Catherine DESHAYES

Catherine DESHAYES

Classification: Murderer
Characteristics: Fortune teller, poisoner and an alleged sorceress
Number of victims: Numerous
Date of murder: 1660's - 1679
Date of arrest: March 12, 1679
Date of birth: c. 1640
Victim profile: Men, women and children
Method of murder: Poisoning
Location: Paris, France
Status: Convicted of witchcraft was burned in public on the Place de Grève in Paris on February 22, 1680
Catherine Deshayes, sometimes known as Catherine Monvoisin, or simply La Voisin was a French serial killer. She was born around 1640, and executed as a witch on 16 February 1680, in Paris; together with several others. She played an important role in the so-called Affair of the Poisons. She lived from charging high fees to make horosocopes. She celebrated black masses, practiced abortions, sold love potions and poisons. She is said to have sacrificed infants.

Catherine Monvoisin, or Montvoisin, née Deshayes, known as "La Voisin" (c. 1640 – February 22, 1680), was a French fortune teller, poisoner and an alleged sorceress, one of the chief personages in the affaire des poisons, during the reign of Louis XIV.

Background

Catherine Deshayes was married to Antoine Monvoisin, a jeweller with a shop at Pont-Marie in Paris. After her husband was ruined, La Voisin started her career by practising chiromancy and face-reading to support her family. She practiced medicine, especially midwifery, and performed abortions.

As for her practice in fortune telling, she was to say that she developed the talent God had given her. She was to have been taught the art of fortune telling at the age of nine, and after her husband became ruined, she decided to profit by it. She studied the modern methods of physiology and reading the client's future by reading their faces and hands. She also spend a lot of money to provide an atmosphere which could make the clients more inclined to believe in the prophecies. For example, she acquired a special robe of crimson red velvet embroidered with eagles in gold for a price of 1500 livres to perform in.

In 1665/66, her fortune telling was questioned by the priests of Saint Vincent de Paul's order, the Congregation of the Mission, but La Voisin defended herself successfully before the professors at the Sorbonne.

Activity

During her work as a fortune teller, she noticed the similarities between her customers wishes about their future: almost all wanted to have some one fall in love with them, that some one would die so that they might inherit, or that their spouses would die, so that they might marry some one else. Initially, she told her clients that their will would be true if it was also the will of God. Then, she started to recommend to her clients some action that would make their dreams come true. These actions were initially to visit the church of some particular saint; eventually, she started to sell amulets and recommend magical practices of various kinds. The bones of toads, teeth of moles, Spanish flies, iron filings, human blood and mummy, or the dust of human remains, were among the alleged ingredients of the love powders concocted by La Voisin.

Finally, she started to sell aphrodisiacs to those who wished for people to fall in love with them, and poison to those who wished for some one to die. Her knowledge of poisons was not apparently so thorough as that of less well-known sorcerers, or it would be difficult to account for Louise de La Vallière's immunity. The art of poisoning had become a regular science at the time, having been perfected, in part, by Giulia Tofana, a professional female poisoner in Italy, only a few decades before La Voisin.

She arranged black masses, where the clients could pray to the Devil to make their wishes come true. During at least some of these masses, a woman performed as an altar, upon which a bowl was placed: a baby was held above the bowl, and the blood from it was poured in to the bowl. She had a large network of colleagues and assistants, among them Adam Lesage, who performed allegedly magical tasks; the priests Étienne Guibourg and abbé Mariotte, who officiated at the black masses; and poisoners like Catherine Trianon.

La Voisin had many clients among the aristocracy and made a fortune from her business. Among her noted clients were countess de Soissons, duchess de Bouillon; Comtesse de Gramont ("la belle Hamilton"), François-Henri de Montmorency, duc de Luxembourg, princesse Marie Louise Charlotte de Tingry, marchioness Benigne d'Alluye, countess Claude Marie du Roure, count de Clermont-Lodéve, countess Jacqueline de Polignac, duchess Antoinette de Vivonne, Marquis Louis de Cessac, Marquis Antoine de Feuquieres and Marechal de la Ferthe.

La Voisin resided at Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, where she received her clients. She tended to her clients all day, and entertained at parties with violin music in her gardens at night, attended by Parisian upper class society. The house also included a furnace for the bodies of dead babies, who were then buried in the garden. She regularly attended at the services at the church of the Jansenist abbé de Sant-Amour, principal at the Paris University, and godmother of her daughter was the noblewoman de la Roche-Guyon. She supported a family of six, including her mother, and among her lovers were the executioner Andre Guillaume, Latour, vicomte de Cousserans, count de Labatie, the alchemist Blessis, the architect Fauchet and the magician Adam Lesage. At one point, Adam Lesage tried to induce her to kill her husband, but she regretted the plan and aborted the process. La Voisin was interested in science and alchemy and financed several private projects and enterprises, some of them made by con artists who tried to fool money out of her. Privately, she suffered from alcoholism, was apparently abused by Latour, and engaged in severe conflicts with her rival, poisoner Marie Bosse.

