The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (13 page)

The games played at court in the King’s reign were
hoca,
(a precursor of roulette)
reversis,
basset
and
lansquenet.
The Lieutenant-General of the Paris Police, Nicolas-Gabriel de La Reynie, considered that
hoca
was especially pernicious as it afforded numerous opportunities for cheating. On his insistence in 1671 it was banned in Paris on pain of death but, as he lamented, the fact that it continued to be played at court meant that it was difficult to enforce this prohibition.
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Towards the end of the 1670s
basset
replaced
hoca
as the current craze, but its effects were scarcely less destructive. Indeed, it would seem that the reason why the King – who until that point had himself been a keen gamester – virtually ceased gambling was that he was sickened by the extent that people close to him became addicted to it. Not only was his mistress Mme de Montespan a frenzied gambler but in 1678 the King’s brother, known as ‘Monsieur’, lost so much that he had to pawn his best jewels. At the time it was noted that the King appeared ‘vexed by these excesses’. He was still more displeased when even the Queen, proverbially pious and dull, succumbed to the fever and one morning lost 20,000 écus after refusing to tear herself away from the tables in order to attend mass, which she normally did without fail. Alarmed at the prospect of her losses if she carried on at the same rate, her husband icily rebuked her, ‘Madame, let’s just calculate how much that is a year.’
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Curiously, it was not considered unacceptable to show wild excitement during gambling sessions. Those who maintained their dignity such as the Comtesse de Soissons or the Marquis de Beaumont (‘who lost 10,000 pistoles and fell into poverty without uttering a single word’),
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were the exceptions. Most people were completely uninhibited when playing: they swore, tore at their hair, pounded the table or stamped their feet, and the Duchesse de Bouillon, sister to the Comtesse de Soissons, would turn on onlookers, accusing them of bringing her bad luck.

At least one man behaved much worse than this. In March 1671 the King was playing cards with his Master of the Wardrobe, the Marquis de Cessac. On being called away, the King asked the Maréchal de Lorges to play his hand for him and, after a bit, the Maréchal came to the conclusion that Cessac was cheating. On investigation it turned out that Cessac had been playing with marked cards and the upshot was that the King banished him from court. Mme de Sévigné heard that Louis had been reluctant to dishonour a man of Cessac’s high rank but, since Cessac’s winnings in recent weeks amounted to 500,000 écus and since numerous people had been ruined playing with him, the King had little alternative. The Savoyard ambassador was relieved that severe action had been taken, for he was sure that cheating was all too prevalent.
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However, Cessac’s exile did not last very long. In 1674 he was permitted to return to court, only to be disgraced again within a few years during the Affair of the Poisons.

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Gambling provided one absorbing occupation for the court’s leisured elite, but time was still apt to lie heavy on their hands. As a result they were invariably on the lookout for novel diversions and were not always too particular about how they alleviated boredom. Fortune-tellers and those supposedly gifted with powers of divination offered excitements that many people at court found intriguing. There are several stories of quite eminent people at court being taken in by practitioners who were credited with the ability to conjure up spirits in a glass of water. The King’s sister-in-law even claimed that after one such demonstration the Minister of War, Louvois, became convinced that a child brought to court had the gift of second sight. The Abbé Choisy described how, one night at the Comtesse de Soissons’s, a little girl correctly predicted the death of the absent Comte de Soissons, and the Duchesse d’Orléans recalled that another fortune-teller conjured up a vision in a glass of water of Mme de Montespan giving birth to one of the King’s children, which she described to the lady’s niece in great detail.
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As Voltaire remarked of this period, ‘The former habit of consulting diviners, to have one’s horoscope drawn, to seek secret means of making oneself loved, still survived among the people and even in the highest of the kingdom.’ Such credulity so angered Bishop Bossuet that he attacked it in one of his sermons: ‘Who can guarantee our future?’ he demanded scornfully. ‘How I laugh at the vanity of these soothsayers who threaten whomsoever they please and fashion for us at will ill-omened years.’
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It took more than these strictures to purge the court of such beliefs.

At one point Bossuet fulminated that ‘these curious sciences … serve as covers for spells and
malefice
’ (i.e. doing harm through sorcery) but, prior to the Affair of the Poisons the King took a more indulgent view of the matter. According to his sister-in-law, Louis ‘was not superstitious except in regard to religious matters such as the miracles of the Mother of God and such things’ and it is clear that he personally had no faith in astrological predictions. Although at his birth a horoscope had been drawn up for him, he was the first French monarch for many generations who did not retain a court astrologer. Following the appearance of a comet in 1664, the King had commissioned the astronomer Pierre Petit to write a treatise explaining that there was no reason to interpret this as a presage of evil. Sixteen years later another astronomer remarked that he knew better than to speculate about what comets portended, for such ‘vain presumptions’ were the province of ‘the vulgar’ and were not acceptable to the King.
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Nevertheless, until 1680, Louis seems not to have been particularly censorious towards people at court who dabbled in astrology, dismissing it as a harmless pastime which amused women and other silly people.

