The Affair of the Poisons was a scandal involving black magic, murder, and deceit at the court of King Louis XIV of France.
It all began with the discovery of a red leather trunk, and would go on to expose the desperation and moral decay behind the glitter of Versailles.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Affair Of The Poisons.
[00:00:28] It's an almost unbelievable story involving the king of France, black magic, deceit, gossip, the Parisian underworld, murder, torture, affairs and, of course, plenty of poison.
[00:00:43] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:00:49] There are many phrases in English that we use to convey the idea that the person at the top of an organisation, whether that’s a family, a company, or even a country, that this person should set an example for how to behave.
[00:01:06] You can say “set an example”, or “lead by example”, or “set the tone”, and no doubt there are plenty of similar phrases in your language.
[00:01:17] It is a universal truth; whatever the person at the top does, that tends to be the example that is followed by those within their orbit.
[00:01:29] In 17th-century France, and to be more precise, in the 17th-century French court, that person was King Louis XIV.
[00:01:40] He was the centre of everything.
[00:01:43] Just as the planets revolve around the sun, so too did the entire French court revolve around Louis. He wasn’t simply a monarch. He was France; the state, the culture, the fashion, the morality, even the gossip, it all radiated outward from him.
[00:02:04] He called himself le Roi Soleil — the Sun King — and was a firm believer that he had been chosen by God to rule France, according to the so-called “Divine Right of Kings”.
[00:02:19] And of course, this god-given right was absolute; nothing else, not the church, not the nobility, even came close to the power that should be wielded by the king.
[00:02:33] One of the ways he did this was by bringing the nobility to him.
[00:02:39] No longer would powerful nobles rule distant corners of the country; they would all live at court, with the king, or at least they would if they wanted to have any kind of influence or power.
[00:02:53] And the centre of this power and influence would be the Palace at Versailles, which Louis turned from a respectable chateau into a vast royal residence, and a glittering stage from which to project his power and splendour.
[00:03:11] And the French aristocracy, desperate to remain close to him, played their roles accordingly.
[00:03:20] Life at court was a performance.
[00:03:23] Every look, every gesture, every word had meaning. But behind the dazzling chandeliers and golden mirrors, it was also a world of extreme excess and moral decay.
[00:03:38] Louis had dozens of mistresses, with eight listed on his Wikipedia page as “among the better known”.
[00:03:47] Strangely enough, if you switch over to his French-language Wikipedia page, you’ll find 14 mistresses, instead of eight.
[00:03:55] No doubt there’s a joke in there somewhere…
[00:03:58] Anyway, some of these mistresses were official, some unofficial, merely whispered about in the shadows, and no doubt there were more who were unknown altogether.
[00:04:11] Of those official, or semi-official ones, each brought with her a retinue of hangers-on and followers.
[00:04:21] All of these mistresses competed for the king’s attention with jewels, flattery, and favours.
[00:04:28] It was a kind of soft warfare, played out in silk and perfume, in secret corridors and garden pavilions.
[00:04:37] At the same time, nobles were kept busy with endless court rituals, distracted with pleasures, and in a seemingly never-ending game of spending one-upmanship, ostentatious displays of wealth and excess.
[00:04:54] They gambled away fortunes at the gaming tables, dressed in costumes that cost more than a village, and whispered behind fans as they plotted ways to climb the social ladder or planned their rivals’ downfalls.
[00:05:11] This was a world where appearances were everything, and survival depended on who you knew, how you charmed, and how far you were willing to go.
[00:05:21] And when charm wasn’t enough, some turned to darker methods.
[00:05:27] Love potions. Spells. Magical powders. Rituals. And poisons.
[00:05:34] Because if power flowed from the king, and you couldn’t reach him with wit or beauty, perhaps there were other ways.
[00:05:44] This was the backdrop to The Affair of the Poisons, a scandal that began in the shadows of Paris, but crept ever closer to Versailles, threatening to unravel the illusion of divine order and perfection that Louis had spent decades crafting.
[00:06:01] It all started in 1672, with the death of a dashing young cavalry officer named Godin de Sainte-Croix.
[00:06:11] Now, nothing appeared to be particularly strange about this man’s death, but when his belongings were collected, a red leather trunk was found.
[00:06:24] Inside were a series of love letters between him and an aristocratic married woman named Marie de Brinvilliers.
[00:06:34] Now, this was 17th-century France; it would probably have been more unusual if he hadn’t had a lover.
[00:06:41] But upon further inspection, the trunk contained something far more incriminating.
[00:06:49] A collection of vials containing strange substances: potions and poisons.
[00:06:57] The young cavalry officer had spent some time in prison, and there he had reportedly got to know an Italian master-poisoner, a man who knew how to prepare different natural ingredients, powders, and liquids to kill.
[00:07:14] The letters exchanged between the two lovers revealed that the pair had spent several years honing their craft, scientifically testing different combinations, and doing practical experiments on unwitting subjects.
[00:07:32] According to one report, Marie de Brinvilliers would choose one of her concoctions, add it to a cake or biscuit mixture, and then turn up at the Hôtel-Dieu, a large public hospital on the bank of the Seine.
[00:07:48] As a member of the French nobility, and without much else to do, she would be allowed to stroll up and down the hospital wards, visiting the sick and giving them token gifts: biscuits, cakes, and so on.
[00:08:04] To someone recovering from illness in a cold and damp hospital bed, it must have been a welcome diversion to have someone come and talk to you, bringing you delicious treats that you might never have been able to afford yourself.
[00:08:19] But it was, of course, not particularly nice to find yourself dead a matter of hours afterwards.
[00:08:26] Now, it’s not known how long this went on for, or how many innocent patients she murdered.
[00:08:33] It seems that nobody noticed, or at least nobody seemed to question why people didn’t survive for long after tasting one of Marie de Brinvilliers’ biscuits.
[00:08:44] These people were in hospital already, it wasn’t so improbable that they would die there, and besides, an aristocratic young woman would never have been considered capable of doing such a thing.
[00:08:56] It was simply not in the female character, especially of a lady of such noble birth.
