The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (65 page)

The King’s desire for reformation soon made a difference. In September 1683, shortly after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse, Mme de Maintenon wrote exultantly to her brother, ‘I think the Queen asked God for the conversion of the whole court; that of the King is wonderful, and the ladies who seemed farthest from it are never out of churches.’ Noting that Mme de Montespan, her sister Mme de Thianges, the Comtesse de Gramont and the Princesse de Soubise were among the most assiduous, she crowed, ‘Normal Sundays are like Easter days in former times.’
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A few years later Mme de Maintenon again expressed delight that ‘piety is becoming very much in fashion’, but she did worry that not all those who professed devotion were sincere. This was a valid fear. In 1688 the Duchesse d’Orléans observed, ‘It is true that people are wearing diamond crosses, but they are purely for ornament and have no religious significance.’ Eleven years later she went further, declaring, ‘Faith is extinguished in this country to the point where not a single young man is to be found who does not choose to be an atheist. But the most amusing thing is that the same young man who plays the atheist in Paris acts pious at court.’
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Saint-Simon relates a story which suggests that much of the religious enthusiasm at court was indeed feigned. The Marquis de Brissac, Adjutant of the Royal Bodyguard, was sure that many of the ladies who came to the late service, which the King attended twice a week in the chapel at Versailles, only did so because they wanted to be noticed by Louis. Determined to catch them out, one evening the Adjutant dismissed the royal bodyguard before the King appeared. When asked the reason, Brissac said that the King was going to miss evensong on this occasion, whereupon most of the female worshippers filed out of the chapel. Brissac then recalled the bodyguard in time for the King’s arrival and when Louis entered he was mystified to find the chapel virtually empty. The mischievous Brissac then explained how he had tricked ‘the pseudo-saints’.
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Some old reprobates simply proved incapable of reformation. The famously promiscuous Maréchale de la Ferté, who had featured peripherally in the Affair of the Poisons, did not die till 1714, when she was aged over eighty. Towards the end of her life she attended a Lenten service in the company of her equally notorious sister, the Comtesse d’Olonne. The priest preached a sermon on hellfire and the need for fasting and repentance, thoroughly alarming the elderly pair. The Maréchale quavered, ‘Sister, this is becoming serious; it is no laughing matter; if we do not do our penance we shall be damned. Sister, what must we do?’ There was a long pause. ‘My dear,’ replied Mme d’Olonne, ‘this is what we must do: we must let the servants fast.’
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Now that the King was doing his best to suppress all forms of licentious behaviour, the excesses of his youth were succeeded by what Saint-Simon called ‘the long years of gravity’. Looking back on what France had been like when he arrived there seven years earlier, Primi Visconti remarked that by 1680, it seemed like ‘a different country’. The balls, banquets and concerts, which had enlivened the court in the past, were now a rarity, and life there was much quieter. ‘Few people have fun and … circumspection is necessary, particularly at court,’ Visconti lamented. ‘Debauchery, [frequenting] places of ill repute, drunkenness, indecent clothing … and even obscene speech ruins a man with the King.’
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The King’s sister-in-law, the Duchesse d’Orléans, was one of those who had difficulty adapting. In 1685 the King ordered her confessor to reprimand her for being too free in her speech (she herself admitted that she often talked ‘about crapping and pissing’) and for permitting her maids of honour to have lovers. The King said he had been so annoyed about this that were it not for the fact that she was his sister-in-law he would have banished her from court. Despite her anger at being treated ‘like a chambermaid’, Madame wrote to apologise for her coarse language, saying she had not realised the King was offended by it. With regard to her maids, she said that it was hard for her to control their behaviour and – doubtless remembering a time when her household had been dubbed ‘the nursery garden for mistresses of the King’ – added slyly that she ‘knew such conduct to be not without precedent and quite usual at any court’. Finding the new strait-laced atmosphere of the court uncongenial she grumbled, ‘The King thinks he is being pious when he arranges for everyone to be eternally bothered and pestered.‘
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In 1690 another observer commented on the great change that had taken place at court, which now bore little resemblance to its former incarnation. Ezechiel Spanheim noted, ‘Debauchery, dissoluteness, blasphemy and other scandalous vices [which were] formerly fairly commonplace at court are no longer tolerated nor unpunished.’ Gallantry was neither ‘in vogue nor in credit, which can be attributed to the King having immersed himself in piety’. Spanheim added that while he made no claim ‘to guarantee the virtue of all the ladies at the French court or to make of them so many vestals’, the fact remained that flighty ladies were now frowned upon rather than being welcomed as in the past.
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In one area the King’s will could not prevail for, despite his strong convictions, he never managed to curb homosexuality at court. This was not for want of trying, but the fact that so many men in the highest echelons of the nobility had homosexual predilections ultimately frustrated him. In June 1682 there was a major scandal when ‘a large number of important persons’ were sent away from court, which was now said to resemble ‘a little Sodom’. Devastatingly for the King, they included not only one of the Princes of the Blood, the Prince de la Roche-sur-Yon (whose exile was only brief) but also Louis’s son by Louise de La Vallière, the Comte de Vermandois, who died not long afterwards, still in disgrace. Three years later there was another wave of expulsions after intercepted letters were found to contain shocking details of ‘ultramontane debauch’. Even so, what the Duchesse d’Orléans called ‘that horrible sodomy’ showed no signs of declining. In 1699 Madame lamented that it was now ‘so much the fashion here that no one attempts to conceal it any longer’; two years later she declared that that species of vice was now more common in France than in Italy.
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According to one authority, Jean Lemoine,
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the inquiry into the Affair of the Poisons was dominated by Louvois, who directed it for his own ends. As Lemoine saw it, the inquiry coincided with a time when Louvois felt that Colbert was edging ahead of him in the factional rivalry in which they were permanently engaged, for in November 1679 Colbert’s brother had replaced the disgraced Minister for Foreign Affairs, Pomponne. Louvois therefore sought to use the Arsenal Chamber to redress the balance of power by summoning before it individuals who were themselves, or came from families, antagonistic to him. The Bouillons, for example, were closely related to the great general, Turenne, who prior to his death in 1675 had repeatedly clashed with Louvois over the conduct of the Dutch War. The Comtesse de Soissons, Luxembourg, Feuquières and Mme de Montespan were likewise known to be on poor terms with him.

