against whom the Treaty of Dover was directed; others accused Monsieur
himself and the Chevalier de Lorraine. In either case, the historical
interest of the problem is very great; the popular imagination
heightened it through the magnificent commentary with which Bossuet
embroidered the death of the beautiful princess; and it has been
enhanced by all the efforts made for more than a century past to solve
it. 'For fifty years and more,' writes one of the masters of modern
erudition, M. Arthur de Boislisle, 'the question has been more closely
studied, and the evidence weighed with more care, at least by impartial
and serious writers familiar with the documents of Louis XIV's reign or
with scientific problems. But it happens that some have abstained from
giving a decisive verdict, and others have varied between poison, in
which Walckenaer, Paul Lacroix, and François Ravaisson very firmly
believed, and death by accident or disease, accepted by Mignet,
Loiseleur, and Littré; with the result that the question has become
darkened rather than illuminated between conclusions diametrically
opposed, but coming from men of equal authority.' Monsieur de Boislisle
himself refrains from stating any conclusion, and recently we have
Doctor Legué, a specialist, in his interesting book, _Médecins et
Empoisonneurs_, devoting a new study to the question, and endeavouring
to prove that Madame was poisoned by corrosive sublimate.
Thanks to a minute study of the documents, guided by the work of
Monsieur de Boislisle we have just quoted, thanks above all to the
skilful guidance of two masters of modern science, we arrive, as will
be seen by and by, at an indisputable solution.
I
In accordance with the first principle of historical criticism, it is
important at the outset to determine exactly the value of the sources
whence we may derive particulars serviceable to our investigation. The
sources are divided into three well-marked categories--(1) The reports
of the physicians and surgeons; (2) the accounts of the persons who were
able to approach Madame in her last moments, or were in a position to
hear authoritative descriptions; (3) the official correspondence of the
courts of London and Paris.
The first category presents to us five reports of the post-mortem
examination:--
(_a_) The official report signed by the fifteen physicians and surgeons,
French and English, who were present at the autopsy.
(_b_) The _Account of the Illness, Death, and Autopsy of Madame_, by the
Abbé Bourdelot, physician. Bourdelot was one of the French physicians
present at the post-mortem.
(_c_) The report of Vallot, physician to the late queen-mother. Vallot
was regarded as one of the most eminent physicians of his time. He was
present among the French doctors at the autopsy. His report was
officially carried to London by the Marshal de Bellefonds.
(_d_) The _Memoir of a Surgeon of the King of England who was present at
the Opening of the Body_. This surgeon's name was Alexander Boscher.
(_e_) The account of Hugh Chamberlain, physician-in-ordinary to the King
of England, also present at the operation. This document, like the
preceding, is exceedingly useful for checking the official report and
the report of the French physicians. Some writers have believed that
Louis XIV, fearing a rupture with England, dictated the opinion the
French physicians were to give. Boscher and Chamberlain were absolutely
independent representatives of the English Government.
To these five documents, of unquestionable authenticity, may be added
the notice inserted in the _Gazette_ of July 5, 1670, which was
officially inspired by the Court physicians, and the opinion of the
famous Guy Patin, Dean of the Medical School of Paris, though he was not
actually present at the autopsy.
In our second category, the narratives of persons who approached Madame
in her last moments, or heard authoritative accounts, we must mention
prominently the account written by the charming Countess de la Fayette,
_The History of Madame Henrietta of England, first wife of Philip of
France, Duke of Orleans_. The Countess de la Fayette was attached to the
suite of Madame; she never left her during the day on which she died.
She has left a simple, precise, and sober account of the short illness,
in which every line bears the stamp of truth.
Next to this valuable document must be cited the letter of Bossuet, who
was present at the final scene, and the story of Feuillet, canon of St.
Cloud, who was with Madame before Bossuet arrived.
