to follow him as a valet. They were to present their wares to the
duchess, and even if she did not take any cloth, 'she would not refrain
from taking gloves,' said Romani, 'because those he would bring from
Grenoble would be very well made, and ladies never failed to take some
of them when they were well made, and the gloves would have the same
effect as the piece of cloth.' They actually sent to Rome and Grenoble
for gloves of the finest quality, and Romani 'prepared' them according
to the recipes of the magicians.
We find among La Reynie's papers a series of little notes which clearly
prove the plot against the life of Madame de Fontanges.
A last feature in the case is not the least surprising.
We have just seen that Madame de Montespan fled from Court when she
learnt of the arrest of the sorceress and her accomplices. Her terror,
and, above all, her fury were extreme. At the moment when her fortune
was for ever ruined, when she felt that she herself was lost, she wished
at least to have the terrible joy of seeing the Duchess de Fontanges
perish at her hands. The sorceress who had been the chief instrument of
her passions was about to be interrogated, and would undoubtedly
disclose to the attentive eyes of the judges the horrible practices in
which the king's mistress had been concerned. It was at this very moment
that Madame de Montespan, burning to realise her designs, entered into
relations with Françoise Filastre, the friend of La Voisin, and after
her the most terrible sorceress in Paris. Filastre was one of those who
had devoted their children to the devil, and murdered them immediately
after birth. She went to Normandy to find Galet, who has already been
mentioned, then went to Auvergne to obtain secrets for 'poisoning
without any sign appearing.' Returning to Paris, she took steps to win
an entrance to the house of Madame de Fontanges; but her arrest
prevented her from carrying her scheme into execution.
Nature gave to Madame de Montespan the terrible satisfaction she had
sought to obtain from magic and poison. On June 28, 1681, the Duchess de
Fontanges died at the age of twenty-two, in the abbey of Port Royal. She
was carried off by pleuro-pneumonia, tubercular in origin, the action of
which was hastened by loss of blood following an accouchement. The young
woman died convinced that she had been poisoned, and suspecting her
rival. Louis XIV, who had the same idea, feared that the autopsy might
reveal the crime, and sought to prevent it; but the relatives insisted
on it. The physicians concluded that it was a natural death. But the
opinion was still held that Madame de Fontanges had succumbed to poison
administered by Madame de Montespan, an opinion echoed by Madame de
Caylus, Madame de Maintenon, Madame Palatine, and Bussy-Rabutin.
* * * * *
Before the commissioners of the Chambre Ardente the magician Lesage had
allowed the following remark to escape him: 'If Filastre were captured,
they would learn some strange things.' She was taken: she denied
everything before the commissioners; but on October 1, 1680, while under
torture, she confirmed in the most precise manner the revelations made
by the prisoners at the Bastille and Vincennes; and on that very day
Louis XIV in terror ordered the sittings of the Chambre Ardente to be
suspended. On October 17, 1680, Louvois wrote to La Reynie: 'I have
received the letters you have done me the honour to write to me, and the
king heard them read with pain.' Louis, then, ordered the closing of the
Chambre Ardente, and when on May 19, 1681, the sittings were resumed at
the entreaty of La Reynie, the judges were forbidden 'to take any steps
in regard to the declarations contained in the reports of the torture
and execution of La Filastre.' From that day Louis had no further doubts
as to the guilt of his mistress. One more proof was to be furnished him.
The name of Mademoiselle Desoeillets, Madame de Montespan's maid,
recurs on every page of the proceedings. She was continually going
backwards and forwards between her mistress and the sorceresses. The
prisoners almost all knew her: they spoke of her in the most positive
manner. The girl Monvoisin pointed out her house, where she had been
several times. Mademoiselle Desoeillets had a friend named Madame de
Villedieu, who frequently visited the sorceresses, but for her own
private ends. When La Voisin was arrested, the two friends talked about
the incident.
'How can you be easy in mind when you have been so often to the
sorceress?' asked Madame de Villedieu.
'The king will not allow me to be arrested.'
