Death, Poison & Witchcraft at Versailles

Death, Poison & Witchcraft at Versailles  

Beneath the gilt and glamor of King Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles wafted a terrible smell

A lack of facilities apparently led courtiers to defecate around the palace and grounds with abandon.

The few bathrooms there were poorly maintained and often overflowing with waste.

But there was another, more sinister stench discernible there as well, one more troubling than the commonplace stink of humanity.

The unmistakable stench of death.....

In the late 1660s and early 1670s, influential members of the French nobility began to die, unexpectedly and close upon one another.

Autopsies showed their insides blackened and corroded.

A fever for poisoning and witchcraft seemed to have infected the court, and in 1679 Louis XIV was forced to establish a special tribunal—a Chambre Ardente, or “burning room”—to investigate and prosecute the murders.

The “Affair of the Poisons,” as it came to be known, is a misleading name for one of the largest witch trials in modern history.

Over just five years, from 1677 to 1682, 319 subpoenas were issued, 194 individuals arrested, and 36 executed (with perhaps dozens more dead from suicide, or in prison or exile).

In total, it claimed between two and three times as many lives as the Salem witch trials across the Atlantic, 10 years later.

It began with what appeared to be an isolated case, but then door after door after door opened, eventually implicating rich and poor alike.

'The Affair' was confusing, complex, convoluted—and persistent because everyone, however powerful, had a common fear of witchcraft, poisoning, and the unknown.

Fortune-telling and palm-reading joined gambling as popular court activities, against a backdrop of superstition and belief in witchcraft. Murder, in this setting, could be just another diversion.

And this diversion didn’t involve blades and blood, but poison....

It was in this context that, in 1672, French police were called to investigate a break-in at a laboratory belonging to one Gaudin de Sainte-Croix, a devilishly handsome, and recently deceased, young army officer.

There, they found a red leather trunk of letters, vials, and mysterious substances.

The contents of the trunk seemed to link Sainte-Croix’s two passions: his lover, the very married Marie de Brinvilliers, and poisoning.

Sainte-Croix and de Brinvilliers shared their passions, and began to test this new substance (likely arsenic), by lacing cakes and other sweets with it, and giving them to unsuspecting patients in a nearby public hospital.

Seemingly, the thrill was their only motive.

Letters in the trunk unambiguously implicated de Brinvilliers in the recent deaths of her father and two brothers as well, a sad turn of events that put her in line to inherit a fortune.

Upon the discovery of the trunk, she fled Paris for the countryside and then abroad, where she managed to remain on the run for four years, before being arrested in Belgium.

Marie de Brinvilliers was found guilty and subjected to “water torture” to force her to name accomplices.

Stripped naked and bound, she had 24 pints of water forced down her throat.

She was then beheaded and burned at the stake, and had her ashes cast into the wind.

 Just before she died, de Brinvilliers said,

“Out of so many guilty people, must I be the only one to be put to death? …

Half the people in town are involved in this thing, and I could ruin them if I were to talk.”

Indeed, Paris was about to go mad.

So many of the citizens of Paris had inhaled de Brinvilliers’s wicked ashes, it was said~

“with such evil little spirits in the air, who knows what poisonous humor may overcome us"

Indeed, over the next seven years, dozens of nobles would perish, by torture, suicide, execution, or poison.

An alarmed King Louis XIV, appointed Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, Lieutenant General of the Paris Police, to oversee an investigation.

It was not long before arrests began.

Police descended upon alchemists, counterfeiters, and poisoners, amid rumors of a royal poisoning plot.

'The Affair' was about poison, to be sure, but it was also about witchcraft—the two were bedfellows.

Police uncovered troves of lethal chemicals ~ arsenic, nitric acid, mercuric chloride, equipment ~ furnaces, forceps, cauldrons, vials, and foul natural ingredients ~ flowers, deadly nightshade, blobs of hanged-man’s fat, nail clippings, bone splinters, specimens of human blood, excrement, urine, and semen.

La Reynie made a hugely important arrest, from another stratum of society, an arrest that gave him the rattling keys to Paris’s criminal underworld.

Catherine Monvoisin, also known as La Voisin, was apprehended outside her parish church on March 12, 1679.

By profession, she was something between a fortune-teller and an amateur apothecary.

La Voisin was a practitioner of some repute, allegedly known to virtually every woman in Paris.

Adultery was illegal for all, but carried no penalty for men. Women, however, could face imprisonment, beatings, or loss of dowry for sullying a husband’s honor and the legitimacy of his heirs.

So women, it appears, turned to poisons to liberate themselves from unwanted pregnancies, lovers, or husbands.

These potions often had uterine origins, menstrual blood or placenta, as if to liberate their users from the bindings of womanhood.

La Reynie learned a lot about this world from La Voisin after she was arrested.

She named names.

Her list of customers was deeply troubling to authorities, and included prominent faces in court, including a countess whose husband had recently and mysteriously died.

More shocking still, her confessions seemed to implicate one of the King’s former lovers, Madamoiselle des Oeillets, whose four-year-old daughter was one of the King's many illegitimate children.

Eleven months after her arrest, La Voisin was burned alive in a public square now known as the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.

She was wheeled in after three days of torture, and as the flames began to lick at her feet, she swore profusely, and went very red in the face.

By this time, La Reynie was becoming convinced that there was an epidemic of poisoning in Paris.

He set up the “burning room” located deep in the bowels of the 'Arsenal', a royal munitions warehouse.

Lit only by flaming torches, below windows shrouded in black cloth, 13 magistrates gathered to interrogate prisoners.

Within these walls, five people were sentenced to life imprisonment, 23 banished, and 36 sentenced to death.

Of those, 34 were executed: decapitated, hanged, strangled, broken on the wheel, or burnt alive.

These were just a fraction of the 442 people charged with crimes related to “‘involvement in evil spells and composing, distributing, and administering poison.”’

In late 1680, a name began to emerge from the widespread interrogations.

Athénaïs de Montespan, then about 40, had once been the King’s favorite mistress.

She came to court in the mid-1660s, and worked as one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, having left her family and husband behind in the countryside.

But de Montespan had higher aspirations~the bed, and heart, of the King.

Though blessed with good looks, it seems to have been her tireless pursuit that won her her place under the King.

Between 1669 and 1678, de Montespan bore him seven illegitimate children.

The claims attached to her name were various and shocking.

She had poisoned the mistresses that preceded her.

She had tricked the king into falling for her by shoveling aphrodisiacs into his food and drinks.

Even that she had called for a bloody “black mass” in which, entirely naked, she had conjured the King’s love with a series of diabolical rites, including infanticide.

After 16 hours of secret, undocumented questioning, the King declared that he wanted any evidence against de Montespan be thrown out.

The Chambre Ardente continued, and many more people were hanged.

In April 1682, La Reynie acknowledged that it might be time to end the investigation.

The entire enterprise had been built on many confessions extracted under torture.

Most of those accused, were now dead.

The last of the secret documents about 'The Affair' were burned, and the investigation was over.

The “burning room” was snuffed out.

Life at court, with its parties and feuds, carried on.

The myths and misconceptions that had set the scene for the Affair—about science, chemistry, magic, witchcraft, gender—seemed as much in place as ever.

The King’s fear of scandal overcame his fear of being poisoned, he ruled judiciously and carefully—albeit with fewer romantic dalliances—for the longest reign of any European monarch, at 72 years.