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

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Account of a Dark Episode In French History
Review: 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.