The remark was voluntarily reported by Madame de Villedieu to the
detective Desgrez. And, in fact, when La Reynie on October 22, 1680,
wrote to Louvois: 'What has been said in regard to Mademoiselle
Desoeillets at the beginning and repeated at the end is so strong that
it is impossible to prevent her from being confronted with the people
who have spoken about her,' his words fell on deaf ears at Versailles.
When Madame de Villedieu was taken to Vincennes, she said: 'It is
astonishing that I am being imprisoned when I went only once to La
Voisin, while you leave Mademoiselle Desoeillets at liberty, who has
been there more than fifty times.'
Louvois at last decided to order Mademoiselle Desoeillets to appear,
not before the judges, but before himself in his private room. On
November 18, 1680, he wrote to La Reynie:--
'Mademoiselle Desoeillets declares with marvellous assurance that not
one of those who have named her know her, and, to assure me of her
innocence, she charged me to urge the king to allow her to be taken to
the place where those who have deposed against her are confined. She
stakes her life that no one will be able to tell who she is. His Majesty
has therefore been pleased to decide that I shall take her to Vincennes
next Friday, and bring down Lesage, the girl Voisin, Guibourg, and the
other persons who, as you inform me, have spoken of her. The person of
whom I have just spoken will enter and show herself to them, and I will
ask them if they know her, without naming her to them.'
The result did not justify Louvois' hopes. La Reynie showed at that time
that, unknown to him and in spite of his vigilance, some one was holding
communication with the prisoners in Vincennes, who were receiving
information from without. This 'some one' was Madame de Montespan. No
doubt the lieutenant of police took greater precautions on this
occasion. The prisoners were not able to receive preliminary coaching,
with the result that one and all immediately recognised the favourite's
maid.
Mademoiselle Desoeillets, moreover, was under great illusions as to
the impunity that would be assured to her. Louis XIV did not allow her
to appear before the judges, nor even to be confronted with the
prisoners, but he had her shut up for the rest of her days in close
confinement. The wretched woman died on September 8, 1686, in the
general hospital of Tours. And poor Madame de Villedieu, whose only
crime was that she was for a moment in the confidence of Mademoiselle
Desoeillets, was visited with the same fate, because of the necessity
of keeping the great secret.
When he learned suddenly of all the crimes with which the woman he had
most loved was stained--the woman whom, in the eyes of Europe, he had
made queen of the French Court, who was the mother of his favourite
children--what were the sentiments and the attitude of King Louis? What
passed in his soul, immured, for posterity as for his contemporaries, in
that 'terrible majesty' of which Saint-Simon speaks?
About the middle of August 1680, Louvois, who in this dreadful business
devoted all his intelligence and all his influence to protect Madame de
Montespan, arranged a _tête-à-tête_ with the king. Madame de Maintenon
anxiously observed them from a distance. 'Madame de Montespan at first
wept,' she says, 'threw reproaches upon him, and at last spoke with
pride.' At the first moment, under the shock of the king's declarations,
Madame de Montespan had been utterly crushed, had burst into tears of
confusion and humiliation; then, regaining command of herself, the
masterful woman had risen to the height of her pride, with all the force
of her passion and her hatred for her rivals. If it was true, she
declared, that she had been driven to great crimes, it was because her
love for the king was great, and great also were the harshness, cruelty,
and infidelity of him to whom she had sacrificed everything. And the
king might strike at her, but he could not forget that he would, with
the same stroke, injure in the eyes of France and Europe the mother of
his children--children who had been made legitimate children of France.
Madame de Montespan left this interview irrevocably ruined, but at the
same time definitively saved.
We must remember the rank to which Louis had raised his mistress. It was
of the utmost importance to him to avoid a scandal. Even by exiling the
fallen favourite, thus absolutely disgracing her, he would run the risk
of unloosing storms. La Reynie, who, thanks to his genius for reading
the hearts of men, knew Madame de Montespan's character thoroughly,
warned Louvois: 'We cannot but fear extraordinary scandals, the
consequence of which cannot be foreseen.' Louvois, Colbert, and Madame
de Maintenon herself united their efforts to soften too violent a fall.