The King’s relaxed attitude to astrology and fortune-telling is demonstrated by his treatment of Giovanni-Battista Primi Visconti, a young Italian who arrived at the French court in 1673. He soon acquired a reputation as a seer because, when an unknown person’s handwriting was shown to him, he would make surprisingly accurate pronouncements about their life and character. He was able to do this by a combination of logical deduction, inspired guesswork and careful research into the backgrounds of people at court, but for a time belief in his powers became so fervent that he was ‘literally besieged.’ The seal was set on his success when he was taken up by the Comtesse de Soissons, and he recalled that there was one day when he counted 223 carriages waiting outside his lodgings. Visconti’s clients included the Duchesse de Vitry, Mme de Thianges, the Duchesse de Montpensier, the King’s brother the Duc d’Orléans and even the Queen. The King himself never consulted him, but after his cousin Mlle de Montpensier had raved about Visconti’s abilities he said lightly to her one day, ‘Cousin, there is the wonderful man.’ This semi-ironical endorsement raised Visconti’s stock still higher.
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The Marquise de Vassé was among those who eagerly sought Visconti’s services, which was scarcely surprising, for her interest in the future was all-consuming. Visconti was aware that she had already employed two female fortune tellers ‘one of whom traced geomancy figures and the other read lines on palms’. She had also engaged an Augustinian friar who claimed to be able to predict the future although, as Visconti drily noted, she had dispensed with his services after he foretold that her husband would outlive her. Later Mme de Vassé would feature peripherally in the Affair of the Poisons because several fortune tellers claimed that she had approached them in hopes of killing her husband, although Mme de Vassé herself never seems to have been questioned about this.
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Apart from his skill as a graphologist Visconti also claimed to be able to divine a person’s disposition and outlook by studying their facial features. One day a court lady slyly asked him if he could derive the same insights from gazing at a woman’s breast, rather than her physiognomy. Visconti instantly responded that doing so would bring ‘still better’ results, ‘and if it was permissible to examine a naked body, I would acquire myself a reputation as a miracle worker.’
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Visconti was joking but during the Affair of the Poisons it was seriously suggested that court ladies had been prepared to submit themselves to comparable indignities at the hands of much more sinister figures than he.

Visconti himself encountered people at court whose interest in the occult went further than his own. The Comtesse de Soissons’s brother, the Duc de Nevers, and the Duc de Brissac told him that they wanted to see the devil but that, ‘despite their extensive investigations, their invocations and their expenditures’, Satan ‘had never satisfied their curiosity’.
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Later it would be alleged that they were by no means alone in dabbling in such matters.

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It was, of course, a paradox that such primitive beliefs could find adherents in a court which prided itself on being the most sophisticated and urbane in the world. Louis XIV’s cousin, Mlle de Montpensier, indeed described it as ‘the most polished and refined court there has ever been’, while it was the judgement of Voltaire that ‘Europe owed its good breeding and social sense to Louis XIV’s court.’ It was only to be expected that French fashions should dominate the continent, but even in matters such as gastronomy a celebrated chef was confident ‘that in that … France carries the day … over all other nations as it does in good breeding and a thousand other sufficiently well-known ways’.
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According to Voltaire the French court was characterised by a ‘singular politeness’, taking its tenor in this from the King who was described by one acquaintance as ‘the most polite man in his kingdom’. At court the most intricate rules governed everyday social intercourse, which could be a minefield to the uninitiated. For example, it was considered a solecism on the part of a gentleman actually to kiss the hand of any lady below the rank of princess but on being presented to ladies of lesser status it was correct to utter the words ‘I kiss your hands.’ Those who fell foul of such arcane procedures found themselves mercilessly ridiculed. The unfortunate Marquis de Montbrun discovered this when he made the mistake of boasting that he was good at dancing and then performing gracelessly at a court ball. The other guests began hooting with laughter, making such an uproar that ‘nobody has ever endured the like. And so he disappeared immediately after and did not show himself again for a long time.’
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The French court instilled in its inhabitants an overwhelming sense of superiority, for it was taken as self-evident that the world of Versailles represented civilisation at its height. The Abbé de Saint-Réal noted wryly, ‘Their contempt for anything that is not of the court is unimaginable, and goes to the point of extravagance. There is nothing well said or well done except what is said or done among them.’ In his opinion, however, the lustre of the court was largely superficial. He wrote caustically, ‘The people of the court … are not all men of intelligence but they are possessed of an admirable politeness that serves them in its stead. They are not all worthy men but they have the air and manner that makes one think them such.’
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Certainly their surface polish could not disguise a fundamental lack of kindness and Christian feeling in many courtiers. The journal of the Marquis de Sourches provides an illustration: after suffering a stroke in 1687, Mme de Menesserre kept breaking into inane laughter for no reason, apparently without realising what she was doing. Sourches noted that this afforded the courtiers, who were ‘not very charitable by nature’, endless opportunities to make cruel jokes at her expense. Such incidents justify La Bruyère’s dictum that the court was composed of men who, like diamonds, were ‘very hard but highly polished’, which led him to the conclusion that ‘all this great refinement is nothing other than a vice called falsehood’.
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Although great importance was attached to correct behaviour, the courtly code of conduct was much less strict when it came to fundamental morality. La Bruyère commented that at court one saw ‘vice reign equally with good breeding’ and the curé of Versailles, Hébert, claimed that never before had there been a court ‘so given up to every sort of vice’. The German diplomat Ezechiel Spanheim believed that the court of the Sun King was ‘the most libertine court in Europe’, while another foreign visitor, the Duke of Pastrana, was so amazed by the spectacle which greeted him when he first set eyes on the court that he exclaimed, ‘Monsieur, this is a real bordello!’
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Primi Visconti was surprised to see that many aristocratic married ladies lived separate existences from their husbands, which he believed was conducive to ‘a great liberty of morals’. Even in cases where marriages had not completely broken down, infidelity was rife. The King’s German sister-in-law, Madame, stated, ‘It is an acknowledged fact that men have affairs and scorn their wives,’ and after studying the period Voltaire formed the impression that ‘all the married women were permitted to have lovers.’ The Savoyard ambassador sounded a note of caution when he told his master that the court was not nearly as promiscuous as scandalmongers claimed, but the force of this disclaimer is undermined by the fact that at other times his despatches provide confirmation that moral standards were poor.
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