Friday the 13th is a fitting day to open a file that a king wanted to disappear.
In July 1709, Louis XIV had a stack of papers burned in front of him. They came from one of the strangest scandals of his reign: a Paris underworld of fortune-tellers, poison sellers and renegade priests, and a list of names that reached all the way to the woman who had given him seven children. Ever since, historians have argued over what was in those papers, and how much of it was true.
This is the Affair of the Poisons. It has everything a Borgia-style scandal needs and, as we will see, very little that anyone can prove.
A box of letters, and a city that stopped trusting its neighbors
It starts with a death that was not suspicious at all. On 31 July 1672, a cavalry officer named Godin de Sainte-Croix was found dead at home, of natural causes. But the inventory of his belongings turned up vials and a small box, and in the box were nine letters from his lover, the Marquise de Brinvilliers. In them, according to the French Ministry of Justice, she claimed to have poisoned her father in 1666 and her two brothers in 1670. An apothecary tested the vials and found virulent poisons that left little trace in the body.
She fled, but in 1676 she was caught, tried, questioned with the “water cure,” and beheaded in Paris on 17 July, her body burned afterward. Paris had watched a noblewoman convicted of poisoning her own family. Poison for hire was an old trade, as our piece on Locusta of Gaul, Nero’s poisoner shows, but now it seemed to be everywhere.
The police chief who hunted her, Nicolas de La Reynie, stayed on high alert. For another family whose name is tied to poison and palace scandal, see our look at the House of Borgia.
The tip, the torture and La Voisin
Sources differ on when the trail began. The French Ministry of Justice says an anonymous note about a plot to poison the king was left in a Jesuit confessional in September 1677. Historian Lynn Wood Mollenauer dates La Reynie’s discovery of the plot to the fall of 1678. Either way, the investigation led to a woman named Marie Bosse, who boasted of poisoning at the urging of aristocratic women. She was arrested, and under torture she named Catherine Deshayes, wife of the jeweler Antoine Monvoisin, known to all Paris as La Voisin.
Wikipedia describes La Voisin as a fortune-teller and midwife who grew wealthy, with clients among the highest aristocracy. She was arrested on 12 March 1679 along with several associates. On 7 April 1679, the king created a special court to try “an affair of poisons.”
The burning chamber
It was called the Chambre ardente, the “burning chamber,” because its hearings took place in a room hung with black cloth and lit by torches. It sat at the Arsenal near the Bastille, with about a dozen senior magistrates, in secret. La Reynie served as one of its two reporting judges.
Between April 1679 and July 1682, the court heard 442 accused and ordered 367 arrests, of which 218 were maintained, according to the French Ministry of Justice. Fortune-tellers, magicians and priests confessed to selling love charms, to magic, to poisoning, and then, hoping to save themselves, they began naming customers. Nobles were named. The Marshal-Duke of Luxembourg, a famous soldier, was named and, the ministry says, wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille for 14 months.
Here is the problem the ministry itself points out: most accusations came from the confessions of La Voisin’s circle, and hard evidence was lacking. La Reynie, it says, with little critical eye, recorded everything, including infants supposedly killed in black masses and buried in gardens, which the ministry lists among the exaggerations and inventions in the confessions. Mollenauer writes that the suspects spun their stories to please their interrogators, like Scheherazade whose life depended on keeping the tale going. The Spectator‘s review of Anne Somerset’s study summarizes her finding that almost all the evidence La Reynie’s commission gathered was either hearsay or produced under torture.
La Voisin herself was burned alive on the Place de Grève in Paris on 22 February 1680, in front of a crowd the ministry calls hysterical. It should have ended there. It did not.
Then the daughter talked
La Voisin’s daughter, Marie-Marguerite, had been arrested in January 1680. After her mother’s execution, she told La Reynie what she said she knew. In the summer of 1680, she and other prisoners said that Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s official mistress, was one of La Voisin’s clients. According to Wikipedia’s account, which relies on Somerset, a magician named Adam Lesage added claims of child sacrifice, Françoise Filastre backed both stories on 1 October 1680, and on 10 October the priest Étienne Guibourg, accused of having celebrated the masses, confirmed the child-sacrifice claim.
What were the allegations? The Encyclopedia of Women in World History lists them. The prisoners variously claimed, sometimes under torture, that Montespan had used love potions on the king, that she had plotted to poison him, that she had poisoned a younger rival, and that she had taken part in black masses. In those masses, the accused said, she lay as the altar while an infant was killed. These are accusations, not established facts. They came from prisoners who were facing execution, and the dates of the supposed masses shift from one retelling to the next, anywhere from 1666 to 1680.
