City of Light, City of Poison Read online

  1. RUE DU BEAUREGARD: CATHERINE VOISIN’S HOME

  2. COUR DES MIRACLES

  3. RUE MONTORGEUIL

  4. RUE DU BOULOI: NICOLAS DE LA REYNIE’S HOME AND HEADQUARTERS

  5. CHTELET: CRIMINAL COURTS AND PRISON

  6. PALAIS DE JUSTICE (PARLEMENT)

  7. SAINT-PAUL CHURCH: LETTER DISCOVERED

  8. SAINT-SÉVERIN CHURCH: FATHER MARIETTE PERFORMS CEREMONY FOR VOISIN AND LESAGE

  9. SAINT-DÉNIS: FATHER GUIBOURG’S HOME AND CHURCH

  10. BASTILLE

  11. ARSENAL COMPOUND

  12. CHTEAU OF VINCENNES

  To my parents, Louhon and Carolyn Tucker.

  My journeys, across continents and through time,

  would not be possible without their

  love and encouragement.

  And to Pat Fife, our Gam, whose adventures

  are as good as any book—and whose

  Moscow Mules helped the words

  flow for this one.

  If you judge by appearances in this place you will often be deceived, because what appears to be the case hardly ever is.

  —MADAME DE LA FAYETTE,

  La Princesse de Clèves, 1678

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  A Note on Currency

  Burn Notice

  PART I“Day and Night They Kill Here”

  1Crime Capital of the World

  2City of Light

  3The Street at the End of the World

  4To Market

  PART IIKing of Hearts

  5Agitation without Disorder

  6The Dew and the Torrent

  7The Door Marked 1

  8“He Will . . . Strangle Me”

  PART III“She Will Turn Us All into Poisoners”

  9The Golden Viper

  10“Madame Is Dying, Madame Is Dead!”

  11Poison in the Pie

  12An Alchemist’s Last Words

  13The Faithful Servant

  14“Brinvilliers Is in the Air”

  PART IV“Cease Your Scandals”

  15House of Porcelain

  16Offering

  17“The Sneakiest and Meanest Woman in the World”

  18“Burn after Reading”

  19Dinner Guests

  20The Question

  21Monsters

  PART V“She Gave Her Soul Gently to the Devil”

  22Quanto

  23Search and Seizure

  24A Noble Pair

  25The Burning Chamber

  26“Beginning to Talk”

  27Fortune-Teller

  28“From One Fire to Another”

  PART VIWicked Truths

  29The Poisoner’s Daughter

  30Sacrifices

  31“A Strange Agitation”

  32Lock and Key

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Affair of the Poisons: A Chronology

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Author’s Note

  However dark and strange the events depicted here may seem, City of Light, City of Poison is a work of nonfiction. Unless otherwise noted, anything between quotation marks is taken directly from details in a court document, interrogation record, memoir, or letter as cited in the endnotes.

  In the French legal tradition of the early modern period, depositions were recorded in the third person, but in such a way as to capture how a witness or suspect spoke and the words they chose. I have translated these indirect quotations into direct quotations, being careful not to change the nature of the exchange between the questioner and the witness or suspect. A few clarifications have been made, as necessary. For example, some referents are not clear in a specific sentence, but are obvious in the context of the rest of the testimony. Run-on sentences, often the result of a scribe’s effort to capture fast-moving dialogue, have been shortened where needed. I have attributed no words, thoughts, motivations, or actions for which there is not documentation.

  If, as I hope, the story feels rich and the characters full of life, it is because what history has left us is similarly rich and alive. Truth be told, I am comforted by the fact that I do not have sufficient imagination to conjure up a story as grim and troubling as this nonfiction account of lost souls and cruel deeds.

  A Note on Currency

  The main forms of seventeenth-century French currency referenced here are the denier, sol or sous, livre, and écu. Twelve deniers were the equivalent of one sol or sous. Twenty sols made one livre. Six livres comprised an écu.