Colbert had just betrothed his younger daughter to Madame de Montespan's
nephew. We know, moreover, how much the famous statesman had at heart
the national greatness to which he had so arduously contributed, and
which in his view could not be dissevered from the greatness of the
king. Madame de Maintenon had tenderly trained the children of Madame de
Montespan, and retained a real affection for them all her life long. Let
us add that Louis, with all his faults--his selfishness, his coarseness,
his lack of feeling, his mediocre intellect--had at least a high
sentiment of the royal dignity, and that in this awful crisis he did not
for a moment depart from that calm and tranquil majesty at which all who
approached him never ceased to wonder. Madame de Montespan was not
driven from Court. She left her splendid apartments on the first floor
for apartments remoter from the centre of the king's life. Louis
continued to receive her in public, and publicly paid her visits which
deceived careless observers; but practised eyes perceived the profound
change which had taken place beneath these external appearances. Madame
de Sévigné wrote to her daughter that Louis treated Madame de Montespan
with harshness; Bussy-Rabutin wrote that he treated her with scorn. Thus
began the expiatory martyrdom which lasted for twenty-seven years.
On March 15, 1691, Madame de Montespan retired to Paris, going into the
community of St. Joseph which she had founded. Louis granted her a right
royal pension, 10,000 pistoles--£20,000 of to-day--a month; but when, in
1692, the double marriage of Madame de Montespan's children,
Mademoiselle de Blois and the Duke de Maine, was celebrated with the
Duke de Chartres and Mademoiselle de Charolais, Louis did not allow
their mother to appear at the ceremony or to sign the contract.
In the early days of her retirement Madame de Montespan had the greatest
difficulty in accommodating herself to the calm monotony of her retreat
at St. Joseph's. 'She aired her leisure and anxieties,' says
Saint-Simon, 'at Bourbon, at Fontevrault, at her estate at Antin, and
for years was quite unable to regain repose of mind.' What were these
anxieties? Saint-Simon could not explain them; but we are acquainted
with them to-day.
Madame de Montespan was much distressed at abandoning the glory of the
world; but from the day when the renunciation was made, she threw
herself with as much passion into penitence as she had displayed in
ambition and love. 'From the moment of her retirement to St. Joseph's,'
says Saint-Simon, 'till her death, her conversion never belied itself,
and her penitence continually augmented.' She might have been seen then,
in the Carmelite convent in the Rue du Faubourg St. Jacques, imploring
from her old rival, whom she had so harshly persecuted--the gentle and
saintly Louise de la Vallière, Sister Louise de la Miséricorde--the
words which give ease of mind and forgetfulness of the past. Though she
tenderly loved those of her children whom she had borne to Louis XIV, it
was towards the Duke d'Antin, the son she had by the Marquis de
Montespan, that she diverted her solicitude, from a sense of duty, and,
as Saint-Simon tells us, 'she occupied herself with enriching him.' 'The
king had no manner of dealings with her,' writes the great chronicler,
'even through their children. Their attentions were discouraged, they
thenceforth saw her only rarely and after having asked permission. The
Père de la Tour wrung from her a terrible act of penitence, namely, to
beg her husband's pardon and place herself again in his hands. She wrote
herself in the most submissive terms, offering to return to him if he
would deign to receive her, or to repair to whatever place he pleased to
command. To any one who knew Madame de Montespan, this was a sacrifice
of the most heroic kind. She had all the merit of it without undergoing
the experience. Monsieur de Montespan sent word that he would neither
receive her nor lay any commands upon her, and that he never wished to
hear her name mentioned for the rest of his life.'
She had no further relations with the Court, the ministers,
_intendants_, or judges; she asked nothing of any man, either for her or
hers, and employed the vast income she owed to the king in doing good
all around her, bestowing alms with ceaseless and unparalleled
generosity, and endowing religious foundations. 'Beautiful as the day,'
says Saint-Simon, 'till the last hour of her life; though she was not
ill, she always fancied that she was, and that she was going to die.'
