The Affair of the Poisons: Murder at Versailles

0:00 [SPEAKER_00]: At the most glittering court in Europe, the ladies and gentlemen are quite clip poisoning each other. [SPEAKER_00]: Husbands are dying of mysterious stomach ailments, rivals are falling ill and wasting away. [SPEAKER_00]: In convenient relatives are dropping dead just when someone stands to inherit.

0:18 [SPEAKER_00]: and behind it all is a hidden network. [SPEAKER_00]: Fortune tellers, alchemists, and self-styled witches, operating out of back rooms in Paris, selling love potions, black magic, and for the right price, a powder that will make your problems disappear into a fresh grave. [SPEAKER_00]: the scandal will reach so high and implicate so many powerful people that the king himself will order the investigation shut down and the records burned.

0:46 [SPEAKER_00]: This is the affair of the poisons. [SPEAKER_00]: This is six feet of history, five minutes of the past, they'd rather you forget. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm August Mercer. [SPEAKER_00]: And tonight, the Poison scandal that gripped the court of Louis XIV exposed the murderous underside of a golden age and reached so close to the throne that the king buried it.

1:10 [SPEAKER_00]: The setting is France in the 1670s and 80s, the France of Louis XIV, the Sun King, at the absolute height of his power and splendor. [SPEAKER_00]: Versy. [SPEAKER_00]: The grandest court in the world. [SPEAKER_00]: Silk, and gold, and etiquette, and dazzling display, and underneath it as we are about to see something rotten.

1:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The scandal began as these things often do with a single case that pulled a thread and unraveled an entire tapestry. [SPEAKER_00]: It started with the marquee's Dabring Villier, a noble woman who, which emerged, had systematically poisoned her own father and her two brothers in order to secure the family inheritance.

1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: She had allegedly tested her poisons on the sick and the poor in hospitals under the guise of charitable visits to perfect the dosage before using them on her own family. [SPEAKER_00]: She was eventually caught, tried, tortured and executed in 1676. [SPEAKER_00]: and at her execution, she reportedly made a chilling remark.

2:17 [SPEAKER_00]: That half the people of quality were involved in this sort of thing, and that she could take many down with her if she chose to talk. [SPEAKER_00]: That remark and the sensation of her case put the authorities on alert, and the man in charge of the Paris police, a capable and determined official, began to pull at the thread, and what he found horrified him.

2:39 [SPEAKER_00]: He discovered that beneath the glittering surface of Parisian society, ran a thriving, organized underworld of poison and the occult. [SPEAKER_00]: A network of fortune tellers, so-called sorcerers, alchemists, renegade priests and midwives who catered to the desires of the wethy and the desperate, and what they were selling was a menu of forbidden services.

3:03 [SPEAKER_00]: For the love-lawn, there were love potions and charms to win back a string husband or capture a desired lover. [SPEAKER_00]: For the ambitious, there were spells and rituals promising advancement for tune and favor. [SPEAKER_00]: And for the truly desperate or the truly ruthless. [SPEAKER_00]: There was what people delicately called inheritance powder.

3:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Inheritance powder was poison. [SPEAKER_00]: Arsenic most often and other toxic compounds prepared and so to people who wanted someone dead. [SPEAKER_00]: A rich husband, an elderly relative standing between you and a fortune, a rival at court, a wife you were tired of, the network would supply the means and sometimes the expertise to remove them quietly with symptoms that mimicked natural illness.

3:51 [SPEAKER_00]: At the center of this web was a woman known as Lavoisine, Catherine Mowoisine, a fortune teller and self-proclaimed sorceress who ran what was essentially a criminal enterprise out of Paris. [SPEAKER_00]: She told fortunes, sold potions and poisons, performed abortions and, according to the investigation, was involved in darker ritual still, because the accusations went beyond poison.

4:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The investigation uncovered claims of so-called black masses, blasphemous, perverted rituals, allegedly involving sacralage and, in the most urid and horrifying testimony, the sacrifice of infants. [SPEAKER_00]: Whether every one of these claims was true or how much was extracted under torture and inflamed by the hysteria of the investigation is genuinely debated by historians.

