The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (33 page)

On 27 May, by which time she had been in custody more than two months, Mme Lepère made much fuller admissions. She acknowledged for the first time that she had the knack of ‘voiding’ pregnant women, though she still insisted that the technique she used was not at all invasive. She explained gravely that she performed the operation with water rather than a hooked instrument and that ‘everything depends on the manner of syringing’.
³⁵

By her own account she had profited little from these skills, for la Voisin had always fixed the price with the client and had only given Mme Lepère a small percentage. Mme Lepère even tried to make out that for many years she had been performing a public service: by saving ladies of rank from embarrassing pregnancies, she had succeeded in conserving their honour. She took pride, too, in recalling that when she performed abortions on women who were so far advanced in pregnancy that the infant showed brief signs of life she would baptise the little creature, securing its salvation. Having saved its soul, she would take the tiny corpse in a box to the local gravedigger who, for a paltry bribe, would be prepared to bury the pathetic bundle in a corner of the cemetery. It may be doubted, however, whether all the aborted infants came to rest in consecrated ground. La Bosse had alleged that large numbers of them were buried in la Voisin’s garden (there is no mention, oddly, of it being searched for human remains) and other sources claimed that la Voisin disposed of bones and waste material in a small stove in her consulting room.

*   *   *

Neither la Voisin nor la Lepère appear to have been pressed to reveal the identities of the women who came to them for abortions, which gives some credence to Primi Visconti’s claim that the King discouraged this aspect of the inquiry from being taken further. However, as the days went by Mme Voisin gave the names of a significant number of clients who, she said, had approached her in the hope that she could hasten the death of another person. Among them was Mme Brissart, the widow of a
Conseiller
in
Parlement.
According to la Voisin, she had first contacted her because her love life was going badly, but she had then asked if anything could be done to rid her of her sister, who had displeased her by contracting an unsuitable marriage. Mme Brissart was consequently detained at Vincennes, though she protested that her sister’s death five years earlier had been caused by smallpox rather than as a result of her intervention. Mme Vertemart was also arrested after it emerged that she had consulted la Voisin on the advice of her aunts because she longed for her husband to die. Mme Roussel was another woman said by la Voisin to have had ‘wicked designs’ on her husband and she was taken into custody in early July.
³⁶

Some of those named by la Voisin were no longer available for questioning. Mme de Saint-Martin, who was said to have yearned for the death of her husband, had herself been dead for some years. Others who were still alive could not be located. In June 1679 la Voisin began giving an account of how, years before, the Marquise de Canilhac had visited her with her lover, M. de Broglio. The couple had started by asking whether Mme Voisin could provide them with some remedy which would make the Marquis de Canilhac drink less for, when drunk, he behaved ‘worse than a pig and brute beast’. When the potion supplied by la Voisin failed to lessen his consumption, the lovers had demanded something more lethal. La Voisin had gone to Mme Lepère, who gave her a water which she said ‘would put the husband to sleep for ever’. Sure enough, Canilhac had died shortly after being given this liquid and his widow had married M. de Broglio. However, the pair had since left the country and, though Louvois tried hard to track them down, he never managed to do so.
³⁷

La Voisin would later allege that this was not the only time that Mme Lepère had supplied her with poison, for she said the midwife had once given her something with which to kill her own husband. Mme Voisin had put this in her husband’s broth but he had come to no harm because their servant, suspecting something was amiss, had thrown the soup away.

*   *   *

It was not only la Voisin’s clients who now came under scrutiny. She and all the others taken into custody in the early stages of the inquiry were questioned exhaustively about their associates and this led to a spate of new arrests. On 24 April the commissioners of the Chamber decreed that fifteen more people should be taken to Vincennes. They included the divineress la Jacob who, Anne Cheron said, had expressed interest in purchasing a secret formula for poison; la Hébert who was ‘blacker than a coal’ and sold lotions to Mme Voisin; Jeanne Leroux, suspected of complicity in the murder of M. Leféron; Mme Vautier and her husband, who did distillations for la Voisin; and la Deslauriers, who had boasted to Anne Cheron that she knew ‘the secret of la Brinvilliers’. Also arrested at this time was the mysterious Latour, a former stonemason who had persuaded la Voisin to part with large sums of money in the belief that he would use his magic powers to assist her clients.
³⁸

These people incriminated others in their turn and the list of prisoners at Vincennes grew steadily longer. By May Catherine Trianon, a fifty-two-year-old widow who was held in awe by other members of her profession and who had often drawn up horoscopes for clients of la Voisin, was in confinement. When her house was searched, many ‘powders and suspicious drugs’ were found in her casket, notably white arsenic, realgar, orpiment, powdered glass and cantharides.
³⁹

She was joined in the cells by Marguerite Delaporte, the sixty-nine-year-old widow of a master baker. Her speciality was reading the future in a glass of water and she admitted that in order to make her visions materialise, she uttered incantations. She insisted, however, that she had never done anyone any harm and that, when her clients asked her to predict the deaths of their husbands, she annoyed them by replying that she left that in God’s hands. This did not fit with evidence from another source that, like la Voisin and la Trianon, la Delaporte had often purchased poisons from the herbalist Maîitre Pierre, ‘the greatest and most skilled poisoner in France’.
⁴⁰

La Pelletier was another woman who had done a lot of work for la Voisin. She was said to know a great deal about the properties of dried herbs and had once supplied la Voisin with a powerful love potion, which was supposed to be applied to the palm of a hand. La Voisin claimed that when Mme Brissart had expressed a desire to kill her sister, she had sent her to discuss the matter with la Pelletier.
⁴¹