This anxiety encouraged a taste for travelling, and in her travels she
always took with her seven or eight persons as a suite. Between her
outbursts of piety and the blossoming forth of her charity, incessant
remorse thus made its appearance, as well as the continual need she felt
of deadening her thoughts. Only Louis XIV, Louvois, and La Reynie could
have explained the following page borrowed from Saint-Simon:--
'Little by little she proceeded to give all that she had to the poor.
She worked for them several hours a day at humble and rough tasks, to
wit, making shirts and other such-like things, and she made those about
her work at them too. Her table, which she had loved to excess, became
particularly frugal; her fasts were multiplied, her piety interrupted
her entertaining and the harmless little card-play at which she amused
herself, and at all hours of the day she would leave everything to go
and pray in her closet. Her mortification of the flesh was constant: her
chemises and sheets were of the roughest and coarsest unbleached linen,
but they were concealed under ordinary sheets and underwear. She
continually wore steel bracelets and garters, and a girdle of steel
which often wounded her; and her tongue, formerly so terrible a member,
had its penance also. She was further so tortured by horror of death
that she paid several women whose sole employment was to watch her. She
lay at night with all the bed-curtains thrown back, with many candles in
her room, her watchers around her, and whenever she woke up she wished
to find them chatting, playing cards, or eating, to make sure that they
did not fall a-nodding.'
The hour so much dreaded at last struck. She had a singular presentiment
of it a year beforehand. At the first attack of illness she saw that her
end was near. It came on May 27, 1707, at Bourbon.
'She profited by a brief respite from pain to confess and receive the
sacraments. Previously she had all her servants, even the humblest,
brought in, made public confession of her public sins, and besought
pardon for the scandal she had so long given, and even for her fits of
temper, with a humility so real and deep and penitent that nothing could
have been more edifying. She then received the last sacraments with
ardent piety. The dread of death which all her life had so continually
troubled her suddenly vanished and troubled her no more. She thanked God
in the presence of them all for permitting her to die in a place where
she was far away from the children of her sin, and during her illness
spoke of them only this once. She was engrossed in the thought of
eternity, in some hope of a cure with which they tried to flatter her,
and in her condition as a sinner whose fear was tempered by a steady
confidence in the mercy of God, with no regrets, solely intent on
rendering to Him the sacrifice most pleasing to Him, with a gentleness
and peacefulness which accompanied all her actions.'
The courtiers were surprised at the indifference Louis displayed on
learning of the death of his sometime mistress. To the Duchess of
Burgundy, who remarked on it, he replied that, since he had dismissed
her, he had counted on never seeing her again, and that she was from
that time dead to him. He openly reproved the grief manifested by Madame
de Montespan's children; and, to the stupefaction of the Court, he
forbade them to wear mourning, a circumstance the more incomprehensible
because at that same date the Princess de Conti, daughter of Louis XIV
and Louise de la Vallière, was wearing mourning for Madame de la
Vallière her aunt.
It would be unjust to judge Madame de Montespan solely by what has been
here said. We have spoken only of the crimes to which she was driven by
the violence of her passions. We have not recalled the wealth she
distributed with as much liberality as discretion, or the brilliance
given to the Court by her grace and wit, or the enlightened protection
which the greatest writers and artists found in her, the radiant
kindliness with which she sweetened the declining years of the great
Corneille--in a word, the innumerable deeds of kindness she performed
with as much intelligence as affection, the fruits of some of which
remain to this day. It would require a Racine, with his penetrating
mind, his ability to reconcile opposite extremes in one and the same
character, and the harmonious majesty of his language, to speak of
Madame de Montespan. Bright and radiantly beautiful, of queenly
elegance, charming by the distinction of her manners and the delicate
wit of her conversation, light-hearted and joyous, she dominated the
whole Court of France--this horrible client of the Abbé Guibourg, of La
Filastre and La Voisin.
