In the summer of 1668, in a parish church deep in Gascony, the Marquis de Montespan stood dressed head to foot in black, presiding over a funeral he had arranged for his own wife. The priest sang a requiem. The children were made to attend. Neighbors came to the door to offer condolences, and the Marquis accepted them gravely, a widower in full mourning.

The wife being mourned was alive. She was in excellent health, several hundred miles to the north, and she was sharing the bed of the King of France. The Marquis knew this. That was the entire point.

His name was Louis Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de Montespan, and he kept the performance going for years. He traveled to Paris almost annually and ordered requiem masses sung for a living woman. He drove around in a carriage draped in black mourning cloth, with an enormous pair of stag’s horns bolted to the roof, so that everyone who watched him pass would understand exactly what had been done to him. When the king himself asked about the black carriage, the Marquis answered that he was in mourning for his wife, who had disappeared.

His wife was Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Marquise de Montespan. For roughly a decade she would be the most powerful woman in France, more powerful than the queen by a very wide margin, and people at court sometimes called her the true queen of France without much exaggeration. Then, in the summer of 1680, prisoners in the dungeons of Vincennes began saying her name in connection with love powders ground from dead men’s bones, plots to poison the king’s food, and masses sung over the naked bodies of women while infants had their throats opened above a chalice. What the king of France did with those statements, and what he did to the people who made them, is one of the darkest stories to come out of the age of Versailles.

Some of those people were burned alive in a public square. Others were chained to the walls of remote fortresses for the rest of their natural lives, under written orders that they were to be flogged if they ever tried to repeat what they knew. She was baptized Françoise de Rochechouart on the 5th of October 1640, at the château of Lussac-les-Châteaux in Poitou, in western France. Her father was Gabriel de Rochechouart, Duke of Mortemart, and her mother was Diane de Grandseigne, a pious, serious woman who served as lady-in-waiting to the queen mother, Anne of Austria.

The Rochechouart family was ancient even by French standards; they liked to say their line ran back further than the ruling house itself, and nobody at court had the energy to argue with them. Land and titles came with the name, but the inheritance the family was actually famous for was something stranger. Contemporaries called it the esprit Mortemart, the Mortemart wit, and they talked about it the way people talk about a hereditary trait like eye color, except this one came out of the mouth. All four of the Mortemart siblings had it: a particular way of turning a phrase, a slow, drawling delivery that made ordinary sentences sound funnier than they had any right to be, an instinct for the exact remark that would make a room laugh and make one person in that room want to die.

Madame de Sévigné, the great letter writer of the age, admired it enormously. Voltaire, writing later, remembered that the Mortemart children pleased everyone with a singular turn of conversation. It was charm as a weapon, and Françoise would grow up to be the finest shot in the family. Her older brother, Louis Victor, the future Duke de Vivonne, was once asked by the king what use reading actually served, since Vivonne was famously bookish and famously fat.

Vivonne answered that reading did for the mind what his partridges did for his cheeks. That is the family sense of humor in one line: quick self-mocking on the surface, and still somehow a boast. Her sister Gabrielle became abbess of Fontevraud, one of the great abbeys of France, and was considered one of the most learned women in the country. She translated Plato.

At twelve, Françoise was sent to the convent of St. Mary at Saintes for her education. And here is a detail that sits oddly against everything that comes later: she was devout, genuinely devout by every account, not going through the motions. She took communion weekly, well beyond what was expected of a schoolgirl.

Piety ran in her from her mother’s side, and it never fully left her, even in the years when her confessors were refusing to absolve her and half of Paris believed she had knelt in front of a defrocked priest while a baby died over her stomach. Somewhere along the way, she stopped answering to Françoise and started calling herself Athénaïs, after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war. She picked it herself. At twenty, she came to court, first as a maid of honor to Henrietta of England, the king’s sister-in-law, and later in the household of the queen herself, Maria Theresa of Spain.

Court was where a girl of her rank was supposed to convert beauty and birth into a marriage, and Athénaïs had plenty of both. She went by Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente in those first seasons, and she made noise fast. She danced in the great court ballets of the early 1660s, productions in which the young king himself performed, so the two of them shared a stage years before they shared anything else. And she built a reputation as one of the most amusing unmarried women in France while keeping her conduct spotless.

Louis noticed the wit, and at that stage nothing else. A story went around that when his brother praised her, the king allowed that she tried hard to be noticed and that he was not tempted. Few men in history have ever been more wrong about their own future at less cost. Tall, blue-eyed, with thick golden hair that fell in heavy curls, she fell in love first with a young marquis named Louis Alexandre de Moirans, the Marquis de Moirans.

It looked for a while like an engagement. Then Moirans got tangled in one of the dueling scandals that regularly chewed up young noblemen in that era, a fight that left a man dead on the ground, and since dueling was a capital offense, he fled the country rather than face the king’s justice. Athénaïs stayed behind, twenty-two years old, suddenly without a match. The replacement arrived quickly.

On the 28th of January 1663, she married Louis Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de Montespan, at the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris. He was a year younger than she was, a Gascon nobleman from a proud southern family, hot-blooded even by Gascon standards. The wedding itself had a comic wrinkle she liked to tell about later: somebody forgot to bring the proper kneeling cushions to the church, so the bride and groom knelt through their marriage vows on cushions borrowed from the dogs. She found that funny for the rest of her life.

For a while the marriage genuinely worked. It seems to have been a love match, or close to one, and it produced two children fairly quickly: a daughter named Marie Christine, and a son, Louis Antoine, who as the Marquis d’Antin would wander back into this story near the very end, sniffing around his mother’s deathbed. The problem was money. The Marquis had it in the way many old families had it: on paper, and in debts.

He borrowed heavily to equip himself for a military expedition against Algiers in 1664 that went badly and paid nothing back, and he kept borrowing after that. Athénaïs’s own attempt to fix things through an investment scheme collapsed into lawsuits. By the middle of the 1660s, you have a young couple of the highest possible birth, glittering at court by day, dodging creditors by night. She had wit, beauty, ancient blood, a war goddess’s name, and no money.

Court life put an obvious solution in front of her every single day. She just had to look at where the money in France actually lived: in a twenty-something king who was busy building the most expensive stage set in human history, and who had a habit of falling in love with his wife’s ladies. Louis XIV had taken personal control of the government in 1661 at twenty-two, and he was in the process of turning the French monarchy into a kind of permanent theatrical production with himself at the center of every scene. His queen, Maria Theresa, was a small, sweet, deeply religious Spanish princess whom he treated with public courtesy and private indifference.

She spoke French badly, played cards badly, and loved him completely, and the whole court knew all three of those facts. The position that actually mattered, the position with real gravity, belonged to the official mistress in the mid-1660s: Louise de La Vallière. Louise was a minor noblewoman from the provinces, shy to the point of pain, sincerely pious, and she walked with a slight limp from a childhood injury. She had fallen in love with Louis the man rather than Louis the king, and everyone who knew her agreed the love was real.

She asked for almost nothing for herself or for her family. She bore the king children and blushed her way through court ceremonies she plainly hated, and she spent a good part of her time as royal mistress quietly consumed by guilt about being a royal mistress. In a court full of sharks, she was something soft, and the sharks noticed. Athénaïs noticed, too.

Around 1666, she began a campaign that viewed from a distance has the clean lines of a military operation. She made herself the close friend of the queen, attending mass with her and being visibly virtuous in her company. She made herself the close friend of Louise de La Vallière at the same time. She became the amusing one, the safe one.

Both the wife and the mistress trusted her. And when both the queen and Louise happened to be pregnant in the same season, and the king needed entertaining company at private suppers, the woman both of them recommended was their dear, witty, trustworthy friend. Athénaïs carried the fox into the henhouse herself, and shut the door behind her. She had also apparently been thinking out loud about the position before she got it.

In the presence of the queen, sometime before anything happened, she said that God preserve her from ever being the king’s mistress, but that if she were, she would be thoroughly ashamed to face the queen. People remembered that remark for decades. It works as piety right up until the moment it starts working as a job application. By the spring of 1667, during the court’s grand traveling circus toward the war in Flanders, the thing was done.

On the 4th of May, the king was seen riding alone in a carriage with her, which at that court amounted to a public announcement. And on the 13th of May, he suddenly made Louise de La Vallière a duchess and legitimized their daughter—a shower of honors that fooled absolutely no one, because at Versailles, a big public gift to a mistress was the standard way of announcing that her services were concluded. Severance pay with a coronet on it. What Louis did next to Louise, with Athénaïs’s full participation, was slower and worse than a clean dismissal.

Both of these people were married. Athénaïs had a living husband, the king a living wife, and adultery between two married people—double adultery—was a far graver scandal in the eyes of the church than a king amusing himself with an unmarried girl. The church could make real trouble over it, and so could the Marquis de Montespan, who under French law had rights over his wife’s body and, more dangerously, a legal claim to any child she bore, no matter who the father was. The affair needed cover.

The cover they chose was Louise. She was kept on at court as the official mistress, the public decoy, while the real affair went on behind her. For a period, the two women were made to share a suite of connecting apartments, so that the king could be seen entering Louise’s rooms and then simply keep walking through her chamber and into Athénaïs’s. Louise had to sit there in her own rooms, listening to the man she loved pass through on his way to someone else.

Courtiers, who had a phrase for everything, said the king was going to Louise’s apartments the way one passes through an antechamber. She endured that arrangement in one form or another for roughly seven years. She was made to ride in the same carriage as the queen and Athénaïs, the three of them jammed together behind the same horses—wife, discarded mistress, reigning mistress—while crowds along the road gawked at what they called the three queens of France. Athénaïs by multiple accounts treated her like staff, sending her to fetch things, using her as a dressing-room attendant, trying rouge on her own face while Louise held the pot.