  In 1667, one pound of bread cost eight deniers. A prisoner’s daily food allowance was four sols. A police officer patrolling on horseback made fifty sols a day, which included the keep of his horse. Police fines ran from six to thirty livres.

  It cost twenty sols to have one’s palm read or horoscope prepared by a magician in the Montorgeuil neighborhood. Midwives and poisoners there also paid fifteen to thirty sols for pigeons, frogs, and other ingredients to make their beauty creams and potions, which they sold for upward of twelve livres. The average fee to “prune a family tree” ranged from 2,000 to 10,000 livres (more than 1,600 écus).

  Burn Notice

  Versailles, 1709

  The plumes on the guards’ hats fluttered in time with the beats of the horses’ hooves along the route from Paris to Versailles. Riding in formation on the hot June day, the men had been entrusted with delivering a single letter to the king. No one, not even the horsemen, knew what made the cargo so precious. But as the swords dangling at their sides and the muskets slung across their chests made clear, they would kill to protect it.

  After a few hours the travelers could see the sprawling palace in the distance. Once the site of a modest royal hunting lodge, Versailles was now home to Louis XIV. Construction on the palace had begun nearly a half century earlier, just months after the king had assumed the throne at the age of twenty-three.

  The palace’s golden gates shimmered in the sun. Beyond them one could spy the large clock above the window of the king’s bedroom. At the center of the clock sat Apollo, the sun god, his face framed by rays of light. The clock marked the king’s day with precision. From the moment he awoke in the morning to the time he went to bed at night, nobles jockeyed for the privilege of attending to the king’s every need, from helping him dress to removing his chamber pot.

  Since 1682 nearly ten thousand souls had lived in cramped quarters in the palace in return for access, either real or longed for, to the king. This sense of connection allowed Louis XIV to retain a large measure of control over the noble class, which he had learned long ago never to trust.

  As the guards entered the palace gates, a sea of carriages and sedan chairs parted to make way for them. Once inside the main gates, the horsemen traversed the place d’Armes, the expansive courtyard fronting the château. Hundreds of soldiers stood in formation to protect the king and to impress his subjects.

  Dismounting, the lead horseman bounded up the massive stone staircase and headed for the quarters of the king’s most trusted minister, Louis de Pontchartrain. As Louis XIV’s chief of staff, Pontchartrain held unparalleled power at Versailles. All correspondence passed through him—no small task given the daily avalanche of reports and requests that flowed into the palace from across France and throughout Europe.

  The guard entered the minister’s quarters and, once acknowledged, placed the letter in Pontchartrain’s hands. Pursing his lips, as was his habit, Pontchartrain turned the letter over. With a start, he recognized the bold handwriting of Nicolas de La Reynie.

  It was a letter from a dead man.

  For more than thirty years Nicolas de la Reynie had served as the police chief
of Paris, the city’s first. He never cared for Pontchartrain. In fact, it had been Pontchartrain’s appointment as the king’s counselor that brought about La Reynie’s eventual retirement. After working closely with La Reynie for nearly seven years, Pont-chartrain strongly encouraged the king to replace the aging police chief with a younger, more dynamic officer. Still, the ever-practical La Reynie knew that the only way to get a letter to the king—and to be sure what it contained stayed intact—was through Pontchartrain.

  After decades of monitoring Paris and its inhabitants, La Reynie knew secrets that the nobility and the monarchy alike would have preferred to keep hidden: crimes of passion, sins of greed. From prostitutes he’d learned of the nobility’s sexual peccadilloes. From matrons and nuns he’d learned the true identities of the children orphaned at foundling homes. Nothing surprised the police chief.

  Some secrets, however, were more dangerous. La Reynie knew of plots so dark and menacing that they posed a direct threat to the monarchy. He promised he would protect these secrets for the rest of his life.

  Now, less than a day after the police chief’s death, his letter lay heavy in the minister’s hands. Pontchartrain broke the wax seal and unfolded the thick piece of paper that formed both letter and envelope. A key tumbled out. Holding the key in one hand and the letter in the other, he scanned the page and then left immediately to find the king.

