Catherine Monvoisin, known in Paris as La Voisin, read palms and faces for a living, worked as a midwife, and for years received a stream of clients at a small house with a garden near the city's northern walls. On the morning of Sunday, March 12, 1679, police officers stopped her as she came out of Mass at the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle. Eleven months later, on February 22, 1680, she was burned alive at the Place de Grève, condemned by a special court that Louis XIV had created to investigate poisoning in Paris.
Her case sits at the center of what became known as the Affair of the Poisons. The investigation, led by the head of the Paris police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, reached from back-street fortune-tellers to duchesses and a marshal of France, and finally to the king's mistress, Madame de Montespan. Much of what is said about La Voisin today, including the black masses and the killing of infants, comes from testimony given after her death, chiefly by her daughter, and never examined in an open trial.
Most of what is known comes from the papers of the investigation. After the storming of the Bastille in 1789 the fortress archives were scattered and partly looted; what was recovered went to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the nineteenth century the Arsenal librarian François Ravaisson classified them and began publishing them as the Archives de la Bastille. His fifth and sixth volumes, printed in 1872 and 1873, reproduce the arrest record, interrogations, the record of La Voisin's torture and of her execution, letters between the minister Louvois and La Reynie, and La Reynie's own memoranda. The archivist Frantz Funck-Brentano, who completed the inventory, drew on the same files for his history Le Drame des poisons (1900).
The record has a large gap. Louis XIV burned the papers he had kept back from the court. The French Ministry of Justice dates that burning to July 1709, and the historian Holly Tucker of Vanderbilt University, interviewed by the History News Network in 2017, said that it came not long after La Reynie's death that year. Funck-Brentano wrote that the main statements of her associate Lesage were among the papers the king burned in his fireplace. What survives is partial, and much of it is La Reynie's summary of documents that no longer exist.
She was born Catherine Deshayes, around 1640, according to The Connexion, a magazine for English speakers in France. She married Antoine Monvoisin. Funck-Brentano describes him as a mercer and jeweler whose shop on the Pont-Marie failed; a note in Ravaisson's edition describes him as a hosier established on the Pont-Marie. Either way, the business collapsed and he stopped working. The historian Jean-Christian Petitfils, quoted by The Connexion in 2019, said he tried all sorts of professions and was bad at all of them.
By her own account to La Reynie, as Funck-Brentano reports it, she then turned to what she called the knowledge God had given her: palmistry and the reading of faces, which she said she had learned at the age of nine. She told her questioners she had a household of ten people to keep, including her children, and until her arrest she gave her elderly mother money every week. Her daughter Marguerite became her assistant, The Connexion reports.
She also said she had been harassed for fourteen years by the Missionaries, the priests of the congregation founded by Vincent de Paul. Ravaisson prints a note on a complaint made against her in 1664 that already described her as a well-known fortune-teller; the vicars general of the diocese, she said, had allowed her to continue. Funck-Brentano adds that she told the police she had explained her craft to the vicars general during a vacancy of the see in 1664 and to several doctors of the Sorbonne, who raised no objection. Her papers, he wrote, contained notes on physiognomy, including a treatise resting on what it called six "unshakable columns", among them the relation of mind and body, the differences between the sexes and between nations, temperament and age.
Funck-Brentano placed her house in the Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, a thinly built quarter between the city ramparts and the Saint-Denis district. The police record of her arrest gives the street as the rue Beauregard. Her maid, Margot, told investigators that the whole world came to her. Clients arrived in groups and treated the visit as an outing, waiting on the lawns of the garden; others sent for her to come to their own houses. She gave suppers with music in the evenings.
Funck-Brentano lists among her lovers the Paris executioner André Guillaume, the vicomte de Cousserans, the comte de Labatie, the architect Fauchet, a local wine merchant, the magician known as Lesage and the alchemist Blessis. Several of these men took large sums from her on the promise of making the philosopher's stone. She had a robe and cloak made for her consultations, the crimson velvet embroidered with 205 double-headed eagles in gold; Funck-Brentano gives its cost as 15,000 livres. Contemporaries, he wrote, described her as small, plump and rather pretty, with unusually sharp eyes. They also described her as a heavy drinker who quarreled and fought with her associates.