In 1671, Louise broke and fled to a convent at Chaillot without permission. The king sent Colbert, his chief minister, the man who ran the finances of France, to physically bring her back, and she came back, and the arrangement resumed. It took until 1674 for Louis to finally let her go. And when he did, she went about it in a way that tells you everything about who she was.

She asked to join the Carmelites of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris, just about the most brutal religious order open to women: barefoot nuns, coarse wool against the skin, perpetual fasting, cells without fires in a Paris winter. Before she left court, she knelt down in front of the whole assembly, in front of Maria Theresa, and publicly begged the queen’s forgiveness. “My crimes were public,” she said, “so my repentance must be public, too. ” Then she walked out of Versailles, let them cut off her famous hair, and took the veil as Sister Louise of Mercy.

She spent the next thirty-six years in that convent doing penance on a stone floor, and she died there in 1710. Meanwhile, back in 1668, the husband had found out. The Marquis de Montespan’s reaction to being cuckolded by the King of France is genuinely one of a kind in the seventeenth century. The normal reaction among husbands so favored was gratitude.

A complacent husband whose wife caught the king’s eye could expect governorships, commands, pensions, a dukedom if the affair ran long enough. Whole families angled for years to place a daughter or a wife in the royal bed. The Marquis de Montespan looked at that arrangement, looked at the most powerful man in Europe, and decided instead to go completely, magnificently berserk. He stormed up from the south and made scenes.

He forced his way into houses where his wife was staying and screamed at her in front of witnesses. He harangued anyone who would listen about the king’s adultery, quoting scripture at courtiers, comparing Louis to King David stealing the wife of Uriah, and he made the comparison loudly in places where it would be repeated. Louis, who could not exactly execute a man for objecting to his own wife being taken, had him arrested and locked in the prison of Fort-l’Évêque for about two weeks in the autumn of 1668, roughly the 20th of September to the 7th of October, and then exiled him to his estates in Gascony, hoping distance would quiet him down. Distance did the opposite.

Down in Gascony, the Marquis staged the full theatrical production: he announced that his wife had died, put his household into mourning, hung the black cloth, and held a formal funeral complete with the requiem mass. And he made his two small children stand there and mourn a mother who was alive and dressing for supper at Saint-Germain. Then came the carriage with the horns mounted on the roof, driven through towns at walking pace so nobody would miss it. And then the habit hardened into ritual.

Year after year, nearly every year between 1670 and 1686, he had a requiem sung for his living wife, and the children attended their mother’s funeral on repeat through their entire childhood. He also at one point simply took the children away with him, out of her reach, since the law was entirely on his side there. The daughter, Marie Christine, would die young. The son, d’Antin, grew up between a father performing grief and a mother who was not allowed to be his mother, and he turned out about as warm as you would expect.

The Marquis was also legally a live grenade rolling around under the throne. Any child Athénaïs bore, the law presumed to be his, and he was exactly the man to march into a courtroom and claim the King of France’s children as his own property just to watch the ceiling come down. That threat shaped everything about how the royal children were handled. And it is the door through which the most consequential woman in this story after Athénaïs herself now enters.

Because the children were coming. The first child of Athénaïs and Louis arrived in the spring of 1669, a daughter, and the birth had to be a covert operation. Athénaïs had spent the pregnancy hiding her shape under a new fashion she more or less invented for the purpose: a loose, flowing gown called the robe battante that hung straight from the shoulders and concealed everything. The court caught on fast; within a season, whenever she appeared in the robe battante, courtiers would murmur to each other that Madame de Montespan had put on her innocent dress and start counting months.

One version of the delivery has the accoucheur, the male midwife, brought to the house blindfolded and ushered into a darkened room where a masked man, unmistakably the king, hovered behind the bed curtains. The secrecy itself was very real, and it had teeth: if the Marquis de Montespan could prove a birth, he could claim the child. So the babies were handed off within days of delivery to a hired household in a discreet house on the Rue des Tournelles in Paris, windows shuttered, servants sworn. And the woman running that household is the hinge on which the last third of this story turns.

Her name was Françoise d’Aubigné, the widow of the comic poet Paul Scarron. She was poor, respectable, clever, thirty-something, and known in the Paris salons, where Athénaïs had met her and liked her. The widow Scarron took on the secret royal nursery as a job, and then, in a development nobody planned, fell completely in love with the children. She nursed them through fevers herself rather than risk a talkative doctor.

She was by every account a better and more constant presence in those children’s daily lives than their actual mother, who had a court to run, and the children knew it—and one of them in particular never forgot it. In twenty years, the widow Scarron will effectively be queen of France, and Athénaïs will have handed her the ladder rung by rung. Children kept arriving through the 1670s, seven in all by the king. The first, a little girl born in 1669, died at three.

Louis-Auguste came in 1670, the future Duke du Maine, the eldest surviving son and his mother’s favorite until he became her betrayer. An illness in early childhood left du Maine with a damaged leg and a lifelong limp, and the widow Scarron dragged him across France to spa towns and specialists, carrying him and worrying over him while Athénaïs sent instructions from Versailles. Louis-César, the Count de Vexin, followed in 1672, a frail boy who lived to eleven. Louise-Françoise, called Mademoiselle de Nantes, arrived the year after that, and another daughter, Mademoiselle de Tours, the year after her.

Françoise-Marie, Mademoiselle de Blois, came in 1677, and finally Louis-Alexandre, the Count de Toulouse, in 1678. Of the seven, four reached adulthood. Athénaïs buried three of her king’s children on top of watching her two legitimate children raised at a hostile distance by a man who held funerals for her. December of 1673 brought something French kings had done before, but rarely this brazenly: he legitimized the children by royal letters, gave them the surname de Bourbon, and had the letters registered by the Parliament of Paris.

Du Maine became a duke at three years old, and the letters contain one glaring deliberate hole: the mother is never named. Legitimizing a child normally required naming both parents, but naming Athénaïs meant handing the Marquis de Montespan a legal opening. So the lawyers simply omitted her, and France was treated to the spectacle of royal children who had legally sprung from the king alone, like Athena from the head of Zeus—an irony her chosen name makes almost too neat. The following year, 1674, the crown finished the job of neutralizing the husband.

The procureur général Achille de Harlay and six judges of the Châtelet granted Athénaïs a formal separation of person and property from the Marquis. He kept the horns on his carriage anyway. With Louise gone to the Carmelites and the husband legally caged, the years from the mid-1670s were the summit, and the summit was something to see. Primi Visconti, an Italian at court who wrote down everything with the cheerful shamelessness of a man planning to publish, described her face as perfect: blue eyes people kept comparing to precious stones, that heavy golden hair, and a figure the fashion of the day was built to flatter.

She was also, and this mattered just as much, the most entertaining person in the palace. The king was not a witty man himself; he was a stately man, and she made him laugh daily for over a decade. Her conversation became a court attraction in its own right. Foreign ambassadors were steered toward her apartments the way visitors today get steered toward the Hall of Mirrors.

The Mortemart family meanwhile collected on her position like shareholders at a dividend. Her father picked up the governorship of Paris. Her brother Vivonne got a marshal’s baton and command of the galleys of France, honors his talents alone would have taken decades longer to earn, if they earned them at all. Her sister Gabrielle received the great abbey of Fontevraud, one of the richest religious houses in the kingdom, where she ruled over monks as well as nuns and hosted philosophy evenings between offices.

Saint-Simon, who was a child during her reign and grew up on the stories, wrote that her circle’s way of talking, that esprit Mortemart, infected the whole court. At Versailles, she eventually held a suite of some twenty rooms on the first floor, close to the king. The Queen of France made do with about half that, one floor up. Nobody missed the message.

Her rooms filled up with the spoils of the position: pet animals wandering loose, thousands of cut flowers replaced constantly, a private gallery, jewels arriving in such volume that she developed a habit of sending pieces back when they failed to impress her. Madame de Sévigné, tracking her career in letters with the code name Quanto (from an Italian card game where the word itself means “how much,” which everyone understood as the real joke), recorded the sums with a mix of horror and delight. The king built her a château of her own at Clagny, just beside Versailles, when she sniffed at the first, cheaper version he offered. The rebuilt Clagny consumed something like two million livres, with 1,200 workmen at a time and gardens by Le Nôtre, the same man designing the king’s own.

Sévigné called the result “a palace of Armida,” the enchantress from the crusader romances who traps a hero in a garden of pleasures. Orange trees stood in silver tubs. A specially built aviary was stocked with rare doves, and Sévigné inventoried with a straight face the most pampered farmyard in Europe attached to the place: turtle doves and prize goats and the fattest pigs and cows in France, a barnyard assembled the way other people assembled jewel collections, so that even the livestock at Clagny outranked most of the nobility’s horses. Down the road, the king put up the Trianon de Porcelaine, a little pleasure pavilion sheathed in blue-and-white tiles, built essentially as a stage for the two of them.

Her losses at the gaming table ran to figures that look like printing errors. She played basset, a card game with approximate house dynamics, for stakes that occasionally approached the budgets of small wars. One Christmas she was said to have lost 700,000 écus in a single sitting, and then staked 150,000 pistoles on three cards and won it back. The king covered the damage, publicly annoyed and privately compliant, and France paid.

Living at that altitude did not soften her. The temper was as famous as the face. Courtiers joked carefully out of her hearing that walking beneath her windows while the king was with her was “passing Paris by,” facing the firing squad; anyone visible below became raw material for her mockery. And she performed the mockery for the king, and the king laughed, and careers ended in that laughter.