The third category comprises the correspondence exchanged between the
courts of England and France and their representatives: these would be
documents of the greatest value, if their official and diplomatic
character had not imposed the greatest reserve on the writers, and even
dictated their sentiments. There are first of all the letters of Louis
XIV and Hugues de Lionne to Charles II and to Colbert de Croissy,
ambassador at London; then, the despatches of Louis and of Hugues de
Lionne to Monsieur de Pomponne, ambassador at the Hague; on the English
side, five letters addressed by Lord Montagu, ambassador at the French
Court, to Lord Arlington, secretary of state to Charles II, and the
letters of Lord Arlington to Sir William Temple.
Such are the only documents worthy of credence we have at our disposal
for studying the circumstances of the death of Madame, for it is
necessary to reject in the most absolute manner the accounts of
Saint-Simon and of Monsieur's second wife, Madame Palatine. Chéruel, and
more especially Monsieur de Boislisle, have shown the improbabilities
and absurdities of these, and we shall not refer to them again. The work
of Monsieur de Boislisle is particularly interesting in showing that
these two famous narratives had a common source. As to the testimony of
d'Argenson, Voltaire, and others, destitute, in the nature of the case,
of any authority comparable to that of the authors we have mentioned
above--it is unnecessary in the points where it confirms the others; on
the points where it contradicts them, it cannot prevail; and on the
points where it contains new information, it is dangerous to follow, for
we lack any evidence by which to check it. Littré acted judiciously in
neglecting these writers when compiling his study on the death of
Madame, and the reproach levelled against him by Loiseleur is without
justification. On the contrary, it is perhaps to this happy stroke of
criticism that Littré owed the success of his argument.
II
We proceed to recount, in the simplest and most precise manner in our
power, the circumstances of the death of Madame; and from this narrative
alone we shall see emerge one of the facts we intend to establish,
namely, that Madame could not have been poisoned.
Henrietta of England, 'more comparable to the jasmine than to the rose,
very slender, delicate, slightly round-shouldered--not less pleasing for
that--exhausted, not only by four accouchements in rapid succession, but
by the fast life then led at Court, was only kept up,' says Monsieur de
Boislisle, 'by that sanguine temperament which is the prerogative of
high-strung women.' In 1664 Guy Patin wrote: 'The Duchess of Orleans was
taken ill at Villers-Cotterets, and her physicians have prescribed ass's
milk.' The presumption is, then, that she suffered from some stomachic
disorder. 'The king,' wrote Hugues de Lionne to Colbert de Croissy,
'tells us that more than three years ago she complained of a pain in the
side which compelled her to lie flat for three or four hours without
finding ease in any posture.' Madame was constantly afflicted with a
pain at one fixed spot in the breast. 'She further used to complain,'
wrote the Abbé Bourdelot, 'of a cruel burning pain, not in the abdomen,
but in the chest.' She was always wanting to vomit. 'Most often she
could take only milk for food, and remained in bed for days together.'
These facts indicate, as Dr. Le Gendre tells us, that Madame suffered
from a chronic inflammation of the stomach, a form of gastritis. The
reports of the autopsy show, further, that Madame was afflicted with
pulmonary tuberculosis, and it is not rare for these two morbid
conditions to co-exist.
During the journey she made in Flanders with the king and Monsieur
before her departure for England, the appearance of the young princess
caused much alarm. 'She was reduced to living on milk,' writes Madame de
la Fayette, 'and retired to her own room as soon as she got out of the
coach, and as a rule she went to bed.... One day, when the talk fell on
astrology, Monsieur said that it had been foretold that he would have
several wives, and judging from the state Madame was in, he was
beginning to believe it.'
Madame returned from England on June 18. Her condition had become very
much worse. Next day she kept her bed. 'She went into the queen's room,'
wrote Mademoiselle de Montpensier, 'like a dressed-up corpse with rouge
on its cheeks, and when she went out, everybody, including the queen,
said that she had death written on her face.' 'On June 24, 1670,' writes
Madame de la Fayette, 'a week after her return from England, Monsieur
and she went to St. Cloud. The first day she went there she complained
of pains in the side and abdomen, to which she was subject.
Nevertheless, as it was extremely hot, she desired to bathe in the
river. Monsieur Yvelin, her chief physician, did all he could to prevent
her, but in spite of all he said she bathed on Friday the 27th, and on
Saturday she was so ill that she did not bathe. I arrived at St. Cloud
on Saturday at six o'clock in the evening. I found her in the gardens.
