Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (13 page)

His ambitions were large. In association with a number of old associates, including de Vanens, and financed by Pierre Cardelan, a Parisian banker, he planned to manufacture enough “alchemical silver” to make a fortune. In November 1677 de Vanens and Cardelan were arrested by Nicolas de la Reynie, recently appointed as Lieutenant-General of Police by Louis XIV, but de Chasteuil managed to escape—he was traced a year later and found already dead, strangled by an unknown assailant.

In the “magical workshop” of the conspirators were found powerful poisons and some forged ingots of silver; much of the counterfeit silver had already been purchased by the Royal Mint at the full price for fine silver.

It soon became apparent to La Reynie that de Vanens and his associates were not only poison-mongers and counterfeiters but Satanists; de Vanens himself boasted of it. He told his fellow prisoners in the Bastille that not God himself was capable of preventing him conducting the Black Mass upon the rump of his familiar spirit—the familiar in question, a large spotted spaniel, seems to have looked innocent enough as far as external appearances were concerned!

For a year de Vanens and his accomplices languished in prison, subjected to frequent interrogation by La Reynie, who, convinced that the prisoners had other associates, was anxious to obtain details of the vast
conspiracy which he was certain existed, although he felt unsure of its exact nature. Then, towards the end of 1678, La Reynie discovered the clue for which he had been searching in the shape of a curious report from a lawyer named Perrin.

One night Perrin had been invited to dine at the home of a M. Vigoureux, a ladies’ dressmaker, and one of his fellow-guests had been Marie Bosse, one of the many fortune tellers who infested Paris. The dinner was a drunken one and Marie Bosse, under the influence of alcohol, boasted of her professional success, “only three more poisonings”, she said, “and I can retire”. The wife of one of La Reynie’s men was sent along, posing as a client cursed with a long-living and miserable husband, to investigate La Bosse. On her first visit she was commiserated with, on her second she was supplied with a vial of poison.

La Reynie acted immediately, arresting La Bosse—discovered by the police in an incestuous situation with her two sons and daughter—and the wife of M. Vigoureux; found among the effects of the witches were a veritable arsenal of poisons: arsenic, mercuric sublimate, hemlock, henbane, belladonna, foxglove, mandragora and “Spanish fly” (Cantharides, a powerful aphrodisiac). Along with these were discovered many substances used in the compounding of philtres—dried toad, human fat, graveyard dust, dried blood, dried human semen and excrement.

Interrogated under torture La Bosse and La Vigoureux incriminated three dozen others, either fellow-sorcerers or clients who had employed poison and witchcraft for their own purposes, and further arrests followed, among them that of Catherine Monvoisin, better known as La Voisin; she, it will be remembered, was the mistress of the magician Le Sage who had been sentenced to the galleys—and suddenly and mysteriously released—some eleven years earlier.

Le Sage was only one of La Voisin’s many lovers (she also had a husband who had managed to survive his wife’s many attempts to poison him
⁴
) and his jealousy of his rivals, particularly of a man named Latour, had turned his love to hatred. Consequently, after his own arrest, only five days after that of La Voisin, he “spilled the beans”,
doing all in his power to send his former paramour to the stake. He revealed that La Voisin not only organised Black Masses—Le Sage named a number of renegade priests who were on her payroll—and sold poisons but was also the leading Parisian abortionist. La Reynie was not surprised; in his search of La Voisin’s villa he had not only found the paraphernalia of Black Magic (including books of spells, incense, black candles and priestly vestments) but a mysterious and sinister stove in the ashes of which were what appeared to be fragments of the bones of young children.

It was only those infants too big to be safely buried by La Voisin that went into her stove but nevertheless, there were more than enough of these; according to her own account the bodies or ashes of over two thousand infants and embryos were buried in her garden. In a way La Voisin’s brutal disregard for the mortal remains of her victims
⁵
contrasted favourably with the nauseating religiosity displayed by other witch/abortionists arrested at the same time; La Lépère, for example, who piously informed her interrogators that “when she aborted a mother who had already felt her child quicken she never failed to baptise the child and carry it to some consecrated ground where she tipped the sexton to bury it in some neglected corner when the priest wasn’t looking”.

