On the same day as Lesage’s arrest, Louis informed La Reynie that he intended to establish a special court to deal with what appeared to be a veritable epidemic of poisoning. The Chambre Ardente, as it became known, was inaugurated by letters patent of 7 April 1679 and held its first sitting three days later. An extraordinary tribunal seemed necessary firstly because of the large number of cases to be tried, and secondly because it appeared that many of the suspects were drawn from the upper echelons of society; if there was going to be a scandal, Louis wanted to have as much control over it as possible. The court was to sit for three years, issuing 319 subpoenas, arresting 194 people and sentencing 104 of them. Thirty-six prisoners were condemned to death, four to the galleys, thirty-four banished or fined and thirty acquitted. Mme. de Sévigné commented: “There is no other topic of conversation. No such scandal as this has ever been known in a Christian court.”
It is important to establish, however, that the Chambre Ardente was not intended to be a “secret” court. The precedent for the creation of special tribunals had existed in French law since the Middle Ages, and the use of such a tribunal in the Affair of the Poisons was not in itself an attempt by the authorities to hush up the cases by removing them from conventional jurisdiction. It is likely that the investigators were initially unaware of the potentially explosive nature of the business in hand. In bypassing Parlement, with which most of the aristocracy, of both the sword and the robe, were connected, it was in fact more likely that unbiased judgments could be passed on the upper classes. At a conference at Versailles on 27 December 1679, Louis personally instructed La Reynie to administer “absolute justice” to anyone found guilty, “regardless of rank or sex or position,” a public declaration of impartiality which would be sorely tested and swiftly compromised.
In January, the scandal broke. Arrest warrants were issued for some of the most prominent members of Louis’s court, among them the Maréchal de Luxembourg, the Princesse de Tingry, the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Comtesse de Soissons (Louis’s former lover Olympe Mancini), the Marquis de Cessac, the Vicomtesse de Polignac and the Marquise d’Alluye. The Duchesse d’Angoulême was accused, as well as the Comte de Gassily, the Duc de Vendôme and the Marquis de Raffetot. Of these, the Comtesse de Soissons and her accomplice, the Marquise d’Alluye, were certainly guilty. Louis, out of tenderness for his old love, warned her secretly in time to allow her to escape with the Marquise d’Alluye into exile, but on the condition that if she ever returned to France she would have to stand trial. The Comtesse had already been suspected of causing the death of her husband in 1673, but La Voisin claimed that Mme. de Soissons had originally approached her to ask how to recover the King’s love, which she had lost to his first
maîtresse en titre
Louise de La Vallière. La Voisin had read her fortune and found it was connected with that of a “great prince” who, to the fury of the Comtesse, would never return to her. The lady was provoked to declare that “if she could not get revenge on Mlle. de La Vallière, then . . . she would do away with both one and the other.” Louis’s leniency, given this reported intention to murder him, testifies to an occasionally dangerous sentimentality, for he was in no doubt of the Comtesse’s guilt and well aware that he would have to answer for her escape to God and to his people. The Comtesse’s reputation was so damaged that when she arrived in Flanders with the Marquise d’Alluye, the towns of Antwerp and Namur closed their gates against them and the people pelted them with squalling cats. Later, when Marie-Louise, the young Queen of Spain, was poisoned in Madrid, no one was at all surprised to learn that the Comtesse had recently paid a visit there.
The Marquis de Cessac also compromised himself by fleeing into exile, as did the Vicomtesse de Polignac, who made a dramatic escape from her country house just minutes before the royal guards arrived. The trials of those aristocrats who were innocent or arrogant enough to remain in France were, naturally, a huge sensation. The Duc de Luxembourg dutifully accepted his prison sentence, determined to obey the King in every way, and passed his time between interrogations in prayer, much to the disgust of Mme. de Sévigné, who felt he had compromised his ducal dignity by accepting trial in a bourgeois court rather than by his peers in Parlement. He was accused of using witchcraft to dispose of his wife and the guardian of a woman he wanted to marry, and, rather greedily, to make his sister-in-law, the Princesse de Tingry, fall in love with him into the bargain. Other accusations were ridiculous and melodramatic, involving orgies with dozens of naked women, satanic sabbats and the procuration of abortions for the Princesse. After fourteen months the Duc was acquitted, as was the Princesse, and after a week’s exile in the country, he returned to Versailles, where everyone behaved as though he had never left. Louis rewarded his stoicism with various important commands, in which the Duc gained enormous credit for himself and significant victories for France.