She ridiculed ministers, generals, duchesses, whoever wandered into range, purely to keep her audience of one amused. This made her feared in a way no previous mistress had been, and hated in a way that matters enormously for what comes later. Spare a thought in the middle of all this glitter for Maria Theresa, who had to live inside it. The queen dined across from her husband’s mistress for years, stood godmother adjacent to arrangements she could not name, and watched the woman who had once knelt piously beside her at mass occupy twenty rooms below her own eleven.

She wept about it to her ladies in Spanish, and a report circulated that she had been pushed far enough at least once to call the marquise by a word queens are not supposed to know. Athénaïs, for her part, was scrupulously, elaborately polite to the queen at all times. And somehow that courtesy, performed from a position of total victory, may have been the hardest part to bear. When her name eventually surfaced in a poison investigation, there was no shortage of people at court who found the accusation easy to believe and easier to enjoy.

One institution refused to play along with any of it, and that collision came to a head at Easter of 1675. Double adultery was the sticking point. The church had swallowed royal mistresses for centuries, but two married people, publicly and continuously, with legitimized children as evidence, was more than the clergy of that generation would bless. When Athénaïs presented herself for confession at Versailles that Lent, expecting the routine absolution that would clear her for Easter communion, the parish priest on duty, a man named Lécuyer, looked at the most powerful woman in France across the grill and said no.

“Is this the madame who scandalizes all France? ” he demanded, and told her to go abandon her shocking life before throwing herself at the feet of the ministers of Jesus Christ. She went over his head naturally. The king went over his head.

The priest’s superior backed the priest. Bossuet, the most formidable preacher in the kingdom and the man who had veiled Louise de La Vallière, threw his whole weight behind them and lectured the king directly about his soul. And for once the machine jammed. The lovers separated.

She withdrew to Clagny. Sermons were preached. The court held its breath through the summer. The reunion, when it finally came the following year, was conducted with full seventeenth-century stage management.

To keep everything respectable, the first meeting between the king and Athénaïs was held in her apartment in front of a chaperoning committee of elderly and respectable court ladies. The two of them exchanged formalities, then drifted together to a window alcove, out of earshot but in full view. The respectable ladies watched them whisper, and watched them both begin to cry, and then watched the King of France make a deep bow to the assembled company and disappear with Athénaïs into the bedchamber. Mademoiselle de Blois arrived nine months later.

The court told that story for years, and the priests understood exactly what their victory had been worth. So that is the surface as the 1670s run on: a palace, a fortune, a king, seven children, an empire of taste and mockery. Underneath it, though, two clocks were ticking. The first was ordinary and biological: she was closing on forty in an era that considered a woman of thirty-five past her season.

The pregnancies had thickened her, and the king’s eye had begun, unmistakably, to travel. The second clock was ticking in Paris, in rented rooms behind the Rue Saint-Denis, where a network of women were selling other women the means to hold a man—or, failing that, to bury him. Athénaïs, according to a mountain of later testimony, had been one of their customers since before she ever reached the king’s bed. To make sense of those claims, we need to leave Versailles for a while and go down into the city.

And the way down runs through the most notorious murderess in France. Her name was Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers. She was tiny, delicate, pretty, with wide blue eyes that everyone who described her mentioned. Born in Paris on the 2nd of July 1630 into serious money and serious respectability—her father, Antoine Dreux d’Aubray, held the office of civil lieutenant of Paris, one of the most powerful judicial posts in the city—she married a marquis, ran through his money and hers, and took a lover, a cavalry officer named Godin de Sainte-Croix, a charming, broke adventurer with a sideline interest in chemistry.

Her father disapproved of the affair strongly enough to use his official muscle, and in 1663 he had Sainte-Croix arrested by lettre de cachet and thrown into the Bastille. That was the elder d’Aubray’s fatal mistake. Inside the Bastille, Sainte-Croix reportedly shared quarters with an Italian poisoner known as Exili, a man with a professional’s knowledge of arsenic, and he came out of prison a few weeks later with a new trade and a grudge. And the marquise had a grudge of her own, plus an inheritance she could see from her window.

What she did next is the part that stops people. Before she used poison on her family, she tested it. Her method was charity. The Hôtel-Dieu, the vast public hospital beside Notre-Dame, encouraged pious ladies to visit the sick poor, and the Marquise de Brinvilliers became a devoted visitor.

She brought the patients little gifts: biscuits, jams, wine. Some of those gifts were dosed. Then she came back on later visits to sit at the bedsides of the people she had poisoned, holding their hands, listening to their symptoms, noting how long each preparation took, what it did to the stomach, what the physicians made of it, whether anything showed. The patients were sick already, so nobody questioned another decline in the ward.

She ran her clinical trials on dying strangers under the cover of Christian mercy, and estimates of how many people she and Sainte-Croix ultimately poisoned, tests and murders together, run to fifty or more across the years 1664 to 1672. Exact counting is impossible: the whole point of the product was that it left so little trace. Her father took eight months to die. She nursed him through it herself, devotedly, at his country estate and in Paris, administering what a later reckoning put at somewhere around thirty separate doses while doctors puzzled over a stubborn wasting illness.

He died in 1666 believing his loving daughter had been the one comfort of his final year. Her two brothers took longer to arrange, since she needed their shares of the estate too, and for them the couple placed a valet named La Chaussée inside the household. Both brothers died in 1670, months apart, of the same slow corrosion. Autopsies found the organs blackened and eaten, and the physicians muttered about poison, and nothing happened because nothing could be pinned to anyone, and the pretty marquise inherited.

The unraveling came by accident. In 1672, Sainte-Croix died, apparently of natural causes, quite possibly wrecked by years of working over poison fumes. He died in debt, so officials inventoried his effects, and among them they found a small red leather casket with a note attached asking that it be delivered unopened to the Marquise de Brinvilliers, or burned if she was dead. The officials opened it.

Inside were packets and vials of prepared poisons, enough to kill a parish, and a stack of her letters tying her to all of it. An apothecary who examined the vials reported that several of the preparations were sophisticated enough to defeat any test then known. The marquise heard the news, tried to buy the box back, failed, and ran that same night. La Chaussée the valet stayed too long and was taken, tortured, and broken alive on the wheel in 1673, his limbs shattered one by one with an iron bar while he confessed the whole mechanism to the crowd.

She stayed ahead of them for more than three years: England, the Low Countries, finally a convent near Liège, gambling that convents were untouchable ground. A Parisian police officer named Desgrez ended the chase with a piece of theater she might have appreciated in other circumstances. He arrived at the convent dressed as an abbé, courtly and charming, paid her respectful visits over several days, and gradually talked the bored, half-safe fugitive into a romantic stroll beyond the convent walls. His men were waiting at the gate.

In her rooms they found a rambling written confession she had composed in some earlier spiral, a document cataloging her sins in her own hand: arson, poisonings, and worse. A paper her lawyers spent the trial trying to bury, and the judges examined anyway. Paris in the summer of 1676 treated her trial as the event of the decade. Convicted on the 16th of July, she was sentenced to make public penance at Notre-Dame, then to be beheaded at the Place de Grève, her body burned, her ashes scattered.

Before the execution came the other sentence, the one pronounced in a basement. French law allowed a condemned prisoner to be put to the question, tortured to extract the names of accomplices, and for her they ordered the water. The question by water worked like this: the prisoner was bound to a bench or stretched between iron rings, the body arched backward over a trestle, the nose pinched shut, and water poured through a funnel or a hollow horn down the throat, jug after jug, the stomach and lungs flooding, the body convulsing between doses while the questions were repeated. The ordinary question was eight pints.

The extraordinary was sixteen. They gave the Marquise de Brinvilliers the extraordinary. She was a very small woman. Walking into the chamber and seeing the three buckets standing ready, she looked at them and remarked that they must surely mean to drown her, since a person of her size could never drink so much.

That line went around Paris within the day. Then they strapped her down and put sixteen pints of water into her anyway. She named no accomplices. That evening, swollen and half destroyed, she was carted through enormous crowds in a tumbril, wearing only a penitent’s shift, a rope around her neck, a lit candle in her hands, and made to kneel on the parvis of Notre-Dame and beg pardon of God and King.

Madame de Sévigné was in the crowd along the route and admitted in a letter that she saw nothing of the famous marquise but a bonnet; the crush was that thick. At the Grève they took her head off with one clean stroke, a mercy people commented on approvingly. And then the body and the head went onto a bonfire, and the ashes were shoveled into the wind. Sévigné wrote her daughter a line about it that has outlived almost everything else from that summer: “Well, it is done; Brinvilliers is in the air,” and went on to muse that all of Paris would now be breathing her in, and that little poisoning spirits might settle in the lot of them, and put strange urges in the general population.

She meant it as a joke. Give it three years, and it stops sounding like one. One more detail from that evening: sections of the crowd had decided, watching her final hours of composure and piety, that the marquise died a saint. After the fire cooled, people picked through the ashes of a woman who had poisoned her father and both brothers, hunting for fragments of bone to keep as holy relics.

The Brinvilliers case frightened the government in a specific way. She was an insider: well-born, wealthy, orbiting the same drawing rooms as the ministers who condemned her, and she had operated undetected for the better part of a decade. If her, who else? Dinner parties across Paris developed a nervous new etiquette around dishes and decanters.

The king himself, according to people around him, took the lesson personally, and he already had the right man in position to act on it. Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie held the newly created office of Lieutenant General of Police of Paris, the first true police chief in the city’s history: a wealthy, tireless, meticulous administrator in his fifties who had spent the previous decade dragging Paris toward order, stringing thousands of lanterns across streets that had never been lit after dark. Now the king pointed him at the darkness the lanterns could not reach. The thread that started everything was a fortune teller.

