Poison Affair

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Poison Affair

Poison Affair, in French history, scandal implicating a number of prominent persons at the court of King Louis XIV. It began with the trial of Marie Madeleine d'Aubray, marquise de Brinvilliers (c.1630–76). She conspired with her lover, Godin de Sainte-Croix, an army captain, to poison her father and two brothers in order to secure the family fortune and to end interference in her adulterous relationship. Her husband escaped the same fate by his complaisance. An investigation was made, and the marquise fled abroad, but in 1676 she was arrested at Liège. The affair greatly worked on the popular imagination, and there were rumors that she had tried out her poisons on hospital patients. She was beheaded and then burned. The Brinvilliers trial attracted attention to other mysterious deaths. Parisian society had been seized by a fad for spiritualist séances, fortune-telling, and the use of love potions. Some of the quack practitioners undoubtedly also sold poison (called “inheritance powders” at the time); after their arrest they furnished the police with lists of their clients, who often were guilty merely of having their palms read or of buying an aphrodisiac, and accused them of complicity in their crimes. The most celebrated case was that of La Voisin, a midwife and fortune-teller whose real name was Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin and whose clientele included the marquise de Montespan, Olympe Mancini (niece of Cardinal Mazarin and mother of Prince Eugene of Savoy), her sister Marie Anne Mancini, and Marshal Luxembourg (duke and peer of France and one of the military heroes of the time). No formal charges were made against any of these, and there is no evidence that they were seriously implicated, yet a permanent stain was left on their names. La Voisin was burned as a poisoner and a sorceress in 1680. A special court, the chambre ardente [burning court], was instituted to judge cases of poisoning and witchcraft, and the poison epidemic came to an end in France. The affair was symptomatic of the witchcraft trials of the period throughout Europe and in New England; however, the judicial investigation was conducted generally with far more regularity and far less hysteria than elsewhere.

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They were not the only "mazarinettes" (as the five Mancini and two Martinozzi girls have been dubbed) to have stories worth telling--two others were implicated in the notorious "poisons affair," an alleged plot involving King Louis's mistress Madame de Maintenon, as described in Anne Somerset's The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (2003).

Rebellious sisters

She is somewhat less persuasive, however, when she tries to argue that the Affair of the Poisons exposed "the limits on royal absolutism" (8).

Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV's France

The scandal of the Affair of the Poisons was initiated by the investigations of the first lieutenant general of the Paris police, Nicolas de la Reynie, into a plot to poison the king.

The first, and longest, of the chapters narrates the story of the Affair of the Poisons during its six year run (1676-82) and interrogation of over four hundred suspects.

Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV's France

The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV.

Students and scholars of the Ancient Regime in France will welcome this thorough examination of the "Affair of the Poisons," a pivotal event in the reign of Louis XIV, with important ramifications on morals and behavior in seventeenth-century courtly society.

The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV

A rapid survey of his domestic reforms is followed by another probing of the king's private life--this time, his affair with Athenais de Montespan, her association with the purveyor of love potions, Catherine Monvoisin, and the famous 'affair of the poisons' in which several high-born ladies were implicated.

Louis XIV

Her narrative, complete with ten pages of biographical entries and a useful glossary of judicial terms, is the most accessible account we have and should become the standard account of the Affair of the Poisons for scholars and the interested general reader.

The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV

In a seamless link with this more general piece, Lynn Wood Mollenauer then studies one particular case, the Affair of the Poisons, in which Louis XIV vigorously pursued the investigation into use of questionable and harmful substances until he began to fear that his mistress, Madame de Montespan, was involved in the affair, at which point he tried to keep the investigation secret; finally he stopped it entirely.

Gisela Engel, Brita Rang, Klaus Reichert, and Heide Wunder, eds. Das Geheimnis am Beginn der europaischen Moderne

She as much as the King created the Versailles of legend until her inevitable downfall in the 'Affair of the Poisons'.