A Study in Combustive Tendencies: Being Some Notes on the Moral Chemistry of the French Court (1673–1682), and Thereafter
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
When one writes of women burned alive, one must be particular. It has long been my professional opinion that approximate data are the plague of History; they smoulder first in footnotes, then erupt into myth. I have therefore approached the scandal known as l’Affaire des Poisons with the same dispassion I once applied to the “Wollongong Census of Moral Hygiene” (unpublished due to clerical misunderstanding). Facts, even imperfect ones, remain the single antiseptic available to the serious mind.
The reader will forgive, I trust, a brief historical recapitulation. Between 1673 and 1682 the French capital witnessed divers episodes of ritual hysteria, poison, and alleged sorcery—episodes scarcely distinguishable, in essence, from the departmental intrigues of any modern faculty. The notorious Marquise de Montespan, whose attachment to His Majesty Louis XIV rendered both her position and her conscience inflammable, is said to have engaged in the services of a certain sorceress, the infamous Catherine Monvoisin, vulgarly La Voisin. The latter, a woman of “intemperate piety,” operated what one may call a mixed consultancy: half dispensary, half confessional. I hazard she would not have been out of place in our own nursing colleges, had Providence delayed her birth by two and a half centuries.
The subsequent institution of the Chambre Ardente—or, as one moralising pamphleteer of 1680 termed it, “the public oven of private vice”—resulted in trials of a florid, almost experimental nature. Some thirty-six individuals were executed on charges of magic or poisoning; thirty-four aristocrats (the high mortality of whom was moral, not physical) were exiled; and in 1682 His Majesty, alarmed by the hazards of moral contagion, enacted a royal edict prohibiting magical operations and chemical unguents of suspect composition.‡
(‡ This edict, while celebrated as humane, produced no observable reduction in injury, since poisoners thereafter resorted to purely spiritual means. See: Gazette de Versailles, “On the Invisible Liquors of Heresy,” Jan. 1683.)
I have not discovered any personal records by La Voisin herself, though many later commentators attribute to her remarks both profound and implausible. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Furet, in his Analyses des Superstitions Domestiques (1831), quotes her as saying: “The King drinks gold, and the poor drink me.” I must note, however, that Furet was found to have appended several speeches to persons who had been dead for over a century, including one addressed to himself. I reproduce the line only for its metaphorical flavour, not its authenticity—though, as scholars now insist, the two are perhaps indistinguishable.
The reader may detect, in these accounts, a perennial confusion between chemistry and morality. It is precisely this confusion that I have endeavoured to analyse—or, at least, to catalogue until it admits of analysis. It has long struck me as a principle of social metabolism that every civilisation must periodically incinerate its excess emotion; that is, the volatile compounds of sexuality, ambition, and theology must be exposed to flame in order to preserve the cooler faculties. France in the seventeenth century achieved this civil catharsis by literal combustion, Sydney in the twentieth by university appointments committees. The difference, though moralists may deny it, is largely thermal.
My late colleague, Professor Hermans of Melbourne (whose certificate in analytico-historical sciences was regrettably never ratified by the Council), once proposed that “witchcraft” represented an early attempt to construct what we would now term the “moral laboratory.” In this model, the priest served as examiner, the sinner as specimen, and the poison as syllabus. A theory of striking brilliance, though somewhat compromised by Hermans’ own use of ether during faculty meetings. Nonetheless, his phrase “moral laboratory” has remained with me, and I now apply it to the French episode under discussion.
In the archive I maintained until my regrettable resignation (a purely administrative occurrence, later cleared of intent), I classified all available reports of the Poisons Affair under four heads, drawn from my own Latinised taxonomy:
– Venena Theologica (poisons spiritual): ritual blasphemies, inverse masses, candles made of tallow not approved by the Crown.
– Venena Amatoria (poisons erotic): aphrodisiacs, philters, misplaced marriage vows.
– Venena Politica (poisons administrative): intrigues involving ministers, confessors, or—most toxic of all—editors of official registers.