Some of the trials provided high comedy. The unfortunate Duchesse de Foix was most embarrassed at the revelation of a note she had written to La Voisin complaining about a breast-enhancing potion — “The more I rub, the less they grow!” The third Mancini sister, the Duchesse de Bouillon, was accused of buying poison from La Voisin to dispatch her boring old husband so that she could marry her lover, the King’s young cousin the Duc de Vendôme. All Paris was thrilled as she arrived insouciantly in the courtroom with her lover on one arm and her patient husband on the other. She was quite unabashed about her consultations with La Vigoureux and La Voisin, claiming that she had visited the latter “to see those Sibyls she had promised me, a company well worth the journeys.” The judge asked her if she had also seen the Devil. “Yes,” she replied, “and he was small, dark and ugly, just like you.” She was acquitted, and left the court gaily, remarking, “Really, I would never have believed that wise men could ask so many silly questions.”
7
Her sauciness delighted Mme. de Sévigné but irritated Louis, and the impertinent Duchesse had to spend several years in the country as punishment for contempt of court. As the trials continued, art inevitably imitated life as record audiences gathered to watch the marvelous special effects of Corneille’s smash hit
The Fortune-Teller,
which featured plenty of sulphur and explosions.
La Voisin’s trial proceeded, and there were suggestions of even more skeletons in the cupboard. Once again, Athénaïs de Montespan was linked with the circle of poisoners. La Voisin was accused by other prisoners of having delivered “love potions” to Athénaïs’s sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Vivonne, at the palace of St. Germain, where they had been placed into the hands of one of Athénaïs’s personal maids, Mlle. des Oeillets. It was of course no crime to procure harmless charms from a fortune-teller, but the thought that so serious a criminal as La Voisin had been able to come so close to the King was troubling. Wary that the mention of Athénaïs’s name in the context of the trials would provoke a furor, Louis had rather compromisingly written to La Reynie in September 1679: “I herewith instruct you to proceed as speedily as possible with such interrogations, but to make transcripts of these responses on separate folios, and to keep these folios apart from the official records of the rest of the investigation.” When the arrests began early in 1680, with the Duchesse de Vivonne under suspicion thanks to the confessions of the prisoners at Vincennes, Louis stayed her arrest, since she was effectively a member of his family. To deviate quite so obviously from his public declarations in his private actions was not typical of Louis, and suggests that he was already afraid of what the public inquiry might reveal.
Finally, Lesage made a concrete accusation against Athénaïs. He claimed to have assisted La Voisin in 1667 when Athénaïs had supposedly consulted her for a spell to get rid of Louise de La Vallière and ensure her own place as favorite. Lesage also alleged that La Voisin had attempted to present a poisoned document to the King, and that she and Mme. de Montespan had plotted to murder Mlle. de Fontanges, who had been at the height of her favor the previous year. Although La Voisin confessed to numerous serious crimes, including that of helping the distinguished writer Racine to murder his mistress, the actress Mme. du Parc (Racine was cleared of the charge), she consistently denied any connection with Mme. de Montespan, or any attempt on the King’s life. Interrogated by Louvois himself, she insisted that she had had no commerce with Mme. de Montespan’s maid, Mlle. des Oeillets. She did admit to saying a blasphemous novena at the request of a girl named Cato, who wished to enter Mme. de Montespan’s service as a maid, but claimed that the spell had failed and that she had never seen the girl again, and had no idea whether she had in the end joined Mme. de Montespan’s household. The “petition” she had tried to present to Louis had been an innocent request, such as every French subject had the right to put to him on certain special days. La Voisin, a more skilled practitioner than Lesage, would in any case certainly have known that percutaneous poisoning, whereby the chemical enters the body through the skin, was largely an ineffective fantasy, producing at best an irritating rash which could become infected. La Voisin spent her last few days in prison drinking and carousing, unrepentant, and even when put to the “question extraordinary” she refused to name Mme. de Montespan.