In 1677 the police arrested a woman named Magdeleine de La Grange on ordinary fraud and poisoning charges. And from her cell she reached out to the war minister Louvois, claiming she knew of matters touching the highest people in the kingdom. Matters of poison. Louvois listened.

La Reynie began pulling. Then at the end of 1678 came the stroke of luck this whole affair pivots on. At a dinner party, a fortune teller and poisoner named Marie Bosse, several bottles deep, stood up and boasted to the table about her marvelous clientèle of duchesses and countesses, and declared that three more poisonings and she could retire rich. The table laughed, taking it for macabre dinner wit.

One guest, a lawyer, went home with the sentence lodged in his ear, turned it over for a day or two, and quietly repeated it to the police. La Reynie sent in the wife of one of his officers posing as a desperate woman with a brutal husband, and Marie Bosse, sober now but greedy always, sold her a preparation for the man’s soup. Early in January 1679, the police kicked in her door before dawn and found Bosse asleep in one large bed with her grown daughter and two grown sons, a domestic detail the investigators wrote down with visible distaste, and arrested the lot. A colleague of hers, Marie Vigoreaux, went into a cell beside her.

And then the two women began to talk, and to accuse each other, and to name names. And the names had names attached. And within weeks, La Reynie understood the true scale of what he had opened. An industry, with its own suppliers and its own clientele.

Paris in the 1670s supported a whole underground economy of fortune tellers, sorceresses, alchemists, and “angel makers,” the era’s word for abortionists, concentrated in neighborhoods like Villeneuve-sur-Gravoirs near the ramparts. Their storefront trade was palmistry and horoscopes. The backroom trade ran deeper: love powders for wives losing their husbands, charms for gamblers and courtiers, abortions for women whose pregnancies could destroy them. And for the customer whose problem could only be solved by a funeral, the flagship product: a fine white preparation of arsenic, tasteless in wine or soup, that Parisians had nicknamed poudre de succession, inheritance powder.

The name is the whole business plan. An inconvenient husband, a long-lived father, a rich aunt with a slow heart—all of them curable. And the cure looked exactly like a gastric fever. And gastric fevers killed people constantly.

And no chemistry then in existence could reliably prove otherwise in a corpse. La Reynie, reviewing what the arrests were dredging up, wrote in genuine horror that human life was practically up for public sale, and that the trade was, in his phrase, almost the only remedy applied in family difficulties. The king’s response in April 1679 was to create a special royal tribunal to try it all outside the normal courts, in secret, with no appeal. Officially it was a royal chamber sitting at the Arsenal.

Paris immediately revived an older, better name for that sort of court: the Chambre Ardente, the burning chamber, a title inherited from heresy tribunals that had once sat in rooms hung entirely with black cloth and lit only by torches. The judges answered to the king alone. La Reynie ran the investigations, and he ran them with a bookkeeper’s thoroughness that ended up preserving, in tens of thousands of pages, one of the most detailed records of a criminal underworld anywhere in early modern Europe. Over its lifetime, the chamber would hold 210 sessions and issue 319 arrest warrants.

It also had at its disposal the standard tools for encouraging candor, and those tools shaped nearly every piece of testimony still to come. The water question you have already seen. The other standard instrument was the brodequins, the boots. The prisoner sat bound while boards were fitted along the calves of both legs and lashed tight.

Then the executioner drove wooden wedges with a mallet into the gap between the boards, one wedge at a time, each one tightening the vice. Four wedges for the ordinary question, eight for the extraordinary. The later wedges burst the legs outright, splitting muscle and cracking the shin bones, sometimes forcing marrow out through the skin. Prisoners routinely fainted and were revived with water and vinegar so the count could continue.

A surgeon stood by whose job was to advise how much more the subject could survive. A prisoner who died under question was a lost witness. Some never walked afterward. Marie Vigoreaux, Bosse’s colleague, died in the spring of 1679 during interrogation.

Every confession, every accusation, every lurid detail sworn in that building was produced by people who had either just been through those procedures or were sitting in a room with the instruments, knowing they were next. The first wave of sentences came down fast, and the Place de Grève, the open square before the city hall where Paris staged its executions, settled into a grim rhythm that spring: scaffold timber going up and coming down, crowds learning the schedule, vendors working the edges of every burning. In May 1679, Marie Bosse, the woman whose drunken toast had started the avalanche, was burned alive at the Grève, and her son was hanged. La Grange, the fortune teller whose jailhouse letters had first pricked Louvois’s attention, went to the gallows.

A hunchbacked abortionist named Catherine Lepère, who claimed a professional career of terrifying length, followed. And every interrogation transcript kept circling one address, one business, one name that every fortune teller in Paris seemed to owe money, favors, or fear: Catherine Monvoisin, La Voisin, the woman at the center of the web. Catherine Deshayes had been born around 1640, the same year as Athénaïs, into a Paris a universe below hers. She claimed she had been telling fortunes since the age of nine, taught to study faces and palms as a child.

She married a jeweler and silk merchant named Antoine Monvoisin, whose business collapsed and left her supporting a household of six. She supported it with her childhood trade, and she turned out to be a prodigy at it: palmistry and horoscopes, futures sold at a fee. She had a genuine gift for sizing people up on sight, for telling a client the thing the client had walked in desperate to hear. Her practice grew until the church took notice and hauled her in for questioning.

Somewhere around 1665 or 1666, she defended herself in front of learned doctors of the Sorbonne, arguing the legitimacy of astrology with enough confidence and enough borrowed learning that they let her go. And she dined out on that story forever afterward: the sorceress certified by the theologians. She came out of that hearing effectively licensed, and she scaled up. By the 1670s, La Voisin was rich.

She operated from a house with a large walled garden at Villeneuve-sur-Gravoirs near Saint-Denis, with a pavilion in the garden for private consultations. She had commissioned a professional robe for her ceremonial work: crimson velvet embroidered with golden two-headed eagles, cut like vestments, at a cost of 1,500 livres—roughly what a Parisian laborer might see in a decade. She threw garden parties for her upscale clientèle with hired violinists playing into the night, and she drank heavily at them, wine and spirits—a detail that will decide how her interrogation gets handled. Her love life was crowded and instrumental: a string of lovers who doubled as business associates, among them the magician Adam Lesage, a convicted felon who had already been sent to the galleys once for sacrilege and impiety and had somehow gotten out, and for a period a man named André Guillaume, whose day job was public executioner of Paris.

She spent her days absorbing the secrets of desperate women and her nights, some of them, in the arms of the man who burned women like her for a living. Her husband Antoine was still around, a ruined man drinking in the corners of his wife’s empire, and more than one associate later testified that Catherine had priced out having him killed and been talked into patience by a colleague. The services scaled with the client’s purse and the client’s nerve. At the entry level, fortunes and horoscopes.

One rung up, love powders, and the recipes that survive in the interrogation records are worth hearing in full, since these are the preparations that will shortly be alleged to have gone into the King of France: dried and powdered moles’ teeth, the bones of toads, cantharides (the blistering beetle sold as Spanish fly), iron filings, human blood, powdered human remains sold under the trade name of “mummy,” and the dust of dead men’s bones, sourced from wherever such things get sourced when there is money waiting. All of it ground fine, folded into food or wine, and fed by wives to husbands and mistresses to lovers all over Paris. One rung above that, the “angel making,” the abortion trade, with the hunchbacked Lepère handling operations and La Voisin taking her cut. And beyond that, for the right client, the powders that solved a problem permanently.

And beyond even that, for clients whose ambitions required the supernatural, ceremonies conducted by ordained priests she kept on call. Renegade clergy turn up all through this network, and one of them, an old sacristan named Étienne Guibourg, we are going to have to look at very closely and very unpleasantly in a few minutes. Her client list ran the entire vertical of French society, from servant girls saving for a love charm up into the peerage. Olympe Mancini, Countess de Soissons, niece of the great Cardinal Mazarin and the king’s own passionate teenage flame from before his marriage.

Her sister Marie-Anne, Duchess de Bouillon. The Countess de Gramont. Marshal Luxembourg, one of the great soldiers of France, who wound up entangled with the network through a shady secretary and a paper the prosecutors chose to interpret as a pact with the devil. And per a stack of testimony we will weigh shortly, the reigning favorite herself, Madame de Montespan, with her purchases handled through intermediaries and her visits made under precautions.

About that walled garden, then, and the mythology it has grown: Marie Bosse, once she was arrested and talking, told the interrogators that late-term pregnancies handled by the network ended in a furnace at La Voisin’s property, and that what the furnace left went into the ground of that walled garden. La Voisin’s own daughter would later speak of infant remains about the property as an ordinary feature of the household she grew up in. Here is the part that tends to shock people who go into the archives expecting a full forensic accounting: the garden was never dug up. No excavation was ever ordered.

No inventory of remains taken. And the record is plain about why: the abortion side of the business reached so deep into respectable and noble families, implicated so many well-born women whose secrets the crown had no appetite to publish, that the word simply came down to leave that entire line of inquiry alone. So the claims stand in the transcripts, specific and repeated, above a plot of ground nobody was permitted to open. Later popular books put a number on what the garden supposedly held—2,500 infants—and that figure has been copied from book to book for a century.

Trace it back, and you arrive at testimony about a furnace, a daughter’s stray remarks, and an order not to look. The police took La Voisin on the 12th of March 1679, and the arrest has a texture novelists would reject as too on the nose: they took her on a Sunday morning outside her parish church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle, immediately after she had attended mass. The great sorceress of Paris, the black-mass broker, was a regular massgoer, kneeling among her neighbors with the trade of the week on her hands. Officers were waiting at the door.