She told me that I should think her looking cross, and that she was not
at all well. She had supped as usual, and she walked in the moonlight
till midnight.' The preceding lines, every detail of which is of great
importance, have been neglected by the historians who have concluded she
was poisoned.
'On Sunday the 29th, at dinner, Madame ate as usual, and after dinner
she lay down on some cushions, as she often did when she was at liberty.
She had made me place myself near her,' says Madame de la Fayette, 'so
that her head was almost on me. An English painter was painting
Monsieur's portrait; we were talking about all sorts of things, and
meanwhile she fell asleep. During her nap she changed so considerably
that after watching her for a long time I was surprised at it, and
thought that her spirit must do a great deal towards adorning her
countenance, since it was so pleasant when she was awake and so little
attractive when she was asleep. But I was wrong in this reflection, for
I had several times seen her sleeping, and had never yet seen her less
lovely. When she awoke, she rose from the place where she had been
lying, but with so haggard a face that Monsieur was surprised and called
my attention to it. She then went away into the drawing-room, where she
walked up and down for some time with Boisfranc, Monsieur's treasurer,
and while talking to him, complained several times of the pain at her
side.'
We are coming to the moment when any poisoning must have taken place; we
see already that the mischief was done.
'Monsieur went downstairs to return to Paris. He found Madame de
Meckelbourg on the steps, and came up again with her. Madame left
Boisfranc and came to Madame de Meckelbourg. As she was speaking to her,
Madame de Gamaches brought to her, as well as to me, a glass of chicory
water that she had asked for some time before. Madame de Gourdon, her
tire-woman, gave it to her. She drank it, and then, replacing the cup on
the salver with one hand, she pressed her side with the other, saying,
in a tone that betokened severe pain, "Oh! what a dreadful twinge! Oh,
what a pain! I can bear it no longer!"
'She reddened in uttering these words, and the next moment turned a
livid pallor, which surprised us all; she continued to cry out, and told
us to take her away, as she could no longer stand. We took her in our
arms; she tottered along half doubled-up; I held her while some one
unlaced her. She moaned all the time, and I noticed that she had tears
in her eyes. I was amazed and affected by it, for I knew that she was
the most patient creature in the world. Kissing the arms I was holding,
I said that she was evidently in great pain, and she told me I could not
imagine how great. She was put to bed, and as soon as she was there, she
cried out more loudly than she had yet done, and threw herself from one
side to the other like a person in infinite agony. Some one went off to
find her chief physician, Monsieur Esprit; he came, said it was colic,
and prescribed the ordinary remedies for such ailments. All the time the
pain was dreadful. Madame said that it was much worse than we thought,
and that she was dying, and begged some one to go in search of a
confessor for her.'
The young princess believed that she was poisoned. A sort of antidote
was brought her in the shape of oil and powdered adder, which made her
vomit. After some hours of frightful agony, Henrietta of England expired
while Bossuet was reciting the last exhortations.
Face to face with death, Madame displayed a greatness of soul to which
all who approached her have borne touching testimony. 'Madame was gentle
towards Death,' said Bossuet, 'as she had been with all the world. Her
great heart was neither embittered nor wrathful against the dread foe.
Nor did she face him with proud disdain, but was content to look him in
the face without emotion and to welcome him without distress.'
III
This bare narrative of the facts would be sufficient to weaken the
opinion of those who believe that the Princess Henrietta died of poison.
The following observations will contribute to deprive it of all credit.
Writers are unanimously agreed about the fact that Madame could only
have been poisoned by the glass of chicory water given her by Madame de
Gamaches. Now as soon as suspicions awoke in the mind of Madame and her
circle, that is to say, the moment after the drink had been taken,
Monsieur ordered some of the water to be given to a dog; Madame
Desbordes, the princess's maid, who was heartily devoted to her, told
her that she had made the drink, and had herself drunk some of it, and
Madame de Meckelbourg also drank some. We are thus bound to acknowledge
that the famous chicory water could not have been poisoned. Monsieur J.