[00:09:03] Or so people thought…
[00:09:07] And if this wasn’t bad enough, there were more letters in the trunk, letters that revealed that sickly strangers hadn’t been the only victims of Marie de Brinvilliers’ poisonous concoctions.
[00:09:21] The letter revealed that she had also murdered her father and her two brothers, not out of spite or hatred, but for financial gain; she wanted the family fortune for herself and her children.
[00:09:37] When her lover was found dead, probably by accidentally poisoning himself, she must have realised that their secret would be revealed.
[00:09:47] She fled, hiding in England for four years, before being arrested in Belgium.
[00:09:52] During all of this time, she had been keeping a sort of journal with her various confessions, and in it she detailed how she had also tried to poison her sister-in-law and her husband.
[00:10:07] The game was up.
[00:10:09] She was condemned to death, but she was first to be subjected to something called “the water cure”, which was a kind of horrible torture where she was forced to drink 13 and a half litres of water, stretching her stomach to the point of agony.
[00:10:26] Then, she was taken to a public square–Place de Grève–her hair shaved, her head chopped off, and her remains burned.
[00:10:37] And this might have seemed like an isolated case–a murderous couple who thought they would never be caught–but it turned out to be the start of something much bigger.
[00:10:49] According to one report, before she was condemned to death, she said, “Out of so many guilty people, must I be the only one to be put to death? … Half the people in town are involved in this sort of thing, and I could ruin them all if I were to talk.”
[00:11:06] End quote.
[00:11:08] Half the people in town, meaning half the people in Paris, would have meant around 300,000 people poisoning family members and murdering unsuspecting hospital patients.
[00:11:19] Clearly, this was something of an exaggeration, but it turned out that it wasn’t so far off.
[00:11:28] According to one French historian, there were 400 witches and warlocks active in the capital at this time.
[00:11:37] Now, these weren’t cartoon-type witches; women in dark robes with pointed hats and black cats.
[00:11:45] But they did have cauldrons, or at least, one of their core specialities was the preparation of mysterious potions to heal, to make you more attractive, to force someone to fall in love with you, or indeed, to kill.
[00:12:02] The true extent of this seedy underworld started to be unravelled after another woman, Magdelaine de La Grange, was arrested on the charge of poisoning her lover, and she said pretty much the same thing as Marie de Brinvilliers, to paraphrase: “everyone’s doing it”.
[00:12:23] Word reached Louis XIV, and he ordered his chief of police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, to launch a full investigation.
[00:12:34] Now, de La Reynie had made a name for himself as a man who had “cleaned up” Paris; he reformed the police force, made sure the city was properly lit, and restored some semblance of law and order to the city.
[00:12:50] But there was still this underworld that he didn’t fully understand, and he was given the task of getting to the bottom of it.
[00:13:01] To deal with the fallout of this investigation, Louis XIV created a secretive tribunal called the Chambre Ardente, or “Burning Chamber,” so-named for the torch-lit basement where its judges met.
[00:13:17] Over the next three years, this would be the centre of the investigation, an investigation that uncovered the true extent of 17th-century France’s obsession with the supernatural.
[00:13:30] And what de La Reynie and this tribunal found was shocking.
[00:13:36] Fortune tellers, alchemists, all sorts of fraudsters and charlatans, and a bustling industry in the heart of Paris.
[00:13:46] But there was an even more sinister side.
[00:13:50] Alongside the people selling fake cures for headaches or lovesickness, there were others preparing deadly poisons, performing backroom abortions, and even conducting so-called “black masses”.
[00:14:05] What really happened at these “black masses” is something of a mystery, but it’s thought that they would involve an altar set up in a bedroom, a naked woman stretched across it, a chalice placed on her body, and, in some cases, the blood of a sacrificed infant used to invoke dark powers.
[00:14:30] And one of the women at the centre of this, Paris’s most famous alchemist, poisoner, abortionist and conductor of black masses, was a woman named Catherine Monvoisin, or simply “La Voisin”, the neighbour, in English.
[00:14:47] Men and women of Parisian high society would go to La Voisin for anything: fortune telling, love potions, medical treatments, abortions, black masses; there was practically no procedure that was beyond her stated abilities.
[00:15:04] Now, there are certainly plenty of question marks as to whether her incantations, love potions or medical treatments had any effect whatsoever.
[00:15:14] Unfortunately, there is little debate when it comes to things like abortions or the preparation of poison: she is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 1,000 and 2,500 individuals.
[00:15:30] She must have thought herself to be invincible; after all, she had grown fabulously wealthy, she was providing a service to those at the very top of French society, and had people queuing around the block.
[00:15:45] But, on the 12th of March 1679, fresh out of mass, she was arrested on the church's steps.
[00:15:54] In the months that followed, she was interrogated.
[00:15:58] Interestingly enough, La Voisin wasn’t subjected to torture for most of her imprisonment, perhaps because the authorities feared what she might reveal, potentially information that might incriminate high-ranking members of the French aristocracy, perhaps even members of King Louis’s inner circle.
[00:16:18] But during her final interrogation, in February 1680, she was put to the boot torture: a brutal method designed to crush the legs and force confessions.
[00:16:31] Even then, she refused to name specific clients, only admitting that, and I’m quoting directly, “ a great number of persons of every sort of rank and condition addressed themselves to her to seek the death of or to find the means to kill many people”.
[00:16:49] In other words, rich and poor, of noble birth and normal people, came to seek her poisonous services.
[00:16:58] Now, it’s worth pausing for a moment to talk about why so many people, especially women, turned to poison.
[00:17:07] It wasn’t that they were cold-hearted murderers, but rather, it was often a desperate act of rebellion.
[00:17:15] In 17th-century France, women had little legal or financial power, and were trapped under the thumb of husbands or fathers.
[00:17:26] If they were cut out of wills, or abused by their fathers, brothers or husbands, there was precious little they could do about it.
[00:17:36] Poison became a secret weapon to escape abusive marriages, secure wealth, or defy a system that left them powerless.
[00:17:46] And it worked very well.
[00:17:49] Poisons like arsenic were nearly impossible to detect.
