L’affaire du Poison
(Jean-Baptiste Cariven) Le supplice de la marquise de Brinvilliers - Jean-Baptiste Cariven - Musée des Beaux-Arts de Gaillac.jpg
The Affair of Poisons was a scandal that rocked the court of Louis XIV of France. Louis’s court was one of the most libertine in the history of… ever. The court featured a group of nobility with no responsibilities except to dress well and vie for the attention and favors of one person; the king. A Spanish duke once referred to it as “a real brothel.” The ladies of the court competed for the privilege of being Lois’s mistress. At this time the most power a woman could yield was that from her hoo-haw. At the same time, Louis attended mass every day. It was in this atmosphere of licentiousness coupled with religiosity that The Affair of Poisons blossomed.
De Brinvillier
The Affair of Poisons began, as many scandals seem to do, with a young and beautiful woman trapped in an unhappy marriage. Marie-Madeleine Marguerite d'Aubray, the Marquise de Brinvillier, had married for social gain. At some point, met and began an affair with a dashing military captain, Godin de Sainte-Croix. Marie Madeline’s father objected to the relationship, as fathers are wont to do, and had her lover thrown in prison. While in the Bastille, Sainte-Croix, made an unusual friend in master poisoner Egidio Exili, who began to mentor Sainte-Croix in an exciting and profitable new hobby; poisoning.
When Sainte-Croix was released he and Madeline Marguerite d’Aubray began experimenting with poisons, attempting to develop an odorless tasteless toxicant. D’aubray reportedly began visiting a charity prison with poisoned treats, testing her concoctions on the sick and the poor. No one noticed d’Aubray’s new hobby until she began bumping off members of her immediate family, she poisoned her father and brothers which meant that she inherited the entirety of the family fortune. While people whispered their suspicions, d’Aubray wasn’t caught until Sainte-Croix, who was by then estranged from D’aubray, died (possibly from testing his own experiments). Love letters between himself and d’Aubray, journals of their experiments, and recipes for poison were all found among his possessions.
D’aubray’s comment, along with the fact that Louis XIV had a fear of being poisoned, caused a moral panic. Every unexplained death of the previous decade was now attributed to poison. The death of the king’s sister-in-law was incorrectly blamed on poison. Rumors of an undetectable poison, known as “succession powder” (because it could quietly kill off your relatives, earning you an inheritance) began to circulate. Then, the chief of police of Paris, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, discovered a plot to poison the king. The common people rioted, believing that infants were being taken for black masses. La Reynie ordered his officers to leave no stone unturned in their search for poisoners and witches. A special tribunal known as the Chambre Ardente or “burning room” was created. Police began storming fortune tellers and apothecaries.
La Voisin
All of these arrests eventually led police to Catherine Monvoisin, known as “La Voisin.” La Voisin was a wealthy “sorceress,” fortune teller, midwife, and abortionist, favored by the elite of society. “She had as much money as she wanted,” a colleague said, “Long before she got up in the morning clients would be waiting for her.” La Voisin was also a devout Christian, who believed that her occult powers were a gift from God, in fact, she was arrested on her way out of church in front of Notre Dame.
Montespan
La Voisin claimed that Montespan had poisoned his previous mistress and tricked the king into loving her with love potions sold to her by La Voisin. Many of these love spells were uterine in origin, containing ingredients such as menstrual blood and placenta, as if in unconscious acknowledgment of a woman’s primary source of power at the time. La Voisin also claimed that she had arranged black masses for Montespan, led by defrocked priests, in which Montespan had acted as a human alter, posing nude while gruesome rituals involving the sacrifice of newborn babies occurred on top of her naked body. After Louis had grown bored of Montespan, La Voisin claimed that she and Montespan had plotted to kill both the king and his new lover.
The commission had sworn to crack down on everyone regardless of their position, but Montespan was still an important social figure at the court of Versailles, Louis had just legitimized six of their mutual children. How would it look if the king were shown to be vulnerable to love spells? He would never again drink out of an unspiked goblet. The king and La Reynie stalled the Chambre Ardente for a few months and then after a super-secret, 16-hour meeting, the king declared that he wanted the commission to continue, but he threw out the charges against Montespan without investigating them. Meanwhile, La Voison was tried for witchcraft and executed by burning.
By 1684 interest in the moral panic had begun to wain, especially by the king. It became obvious that the majority of the increasingly far-fetched confessions had been extracted by torture. All of the key players had been either thrown in jail or burned to death. The king closed his “burning room,” seemingly got over his fear of poisoning, and dialed down the womanizing a bit. Montespan continued to live at court, until she eventually retired to a convent, presumably in the countryside, where there was lots of fresh air and she could run free with the other retired mistresses.
According to Wikipedia, “The Poison Affair implicated 442 suspects: 367 orders of arrests were issued, of which 218 were carried out. [1] Of the condemned, 36 were executed; five were sentenced to the galleys and 23 exiled,” making it one of the largest witch trials in history.