Connection to Madame de Montespan

The most important client of La Voisin Madame de Montespan, official royal mistress to King Louis XIV of France. Their contact were often performed through the companion of Montespan, Claude de Vin des Œillets. In 1667, Montespan hired La Voisin to arrange a black mass. This mass was celebrated in a house in Rue de la Tannerie. Adam Lesage and abbé Mariotte officiated, while Montespan prayed to win the love of the king. The same year, Montespan became the official mistress of the king, and after this, she employed La Voisin whenever a problem occurred in her relationship with the king.

In 1673, when the king's interest in Montespan seemed to deteriorate, Montespan again employed La Voisin, who provided a series of black masses officiated by Etienne Guibourg. On a least one occasion, Montespan herself acted as the human altar during the mass. La Voisin also provided Montespan with aphrodisiac, with which Montespan drugged the King. During the king's affair with Soubise, Montespan used aphrodisiac provided by Voisin's colleague Francoise Filastre and made by Louis Galet in Normandy.

In 1677, Montespan made clear that if the king should abandon her, she would have him killed. When the King entered in to a relationship with Angélique de Fontanges in 1679, Montespan called for La Voisin and asked her to have both the king and Fontages killed. La Voisin hesitated, but was eventually convinced to agree. At the house of her colleague, Catherine Trianon, La Voisin constructed a plan to kill the king together with the poisoners Trianon, Bertrand and Romani, the last being also the fiancé of her daughter. Trianon was unwilling to participate and tried to make her change her mind by constructing an ill-fated fortune for her, but Voisin refused to change her mind. The group decided to murder the king by poisoning a petition, to be delivered to his own hands.

The 5 March 1679, La Voisin visited the royal court in Saint-Germain to deliver the petition. At that day, however, there were too many petitioners and the king did not take them in his hands, which made her return without having delivered it. Upon her return to her home in Paris, she was castigated by a group of monks. She handed the petition to her daughter and asked her to burn it, which she also did. The next day, she made plans to visit Catherine Trianon after mass, to plan the next murder attempt upon Louis XIV.

Investigation and execution

The death of the king's sister-in-law, the Duchesse d'Orléans, had been falsely attributed to poison, and the crimes of Madame de Brinvilliers (executed in 1676) and her accomplices were still fresh in the public mind. In parallel, a riot took place where people accused witches of abducting children for the black masses, and priests reported that a growing number of people were confessing to poisoning in their confessions.

In 1677, the fortune teller Magdelaine de La Grange was arrested for poisoning, and claimed that she had information about crimes of high importance. The arrest of the successful fortune teller and poisoner Marie Bosse and Marie Vigoreux in January 1679, made the police aware that there existed a network of fortune tellers in Paris who dealt with the distribution of poison.

The 12 March 1679, La Voisin was arrested outside Notre-Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle after having heard mass, just before her appointed meeting at Catherine Trianon. In April 1679, a commission appointed to inquire into the subject and to prosecute the offenders met for the first time. Its proceedings, including some suppressed in the official records, are preserved in the notes of one of the official court reporters, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie.

At the arrest of La Voisin, her maid Margot stated that the arrest would mean the end of a number of people of all positions of society. The arrest of La Voisin was followed by the arrest of her daughter Marguerite Monvoisin, Guibourg, Lesage, Bertrand, Romain and the rest of her network of her associates. La Voisin was imprisoned at Vincennes, were she was subjected to questioning. On 27 December 1679, Louis XIV issued an order that the whole network should be exterminated by all methods regardless of the rank, gender or age of those involved.

La Voisin confessed to the crimes she was accused of and described the development of her career. She was never subjected to torture: a formal order was issued giving permission to the use of torture, but it was made clear that the order was not to be put in effect, and consequently it was never made use of. The reason it suggested to be the fear that she might give away the names of influential people if she was questioned under torture. La Voisin never mentioned the names of any of her clients during the interviews. She once mentioned to the guards, that the question she feared most was that they should ask her about her visits at the royal court. It is likely that she was referring to Montespan as her client and her attempt of murdering the king, and that she feared that such a confession should result in her execution for regicide. Her list of clients, the arranging of the black masses, her connection to Montespan and the murder attempt on the king was not to be revealed until after her death, when it was stated by her daughter and confirmed by the uncontaminated testimonies of the other accused.