[00:17:53] They were tasteless, odourless, and invisible in autopsies, so people who were murdered by poison would typically be written off as dying of ‘natural causes’.
[00:18:06] And La Voisin was one of the women who made it all possible, for a while at least.
[00:18:13] In February of 1680, nearly a year after her arrest, she too was led to Place de Grève–the same square where de Brinvilliers had been beheaded four years earlier–and she was burned at the stake.
[00:18:28] She had taken the names of her trusted clients to the grave with her, but just a few months later, the identity of one would be revealed.
[00:18:39] La Voisin’s daughter confessed the name of one of her mother’s most secretive clients: Madame de Montespan, who just so happened to be one of Louis XIV’s favourite mistresses, and the mother of seven of his illegitimate children.
[00:18:56] According to witnesses, she had first sought out La Voisin in 1667 to conduct a series of “black masses”, with the objective of winning the king’s love.
[00:19:08] She also asked La Voisin to prepare a series of aphrodisiacs–magic potions–which she arranged to be slipped into his drink and food.
[00:19:20] Sure enough, a year later, she was added to his long list of mistresses.
[00:19:26] Now, the fact that she was prepared to go to the length of organising these pseudo-religious dark rituals and procuring aphrodisiacs probably gives you an idea of her determination to seduce the King, and his extensive list of mistresses suggests that it might not have been the toughest job in the world.
[00:19:46] But she clearly thought her success with the King was due to La Voisin’s magic powers.
[00:19:53] And after the pair had become lovers, her relationship with La Voisin became even more important.
[00:20:01] Whenever there was any kind of issue between her and the king, between her and a rival for the king’s affections, or an issue with anyone else at court, she would turn to her trusted back-street witch, La Voisin.
[00:20:16] There are even reports that she turned to her to poison the king.
[00:20:21] Louis was clearly not a man who put a great emphasis on loyalty and monogamy, and only a few years after Madame de Montespan had become his lover, did his eyes start to wander, and he started to lose interest.
[00:20:38] Together with La Voisin, de Montespan dreamed up a plan to poison one of her rivals, and it has even been alleged that they had planned to poison the king himself.
[00:20:50] If he was going to desert her, he must pay the price, so the theory goes.
[00:20:56] Fortunately for Louis, at least, La Voisin was arrested and executed before this could happen.
[00:21:04] And as for Madame de Montespan and her other poison-loving colleagues at court?
[00:21:09] If this information had got out, it would have been scandalous.
[00:21:14] But it didn’t.
[00:21:17] The investigation continued, but quietly. Arrests were made, but names were omitted from the public record. Madame de Montespan was never formally charged, but soon after, she lost her influence at court.
[00:21:33] And in 1682, the same year that the royal court officially moved to Versailles, the full investigation was closed.
[00:21:43] By then, the Chambre Ardente had charged 442 people.
[00:21:49] Thirty-six were executed. Dozens more were imprisoned for life or exiled. And countless others — especially among the nobility — simply vanished from the record.
[00:22:02] The scandal was swept under the royal carpet.
[00:22:06] This all coincided with the royal court’s official move to Versailles, a carefully stage-managed shift to an image of splendour, and perhaps an ideal moment to quietly bury the affair, along with any remaining embarrassing secrets.
[00:22:22] Not forgotten, exactly, but filed away. A stain on the Sun King’s legacy that no amount of gold or glitter could fully erase.
[00:22:32] And yet, the Affair of the Poisons is a reminder not just about Louis XIV and his court, but perhaps about human nature itself.
[00:22:41] That beneath the surface of the most refined societies, behind the manners, the titles, the rituals, there can lie a deep current of desperation — to be seen, to be loved, to hold on to power.
[00:22:56] And when the stakes are high enough, people will often turn to the darkest of means.
[00:23:04] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the Affair of the Poisons.
[00:23:09] If you enjoyed this story and you haven’t had enough of mysteries at the French court, you might like to listen to episode number 479, about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
[00:23:20] There’s less poison, but there are affairs, a king called Louis, criminals, and of course a very large diamond necklace.
[00:23:28] I’ll put a link to that below, or you can just search for it on the website. It’s Episode number 479 and it’s called the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
[00:23:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:43] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Affair Of The Poisons.
[00:00:28] It's an almost unbelievable story involving the king of France, black magic, deceit, gossip, the Parisian underworld, murder, torture, affairs and, of course, plenty of poison.
[00:00:43] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:00:49] There are many phrases in English that we use to convey the idea that the person at the top of an organisation, whether that’s a family, a company, or even a country, that this person should set an example for how to behave.
[00:01:06] You can say “set an example”, or “lead by example”, or “set the tone”, and no doubt there are plenty of similar phrases in your language.
[00:01:17] It is a universal truth; whatever the person at the top does, that tends to be the example that is followed by those within their orbit.
[00:01:29] In 17th-century France, and to be more precise, in the 17th-century French court, that person was King Louis XIV.
[00:01:40] He was the centre of everything.
[00:01:43] Just as the planets revolve around the sun, so too did the entire French court revolve around Louis. He wasn’t simply a monarch. He was France; the state, the culture, the fashion, the morality, even the gossip, it all radiated outward from him.
[00:02:04] He called himself le Roi Soleil — the Sun King — and was a firm believer that he had been chosen by God to rule France, according to the so-called “Divine Right of Kings”.
[00:02:19] And of course, this god-given right was absolute; nothing else, not the church, not the nobility, even came close to the power that should be wielded by the king.
[00:02:33] One of the ways he did this was by bringing the nobility to him.
[00:02:39] No longer would powerful nobles rule distant corners of the country; they would all live at court, with the king, or at least they would if they wanted to have any kind of influence or power.
[00:02:53] And the centre of this power and influence would be the Palace at Versailles, which Louis turned from a respectable chateau into a vast royal residence, and a glittering stage from which to project his power and splendour.
[00:03:11] And the French aristocracy, desperate to remain close to him, played their roles accordingly.
[00:03:20] Life at court was a performance.