Lair, with his clear and vigorous mind, has well analysed the scene:
'The decoction of which so many persons had drunk was harmless; it was
the cup that ought to have been examined.' 'The details given by Madame
de la Fayette and others,' writes Monsieur de Boislisle, 'exclude the
idea of poison poured into the glass itself; and indeed Madame Palatine
says that what was poisoned was not the water itself, nor the vessel in
which it was made, but the cup which was reserved for the princess, and
which no one else would have dared to use.'
It is a fact that the seventeenth-century poisoners sought to prepare
goblets and silver cups in such a way as to poison the persons who were
afterwards to use them. Among the constant friends of La Voisin, La
Bosse, La Chéron, and La Vigoureux, the most renowned sorceresses of the
period, we find a certain François Belot, one of the king's bodyguard,
making a specialty of this, and deriving a comfortable income from it,
until the day when this trade led him to the Place de Grève, where he
was broken on the wheel on June 10, 1679. His method of procedure was as
follows: 'He crammed a toad with arsenic, placed it in a silver goblet,
and then, pricking its head, made it urinate, and finally crushed it in
the goblet.' During this pleasant operation he mumbled his wicked
charms. 'I know a secret,' said Belot, 'such that in doctoring a cup
with a toad and what I put into it, if fifty persons chanced to drink
from it afterwards, even if it were washed and rinsed, they would all be
done for, and the cup could only be disinfected by throwing it into a
hot fire. After having thus poisoned the cup, I should not try it upon a
human being, but upon a dog, and I should intrust the cup to nobody.'
But it happened that a client of Belot's, being somewhat sceptical, got
a dog to drink out of the doctored cup, and found that the animal was
not harmed in the least; he even picked a violent quarrel with the
magician about the matter, taunting him with the worthlessness of his
wares. Belot spoke frankly to the commissioners of the Chambre Ardente:
'I know that the toad cannot do anybody any harm; what I did with the
silver cups and trenchers was done solely to get hold of such cups and
trenchers.' His skill, nevertheless, enjoyed a very substantial
reputation. At the same date the magician Blessis was believed to know
how to manipulate mirrors in such a way that any one who looked in them
received his deathblow.
These facts seem mere childish folly under scientific investigation. The
knowledge people had of poisons in the eighteenth century was limited to
arsenic, antimony, and sublimate; it did not enable them so to poison a
cup as to cause sudden death to the person using it, without his being
aware of the poison at the moment of drinking it. The opinion of
Professor Brouardel on this point is explicit; and Dr. Legué, convinced
as he is of the poisoning of Madame, admits that the story of the cup
can only make any well-informed man smile.
The conclusion is that as Madame could not have been poisoned by the
water she drank, or by the cup containing the water, she could not have
been poisoned at all.
IV
'Her body was opened,' writes Bossuet, 'among a large concourse of
physicians and surgeons and all sorts of people, because, having begun
to feel extreme pain when drinking three mouthfuls of chicory water,
given her by the dearest and most intimate of her women, she said at
once that she was poisoned.' It was with the same idea that the English
ambassador attended the operation along with an English physician and
surgeon.
After having shown that Madame could not have been poisoned, it remains
to settle what disease it was of which she died. Our task is simplified
by the marvellous study in which Littré proved that she succumbed to an
acute peritonitis, the immediate and inevitable result of the
perforation of the stomach by an ulcer. This study, Dr. Paul Le Gendre
tells us, is the finest extant example of a retrospective medical
demonstration. We have it now under our eyes; but we find it condensed
by the pen of the most elegant writer of our time, M. Anatole France,
who will allow us to borrow this quotation: 'Littré, an expert in
medical observation, does not hesitate to diagnose a simple ulceration
of the stomach, which Professor Cruveilhier was the first to describe,
and which Madame's physicians could not recognise because they knew
nothing about it. It is unquestionable that for some time Madame had
been suffering from abdominal pains after her meals. The liquid she took
on June 29 brought about the perforation of the ulcerated wall, and this
caused the terrible pain in her side and the peritonitis which we have
mentioned. The physicians who opened the body found, indeed, that the
stomach was pierced with a little hole; but as they could not account
for the pathological origin of this hole, they fancied after the event
that it had been made inadvertently during the autopsy, "upon which,"
says the surgeon of the king of England, "I was the only one to insist."
