Character Catalog

La Voisin spent nearly twenty years building a clandestine supply network for poisons made from arsenic and toxic plants. This network served a clientele ranging from jealous bourgeois women to high-ranking aristocrats eager to eliminate a husband or a rival.

Her official trade as a fortune-teller and card reader served as a legal front to attract and retain wealthy clients. This double life allowed her to prosper for years before La Reynie's investigation dismantled her network.

La Voisin orchestrated sacrilegious ceremonies in her garden and in secret locations, in collaboration with defrocked priests including Abbé Guibourg. These black masses were the most spectacular and most incriminating aspect of her activities, directly implicating illustrious names from the royal court.

Known by the euphemism 'angel-maker,' La Voisin performed clandestine abortions for women of all social classes. This activity, criminally prosecuted under the Ancien Régime, reveals the social reality of a world in which women had no legal recourse.

The said Deshayes confessed to having supplied powders and poisons to various persons of quality, and to having arranged for masses to be celebrated for sacrilegious purposes, all in exchange for money.

This woman is of an extraordinary character in her boldness and obstinacy. She names few accomplices and appears to fear neither death nor torture.

On the twenty-second day of February 1680, Catherine Deshayes, known as La Voisin, convicted of crimes of sorcery, poisoning, and sacrilege, was burned alive at the Place de Grève, having refused to the last the consolations of religion.

They say that La Voisin drank shamelessly on the day before her execution; she sang songs. This morning she was given the retentum — that is, she was strangled before being thrown into the fire.

The list of persons implicated in La Voisin's practices includes names from the most illustrious families of the kingdom, which made the investigation extremely delicate and compelled the king to order secrecy over several depositions.

It was in this house in the Saint-Denis district that Catherine Deshayes received her clients and prepared her poisons and love potions. She also held secret ceremonies in the garden there, according to confessions gathered during the investigation.

After her arrest in March 1679, La Voisin was first imprisoned at the Château de Vincennes, where the initial interrogations conducted by Nicolas de La Reynie took place. This royal detention facility held many of the accused in the Affair of the Poisons.

La Voisin was subsequently transferred to the Bastille, the royal fortress-prison, where interrogations and sessions of torture continued. It was there that she made her most important revelations about her accomplices and clients.

Now known as the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, the Place de Grève was the traditional site of public executions in Paris. It was here that Catherine Deshayes was burned at the stake on February 22, 1680, before a large crowd described by chroniclers of the time.

The Chambre ardente, a special tribunal established by Louis XIV to investigate the Affair of the Poisons, sat at the Paris Arsenal. It was before this court that La Voisin and dozens of her accomplices were tried between 1679 and 1682.