The crime of Madame Tiquet—A charming little Hand—_Aqua
Toffana_—The Casket—A devout Criminal—The Sinner and
the Saint—Monsieur de Lauzun’s Boots—“Sister Louise”—La
Fontanges—“Madame de Maintenant.”—The Blanks in the Circle—The
Vatican Fishes and their Good Example—Piety at Versailles—The
Periwigs and the Paniers—Père la Chaise—A dull Court—Monsieur de
St Evrémond’s Decision.
The eighteenth century in France is stained with the record of three
criminal cases which glare forth in the annals of human wickedness.
The last occurred in the latest years, and culminated in the trial
and execution of the chief criminal, Madame Tiquet. Though she had
accomplices—one of whom also suffered the extreme penalty—and
although the murderous aim fell short, and the intended victim
escaped, the attempt on the life of Monsieur Tiquet—an esteemed
magistrate—charged against his wife, made on two separate occasions,
was held to be sufficient warranty for the capital sentence upon her.
Still, since Monsieur Tiquet was living and well, the decision was
much criticised. The Parliament was accused of exacting too great a
penalty for the crime committed against itself, in the person of one
of its members, and Monsieur Tiquet himself is said to have pleaded
with the king personally for his wife’s reprieve, but to no effect.
Madame Tiquet was a beautiful woman, moving in the best society,
and extenuation was accordingly made by many, some even going the
length of declaring belief in her entire innocence. But Madame Tiquet
was decapitated on the Place de Grêve, while her chief accomplice,
Jacques Moura, was hanged.
The enormity of this crime rivalled that of the recorded murder
already narrated, of the Duchesse de Ganges, some score years
earlier, these both being rivalled by the series of murders,
perpetrated by poison, of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers. It is
recorded in her connection, that
“In the plaster-cast shop is a small, delicate, plump little
hand, dimpled and beautiful, which is sold to artists as a model.
You take it in yours, handle it, admire it, almost fancy you are
shaking hands with the good-humoured and festive little personage
to whom it must have belonged. You ask whose it was, and are told
that it was that of Madame de Brinvilliers, the notorious poisoner.
You recoil as if you had been handling an asp.”
Marguérite d’Aubrai was the daughter of one Monsieur d’Aubrai,
lieutenant-civil of Paris, and she was married at an early age to
the Marquis de Brinvilliers, to whom for a while she was devotedly
attached. In time her affection waned in favour of a Gascon
officer named St Croix, a worthless adventurer. Monsieur d’Aubrai,
discovering his daughter’s infatuation, obtained an order for the
imprisonment of St Croix in the Bastille. During the year he was
confined there, he contrived to make acquaintance with an Italian
named Exili, who was an adept in the art of toxicology, and possessed
the secret of the concoction of the terrible _Aqua Toffana_—to
call it by its best-known name, and as it was in its later form
called by “la Toffana,” the Neapolitan woman who got possession of
the recipe from the reputed witch, la Sphara, the hag of a hundred
years earlier, who was in the pay of the Borgias. In course of time
the secret of the hideous brew—originally styled by la Sphara,
“The Manna of St Nicolas of Bari”—had leaked out through the
confessional, the father-confessors, appalled probably by the many
penitential revelations made, had in course of generations given vent
almost unwittingly to the disclosures of so many crimes at so many
different hands; for it is said the “Manna,” had poisoned over six
hundred persons, and Exili had learnt the secret of the ingredients
of the subtle mortal poison, which was a tasteless colourless drug.
On the release of St Croix, the marchioness’s mad love for him had
only waxed greater, and when she had extracted from him this recipe
for death, they planned together to poison her father, her sister,
and two brothers successively, all in the same year of 1670, the
marchioness, meanwhile, being apparently a most charitable and pious
visitor of the sick in the Hôtel Dieu, and other hospitals of Paris,
but suspected later of trying the effects of her potions on the
various patients.
One day brought the discovery of the crimes of these two. The
poisons that St Croix delighted in, were many of them, so deadly
of breath, that he wore a glass mask to protect his face and lips
from the vapours, and on one occasion, while he was at work, the
mask fell off. He died instantly. No one coming forward to claim
the adventurer’s effects, they fell into the hands of Government.