La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and was burned in public on the Place de Grève in Paris the 22 February 1680. In July, her daughter Marguerite Monvoisin revealed her connection to Montespan, which was confirmed by the statements of the other accused. This caused the monarch to eventually close the investigation, seal the testimonies and place the remaining accused outside of the public justice system by imprisoning them under a lettre de cachet.

Wikipedia.org

Catherine Monvoisin, known as “La Voisin” (d. 1680), French sorceress, whose maiden name was Catherine Deshayes, was one of the chief personages in the famous affaire des poisons, which disgraced the reign of Louis XIV.

Her husband, Monvoisin, was an unsuccessful jeweller, and she practised chiromancy and face-reading to retrieve their fortunes. She gradually added the practice of witchcraft, in which she had the help of a renegade priest, Étienne Guibourg, whose part was the celebration of the “black mass,” an abominable parody in which the host was compounded of the blood of a little child mixed with horrible ingredients. She practised medicine, especially midwifery, procured abortion and provided love powders and poisons. Her chief accomplice was one of her lovers, the magician Lesage, whose real name was Adam Cœuret. The great ladies of Paris flocked to La Voisin, who accumulated enormous wealth. Among her clients were Olympe Mancini, comtesse de Soissons, who sought the death of the king's mistress, Louise de la Vallière; Mme de Montespan, Mme de Gramont (la belle Hamilton) and others. The bones of toads, the teeth of moles, cantharides, iron filings, human blood and human dust were among the ingredients of the love powders concocted by La Voisin. Her knowledge of poisons was not apparently so thorough as that of less well-known sorcerers, or it would be difficult to account for La Vallière's immunity. The art of poisoning had become a regular science. The death of Henrietta, duchess of Orleans, was attributed, falsely it is true, to poison, and the crimes of Marie Madeleine de Brinvilliers (executed in 1676) and her accomplices were still fresh in the public mind.

In April 1679 a commission appointed to inquire into the subject and to prosecute the offenders met for the first time. Its proceedings, including some suppressed in the official records, are preserved in the notes of one of the official rapporteurs, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. The revelation of the treacherous intention of Mme de Montespan to poison Louis XIV. and of other crimes, planned by personages who could not be attacked without scandal which touched the throne, caused Louis XIV. to close the chambre ardente, as the court was called, on the 1st of October 1680. It was reopened on the 19th of May 1681 and sat until the 21st of July 1682. Many of the culprits escaped through private influence. Among these were Marie Anne Mancini, duchesse de Bouillon, who had sought to get rid of her husband in order to marry the duke of Vendôme, though Louis XIV. banished her to Nérac. Mme de Montespan was not openly disgraced, because the preservation of Louis's own dignity was essential, and some hundred prisoners, among them the infamous Guibourg and Lesage, escaped the scaffold through the suppression of evidence insisted on by Louis XIV. and Louvois. Some of these were imprisoned in various fortresses, with instructions from Louvois to the respective commandants to flog them if they sought to impart what they knew. Some innocent persons were imprisoned for life because they had knowledge of the facts.

La Voisin herself was executed at an early stage of the proceedings, on the 20th of February 1680, after a perfunctory application of torture. The authorities had every reason to avoid further revelations. Thirty-five other prisoners were executed; five were sent to the galleys and twenty-three were banished. Their crimes had furnished one of the most extraordinary trials known to history.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Affair of the Poisons (L'affaire des poisons) was a major murder scandal in France which took place in 1677–1682, during the reign of King Louis XIV. During it, a number of prominent members of the aristocracy were implicated and sentenced on charges of poisoning and witchcraft. The scandal reached into the inner circle of the King. It led to the execution of 36 people.

Context and origin

The origin of the case began in 1675 after the trial of Madame de Brinvilliers, who had conspired with her lover, army captain Godin de Sainte-Croix, to poison her father Antonine Dreux d'Aubray in 1666 and two of her brothers, Antoine d'Aubray and François d'Aubray, in 1670, in order to inherit their estates. There were also rumors that she had poisoned poor people during her visits in hospitals. She fled, but was arrested in Liège. She was forced to confess, sentenced to death and on 17 July was tortured with the water cure (forced to drink sixteen pints of water), beheaded and burned at the stake. Her accomplice Sainte-Croix had died of natural causes in 1672.

The sensational trial drew attention to a number of other mysterious deaths, starting a number of rumours. Prominent people, including Louis XIV, became alarmed that they also might be poisoned. The King forced some of his servants to become his food tasters.