Her maid, watching it happen, reportedly wailed that this arrest would be the destruction of people at every level of society—a servant girl’s assessment that turned out to be more accurate than most ministries. La Voisin went into the fortress of Vincennes, and her house, her papers, and her associates began feeding the machine. Her interrogation was handled with a delicacy that had nothing to do with mercy. A formal permit to put her to the question was drawn up and never used.

La Reynie’s team never showed her the water or the boots. A woman with her clientèle, under the wedges, might scream out names the crown could not afford to have screamed in front of witnesses. And she drank. Her jailers knew it, and so the interrogations were conducted with wine on the table, session after session, the prisoner kept comfortably supplied and talking, the questions circling in as the bottles emptied.

Drunk, she admitted plenty: the powders, the trade in poisons, clients across society, the whole shape of the industry. She fenced, though, with a professional’s discipline around the highest names, and she confided to the people guarding her that the questions she truly feared were any that touched on her visits to the royal court. That fear is one of the few things in this file she voiced sober and unprompted. They tried her on the 17th of February 1680, convicted her of witchcraft and poisoning, and sentenced her to the fire.

On the 22nd of February, she was carted to the Grève. The standard ritual called for the condemned to make the amende honorable first, kneeling in penance with the torch and the rope, and La Voisin refused to play. In the cart, she shoved the attending priest away when he pressed a crucifix at her. At the stake, bound with iron, straw and kindling heaped to her knees, she used what movement she had to kick and shove the burning straw away from herself five or six times by the count of people watching, cursing through it, fighting the fire itself in front of thousands of spectators until the pile caught fully and the smoke took the fight out of her.

Madame de Sévigné, who tracked the execution through eyewitnesses and wrote it up for her daughter in a letter that mixes horror with the guilty relish of very good gossip, noted the shoving away of the straw, the swearing, the refusal of the confessor, and passed along the crowd’s summary of the whole career. The ashes went into the wind, same as Brinvilliers. Her death solved nothing for the crown, because by then the investigation had already burst its banks and was flooding upward into the nobility, and the great names began reacting the way great names do. In January of 1680, weeks before La Voisin burned, warrants were being prepared against a clutch of aristocrats.

And the king did something revealing for Olympe Mancini, Countess de Soissons, the woman he had loved at nineteen: he sent a private warning ahead of the warrant. She could stay and face the judges at the Bastille, or she could be gone by morning. She chose gone. She left a ballroom at midnight, climbed into a coach with the horses already waiting, and drove hard for the border into the Spanish Netherlands, out of France forever, leaving behind her fortune and her children.

The charge waiting for her had been that she poisoned her late husband, and the mob believed it wherever she went for the rest of her life. Years later in Spain, crowds would hoot “poisoner” at her coach, and when the young queen of Spain died suddenly, fingers pointed at her within the week. She also left behind a teenage son the French war office had recently rejected for a commission, a small, unimpressive-looking boy named Eugène. He walked away from France, offered his sword to the Austrian Habsburgs, and became Prince Eugene of Savoy, one of the two or three greatest generals of the age, who then spent the following forty years methodically beating French armies across Europe.

Her sister, the Duchess de Bouillon, did stand before the judges and turned the appearance into theater. She arrived at the Arsenal with a train of relatives and admirers as if attending a premiere, answered the charge that she had sought poison for her husband with her husband standing supportively beside her, and when one of the judges asked whether she had seen the devil during her dealings with the network, she looked the man over and replied that she was looking at him right now: he was ugly, and he was dressed as a judge. Paris adored it. The king did not, and she was banished from court to the provinces.

Marshal Luxembourg, too grand to burn and too compromised to ignore, sat fourteen months in the Bastille before walking free into a full rehabilitation, and went on to win so many battles and capture so many enemy flags that Paris nicknamed him “the upholsterer of Notre-Dame” for keeping its walls decorated. Even Racine, the greatest tragic playwright in France, spent a bad season under suspicion after La Voisin from her cell accused him of having poisoned his mistress, the actress Du Parc. A warrant was actually discussed at ministerial level. It quietly evaporated, and Racine kept his head down and eventually took a nice safe job writing the king’s history.

You can feel in that scatter of outcomes the tribunal starting to bend under the social weight of its own catch. Fortune tellers burned. Countesses fled or sassed the bench. And the investigation had not even reached its worst floor yet.

That floor came into view in the summer of 1680, when the interrogators went back to the prisoners of Vincennes after La Voisin’s execution, and her daughter began to talk. Marguerite Monvoisin was about twenty-one or twenty-two, and she had spent her entire life inside her mother’s business: running errands, mixing powders, opening the door to weeping duchesses, growing up in a house where the garden was off limits and the furnace ran at odd hours. She had been arrested along with the rest of the network and held at Vincennes while her mother was interrogated, tried, and burned. Nobody had leaned on her especially hard while Catherine lived.

Then Catherine died at the Grève in February, and some months later, in the summer of 1680, Marguerite began giving the interrogators a version of the business her mother had taken considerable trouble to keep out of her own file. Why she talked is a fair question with several available answers: fear of the fire, obviously; rage, possibly, at the fine clients who had made her mother rich and then let her burn alone. Some historians have wondered whether she shaped her story toward what the questioners plainly wanted. Prisoners at Vincennes could hear things through walls, and a smart young woman could work out which names made the gentlemen from Paris sit up.

Here is what she said. She said Madame de Montespan had been her mother’s client since 1667, since the beginning—in other words, since before the affair with the king, or right at its birth. Meaning, if you take the testimony straight, the entire romance of the Sun King and his dazzling favorite had been assembled with product. The contact ran through intermediaries, principally a woman named Claude de Vin des Œillets, Athénaïs’s chambermaid and confidante, a figure the investigators found threaded through the whole file.

Des Œillets is a story by herself. She served Athénaïs for years at the closest possible range, and she had also, by the accounting of the court’s better-informed gossips, spent some of that service in the king’s bed herself, in the casual way Louis used the women within reach, and borne a daughter he never acknowledged. A woman with access to everything, standing in the shadow of a mistress she had every human reason to resent. Now named by multiple prisoners as the courier who came to Villeneuve to fetch the powders.

When she was eventually brought discreetly in front of some of the accusers, several identified her on sight. She denied everything flatly and kept denying it. And the crown, for reasons you can guess by now, had no appetite for arresting the personal maid of the mother of the king’s children and hearing what she might say under the question. She had already left Athénaïs’s service around 1677 with savings far beyond a chambermaid’s wages, and she died in her own bed in 1687, uncharged, unquestioned in any court, taking whatever she carried out of those years with her.

The powders themselves, per Marguerite and per Lesage the magician, who was talking too, flowed toward the palace for years. Love powders of the house recipe—the moles’ teeth and toad bone and Spanish fly and dried blood and mummy dust, ground fine and handed off to des Œillets. And from there, the testimony says, into the food and drink of the King of France, continuously by that account across a decade, refreshed whenever the favorite felt her hold slipping. If that is true, the most carefully guarded man in Europe, the man whose meals were prepared under ceremony and tasted and served with cathedral solemnity, was eating ground beetle and human residue at the pleasure of his mistress for years, and nobody caught it.

Courtiers of the period did note the king’s recurring headaches and his stretches of vapors and low spirits, and later writers have enjoyed connecting those complaints to the alleged seasoning. Beyond the powders lay the ceremonies, and this is where the file drops into its cellar. Lesage had already told interrogators about early rituals from the 1667 period: a first ceremony arranged for Athénaïs at a house in the Rue de la Tannerie, with a priest named Mariotte assisting, conjurations over her head while she knelt, and a written petition recited on her behalf. A version of that petition survives in the record, and its asks are specific: the king’s love for her, the queen to be barren, the king to abandon the bed and board of La Vallière for hers, court positions for her relatives.

It ends, as such documents tend to, with a general clause requesting everything she could desire. Set that beside the actual chronology—the affair beginning that very season, La Vallière shoved into the antechamber of her own life, the honors rolling toward the Mortemart family—and you can see exactly why La Reynie kept these papers under lock. The petition tracks the reality. Either the ceremonies described were performed and their author got everything on the list, or someone constructed testimony with a very good grasp of recent court history.

Both readings have had serious defenders for three hundred years. One document complicated the slander theory, though, and La Reynie is the one who dug it up. Lesage and the priest Mariotte had been arrested once before, back in 1668, a full decade before any of this, tried before the ordinary courts on charges of impiety and sacrilege. And in the dusty record of that old proceeding, testimony already spoke of ceremonies performed for Madame de Montespan by name at the very season her affair with the king was beginning.

Lesage had gone to the galleys for it. Mariotte, who had relatives on the bench, had been let off with a scratch. Nobody in 1668 had any motive to invent her involvement: she was barely famous yet, and no tribunal was fishing for her. So the 1680 prisoners were either confirming something with a ten-year paper trail, or building their stories on top of an old rumor that had been sitting in the archive all along, waiting to be useful.

La Reynie set the two files side by side and, on his own account, lost sleep. Then came Guibourg. Étienne Guibourg was around seventy when the police took him: a squat old priest with a bloodshot wandering eye that every description dwells on, holder of a string of minor chaplaincies and sacristan posts around Paris, and he liked to claim a bastard son of the great house of Montmorency. He had a longtime housekeeper-mistress and children by her, a working knowledge of chemistry, and a side career running back decades in exactly the ceremonies La Voisin’s clients paid premium rates for.

Under interrogation across multiple sessions, with his formal statements coming in the autumn of 1680, Guibourg described the amatory mass, the black mass, as he himself had performed it. The woman for whom the mass was said served as the altar. She stripped naked and lay on her back on a mattress or a draped table in a private room or a chapel fitted for the purpose, a long velvet pall beneath her. A napkin was spread across her lower belly, and on the napkin, over her navel, stood the chalice.