[00:03:23] Every look, every gesture, every word had meaning. But behind the dazzling chandeliers and golden mirrors, it was also a world of extreme excess and moral decay.
[00:03:38] Louis had dozens of mistresses, with eight listed on his Wikipedia page as “among the better known”.
[00:03:47] Strangely enough, if you switch over to his French-language Wikipedia page, you’ll find 14 mistresses, instead of eight.
[00:03:55] No doubt there’s a joke in there somewhere…
[00:03:58] Anyway, some of these mistresses were official, some unofficial, merely whispered about in the shadows, and no doubt there were more who were unknown altogether.
[00:04:11] Of those official, or semi-official ones, each brought with her a retinue of hangers-on and followers.
[00:04:21] All of these mistresses competed for the king’s attention with jewels, flattery, and favours.
[00:04:28] It was a kind of soft warfare, played out in silk and perfume, in secret corridors and garden pavilions.
[00:04:37] At the same time, nobles were kept busy with endless court rituals, distracted with pleasures, and in a seemingly never-ending game of spending one-upmanship, ostentatious displays of wealth and excess.
[00:04:54] They gambled away fortunes at the gaming tables, dressed in costumes that cost more than a village, and whispered behind fans as they plotted ways to climb the social ladder or planned their rivals’ downfalls.
[00:05:11] This was a world where appearances were everything, and survival depended on who you knew, how you charmed, and how far you were willing to go.
[00:05:21] And when charm wasn’t enough, some turned to darker methods.
[00:05:27] Love potions. Spells. Magical powders. Rituals. And poisons.
[00:05:34] Because if power flowed from the king, and you couldn’t reach him with wit or beauty, perhaps there were other ways.
[00:05:44] This was the backdrop to The Affair of the Poisons, a scandal that began in the shadows of Paris, but crept ever closer to Versailles, threatening to unravel the illusion of divine order and perfection that Louis had spent decades crafting.
[00:06:01] It all started in 1672, with the death of a dashing young cavalry officer named Godin de Sainte-Croix.
[00:06:11] Now, nothing appeared to be particularly strange about this man’s death, but when his belongings were collected, a red leather trunk was found.
[00:06:24] Inside were a series of love letters between him and an aristocratic married woman named Marie de Brinvilliers.
[00:06:34] Now, this was 17th-century France; it would probably have been more unusual if he hadn’t had a lover.
[00:06:41] But upon further inspection, the trunk contained something far more incriminating.
[00:06:49] A collection of vials containing strange substances: potions and poisons.
[00:06:57] The young cavalry officer had spent some time in prison, and there he had reportedly got to know an Italian master-poisoner, a man who knew how to prepare different natural ingredients, powders, and liquids to kill.
[00:07:14] The letters exchanged between the two lovers revealed that the pair had spent several years honing their craft, scientifically testing different combinations, and doing practical experiments on unwitting subjects.
[00:07:32] According to one report, Marie de Brinvilliers would choose one of her concoctions, add it to a cake or biscuit mixture, and then turn up at the Hôtel-Dieu, a large public hospital on the bank of the Seine.
[00:07:48] As a member of the French nobility, and without much else to do, she would be allowed to stroll up and down the hospital wards, visiting the sick and giving them token gifts: biscuits, cakes, and so on.
[00:08:04] To someone recovering from illness in a cold and damp hospital bed, it must have been a welcome diversion to have someone come and talk to you, bringing you delicious treats that you might never have been able to afford yourself.
[00:08:19] But it was, of course, not particularly nice to find yourself dead a matter of hours afterwards.
[00:08:26] Now, it’s not known how long this went on for, or how many innocent patients she murdered.
[00:08:33] It seems that nobody noticed, or at least nobody seemed to question why people didn’t survive for long after tasting one of Marie de Brinvilliers’ biscuits.
[00:08:44] These people were in hospital already, it wasn’t so improbable that they would die there, and besides, an aristocratic young woman would never have been considered capable of doing such a thing.
[00:08:56] It was simply not in the female character, especially of a lady of such noble birth.
[00:09:03] Or so people thought…
[00:09:07] And if this wasn’t bad enough, there were more letters in the trunk, letters that revealed that sickly strangers hadn’t been the only victims of Marie de Brinvilliers’ poisonous concoctions.
[00:09:21] The letter revealed that she had also murdered her father and her two brothers, not out of spite or hatred, but for financial gain; she wanted the family fortune for herself and her children.
[00:09:37] When her lover was found dead, probably by accidentally poisoning himself, she must have realised that their secret would be revealed.
[00:09:47] She fled, hiding in England for four years, before being arrested in Belgium.
[00:09:52] During all of this time, she had been keeping a sort of journal with her various confessions, and in it she detailed how she had also tried to poison her sister-in-law and her husband.
[00:10:07] The game was up.
[00:10:09] She was condemned to death, but she was first to be subjected to something called “the water cure”, which was a kind of horrible torture where she was forced to drink 13 and a half litres of water, stretching her stomach to the point of agony.
[00:10:26] Then, she was taken to a public square–Place de Grève–her hair shaved, her head chopped off, and her remains burned.
[00:10:37] And this might have seemed like an isolated case–a murderous couple who thought they would never be caught–but it turned out to be the start of something much bigger.
[00:10:49] According to one report, before she was condemned to death, she said, “Out of so many guilty people, must I be the only one to be put to death? … Half the people in town are involved in this sort of thing, and I could ruin them all if I were to talk.”
[00:11:06] End quote.
[00:11:08] Half the people in town, meaning half the people in Paris, would have meant around 300,000 people poisoning family members and murdering unsuspecting hospital patients.
[00:11:19] Clearly, this was something of an exaggeration, but it turned out that it wasn’t so far off.
[00:11:28] According to one French historian, there were 400 witches and warlocks active in the capital at this time.
[00:11:37] Now, these weren’t cartoon-type witches; women in dark robes with pointed hats and black cats.
[00:11:45] But they did have cauldrons, or at least, one of their core specialities was the preparation of mysterious potions to heal, to make you more attractive, to force someone to fall in love with you, or indeed, to kill.