Louvois’s involvement in the affairs of the
Chambre Ardente
was unofficial, but his interest in it was widely recognised. Primi Visconti stated that the setting up of the Chamber ‘was his work’ and added that many people believed that the tribunal had been brought into being with the express object of ‘satisfying the vengeful desires of two or three individuals’. The father of the Marquis de Feuquières likewise hinted that the Chamber was being used as an instrument of faction when he informed the King that in Sweden it was assumed that it provided ‘a means to satisfy private passions and to sow divisions’. Feuquières himself was sure the inquiry was conducted in a highly partisan manner and that hostile testimony was solicited by Louvois’s stooge, La Reynie, against those whom he wished to bring low.
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Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the truth of this as the written records of the interrogations often do not include the questions which were put to suspects, but only their answers, with the result that one cannot judge the extent to which they were prodded into incriminating specific individuals.

Others at the time were equally sure that Louvois manipulated events to suit himself. The Marquis de La Fare commented in his memoirs that the Affair of the Poisons provided Louvois, ‘a malignant and hate-filled man, with a fine opportunity to ruin whomsoever he wished’. Before fleeing the country the Comtesse de Soissons reportedly said she dared not stay to defend herself as she knew that her ‘mortal enemy’ Louvois would have no compunction about falsifying evidence against her to secure a conviction. In 1680 the Marquis de Saint-Maurice, who by that time had returned to his native Savoy, was told by an informant in France that Louvois completely controlled the
Chambre Ardente,
acting ‘to suppress proceedings against some persons and to pursue others to extremity’.
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Certainly it is mysterious that even though serious accusations were made against certain individuals such as the Marquise de Vassé or the Comte de Gassilly, they were never called before the commission. Perhaps the reason why they were left alone was that they enjoyed Louvois’s protection.

