others, their weakness being soon found out, and
acted upon at once when it is discovered."

The fortune-teller was, in fact, the grand
resource of all who sought to realise unlawful
wishes, and the most in vogue of these givers of
bad gifts was the jeweller's wife, La Voisin,
whose former profession had been that of a
midwife. Finding that this pursuit brought in too
little, she resolved to speculate on public credulity
by telling fortunes by cards and drawing
horoscopes, accomplishments which were the
precursors only of a more lucrative but more
dangerous profession, that of selling poisons and
philters.* The manner of La Voisin's arrest was
in this wise: Denounced by one of the first
batch of prisoners made by La Reynie, she was
taken the day before presenting a petition to
the king in favour of a lover of hers, a military
officer named Blessis, and, once in the
unrelenting gripe of the law, she herself became
a general accuser. According to her statements,
she had been consulted for several
years by the Countess du Roure and Madame
de Polignac, who were desirous of securing
the king's love and getting rid of Mademoiselle
La Valliere.  She declared that the Countess
de Soissons, desperate at seeing that Louis
the Fourteenth remained faithful to his mistress
in spite of the spells employed to detach him
from her, had said: " If he does not return to
me, and I cannot get her turned off, my
vengeance shall go the length of making away with
them both." But, however she might attempt
to screen herself by denouncing others, enough
of actual crime was proved against La Voisin to
cause her condemnation, and after the usual
amount of torture she was burnt alive on the
22nd of February, 1680. Her judges seem to
have been in a hurry to execute La Voisin, while
the greater part of her titled accomplices were
still under arrest, with nothing proved against
them. The affair was certainly complicated by
her death, as it put a stop to further revelations
on the part of the person best qualified to make
them. But whether they were equally capable
or not of throwing light on the great mystery,
other accusers soon appeared in the person of La
Voisin's daughter, of a woman named Filastre,
and of two priests—Lesage and Guibourg—who
made avowal of certain facts, which, immediately
communicated by Colbert and Louvois, made a
great impression on the king. A letter from
Louvois to La Reynie, dated the I8th of
October, 1679, informs the lieutenant-general of
police that he had been the evening before to
Vincennes, where Lesage was confined, and that
he had promised him his life if he made a full
confession. To this Lesage, who was an almoner
in the family of Montmorency, at first agreed,
but afterwards drew back. When, however, the
girl La Voisin spoke out after her mother's
execution, Lesage no longer hesitated, but said he
must see, in the first instance, what it was the
younger La Voisin had revealed. According to
her declaration, the object of her mother in seeking
to present a petition to the king was to take
the opportunity of poisoning him by gliding
certain powders into his pocket and scattering them
on his handkerchief. She declared, that for years
past, her mother had had relations with Madame
de Montespan; that one of her women, the
Demoiselle Desœillets, "who concealed her name,
but she knew her perfectly," had been many
times with her mother, to whom she gave
letters; that every time Madame de Montespan
had feared "some diminution of the king's fondness
for her," La Voisin was informed of it, and
instructed to procure masses and send love
powders for the king to take; and that, finally,
these practices having failed, Madame de
Montespan had resolved to carry matters to
extremity by employing two of her mother's
creatures, Romané and Bertrand (both of whom
were arrested), to introduce themselves into the
apartments of Mademoiselle de Fontanges to sell
her poisoned stuffs and gloves. The girl Voisin
also spoke of a mass performed by the Abbé
Guibourg in presence of an English nobleman,
who had promised a hundred thousand livres if
the king could be poisoned.

* It will scarcely be credited, but the writer of
this paper was told by a most respectable chemist in
his neighbourhood, only a few days since, that he
was in the habit of being constantly applied to for
philters—twice a week at least. He added that he
ministered to these wants by selling an entirely
harmless mixture with which the applicants went
away perfectly satisfied.

There were numerous inconsistencies and
several lies, no doubt, in the girl's declaration,
but La Reynie laid stress upon it because—
whatever they might have been worth—it was,
in many respects, in conformity with the
revelations afterwards made by more credible
witnesses. The Abbé Lesage, for instance,
declared in his interrogatory of the 16th of
November, 1680, that he had seen the Demoiselle
Desœillets with a foreigner at the house of La
Voisin. Their project was to poison the king,
that they might share a large sum of money
which the foreigner had promised them, and
then escape from France. Lesage added that,
were he at his latest torments, he was able to
say nothing else, except this: that, in the early
part of the summer of 1675, Madame de
Montespan, being desirous of maintaining her credit,
La Voisin and Desœillets worked, or made
pretence of working, for her; but that, in reality
powerless to ensure the king's love for the
marchioness, they turned her to account by
giving her powders which, taken in constant
doses, would have been a certain poison. For
this purpose mixtures, containing arsenic and
corrosive sublimate, had been given to Desœillets,
and a person named Vautier, an artist in poisons,
had manufactured similar powders combined
with snuff. The facts stated by the Abbé
Guibourg confirmed the preceding depositions,
which assumed a character of greater gravity
from the circumstance of the connexion
between Desœillets and La Voisin, the latter
having always formally denied that they knew
each other. In this respect, therefore, it was
clear that La Voisin had lied, unless, indeed, the