  Pontchartrain did not hide his annoyance at the crowds as he marched through the halls of Versailles toward the king’s counsel room. The interior of the château teemed with so many nobles and their attendants that Louis XIV’s late superintendent of royal buildings, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had fretted over whether the palace’s marble floors were thick enough to withstand the constant traffic.

  Congestion was always worst in the long corridor that linked the palace’s north and south wings. First-time visitors stood in awe as their reflections ricocheted across the 578 mirrors that lined the gallery’s walls. On the barreled ceiling were thirty stunning paintings by the master Charles Le Brun that told the story of the Sun King’s economic and political successes. Pontchartrain was now too preoccupied to look up to admire Le Brun’s masterpieces; if he had, he would have been reminded of the king’s gesture of gratitude to the man whose letter he held in his hands.

  Among Le Brun’s works was a painting titled The Police and Safety Established in Paris, an allegorical image featuring two women in flowing Greco-Roman gowns. Holding a balance and a sword in one hand, Justice orders soldiers to disperse the violent gangs battling in the background. Reclining at her feet is Security, who extends an open wallet to the soldiers as a show of her support and confidence. The soldiers—armed with weapons and lanterns—point toward newly paved and lighted streets to show the fruits of their labor. La Reynie’s transformation of Paris from a crime-infested city into a civilized one had been chronicled in gesso and gilt for all to see at the king’s château.

  An ornate mechanical clock chimed ten as Pontchartrain moved through the king’s empty bedroom and into the adjacent counsel room. He walked to the large table that sat in the center of the room and stood quietly alongside a small group of other ministers. The aging king walked slowly toward his seat. Once settled at the table, he looked toward his ministers and nodded to indicate that he was ready for his daily report.

  It did not take long for the king’s eyes to fasten on the letter and key Pontchartain held in his hands. Without a word, Pontchartrain slid the letter toward him.

  Louis XIV read the former police chief’s words and paused for a moment, weighing their meaning. He handed the letter back to Pontchartrain. There was no need to speak; the minister knew what to do.

  Several days later the royal notary François Gaudion placed a large black leather box on a table in front of Pontchartrain. Thirty years of dust coated the box, confirming that its contents had not been disturbed. When La Reynie entrusted this box and others to Gaudion decades earlier, he made it clear that they were to stay in the notary’s safekeeping until further notice. That moment had arrived. Pontchartrain offered Gaudion written confirmation from the king that neither he nor his family nor his progeny would be held responsible for anything that might be revealed once the box was opened.

  Reassured, Gaudion bowed and left the room, shutting the door behind him. Alone, Pontchartrain inspected the black case. It was secured with not one but two sets of wax seals imprinted with La Reynie’s official insignia. Pontchartrain cracked open the brittle seals with a small knife and inserted the key into the lock. The mechanism gave despite years of disuse. Inside he found hundreds of manuscript pages bundled together. Removing one large stack of pages, he placed the papers on the table and turned each gingerly. He saw names of France’s highest nobility. Alongside them were scrawled the words “death,” “poison,” “murdered.”

  Only four other men knew the extent of the secrets that Louis XIV had worked so hard to keep hidden for so long. The first was Jean Sagot, La Reynie’s chief notary, who was now long dead. The second, Louis’s trusted minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, also took the secrets to his grave in 1683. He was followed eight years later by the marquis of Louvois, Colbert’s nemesis and Louis’s esteemed minister of war. And, of course, Nicolas de La Reynie.

  With La Reynie’s death, Louis XIV became the sole keeper of the secrets surrounding the Affair of the Poisons, and he had no intention of letting them outlive him. The king ordered his servants to start a fire in the large stone fireplace at the end of the counsel room. For a hot July day, it was an odd request.

  Page by page, Pontchartrain handed the documents to the king, who fed each of them into the hungry flames. The two men watched the parchment curl and catch fire. As the smoke rose from the chimney into the summer sky above Versailles, the king silenced the horrors of the affair and the screams of its victims for good.

  Or so he believed.

