Madame de Dreux was the wife of a Parlement maître des requêtes. She was not yet thirty, and was endowed with much grace and beauty, a delicate and dainty beauty, with infinite charm and distinction. She was so fond of Monsieur de Richelieu, declared La Joly, one of the sorceresses tried by the court, ‘that as soon as she knew that Monsieur de Richelieu was even looking at any one else, she thought of doing away with him.’ She had further poisoned ‘Monsieur Pajot and Monsieur de Varennes and many others,’ and, in particular, one of her lovers, to avoid, as she said, the bother and annoyance of a rupture. She had also tried to poison her husband, and to get rid of Madame de Richelieu by sorcery. All these details were widely known in Paris, where society, difficult as it is to believe it, was wonderfully amused by them. The husband was riddled with epigrams, which Madame de Sévigné declares ‘divinely diverting.’ Madame de Dreux was too pretty, really!—and besides, she was a cousin of two of the judges of the Chambre Ardente; the result was that on April 27, 1680, the judges contented themselves with admonishing her. ‘Monsieur de Dreux and her whole family,’ writes Madame de Sévigné, ‘went to the court to meet her.’ Set at liberty, the young woman was fêted and petted by the whole world of fashion. ‘There was joy and triumph and kisses from all her family and friends. Monsieur de Richelieu did wonders in this business.’ A fact which will appear incredible is, that after she left prison, Madame de Dreux returned to the sorceresses, met La Joly in the Jesuits’ church, and asked and obtained from her powders to poison a lady whom Monsieur de Richelieu was ‘considering.’
Truth to tell, La Joly was arrested while this was going on, and, as a result of her revelations, a fresh warrant was issued against Madame de Dreux; but she was warned, and escaped. She was proceeded against for contumacy. Her husband and Monsieur de Richelieu were then seen pleading for her in company. On January 23, 1682, Madame de Dreux was condemned to banishment beyond the kingdom, but the king allowed her to remain in France provided she lived in Paris with her husband.
Madame Leféron, who also belonged to judicial society, was less pleasant in appearance. The daughter of a Parlement counsellor, her maiden name was Marguerite Galart. Her husband, president of the first court of enquêtes, is represented in the Tableau du Parlement of 1661 as ‘a good judge, of solid judgment and firm opinion, never changing except on good grounds, unprejudiced, loving rule and order, a good and disinterested man.’ He had given proof of independence of character at the time of Fouquet’s case, by showing clemency to the superintendent. Madame Leféron found him a bore, avaricious, and further—how can one say it?—insufficient. Yet the fair dame had passed her fiftieth year. But she was madly smitten with one Monsieur de Prade, who on his side was in love with her money. She asked La Voisin for poisons to kill her husband, and de Prade went to her for charms to help him win the heart of his mistress. La Voisin gave them all they wanted: phials to the lady, and to the gallant a mask of virgin wax representing the face of Madame Leféron. This, enclosed in a zinc box, was to be warmed every now and then, which would warm the heart of the lady. De Prade gave La Voisin a note for 20,000 livres—£4000 to-day.
The phials produced their effect, and Leféron died on September 8, 1669. The waxen mask was equally successful, and Madame Leféron married de Prade. On February 20, 1680, as she went to the stake, La Voisin said to Sagot, clerk to the court: ‘It is quite true that Madame Leféron came to see me, most joyous at being a widow, and when I asked her if the phial of liquid had taken effect, she said, “Effect or not, he is done for!”’ De Prade appeared no less happy. He scoured the city in a brand-new carriage, ‘with three or four lackeys behind.’ His joy was short. The lady saw that her new husband thought chiefly of getting ‘donations’ out of her, and the husband soon saw that his wife was trying to poison him in his turn. He fled to the Turks. On April 7, 1680, Madame Leféron was condemned to banishment beyond the borders of the viscounty of Paris and to a fine of 1500 livres, though there were, as Louvois wrote to Louis XIV, thirteen or fourteen witnesses of her crime.
Madame de Dreux and Madame Leféron owed this remarkable indulgence to Madame de Poulaillon. Born Marguerite de Jehan, of a noble Bordeaux family, she had come to Paris when very young to associate with the alchemists, having a passion for the occult sciences. She had married Alexandre de Poulaillon, much older than herself, but very rich. Contemporaries are unanimous in praising the pretty face, the delicate and keen intelligence, and the exquisite distinction of the young lady. Unhappily for herself, she met a certain La Rivière, who had a wonderful talent for getting money out of ladies. As we know, in the seventeenth century, a talent of this sort was not the discreditable thing it is to-day. Her excellent husband, becoming suspicious, drew his purse-strings tight and locked his safes. Madame de Poulaillon had recourse to various expedients. She sold the house furniture, chairs, sofas, ‘the big gilded bed upholstered in English watered silk,’ the plate, and even the clothes of her husband. He, in a furious temper—we may suppose so, at least—ceased to give his wife even money for her toilet, and bought her dresses and ribbons himself.
