The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (35 page)

All went according to plan, for shortly afterwards Gontier had taken Mme Desmaretz as his wife. Following Lesage’s arrest, however, the methods she had used to ensnare her husband were exposed to humiliating scrutiny. In late August 1679 Mme Desmaretz was summoned before the
Chambre Ardente
to give an account of her actions. Presumably it came as an unpleasant shock to M. Gontier to learn of the manner in which he had been manoeuvred into marriage, but the commissioners were not too hard on her and let her off with a modest fine for profanity.

Mme Brissart was another of la Voisin’s clients whose romantic aspirations were furthered by Lesage. She yearned for an army officer named Captain Rubantel who, before going on campaign, had happily spent her money to fit himself out with military accoutrements, but since then had treated her coldly. Once again Lesage resolved the situation by performing a solemn ceremony. Having struck the ground with his wand, he called on Rubantel, in the name of the ‘all-powerful one’ to cease neglecting Mme Brissart, who henceforth would possess his heart and body. This, too, yielded results, for Rubantel soon became more attentive, though Lesage himself would later give a prosaic reason for his success. He explained that Mme Brissart had initially wearied her lover by showing herself too eager, but when she followed Lesage’s advice and became more distant, Rubantel’s interest was reawakened.
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Matters relating to love and marriage formed a fair part of Lesage’s business, but for him death, too, was a saleable commodity. Admittedly, when people came to him in the hope that he could arrange for a death to take place, he never sought to facilitate crude acts of homicide. Mme Voisin herself would ultimately exonerate him of this, for her final words on Lesage were that while he had proved to be ‘no friend of hers’, she did not believe he had ever been involved in any form of poisoning.
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Instead, Lesage convinced his clients that he could procure deaths by casting spells and that this was an infinitely more sensible way to proceed than resorting to poison, with its inherent risk of detection.

It was not until some months after his arrest that details of all this began to emerge. Lesage had doubtless hoped that such matters could be kept hidden but gradually it became plain that they had taken up much of his time. He admitted, for example, that the Comte de Gassilly, a former client of Marie Bosse and Mme Vigoreux, had come to him because he wanted his uncle to die. Lesage had instructed the Comte to furnish him with some human bones and had then performed some ‘monkey tricks’ with them, which satisfied Gassilly that his uncle would not live much longer. On another occasion a cook named David and his friend Chaix had informed Lesage that they wanted to murder M. Poncet, a
Conseiller d’état.
Lesage then performed a series of spells featuring arsenic, telling them that this obviated the need of actually administering the poison to Poncet.
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Lesage did his best to make out that his conduct was not worthy of serious censure. Unlike other members of his profession, he did not really believe in magic and had merely cynically imposed on the credulous in order to make money. While he could hardly deny that his activities had been fraudulent, he sought to portray them as essentially harmless. He even argued that he had actually saved lives by luring clients away from the likes of la Bosse, la Voisin and la Vigoreux, for they would have advocated the use of poison to resolve difficulties, to which he was resolutely opposed. He therefore deserved credit for having persuaded ‘Gassilly and the others to abandon the route of poison’ by convincing them that he could help them attain their wishes with complete safety. Citing another case where he had persuaded the divineress Mme Chapelain to enlist his aid rather than kill someone through her own efforts, he noted proudly that ‘by his monkey tricks he persuaded her he knew much more about poisoning people through magic’ than she could achieve with more conventional methods. He claimed that there had been many times when, by ‘similar contrivances’ he had ‘prevented … pernicious designs’ from being executed.
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Despite his efforts to present his actions in a favourable light, Lesage had better reason than anyone to be aware that they were liable to incur savage retribution. Nevertheless, he clung to the hope that if he furthered the inquiry without incriminating himself too much he would be shown mercy, and he did everything he could to achieve this result. He had no qualms about denouncing others, overwhelming them with a torrent of accusations, which he steadfastly maintained in the face of their shrill denials. As a practised and polished liar who was accustomed to living on his wits, Lesage had no difficulty mingling truth and falsehood in the most plausible fashion, and he was determined that through his adroit manipulation of the evidence he would manoeuvre himself into a much more advantageous position.