However, there is a danger that by placing too much stress on the part of Louvois in these events one overlooks the contribution of the King, which was of key significance. Primi Visconti indeed asserted that one reason why Louvois interfered so energetically in the proceedings of the
Chambre Ardente
was that he saw it as a way of commending himself to his master, ‘having noticed that he was fearful of poison and that he was intent on extirpating it by the root’.
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Admittedly, it is problematic to gauge the extent of Louis’s involvement. It is not clear, for example, how many of the documents detailing the accusations against eminent people were read by him, or whether he usually relied on Louvois and La Reynie to keep him informed. If he followed the latter course it would, of course, have been easier for them to distort facts and inflame him against selected individuals. Yet the King was not by nature a passive ruler who permitted his ministers to impose on him and it is likely that he monitored this affair with his customary vigilance. When the scandal was at its height it is significant that whenever the King went far away from Paris (as in early 1680, when he went to meet the Dauphine, or that summer, when he went on a northern tour) the
Chambre Ardente
did not hold hearings in his absence. Clearly, the King did not want to permit it too great autonomy and was determined to remain in control of developments.

The King had no doubt that poison posed a genuine danger to his subjects and was ready to accept that he personally could be at risk from it. The Affair of the Poisons revealed how extraordinarily mistrustful he could be, even towards intimates, and exposed his chilling capacity to believe evil of others. Yet despite its searching nature, the inquiry failed to show that anyone at court had used poison and still less that a single person there had contemplated poisoning Louis. As Primi Visconti put it, ‘Not so much as a bad thought against the King was found.’ Obviously it was disquieting that the Vicomtesse de Polignac had allegedly resorted to conjurations and impious ceremonies to make the King enamoured of her, but even she could be said to have acted from a perverted form of devotion. It merely went some way to proving Primi Visconti’s contention that ‘all at court, particularly the ladies, would have given themselves to the devil for love of the King’.
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There is no doubt that the King was convinced that he was acting in the best interests of the public by setting up the
Chambre Ardente
and he would have considered it a dereliction of duty if he had intervened to protect eminent people who were suspected of involvement with poisoners. It is conceivable, however, that in encouraging the Chamber to pursue enquiries against such persons the King had an additional agenda, though he may not have acknowledged it, even to himself. The
Chambre Ardente
provided the King with a means of reminding his courtiers of his authority and checking indiscipline. For a King who prided himself on being well informed about his courtiers, it had been alarming to discover how many were engaged in unauthorised activities and the inquiry afforded him an opportunity to reassert control over them.

It was no accident that the
Chambre Ardente
contravened the privileges of the nobility, which entitled them to be tried by the highest chamber of
Parlement.
By insisting that they were subject to the jurisdiction of his special commission, the King had found a new way of subjugating them to his will and anyone who protested at this infringement of his or her rights was penalised. The King ensured that those who felt they had been wrongly treated by the
Chambre Ardente
could never obtain redress, as when he prevented the Maréchal de Luxembourg from bringing proceedings against La Reynie after his restoration to court. Those summoned before the Chamber were expected to suffer the indignity in silence, for criticism was not tolerated. After being discharged the Marquis de Feuquières wrote an account of his experiences (sadly lost) to his father, but prudence dictated that he sent it to him in cipher. He urged him not to show it to a soul, ‘for I would be a ruined man if certain people came to know of it’.
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In his memoirs the Marquis de La Fare wrote that he was amazed at the meekness with which those affected accepted their treatment by the
Chambre Ardente.
‘I do not know whether it must be attributed to the King’s authority or to the servility of the high nobility, which was excessive in this reign,’ he mused. While he did not specify how the individuals concerned could have shown more defiance without disgracing themselves irredeemably, he believed the episode illustrated ‘the contempt which King and ministers had for the grandest people in the country’. Primi Visconti wrote that Louvois considered the
Chambre Ardente
to be ‘a fine invention to keep subjects on the alert’
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and one may surmise that the King regarded this as an equally desirable outcome. The findings of the commission encouraged people to be more watchful of his safety while reminding the court nobility that their conduct was subject to his scrutiny.