In despair, the young woman opened relations with La Vigoureux: she required money for her lover, and the riddance of her husband. With this intent she planned the most audacious strokes. Two or three hired bravoes would do: ‘While one held Poulaillon by the throat in his study, the other would throw bags of money out of the window, and she would open the study door herself.’ Another time she thought of getting her husband kidnapped alive. She was quite ready herself for the enterprise, but failed to find men to assist her. At last she saw Marie Bosse, who from the first appeared to her more plucky. However, Madame de Poulaillon displayed so furious a haste to get rid of her ‘old goodman,’ that Marie Bosse, hardened as she was, fairly took fright. She would not give her in one dose the powder necessary for the poisoning, for fear that the lady, by giving it all at once, would create a scandal. The sorceress was prudent enough to begin with the shirt, one of the most horrible of these hags’ inventions. The shirts of the husband were washed in arsenic. This left no trace. Whoever put them on was before long attacked by a violent inflammation in the limbs and the lower part of the body. And every one sympathised with the wife whose husband was suffering from a disgraceful malady caused by debauchery! Arsenic was put also into the injections, which in those days were in common use. The contents of a phial poured into the wine or soup hastened the operation.
The negotiations between Madame de Poulaillon and Marie Bosse were carried on in the church of the Carmelites. The young woman gave 4000 livres (£800) for the phial and the preparation for the shirts. Poulaillon was warned by an anonymous letter; moreover, his wife could not obtain the necessary assistance from her servants. Then in her rage she applied to some soldiers, and asked them to wait for her husband at the corner of a road she pointed out to them, where it would be the easiest thing in the world, she said, to do for him. The soldiers took her money and hastened to inform Poulaillon, who now lost all patience, shut his wife up in a convent, and laid an information before the Châtelet. It was at this time that the lady had a writ issued against her by the Chambre Ardente.
As soon as he saw the storm threatening, La Rivière, to whom Madame de Poulaillon had sacrificed everything, fled to Burgundy, where he hid behind the skirts of Madame de Coligny, daughter of the famous Bussy-Rabutin, and widow of the Marquis de Coligny. She fell in love with La Rivière, who, kept informed of the progress of the trial, joked pleasantly with his new flame on the misfortunes of his old mistress. She, though madly in love with the gallant, was shocked. ‘If the misfortune of the lady who has so much merit, I hear, and who loves you and has loved you so passionately, no longer touches you, what reason have I to flatter myself I shall keep you always?’ This brilliant cavalier, who insisted on being called the Marquis de la Rivière, Lord de Courcy, was really a bastard son of the Abbé de la Rivière, Bishop of Langres.
Madame de Poulaillon was finally examined on June 5, 1679. The attorney-general had demanded the penalty of torture and death on the Place de Grève; but the memory of the edifying and touching end of Madame de Brinvilliers was still strong in the minds of the judges, and had almost stricken them with remorse. Madame de Poulaillon displayed before her judges even more grace, more submission to the hand of God, more sweet and tranquil resignation. So strongly were these men of law moved, that they could not bring themselves to order the severing of that charming head. ‘This lady, who had infinite spirit,’ notes Sagot the clerk, ‘cared little about death, and though she did not expect to escape, showed during her whole examination an extraordinary presence of mind, which won the judges’ admiration and pity.’ La Reynie writes that the judges were touched ‘by her spirit, and by the grace with which at the last she explained her unhappiness and her crime.’ ‘The commissioners,’ says Sagot, ‘remained in deliberation for four whole hours, all of them, especially those who had some interest in these ladies, being prepared for anything which might serve, if not for the discharge of Madame de Poulaillon, at any rate for the mitigation of the facts they could not dispute, in so far as that could be done without a manifest miscarriage of justice. Monsieur de Fieubet was the one who dilated most on this view, employing all the power of his natural eloquence; and he it was who saved the life of Madame de Poulaillon, having brought round to his way of thinking three of the six judges who had previously decided for death. This was a precedent fortunate for Mesdames de Dreux and Leféron and other prisoners, and in fact it was through this that the court lost credit.’
‘The great difficulty,’ adds La Reynie, ‘was afterwards to console Madame de Poulaillon when she found that she was only condemned to exile instead of the death she had herself pronounced in presence of the judges, after having declared the joy she had in thus expiating her crime, and at the same time winning deliverance from all her other woes.’ On the demand of the young lady herself, her punishment was increased by royal warrant to detention with the Penitents at Angers. Meanwhile La Rivière, after making Madame de Coligny a mother, married her without a trace of compunction. True, shortly afterwards, Bussy-Rabutin and his daughter, undeceived about the man, endeavoured to dissolve the union; but the gay spark resisted, and Madame de la Rivière was forced to pension him off at a very high figure before he would agree to desert her.