III. A MAGISTRATE
Lieutenant of police Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie was the mainspring of
the proceedings against the poisoners. He alone carried through the vast
operations, bristling with difficulties. And it would be impossible to
find any point of his administration in which his genius and his
character appear in a more striking or complete manner. It is thanks to
him, and to the careful notes he took daily on the cases of the
prisoners, that we have been able to discover the facts of which Louis
XIV believed he had destroyed every trace when he ordered the burning of
the various documents in his private room.
Saint-Simon, who has utterly shattered reputations which seemed firm as
rock, pauses with respect before Nicolas de la Reynie, though the
functions with which he was endowed were a subject of genuine abhorrence
to him. 'La Reynie, councillor of state,' he writes, 'so well known for
having been the first to lift the office of lieutenant of police from
its natural low estate, and for making it a sort of ministerial office;
a man of great importance too, because of the king's direct confidence
in him, his constant relations with the Court, and the number of things
in which he is concerned, and in which he has infinite powers of serving
or harming in innumerable ways people of the greatest importance,
obtained at length in 1697, at the age of eighty, permission to resign
so arduous an employment, which he had for the first time ennobled by
the equity, moderation, and disinterestedness with which he had
fulfilled it, without swerving from the greatest scrupulousness, and
doing the least possible injury as seldom as possible; he was, moreover,
a man of great virtue and capacity, who in an office which he had, so to
speak, created, and in which he was bound to draw upon him the hatred of
the public, nevertheless won universal esteem.'
We have a portrait of La Reynie by his friend Mignard, and an admirable
etching of the painting by Van Schuppen. Engraving has never reproduced
human features with more clearness, colour, and lifelikeness. The face
bespeaks a clear, powerful, and well-balanced intelligence; the eyes
express a firm and thoughtful kindliness. Such was the La Reynie who
investigated the great poison cases.
Though Bazin de Bezons of the French Academy had been associated with
him in the Chambre Ardente as examining commissioner, it was the
lieutenant of police who did all the work. The number of depositions,
interrogatories, confrontations, pleadings, and other documents which he
collected is enormous; and we see the magistrate with sure hand cutting
a way through this tangled forest, guided by his experience, his
knowledge of the human soul, and his clear intellect.
The memorials he has left on questions of the greatest difficulty are
useful and interesting to study, because of the method of work they
reveal. It is exactly the method which our old professors of rhetoric
used to teach for the orderly arrangement of a French dissertation or an
historical essay. The principal and fundamental fact is noted down about
the middle of the left-hand page, with a large bracket embracing
sub-divisions; each of these sub-divisions is in turn accompanied by a
bracket embracing sub-divisions of these sub-divisions; and so on to the
end of the right-hand page, which is filled from top to bottom with
minute and close writing: there you have a multitude of slight facts
following one another in methodical order, all focussing on the
principal fact, found, as we have said, in the middle of the left-hand
page. There is no college student but has built up his schemes for
French essays on this model. But there is no question, in La Reynie's
portfolios, of rhetorical dissertations or Latin compositions; he deals
there with irrevocable sentences about to be pronounced 'on the flesh
and blood of men,' to use his own phrase. And if we go from these
bracketed plans to the memoirs and reports to which they guided the
magistrate's thought, we find ourselves in possession of marvels of
clear thinking and judging.
During the long poison case, La Reynie showed himself indefatigable in
work. He had no other concern than right and the triumph of justice. And
in proportion as the number of criminals increased, and the greatest
names in the French nobility and Parlement were found to be compromised
by his inquiries--in proportion as relatives, friends, all who feared
for themselves, and nobility and Parlement fearing for their honour and
their privileges, were up in arms against him, his courage grew, his
activity redoubled; he pushed on his inquiries, urging the king, urging
the ministers, demanding new warrants, fresh arrests, seeking permission
to extend his formidable investigations over an ever-widening circle.
Sorceresses and magicians thronged about the royal Court like swarms of
wasps about a hive of honey. In this monstrous hive were concentrated
the wealth and honours which awoke and stimulated the ambitions and
passions in which the sorceresses found their booty.