Among the priests named by Le Sage as being involved in the performance of Black and Amatory Masses were Mariette, the old associate who had been tried with him in 1668, the Abbé Davot, who was La Voisin’s confessor at her own Parish Church, and the Abbé Guibourg, chief of the whole hellish crew. All were arrested by La Reynie, who described Guibourg as follows:

“A priest sixty seven years of age, born in Paris, claiming to be a bastard son of Monsieur de Montmorency. A libertine who has travelled a good deal, has held benefices at Issy and at Vanves, and who is at present attached to the Church of Saint Marcel. For twenty years he has engaged continually in the practice of poison, sacrilege and every evil business. He has cut the throats and sacrificed uncounted numbers of children on his infernal altar. He has a mistress (a certain La Chanfrain) by whom he has had several children, one
or two of whom he has sacrificed. A man who at times seems a raving lunatic, and at other times calmly boasts of what he will say when put to the question…. It is no ordinary man who thinks it a natural thing to sacrifice infants by slitting their throats and to say Mass upon the bodies of naked women.”

We know a good deal about the nature of the Masses said by Guibourg “upon the bodies of naked women” from his own testimony and that of La Voisin’s stepdaughter, who had, when pregnant, fled in terror from her home in fear that her child would be taken from her and used as a blood sacrifice. The Voisin girl (throughout the records of her questioning she was referred to as
la Fille Voisin)
claimed that many of these Masses had been celebrated at the behest of Madame de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV and mother of three of his bastard children.

Since 1667 Madame de Montespan had supplemented her personal sexual attractions by magical means—that is to say by the celebration of first Amatory, and later Black, Masses designed to win and hold the love of the King.
⁶
The early Masses were innocent enough (save, of course, in a theological sense) and involved neither devil worship nor murder. Mariette sang the Mass orthodoxly enough but the Gospel was read over the lady’s head and an incantation was uttered; “that the Queen may be barren that the King leave her table and bed for me, that I obtain from him all that I ask for myself and for my relatives; that my servants may be pleasing to him; that beloved and respected by great nobles I may be called to the councils of the King and know what passes there; and that, this affection being redoubled on what has existed in the past, the King may leave La Valliere
⁷
and look no more upon her; and that the Queen being repudiated I may marry the King.”

This Amatory Mass was repeated at Saint Germain, in the lodging of Madame de Montespan’s sister. The third Mass of the series involved a bloody sacrifice of a comparatively innocent nature—two doves, traditional symbols of the goddess Venus, were consecrated to Louis and Madame de Montespan, were placed on the altar throughout the
saying of the Mass, and finally had their hearts torn out from their living bodies.

At first it seemed to Madame de Montespan that her desires had been achieved; the Queen was neglected and the gentle La Valliere was first neglected by the King and eventually persuaded to enter a nunnery. Nevertheless the King showed no sign of getting rid of his Queen and marrying Madame de Montespan and always the latter felt the fear of rival mistresses who might supplant her as she herself had supplanted La Valliere. In every crisis in her relationship with the King she resorted to magic. The Voisin girl stated that “every time that anything fresh happened to Madame de Montespan and she feared some lessening in the favour of the King she came running to my mother that she might provide some remedy; my mother at once called in one of the priests, whom she instructed to celebrate Masses, and then she gave her (La Montespan) powders that were to be administered to the King.” The powders in question, mixtures of real and supposed aphrodisiacs such as cantharides and dried cockerels’ testicles, had been consecrated by being passed under the Chalice at Amatory Masses.