The procedure followed by the Chambre Ardente was that La Reynie would submit the names of suspects to the prosecutor-general, after which they would be arrested, interrogated and perhaps paraded before other prisoners to be identified. Then they would either be freed or progress to a second examination. If they were still under suspicion, they could be put to torture, on the result of which “extraordinary” questioning the final sentence would be delivered. At each stage of the investigation, the findings of the preliminary questioning and the questions ordinary and extraordinary were put to the judges, who would decide whether to acquit or to continue the trial. Various revolting forms of torture were used, such as forcing gallons of iced water into the gullet to cause the victim to burst, the rack and branding irons. La Voisin was condemned to interrogation with
les brodequins,
a process in which the legs were crushed between wooden planks and systematically broken with hammers. One source of the confusion surrounding the testimonies of the accused of the Chambre Ardente is that confessions extracted during such appalling agonies were often subsequently retracted by condemned prisoners unwilling to die with a lie on their consciences. La Voisin, it was claimed, held firm, but a note from La Reynie shows that in her case the authorities merely went through the motions of applying the dreadful
brodequins,
causing no real damage. Why? Only Louvois or Colbert could have ordered such a special dispensation. Was this evidence of favor in high places, suggesting that La Voisin’s silence was a loyal one, and that she was hopeful of a last-minute reprieve? Or was the torture countermanded through fear of what she might reveal under duress? Whatever the case, La Voisin followed her colleagues La Bosse and La Vigoureux to the fire drunk and defiant, although some witnesses claimed that as smoke began to engulf the pyre in the Place des Grèves, she whispered urgently to her confessor that “a great number of persons, of all sorts of conditions addressed themselves to me to ask for death and the means to procure it ...it’s debauchery which is the first cause of all this disorder.” If this is true, was it a reference perhaps to the King and his famous double adulteress?
La Voisin’s death on 4 February 1680 seemed to liberate the tongues of the witches imprisoned at Vincennes. Suddenly, they began to pour forth a flood of accusations against Mme. de Montespan. The first to speak up was Marie Monvoisin, La Voisin’s daughter, who claimed she had been too terrified of her mother to confess previously, and who had already tried to commit suicide in her cell. Her charges against Athénaïs fell into three categories, first, that she had used on the King “powders” obtained from La Voisin, second that she had conspired to murder Mlle. de Fontanges and the King, and third that she had participated in black Masses to gain the Devil’s help in keeping the King’s love.
With regard to the “powders,” Marie said:
Every time something new happened to this lady and she feared the good graces of the king were diminishing, she advised my mother of it so she could bring a remedy. My mother therefore said Masses over these powders destined for the King. They were powders for love. There were black ones, gray ones, and white ones. My mother mixed them. Some were passed beneath a chalice by a preacher. Yes, it happened that I carried these powders to the lady myself. The first time, if I remember properly, was two and a half years ago [this would place the events in 1678, around the time of the birth of the Comte de Toulouse]. The lady came to my mother’s house and, after having spoken together, my mother brought me to the lady and said to her, “Madame, will you be sure to recognize this girl?” The lady said, “Yes, if we arrange some signal.” It was arranged that day, a Thursday, I think, that the lady would come the following Monday to the Petits-Pères, and that I would have a mask, that I should kneel and pretend to pray, when I saw the lady I would rise and, without stopping, put into her hand the hidden packet of powder which my mother had given me. Another time, it was between Ville d’Avray and Clagny . . . that I met this lady to put into her hands a powder that had been passed beneath the chalice.
Marie also maintained that on another occasion she had gone with her mother and a group of others to Clagny to deliver fifty louis’ worth of powders, though she herself had not gone inside. At every one of their supposed meetings, “Mme. de Montespan” had been masked. Most of the powders had been delivered to the maid Mlle. des Oeillets, and Marie had only learned the name of this mysterious, cloaked brunette through a slip of the tongue by her mother.