The marriage was violent. Funck-Brentano recounts that Lesage advised her to get rid of her husband, and that the two buried a sheep's heart in the garden as a spell; when Antoine fell ill with stomach pain, she was seized with remorse, went to confession and had Lesage undo the charm. The story comes from the interrogations, and no harm to Antoine Monvoisin was ever charged.
La Voisin told La Reynie, in Funck-Brentano's summary, that most of the people who came to her wanted to know whether they would soon be widowed so that they could remarry, and that those who asked for other things were usually after the same result: to be rid of someone. She said she used to answer that people died when God willed it, and that clients told her she was not very learned.
Much of her trade, as the files describe it, was harmless or fraudulent: fortunes, love charms, recipes. Madame de Sévigné, writing to her daughter in January 1680, passed on the story that the king had returned to the duchesse de Foix a note she had written to La Voisin, "Plus je frotte, moins ils poussent" ("The more I rub, the less they grow"), which turned out to be about a recipe to enlarge the bust. Funck-Brentano describes a case in which Lesage chanted Latin formulas in the garden and burned two names in a ball of wax to bring back a client's straying lover, and La Voisin gave the woman some practical advice that worked better than the spell.
The files also describe abortions. A note of March 1679 printed by Ravaisson records that La Voisin and her friend La Lepère carried out abortions and that her servant knew of it. Abortion was a crime. The investigators asked her, under the question in February 1680, whether her servant Margot knew of "her poisonings, abortions, profanations and impieties", and whether she had anything to add on poisons, abortions or impieties; she answered no.
The affair grew out of the case of the marquise de Brinvilliers, who had poisoned her father and two brothers and was beheaded at the Place de Grève on July 17, 1676, according to the French Ministry of Justice. In 1677 a fortune-teller named Magdelaine de La Grange was arrested for poisoning, The Connexion reports, and in September 1677 an anonymous note about a plot with a "white powder" was found in a Jesuit confessional, according to the ministry.
La Reynie's inquiries led to Marie Bosse, a widow who read fortunes, and to Marie Vigoureux. Bosse was arrested on January 3 or 4, 1679, on her way back from Saint-Germain, according to a document Ravaisson printed. A royal decree of January 10 ordered La Reynie to pursue the two women and their accomplices, Funck-Brentano wrote. Bosse, questioned and then tortured, named Catherine Deshayes, the ministry's account says.
Bosse's statements against her former friend went beyond poison. In a confrontation printed by Ravaisson, Bosse reported that La Voisin's servant Margot had said there were many children buried in La Voisin's garden. Madame de Sévigné later heard, as gossip, that La Voisin had put into an oven the infants from the abortions she performed. These are the origins of the accusation about infants. La Voisin denied it, and no court ever made a finding on it.
The arrest record survives. At about eight in the morning of Sunday, March 12, 1679, the police officer Desgrez came to the house of Commissaire Camuset with the king's order, passed on by La Reynie, to seal the house of "la Voisin qui se mêle de deviner" (the Voisin woman who meddles in fortune-telling) after her arrest. With Desgrez and several sergeants, Camuset went to the Villeneuve quarter and found her in the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle, finishing Mass. They spoke to her as she came out, took her to the commissaire's house and searched her, and Desgrez drove her away in a carriage. The officers then went to the house in the rue Beauregard, where they found Antoine Monvoisin in a ground-floor room and put seals on the premises in his presence.
She was held at the château of Vincennes. Funck-Brentano, citing her daughter's later statements, wrote that missionary priests had visited La Voisin on Friday, March 10, and that, frightened, she gave her daughter a petition to burn, which Marguerite did the next morning; he also wrote that Madame de Montespan left the court on March 15 after news of the arrest spread. Those links come from testimony given more than a year later and should be read as such.
On April 7, 1679, Louis XIV, strongly encouraged by La Reynie, created a special court to investigate and try what it called an "affaire de poisons", the Ministry of Justice records. It sat at the Arsenal near the Bastille, which gave it its formal name, the Chambre de l'Arsenal; it became known as the Chambre ardente. About a dozen senior magistrates of the Parlement sat on it. Louis Boucherat presided, and Bazin de Bezons and La Reynie acted as reporting judges; Ravaisson prints a letter naming Robert as the king's prosecutor before it.