The incident is reported as follows by the Abbé Bourdelot: "It happened
by misadventure during the dissection that the point of the scalpel
made an opening at the top of the ventricle, and many of the gentlemen
asked how it came about. The surgeon said that he had done it by
accident, and Monsieur Vallot said that he had seen when the cut was
made."'
Littré objects, with reason, that it is difficult to make inadvertently
an incision with the point of a pair of scissors--there is no question
of a scalpel--in a tough and distended membrane like the stomach during
an autopsy. The illusion of the physicians present at the operation is
the more easily explained because in that lesion, as it is now known,
the edges of the opening are perfectly clean and sharp, very regular, so
that the hole seems to have been made artificially. Jaccoud points out
'the very sharp delimitation of the ulcer, the absence of inflammation,
and of peripheral suppuration.' 'The section of the tissues,' writes
Monsieur Bouveret, 'is so clean that, to adopt a classical comparison,
the ulcer appears as though cut out with a punch.' It varies in
dimensions from the size of a lentil to that of a five-franc piece.
M. Anatole France admirably explains the state of mind of the physicians
who drew up the report of the autopsy. 'The French physicians were
afraid of finding in the viscera of the princess indications of a crime
which might throw suspicion on the royal family. They dreaded even
everything which lent itself to doubt, and thereby to malevolence.
Knowing that the least uncertainty as to the cause of death or the
condition of the corpse would be interpreted by the public in a sense
that would ruin them, they had reasons of self-interest and the zeal of
fear to urge them to explain everything. Now, in their inability to
connect with a normal pathological type a lesion unknown to them all,
and perhaps suspicious to some, it was much to their advantage to
explain this enigmatical wound as an accident during the autopsy. And we
can understand their believing what they wished to believe. The English
surgeons, as ignorant as they, accepted their conclusion in default of a
better.' 'The fact is,' says Littré in conclusion, 'that they were bound
to find a hole, and they did find it. All dispute was silenced in the
presence of three things: the sudden attack, the peritonitis, and the
presence of oil ['and of bile,' adds Dr. Le Gendre] which the reports of
the autopsy show to have been in the lower bowel.' In the lower bowel
was found, indeed, a substance which the reports of the French
physicians describe as 'fat like oil.'[13] It was, in fact, oil--the oil
which Madame had drunk as an antidote, and which had been discharged
from the stomach.
Further, even supposing, against all probability, that the hole had
actually been made accidentally by young Félix, who was the operator,
all the details of Madame's health known before death, and the details
revealed by the autopsy, are so conclusive in favour of the diagnosis
of a simple ulcer ending in perforation, that we should be led to the
admission that there must have existed, in another part of the wall of
the stomach, another small hole which escaped the notice of the
physicians and surgeons present at the autopsy. There would have been
nothing surprising in this, for their attention was not directed to this
point. It might even be supposed that the scissors of Félix, if they had
really cut the wall of the stomach by inadvertence, only increased the
size of the natural perforation already existing. Allowance must indeed
be made for the state of putrid softening in which the organs are bound
to have been, the corpse having remained exposed all through a day of
intense heat.
'To sum up, before June 29, there were gastric pains caused by
ulceration; on the 29th, bursting of the ulcer and acute peritonitis.'
Peritonitis is distinctly indicated by the reports. Such are the
conclusions of Littré: Dr. Paul Le Gendre, a most competent authority,
unhesitatingly confirms them, as also does Professor Brouardel, who
writes as follows: 'Admitting ulceration of the stomach, all the
phenomena supervene with classic exactitude.'
If we refer to the works of the celebrated Cruveilhier, who was the
first to describe simple ulcers, we find by an interesting coincidence,
in the very case he presents as a type, the closest correspondence with
the illness of Madame, and a fresh proof of the soundness of Littré's
opinion.