A Witch in Royal Court: La Voisin

In 1640 a woman got burned by a group of robed, faceless men in a dark room. They accused the woman of attempting to kill the King. But, she was more than that in fact. 

Just like most of the women in history, there is not enough information about Catherine Deshayes. It is thought that she was born in 1640 in France and she had a poor childhood. She married Antoine Monvoisin, who was a jeweller and silk merchant. But, when Catherine was 20, she recognized her husband’s incompetence and unreliability. He was about to bankrupt and was in too much debt, there was no way to rescue his trade business. Catherine knew poverty very well, and she did not want to return to a life on the streets. She thought she had to do something, and she helped her family by practising chiromancy and face-reading. She helped dissatisfied wives how to better their relationships with their aristocratic husbands by reading the lines on their hands and faces. Besides being a fortune teller; she was also active as a midwife which developed into providing abortions which was against to Catholic beliefs. Also, the Church disapproved witchcraft; it was seen as a huge sin and crime. But, Catherine was too intelligent to burn in the stake. She persuaded the Sorbonne university vicars and professors of theology who objected to her practise. She convinced them her divination abilities were given to her by God.

Church authorities believed her explanation which was covered in lies and therefore she worked under the name of the church. Her business started to develop with her participation in the church. Catherine began to find a pattern in her customers; the vast majority of them desired more from the men in their lives. Some women desired for men to become their husband, others desired for their husbands to die, others desired to inherit their fortune. By this way, Catherine began fabricating potions to help in the fulfilment of certain wishes of her clients. Besides being a witch, she was a herbalist as well. Apparently, knowing this field well helped her to make poison. Her mixture included human blood, bones of toads, iron shavings and Spanish fly. She grinded them and sold them to women in Parisian society. But, these were not the things that gave her a great reputation and the name ‘La Voisin’. Once her popularity grew, she wanted to take advantage of her clients' desperation and deep pockets. By the 1660s, Catherine had become a rich and well-known fortune teller; her customers were the highest aristocracy of France. She lived in Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, where she welcomed clients all day and entertained the upper crust of Parisian society at parties in her garden. Besides that some nights she arranged satanic rituals in the catacombs underneath her home. These Black Masses were sinister inversions of a typical Catholic rite in which a nude woman would lie down as an altar, holding black candles in each hand and a chalice on her chest. As the woman prayed to the dark lord, a priest would perform Satanic rituals over her body before pouring the blood of a newborn baby into the cup.

Finding the blood of a newborn baby was easy for Catherine, she had a house for single mothers. There she helped women who want to have abortion and also the lower class ladies get rid of their babies after childbirth. Those were women who couldn't afford the embarrassment of having a child without marriage, or who couldn't afford to raise a child.

Catherine didn't charge her peasant clients for these services; instead, she charged aristocratic women who came to her for assistance extra to cover the cost of her charity. Woman from an aristocratic class accounted for half of her clients, although this situation benefited her, it was also harmful. Affair of the Poisons was a scandal that rocked French nobility in the 17th century.

In the 17th century, a scandal rocked among French nobility; Affair of the Poisons. One of Catherine’s clients was Madame de Montespan, who was official royal mistress to King Louis XIV of France. In 1667, Montespan allegedly employed Catherine to organise a black mass in order to win the love of the King. Montespan became the King's official mistress to the King thanks to black mass, and she continued to use Catherine whenever a conflict in her relationship with the King arose. By 1673, the King’s interest in Montespan waned, afraid of losing the love of the king and the privileges it brought to Montespan employed Catherine again. Apart from the black mass, Catherine gave Montespan an aphrodisiac to drug the King. Montespan was a determined and shrewd woman, she was aware of the benefits of being mistress of the King and she had no intention of giving up on these. Therefore, Montespan decided that if the King betrayed her, she would assassinate him and his new mistress.

In 1679, the King began a relationship with Angélique de Fontanges, Montespan called La Voisin and requested her to assassinate both the King and Fontanges. Catherine was hesitant at first, but later agreed. She made a plan to assassinate the King at the home of Catherine Trianon who was her colleague. Also, she received help from the poisoners Trianon, Bertrand, and Romani. Actually Trianon did not want to participate and also attempted to persuade Catherine to change her mind by conjuring up an ill-fated fortune for her, but she resisted. The conspirators intended to assassinate the King by poisoning a petition, to be delivered to his own hands. Catherine sent the appeal to the royal court in Saint-Germain on March 5, 1679. However, there were so many petitioners that day, and the King refused to accept their petitions therefore they did not achieve the assasination. When she returned to her home in Paris, a group of monks were waiting for her to castigate and she gave the petition to her daughter and told her to burn it. Besides that she planned to meet Catherine Trianon after mass to arrange the next assassination attempt on Louis XIV. Meanwhile, Madame de Brinvilliers was accused of working with her lover to murder her father and brothers and she executed. After her execution, another fortune teller Magdelaine de La Grange was arrested for poisoning people and she offered cooperation to the police in order to survive. Police used her information and eventually solved the network of fortune tellers in Paris who were distributing the poison. With the arrestments, people suspected the witches kidnapped their children for use in black masses and they started a riot. Also, priests announced that an increasing number of people were confessing to poisoning in their confessions. Arrests and executions terrified Catherine, eventually she was arrested after having heard mass, just before her meeting with Catherine Trianon.

She was imprisoned at Vincennes and was subjected to questioning. After her arrestment, her maid said that the arrest of Catherine would mean the end of a number of people in all levels of society. Contrary to expectations, she was not tortured, the police knew what kind of woman she was. She was known with her lovers and addiction of wine, that’s why the Chief of Police tried to interrogate her in a different way. When she was imprisoned, he held her drunk and interrogated her about who she represented and what such services entailed. Eventually the truth was revealed; drunk Catherine told everything. She was sentenced to be burned at the stake for witchcraft, her death intended to serve as a warning to the ladies of the court as well as the necromancers and fortune-tellers operating in Paris. Her ceremonies were thought to have poisoned over 1,000 people, with others speculating that she killed over 2,500 babies. After her admission, she got the death penalty and many women like Catherine were punished with death. However, most of the women in the French aristocracy, like Madame Montespan, spared prosecution thanks to King Louis XIV, who was concerned that if the public knew the facts that his court was teeming with liars, murders, and witchcraft practitioners, the peasant class would revolt, or worse, his enemies would use the outrage as a pretext to attack. During her execution some say she begged the crowd for justice, while others say she cried her innocence and cursed the families of the man responsible for her conviction.

Even though her body was burnt to ashes, Catherine still exists in French history. 

WORKS CITED:
Somerset, Anne. The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV. St. Martin’s Press, 2003.
Stradling, R. A. The Affair of the Poisons: Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan, and One of History’s Great Unsolved Mysteries. Pegasus Books, 2017.