Implications and investigation

The affair proper opened in February 1677 after the arrest of Magdelaine de La Grange on charges of forgery and murder. La Grange appealed to François Michel le Tellier, Marquis of Louvois, claiming that she had information about other crimes of high importance. Louvois reported to the King, who told Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, who, among other things, was the chief of the Paris police, to root out the poisoners. La Reynie sought to calm the King. The subsequent investigation of potential poisoners was to lead to accusations of witchcraft, murder and more.

Authorities rounded up a number of fortune tellers and alchemists that were suspected of selling not only divinations, séances and aphrodisiacs, but also "inheritance powders" (a euphemism for poison). Some of them under torture confessed and gave the authorities lists of their clients, who had allegedly bought poison to either get rid of their spouses or rivals in the royal court.

The most famous case was of the midwife Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin or La Voisin, who was arrested in 1679 after she was pointed out by the poisoner Marie Bosse. La Voisin implicated a number of important individuals in the French court. These included Olympia Mancini, the Comtesse de Soissons, her sister Marie Anne Mancini Duchesse de Bouillon, François Henri de Montmorency, Duke of Luxembourg and, most importantly, the King's mistress, Athénaïs de Montespan.

Questioned while she was kept intoxicated, La Voisin claimed that de Montespan had bought aphrodisiacs and performed Black Masses with her in order to gain and keep the King's favor over rival lovers. She had worked with a priest named Étienne Guibourg. There was no evidence beyond her confessions, but bad reputations followed these people afterwards. Eleanor Herman, on page 113 in her book Sex With Kings, records "Given" claimed the remains of 2,500 infants were found in La Voisin's garden. But Anne Somerset disputes this in her book The Affair of the Poisons and states there is no mention of the garden being searched for human remains.

Also involved in the scandal was Eustache Dauger de Cavoye, the eldest living scion of a prominent noble family. De Cavoye was disinherited by his family when, in an act of debauchery he chose to celebrate Good Friday with a Black Mass. Upon his disinheritance, he opened a lucrative trade in "inheritance powders" and aphrodisiacs. He mysteriously disappeared after the abrupt ending to Louis' official investigation in 1678. Because of this and his name, he was once suspected of being the Man in the Iron Mask. However, this theory has fallen out of favor because it is known that he was imprisoned by his family in 1679 in the Prison Saint-Lazare.

The end of the trial

La Voisin was sentenced to death for witchcraft and poisoning, and burned at the stake on 22 February 1680. Marshal Montmorency-Bouteville was briefly jailed in 1680, but was later released and became a captain of the guard. Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert helped to hush things up.

De La Reynie re-established the special court, the Chambre Ardente ("burning court") to judge cases of poisoning and witchcraft. It investigated a number of cases, including many connected to nobles and courtiers in the King's court. Over the years, the court sentenced 34 people to death for poisoning or witchcraft. Two died under torture and several courtiers were exiled. The court was abolished in 1682, because the King could not risk publicity of such scandal. To this, Police Chief Reynie said, "the enormity of their crimes proved their safeguard."

Aftermath

Perhaps the most important effect of the scandal and subsequent persecutions was the expulsion from France of the Comtesse de Soissons. Her son remained in France, only to find that his mother's high-profile disgrace prevented him from realising his personal ambitions, as he was effectively barred from pursuing a military career. He would eventually leave France, nurturing a profound grudge against Louis XIV, and enter the service of France's sworn enemies the Habsburgs. Prince Eugene of Savoy, or Prinz Eugen, would, in time, come to be known as one of the greatest generals of the age and one of the factors behind the failure of Louis' bid for hegemony in Europe.

Condemned in the Poison Affair

The Poison Affair implicated 442 suspects: 367 orders of arrests were issued, of which 218 were carried out. Of the condemned, 36 were executed; five were sentenced to the galleys; and 23 to exile. This excludes those who died in custody by torture or suicide. Additionally, many accused were never brought to trial, but placed outside of the justice system and imprisoned for life by a lettre de cachet.

Of the people who were condemned to perpetual imprisonment by lettre de cachet, six women were imprisoned at Château de Villefranche; 18 men at Château de Salces; 12 women at Belle-Île-en-Mer; ten men at Château de Besançon; 14 women at St Andre de Salins; and five women at Fort de Bains.

Professionals

This lists people involved in the Poison Affair by being professionally involved in criminal activity. Their punishment is mentioned after their name and role.

Clients

This lists people involved in the Poison Affair by being clients of the professionals above. Their punishment is mentioned after their name and role.