The courtiers were surprised at the indifference Louis displayed on learning of the death of his sometime mistress. To the Duchess of Burgundy, who remarked on it, he replied that, since he had dismissed her, he had counted on never seeing her again, and that she was from that time dead to him. He openly reproved the grief manifested by Madame de Montespan’s children; and, to the stupefaction of the Court, he forbade them to wear mourning, a circumstance the more incomprehensible because at that same date the Princess de Conti, daughter of Louis XIV and Louise de la Vallière, was wearing mourning for Madame de la Vallière her aunt.
It would be unjust to judge Madame de Montespan solely by what has been here said. We have spoken only of the crimes to which she was driven by the violence of her passions. We have not recalled the wealth she distributed with as much liberality as discretion, or the brilliance given to the Court by her grace and wit, or the enlightened protection which the greatest writers and artists found in her, the radiant kindliness with which she sweetened the declining years of the great Corneille—in a word, the innumerable deeds of kindness she performed with as much intelligence as affection, the fruits of some of which remain to this day. It would require a Racine, with his penetrating mind, his ability to reconcile opposite extremes in one and the same character, and the harmonious majesty of his language, to speak of Madame de Montespan. Bright and radiantly beautiful, of queenly elegance, charming by the distinction of her manners and the delicate wit of her conversation, light-hearted and joyous, she dominated the whole Court of France—this horrible client of the Abbé Guibourg, of La Filastre and La Voisin.
III. A MAGISTRATE
Lieutenant of police Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie was the mainspring of the proceedings against the poisoners. He alone carried through the vast operations, bristling with difficulties. And it would be impossible to find any point of his administration in which his genius and his character appear in a more striking or complete manner. It is thanks to him, and to the careful notes he took daily on the cases of the prisoners, that we have been able to discover the facts of which Louis XIV believed he had destroyed every trace when he ordered the burning of the various documents in his private room.
Saint-Simon, who has utterly shattered reputations which seemed firm as rock, pauses with respect before Nicolas de la Reynie, though the functions with which he was endowed were a subject of genuine abhorrence to him. ‘La Reynie, councillor of state,’ he writes, ‘so well known for having been the first to lift the office of lieutenant of police from its natural low estate, and for making it a sort of ministerial office; a man of great importance too, because of the king’s direct confidence in him, his constant relations with the Court, and the number of things in which he is concerned, and in which he has infinite powers of serving or harming in innumerable ways people of the greatest importance, obtained at length in 1697, at the age of eighty, permission to resign so arduous an employment, which he had for the first time ennobled by the equity, moderation, and disinterestedness with which he had fulfilled it, without swerving from the greatest scrupulousness, and doing the least possible injury as seldom as possible; he was, moreover, a man of great virtue and capacity, who in an office which he had, so to speak, created, and in which he was bound to draw upon him the hatred of the public, nevertheless won universal esteem.’
We have a portrait of La Reynie by his friend Mignard, and an admirable etching of the painting by Van Schuppen. Engraving has never reproduced human features with more clearness, colour, and lifelikeness. The face bespeaks a clear, powerful, and well-balanced intelligence; the eyes express a firm and thoughtful kindliness. Such was the La Reynie who investigated the great poison cases.
Though Bazin de Bezons of the French Academy had been associated with him in the Chambre Ardente as examining commissioner, it was the lieutenant of police who did all the work. The number of depositions, interrogatories, confrontations, pleadings, and other documents which he collected is enormous; and we see the magistrate with sure hand cutting a way through this tangled forest, guided by his experience, his knowledge of the human soul, and his clear intellect.
The memorials he has left on questions of the greatest difficulty are useful and interesting to study, because of the method of work they reveal. It is exactly the method which our old professors of rhetoric used to teach for the orderly arrangement of a French dissertation or an historical essay. The principal and fundamental fact is noted down about the middle of the left-hand page, with a large bracket embracing sub-divisions; each of these sub-divisions is in turn accompanied by a bracket embracing sub-divisions of these sub-divisions; and so on to the end of the right-hand page, which is filled from top to bottom with minute and close writing: there you have a multitude of slight facts following one another in methodical order, all focussing on the principal fact, found, as we have said, in the middle of the left-hand page. There is no college student but has built up his schemes for French essays on this model. But there is no question, in La Reynie’s portfolios, of rhetorical dissertations or Latin compositions; he deals there with irrevocable sentences about to be pronounced ‘on the flesh and blood of men,’ to use his own phrase. And if we go from these bracketed plans to the memoirs and reports to which they guided the magistrate’s thought, we find ourselves in possession of marvels of clear thinking and judging.
During the long poison case, La Reynie showed himself indefatigable in work. He had no other concern than right and the triumph of justice. And in proportion as the number of criminals increased, and the greatest names in the French nobility and Parlement were found to be compromised by his inquiries—in proportion as relatives, friends, all who feared for themselves, and nobility and Parlement fearing for their honour and their privileges, were up in arms against him, his courage grew, his activity redoubled; he pushed on his inquiries, urging the king, urging the ministers, demanding new warrants, fresh arrests, seeking permission to extend his formidable investigations over an ever-widening circle.
Sorceresses and magicians thronged about the royal Court like swarms of wasps about a hive of honey. In this monstrous hive were concentrated the wealth and honours which awoke and stimulated the ambitions and passions in which the sorceresses found their booty.