8/7/2019 Famous Witches - La Voisin (c.1640 - 1680)

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Famous Witches - La Voisin (c.1640 - 1680)

Catherine Monvoisin (maiden name Catherine Deshayes, and popularly known as "La

Voisin"), was a French sorceress, who was one of the chief personages in the infamous

affaire des poisons which disgraced the reign of Louis XIV.

Her husband, Monvoisin, was an unsuccessful jeweller, and she took to practising

divination techniques such as chiromancy and face-reading in order to retrieve her

and her husband's fortunes. She gradually added the practice of witchcraft, in which

she had the help of a renegade priest, Etienne Guibourg, whose part was the

celebration of the "black mass," a parody of the Christian mass.

She practised medicine, especially midwifery, procured abortions and provided love

powders, potions and poisons. She was promiscuous throughout her marriage, and one

of her chief accomplices was one of her lovers, the magician Lesage (real name, AdamCoeuret). Her love powders included such ingredients as the bones of toads, the teeth

of moles, Spanish flies, iron filings, human blood and the dust of human remains.

Gradually, the great ladies of Paris flocked to La Voisin, who accumulated enormous

wealth. Her clients included: Olympe Mancini, the Comtesse de Soissons (who sought

the death of the king's mistress, Louise de La Vallire); her sister Marie Anne Mancini,

the Duchesse de Bouillon; Franois Henri de Montmorency-Bouteville, the Duc de

Luxembourg; Franoise-Athnas, the Marquise de Montespan (another of the king's

mistresses); and the Comtesse de Gramont ("La Belle Hamilton"); among many

others.

La Voisin was eventually caught up in the Poison Affair (Laffaire des poisons), a

murder scandal in France during the reign of King Louis XIV which launched a

period of hysterical pursuit of murder suspects, during which a number of prominent

people and members of the aristocracy were implicated and sentenced for poisoning

and witchcraft.

The furor began in 1675 after the trial of Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, the

Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was forced to confess to poisoning her father and

siblings. She was sentenced to death and, after torture with the water cure (beingforced to drink sixteen pints of water), was beheaded and burned at the stake. This

case drew attention to a number of other mysterious deaths, and many fortune-tellers

and alchemists suspected of selling not only divinations, sances and aphrodisiacs, but

also "inheritance powders" (i.e. poison), were rounded up and tried.

La Voisins testimony implicated a number of important individuals in the French

court, particularly the king's mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, who she claimed

had bought aphrodisiacs and performed black masses with her in order to gain the

king's favour. La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and poisoning and was burned in

public on the Place de Grve in the centre of Paris in 1680.

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