The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (30 page)

During that episode several cases would come to light when attempts to practise magic had ultimately led to much worse things. Few people came to the divineress with the express intention of purchasing poison. On the whole, they began by complaining of their husband or some other individual who irked them, and the divineress would hold out the hope that their death could be brought about by supernatural means. It was only when this failed to achieve the desired result that they became ready to countenance murder, for the spells that had proved so harmless to the intended victim invariably had a corrupting effect on the perpetrators. Having already parted with a great deal of money, and unwilling to endure disappointment, the client found it easier to take on board that poison could provide an acceptable solution. Thus, merely by consulting the divineress the client had set in motion a cycle of moral degradation, which led to crimes that would once have seemed unthinkable.

For this reason even those who did not believe that ‘witches’ possessed magical powers had no doubt of their capacity for evil. The Duchesse d’Orléans, who prided herself on her robust common sense, commented that it was obviously wrong to burn reputed witches for having ‘flown down the chimney mounted on a broomstick’, but all too often serious crimes could be laid at their door. In such cases harsh treatment was in order and if it could be shown that they ‘had handled poisons or committed sacrilege they cannot be punished too severely’.
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M. de La Reynie was convinced that the arrest of Mme Bosse and Mme Vigoreux would prove pregnant with consequence. He was not surprised when preliminary interrogations indicated that la Bosse and Magdelaine de La Grange were known to each other, and had sometimes worked together. Furthermore, Mme de La Grange appeared to have had contacts with Vanens and his servant La Chaboissière who, prior to his own arrest, was reported to have visited the priest Nail in prison.
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To La Reynie’s mind all this confirmed that a network of poisoners was active in Paris and that they were operating in concert with one another. As yet, he was groping for details but he believed that, if she chose, Mme de La Grange could help him to find the missing piece of the jigsaw.

Since the discovery of the anonymous letter in the autumn of 1677, Magdelaine de La Grange had been regularly questioned, but her answers had always been infuriatingly obscure. She had explained that while she had a strong feeling that the King and the Dauphin remained in danger, her clairvoyant powers would not work while she was in prison. Only if she was moved to somewhere with a more ‘free and serene’ atmosphere would she be able to function satisfactorily.
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La Reynie had not fallen for this, but he was sure that, provided he waited long enough, Mme de La Grange would give him the information he wanted. However, although he would have liked to postpone the execution of both her and Nail until the moment when he could feel confident they had yielded up all their secrets, this proved impractical. In November 1678 the Controller-General of Finance, M. Colbert, had begun to complain that it would be an abuse of the legal process if their appeal were put off any longer. By early 1679 the pressure to resume proceedings had become irresistible.
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On 4 February the appeal of Nail and Mme de La Grange was heard by
Parlement.
That body upheld the lower court’s verdict of guilty and confirmed that the pair should be hanged after enduring torture. Still anxious about the prospect of her being silenced for ever, the King, Louvois and La Reynie decided that, contrary to normal practice, an interval should elapse between Mme de La Grange’s torture and execution. This would enable the King to study the written record of her interrogation. If under torture she said anything that suggested she and Vanens were leagued together in a conspiracy, a confrontation must be arranged between the two of them prior to her hanging. Because the information that might come to light as a result was likely to be so sensitive the King decreed that, in another departure from convention, no commissioners from
Parlement
should be present at this meeting. Instead, M. de La Reynie was entrusted with the responsibility of monitoring proceedings.
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After all these precautions, Mme de La Grange’s end was something of an anticlimax. Under torture she revealed nothing of interest, insisting that Vanens was unknown to her and that she could cast no further light on the anonymous letter. Nail was equally unforthcoming, even though he was tortured so severely that at one point he lost consciousness and had to be revived before fresh torments could be applied.
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La Reynie did not give up hope, reasoning that one of the prisoners might start to talk as they were taken in tumbrils to the place of execution. If it appeared that either had anything significant to say, they could even then be diverted to the Town Hall for a confrontation with Vanens. However, to La Reynie’s regret, as they were taken to their deaths, neither of the prisoners proved particularly communicative. On the way to the Place de Grève, Mme de La Grange did suddenly volunteer that her marriage certificate had been forged and that she had duped the notary who drew up her marriage contract. Nail admitted that he had impersonated Faurye, but their acknowledgement of these commonplace crimes fell far short of what La Reynie wanted. Enigmatic to the last, on the evening of 8 February 1679 Magdelaine de La Grange and Nail were hanged by torchlight.
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The pair had died with their secrets still intact, but while this was a setback for La Reynie he did not despair. By now there were other prisoners in custody on suspicion of poisoning and he was confident that, though so far the truth had eluded him, he was on the verge of making important discoveries. While Magdelaine de La Grange had ultimately frustrated him, it was to be hoped that Marie Bosse and Mme Vigoreux would prove more enlightening.

