Chapter 7 No.7

This bare narrative of the facts would be sufficient to weaken the opinion of those who believe that the Princess Henrietta died of poison. The following observations will contribute to deprive it of all credit. Writers are unanimously agreed about the fact that Madame could only have been poisoned by the glass of chicory water given her by Madame de Gamaches.

Now as soon as suspicions awoke in the mind of Madame and her circle, that is to say, the moment after the drink had been taken, Monsieur ordered some of the water to be given to a dog; Madame Desbordes, the princess's maid, who was heartily devoted to her, told her that she had made the drink, and had herself drunk some of it, and Madame de Meckelbourg also drank some. We are thus bound to acknowledge that the famous chicory water could not have been poisoned. Monsieur J. Lair, with his clear and vigorous mind, has well analysed the scene: 'The decoction of which so many persons had drunk was harmless; it was the cup that ought to have been examined.' 'The details given by Madame de la Fayette and others,' writes Monsieur de Boislisle, 'exclude the idea of poison poured into the glass itself; and indeed Madame Palatine says that what was poisoned was not the water itself, nor the vessel in which it was made, but the cup which was reserved for the princess, and which no one else would have dared to use.'

It is a fact that the seventeenth-century poisoners sought to prepare goblets and silver cups in such a way as to poison the persons who were afterwards to use them. Among the constant friends of La Voisin, La Bosse, La Chéron, and La Vigoureux, the most renowned sorceresses of the period, we find a certain Fran?ois Belot, one of the king's bodyguard, making a specialty of this, and deriving a comfortable income from it, until the day when this trade led him to the Place de Grève, where he was broken on the wheel on June 10, 1679. His method of procedure was as follows: 'He crammed a toad with arsenic, placed it in a silver goblet, and then, pricking its head, made it urinate, and finally crushed it in the goblet.' During this pleasant operation he mumbled his wicked charms. 'I know a secret,' said Belot, 'such that in doctoring a cup with a toad and what I put into it, if fifty persons chanced to drink from it afterwards, even if it were washed and rinsed, they would all be done for, and the cup could only be disinfected by throwing it into a hot fire. After having thus poisoned the cup, I should not try it upon a human being, but upon a dog, and I should intrust the cup to nobody.' But it happened that a client of Belot's, being somewhat sceptical, got a dog to drink out of the doctored cup, and found that the animal was not harmed in the least; he even picked a violent quarrel with the magician about the matter, taunting him with the worthlessness of his wares. Belot spoke frankly to the commissioners of the Chambre Ardente: 'I know that the toad cannot do anybody any harm; what I did with the silver cups and trenchers was done solely to get hold of such cups and trenchers.' His skill, nevertheless, enjoyed a very substantial reputation. At the same date the magician Blessis was believed to know how to manipulate mirrors in such a way that any one who looked in them received his deathblow.

These facts seem mere childish folly under scientific investigation. The knowledge people had of poisons in the eighteenth century was limited to arsenic, antimony, and sublimate; it did not enable them so to poison a cup as to cause sudden death to the person using it, without his being aware of the poison at the moment of drinking it. The opinion of Professor Brouardel on this point is explicit; and Dr. Legué, convinced as he is of the poisoning of Madame, admits that the story of the cup can only make any well-informed man smile.

The conclusion is that as Madame could not have been poisoned by the water she drank, or by the cup containing the water, she could not have been poisoned at all.