She held a lit taper in each outstretched hand and lay still in the posture of church furniture for the duration of a full mass, which Guibourg, an ordained priest, celebrated over her body: investiture, kissing her body where the rite prescribed kissing the altar, consecrating the host upon her. The mass was addressed past God to other parties. Guibourg named the demons invoked as Asmodée and Astaroth, “princes” in the framing of the rite of love and friendship. And he recited for the interrogators the conjuration spoken on behalf of the client.

And the words as they sit in the record are these: “Astaroth, Asmodée, princes of friendship, I conjure you to accept the sacrifice I present to you of this child for the things I ask of you. ” The sacrifice of this child. At the consecration, an infant was brought to the altar, held over the chalice on the woman’s body, and its throat was opened with a knife. The blood ran down into the cup.

Guibourg described drawing the blood into the chalice, mingling it with the host, with flour, consecrating the mixture, and reserving portions of it—some for the client to take away for use in her powders and philters. Blood consecrated on such an altar was premium raw material. What remained of the child was rendered useful, too: entrails carried off for distillation, the heart and blood dried into powders, the small body burned in the furnace or otherwise disposed of. Where the infants came from, Guibourg answered without much apparent difficulty.

Some were bought, he specified in one deposition, purchasing a child from a beggar for an écu—one silver coin, the price of a decent dinner. Some came from the other side of the house’s business, from the “angel making,” from pregnancies. The mass took about an hour. The client dressed, paid, and went home.

And the client on the occasions that concern us was, per this testimony, Madame de Montespan. Guibourg described masses said over a woman he was told was the marquise, including one at a château called Villebousin, south of Paris, around 1673—a cold ceremony in a moldy old house—and others in Paris rooms. He was careful under repeated questioning in a way the interrogators noted: he did not claim long acquaintance with her face. Women at these ceremonies sometimes came veiled or masked until the disrobing.

The introductions were handled by La Voisin, and he knew what he had been told and what he had been paid. Marguerite Monvoisin, for her part, testified that she personally attended at least two masses at which the woman on the altar was Montespan. No ambiguity offered, and she supplied the domestic details around the ceremonies: her mother’s preparations, the wax figures baptized for the marquise, the pigeon hearts, the fees. 1673, if you are keeping the calendar in view, was the year of the legitimizations: the year everything Athénaïs had gambled for was being written into law, a season in which she had more to secure and more to lose than at any point in her life.

La Reynie noticed that alignment. His notes keep returning to the dates, the way the alleged ceremonies cluster exactly at the crisis points of her career: 1667 as she climbed, 1673 as the children’s status hung in the balance, and then 1679, when a nineteen-year-old girl from Auvergne walked into the king’s field of vision, and per the prisoners of Vincennes, the requests coming out of the marquise’s circle changed from love to death. First, though, the plot that La Reynie considered the gravest thing in his whole mountain of paper. The point where this investigation stopped being about dead husbands in the Marais and became a matter of the survival of the king.

Because according to the testimony of 1680, the powders had failed, the masses had failed, the girl from Auvergne was in the royal bed, and Madame de Montespan’s orders to the network had escalated to the removal of Louis XIV himself. The plan, as Marguerite Monvoisin laid it out, was built around one of the small rituals of French kingship: subjects had the ancient right to hand petitions directly to the king. On designated occasions at Saint-Germain, ordinary people lined up, papers in hand, and the king took the documents personally from their hands into his. La Voisin, so her daughter testified, prepared a petition whose paper had been treated, soaked in a poison meant to work through touch, through the skin of the hands that would receive it.

And on the 5th of March 1679, Catherine Monvoisin traveled to Saint-Germain, stood in the crowd of petitioners, and waited to place a poisoned paper into the hands of Louis XIV. The crowd saved him, if saving was needed: petitioners that day were too many, the session was cut short, the king took no papers, and La Voisin went home with the petition still in her bag. Per Marguerite, a second attempt was in the works. Seven days after that trip to Saint-Germain, the police took La Voisin outside her church on the fraud and poison investigation, with no idea at that point what they had walked past.

The petition itself, Marguerite said, she burned in the garden on her mother’s instructions after the arrest. So the physical paper is smoke, and the plot exists purely in her account of it, given the following year, by a young woman whose mother the crown had just executed. Chemists then and since have shrugged hard at whether any preparation available in 1679 could reliably kill a healthy man through brief contact with his fingers. La Reynie did not shrug.

His notes treat the petition as the black center of the whole affair, the point where every thread of powders and masses knots into an attempt on the king’s life. And whatever we make of the chemistry, the men running France in 1680 took it with total seriousness. You will see how seriously by what they did to everyone who knew about it. Now the girl.

Marie-Angélique de Scorailles, Duchesse de Fontanges, arrived at court in 1679 as a maid of honor, seventeen years old, sent up from Auvergne by a family that, in the frank accounting of the day, hoped for exactly what happened. She was by consensus one of the most beautiful women anyone at that court had ever seen: ash blonde, grey-eyed. And the Abbé de Choisy fixed her in history with a single cruel sentence: “Beautiful as an angel, and silly as a basket. ” The king, forty going on twenty, fell hard and fast.

During a hunt, the story goes, a branch tore her hairstyle apart, and she gathered her hair up and tied it with a ribbon and a garter, curls tumbling at the front. Louis liked the look so much she wore it that way in the evening, and by the next week every woman at court wore it, and the coiffure à la Fontanges dominated European fashion for a generation—a hairstyle with a longer reign than the girl. One report adds a strange wrinkle to the girl’s arrival: if it is right, Athénaïs helped engineer it herself. By the late 1670s, her real rival for the king’s attention was Madame de Maintenon, the governess, whose weapon was conversation.

And Athénaïs is said to have calculated that a beautiful idiot in the king’s bed was a manageable problem, while a brilliant woman in his confidence was a fatal one, and to have smiled on the Auvergne girl’s introduction accordingly. If so, she scored one of the great self-inflicted defeats in the history of mistresses. The beautiful idiot took the bed. The brilliant woman kept the confidence.

And Athénaïs was left holding neither. Athénaïs, watching a teenager occupy the position she had held for twelve years, did not manage her feelings quietly. She was nearing forty, thickened by seven royal pregnancies, and she now had assigned to her by the king a role she recognized instantly, since she had written it: the established woman kept on for appearances and conversation, while the king’s evenings went elsewhere. She raged, mocked the girl’s brains to anyone who would listen, and the court settled in to enjoy the spectacle.

In April 1680, the king made the girl Duchesse de Fontanges with a pension of 80,000 livres a year, and everyone at Versailles could translate that instantly: the same golden handshake La Vallière had gotten in 1667. An enormous public honor, meaning the affair was ending. It was ending for the saddest of reasons. Around the turn of that year, Fontanges had given birth to the king’s child.

The child was lost, born dead or dying, and the birth injured her internally in a way the medicine of the age had no ability to repair. She began bleeding, and the bleeding did not stop. Weeks, then months. Court ladies whispered about it in terms of laundry and linen.

The physicians responded with the finest treatment of the seventeenth century: bleeding her further, opening veins in her arm and her foot to drain a woman already draining, dosing and purging her while she whitened and shrank. Sévigné passed along the phrase making the rounds, that the young duchess was “wounded in the king’s service. ” The king’s ardor, meanwhile, cooled at the pace of her decline, since a dying nineteen-year-old is a mirror no aging man wants at his bedside, and his visits thinned, and the girl understood everything. She withdrew to the Abbey of Port-Royal in Paris in the spring of 1681 to die, and she took a long time about it, wasting through the spring into summer.

Louis came once near the end. He stood at her bedside and wept. And she produced from somewhere inside that ruined body the most graceful sentence of her short life: “I die content,” she said, “since my last looks have seen my king weep. ” She died on the 28th of June 1681, at nineteen or twenty years old, two years after arriving at court.

And she died convinced she had been murdered. Through her decline, she said it plainly and repeatedly: poison. And she named the poisoner: Madame de Montespan, and claimed the marquise had bought one of her servants. Her family believed it too, and demanded an autopsy.

The king tried to head the autopsy off, an intervention people have chewed on ever since—protective delicacy, or something else. The examination went ahead regardless. The surgeons opened her and found the chest a disaster: the right lung essentially destroyed, rotten with purulent matter, the organs around it diseased. Their conclusion pointed toward the long internal aftermath of that childbirth: infection and decay dragged out across eighteen months, a natural death by the standards then available.

No sign the doctors could recognize as poison. Set against that finding stands the file at Vincennes, where the prisoners questioned before and after her death had quite a lot to say about the Duchesse de Fontanges. Marguerite Monvoisin testified that her mother’s circle had taken a commission on the duchess. A man called Romani, a professional of the network who worked dressed as a silk merchant, was to gain access to her with luxury goods: gloves and bolts of fine cloth prepared with poison.

Scented and treated gloves were a standard lady’s purchase and a standard assassin’s vector. Whether any treated glove ever actually touched her hands, no document establishes. Her own conviction, her family’s conviction, the autopsy’s findings, and the prisoners’ testimony all sit in the record together, disagreeing with each other over the body of a teenager whose two years at Versailles bought her a hairstyle, a dukedom, a dead child, and eighteen months of bleeding to death in front of an audience. One more figure belongs to the Fontanges file, and her end tells you what the tribunal was capable of when it wanted a statement.