These Amatory Masses and aphrodisiac powders sufficed until 1673 when Madame de Montespan, alarmed by the King’s neglect, real or imaginary, resorted to stronger and darker magic. This time Guibourg officiated at the Mass,
⁸
the body of a masked, but otherwise naked, woman—probably Madame de Montespan herself—lay on the altar and a child was sacrificed. Details of the liturgy used are scant but it is clear that at the moment of Consecration a child’s throat was slit, following which its blood was drained into the Chalice (which stood on the pubic area of the woman on the altar) and the following prayer recited: “Ashtaroth and Asmodeus, Princes of Love, I beseech you to accept the sacrifice of this child which I now present to you so that I may receive the things I ask of you; that the love of the King may be continued … that the queen may become barren …”

Following this prayer various gross sexual manipulations involving the Consecrated Elements took place—the host (the consecrated wafer of unleavened bread) was inserted into the vagina of the woman lying upon the altar and the genitals of Guibourg and the woman were washed with the mixture of wine and blood; some of this unpleasant confection was taken away by the woman in a glass vial in order that
it might be secretly administered to the King. Later the heart and entrails of the murdered child were returned to Guibourg for a second consecration; he was told that these were to be dried, powdered and, like the blood and the wine, given to the King in his food.
⁹

In 1678 another series of Masses took place. The Voisin girl helped her mother prepare for the first of these; a mattress was laid on the altar, candlesticks with black candles stood on stools at its side. Guibourg wore a white chasuble embroidered with pine-cones—symbols of the god Dionysius—while Madame de Montespan lay naked on the mattress; the latter had proved too short and the favourite’s head dangled over the edge of the altar where it was supported by a pillow placed on a chair. A child was again sacrificed and the blood, said the Voisin girl, “was carried away with the wine and the wafer to be distilled”.

All was in vain; Madame de Montespan slowly began to lose the King’s favour. Someone, just possibly de Montespan herself but more probably one of her ladies-in-waiting, decided to use magic not for love but for death—to celebrate a Mass designed to encompass the King’s destruction.

This Mortuary Mass, celebrated by Guibourg at the home of La Voisin, involved even more sexual unpleasantness than the Amatory Masses.
¹⁰
Guibourg’s own account, given under interrogation, goes: “Clad in alb and stole I officiated at a conjuration at La Voisin’s in the presence of La des Oeillets,
¹¹
who wanted to put a death charm upon the King and was accompanied by a man who supplied the rubric of the conjuration. For the rite it was required to have the sperm of both
sexes
¹²
but since des Oeillets was having her monthly period menstrual blood was used instead; the man with her went to the space between the bedrail and the wall with me (
Guibourg
) and masturbated himself. I directed his semen into the Chalice.” Into the mixture of wine, semen, and menstrual blood, was put dried, powdered bat-blood and flour “to give consistancy to the concoction” which was then taken away in a glass vial by des Oeillets and her companion.

The Mortuary Masses failed; it was planned to give Louis a petition impregnated with a fatal poison so powerful as to be effective through his glove and the skin of his hand
¹³
but before this could be done the conspirators were arrested.

In all La Reynie arrested three hundred and sixty persons, of whom two hundred and eighteen were kept in custody. Of these only one hundred and ten were actually tried and sentenced. Some were hanged, some were exiled, others, like Vanens, were immured for life in provincial prisons, La Voisin was burnt
¹⁴
—she spent the night before her death in “scandalous debauches”, refused to make the
Amende Honorable
when the tumbril carrying her to her place of execution stopped at Notre Dame, and, when finally lashed to the stake, “five or six times she pushed aside the faggots but finally the flames leaped up and enveloped her”.

As La Reynie’s interrogations progressed it became more and more apparent that Madame de Montespan, mistress of the King, mother of his children, was deeply involved in the crimes that had been committed. It was clear that if the trials continued the actions of La Montespan would be publicly revealed, and that the King was not prepared to endure. The trials were stopped and the matter was settled by
lettres de cachet
, the surviving prisoners—including Guibourg—being imprisoned for the rest of their lives. The conditions under which they were imprisoned were hard, and measures were taken to see that they did not
talk; “above all”, said an instruction to one prison governor, “insist that the guards take measures to stop anyone hearing the rubbish that this gang is capable of saying. They have been known to speak infamies about Madame de Montespan … warn the prisoners that they will be mercilessly punished if they say the least word on such a subject.”