As the numbers at Vincennes swelled relentlessly, La Reynie was filled with horror by what he was learning. It was his impression that the lives of an entire sector of the Paris population revolved around poison, and that a frightening amount of effort was devoted to its purchase, sale and manufacture. Poison was so much a part of these people’s existence that they accepted as an occupational hazard that they themselves might fall victim to it. Sometimes this could be accidental, for the fact that so many of them dabbled in alchemy meant they were often exposed to dangerous chemicals. However, when unpleasant incidents occurred they were much more likely to ascribe the cause to deliberate attempts at murder. For example, Anne Cheron recalled an occasion when she and François Belot had fallen ill when drinking with a woman called la Montigny. Leaping to the conclusion that she had poisoned them, they had at once taken orvietan, a fashionable compound believed to be an antidote. On another occasion la Montigny herself had had an unpleasant experience when she had visited la Cheron’s house. When she had wiped herself with a handkerchief left behind by Marie Bosse, her face had begun to swell, which she thought was because the handkerchief was impregnated with some toxic substance. La Cheron had saved the day: she urinated in her shoe and persuaded la Montigny to drink the contents, causing her to vomit.
⁴²

*   *   *

On 5 June 1679 Mme de Poulaillon was tried at the Arsenal. It was a significant test for the commission, as it was the first time it had been required to judge a well-born defendant. After examining the evidence the Attorney-General of the Chamber had recommended that, like Mme de Brinvilliers, Mme de Poulaillon should be tortured, then beheaded. The commissioners took a different view. When the prisoner sat before them on the
sellette,
her penitent demeanour, coupled with her grace and charm, made a very favourable impression. Mme de Poulaillon disarmingly admitted that she merited severe punishment for having sought to drug and rob her husband, while maintaining that she had never attempted to kill him. After she had been taken back to prison, the commissioners debated for four hours what penalty was appropriate. At first it seemed that a majority of the judges favoured a death sentence. However, some of them were mindful of the implications this would have on the treatment of Mmes de Dreux and Leféron, and were therefore predisposed to leniency. They proved singularly persuasive and M. Fieubet in particular spoke so eloquently in the prisoner’s defence that he won over three of his colleagues. In the end the commissioners decreed that Mme de Poulaillon should be banished rather than executed.
⁴³

La Reynie, who clearly had been among the minority who voted for a death sentence, subsequently stated that Mme de Poulaillon herself considered that she had been shown undue compassion. He said that, when informed she would not be called upon to expiate her crime with her blood she had appeared inconsolable. She had pleaded that instead of being left free to roam abroad, she should be confined somewhere secure, for otherwise she could not guarantee that she would not commit fresh offences. If she really expressed herself thus, she subsequently had cause to regret it, for her wishes were fulfilled all too exactly. She was locked up in a forbidding ‘house of correction’ for fallen women in Angers and for eighteen years she eked out a sad existence in this grim institution. Finally, in May 1697, she petitioned that she might be permitted to retire to a convent where conditions would be less austere. Her request seemed likely to be granted until it was referred to M. de La Reynie. By that time on the verge of retirement, he showed that age had not in any way softened his rigour. He declared himself implacably opposed to her release, pointing out that she herself had warned that, if freed, she would be a menace to society. The result was that Mme de Poulaillon remained incarcerated in her horrible workhouse for the remainder of her days.
⁴⁴

*   *   *

Mme de Poulaillon can hardly be said to have evaded punishment. On the other hand she had been handled more gently than prisoners who came from a less privileged background. The outcome of the trial suggested that the King had been misguided to hope that, when called upon to deliver judgement on members of their own class, the commissioners of a special tribunal would be less partisan than
Parlement.
Plainly regretful that his colleagues had been swayed by such considerations, the Recorder of the Chamber noted that on this occasion the commission had failed to show ‘the vigour which the public expected of it’.
⁴⁵

Events soon showed that the commissioners did not shrink from severe measures when they judged individuals with whom they could not so readily identify. On 10 June Mme Philbert was hanged for the murder of her first husband, having previously had her right hand amputated.
*
The guardsman François Belot was hanged with her for trying to poison M. de Poulaillon’s cup. Even under torture he had protested that he had not really known how to do this and that his real aim had been to steal the silver tankard. This earned him the concession of being strangled before being broken on the wheel. A week later his confederate Anne Cheron was hanged after admitting under torture that she had devoted great efforts to developing new poisons made from the juices of dead toads.
⁴⁶

The abortionist Mme Lepère was tried on 11 August. She was convicted of ‘having abused her skill as a sworn midwife’ by having ‘brought to bed before their term several girls and women … causing the deaths of the children they were carrying’.
⁴⁷
The next day she was placed in the
brodequins
although, in a rare instance of mercy, the torture was not actually applied on account of her advanced age. The grisly charade achieved nothing and she went to the gallows without revealing anything of substance.

Throughout the summer the grim toll mounted, but while this represented progress of a kind, La Reynie was not at all complacent. He did not flatter himself that the execution of these insignificant offenders would eradicate the scourge of poisoning, which was too virulent to be allayed so easily. He was sure that many crimes remained to be uncovered and that la Voisin’s clientele was far more distinguished than she had yet admitted. While he had no doubt that this would be a slow process, he believed that with patience and perseverance he would eventually learn everything and that the information would be drawn either from Mme Voisin herself or from the prisoners locked up with her.

SIX

THE MAGICIAN LESAGE

On 12 September 1679 Mme Voisin gave her fullest deposition to date.
¹
Perhaps she hoped that if she co-operated, mercy would be shown her; alternatively she may merely have wanted to delay her trial and realised that her captors would not institute proceedings against her while they believed they could learn important things from her. At any rate, she explained that she had hitherto refrained from telling them all she knew because she had been reluctant to cause anyone distress. Now, however, she wished to clear her conscience, hoping that since she had entrusted herself to God’s care and protection ‘the King would out of his goodness wish to have pity on her and her family’.