Françoise Filastre was a poisoner, an abortionist, and an operator in the network style, and she had tried in 1680 to get herself hired into the Duchesse de Fontanges’s household—an application that looks innocent. In no version of this story is it innocent. Arrested and put to the question, the full procedure, the wedges, Filastre confessed in her agony that she had been working for Madame de Montespan, hired to remove Fontanges so her patroness could reclaim the king. That confession, extracted at the boots, went into the record naming the mother of the king’s legitimized children as the buyer of a murder.

On the 1st of October 1680, they burned Filastre at the Grève. And at the stake, with nothing left to gain or protect, she recanted. “All that I said is false,” she declared to the confessor attending her. “I said it only to free myself from the pain and the torment.

” Then the fire was lit. Both sentences, the accusation and the retraction, sit side by side in the file, and they are the whole problem of this affair in miniature: the tribunal’s instruments could make anyone say anything, and the tribunal knew it and used them anyway, and then had to decide which screams to believe. That, more or less, is the case as it stood on La Reynie’s desk in the autumn of 1680: testimony from the daughter, from Lesage, from Guibourg, from Filastre, and from others in the cells, overlapping, cross-confirming in parts, contradicting in parts, describing a favorite who had drugged the king for a decade, knelt naked under murdered infants, and finally shopped for the deaths of the king and his new mistress. Nearly every syllable of it produced inside a torture apparatus by people bargaining for their lives, some of whom had provably coordinated stories before.

And all of it aimed at a woman who had a palace full of enemies and no way on earth to prove a negative. La Reynie, to his credit, agonized in writing. His notes worry at the problem from both sides: the enormity of believing it, the enormity of ignoring it, the strange precision of the dates. Modern historians have kept the argument running along exactly his lines.

Some find the love powder trade entirely plausible—a mistress topping up her advantage with the standard products of her era while gagging at the black masses. Some accept the early ceremonies and reject the murder plots. Some see a coordinated jailhouse slander built by prisoners who knew which name would make them too valuable to burn. The one person who never got to address any of it in any forum was Athénaïs.

The king made sure no forum ever existed in which she could be charged or questioned, and no denial from her survives anywhere in the record. What he built instead of a trial is its own kind of horror story. When Athénaïs’s name first surfaced in the depositions in the summer of 1680, Louis XIV faced a problem with no clean exit. He had personally created the Chambre Ardente and ordered it in writing to pursue the guilty regardless of rank, sex, or age.

His own tribunal was now generating sworn testimony that the mother of his legitimized children, the woman installed twenty rooms from his own, had trafficked with child killers and priced his own murder. Airing that in any court, even a secret one, meant announcing to Europe that the Sun King had spent thirteen years being dosed and conjured by his official mistress. Burying it meant strangling his own justice. He chose burying, and he did it with a thoroughness that ended up preserving the evidence he meant to destroy.

The public machinery stopped first. The chamber’s sessions were suspended while the ministers fought over the file, and they genuinely fought along the fault lines of the court. Louvois, the war minister, whose networks had fed the investigation from the start, pressed the accusations forward. Colbert, whose fortunes were tied to the Montespan connection, went the other way, commissioning a lawyer named Duplessis to write a formal demolition of the testimony, a document arguing point by point that the prisoners were coached, contradictory, and lying for their lives.

That defense brief is the closest thing to a day in court Athénaïs ever received: written by a man she never engaged, for a proceeding that never happened. The king ordered La Reynie to carry on the sensitive interrogations in secret before a handpicked commission, and to record the material touching Montespan separately from the official registers, on loose leaves rather than in the bound minutes, so that the dangerous pages could one day be pulled and destroyed without leaving a visible wound in the archive. Remember the loose leaves. They are the reason you are hearing any of this.

The chamber reopened in May 1681 to process the small fry, and was dissolved for good on the 21st of July 1682. The final ledger of the affair across its whole run reads like this: 442 people accused. 367 arrest orders. 28 of them carried out.

36 executions—men and women hanged, beheaded, or burned in the public squares of Paris, with others dead in the cells under questioning or by their own hands. Five sent to the galleys. 23 banished. Bold numbers, and behind every one a scene like the ones you have already watched: the tumbril and the straw.

Then a separate category, and this is the piece of the affair hardest to put down. Dozens of prisoners could never be tried at all, in any venue, ever. They had heard the testimony about Madame de Montespan, or given it. A trial meant a courtroom.

A courtroom meant speech. And speech meant the marquise’s name in the air. So they were removed from the justice system entirely, by lettre de cachet—the king’s sealed order requiring no charge and permitting no appeal—and distributed for life among remote fortresses chosen for distance and deafness. Twelve women to Belle-Île off the Brittany coast.

Six to Villefranche in the Pyrenees. Fourteen to Sainte-André-de-Salins in the mountains of the east. Five more to Fort-L’Évêque. Eighteen men to the fortress of Salces in the far south.

Ten to the citadel of Besançon. The crown paid for their bread and their chains out of the royal purse for decades, and the invoices survive: tidy annual sums for the warehousing of human beings whose only function left on earth was to not say a name. Louvois sent the commanders written instructions that survive, and their tone is the tone of a man ordering the storage of hazardous material. The prisoners were to be held in isolation, chained where necessary, and the orders specify: flogged if they attempted to speak of the matters they knew.

Beaten. Not for escape attempts or violence, but for talking. Reports drifted back over the years of prisoners in those holds screaming what sounded like nonsense at their walls, ravings about the marquise and dead children. And the garrisons had their instructions, and the instructions were applied, and the years went by, and the 1680s became the 1690s, became a new century.

And some of those people were still alive in their chains past 1720, outliving the king, the marquise, and nearly everyone else in this story, imprisoned for the crime of having ears. Marguerite Monvoisin vanished into that system and never came out of the records again. Guibourg, the old priest of the chalice, was chained to a wall in one of those fortresses and died there in 1686. Lesage the magician disappeared the same way.

La Reynie, closing his review of why the worst offenders in his files would never face a court, wrote the sentence that stands as the epitaph of the entire affair: “The enormity of their crimes proved their safeguard. ” They had said things too monstrous to be tried, and so they could never be tried. And so they were simply erased alive. And at Versailles, nothing happened.

That was the performance, and it may be the most remarkable single fact in this story. Through the entire crisis, while a secret commission weighed testimony about her chalices and her powders, Madame de Montespan remained at court, in her apartments, at the king’s table, visited by the king daily. No scene took place, and no exile followed. The two of them were never once recorded discussing any of it, then or ever, in public or in private.

Louis gave her in 1679 the superintendency of the queen’s household—the most dignified post available to a lady at court, purchased precisely so that her continued presence would look like honor rather than containment. He said nothing on the subject ever, to anyone whose account survives. But watch what he did: he never dined alone with her afterward. The daily visits continued for years, and witnesses were always present, and the visits grew shorter, and the intimacy was over permanently from the season her name entered the file.

Whether that adds up to a king protecting a woman he believed innocent, or quarantining a woman he believed guilty, and whether he himself ever settled the question in his own mind, is a door you get to walk through in whichever direction persuades you. The one thing the record makes plain is that he protected the mother of his children with the full machinery of the state. And while doing it, he backed quietly and permanently out of her reach, as a man might back away from a dish he has been told about. The space he backed into was already occupied.

Françoise d’Aubigné, the widow Scarron, governess of the secret nursery, had been rising for a decade on exactly the qualities Athénaïs lacked: calm, discretion, patience, and a total absence of scandal. Athénaïs had gotten her the money to buy the estate of Maintenon, and the king, who had initially found the governess stiff and dull, had begun visiting the children and staying to talk to the woman raising them. By the late 1670s, the talks were long. By the early eighties, the court had a new center of gravity, and everyone could feel it.

The two women had been sniping for years by then, the mistress and the governess, with the children as the battlefield, and Athénaïs lost that war in the worst possible currency: her favorite son, du Maine, the boy with the damaged leg, loved the governess who had carried him to the spas, and grew into a young man openly devoted to Maintenon and openly cold to his mother. Then in July 1683, Queen Maria Theresa died suddenly. And the king, standing over the deathbed of the wife he had humiliated for twenty-three years, produced one of the most quietly brutal epitaphs any husband has ever spoken, remarking that this was the first trouble she had ever given him. Within months, in secret, at night, in the chapel at Versailles, Louis XIV married the widow Scarron.

The governess hired off the Paris salons to hide her babies was now, unofficially but absolutely, the queen of France, and would hold that position for the remaining thirty-two years of the reign. Athénaïs stayed on at court for eight more years after that marriage, and the eight years were a long public diminishment. Her rooms filled with the wrong kind of quiet. The court, with its flawless instinct for the standings, routed itself around her, toward Maintenon’s door.

She filled some of the vacuum with good works—quietly at first, dowries for poor girls and money into hospitals, an early rehearsal of the penitent she was about to become—and the court squinted at even that, since charity coming from a woman rumored to have knelt beneath a chalice invited a certain sort of commentary. Her surviving children were raised, married, and managed by other hands. And when the young Count de Vexin, her frail second son, died at eleven in 1683, and little Mademoiselle de Tours had died two years before that, she mourned them from the strange sidelined position of a mother with no official motherhood. The final push came in 1691, and her own son delivered it.

The king wanted her gone and wanted not to say so, and du Maine handled it, arranging matters so that his mother’s grand apartment was reassigned to himself. By one famous account, her furniture was simply put out. Athénaïs asked the king directly whether he wished her to retire, received the answer in the form of a pension of half a million francs and no request to stay, and left Versailles in tears and fury. Saint-Simon’s phrase: she never forgave du Maine.