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Lesage’s relations with la Voisin had by no means always been harmonious but they had acknowledged each other as masters in their field and la Voisin had never quite overcome her fascination for him. It appears that following his return from the galleys, she had continued to be strongly attracted to him, though Lesage had not reciprocated her feelings as warmly as she would have liked. At one point la Voisin had tried to remedy this by paying her neighbour, la Pelletier, to perform a Novena on her behalf in the hope that this would make Lesage fall in love with her. When this had failed, la Voisin had tried another tactic, telling Lesage that she had given birth to his child and that he must support it. However, since Lesage suspected – rightly, as it turned out – that the child was supposititious, he refused to acknowledge it as his own. He told her he considered her too old to conceive a baby and that unless he received independent evidence that she had given birth – such as proof that she was lactating – he would not contribute a sou to the child’s upkeep.
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Now, however, that both were in custody there was no question that memories of their past affection would make them try to protect each other. La Voisin herself recognised well enough that she could expect no loyalty whatever from Lesage. When they were brought together for a confrontation on 19 May she commented bitterly ‘that he had always betrayed her’ to which Lesage retorted that, on the contrary, it was she who had always cheated him. Certainly, on his arrest Lesage had wasted little time heaping calumny on his former lover. During his very first interrogation on 22 March he had described la Voisin as ‘a wicked woman whom God will punish’, and he would later refer to her as ‘a veteran poisoner’.
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In the months after his arrest Lesage would testify that la Voisin had on more than one occasion tried to poison her own husband. He even claimed that after a quarrel between them he himself had come close to being poisoned by her. Hearing that he was ill, la Voisin had sent the herbalist Maître Pierre to his bedside but Lesage said that the supposedly therapeutic plasters that Maître Pierre had applied had made him so ill that he would have died had he not promptly removed them.
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However, his allegations against la Voisin were far more extensive than this, for he accused her of multiple murders, which no one else attributed to her and for which she never admitted responsibility.

