Customer Reviews

The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV

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Anne Somerset has done a fantastic job in bringing this bit of dark and forgotten history to the fore in the first serious work on this subject in decades.

"The Affair of the Poisons" relates how in 1680, Paris society was thrown into an uproar as details came to light of a rash of magical potions and poisons being circulated from the Paris underground into the highest ranks of the French high society. As the police investigated further into what they thought to be outlandish rumours of satanic rituals and child sacrifice, a strange story began to take form around a number of high profile individuals, notably the jealously obssessed and now out-of-favor royal mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, concerning a plot to assasinate the King and Queen themselves. The Marquise was said to have turned to the performance of satanic rites of the Black Mass, using the blood of child sacrifices, freshly killed by the self proclaimed abortionist and sorceress known as La Voisin. When her most desperate attempts to win the King back through black magic failed, the Marquise is said to have turned to murder, first of her competitors at court, and finally hatching a plot to poison the King himself. The details themselves are never truly know as the journals, testimonies, and eyewitness accounts taken down by the King's appointed investigators were locked away and later destoryed by the King himself, in a desperate attempt to avoid a potentially ruinous scandal that threatened to shake the very foundations of the monarchy.

The Affair of the Poisons is a fascinating look into the strange world of the French court and the lengths one woman went to maintain her exalted status among the glittering yet hopelessly vain and self-destructive upper eschelon of French society. Perhaps the truth of these dark events of history will never be known for certain, but whether or not the Marquise was indeed guilty of the miriad of vile crimes attributed to her, her name has come down through the centuries as synonymous with evil. Sommerset has done an excellent job of retelling this tale with attention to detail, particularly the chapters concerning the highly complex intrigues of the court of Louis XIV and the machinations of his many mistresses. It also provides an fascinating glipse into the dark underworld of Parisan society and the many shady characters who inhabited it.

I bought this book in the bookstore at Versailles. After my tours of the palace and the gardens looking for ghosts and wondering what life was like and what was in the heads of the people at courts of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. I was hoping that this history would help me with that and it did. This is a well footnoted scholarly history but it is also a very good read, a very unusually good read.

I knew nothing about this period of history, other than having a vague knowledge of Louis XIV ("the Sun King"), before picking up this book. It is remarkably easy to read, packing in a great deal of information without ever being dry or tedious. The author takes a simultaneously critical and sympathetic look at the passions that drove the nobility and hangers-on at court, and makes shrewd estimates about the validity of various contemporary and historical theories regarding the events in issue (including observations about the biases of the various letter writers and memoirists on whose writings she draws as sources). I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in this period of French history.

Also recommended: "Ridicule," a film about the French court under Louis XVI, which bears out many of the observations in this book about the period a century earlier.

Since reading Alexander Dumas novels as a child I have always been fascinated with the intrigue and byzantine plots of the French Court. I was first made aware of the accusations against the Marquise de Montespan in a history book by Jacques Barzun which made her out to be a female anti christ or the whore of babylon. Somerset's history of the events goes into more depth and paints Athenais to be more of an earlier version of the witless Marie Antoinette than a French Lady McBeth.

The whole affair of the poisons caused a paranoia that turned a criminal investigation into a Salem Witch Hunt or better yet a grassy knoll conspiracy that reached into the highest level of government. The fact that torture or the threat of torture and painful death were used to gain most of the 'confessions' was not seen as detrimental to the case by the public makes me glad in live in more modern times.

The court of Louis XIV was the height of decadance and its opulance eventually caused the bankruptcy of the French treasury during the reign of his descendants leading to Revolution, Terror, and the Rise of the First Empire.

This was an interesting excursion into an area of French history I didn't know much about.The accusations and in some cases just hearsay,I found had similarities to a the hysteria Involving
The Salem Witch Trials.Would reccomend this for anyone with
an interest in life at french court/Louis XIV.

Ever since reading Judith Merkle Riley's excellent novel "The Oracle Glass," about the Affair of the Poisons, I have wanted to know more about the actual history that Riley based her book on. "The Affair of the Poisons" is a wonderfully detailed, well-written study through this strange time in French history, when courtiers at one of the most elegant courts in Europe turned to poison, fortune tellers, and even black magic to gain influence, money, lovers, and to keep their social standing. Somerset opens a window into a strange world, and guides us through the tangle of court life with skill and deftness.