[00:12:02] The true extent of this seedy underworld started to be unravelled after another woman, Magdelaine de La Grange, was arrested on the charge of poisoning her lover, and she said pretty much the same thing as Marie de Brinvilliers, to paraphrase: “everyone’s doing it”.
[00:12:23] Word reached Louis XIV, and he ordered his chief of police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, to launch a full investigation.
[00:12:34] Now, de La Reynie had made a name for himself as a man who had “cleaned up” Paris; he reformed the police force, made sure the city was properly lit, and restored some semblance of law and order to the city.
[00:12:50] But there was still this underworld that he didn’t fully understand, and he was given the task of getting to the bottom of it.
[00:13:01] To deal with the fallout of this investigation, Louis XIV created a secretive tribunal called the Chambre Ardente, or “Burning Chamber,” so-named for the torch-lit basement where its judges met.
[00:13:17] Over the next three years, this would be the centre of the investigation, an investigation that uncovered the true extent of 17th-century France’s obsession with the supernatural.
[00:13:30] And what de La Reynie and this tribunal found was shocking.
[00:13:36] Fortune tellers, alchemists, all sorts of fraudsters and charlatans, and a bustling industry in the heart of Paris.
[00:13:46] But there was an even more sinister side.
[00:13:50] Alongside the people selling fake cures for headaches or lovesickness, there were others preparing deadly poisons, performing backroom abortions, and even conducting so-called “black masses”.
[00:14:05] What really happened at these “black masses” is something of a mystery, but it’s thought that they would involve an altar set up in a bedroom, a naked woman stretched across it, a chalice placed on her body, and, in some cases, the blood of a sacrificed infant used to invoke dark powers.
[00:14:30] And one of the women at the centre of this, Paris’s most famous alchemist, poisoner, abortionist and conductor of black masses, was a woman named Catherine Monvoisin, or simply “La Voisin”, the neighbour, in English.
[00:14:47] Men and women of Parisian high society would go to La Voisin for anything: fortune telling, love potions, medical treatments, abortions, black masses; there was practically no procedure that was beyond her stated abilities.
[00:15:04] Now, there are certainly plenty of question marks as to whether her incantations, love potions or medical treatments had any effect whatsoever.
[00:15:14] Unfortunately, there is little debate when it comes to things like abortions or the preparation of poison: she is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 1,000 and 2,500 individuals.
[00:15:30] She must have thought herself to be invincible; after all, she had grown fabulously wealthy, she was providing a service to those at the very top of French society, and had people queuing around the block.
[00:15:45] But, on the 12th of March 1679, fresh out of mass, she was arrested on the church's steps.
[00:15:54] In the months that followed, she was interrogated.
[00:15:58] Interestingly enough, La Voisin wasn’t subjected to torture for most of her imprisonment, perhaps because the authorities feared what she might reveal, potentially information that might incriminate high-ranking members of the French aristocracy, perhaps even members of King Louis’s inner circle.
[00:16:18] But during her final interrogation, in February 1680, she was put to the boot torture: a brutal method designed to crush the legs and force confessions.
[00:16:31] Even then, she refused to name specific clients, only admitting that, and I’m quoting directly, “ a great number of persons of every sort of rank and condition addressed themselves to her to seek the death of or to find the means to kill many people”.
[00:16:49] In other words, rich and poor, of noble birth and normal people, came to seek her poisonous services.
[00:16:58] Now, it’s worth pausing for a moment to talk about why so many people, especially women, turned to poison.
[00:17:07] It wasn’t that they were cold-hearted murderers, but rather, it was often a desperate act of rebellion.
[00:17:15] In 17th-century France, women had little legal or financial power, and were trapped under the thumb of husbands or fathers.
[00:17:26] If they were cut out of wills, or abused by their fathers, brothers or husbands, there was precious little they could do about it.
[00:17:36] Poison became a secret weapon to escape abusive marriages, secure wealth, or defy a system that left them powerless.
[00:17:46] And it worked very well.
[00:17:49] Poisons like arsenic were nearly impossible to detect.
[00:17:53] They were tasteless, odourless, and invisible in autopsies, so people who were murdered by poison would typically be written off as dying of ‘natural causes’.
[00:18:06] And La Voisin was one of the women who made it all possible, for a while at least.
[00:18:13] In February of 1680, nearly a year after her arrest, she too was led to Place de Grève–the same square where de Brinvilliers had been beheaded four years earlier–and she was burned at the stake.
[00:18:28] She had taken the names of her trusted clients to the grave with her, but just a few months later, the identity of one would be revealed.
[00:18:39] La Voisin’s daughter confessed the name of one of her mother’s most secretive clients: Madame de Montespan, who just so happened to be one of Louis XIV’s favourite mistresses, and the mother of seven of his illegitimate children.
[00:18:56] According to witnesses, she had first sought out La Voisin in 1667 to conduct a series of “black masses”, with the objective of winning the king’s love.
[00:19:08] She also asked La Voisin to prepare a series of aphrodisiacs–magic potions–which she arranged to be slipped into his drink and food.
[00:19:20] Sure enough, a year later, she was added to his long list of mistresses.
[00:19:26] Now, the fact that she was prepared to go to the length of organising these pseudo-religious dark rituals and procuring aphrodisiacs probably gives you an idea of her determination to seduce the King, and his extensive list of mistresses suggests that it might not have been the toughest job in the world.
[00:19:46] But she clearly thought her success with the King was due to La Voisin’s magic powers.
[00:19:53] And after the pair had become lovers, her relationship with La Voisin became even more important.
[00:20:01] Whenever there was any kind of issue between her and the king, between her and a rival for the king’s affections, or an issue with anyone else at court, she would turn to her trusted back-street witch, La Voisin.
[00:20:16] There are even reports that she turned to her to poison the king.
[00:20:21] Louis was clearly not a man who put a great emphasis on loyalty and monogamy, and only a few years after Madame de Montespan had become his lover, did his eyes start to wander, and he started to lose interest.
[00:20:38] Together with La Voisin, de Montespan dreamed up a plan to poison one of her rivals, and it has even been alleged that they had planned to poison the king himself.
