, however, volunteered some startling information, which sparked fresh concerns for the King’s safety.

Debray revealed he had sometimes worked in partnership with a shepherd named Christophe Moreau who operated a profitable sideline to his pastoral duties. Despite the ample choice of practitioners offering similar services in the capital, people from Paris would come to see this man for help with love affairs and marriages or, more sinisterly, when they wanted to procure the death of some person. Some years earlier Moreau had been consulted by a man who said he was a relation of M. Fouquet, the former
Surintendant
of Finance whom the King had imprisoned for life. The mysterious client had said he was determined to bring about Fouquet’s restoration to power and that, to achieve this end, he would not scruple to kill the King.
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Debray’s revelations engendered a flurry of arrests. Moreau was seized, along with Jean Perceval and Mathurin Barenton, whom Debray had named as Moreau’s accomplices. Debray was kept alive to see if he could remember more about the conspiracy, while his former companion Deschault, who clearly knew nothing of all this, went to the gallows as planned.

When questioned, Moreau agreed that he had had a client who was a relation of Fouquet’s and who had styled himself the Chevalier de La Brosse. He had been accompanied by his valet, who had been introduced as Dubois, though it seemed likely that these were assumed names. Moreau protested that the Chevalier had never expressed any interest in killing the King and had merely wanted to improve his standing at court, but his account was not believed. Such scepticism seemed justified by a statement from Barenton that when Moreau had brought the Chevalier de La Brosse to see him, the Chevalier had not sought to disguise his hostility to the King.
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The search was now on for the mysterious Chevalier and events took a new turn when evidence given by another suspect, Mathurin Chapon, led La Reynie and Louvois to believe that they had unmasked his true identity. They concluded that the Chevalier de La Brosse was the name adopted by Roger de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de Termes, a cousin by marriage of Mme de Montespan, who had already featured in the inquiry in a peripheral way.

Exactly what led Louvois and La Reynie to Termes is unclear, though he was known to have lost a fortune as a result of Fouquet’s fall. Termes was a somewhat eccentric figure with a strange appearance and a pronounced speech impediment caused by a cleft palate though, oddly enough, he could enunciate perfectly when singing. Around the time of Fouquet’s fall he had been briefly imprisoned in the Bastille and since then had led ‘a highly licentious life’.
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He had also devoted great efforts to restoring his lost wealth and had hoped to enrich himself by attaining the Philosopher’s Stone. Using compulsion, he had set to work in his chateau a crew of alchemists including la Voisin’s lover Blessis. Their resentment at having been pressed into servitude in this way had reportedly led some of them to consider poisoning Termes. Now, however, there were suspicions that Termes was more than just a potential victim and that his bitterness at being deprived of his fortune had led him to plot the King’s death. Accordingly, he was arrested and a former employee of his named Antoine Monteran was also taken into custody.

Confusion mounted, however, when Moreau was interviewed again and pointed the manhunt in an entirely different direction. While ignorant of the true name of the Chevalier de La Brosse, he recalled that during one visit the Chevalier had been accompanied by M. Jean Maillard, a
Conseiller
in the Paris
Parlement.
Maillard was promptly arrested and agreed that he had once been to see Moreau with the late M. Jacques Pinon du Martroy, a former
Conseiller
in the Court of Inquests. Pinon du Martroy had once been immensely wealthy but had been ruined when his assets had been seized following the arrest of Fouquet. Since then he had become so heavily indebted that when he had taken Maillard to see Moreau, he had adopted the pseudonym of the Chevalier de La Brosse in hopes of avoiding being harassed by his creditors.
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Information provided by Guibourg added to the case against Pinon du Martroy, for when questioned about him the priest disclosed that Pinon had been a client of his for many years. At first Guibourg merely had a vague memory that the
Conseiller
had asked for his assistance in wreaking revenge on his enemies. Having thought about it a bit longer, it suddenly came back to him that Pinon had confided he wanted to poison the King.
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The luckless M. Maillard insisted that his own and Pinon du Martroy’s encounter with Moreau had been completely innocent, but he failed to disassociate himself from the conspiracy supposedly masterminded by his dead friend. It was true that no firm evidence ever emerged to link Maillard with the recently identified threat to the King, but on the other hand there were aspects of his past history that were disturbing. Some years before, Maillard had rented his country house to Sainte-Croix, the lover of Mme de Brinvilliers who had supplied her with poisons. Maillard protested that he had known Sainte-Croix merely ‘on the footing of a man of pleasure’,
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but this failed to explain why he had bound himself to pay the sum of 4000 livres on the presentation of a bill of exchange he had lodged with Sainte-Croix. When the debt had been called in after Sainte-Croix’s death, Maillard had paid the full amount to Belleguise, a crony of Sainte-Croix’s who was also clerk to the financier Pennautier.