And on that point, whatever else you conclude about her, it is hard to argue she was wrong. She was fifty years old, and she had sixteen years left, and she spent them trying to buy back her soul at a rate of exchange she seemed to consider steep but fair. Her first address was a convent she had herself founded years earlier: the Filles de Saint-Joseph on the Rue Saint-Dominique in Paris, a community devoted to housing and training poor orphaned girls. The picture of her early residence there has its comedy: the fallen sultana of Versailles sweeping through a charity house with her retinue, chafing at plain food, still every inch a Mortemart.

The transformation that followed was gradual, and then it was total. She placed herself under a spiritual director of the severe school, Père de La Tour of the Oratory, and asked him in effect for the full program. And he gave it to her. His conditions were designed to hurt: a complete break with the court and its vanities; restitution and charity on a crushing scale; and one condition that must have taken her breath: formal submission to her husband.

She was to write to the Marquis de Montespan, the man of the horned carriage and the funerals, acknowledge her fault, and offer to return to him and live under his authority if he would have her. She wrote the letter. The Marquis’s answer, as reported, was that he wanted neither to see her nor to hear of her ever, in any form. He had spent twenty years mourning a living wife, and when the living wife finally knocked, he declined delivery.

He died in 1701, still unreconciled, and she put on formal widow’s mourning for him anyway: black veils worn in earnest for the man of the horned carriage, and nobody around her dared smile about it. The regime she built for herself after that would have impressed the Carmelites who took in her old rival. Under the gowns she still wore in public, she wore a shirt of rough cloth against her skin. Around her wrists, above her knees, and at her waist, she wore bracelets, garters, and a belt fitted with iron points turned inward.

And Saint-Simon records that the points regularly opened wounds in her flesh: the most celebrated body of the age went about its last decades secretly bleeding under silk. Her sheets were coarse linen of the harshest weave, hidden under fine coverlets so visitors would not see the austerity—advertised penance is spoiled penance. She fasted constantly, cut her famous table down to plainness, and sat for several hours every day with needle and thread, sewing coarse shirts and clothing for the poor with her own hands. The hands that had dealt basset for stakes above the budgets of provinces.

Her money poured out into hospitals and charities in amounts that alarmed her family. And in 1693, she founded the institution she plainly meant as her account settled in full: a hospice endowed to feed, house, and nurse one hundred poor people in perpetuity, established first near her sister Gabrielle’s abbey of Fontevraud and later moved to Oiron, a château she bought in 1700 and moved into herself in 1704. An old marquise living above her own poorhouse, taking her turn at the linen. A portrait of her from these years hangs at Oiron still, painted as Mary Magdalene: the beautiful sinner weeping in the desert.

And whatever committee of self-knowledge and self-presentation chose that subject, they chose it with open eyes. And through all of it, one throne survived. Saint-Simon records that in her chamber, wherever she lived in those years, she kept exactly one armchair: hers, its back set to the foot of the bed, and offered a seat to no one. Duchesses stood.

Bishops stood. Her own children, princes and princesses of the blood by legitimization, remained on their feet while their penitent mother, in her secret hair shirt, received them from the one chair like an audience, and spoke, in his phrase, “like a queen” to all. The iron points she wore where nobody could see them. The armchair everybody saw.

None of it bought her a single quiet night. The fear of death ruled her last years with a completeness that everyone around her observed, and Saint-Simon sat down in detail. She could not bear darkness. She slept, when she slept, with the curtains of her bed tied open and her chamber blazing with candles, dozens of them, burning until morning.

She employed women whose entire job was to sit up around her bed through the night, awake, paid handsomely for their insomnia, and she required them to talk, play cards, eat, make noise, so that whenever she surfaced from sleep, she would find the room lit and living, proof against whatever stood behind the dark. If she woke and found them drowsing, the distress was immediate. A storm could reduce her to open terror. This is the same woman who allegedly lay as a naked altar while an infant bled out over her navel, and also the same woman who at twelve took weekly communion at Saintes.

In these candle-lit rooms, at the end, the two of them finally lived together. Whichever of them was real. During these penitential years, she paid one visit that closes an old account. She went to the Carmelite convent on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques and sat in the parlor grill with Sister Louise of Mercy, formerly Louise de La Vallière, the woman whose life she had walked over on her way up.

The two aging rivals talked. At some point, Athénaïs, in a gesture of humility, offered to prepare a dish for her with her own hands. Louise accepted the kindness with one adjustment: she asked to be given the raw ingredients, and cooked the dish herself. A nun in her sixties, three decades removed from the world, quietly declining to eat anything the Marquise de Montespan had touched.

No account records that either woman remarked on the reason. Asked on some visit in those years whether she was happy in that stone house, Louise gave the answer that deserves to be carved somewhere: “No,” she said. “But I am content. ”

The end came at the spa town of Bourbon-l’Archambault, where Athénaïs had gone most years since the 1670s to take the waters.

In May of 1707, sixty-six years old and in apparently decent health, she prepared for the trip in a way her household noticed and remembered: she paid her charitable pensions two full years in advance, and doubled her alms, and spoke as if squaring accounts before a departure longer than a spa season. At Bourbon, she fell suddenly and violently ill in the night. One account from the period lays the collapse at the door of her attendant, a young woman supposedly administering an emetic in a massive overdose that wrecked her—a detail from the later biographies rather than any official record, so hold it loosely. What the eyewitnesses do agree on is what she did with the hours she had left, and it is the scene her whole last act had been rehearsing.

She summoned her entire household into the sick room, all of them, down to the servants, and made a public confession of her public sins, asking pardon aloud of everyone present for the scandal of her life. Saint-Simon, no flatterer of hers, wrote that the humility of it was so profound and so penitent that nothing could have been more edifying. And then, by every account, the terror that had kept her rooms burning bright for sixteen years simply left. She took the last sacraments with what witnesses called ardent piety, faced the actual arrival of the thing she had dreaded above everything, and met it calm.

She died toward three in the morning on the 27th of May, 1707. Her last word, the tradition says, was “pardon. ”

What happened to her body afterward reads like a final invoice from a century that had given her everything. Following custom for the great, the body was opened and divided for burial: the heart destined for the church at La Flèche, the entrails for the priory of Sache near Cubord, the body itself for the family vault at Poitiers.

The entrails traveled in a sealed urn entrusted to a local porter. And somewhere on the road to Sache, the seal failed against the summer decomposition, and the smell coming through it overwhelmed the man. He stopped, opened the urn to find the source, understood approximately what he was carrying, and in his horror tipped the contents into the roadside ditch, and went on with the empty vessel. The viscera of the true queen of France—the woman for whom Clagny rose and twelve hundred workmen sweated and a king emptied treasuries—went into a ditch in the Bourbonnais and stayed there.

Word of it traveled back as word of everything traveled back, and even a court fluent in cruelty found that detail difficult to top. The rest of her reached the vault of the Cordeliers at Poitiers, where her ancestors lay, and rested until the Revolution, whose crowds broke open the tombs of the mighty on principle—and hers among them. The news reached Versailles, and Versailles performed itself one last time over her. The king received the report of her death with what Saint-Simon called “perfect insensibility,” a composure so total that his granddaughter-in-law, the young Duchesse de Bourgogne, could not hide her astonishment.

And Louis, catching the look, explained himself with the coldest sentence in this entire story: since he had dismissed her, he said, he had reckoned on never seeing her again, and so from that day she had been dead to him already. He then forbade their children to wear mourning. She had never legally been their mother. The letters of legitimization had seen to that four decades earlier, and the paperwork of 1673 now reached forward to strip her children of the right to grieve her in public.

They grieved anyway, some of them, and Saint-Simon marveled at how hard: the Duchesse d’Orléans wept, the Count de Toulouse wept—children she had barely been allowed to raise, mourning without mourning clothes. Du Maine received the news of his mother’s death, and in Saint-Simon’s report could scarcely conceal his joy. Her legitimate son d’Antin raced to Bourbon at speed, arrived after she was gone, went through her papers, and was back at court within days; courtiers noted the errand looked more testamentary than filial. And in her apartments at Versailles, Madame de Maintenon, the widow Scarron, the governess, the wife who had spent forty years first serving this woman and then replacing her, heard that Athénaïs was dead, and to the bafflement of everyone who knew their history, wept, and withdrew to hide the weeping, and stayed hidden a long while.

Of everyone at that court, she may have been the only one still able to see all the way back to the beginning: two clever young women in a Paris salon, neither of them yet anything, one of them offering the other a strange, discreet job minding some babies. Two years later, in 1709, an old king closed the file. La Reynie died that June, the policeman who had carried the affair in his head for thirty years. And with him gone, Louis sent for the records.

The bound dossier of the interrogations touching Madame de Montespan was brought from the archive to Versailles. And there, by the fireplace, the king went through them and fed them to the flames with his own hands: sheet after sheet, an afternoon’s methodical work—the confessions of Guibourg and Marguerite and Filastre and the rest—curling into ash under the eyes of the man they had been about. He believed, as far as anyone can tell, that he was ending the story. That after the fortresses and the floggings and the chains and now the fire, no voice and no page remained.

He missed the loose leaves: his own security procedure. The order that the most dangerous testimony be kept on unbound sheets outside the official registers had left copies of exactly the worst material sitting in La Reynie’s personal working papers, which no one thought to hunt down, and which passed quietly with the rest of his files into the royal collections. They are in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris right now. The Bastille’s own archives, with the interrogation records of the whole affair, survive at the Arsenal library, a few minutes’ walk from where the Chambre Ardente sat.

Historians found it all in the nineteenth century and have been arguing about it ever since. And you can go today and request the boxes and turn over the actual sheets and find the conjuration to Astaroth and Asmodée in a clerk’s careful hand, and her name beside it, in the pages a king spent thirty years and dozens of lives trying to unwrite. He burned everything he could reach.

The rest is still there.