The array of culprits and the goggling audience alike ranged from the most glittering members of France's aristocracy to Paris's dregs. That's one reason the bizarre chain of events that kept France intermittently on edge and in a tizzy from 1670 to 1682, retold with verve by Holly Tucker in City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris, may qualify as the first truly modern scandal. What historians of Louis XIV's reign most often call "The Affair of the Poisons" had it all: sex, death, forgery, sorcery, clandestine meetings in sordid locales, political rivalries and shenanigans, iniquity among the powerful. Not to mention a dedicated flatfoot out to get to the bottom of things — and, ultimately, an official cover-up once somebody too close to the king for anyone's comfort was implicated.
Previewing our own age of tabloid docudramas, "audience" isn't even a wholly figurative term. The whole gallimaufry went on long enough that a play burlesquing it was produced on the Left Bank in time for one of the well-born suspects to attend it, not long before she wound up in the dock herself. Like a number of her peers, the duchess of Bouillon (some name!) had been hoping to bump off a husband she disliked with help from a sinister back-street necromancer, abortionist, and peddler of potions known as Madame Voisin. Unlike some of the other perps, however — including her sister Olympe, the duchess of Soissons, who bolted the country when alerted to her impending arrest — Bouillon had enough temerity to successfully stymie Tucker's hero: Nicholas de la Reynie, the founder of the Paris police force.
La Reynie had been given the newly created post of lieutenant general of police in 1667. That was shortly after the official formerly, and ineffectually, responsible for maintaining public order — one François Dreux d'Aubray — died of what was declared to be gout. (Not so, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) At the time, Paris was, so Tucker tells us in a chapter title, the "Crime Capital of the World": filthy, overrun with cutpurses and mayhem-prone drunks, and — thanks to people of all classes acquiring the heretofore exotic gadgets known as pistols — newly lethal. Since venturing outdoors was particularly dangerous after dark, among de la Reynie's first steps was to order the streets hung with lanterns, turning Paris into "the first major European city to be illuminated at night." Isn't it nice to know the origin of la Ville Lumière's nickname?
Murder by poisoning was a common enough fear that at least one apothecary specialized in selling antidotes certified by La Reynie himself. But at least in aristocratic circles, fear didn't blossom into hysteria until Louis XIV's beloved sister-in-law — the young wife of "Monsieur," the king's younger brother Philippe — fell mortally ill in June 1670 after drinking a glass of chicory water. That September, two brothers of the marquise de Brinvilliers both sickened and died after sharing a pie with some guests at their country estate. They were the sons — as the marquise was the daughter — of François Dreux d'Aubray.
Brinvilliers didn't come under suspicion until her lover and accomplice, Gaudin de Sainte-Croix, died two years later (not from poison, apparently). He left behind a box of incriminating materials that ended up in the hands of one of La Reynie's police commissioners. Recognizing she was in danger, she fled into hiding in Liège, and La Reynie's men only tracked her down and hauled her back to Paris in 1676. Doubtless guessing what was in store for her, she tried to kill herself more than once on the journey.
Nonetheless, at her trial, she "bitterly denied everything, using rank and privilege as her principal alibi," Tucker writes. But Louis XIV had instructed the courts to show no mercy. Sentenced to death by beheading but trying to forestall the torture session that preceded it — known as the "Extraordinary Question" and meant to extract both religious contrition and useful confessions — Brinvilliers admitted to poisoning her father and her brothers. By way of a bonus, she added that she'd tried to kill her husband by the same means five times.
Her breasts bared to the mob once the executioner tore her dress off her shoulders — a rare, perhaps unprecedented humiliation of a French marquise in those days, though Tucker doesn't say — she was decapitated on the place de Grève that July. Before her death, however, Brinvilliers had supposedly told La Reynie, "Half of the nobility have done the same things, if I felt like talking, I'd ruin them all!" He wasn't to find out how near being true that was until investigating a rumored plot to kill the king — by poison, of course — led him by circuitous stages to Madame Voisin.
The 1679 arrest of Voisin and her frequent collaborator, a charlatan known as Lesage, was the affair's real turning point. The clientele for their services, from charms and spells to aphrodisiacs and deadly toxins, had included not only wealthy bourgeoises but noblewomen — noblewomen whose identities de la Reynie was determined to find out, and did. Once three of them, with more to come, were in custody at the fortress prison of Vincennes, "the public's interest became insatiable," and it was partly for that reason Louis decided to establish a secret tribunal to conduct the many trials in prospect: the Chambre Ardente, or "Burning Chamber."