The court's totals are given differently. The Ministry of Justice says that between April 10, 1679, and July 21, 1682, it dealt with 442 accused and ordered 367 arrests, of which 218 were maintained, and that it had 34 people executed, sent 5 to the galleys and banished 23. Encyclopaedia Britannica gives 210 sessions, 319 writs of arrest and 36 death sentences.
La Voisin was questioned many times at Vincennes. The interrogations of October 1679 that Ravaisson prints show her discussing clients by name: she was asked about ladies who wanted Louise de La Vallière, the king's former mistress, removed by poison, and named the comtesse du Roure and the vicomtesse de Polignac in that connection. In a confrontation with Lesage on October 11, 1679, she denied ever giving a potion or poison to a woman named La Chapelle. Ravaisson notes that La Voisin never fixed dates.
By January 1680 the investigation had reached the high nobility. The comtesse de Soissons left France rather than face the court; the maréchal de Luxembourg gave himself up at the Bastille; the duchesse de Bouillon and the princesse de Tingry were questioned at the Arsenal. Madame de Sévigné reported the gossip to her daughter: that the duchesse de Bouillon had asked La Voisin for a little poison to be rid of an old and tiresome husband, and for a way to marry the young duc de Vendôme. Sévigné thought there was nothing "black" in the follies charged against such women, "not even grayish-brown", and wrote that the tone of the day was the innocence of those named and horror at the scandal. The duchess, by Sévigné's account, entered the chamber "like a little queen" and said she had never thought that wise men could ask so many foolish questions.
Letters between Louvois and La Reynie show the king managing the timing of La Voisin's trial. In late January 1680 the chamber decided not to hear her on the sellette, the low stool on which an accused was questioned before judgment, on a planned Friday. Another letter said the king wanted her judgment postponed as long as necessary, so that her accusations would remain supported by evidence even after her execution, and suggested that Desgrez tell her the trial would be delayed for months so that despair would not lead her to harm herself.
A later letter set the plan: La Voisin would be put on the sellette on Saturday, February 17, and judged on the following Monday. According to Ravaisson's note, she appeared before the chamber on February 17 and was condemned to be burned alive after undergoing the question and making public penance. The record of her execution, written by the court's clerk, Sagot, gives the date of the judgment as February 19. The king's prosecutor had asked that her tongue be pierced and her hand cut off; the chamber set those punishments aside, Ravaisson wrote, as having fallen out of use.
The published accounts do not quote what the judgment named as her crimes. Britannica calls her a poisoner. Sévigné, in her letter describing the execution, called her "famous for her crimes and for her impiety". The questions put to her under torture concerned poisonings, abortions, profanations and impieties. A writer quoted by Ravaisson in a report of early March 1680 said that she had declared at the end that she had sold poison wholesale. Popular accounts say she was convicted of witchcraft alone; the records cited by historians do not support that wording.
Something she said on the sellette did reach the public. La Reynie wrote in a later memorandum that when she was heard on the sellette, Madame de Montespan and her companion Mademoiselle des Œillets were mentioned, and that "something of it came back to the public". He credited the judges with not pursuing it.
The record of La Voisin's torture, the "procès-verbal de question", survives in part and Ravaisson printed it. Most of it concerns one case. Président Leféron, a senior magistrate, had died on September 8, 1669. Under questioning, La Voisin said that the vial of water she gave his wife came from a woman named Leroux, that she had told the wife to put it in her husband's broth, and that after his death Madame Leféron came to see her, happy to be a widow. Asked whether Leroux knew that the vial was meant to poison Leféron, she answered yes. She said she knew of no poisonings other than those of a man named Brunet and of Président Leféron, and a vial for the first husband of Madame de Broglio.
