Catherine Deshayes, widow Monvoisin, known as "La Voisin" (c. 1640 – February 22, 1680), French sorceress, was one of the chief personages in the affaire des poisons, which disgraced the reign of Louis XIV.
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Sorcery and scandal
Catherine Deshayes, wedded an unsuccessful jeweller named Monvoisin. She was promiscuous throughout her marriage, and she practised chiromancy and face-reading 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 abortion, and provided love powders and poisons. Her chief accomplice was one of her lovers, the magician Lesage, whose real name was Adam Cœuret.
The great ladies of Paris flocked to La Voisin, who accumulated enormous wealth from them. Among her clients were Olympe Mancini, Comtesse de Soissons, who sought the death of the king's mistress, Louise de La Vallière; and the Comtesse de Gramont ("la belle Hamilton"), among others. The Marquise de Montespan was accused of working with La Voisin to poison Louis XIV and Mademoiselle de Fontanges, a woman who was sleeping with Louis, though La Voisin never admitted to working with Montespan many other people claimed she had worked with La Voisin but there is no sufficient evidence of this and many of the confessor's stories were inconsistent.
The bones of toads, the teeth of moles, Spanish flies, iron filings, human blood and mummy, or the dust of human remains, were among the alleged ingredients of the love powders concocted by La Voisin. Her knowledge of poisons was not apparently so thorough as that of less well-known sorcerers, or it would be difficult to account for La Vallière's immunity. The art of poisoning had become a regular science at the time.
Public execution
The death of the king's sister-in-law, the Duchesse d'Orléans, had been falsely attributed to poison, and the crimes of Marie Madeleine de Brinvilliers (executed in 1676) and her accomplices were still fresh in the public mind. In April 1679, a commission appointed to inquire into the subject and to prosecute the offenders met for the first time. Its proceedings, including some suppressed in the official records, are preserved in the notes of one of the official court reporters, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie.
La Voisin was thereafter convicted of witchcraft and was burned in public on the Place de Grève in Paris.
Film
The part of La Voisin in the 1997 film Marquise was played by Anémone.
References
"La Voisin". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.- Anne Somerset - The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (St. Martin's Press (October 12, 2003) ISBN 0-312-33017-0)
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