An epidemic of suspicion
Teresa Waugh
THE AFFAIR OF THE POISONS by Anne Somerset Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 377, ISBN 0297842161 mention of the Sun King and his court must usually bring to mind Versailles in all its splendour, the salle des glaces, Mansart, Le Notre, Racine, Mohere, Lully, fashion, elegance, intrigue and the king's mistresses. Although certainly concerned with the last two, Anne Somerset's new book, The Affair of the Poisons, is, as it claims on the dust-jacket, more immediately concerned with murder, infanticide and Satanism at the court of Louis XIV.
It is a pity that Anne Somerset kept The Affair of the Poisons' for her title. It may be the time-honoured, clumsy rendering of `L'affaire des poisons', but 'The Poison Affair' would have been so much more harmonious. Ceci dit, as they say over there, her renderings of quotations from the likes of Madame de Sevigne and SaintSimon among many others are impeccable and she tells her gruesome, unbelievably involved tale with style, wit and admirable clarity.
This poison affair, then, came to light in Paris as a result of the execution in 1776 of the marquise de Brinvilliers for the murder by poisoning of her father and two brothers. Le tout Paris turned out to witness the execution and Madame de Sevigne', unaware of what was to come, had a few flippant remarks to make about it.
But, in the wake of Madame de Brinvilliers' execution and as a result of the enquiries surrounding the case, the finger of suspicion came to be pointed in many directions. The high and mighty at court were seen in a new light, so that even Madame de Montespan, the king's mistress, and the marechal-duc de Luxembourg were accused of the most terrible deeds. Luxembourg was valued by the king as a brilliant soldier, whilst SaintSimon, according to Somerset, refers to his 'astonishingly repulsive exterior'.
In fact Somerset has an excellent lightness of touch with her introduction of contemporary quotations, thus bringing many of the characters very much to life. She has, too, done an enormous amount of research.
So everyone in Paris and everyone at court began to suspect everyone else; dreadful stories circulated, fathers suspected sons, husbands suspected wives and no one felt safe. Madame de Montespan was accused of trying to murder a younger, newer mistress of the king's, many wives were supposed to have visited fortunetellers or divineresses in an attempt to be rid of their husbands. Abortions were said to be performed under the vilest of circumstances with the foetuses being offered up to the Devil, poisons and aphrodisiacs were acquired, black masses were said, newborn babies were sacrificed. Every sort of imaginable and unimaginable horror was supposed to be taking place all over France. Even the king's life was said to be threatened.
In order to take control of the situation, Louis XIV set up a commission known as the Chambre Ardente whose duty it was to investigate the poisonings, under the direction of the single-minded, relentless and singularly unpleasant lieutenant-general of the Paris police, Nicolas-Gabriel de La Reynie. The establishment of the Chambre Ardente was a particular threat to aristocrats as it was outside, and independent of, the normal judicial system from which they could claim exemption. The Affair of the Poisons fascinates not so much by the actual history of the individual suspects, or the intricacy of the plot whereby everyone questioned lies about everyone else, as by its revelation of the extraordinary attitudes that people had at the time to justice, death, witchcraft, alchemy, crime and indeed punishment. It doesn't really matter to us who was putting nitric acid up whose bottom or who was burying a dead sheep's heart in whose garden. On the other hand, prejudice was such that it was generally assumed that an Italian was more likely to be a poisoner than anyone else; bigamy could be punished by forcing a man to the galleys, to avoid which fate he would willingly cut off his legs; 'committing impieties' was a serious offence and contempt of court a capital one.
Enormous numbers of people, many of whom were clearly totally innocent, were arrested and imprisoned at the time and were kept in prison for months or even years, sometimes in the hope that they would eventually reveal more evidence to incriminate other suspects. The lives of many innocent men and women were blighted by the affair and the mere suggestion that they might have been involved in it.
Almost all the evidence gathered by La Reynie and his commission, which was subsequently passed on to Louvois, the minister of war, and to the king himself, was either hearsay evidence or evidence produced by the vilest forms of torture, and we finally learn that, having initially declared that no one was to be spared from the highest in the land to the lowest, Louis XIV himself had evidence suppressed that was not to his liking.
Anne Somerset has succeeded in evoking not only the horrors of this affair and the panic it produced in a hardhearted, selfish society, but the desperate, seedy, Parisian underworld, the contemporary disregard for truth and justice, and the extraordinary gullibility of the public. A whole unsettling world is here. So much, one may feel, for the Sun King's gloire!
The list of principal characters that Somerset includes at the beginning of the book runs to 11 pages and is essential, for without it the reader might well feel lost amongst all the different poisoners, magicians, aristocrats and others involved in this sorry tale. One of the most unsettling aspects of the whole story is that in the end it all seemed like a storm in a teacup, exacerbated by the very commission designed to control it. Somerset keeps an open mind about the guilt of this or that character and about the degree to which he or she may lie. She even keeps an open mind as to the exact nature of the king's involvement. Certainly the poisoning epidemic was nothing like as widespread as was at first claimed. But it makes an excellent story.
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