[00:20:50] If he was going to desert her, he must pay the price, so the theory goes.
[00:20:56] Fortunately for Louis, at least, La Voisin was arrested and executed before this could happen.
[00:21:04] And as for Madame de Montespan and her other poison-loving colleagues at court?
[00:21:09] If this information had got out, it would have been scandalous.
[00:21:14] But it didn’t.
[00:21:17] The investigation continued, but quietly. Arrests were made, but names were omitted from the public record. Madame de Montespan was never formally charged, but soon after, she lost her influence at court.
[00:21:33] And in 1682, the same year that the royal court officially moved to Versailles, the full investigation was closed.
[00:21:43] By then, the Chambre Ardente had charged 442 people.
[00:21:49] Thirty-six were executed. Dozens more were imprisoned for life or exiled. And countless others — especially among the nobility — simply vanished from the record.
[00:22:02] The scandal was swept under the royal carpet.
[00:22:06] This all coincided with the royal court’s official move to Versailles, a carefully stage-managed shift to an image of splendour, and perhaps an ideal moment to quietly bury the affair, along with any remaining embarrassing secrets.
[00:22:22] Not forgotten, exactly, but filed away. A stain on the Sun King’s legacy that no amount of gold or glitter could fully erase.
[00:22:32] And yet, the Affair of the Poisons is a reminder not just about Louis XIV and his court, but perhaps about human nature itself.
[00:22:41] That beneath the surface of the most refined societies, behind the manners, the titles, the rituals, there can lie a deep current of desperation — to be seen, to be loved, to hold on to power.
[00:22:56] And when the stakes are high enough, people will often turn to the darkest of means.
[00:23:04] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the Affair of the Poisons.
[00:23:09] If you enjoyed this story and you haven’t had enough of mysteries at the French court, you might like to listen to episode number 479, about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
[00:23:20] There’s less poison, but there are affairs, a king called Louis, criminals, and of course a very large diamond necklace.
[00:23:28] I’ll put a link to that below, or you can just search for it on the website. It’s Episode number 479 and it’s called the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
[00:23:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:43] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Affair Of The Poisons.
[00:00:28] It's an almost unbelievable story involving the king of France, black magic, deceit, gossip, the Parisian underworld, murder, torture, affairs and, of course, plenty of poison.
[00:00:43] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:00:49] There are many phrases in English that we use to convey the idea that the person at the top of an organisation, whether that’s a family, a company, or even a country, that this person should set an example for how to behave.
[00:01:06] You can say “set an example”, or “lead by example”, or “set the tone”, and no doubt there are plenty of similar phrases in your language.
[00:01:17] It is a universal truth; whatever the person at the top does, that tends to be the example that is followed by those within their orbit.
[00:01:29] In 17th-century France, and to be more precise, in the 17th-century French court, that person was King Louis XIV.
[00:01:40] He was the centre of everything.
[00:01:43] Just as the planets revolve around the sun, so too did the entire French court revolve around Louis. He wasn’t simply a monarch. He was France; the state, the culture, the fashion, the morality, even the gossip, it all radiated outward from him.
[00:02:04] He called himself le Roi Soleil — the Sun King — and was a firm believer that he had been chosen by God to rule France, according to the so-called “Divine Right of Kings”.
[00:02:19] And of course, this god-given right was absolute; nothing else, not the church, not the nobility, even came close to the power that should be wielded by the king.
[00:02:33] One of the ways he did this was by bringing the nobility to him.
[00:02:39] No longer would powerful nobles rule distant corners of the country; they would all live at court, with the king, or at least they would if they wanted to have any kind of influence or power.
[00:02:53] And the centre of this power and influence would be the Palace at Versailles, which Louis turned from a respectable chateau into a vast royal residence, and a glittering stage from which to project his power and splendour.
[00:03:11] And the French aristocracy, desperate to remain close to him, played their roles accordingly.
[00:03:20] Life at court was a performance.
[00:03:23] Every look, every gesture, every word had meaning. But behind the dazzling chandeliers and golden mirrors, it was also a world of extreme excess and moral decay.
[00:03:38] Louis had dozens of mistresses, with eight listed on his Wikipedia page as “among the better known”.
[00:03:47] Strangely enough, if you switch over to his French-language Wikipedia page, you’ll find 14 mistresses, instead of eight.
[00:03:55] No doubt there’s a joke in there somewhere…
[00:03:58] Anyway, some of these mistresses were official, some unofficial, merely whispered about in the shadows, and no doubt there were more who were unknown altogether.
[00:04:11] Of those official, or semi-official ones, each brought with her a retinue of hangers-on and followers.
[00:04:21] All of these mistresses competed for the king’s attention with jewels, flattery, and favours.
[00:04:28] It was a kind of soft warfare, played out in silk and perfume, in secret corridors and garden pavilions.
[00:04:37] At the same time, nobles were kept busy with endless court rituals, distracted with pleasures, and in a seemingly never-ending game of spending one-upmanship, ostentatious displays of wealth and excess.
[00:04:54] They gambled away fortunes at the gaming tables, dressed in costumes that cost more than a village, and whispered behind fans as they plotted ways to climb the social ladder or planned their rivals’ downfalls.
[00:05:11] This was a world where appearances were everything, and survival depended on who you knew, how you charmed, and how far you were willing to go.
[00:05:21] And when charm wasn’t enough, some turned to darker methods.
[00:05:27] Love potions. Spells. Magical powders. Rituals. And poisons.
[00:05:34] Because if power flowed from the king, and you couldn’t reach him with wit or beauty, perhaps there were other ways.
[00:05:44] This was the backdrop to The Affair of the Poisons, a scandal that began in the shadows of Paris, but crept ever closer to Versailles, threatening to unravel the illusion of divine order and perfection that Louis had spent decades crafting.
[00:06:01] It all started in 1672, with the death of a dashing young cavalry officer named Godin de Sainte-Croix.
[00:06:11] Now, nothing appeared to be particularly strange about this man’s death, but when his belongings were collected, a red leather trunk was found.