Madame de Sévigné, who heard about it secondhand, wrote that La Voisin had known her sentence from Monday, which was unusual; that she asked her guards that night whether they would not have a midnight supper, drank a good deal of wine and sang twenty drinking songs; and that on Tuesday she was given the question, ordinary and extraordinary, and then confronted on the mattress with Madame de Dreux, Madame Leféron and several others. A report of early March printed by Ravaisson said seventeen people were confronted with her after the torture.
Whether the torture was real is disputed. The official record says she was put to the question. La Reynie, as Funck-Brentano reports, wrote indignantly that she had not truly undergone it, because those administering it had held back for fear that she would say too much. Funck-Brentano wrote that the torturers and the other judges had received orders.
At noon on February 22, Sagot's record states, La Voisin was transferred from Vincennes to the Bastille, made to kneel in the chapel of the fortress, and read her death sentence for the second time. The grand penitentiary of Paris came to hear her confession. Asked whether she had anything more to declare, she said she had nothing beyond what she had told the commissioners.
At about four in the afternoon Sagot went back to the chapel. La Voisin, who was with her confessor, asked to speak to him privately, and made a declaration "to put her conscience at rest" before the sentence was carried out: she had not given Madame Leféron a vial of water, and Leroux had not given her one. She confirmed that Madame Leféron had come to see her, happy to be a widow, and asked whether the vial had worked, and that the rest of what she had said about Madame Leféron at her trial was true. In his note Ravaisson wrote that La Reynie suspected, "not without reason", that the grand penitentiary had something to do with this softening, and a letter from Louvois advised against using the same priest for the next condemned woman.
Sévigné wrote two letters about the day. On Wednesday she believed the burning was happening as she wrote. In her next letter she corrected herself: it had been "yesterday", Thursday. She described La Voisin being refused anything but broth and complaining that she would not have the strength to speak to the gentlemen; being brought by carriage from Vincennes; being bound at five o'clock and put into the cart in a white shift, the garment of those to be burned, holding a torch, her face very red, pushing away the confessor and the crucifix. Sévigné watched the cart pass from the Hôtel de Sully with the duchesse de Chaulnes, the duchesse de Sully, the comtesse de Fiesque and others. At Notre-Dame, she wrote, La Voisin would not pronounce the public penance; at the Place de Grève she resisted leaving the cart, was taken out by force, seated on the pyre, bound with iron and covered with straw, swore a great deal and pushed the straw away five or six times before the fire rose and she was lost to sight. Sévigné passed on what a judge had told her son: that the executioners had ways of shortening the suffering of women. Ravaisson's own note says only that she made public penance and was burned "without other incident".
Accounts of her last words disagree. On February 28 Sévigné wrote that La Voisin had given her soul to the devil in the middle of the fire. On March 6 she corrected that too: La Voisin's confessor, she had been told, said that she pronounced "Jesus Maria" in the flames, and Sévigné added that she was careful to correct false news. The early-March report that Ravaisson printed quoted the confessor as saying that, on the way to execution, she told him she was burdened with so many crimes that she did not wish God to work a miracle to save her from the fire. The same report said she had declared that the evil was greater than anyone thought and that nothing was more harmful to a state than people who made a profession of fortune-telling. Funck-Brentano adds, from La Reynie's notes, that she told her confessor that people of every rank had come to her to have others killed, and that debauchery was the first motive of all these crimes.
The painter Antoine Coypel made a portrait of her on the way to execution, according to Funck-Brentano.
Her clients' cases went on after her death. Madame Leféron was sentenced on April 7, 1680, to banishment from the vicomté of Paris and a fine of 1,500 livres, a lenient outcome that Funck-Brentano contrasted with Louvois's statement that there were thirteen or fourteen witnesses against her. The royal flutist Philbert Rebillé, drawn into the inquiry over the death of a man named Brunet, was acquitted on April 7, 1680, according to Funck-Brentano. Madame de Dreux was let off with an admonition on April 27, 1680, Funck-Brentano wrote, though he also records a later sentence of banishment against her in January 1682 that the king allowed her to serve in Paris. The marshal de Luxembourg was discharged and sent away from Paris. Sévigné, writing of the outcomes, called it "a scandal for nothing".