  PART

  I

  “Day and Night

  They Kill Here”

  1

  Crime Capital of the World

  Late seventeenth-century Paris assaulted the senses and rattled the nerves. Screams and yells echoed off the walls of narrow streets as Parisians lodged boisterous complaints against the insults of urban life: fistfights among angry neighbors, cutpurses racing from victims, chamber pots dumped out from upper floors onto passersby below. Carriage drivers swore and taunted one another as they jockeyed for command of the street. Packs of vendors shouted at the top of their lungs. Sounds of animals punctuated the cacophony: dogs barked, roosters crowed, cows lowed as they strolled with their bells clanking.

  The filth of Paris attached itself to clothes, the sides of buildings, and the insides of nostrils. Several times a week, butchers, tanners, and tallow makers welcomed herds of cattle and sheep to the city’s central slaughterhouses, located near streets with names like rue Pied-de-Boeuf (Cow-Foot Street) and rue de la Triperie (Tripe-Shop Street). On Thursdays and Fridays, Parisians had no choice but to trudge through inches of congealed blood. Even on nonslaughter days, the streets were permanently rust colored from the blood that had soaked into the earth.

  There were no sidewalks in Paris. No European city had them. In a futile response to the mud, many homeowners installed a protruding iron bar at ankle height in their home’s stone edifice, so visitors could scrape the foul muck from their shoes before entering. To avoid walking in the streets altogether, those who could afford to hire carriages increasingly did so. In the mid-seventeenth century, there were barely three hundred carriages navigating the streets. Within just a few decades, that number swelled to well over ten thousand, creating traffic jams in the narrow streets for hours at a time and, worse, a major safety hazard. As one Italian traveler wrote, “There is an infinite number of filthy carriages covered in mud, which serve to kill the living.”

  Overcrowded and dirty, Paris brought even the most levelheaded of inhabitants to the brink of violence. Conflicts were frequently adjudicated by a supply of weap
ons—from brass knuckles and clubs to daggers and rapiers—kept close at hand. When street “justice” was dealt, it came swiftly and often to the great shock of its victim. Only steps from the king’s library on the rue Richelieu, a watchmaker encountered a former customer. Bypassing all polite greetings, the man launched into vitriolic complaints about defects in the watch he had bought a year earlier. When the watchmaker protested, his customer smashed a heavy sword into the watchmaker’s head, leaving him dead.

  The new accessibility of pistols across social classes turned an already dangerous city into an even more deadly one. The product of the sixteenth-century discovery of saltpeter, guns revolutionized early European warfare overnight. By the 1640s the French had perfected flintlock-firing technology, which made guns much lighter, smaller, and less expensive to produce than traditional wheel-lock guns and rifles. Armed with pocket-size pistols under their cloaks, thieves became bolder. Parisians looking to protect their homes raced to buy handguns, making the city all the more unsafe.

  In response to the rising violence, the Crown issued an edict in 1660 calling for the ban of all weapons including—and especially—handguns, by anyone other than soldiers, police officers, judges, and noblemen. The law did not have the desired effect. Another ordinance issued six years later repeated the 1660 law nearly verbatim. It also added that all handguns needed to be conspicuous, heavy, and with barrels that were at least fifteen inches long. Any person in possession of such a weapon was required to carry a lantern or a torch as he moved through the streets at night, so both law officials and citizens could see that the person was armed. Judging from the violence that filled the city after dark, few followed this mandate either.

  By night Paris became frighteningly claustrophobic. At sunset, soldiers pulled shut the massive gates of the city’s ramparts and lowered the barricades behind them. But the gates did little to protect those locked in with their fellow citizens. Nighttime revelers made their way across a city plunged into inky shadows, with only the faint glow of candlelight peeking through a drape or shutter illuminating a small stretch of street. Homeowners and shopkeepers battened down their homes and stores, pulling shut windows and doors for the night like sailors preparing for a storm. Here the weapons came in handy. As one Mademoiselle Surqualin said nonchalantly to the police after killing an intruder, she always kept a knife at her bedside precisely for that task.