Among those whom Lesage listed as victims of la Voisin was a M. Le Roule, whose wife had supposedly sought la Voisin’s help in eliminating him and who had been killed with poisons supplied by Maître Pierre. According to Lesage, la Voisin was also behind the death of the Comte d’Argenton. His widow had subsequently remarried but had then taken against her second husband and had approached la Voisin to see if he, too, could be poisoned. In addition, a man called Nesle had given la Voisin a pearl necklace because he wanted to poison somebody. When la Voisin was told of this accusation against her, she agreed that Nesle had been a client of hers but said he had come to her simply because he wanted her to further a marriage for him.
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Lesage further alleged that a woman called Mme Yvon had prevailed upon la Voisin to poison her husband. Some years after his death Mme Yvon had asked la Voisin to provide the same service for a daughter of hers named Mme Leroy, whose marriage was unhappy. On being challenged about this during a confrontation with Lesage, la Voisin protested that she had had nothing to do with Yvon’s death and had never even met with Mme Yvon in the lifetime of her husband. It was true that Mme Yvon had later brought her daughter to see her but this was simply because they wanted la Voisin to devise a way of arranging that M. Leroy’s niece should leave his household.
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Lesage supplemented this by accusing la Voisin of having enabled Mme de Montmort to kill her husband. When this was put to la Voisin she was adamant that Mme de Montmort had only wanted her assistance to recover a lost casket. Another person who had allegedly sought la Voisin’s assistance in a murder was the German Mlle de Bribach, who had wanted to marry a man named M. de Montauban. Fearing that Montauban’s sister would obstruct the union, she had sent a servant to obtain a liquid from la Voisin to resolve the matter. Lesage admitted he did not know whether the intended victim had lived or died, whereas la Voisin denied that murder had ever been contemplated. She admitted that Mlle de Bribach had hoped to marry M. de Montauban but said that all she had done for her was to provide her with a love potion made from the dried corpse of a mole.
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La Voisin was by no means the only person against whom Lesage testified, for he proved eager to blacken a significant number of his former associates. At his very first interrogation he had been scathing about Marie Bosse (‘She’s the worst, that one,’ was his comment) but he followed this up with attacks on numerous other denizens of the Paris underworld who had hitherto escaped suspicion. It was he who first named the herbalist Maître Pierre as an accomplished poisoner, claiming that he was an expert on preparing deadly enemas and toxic infusions. He said la Voisin purchased many of her poisons from him, but la Bosse, la Trianon and la Delaporte were also his devoted customers. Blessis and Latour, two other men who were much in la Voisin’s company, were ‘very wicked persons’. Blessis, who was one of Mme Voisin’s lovers, was not only a forger but was probably the person who had taught her how to poison linen and perfumes. For good measure Lesage added that he understood a man called Boucher, whom he had never actually met, had not only poisoned his own wife but had worked in conjunction with the divineress Mme Chapelain. Together they had practised magic and made poisons, and he believed them to have been guilty of ‘great abominations’.
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On 23 June Lesage had announced that he had ‘important things to declare … which he was ready to do for the discharge of his conscience’, as it was ‘a question of duty, above all regarding the King’. What he had to say related to Louis Vanens and Cadelan, who had never been charged since their arrest in 1677 but were still in prison on suspicion of serious offences. Without advancing any proof, Lesage stated that he knew Cadelan had poisoned his wife’s first husband, a rich man named Rondeau. More worrying still, he revealed that Vanens, Cadelan and Bachimont had entered into a grand conspiracy with a pirate captain named Baix and Dr Rabel, a fashionable physician who was currently living in England. Lesage remained vague as to their objectives, though he hazarded it had something to do with making gold, and that there was some Italian link, as all the protagonists had travelled extensively in that country. Lesage stressed that it was of ‘great consequence for the King’s service’ that Baix should be located, as he was ‘very dangerous’. Lesage was far from clear as to the privateer’s whereabouts, suggesting that he might now be living in Dunkirk, Sweden or even Transylvania; nevertheless, urgent (though unsuccessful) efforts were at once made to find Baix.
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Since so much of Lesage’s information was ill defined and insubstantial it is curious that he commanded so much attention. Strictly speaking, indeed, no account whatever should have been taken of his evidence, for the law stated that as a convicted criminal he was ineligible to testify against others. Yet Louvois made it clear that he considered him a particularly valuable witness, enthusing that despite the fact that Lesage himself had never been implicated in any poisonings, he knew all about those committed in recent years. Lesage did not fail to take advantage of such twisted logic and was determined to exploit every opportunity afforded him of talking his way out of trouble. Articulate and wily, and highly attuned to what his interlocutors wanted to hear, he was able to play upon their fears in the most masterly fashion. Possessing those essential attributes of the skilled liar, a fertile imagination and a retentive memory, he had the knack of enlivening his stories with such vivid detail that even his most brazen inventions acquired a spurious verisimilitude. Encouraged by the reception accorded to his words, he soon progressed from making accusations against former colleagues to attacking the reputation of much more eminent persons and it was largely due to him that the scope of the inquiry became so much wider. Having been put on trial as a result of Lesage’s denunciations, the Maréchal de Luxembourg would bitterly point to him as the true ‘author of this whole web of perfidy and iniquity’.
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On 15 September la Voisin had suggested that Lesage knew damaging things about the Duchesse de Vivonne. For a time Lesage dodged responding to this directly but two days later he counter-attacked by alleging that la Voisin herself had had links with people at court, which merited investigation. Precisely what he said cannot be established, but from the notes La Reynie jotted down it would seem Lesage indicated that in 1675 Mme Voisin had paid frequent visits to the royal palace of Saint-Germain. She had delivered powders to clients there and Lesage said these had contained cantharides. At the time she had been engaged in some project which her husband had considered extremely risky and had prophesied would bring disaster on her. La Voisin, however, had expected it would make her rich and had plans to leave the country once she had been paid the enormous sum of 100,000 écus. Several associates of la Voisin had been privy to the conspiracy, including Latour, Marie Bosse, la Vigoreux and the divineresses la Petit and la Bergerot.
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