[00:06:24] Inside were a series of love letters between him and an aristocratic married woman named Marie de Brinvilliers.
[00:06:34] Now, this was 17th-century France; it would probably have been more unusual if he hadn’t had a lover.
[00:06:41] But upon further inspection, the trunk contained something far more incriminating.
[00:06:49] A collection of vials containing strange substances: potions and poisons.
[00:06:57] The young cavalry officer had spent some time in prison, and there he had reportedly got to know an Italian master-poisoner, a man who knew how to prepare different natural ingredients, powders, and liquids to kill.
[00:07:14] The letters exchanged between the two lovers revealed that the pair had spent several years honing their craft, scientifically testing different combinations, and doing practical experiments on unwitting subjects.
[00:07:32] According to one report, Marie de Brinvilliers would choose one of her concoctions, add it to a cake or biscuit mixture, and then turn up at the Hôtel-Dieu, a large public hospital on the bank of the Seine.
[00:07:48] As a member of the French nobility, and without much else to do, she would be allowed to stroll up and down the hospital wards, visiting the sick and giving them token gifts: biscuits, cakes, and so on.
[00:08:04] To someone recovering from illness in a cold and damp hospital bed, it must have been a welcome diversion to have someone come and talk to you, bringing you delicious treats that you might never have been able to afford yourself.
[00:08:19] But it was, of course, not particularly nice to find yourself dead a matter of hours afterwards.
[00:08:26] Now, it’s not known how long this went on for, or how many innocent patients she murdered.
[00:08:33] It seems that nobody noticed, or at least nobody seemed to question why people didn’t survive for long after tasting one of Marie de Brinvilliers’ biscuits.
[00:08:44] These people were in hospital already, it wasn’t so improbable that they would die there, and besides, an aristocratic young woman would never have been considered capable of doing such a thing.
[00:08:56] It was simply not in the female character, especially of a lady of such noble birth.
[00:09:03] Or so people thought…
[00:09:07] And if this wasn’t bad enough, there were more letters in the trunk, letters that revealed that sickly strangers hadn’t been the only victims of Marie de Brinvilliers’ poisonous concoctions.
[00:09:21] The letter revealed that she had also murdered her father and her two brothers, not out of spite or hatred, but for financial gain; she wanted the family fortune for herself and her children.
[00:09:37] When her lover was found dead, probably by accidentally poisoning himself, she must have realised that their secret would be revealed.
[00:09:47] She fled, hiding in England for four years, before being arrested in Belgium.
[00:09:52] During all of this time, she had been keeping a sort of journal with her various confessions, and in it she detailed how she had also tried to poison her sister-in-law and her husband.
[00:10:07] The game was up.
[00:10:09] She was condemned to death, but she was first to be subjected to something called “the water cure”, which was a kind of horrible torture where she was forced to drink 13 and a half litres of water, stretching her stomach to the point of agony.
[00:10:26] Then, she was taken to a public square–Place de Grève–her hair shaved, her head chopped off, and her remains burned.
[00:10:37] And this might have seemed like an isolated case–a murderous couple who thought they would never be caught–but it turned out to be the start of something much bigger.
[00:10:49] According to one report, before she was condemned to death, she said, “Out of so many guilty people, must I be the only one to be put to death? … Half the people in town are involved in this sort of thing, and I could ruin them all if I were to talk.”
[00:11:06] End quote.
[00:11:08] Half the people in town, meaning half the people in Paris, would have meant around 300,000 people poisoning family members and murdering unsuspecting hospital patients.
[00:11:19] Clearly, this was something of an exaggeration, but it turned out that it wasn’t so far off.
[00:11:28] According to one French historian, there were 400 witches and warlocks active in the capital at this time.
[00:11:37] Now, these weren’t cartoon-type witches; women in dark robes with pointed hats and black cats.
[00:11:45] But they did have cauldrons, or at least, one of their core specialities was the preparation of mysterious potions to heal, to make you more attractive, to force someone to fall in love with you, or indeed, to kill.
[00:12:02] The true extent of this seedy underworld started to be unravelled after another woman, Magdelaine de La Grange, was arrested on the charge of poisoning her lover, and she said pretty much the same thing as Marie de Brinvilliers, to paraphrase: “everyone’s doing it”.
[00:12:23] Word reached Louis XIV, and he ordered his chief of police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, to launch a full investigation.
[00:12:34] Now, de La Reynie had made a name for himself as a man who had “cleaned up” Paris; he reformed the police force, made sure the city was properly lit, and restored some semblance of law and order to the city.
[00:12:50] But there was still this underworld that he didn’t fully understand, and he was given the task of getting to the bottom of it.
[00:13:01] To deal with the fallout of this investigation, Louis XIV created a secretive tribunal called the Chambre Ardente, or “Burning Chamber,” so-named for the torch-lit basement where its judges met.
[00:13:17] Over the next three years, this would be the centre of the investigation, an investigation that uncovered the true extent of 17th-century France’s obsession with the supernatural.
[00:13:30] And what de La Reynie and this tribunal found was shocking.
[00:13:36] Fortune tellers, alchemists, all sorts of fraudsters and charlatans, and a bustling industry in the heart of Paris.
[00:13:46] But there was an even more sinister side.
[00:13:50] Alongside the people selling fake cures for headaches or lovesickness, there were others preparing deadly poisons, performing backroom abortions, and even conducting so-called “black masses”.
[00:14:05] What really happened at these “black masses” is something of a mystery, but it’s thought that they would involve an altar set up in a bedroom, a naked woman stretched across it, a chalice placed on her body, and, in some cases, the blood of a sacrificed infant used to invoke dark powers.
[00:14:30] And one of the women at the centre of this, Paris’s most famous alchemist, poisoner, abortionist and conductor of black masses, was a woman named Catherine Monvoisin, or simply “La Voisin”, the neighbour, in English.
[00:14:47] Men and women of Parisian high society would go to La Voisin for anything: fortune telling, love potions, medical treatments, abortions, black masses; there was practically no procedure that was beyond her stated abilities.