Among the articles was a certain casket, which the marchioness
claimed, and so insistently and vehemently, that the authorities
became suspicious, and first had the casket opened. Its contents were
composed of packets of many kinds of poisons, each ticketed with a
description of the effects they produced. When she learned of the
opening of the casket, the murderess made her escape to England; but
still in terror of pursuit, she fled back to the Continent, where she
was tracked down at Liège, and taken under arrest back to Paris. The
crimes, one by one, were brought home to her, and she was condemned
to be beheaded and burned. Refusing however, to plead, she was put to
the question by the torture of swallowing water—“Surely,” she cried,
when she saw the three bucketfuls of water standing ready, “it is not
intended to drown me, for it is absurd to suppose that a person of my
dimensions can swallow all that!”
Not content with her own criminal work, she was proved to have
supplied the means for it to many suspected of similar crimes.
Implicated among those was the Duc de Luxembourg, and some of his
friends, who, it will be remembered, were suspected of causing the
death of the amiable and lamented Duchesse d’Orléans.
One person escaped who might well be supposed would have been one of
the marchioness’s first victims—her husband. It is believed that his
indifference to her induced her to pass him over. Madame de Sévigné,
however, mentions the _on dit_ that she did more than once attempt
to poison Brinvilliers; but that St Croix, for his own reason,
administered him an antidote, and the marquis survived to intercede
for his wife’s life, but, of course, ineffectually.
When she was arrested at Liège, a kind of general written formula
framed in vague allusion to her criminal doings was found upon
her, clearly for using in confession, to which she went with great
regularity. This was sufficiently explicit to confirm the other
evidences of her guilt.
“She communicated her poisons frequently in pigeon-pies—by which
a great many were killed,” writes Madame de Sévigné, “not from any
particular reason for despatching them, but out of mere curiosity
to try the effects of her drugs. The chevalier de Guet, who had
been a guest at her delightful entertainments about three years
ago, has been languishing ever since. She inquired the other day if
he was dead; upon being answered ‘No,’ she said, turning her head
on one side, ‘He must have a very strong constitution then.’ This
Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld swears to be true.”
During the next ensuing days, Madame de Sévigné’s letters brim with
details of the wretched woman’s latest hours.
“At six o’clock on the morning of her execution,” she writes, “la
Brinvilliers was carried in a cart, stripped to her shift, with a
cord about her neck, to the church of Notre Dame, to perform the
_amende honorable_. She was then replaced in the cart, where I saw
her lying at her length on a truss of straw, only her shift and a
suit of plain head-clothes, with a confessor on one side and a
hangman on the other. Indeed, my dear, the sight made me shudder.
Those who saw the execution say she mounted the scaffold with great
courage.”
Threatened with the question, it was not applied; since she said at
last that she would confess everything, and an appalling confession
it was. Repeatedly she had tried to poison her father, brother and
several others, before she succeeded; and all under the appearance of
the greatest love and confidence. Finally, Madame de Sévigné writes—
“At length all is over—la Brinvilliers is in the air; after her
execution, her poor little body was thrown into a great fire, and
her ashes dispersed by the wind. And so we have seen the end of a
sinner. Her confessor says she is a saint!!”
After the death of Queen Maria Théresa, which occurred some little
time before the fall of Madame de Montespan, the ascendency of the
royal governess increased rapidly.
Madame Arnoul was now no longer the indispensable friend of Madame
Scarron. She had come, in fact, to be so nearly an encumbrance,
that Françoise had handed her over in marriage to a gentleman of
Marseilles, with a portion of twenty thousand crowns, after having
profited so excellently by the example of the intriguing skill of
that past-mistress in the art, that she was quite capable henceforth
of acting for herself.
