Sexuality, Magic and Perversion by Francis King

recently appointed as Lieutenant-General of Police by Louis XIV, but de Chasteuil managed to escape—he was traced a year later and found already dead, strangled by an unknown assailant.
    In the “magical workshop” of the conspirators were found powerful poisons and some forged ingots of silver; much of the counterfeit silver had already been purchased by the Royal Mint at the full price for fine silver.
    It soon became apparent to La Reynie that de Vanens and his associates were not only poison-mongers and counterfeiters but Satanists; de Vanens himself boasted of it. He told his fellow prisoners in the Bastille that not God himself was capable of preventing him conducting the Black Mass upon the rump of his familiar spirit—the familiar in question, a large spotted spaniel, seems to have looked innocent enough as far as external appearances were concerned!
    For a year de Vanens and his accomplices languished in prison, subjected to frequent interrogation by La Reynie, who, convinced that the prisoners had other associates, was anxious to obtain details of the vastconspiracy which he was certain existed, although he felt unsure of its exact nature. Then, towards the end of 1678, La Reynie discovered the clue for which he had been searching in the shape of a curious report from a lawyer named Perrin.
    One night Perrin had been invited to dine at the home of a M. Vigoureux, a ladies’ dressmaker, and one of his fellow-guests had been Marie Bosse, one of the many fortune tellers who infested Paris. The dinner was a drunken one and Marie Bosse, under the influence of alcohol, boasted of her professional success, “only three more poisonings”, she said, “and I can retire”. The wife of one of La Reynie’s men was sent along, posing as a client cursed with a long-living and miserable husband, to investigate La Bosse. On her first visit she was commiserated with, on her second she was supplied with a vial of poison.
    La Reynie acted immediately, arresting La Bosse—discovered by the police in an incestuous situation with her two sons and daughter—and the wife of M. Vigoureux; found among the effects of the witches were a veritable arsenal of poisons: arsenic, mercuric sublimate, hemlock, henbane, belladonna, foxglove, mandragora and “Spanish fly” (Cantharides, a powerful aphrodisiac). Along with these were discovered many substances used in the compounding of philtres—dried toad, human fat, graveyard dust, dried blood, dried human semen and excrement.
    Interrogated under torture La Bosse and La Vigoureux incriminated three dozen others, either fellow-sorcerers or clients who had employed poison and witchcraft for their own purposes, and further arrests followed, among them that of Catherine Monvoisin, better known as La Voisin; she, it will be remembered, was the mistress of the magician Le Sage who had been sentenced to the galleys—and suddenly and mysteriously released—some eleven years earlier.
    Le Sage was only one of La Voisin’s many lovers (she also had a husband who had managed to survive his wife’s many attempts to poison him 4 ) and his jealousy of his rivals, particularly of a man named Latour, had turned his love to hatred. Consequently, after his own arrest, only five days after that of La Voisin, he “spilled the beans”,doing all in his power to send his former paramour to the stake. He revealed that La Voisin not only organised Black Masses—Le Sage named a number of renegade priests who were on her payroll—and sold poisons but was also the leading Parisian abortionist. La Reynie was not surprised; in his search of La Voisin’s villa he had not only found the paraphernalia of Black Magic (including books of spells, incense, black candles and priestly vestments) but a mysterious and sinister stove in the ashes of which were what appeared to be fragments of the bones of young children.
    It was only those infants too big to be safely buried by La Voisin that went into her stove but