– Venena Domestica (poisons dietary): mushroom soups, tinctured pastries, and those curiosities which, in all centuries, serve as equaliser between the haute and the hungry.
The data themselves are fragmentary, yet I have interpolated missing portions according to what I deem the “moral pattern principle”—that is, interruptions in the record are to be completed, not by conjecture, but by what the subject ought to have done. This method has yielded remarkably coherent results, though I am aware some readers persist in calling it imagination.
A difficulty arises from the overabundance of confession. Each suspect, once interrogated, produced a document of such extreme self-description that one is reminded of today’s students in their scholarship essays. Under the stimulus of promised forgiveness—or, failing that, of heat—they wrote volumes. La Voisin’s own daughter, Marguerite, whose recollections were collected but never bound, exhibits that hysterical lucidity familiar in both saints and witnesses. I incline to believe her least plausible statements the most reliable, for veracity in such cases occurs only when all purpose has departed.
Historians, among whom I hesitantly class myself, have never been tolerant of female agency in the economy of sin. The participation of women in the manufacture of poisons, as in that of facts, has been treated as incidental at best, heretical at worst. My own conclusion, derived after considerable hesitation, is that poison entered Europe not through botanical gardens nor alchemical treatises, but through correspondence—unfiled, undusted, and civilly ignored. The true venom was linguistic: a misplaced address, a repeated rumour, a grammatical lapse. As Mme. de Maintenon is (perhaps) supposed to have remarked: “A misplaced comma may condemn a house.”
Experts more continental than myself have claimed that Louis XIV’s edict of 1682 “cleansed the moral atmosphere.” I cannot support this assertion. To prohibit magic seems only to have transferred it to bureaucracy. After 1682, petitions multiplied by precisely thirty-six percent, which is also the number of persons then executed—coincidences being, in history as in chemistry, the most suggestive proofs. In the world’s first century of reason, faith was reduced not by God’s absence, but by the introduction of filing systems.
If readers should find certain margins within this volume uneven or corrections intrusive, they must understand the circumstances. Several sources consulted were themselves combusted; others are in private hands; one or two are entirely apocryphal, but enter the argument by force of tone. I have attempted, wherever possible, to preserve the French phrasing of petitions, restoring sense where the language had collapsed into prayer. My translations, I regret to say, will not satisfy the academic fastidious, yet truth, once filtered through secretaries and centuries, scarcely obliges precision.
A brief word regarding contemporary relevance. The modern reader, basking in fluorescent security, supposes himself immune to metaphysical combustion. I differ. The urge toward purification through public spectacle—burnings, coronations, committees—remains our chief civic recreation. We are, as ever, descendants of our poisons. The difference lies only in dosage and apparatus. Where La Voisin possessed her oils and powders, we possess bureaucratic forms, each capable, given friction, of spontaneous ignition.
I have striven, as befits the historian, to avoid speculation on the ultimate guilt of Mme. de Montespan. My judgement—never final, always revisable pending tenure—rests on the delicate premise that scandal seldom requires truth to propagate. The Chambre Ardente may be seen, in retrospect, not as an instrument of justice, but as a luminously mismanaged archive, and thus of great interest to anyone familiar with archival employment.
If from this laborious preface the discerning reader infers a certain personal sympathy for the condemned, I must deny it firmly. Nothing could be further from my intention, which is exclusively scientific. Sympathy clouds the glass of observation, as I once attempted to demonstrate in a series of statistical notes on “Moral Temperature and Institutional Stability” (Sydney Historical Review, 1944). Yet I confess—purely as a natural historian of emotion—that the spectacles of 1682 exert an instructive charm. The flames, it appears, rendered their victims translucent, permitting at last a perfect view of the soul.
The following chapters—arranged according to the fourfold toxicology enumerated above—contain the results of twelve years’ intermittent investigation, together with certain reflections I have deemed suitable for the learned yet credulous public. Should any errors remain, they will, I am confident, be of an illuminating sort.
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