Madame Scarron was not slow to mark the preponderating affection of
Louis for his illegitimate children over the children of the queen,
and that to secure His Majesty’s favour and goodwill, was to work
to advance their interests by every possible means. She therefore
took at its turn the tide of the ill-starred fortunes of Mademoiselle
Montpensier’s connection with de Lauzun, to win from her the duchy of
Aumâle, the earldom of Eu, and the principality of Dombes, wherewith
to endow the children, as the price paid for obtaining from Louis the
pardon and release of de Lauzun, from Pignerol. Then came the turn of
Lauzun to extract from Mademoiselle, for himself, the duchy of Saint
Fargeau, the barony of Thiers in Auvergne, also a huge income from
the salt-tax in Languedoc. That done, de Lauzun showed himself for
the base ungrateful creature he was. That before his incarceration
at Pignerol a secret marriage had been made between them, had always
been the supposition; since otherwise she would not, it was thought,
have tolerated his treatment of her now, nor all the insults his
fertile imagination devised for heaping on her. One day, in the
presence of others, he had the cruelty to find fault with her style
of dress as entirely out of keeping with her age. Another time he
accused her of being the cause of all his sufferings at Pignerol.
No money, he declared, would ever make up for it. He was for ever
extorting from her money or jewels, which he lost at cards. Then he
strove to obtain from her the sole command and control of all she
still possessed; but the worm will turn, and Mademoiselle refused.
This enraged him to a pitch that spared her no insults, and his
finishing touch was to stretch out his foot one day when he visited
her at Choisy, and desire her to pull off his boots. Mademoiselle
turned scornfully away, and in a little while sought consolation and
refuge from these indignities in religious exercises of the most
rigid kind.
Mademoiselle de la Vallière, another broken-hearted woman, also about
this time entered into the convent of the Carmelites. She took the
veil, and passed the rest of her days a veritable saint under the
name of “Sister Louise de la Miséricorde.”
Madame de Montespan, finding all attempts to regain the old empire
over Louis in vain, subsequently made some endeavour to live a more
creditable life.
And meanwhile the star of Françoise rose higher and higher in the
royal firmament. The flickering meteor known as Mademoiselle de
Fontanges hardly ruffled her placidity. To Ninon, Françoise merely
referred to her as a proof that the intimacy in which she herself
lived with the king, was no more than one of pure warm friendship,
and had never exceeded those limitations.
As for la Fontanges, she is best known to posterity by the
extraordinary head-dress she adopted. Ugly as it was, it remained in
fashion for half a score of years. It was a structural arrangement
of eight divisions, in wire, covered with pieces of muslin, bows of
ribbon, interlaced with curls. These divisions were severally called:
la Duchesse, le Solitaire, le Chou, le Mousquetaire, le Croissant,
le Firmament, le Septième Ciel, and la Souris. (The Duchess, the
Solitary, the Cabbage, the Musketeer, the Crescent, the Firmament,
the Seventh Heaven and the Mouse.)
The king now bought for Madame Scarron the château and estate of
Maintenon, in Brittany, on the banks of the Gave near Chartres,
and by his desire she was henceforth called “Madame de Maintenon.”
Perhaps hardly so much at his desire, there were some about who made
a slight change in the orthography of the last syllable, and called
her “Madame de _Maintenant_.”
Her marriage with Louis is believed to have been celebrated in the
chapel of the château[7] in 1683—she being fifty and the king
forty-seven years old—in the presence of Harlay and Louvois, the
nuptial knot being tied by the confessor of the marquise, Père la
Chaise. She further obtained his appointment to the office of the
king’s confessor.
Père la Chaise was a priest of the Company of Jesus, a man, if
“neither fanatical nor fawning,” intolerant of all religious creeds
outside his own; and now, holding the conscience of Louis XIV. and of
Madame Louis XIV., Père la Chaise soon became a power in the land.
One by one death was bearing away the friends of Ninon’s earlier
years. The death of Madame de Chevreuse, at Port Royal, was followed
close by that of Madame de Longueville. Madame de Maintenon’s
prediction that de la Rochefoucauld would quickly follow her to whom
his heart had been unchangingly given, was verified. A few months,
and Marsillac, the friend of Ninon’s merry days at Loches, was no
more.