[00:15:04] Now, there are certainly plenty of question marks as to whether her incantations, love potions or medical treatments had any effect whatsoever.
[00:15:14] Unfortunately, there is little debate when it comes to things like abortions or the preparation of poison: she is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 1,000 and 2,500 individuals.
[00:15:30] She must have thought herself to be invincible; after all, she had grown fabulously wealthy, she was providing a service to those at the very top of French society, and had people queuing around the block.
[00:15:45] But, on the 12th of March 1679, fresh out of mass, she was arrested on the church's steps.
[00:15:54] In the months that followed, she was interrogated.
[00:15:58] Interestingly enough, La Voisin wasn’t subjected to torture for most of her imprisonment, perhaps because the authorities feared what she might reveal, potentially information that might incriminate high-ranking members of the French aristocracy, perhaps even members of King Louis’s inner circle.
[00:16:18] But during her final interrogation, in February 1680, she was put to the boot torture: a brutal method designed to crush the legs and force confessions.
[00:16:31] Even then, she refused to name specific clients, only admitting that, and I’m quoting directly, “ a great number of persons of every sort of rank and condition addressed themselves to her to seek the death of or to find the means to kill many people”.
[00:16:49] In other words, rich and poor, of noble birth and normal people, came to seek her poisonous services.
[00:16:58] Now, it’s worth pausing for a moment to talk about why so many people, especially women, turned to poison.
[00:17:07] It wasn’t that they were cold-hearted murderers, but rather, it was often a desperate act of rebellion.
[00:17:15] In 17th-century France, women had little legal or financial power, and were trapped under the thumb of husbands or fathers.
[00:17:26] If they were cut out of wills, or abused by their fathers, brothers or husbands, there was precious little they could do about it.
[00:17:36] Poison became a secret weapon to escape abusive marriages, secure wealth, or defy a system that left them powerless.
[00:17:46] And it worked very well.
[00:17:49] Poisons like arsenic were nearly impossible to detect.
[00:17:53] They were tasteless, odourless, and invisible in autopsies, so people who were murdered by poison would typically be written off as dying of ‘natural causes’.
[00:18:06] And La Voisin was one of the women who made it all possible, for a while at least.
[00:18:13] In February of 1680, nearly a year after her arrest, she too was led to Place de Grève–the same square where de Brinvilliers had been beheaded four years earlier–and she was burned at the stake.
[00:18:28] She had taken the names of her trusted clients to the grave with her, but just a few months later, the identity of one would be revealed.
[00:18:39] La Voisin’s daughter confessed the name of one of her mother’s most secretive clients: Madame de Montespan, who just so happened to be one of Louis XIV’s favourite mistresses, and the mother of seven of his illegitimate children.
[00:18:56] According to witnesses, she had first sought out La Voisin in 1667 to conduct a series of “black masses”, with the objective of winning the king’s love.
[00:19:08] She also asked La Voisin to prepare a series of aphrodisiacs–magic potions–which she arranged to be slipped into his drink and food.
[00:19:20] Sure enough, a year later, she was added to his long list of mistresses.
[00:19:26] Now, the fact that she was prepared to go to the length of organising these pseudo-religious dark rituals and procuring aphrodisiacs probably gives you an idea of her determination to seduce the King, and his extensive list of mistresses suggests that it might not have been the toughest job in the world.
[00:19:46] But she clearly thought her success with the King was due to La Voisin’s magic powers.
[00:19:53] And after the pair had become lovers, her relationship with La Voisin became even more important.
[00:20:01] Whenever there was any kind of issue between her and the king, between her and a rival for the king’s affections, or an issue with anyone else at court, she would turn to her trusted back-street witch, La Voisin.
[00:20:16] There are even reports that she turned to her to poison the king.
[00:20:21] Louis was clearly not a man who put a great emphasis on loyalty and monogamy, and only a few years after Madame de Montespan had become his lover, did his eyes start to wander, and he started to lose interest.
[00:20:38] Together with La Voisin, de Montespan dreamed up a plan to poison one of her rivals, and it has even been alleged that they had planned to poison the king himself.
[00:20:50] If he was going to desert her, he must pay the price, so the theory goes.
[00:20:56] Fortunately for Louis, at least, La Voisin was arrested and executed before this could happen.
[00:21:04] And as for Madame de Montespan and her other poison-loving colleagues at court?
[00:21:09] If this information had got out, it would have been scandalous.
[00:21:14] But it didn’t.
[00:21:17] The investigation continued, but quietly. Arrests were made, but names were omitted from the public record. Madame de Montespan was never formally charged, but soon after, she lost her influence at court.
[00:21:33] And in 1682, the same year that the royal court officially moved to Versailles, the full investigation was closed.
[00:21:43] By then, the Chambre Ardente had charged 442 people.
[00:21:49] Thirty-six were executed. Dozens more were imprisoned for life or exiled. And countless others — especially among the nobility — simply vanished from the record.
[00:22:02] The scandal was swept under the royal carpet.
[00:22:06] This all coincided with the royal court’s official move to Versailles, a carefully stage-managed shift to an image of splendour, and perhaps an ideal moment to quietly bury the affair, along with any remaining embarrassing secrets.
[00:22:22] Not forgotten, exactly, but filed away. A stain on the Sun King’s legacy that no amount of gold or glitter could fully erase.
[00:22:32] And yet, the Affair of the Poisons is a reminder not just about Louis XIV and his court, but perhaps about human nature itself.
[00:22:41] That beneath the surface of the most refined societies, behind the manners, the titles, the rituals, there can lie a deep current of desperation — to be seen, to be loved, to hold on to power.
[00:22:56] And when the stakes are high enough, people will often turn to the darkest of means.
[00:23:04] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the Affair of the Poisons.
[00:23:09] If you enjoyed this story and you haven’t had enough of mysteries at the French court, you might like to listen to episode number 479, about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
[00:23:20] There’s less poison, but there are affairs, a king called Louis, criminals, and of course a very large diamond necklace.
[00:23:28] I’ll put a link to that below, or you can just search for it on the website. It’s Episode number 479 and it’s called the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
[00:23:38] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:43] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