This is where Tucker's expert reconstruction of the case merges with the other, superficially unrelated story she's been telling in counterpoint from the start: the many loves of Louis XIV, from poor Louise de la Vallière (who ended her days in a convent) to Athenais, marquise de Montespan, the most famous royal mistress of the reign. To Louis's mounting incredulity, if not horror, several of his erstwhile bedmates ended up implicated in de la Reynie's investigation, including, among others, Brinvilliers's sisters Olympe and Marie Mancini — a.k.a. the duchesses of Soissons and Bouillon, respectively, both of whom he'd dallied with in his youth.
But then Lesage, seconded by Voisin's daughter Marie-Marguerite once her mother's 1680 execution turned her talkative, implicated Montespan herself. Worse yet, the accusations against Athenais were the most lurid of all, involving incantations, elixirs, and black-magic ceremonies — allegedly climaxing with a ghoulish child sacrifice — to either win back the king's love or punish him for tiring of her. She was suspected of poisoning twenty-year-old Marie-Angelique Fontanges, her chief successor in the royal bed, and even of plotting the ultimate revenge: regicide. Naturally, we'll never know how much of this was true, how much exaggerated or concocted — but it does seem all but certain that she had at least dabbled in Voisin's hoodoo.
That was too much for Louis, who chose to simply refuse to believe the charges rather than have Montespan arrested or interrogated, despite the testimony against her. The Chambre Ardente was permanently dissolved in 1682, having tried 88 of the nearly 200 people by then under detention. La Reynie's final report on the whole affair was kept secret, and when the only copy was returned to the king after La Reynie's death, Louis had it burned. But unbeknownst to the Sun King, La Reynie's voluminous investigation notes survived, becoming Tucker's (and everybody else's) primary source of information on the case.
The story has been told before, perhaps most memorably in Frances Mossiker's The Affair of the Poisons (1969) as well as, obviously, many biographies of Louis XIV and other studies of his reign. But beyond Tucker's prodigious archival research and eye for the telling detail, one of her book's strength is that, unlike most of her predecessors, she isn't seduced by the glamour of Versailles, much less the wicked allure — even now, going on three centuries after her death — of the marquise de Montespan. (Lisa Hilton's besotted 2002 Athenais is an almost comical example of Montespan's charisma overpowering moral judgments that disfavor her.) Among City of Light, City of Poison's most admirable qualities is the way it corrects the balance by not only giving the indefatigable La Reynie pride of place, but plunging readers into the squalid, brutally impoverished seventeenth-century Paris where the likes of Voisin thrived.
Another asset is that Tucker knows a lot about medicine — meaning, in this case, poison. Her previous book, 2011's Blood Work, used seventeenth-century experiments with blood transfusion as a window into the political and social underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution. This time around, she keeps readers fascinated by savvily explaining the ingredients of all the toxins and other potions that play a role in the story, the often gruesome ways they were obtained, and their effect on the intended recipients.
To her credit, she wants us to stay alert to the human suffering involved. That's true whether she's contemplating the anonymous Paris infants abducted for Voisin's grisliest recipes or detailing the agonies involved in being subjected to the "Extraordinary Question," particularly when women are the victims. She's most winning when she admits toward the end that De la Reynie's unmoved witness to the tortures he put in motion considerably darkens her otherwise favorable view of him.
Despite Tucker's impressive structural knack, there are times when the material's many strands escape her grip. Even readers with some prior knowledge of the Affair of the Poisons may find themselves wishing for a "Cast of Characters" crib sheet that keeps the dozens of players identifiable. But that takes very little away from this book's central achievement, which is to turn them all — aristocratic or base, vicious or virtuous — from historical waxworks into flesh-and-blood creatures with convincingly vivid fears, pains, and malevolent or upright motives. The story told in City of Light, City of Poison may be peculiar and occasionally ghastly, but only seldom does it feel remote.
A two-time National Magazine Award winner during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist, Tom Carson is currently a columnist at GQ. He is the author of Gilligan's Wake (2003), a novel.
Reviewer: Tom Carson
