Implications and Investigation
The affair proper opened in February 1677 after the arrest of Magdelaine de La Grange on charges of forgery and murder. La Grange appealed to François Michel le Tellier, Marquis of Louvois, claiming that she had information about other crimes of high importance. Louvois reported to the King, who told Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, who, among other things, was the chief of the Paris police, to root out the poisoners. La Reynie sought to calm the King. The subsequent investigation of potential poisoners was to lead to accusations of witchcraft, murder and more.
Authorities rounded up a number of fortune tellers and alchemists that were suspected of selling not only divinations, séances and aphrodisiacs, but also "inheritance powders" (a euphemism for poison). Some of them under torture confessed and gave the authorities lists of their clients, who had allegedly bought poison to either get rid of their spouses or rivals in the royal court.
The most famous case was of the midwife Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin or La Voisin, who was arrested in 1679 after she was pointed out by the poisoner Marie Bosse. La Voisin implicated a number of important individuals in the French court. These included Olympia Mancini, the Comtesse de Soissons, her sister Marie Anne Mancini Duchesse de Bouillon, François Henri de Montmorency, Duke of Luxembourg and, most importantly, the King's mistress, Athénaïs de Montespan.
Questioned while she was kept intoxicated, La Voisin claimed that de Montespan had bought aphrodisiacs and performed Black Masses with her in order to gain and keep the King's favor over rival lovers. She had worked with a priest named Étienne Guibourg. There was no evidence beyond her confessions, but bad reputations followed these people afterwards. Eleanor Herman, on page 113 in her book Sex With Kings, records "Given" claimed the remains of 2,500 infants were found in La Voisin's garden. But Anne Somerset disputes this in her book The Affair of the Poisons and states there is no mention of the garden being searched for human remains.
Also involved in the scandal was Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, the eldest living scion of a prominent noble family. De Cavoye was disinherited by his family when, in an act of debauchery he chose to celebrate Good Friday with a Black Mass. Upon his disinheritance, he opened a lucrative trade in "inheritance powders" and aphrodisiacs. He mysteriously disappeared after the abrupt ending to Louis' official investigation in 1678. Because of this and his name, he was once suspected of being the Man in the Iron Mask. However, this theory has fallen out of favor because it is known that he was imprisoned by his family in 1679 in the Prison Saint-Lazare.
Read more about this topic: Affair Of The Poisons
Famous quotes containing the words implications and and/or implications:
“When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)