A deep melancholy darkened in upon Ninon as she thought of all those
gone hence, and the many missing now from the circle in the rue
des Tournelles, although new faces were not wanting there, and she
maintained the old hospitalities. She was not sorry, however, to put
an end to these for a while, in order to fall in with the proposition
of Monsieur le Nôtre, that she, with Madame de la Fayette, should
accompany him to Rome, whither he was bound with his friend, the poet
Santeuil, a canon of St Victor, who was making the journey in order
to try and obtain the sanction of the pope to the use of a certain
collection of Latin hymns he had composed—in all the churches of
Christendom; while the pope was anxious to consult the royal gardener
upon the laying out of the parterres of the Vatican.
They went by way of Geneva, Turin, Parma, and Florence, and arrived
in Rome. His Holiness received the travellers with the most gracious
and fatherly of welcomes, surrounded by all the members of the Sacred
College. After a while he conducted the visitors to the gardens,
where he paused on the brink of a great pond, containing fish of all
kinds, some of them carp two hundred years old. Presently one of the
cardinals rang a bell hanging to a post near the water’s edge, and
all the fishes came swimming with lightning rapidity, their heads
lifting high above the surface of the water, and a page approached
with two baskets, one filled with bread-crumbs, the other with grain.
These dainties the pope threw into the pond to his favourites, who
snapped up every morsel in a trice. Then the bell rang again, the
fish twisted and turned joyously for a little while, as if to display
their gratitude and satisfaction, and then disappeared. De Santeuil
remarked that the fish set a fine example to the religious Orders,
observing so excellently as they did, the rule of silence, and
drinking nothing but water. The observation was not very cordially
received by either the pope or his cardinals, and in any case, de
Santeuil, who did not then obtain the permission to use his hymns,
was inclined to blame the fishes. Some grace was accorded the hymns
later; but the Consistory was of opinion that they bore a flavour of
paganism.
Ninon, on returning from the Holy City to Paris, found Corneille
at the point of death. Memories now were her best consolation, and
though she had not been eight months away from Paris, she found as
many changes on her return, as if she had been absent a century.
The king, to begin with, had become converted, and the Court had
followed suit. Everyone was occupied with the concerns of his future
salvation. The king had cut off his moustache, and the courtiers had
all shaved their upper lips. As His Majesty had decided that a grey
wig would add to his air of respectability, everybody had powdered
their hair. Hitherto, hair-powder had been used by women only. Hair
had become so enormously expensive, that moderately-supplied purses
had to be content with a thin kind of crape puffed into curls. The
_justaucorps_, after having developed into a cassock kind of garment,
was now a coat, and the nether clothes Ninon considered to have grown
disgracefully ugly in shape.
The women had borrowed from Spain the hideous deformity of
_vertugadins_, cage-like objects composed of wire, horsehair, or
both, which they bound upon their hips, to extend the hang of their
petticoats. On the top of this monstrosity came the panier, a
whalebone contrivance covered with cloth stuff, put to similar ends,
and so greatly obstructing the thoroughfares, that the women were
frequently obliged to stand on one side to allow of others passing.
Pairing off with the older fashions, went the old French natural
gaiety, graceful manners and conversation, and pompous deportment
and stilted formalities of speech were the vogue. Ninon almost found
consolation for growing old in face of these dreary surroundings,
fostered and assiduously tended by Madame Louis Quatorze and her
Jesuit director, Père la Chaise. Of what consequence was France and
her well-being, provided these two carried their own ends to fruition?
Possibly this altered state of things had something to do with
Monsieur de St Evrémond’s decision to remain in England, where the
natural atmosphere might be brumous, but the social conditions far
less lugubrious. He wrote, at all events, to Ninon that, everything
considered, he preferred to remain where he had now been for fifteen
years, and would content himself with correspondence with her, and “I
shall read with vast satisfaction about things which you will tell
me that I know,” he writes, “but above all, tell me of the things
about which I do not know.”
And Ninon did write bright letters to her old friend, full of chat
and the social events of the day, as of the days that were past—a
sort of long confession, in which she did not specially spare anyone;
certainly not herself.