The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

It soon became clear to Reynie that this case concerned more than a few unscrupulous old women. There was a widespread ‘poisons ring’, dealing in undetectable poisons – rather as a modern drugs ring deals in drugs – and many wealthy and influential men seemed to be mixed up in it; but there was also an element of black magic, and here he found that many priests were involved. Abortions were performed and the unwanted babies ‘sacrificed’ on an altar, their blood often falling on to the breast of a naked girl who was lying there.

Now France may be said to have had something of a tradition of monastic misdemeanours connected with black magic. In the 1630s, there was a scandal involving Franciscan nuns in a convent at Louviers, when it became clear that two successive father confessors had made a habit of debauching the nuns and holding black masses, during one of which a newborn baby was crucified. Two priests were publicly burned. Now de la Reynie revealed how one woman, a Madame de Poupaillon, wanted to get rid of her aging husband and was given a potion containing arsenic in which she was to soak his shirt; it could cause a skin inflammation resembling syphilis. She was also given ‘healing salves’ to rub on the sores – actually, more poison. Her husband became suspicious and retreated out of harm’s way into a monastery.

The king ordered the creation of a special court – it became known as the Chambre Ardente, the lighted chamber, because the room was draped in black and lit by candles. More old women were arrested – one, called La Voisin, was an abortionist who had got rid of 2,500 unwanted babies. She was burnt alive in an iron chair.

The king became alarmed when he learned that his mistress, Madame de Montespan, had often served as the naked ‘altar’ for a sacrifice. Another of his mistresses, Madame des Oillets, had bought a love charm for the king, which had been concocted by a priest from menstrual blood – from the lady – and sperm from a man, who masturbated into a chalice. Another priest had copulated with the girl who served as an altar in view of the congregation. After seven years of investigation, it became clear to the king that more public scandal would cause a major political upheaval. A hundred and four people were sentenced – thirty-six to death; then Louis decided to suspend the Chambre Ardente. Fortune tellers were banned by law. But witchcraft was declared to be a superstition. In 1709, the king attempted to consign the whole affair to oblivion by having all the papers destroyed; but the official transcripts were overlooked. They reveal quite clearly that, unlike earlier cases of witchcraft, the Chambre Ardente affair involved a very large number of people who believed they were taking part in black magic ceremonies, and that their criminal projects had received the active support of the devil.

Another public scandal of the same period indicates that poisoning was as popular in seventeenth-century France as in Rome under the Borgias. When a young libertine named Sainte-Croix died in 1672, a small box was found among his effects; it contained a number of vials containing colourless liquids – which turned out to be poisons – and letters from the Baroness de Brinvilliers, which made it clear that she and Sainte-Croix were lovers, and that they had been involved together in various poisonings. When she heard that the box had been found, Madame de Brinvilliers fled to England, then to the Netherlands, then took refuge in a convent. She was at large for three years; and when finally arrested was found to be carrying a confession which was so frank in its erotic detail that it had to be printed in Latin.

The Baroness – Marie Madeline d’Aubray – had been born in 1630, the daughter of a nobleman who was civil lieutenant of Paris. She seems to have been highly sexed from the beginning, and by the time she reached her teens had had sexual intercourse with her brothers. She married the Baron de Brinvilliers at twenty-one, and he soon spent the enormous dowry she brought him. Then she met Sainte-Croix and became his mistress. The baron had no objection; but when Marie’s father found out, he had Sainte-Croix arrested and thrown into the Bastille. Here the young man met an Italian poisoner named Exili, and learned something of the art of administering ‘inheritance powders’. When Sainte-Croix was released from the Bastille after two months, he told his mistress that he had discovered a foolproof method by which they could be avenged on her father. They bought poisons from an apothecary, and Marie tried them out by visiting poor patients in the hospital and presenting them with bottles of wine and baskets of fruit. These tests convinced her that the poisons were efficient and undetectable. When she was at home with her father during Whitsun 1666, he fell ill, and was carefully nursed by Marie. He died that September.

In the following year, her two brothers died. Poison was detected in the body of one of them, but no accusation was made. The man who administered the potions was a professional poisoner named Hamelin, who later blackmailed Marie and became her lover. Sainte-Croix was also extorting money from her on the strength of her letters and two promissory notes she had signed when he agreed to help her murder her brothers.

An attempt to poison her sister and sister-in-law came to nothing when a tutor in whom she had confided sent a warning to the sister. She next tried to poison her husband, in order to marry Sainte-Croix; but Sainte-Croix had no intention of marrying her, and kept frustrating her plans by administering antidotes. All this did the baron’s health no good, but he survived.

At this point, Sainte-Croix died of an illness. When Marie heard about it, she exclaimed: ‘The little box!’ And in fact, the contents of the little box were to bring her to the headman. The poisoner Hamelin was arrested and tortured; he was sentenced to be broken alive on the wheel. By this time, Marie de Brinvilliers was in England; when attempts were made to extradite her, she fled to the Netherlands, then back into France, then to Antwerp and Liége. In his Celebrated Crimes, Alexandre Dumas tells a delightful story of how the agent who was sent to arrest her discovered that the police had no jurisdiction within the walls of a convent, and was compelled to disguise himself as an abbé and seduce her, then persuade her to meet him outside, where he was able to arrest her. The true story seems to be that she was arrested by a political agent who was given a key of the convent, so that he had only to let himself in and take her by surprise.

She was tortured by having buckets of water poured in her mouth through a funnel, and sentenced to death after a court case that lasted three months, between April and July 1676. On the scaffold she behaved with dignity and courage. The executioner severed her head at one stroke, after which the body was burnt. But some of her relics were sold as charms – the story of her repentance made many consider her a saint. Like the Chambre Ardente affair, the Brinvilliers case has an odd air of belonging to an earlier century. In fact, both cases reveal that France was only just emerging from the Middle Ages.

Before we plunge back into this increasingly fast-flowing stream of modern history, let us pause to survey the long road that mankind has travelled in eight thousand years.

The first great landmark in the story of man is the establishment of the cities, more than eight thousand years ago. The next was the invention of writing, about three millennia later. Within a mere two thousand years, this had led to the achievement of Greece – to Plato, Aristotle and the Greek dramatists, and of great scientists like Aristarchus and Eratosthenes.

Unfortunately, this development of the human spirit is paralleled by a development in the spirit of war. From the time of Sargon of Akkad, military leaders have expressed their sense of destiny – that is, their evolutionary appetite – by trying to build empires – the Assyrians, the Minoans, the Achaeans, the Persians, the Babylonians and the Spartans – even the Athenians themselves. The collapse of Athens is perhaps the most interesting tragedy in human history in that here we see the downfall of the spirit of intellectual evolution at the hands of the spirit of war.

For two thousand years, science and philosophy lie dormant. Instead, the spirit of religion becomes the spearhead of evolution. Ancient Rome is the purest expression of aggressive militarism; it produces no art, literature, philosophy or religion worth mentioning. Rome invited its own destruction by spreading its boundaries too far, until even the most warlike of emperors could not maintain peace for more than a year or two at a time; Diocletian collapsed with exhaustion after holding it together for twenty years. And we see this as a recurrent pattern of military history. Even if a great conqueror can contain his newly-won empire, his sons or grandsons find it too much for them – and it disintegrates.