4:43 [SPEAKER_00]: but the testimony was there and it was appalling and it named names. [SPEAKER_00]: Because that was the truly explosive thing. [SPEAKER_00]: As the police interrogated Lavoisar and her associates and interrogation in this era meant torture, they began to name their clients. [SPEAKER_00]: And the clients were not just desperate commoners.

5:05 [SPEAKER_00]: They were aristocrats, courtiers, prominent nobles, people at the very top of French society. [SPEAKER_00]: The King established a special court to try the cases. [SPEAKER_00]: A tribunal that became known as the Shompa Ardente, the burning chamber, named for the black draped candlelit room in which it sat.

5:26 [SPEAKER_00]: And it worked its way through amounting pile of accusations, arresting and trying and executing a growing number of people. [SPEAKER_00]: Fortune tellers and poisoners were burned, hanged, or broken. [SPEAKER_00]: Levoiser herself was burned at the stake in 1680. [SPEAKER_00]: Still, the names kept coming, and they kept climbing higher up the social ladder toward the king's own inner circle.

5:47 [SPEAKER_00]: And then the investigation reached a name that could not be spoken. [SPEAKER_00]: because, among those implicated by the testimony, was Madame de Montespan, the King's own official mistress. [SPEAKER_00]: The most powerful woman at court, the woman who had shared Louis XIV's bed for years and born him several children.

6:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The accusations against her were grave. [SPEAKER_00]: It was alleged that, over the years, she had turned to love Wazaar's network to secure and keep the king's love. [SPEAKER_00]: That she had used love potions, possibly administered to the king himself in his food, and had participated in black masses, allegedly conducted over her own body, to magically bind Louis to her and destroy her rivals.

6:34 [SPEAKER_00]: and it was even suggested that, as the King's affections later cooled and wandered to younger women, she may have contemplated poison. [SPEAKER_00]: Now whether Montespan was truly guilty, is one of the great unresolved questions of the affair. [SPEAKER_00]: The evidence against her came largely from the testimony of criminals under torture and threat of death, which is notoriously unreliable.

6:57 [SPEAKER_00]: People will say anything to stop the pain or to implicate the powerful in hope of mercy. [SPEAKER_00]: She was never formally charged, it is entirely possible she was innocent or guilty only of buying some harmless seeming love charm years earlier and that the darker accusations were exaggeration and invention.

7:17 [SPEAKER_00]: But it did not matter whether it was true. [SPEAKER_00]: What mattered was that it had been said in an official investigation by multiple witnesses. [SPEAKER_00]: The mother of the king's children stood accused of poison and blasphemy and of drugging the king himself. [SPEAKER_00]: and that is the point at which Louis XIV shot it all down, because think about the King's position.

7:39 [SPEAKER_00]: If the investigation continued and the accusations against Montespan became public, the scandal would be catastrophic. [SPEAKER_00]: It would humiliate the monarchy beyond repair. [SPEAKER_00]: It would suggest that the sunking, the living symbol of France, the man who claimed to rule by the will of God, had been magically manipulated, drugged and surrounded by devil worshiping poisonous in his own bed for years.

8:05 [SPEAKER_00]: It would make him a laughing stock and a victim, the prestige of the crown which was everything would be shattered, so the king made a decision. [SPEAKER_00]: He protected the monarchy, which meant protecting himself, and quietly protecting Montespunk, whatever the truth about her was. [SPEAKER_00]: The most sensitive cases, those touching people to important to be exposed, were removed from the public tribunal.

8:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the accused who knew too much were not tried and executed, because a public trial would let them talk. [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, a number of them were simply imprisoned in secret for the rest of their lives, held in remote fortresses, forbidden to speak of what they knew, kept alive but silenced so that the secrets would die with them behind stone walls.

8:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And then, years later, Louis had the most sensitive documents of the investigation destroyed. [SPEAKER_00]: He personally saw to it that certain records, the ones that touched Montespan and the inner most circle were burned. [SPEAKER_00]: He was quite literally burning the evidence to protect the reputation of his throne.

9:13 [SPEAKER_00]: which means that we will never fully know the truth of the affair of the poisons, the king ensured it. [SPEAKER_00]: The deepest secrets went into the fire, or into the graves of prisoners locked away and forgotten. [SPEAKER_00]: What survives is the record of the cases that were allowed to proceed, which was scandal enough, and the shadow of the ones that were not.