The accusations that made La Voisin's name came after her death. Her daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, was a prisoner at Vincennes. On August 2, 1680, Louis XIV wrote to La Reynie from Lille that he had seen the declaration Marguerite made on July 12 and wanted every effort made to clarify the facts in it, Funck-Brentano reports.
According to La Reynie's summaries, Marguerite said that whenever Madame de Montespan feared losing the king's favor she sent word to La Voisin, who found priests to say masses and supplied powders to be given to the king; Marguerite described these as love powders. She said that the priest Étienne Guibourg said masses over the body of a woman lying on a mattress at her mother's house, and that Madame de Montespan had had such a mass said there in 1676. She said that a child was killed at that mass. Marguerite and Guibourg were confronted on October 23, 1680, and Funck-Brentano wrote that they confirmed these facts, though Guibourg tried to blame La Voisin for the child's death. She also described a plan, which Funck-Brentano sets in the weeks before the arrest, for her mother to hand the king a poisoned petition at Saint-Germain, said to have been on behalf of Madame de Montespan, and said she had burned the petition herself.
Lesage, to whom Louvois had held out the hope of the king's mercy in October 1679, gave statements that Funck-Brentano, working from La Reynie's notes, said confirmed Marguerite's. On September 30 and October 1, 1680, another accused woman, Françoise Filastre, confirmed parts of these accounts under torture, Funck-Brentano wrote, and he described her statements as falling on the king like a thunderbolt. Britannica summarizes the accusations against Montespan made by La Voisin's daughter and accomplices: that she had been a client since 1667, had used magic and love potions to keep the king, had taken part in black masses, and had tried to poison her rival, Mademoiselle de Fontanges, and the king. Britannica says the black mass and poisoning charges against her were never proven.
La Reynie's memoranda, printed by Ravaisson, show the investigator himself weighing this testimony and changing his mind. He called the poison plot Marguerite described "not very plausible" and insufficiently detailed. Yet he found it hard to believe that she, who seemed intelligent and aware of what was at stake, had invented such things, and he wrote that it seemed morally impossible that she had made up an account accompanied by so many consistent circumstances. He noted that Guibourg and Marguerite had separately described the same particular details. He also noted that the accused had every interest in hiding the truth, and he concluded that the general presumptions against "the person of importance" whom Guibourg and Marguerite named did not establish any certainty. He recorded that Marguerite had tried to strangle herself before making her statements.
A later paper printed by Ravaisson, with no author named in the text read, acknowledges an error. Its writer, the official reporting to the king on the prisoners, told the king that, had God not allowed him to delay his final decision, he might have misled him about Madame de Montespan, because his earlier reasoning had rested on a gross mistake of fact. In a memorandum La Reynie also wrote that La Voisin's daughter, like the priest Mariette, could not be judged.
Louis XIV ordered that the statements of La Voisin's daughter and of two other prisoners, Romani and Bertrand, be separated from the files sent to the court, Funck-Brentano wrote. The Ministry of Justice says the king had the interrogations naming Montespan written on loose sheets kept in a sealed casket and barred the chamber from the cases in which she was named. On July 21, 1682, he suspended the chamber and sent the remaining accused to royal fortresses by lettres de cachet, orders that needed no trial, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. The Connexion reports that it is not known when Marguerite or the others died.
A royal declaration against "magicians, sorcerers and poisoners", issued on August 29, 1682, regulated the sale of poisons including arsenic and banned fortune-telling, Actu-Juridique reported in 2022. In 1709 the king burned the papers he had kept in the casket.
Proven by the surviving record: her arrest on March 12, 1679; her trial before the Chambre de l'Arsenal; her hearing on the sellette on February 17 and the judgment of February 19, 1680, condemning her to be burned alive after the question and public penance; the question itself; her execution at the Place de Grève on February 22, 1680.
Admitted by her under torture and partly retracted: supplying the vial used, by her account, to poison Président Leféron. She also spoke of the Brunet poisoning as something she had heard about, not as her own act.
Alleged, never tried against her in open court: the poisonings of other clients' relatives; abortions on a large scale; the burning or burial of infants (Marie Bosse's statements, relaying the maid Margot; Paris gossip reported by Sévigné, who treated the oven story as a salon joke); the masses over a woman's body with the killing of a child, and the poisoned petition against the king (her daughter Marguerite's statements of July 1680 onward, Guibourg's and Lesage's statements, and Filastre's under torture). Madame de Montespan's part in any of this was never tried, and Britannica says it was never proven.
