The first words that set the police upon the scent were uttered over a meal. A woman had drunk deep; she boasted of possessing expeditious means of making a fortune. A few more poisonings, if she was to be believed, and her declining years would be amply provided for. There happened to sit among the guests a man who harboured no taste for such arithmetic. The advocate Perrin went straight to Desgrez. That supper, recorded in the archives examined by Funck-Brentano, was destined to open many doors, and to close behind their masters those of the fortress of Vincennes.
The prattler was named Marie Bosse. To test her inclinations, the police dispatched to her the wife of an archer, instructed to play the part of a miserable spouse. At the second interview, a vial passed from the fortune-teller’s hands into those of her supposed client. The experiment had yielded far more than a supper-table confidence. On the 4th of January 1679, Bosse was apprehended; Dame Vigoureux, beneath whose roof the supper had been held, was taken likewise. A few weeks later, the intelligence gathered led directly to another woman, established in a commerce of an altogether different stature.
On the 12th of March, Catherine Deshayes, wife of Montvoisin, was seized as she emerged from Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle. Paris knew her by a briefer appellation: La Voisin. She was returning from church; she was carried off to answer for matters in which poison, incantations, and the least charitable desires of her contemporaries were inextricably mingled.
The Merchant of Hopes
Her house in the Villeneuve-sur-Gravois bore little resemblance to the dark hovel imagination commonly assigns to sorceresses. There, one waited one’s turn. Consultations followed in swift succession; of an evening, the strains of violins might be heard within. The mistress of the house knew well how to entertain, to drink, and to spend. For the practice of her art, she possessed a sumptuous habit, heavy with embroidery. The client who had come in search of the extraordinary was meant to find it even in the vestments of the woman who sold it.
Before her judges, she accounted for the beginnings of this trade by the embarrassments of her household. Her husband, a working jeweller, had met with no success in business. She had turned her hand to reading palms and physiognomies. Thus presented, the calling assumed almost the modest air of a domestic expedient: when the shop could no longer feed its own, the future of strangers supplied the deficiency.
Yet the future her visitors sought to know possessed one singular trait. It turned, very frequently, upon the removal of a person in the fullest health. A wife desired to be free to wed her lover; an heir found the passage of years unconscionably slow; a mistress wished to recall a man whose missives were growing cold. La Voisin claimed to have answered that demise belonged to God alone. Such a scruple, if indeed she ever voiced it, did not invariably conclude the consultation. Certain visitors demanded a date; others asked for an instrument.
Not all these transactions partook of the same gravity. The history of Madame Brissart, as revealed through the interrogatories, depicts a client infatuated with Captain de Rubentel, whom she supplied with funds. The captain took his distance. Recourse was had to the rituals and promises of the magician Lesage, without ever summoning back the runaway. La Voisin at last advised the lady to suspend both her messages and her solicitations. Rubentel returned. The client attributed this reconciliation to the power of the sorceress and rewarded her accordingly. In this modest triumph of magic, a man had merely felt the withdrawal of the hand that held the purse.
From Consultations to Indictments
Lesage, a former wool-merchant whose true name was Adam Cœuret, was one of the confederates of the house. He possessed the art of making objects vanish, discovering them elsewhere, and adorning these removals with an explanation sufficiently wondrous to pass for proof. La Voisin herself appears to have been dazzled by some of his sleights of hand. On the 17th of March 1679, he joined the captives. Henceforth, the associates were to recount apart that which they had previously found it in their interest to present in common.
Behind these conjuring tricks, however, lay accusations whose gravity no pleasantry could diminish. The dossier concerning Madame la Présidente Leféron turned upon the death of her husband, which had occurred in 1669. The widow had since married Monsieur de Prade. La Voisin was questioned touching the vials she was alleged to have supplied and the steps taken by this client. The dossier of Madame de Dreux brought to light designs against both a husband and a rival. Names, visits, and the transfer of sums criss-crossed through the depositions.
We do not possess, for each of these deaths, the demonstrable certainty that a modern investigation would furnish. The experts of that age had only the narrowest means of detecting a poison within a corpse. The procedure leaned heavily upon the spoken words of the accused, mutual denunciations, and confrontations. This renders the surviving documents invaluable; yet it forbids us from treating each deposition as though the clerk of the court had himself witnessed the crime.
Louis XIV established an extraordinary commission. Convening at the Arsenal from the 10th of April 1679, it received the name of the *Chambre ardente*. La Reynie conducted the preliminary inquiry alongside Bezons; Boucherat presided. Arrests, examinations, and confrontations fed the reports laid before the magistrates. The accused appeared at last upon the stool of repentance, the *sellette*. The sentence admitted of no appeal.
La Voisin had long listened to the secrets of others in a cabinet where every confidence might be turned into a receipt. At Vincennes, her own utterances were taken down, re-read, and set against the declarations of another prisoner. The authority of the woman who once claimed to know all dissolved before the compulsion of the captive bound to answer. As for her clients, they discovered that a discreet consultation might long survive within the self-interested recollection of their counsellor.
What the Flames Did Not Quench
By February 1680, the condemnation of La Voisin was determined. The letter written by Madame de Sévigné to her daughter on the 23rd permits us to trace, with the reservations proper to the town gossip she reports, the prisoner’s final days. Sévigné describes her suppers with the guards, her songs, then the torture of the question and the confrontations. This worldly account preserves, even amid the horror, something of the light conversational tone of the salon; its levity does not render the suffering one whit lighter.
On Thursday the 22nd of February, the condemned woman was conveyed from Vincennes to Paris. Sévigné beheld her passing before the Hôtel de Sully, clad in white upon the tumbril, a torch in hand. Concerning this passage, the letter-writer speaks as an eye-witness; for what followed at Notre-Dame and upon the Place de Grève, she conveys the accounts that reached her ear. She recounts the resistance of La Voisin and her death upon the pyre. A woman whose answers had been sought by so many visitors could now furnish not a single one.
The inquest, however, did not expire with her. The most resounding accusations—those that were to touch the intimate circle of the King and the name of Madame de Montespan—unfolded only after her death. La Voisin’s daughter Marguerite, the priest Guibourg, and other captives brought forth tales of sacrilegious rites. The reading of these accounts has long supplied historians with ready-made scenes. It calls for far greater caution: disputed identifications, recantations, and declarations extorted through terror do not, by their mere accumulation, amount to certainty.
La Voisin had been executed. Yet around the great names she had known, justice continued to tread with utmost circumspection. The contrast remained, as glaring as her white gown in the middle of the street: the petty purveyors lay entirely at the mercy of the magistrates; the connections of their illustrious clients carried the affair to the very threshold of doors before which the magistrates themselves were forced to wait.