9:34 [SPEAKER_00]: to how much of it was real, and this is where we have to be careful and honest as always. [SPEAKER_00]: Some of it was unquestionably real, poisoning was a genuine phenomenon in this era. [SPEAKER_00]: the brinvilius case was real. [SPEAKER_00]: A woman really did murder her family for money.

9:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The trade in arsenic and other poisons was real. [SPEAKER_00]: The network of fortune tellers and potion sellers praying on the fears and desires of Perisians was real. [SPEAKER_00]: People really were arrested, tried and executed. [SPEAKER_00]: Lavoisa really was burned, but the affair also had every ingredient of a moral panic and a witch hunt.

10:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The investigations relied heavily on torture which produces false confessions and wild accusations. [SPEAKER_00]: The atmosphere became feverish, and once the machine was running, it had every incentive to keep finding guilt. [SPEAKER_00]: The most sensational claims, the black masses, the infant sacrifices, are exactly the kind of lure it's satanic accusations that recur throughout history.

10:36 [SPEAKER_00]: whenever a society whips itself into a frenzy about hidden evil, and they shall be treated with deep skepticism even as we acknowledge that something dark was genuinely going on. [SPEAKER_00]: The truth, most likely, sits in the uncomfortable middle. [SPEAKER_00]: There was a real trade in poison and a real willingness among some of the powerful to use it.

10:58 [SPEAKER_00]: and there was also a hysterical torture-driven investigation that inflated that reality into something vast and demonic, sweeping up the innocent and the guilty together, until it threatened the throne itself and had to be buried. [SPEAKER_00]: And that, in the end, is what makes the affair of the poisons so revealing, not the potions, not even the murders, but what it shows us underneath the gold.

11:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Because Versailles is remembered as the summit of civilization, refinement, art, elegance, order. [SPEAKER_00]: And this affair pulls back the tapestry and shows you what was living behind it, fear and ambition and greed and desperation, and a willingness to visit a witch in a back room in Paris and buy a powder to kill your husband.

11:49 [SPEAKER_00]: The same court that danced the menu at in silk was some of it quietly shopping for poison. [SPEAKER_00]: Human beings do not become better because their surroundings become more beautiful. [SPEAKER_00]: The people at the most refined court in the world were poisoning each other for money and love and advantage exactly as human beings have always done in every setting at every level of society.

12:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The elegance was real, so with the arsenic. [SPEAKER_00]: They co-existed in the same rooms in the same people, and there is a direct thread from this scandal to another story we have told on this show. [SPEAKER_00]: Because among the secrets the king were so determined to bury, some touched on the shadowy world of servants and gobetweens who knew too much.

12:34 [SPEAKER_00]: And the practice of quietly imprisoning inconvenient people for life in remote fortresses under absolute secrecy is exactly the machinery that produced the legend of the man in the iron mask in the same rain under the same king. [SPEAKER_00]: Louis XIV had a well-established habit of making dangerous knowledge disappear behind stone walls.

12:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The affair of the poisons is simply the largest documented case of it. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the affair of the poisons. [SPEAKER_00]: a scandal that began with one woman poisoning her family and unraveled into a hidden underworld of poison and black magic that reached all the way to the king's own bed.

13:13 [SPEAKER_00]: And was then buried deliberately in secret prisons and burned documents by a king who decided that some truths were too dangerous for even the sun king to let see the light. [SPEAKER_00]: We know what he wanted us to know. [SPEAKER_00]: The rest went into the fire, and somewhere in that missing evidence is the answer to whether the most powerful woman in France really did try to bewitch and perhaps poison the most powerful man in Europe.

13:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Louis made very sure we would never find out. [SPEAKER_00]: Follow six feet of history for a new story every day. [SPEAKER_00]: Next time, a single ship that vanished with a nation's treasure, a curse laid by a drowning man, and the gold still lying somewhere on the seabed. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm August Mercer.

13:59 [SPEAKER_00]: And this was six feet of history. [SPEAKER_00]: A dark whisper studio's production.