The numbers attached to her name are not findings. Funck-Brentano wrote in 1900 that La Voisin admitted burning or burying in her garden the bodies of more than 2,500 children born before term; he did not quote the document, and no court ruled on any figure. The Connexion repeats the figure as an unconfirmed claim. The Ministry of Justice describes the confessions to the chamber as mixing poisonings with abortions, magic and black masses, including claims of infants killed and buried, and treats those claims as exaggerated. Pierre-Robert Leclercq, writing in the Encyclopædia Universalis, says many accusations were probably exaggerated by defendants under torture who hoped for a reprieve or a lighter sentence.
Historians differ on the black masses. Funck-Brentano accepted Marguerite's account, arguing that its agreement with Guibourg's and with Sévigné's letters about Montespan's moods made it credible. Holly Tucker, asked in 2017 about the child-sacrifice accusations against a royal mistress, said she wanted to believe they were untrue, but that there was too much testimony from people who claimed to have seen the ceremonies at first hand to dismiss them, and that the accounts generally line up. Jean-Christian Petitfils, quoted by The Connexion, described La Voisin as a woman of her time who built a business as an agent linking clients with people who would do almost anything for a fee, in a society predisposed to believe in magic. The historian Orest Ranum, reviewing Lynn Wood Mollenauer's 2007 study of the affair, Strange Revelations, called it nearly definitive while noting the limits imposed by the lack of further sources.
Details that differ between sources: her husband's trade (mercer and jeweler, or hosier, on the Pont-Marie); the number of executions ordered by the chamber (34 or 36); the day of the judgment (the clerk's record says the 19th; the printed note's date is a misprint); and Sévigné's letter describing the execution, which is headed Friday, February 22, in the 1876 Firmin-Didot edition although the letter itself says the burning took place "yesterday", Thursday, the date the clerk's record gives.
About 1640: Catherine Deshayes is born.
1664: a complaint describes her as a well-known fortune-teller; by her account she explained her craft to the diocesan vicars general and Sorbonne doctors.
September 8, 1669: death of Président Leféron.
July 17, 1676: the marquise de Brinvilliers is executed in Paris.
1676: by her daughter's later account, Madame de Montespan has a mass said at La Voisin's house.
1677: arrest of Magdelaine de La Grange; in September an anonymous note about a poison plot is found in a confessional.
January 3 or 4, 1679: Marie Bosse is arrested; on January 10 La Reynie is ordered to pursue Bosse, Vigoureux and their accomplices.
March 12, 1679: La Voisin is arrested at Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle; her house in the rue Beauregard is sealed.
April 7, 1679: Louis XIV creates the Chambre de l'Arsenal; it begins work on April 10.
October 1679: interrogations at Vincennes and her confrontation with Lesage.
January 1680: the comtesse de Soissons leaves France; Luxembourg enters the Bastille; the duchesse de Bouillon and princesse de Tingry are questioned.
February 17, 1680: La Voisin is heard on the sellette.
February 19, 1680: she is condemned to death.
After the judgment (Sévigné: "Tuesday"): she is put to the question and confronted with other accused.
February 22, 1680: taken to the Bastille chapel, then to Notre-Dame and the Place de Grève, where she is burned.
April 7, 1680: Madame Leféron is banished from the vicomté of Paris and fined.
July 12, 1680: Marguerite Monvoisin makes the declaration the king reads at Lille.
September 30 and October 1, 1680: Françoise Filastre's statements under torture.
October 23, 1680: Marguerite is confronted with Guibourg.
July 21, 1682: the king suspends the chamber; remaining prisoners are held for life by lettres de cachet.
August 29, 1682: royal declaration against magicians, sorcerers and poisoners.
1709: Louis XIV burns the papers kept back from the court.
1872 to 1873: Ravaisson publishes the investigation's papers in the Archives de la Bastille.
1900: Funck-Brentano's Le Drame des poisons (fourth edition).