FIVE

LA VOISIN

Following the arrest of Mme Vigoreux and Marie Bosse in early January 1679 their houses had been searched. Substances discovered there were taken away to be analysed and suspicions mounted against Marie Bosse when a casket belonging to her was found to contain not only disturbing items such as nail clippings and samples of menstrual blood, but also arsenic, cantharides and nitric acid.

Things looked even worse when Mme Vigoreux disclosed that Mme Marguerite de Poulaillon was a client of hers and la Bosse. La Vigoreux maintained that this lady, who came from a good family in Bordeaux and was married to a well-to-do bureaucrat, had come to them to have her fortune read and to borrow money. However, it seemed likely there had been more to it than that, for Mme de Poulaillon had recently been put in a convent by her husband after he had been warned that she was trying to kill him.

Further interest was aroused when Mme Vigoreux revealed that la Bosse was on friendly terms with a woman called Mme Philbert. The latter was now the wife of a court musician, but some years ago her first husband, M. Brunet, had died in suspicious circumstances. La Vigoreux also provided the first intimation that people at court might be implicated in the affair when she mentioned that the Marquis de Feuquières had asked her to devise a way of protecting him against being wounded in battle. Sensing that this would be the forerunner of more significant disclosures, on 6 January 1679 M. de La Reynie requested the King’s authorisation to take personal charge of the inquiry. This was speedily granted.

On 1 February Mme de Poulaillon was arrested and taken to Vincennes. A former servant of hers, Perrine Delabarre, was also taken into custody and before long poured forth a wealth of compromising information about her employer. It emerged that Mme de Poulaillon had been having an affair with the self-styled Marquis de La Rivière, an immensely charming adventurer who supported himself by preying on susceptible women. People had attempted to alert M. de Poulaillon to what was going on, but he did not listen, for he doted on his attractive young wife to such an extent that ‘one kind word’ from her was enough to keep him happy.
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Unfortunately, M. de La Rivière was so expensive to maintain that Mme de Poulaillon had found herself in constant need of money. If her husband gave her a new dress, she at once pawned it to raise cash for her lover, but the sums raised in this way were soon dissipated. Desperately she had formed plans to break into her husband’s study to steal a valuable pair of hangings and even had a key cut to enable her to take money out of his strongbox. However, after a series of farcical mishaps, all these schemes had come to nothing.

