Inheritance Powder

On 13 July 1709 a king of seventy sat by a fire and watched a sealed archive burn. Louis XIV was at war with most of Europe, the Seine had frozen that winter, and he had called for the papers of a tribunal closed twenty-seven years earlier. A note in the chancellor's office records that he fed them to the fire himself. They were the record of the Chambre ardente, the special court he had created in 1679 to try the poisoners of Paris, and everything it had heard about his own household.

He was a month too late. Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, the lieutenant of police who had run the investigation from its first day, had died in June at eighty-four, and his working papers were not among those the king sent for. His interrogation notes and his copies of the depositions that mattered had already gone into the archives of the Bastille, where they survived 1789 and were printed in the 1870s. Everything written about the Affair of the Poisons since rests on what one official chose to keep and one king forgot to ask for.

Inheritance Powder is the history of that investigation, told in the order the policeman conducted it, and of the moment the most absolute monarch in Europe decided he would rather not know.

The story begins before the Affair, with the marquise de Brinvilliers, beheaded and burned on the Place de Grève in July 1676 for poisoning her father and both her brothers to reach the family money. Her case taught Paris that any sudden death in a propertied family deserved a second look, and gave a police office then nine years old its first reputation. Before March 1667 nobody in a city of half a million had the job of knowing what went on. La Reynie was the first man who did, and the archive he built was what made the investigation of 1679 possible.

It started with a drunken boast at a supper late in 1678. From there the book follows the arrests of 1679, the creation of a tribunal at the Arsenal with no appeal, and the widening of the circle as prisoners at Vincennes learned what their questioners wanted to hear. The fortune-tellers of Paris ran one trade under many names: horoscopes, love charms, abortions, masses said for a purpose, and, for the rarest client, the white arsenic the city called inheritance powder. In January 1680 the tribunal issued warrants for two of Cardinal Mazarin's nieces, a marshal of France went into the Bastille, and an arrest order for Racine was drawn up and never used.

In July 1680 the daughter of the executed fortune-teller La Voisin named Madame de Montespan. The book gives that testimony as testimony, with who gave it, the pressure they were under, and the fact that one of them took her story back on the way to the scaffold. It splits the accusation into three charges of descending strength, love powders, sacrilegious rites, and a plot on the king's life, and weighs each on its evidence. Then it follows what Louis did: the suspension, the secret hearings, the dissolution of 1682, the sealed letters that sent the witnesses to fortresses for life, and the edict that quietly stopped French courts from asking whether the devil had been present at a crime.

Why I Wrote This

What hooked me was a phrase. Poudre de succession, inheritance powder, was a Paris joke before it was an indictment, slang for the arsenic that hurried a rich uncle along. A city with a joke like that has already decided something about itself, and I wanted to know what happened when a new kind of official took it literally and started writing names down.

The other thing was the fire. The cover-up is the best-documented fact in the whole affair, and it is also what destroyed the documents. Louis XIV burned the tribunal's record and missed the policeman's copies, so everything we know comes from the archive he did not think to ask for. That seemed to me the real subject: not whether the king's mistress did it, which cannot now be settled, but what a monarchy built on one man's person does when the knowing arrives at a door it may not open. I had come to the period through The Thirty Years' War, and wanted to see the France that war left on top from underneath.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Madame de Montespan really poison anyone?

No evidence says she did, and the book does not say so. Most historians who have worked through the record think it likely she bought love powders from La Voisin, the trade's most ordinary product. The alleged rites rest on testimony from prisoners facing death, and the plot against the king is the weakest charge of the three. She was never questioned, by the king's decision.

Is this true crime?

No. It is court and political history. The poisonings are reported as facts in a record, not reconstructed as scenes, and the people at the center are a king, a mistress, two duchesses, a minister and a policeman. A reader who wants gore will not find it; a reader who wants to know what Versailles was built on will.

Do I need to know French history to follow it?

No. The first chapter sets up the court from Mazarin's death in 1661, French terms are glossed on first use, and three appendices supply a who's who, a guide to the surviving records, and a timeline from 1661 to 1709.

Is this part of a series?

No. It is a standalone court history of Louis XIV's France. It links to The Thirty Years' War for the war that made that France possible; a book on the Borgia poison legend, which this one ends by dismantling, is planned.

If You Liked This, You Might Like

• The Thirty Years' War — the war that left Louis XIV's France the dominant power in Europe and able to afford a Versailles.
• Mary, Queen of Scots: Murder, the Casket Letters, and the Crown She Could Not Keep — another royal scandal that turned on a casket of letters and evidence never tested in open court.
• The Powder Treason: Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby, and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 — a seventeenth-century state investigation of a plot against a king, by a government that, unlike Louis, wanted every word published.
• Plague and Fire — London in the same decade La Reynie took office in Paris, a city with nobody yet in charge of knowing it.

The king could command almost anything except a verdict. Inheritance Powder: The Affair of the Poisons and the Scandal That Reached Louis XIV's Court follows the investigation from a supper table to the door of the royal bedchamber, and shows what it cost to keep that door shut.