A possible reason why Maillard had owed money to Sainte-Croix was soon uncovered. Years before, Maillard had had an affair with the wife of M. Violet, an attorney in
Parlement
who had died suddenly in 1665. At the time Violet had employed a woman named Mme Guesdon who subsequently went on to work for both Mme de Brinvilliers and Sainte-Croix. Bearing this in mind, it appeared a plausible hypothesis that Mme Guesdon had been commissioned to poison Violet and that Maillard had promised to pay Sainte-Croix a substantial sum for arranging this. Violet’s widow had since remarried, but when questioned about all this, she hinted that Maillard had been responsible for Violet’s death. On the other hand her second husband had recently conceived suspicions that she had been trying to poison him, so it is not impossible that she had murdered Violet without any assistance from Maillard.
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The fact that Sainte-Croix’s name was once again featuring in the inquiry prompted a revival of interest in his activities. Links had already been established between Sainte-Croix and M. Fouquet, for it was Sainte-Croix who had told Mme de Brinvilliers that Fouquet had sent the chemist Christophe Glaser to find out more about poison in Florence. This led La Reynie to speculate whether Maillard and Sainte-Croix might have jointly conspired to kill the King so that Fouquet might be freed.

Convinced that the two men had been bound together in some sinister way, La Reynie suggested that the widow of Christophe Glaser should be lured back from her retirement in Switzerland to see if she could shed any light on the matter. Understandably, however, on being asked to return to France to assist the inquiry, she turned down the invitation.
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Though nothing came of that approach, La Reynie was confident he could establish the truth about the Chevalier de La Brosse’s plans to murder the King. He was spurred on by the King himself, who evinced a keen interest in the progress of the inquiry. The diligent way the matter was pursued was not motivated solely by concern for the King’s safety, for if it could be established that poisoners posed a risk to the monarch himself, there could be no better justification for the existence of the
Chambre Ardente.
Previously Colbert had questioned the decision to establish a special commission to try offences which could have been adequately dealt with by the criminal courts. His legal adviser Duplessis had agreed that setting up the commission had been unwarranted unless it could be shown that
lèse-majesté
had been committed, for the dreadful threat posed by that crime justified the most extreme measures. Earlier it had, of course, been indicated to La Reynie that poison might be used against the King, but he had been prevented from laying the evidence before the commissioners. There was no problem, however, about bringing this case to trial and once it became known that the Chamber was adjudicating on a matter relating to the King’s personal safety no loyal subject could dispute that it was fulfilling a vital function.

This consideration rendered it all the more imperative that those suspected of conspiring against the King should be compelled to admit their guilt. Louvois stressed the importance of this to the officer appointed to supervise their torture after conviction. Emphasising that ‘this affair is of very great consequence’, he gave orders that the torture of the guilty parties should be carried out with the utmost severity.
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His admonitions were heeded all too slavishly, for there can be no doubt that the sufferings inflicted on these wretched men were particularly frightful.

Barenton was the first to be brought before the commission. On 5 September he was found guilty of ‘treason in the highest degree for having known of the design against the King without revealing it; also of having … traded in poisons’. At dawn on 6 September he was taken to the torture chamber where initially he insisted he had been wrongly convicted. He agreed that he had once met with the Chevalier de La Brosse but said that all he had ever given him was a water to bathe sore eyes. As the torture intensified, however, Barenton changed his story. ‘Must I damn myself?’ he wailed as it became clear to him that his resistance was crumbling. Having reached the limits of his endurance he then agreed that he had supplied poison intended to kill the King. He explained that the Chevalier de La Brosse had told him that Moreau had already sold him poison, which had proved ineffective, so he wanted Barenton to find him something stronger and more subtle, preferably made of toad venom. Barenton was left so weakened by his ordeal that when he was taken to his death later that afternoon he proved unable to perform the prescribed penance outside Notre-Dame, and there was a real fear he might die before reaching the Place de Grève.
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Three days later Debray, who had given the first warnings that the King had been targeted, was executed. He was not tortured again, but that morning he went into further details about the alleged plot, saying that he now remembered things which might be of importance. Piously thanking the Almighty for having deferred his execution so he could die with a clear conscience, he stated that he had seen both Moreau and Barenton hand poison to the Chevalier de La Brosse. Perhaps he hoped he would be kept alive for a bit longer to answer more questions, but now that he had served his purpose he was expendable. Some consideration was shown him, for when he pleaded for wine on his way to execution his wish was granted. Thus fortified, he died with dignity, telling the crowd he had been justly convicted and asking them to pray for him.
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