By now Mme de Poulaillon had begun having consultations with Mme Vigoreux and, after hearing her plight, la Vigoreux sent her to see Marie Bosse. Matters had then taken a grimmer turn. After paying several visits to Mme de Poulaillon’s country house, la Bosse had instructed her to furnish her with one of M. de Poulaillon’s shirts, together with some arsenic which Mme de Poulaillon had originally purchased to use as rat poison. La Bosse had then combined the arsenic with soap and washed the shirt with it, claiming that when M. de Poulaillon next wore the shirt his lower parts would become painful and inflamed. Mme de Poulaillon may have been led to hope that the effects would prove fatal, although she later claimed that she had simply intended to rob her husband’s strongbox while he was bedridden with this complaint. It is, in fact, doubtful that M. de Poulaillon would have been harmed by wearing the shirt (though la Bosse assured her client that she had achieved excellent results in the past) but in the event this was never put to the test. After being treated by la Bosse, the shirt acquired such a noticeably brownish tinge that Mme de Poulaillon decided it was impossible to use it.
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However, far from giving up altogether, Mme de Poulaillon twice gave her servant Perrine Delabarre phials of liquid and ordered her to add the contents to her husband’s wine. On both occasions the frightened servant poured the liquid away, so M. de Poulaillon came to no harm. But towards the end of 1678 he received several anonymous warnings that his wife had attempted to murder him and this eventually persuaded him that his own safety demanded that he should place her in a convent.

Even this did not stop the determined Mme de Poulaillon. In December she left her convent to visit Marie Bosse and Mme Vigoreux in Paris, and they agreed that a final effort must be made to poison Poulaillon. Accordingly, Mme Bosse had enlisted the services of a fruit seller, Anne Cheron, and François Belot, a member of the royal guard. Belot had boasted that he had a secret way of poisoning silver cups, so infallible that ‘if fifty people drank out of it, even after it had been washed and rinsed, they would all die’. At the very beginning of January 1679 la Cheron had supplied Belot with the live toad he said he needed, and at la Bosse’s house they had together set about torturing the poor animal to render it in the right condition for their purposes. After it had been beaten, they forced arsenic into its mouth on the assumption that if the creature urinated during its death throes, its piss would prove highly toxic.
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A cup supplied by Mme de Poulaillon was then treated with this noxious fluid. However, before the utensil could be used, Marie Bosse and Mme Vigoreux had been arrested on 4 January.

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As La Reynie amassed more information, so the number of people in custody grew. François Belot and Anne Cheron joined Marie Bosse at Vincennes. On 1 March orders were given for the arrest of Mme Philbert, for there were now strong suspicions that she had murdered her first husband, M. Brunet. A woman called Mme Ferry, whose husband had died shortly before la Bosse’s arrest, after an illness lasting three weeks, was also detained.

By 8 March it seemed clear that there would have to be numerous trials to bring these and other malefactors to justice. After consultation with Louvois, the King decided to form a special commission to hear all the cases. Fourteen commissioners from the higher ranks of the legal hierarchy were chosen by the King to serve as judges on this tribunal, which had its own president, attorney-general and recorder. M. de La Reynie was named as one of the commissioners, but besides this judicial role he also remained in charge of the investigation into poisoning. In addition he was appointed
rapporteur
to the commission, which meant that once he had amassed evidence against defendants he outlined the case to his fellow commissioners. In effect, therefore, he acted as a detective, prosecutor and judge.

Another commissioner, Louis Bazin, Seigneur de Bezons, was selected as an auxiliary
rapporteur.
This former
Intendant
had already established a fruitful working relationship with La Reynie when he had served alongside him on the commission that dealt with the Chevalier de Rohan’s treason. The Marquis de La Fare later alleged that Bezons had trapped Rohan into admitting his guilt by falsely promising him a pardon. There would be claims that during the poisons inquiry, Bezons would be equally unscrupulous about obtaining convictions, and Primi Visconti went so far as to call him ‘the Judas of the assembly’.
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One reason for forming the commission was that the King did not want the regular courts – which were overburdened with business as it was – to become clogged up with poisoning cases. Besides this, however, Louis wanted to prevent details of the investigation from becoming public and he strongly urged the commissioners to divulge nothing about their proceedings to outsiders.
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It is clear that although no high-ranking people had yet been implicated as poisoners, it was anticipated that this would be an inevitable outcome of the current inquiry. When that happened, the King wanted secrecy to be preserved as far as possible. It was also assumed that in such circumstances a special commission would prove less vulnerable to pressure from interested parties than would be the case if the matter came before
Parlement.