One famous claim you may have seen online is that police dug up the bones of 2,500 infants in La Voisin’s garden. We cannot find any support for it. Anne Somerset, in her standard study, disputes it, according to Wikipedia, and neither the French Ministry’s account nor the Spectator’s review of Somerset mentions such a discovery. Treat it as legend. The vivid, candle-lit black mass scene quoted on Wikipedia comes from a twentieth-century writer, Montague Summers, and should not be mistaken for a court record.
The king closes the file
Louis XIV saw at once what was at stake. According to the ministry, as soon as rumors about Montespan surfaced, he told the judges to stop writing interrogations into the registers and to use loose sheets instead, and the sheets went into a sealed casket he kept himself. On 14 May 1681, according to the Encyclopedia of Women in World History, he ordered the testimony against Montespan removed from the files, and the ministry says he soon told the Chambre ardente to drop any case in which her name appeared. The judges did not accept this. On 21 July 1682, the king suspended the court. He scattered the last accused through royal prisons by lettres de cachet, secret orders of imprisonment, where they stayed for life. La Voisin’s daughter was sent to the island fortress of Belle-Île-en-Mer. Guibourg went to Besançon.
By the French Ministry’s count, the court had 34 people executed, sent five to the galleys and sentenced 23 to banishment. Other sources give slightly different totals: Wikipedia says 36 executions, and Mollenauer counts 36 deaths, four to the galleys and 34 into exile. In 1682, a royal edict also regulated the sale of poisons and, according to Mollenauer, declared magic a fraud.
Madame de Montespan was never questioned and never faced her accusers. She left court in 1691, retired to a Paris convent, and died on 27 May 1707.
What do we actually know?
The Encyclopedia of Women in World History sums up the view of historians like this: Montespan probably was in touch with La Voisin through a personal maid and obtained aphrodisiacs and charms to keep the king’s favor, but she had nothing to do with any plot to poison him. In its summary, the younger rival, the Duchess of Fontanges, died of natural causes, not poison. As for the black masses, the encyclopedia says the accounts contain significant discrepancies and implausibilities but cannot be ruled out definitively, so the Scottish verdict of “not proved” fits best. Mollenauer says the reliability of the suspects’ testimony “remains highly uncertain.”
The review of Somerset’s book in the Spectator goes further, saying that in the end it all seemed like a storm in a teacup, made worse by the very commission set up to control it, and that the poisoning epidemic was nothing like as widespread as first claimed. For another case of fear feeding accusation, see the Salem witch trials and the ergot theory. For another prisoner of Louis XIV’s secretive state, see the Man in the Iron Mask.
The fire of 1709, and the papers that survived
A record preserved in the French National Archives, dated 13 July 1709 and published by the historian François Ravaisson, says the king, in council, examined the minutes and documents that the chancellor handed to him and had them burned in his presence. The ministry puts it more bluntly: the king burned the accusing papers from his casket himself. The papers in the record had come from La Reynie and from the late Sagot, the clerk of the Chambre. By that time La Reynie had been dead for less than a month, according to Wikipedia, which gives his death as 14 June 1709. No source we found says what, if anything, that timing means.
Not everything vanished. The French National Library’s catalog shows that the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal still holds 22 manuscript volumes on the Affair of the Poisons, and the catalog itself notes that far from all the documents have survived.
Your turn
Was Madame de Montespan a woman who used love charms to hold on to a king, a victim of prisoners trying to save their own necks, or something darker? Tell us in the comments: what do you think was in the papers Louis XIV burned?
Historic Mystery
Sources
French Ministry of Justice, “L’affaire des poisons,” in the series “Les grands procès de l’histoire”: justice.gouv.fr/actualites/actualite/laffaire-poisons
Lynn Wood Mollenauer, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France (Penn State University Press), publisher’s page with excerpt: psupress.org
Lynn Wood Mollenauer, “Scandal, conspiracy and the affair of the poisons: inside the court of Louis XIV,” HistoryExtra: historyextra.com
“Montespan, Françoise, Marquise de (1640 to 1707),” Encyclopedia of Women in World History: encyclopedia.com
Review of Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), The Spectator: “An epidemic of suspicion,” 27 September 2003: archive.spectator.co.uk
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Archives et manuscrits, “Archives de la Bastille” (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms-10338 to 10359, “Affaire des poisons”), quoting the 13 July 1709 record published in François Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille, vol. 12: archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr
“Affair of the Poisons,” “La Voisin,” “Étienne Guibourg,” “Madame de Montespan,” “Marguerite Monvoisin,” and “Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie,” Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_Poisons
Image: Henri Gascar, portrait of Madame de Montespan at Clagny, 17th century, Wikimedia Commons (public domain): commons.wikimedia.org
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