Reflections on History and Closing Remarks

It's sixteen sixty three, beautiful and wealthy Marie Dobre has been experimenting with the dosage of her poison for months . She leans over a patient at the hospital in Paris , two deadly drops find their way into the water on the bedside table . Marie is a serial killer in seventeenth century France. She murdered her father, and her brother, her servants , and more . But when her crimes were exposed, they uncovered a network of poisoners across Paris that reached all the way to the court of Louis X . Even his mistress, Madame de Montespond was implicated in what became known as the Affair of the Poisons . More than four hundred people were investigated and dozens were executed . So now, from the poisonous world of seventeenth century Paris . This is After Dark . Well hello and welcome to After Dark. I am Anthony and of course I'm not joined by Maddie because she is currently trying to investigate the inclusion of fluoride for key stage one children all across the north of England. Once she's that solved, she will be back. But for now, we've been joined by a plethora of guest co hosts and I'm going to wait for just a second to reveal who my current guest co host is because you may have noticed that over my left shoulder there is a charming addition to the After Dark family and this is T eresa. And Teresa has been sent to us by a listener called Shannon and she lives in Canada and she sent this to us all on her own back and it is, I mean not physically she didn't actually carry it on her back. There is post nowadays. And it is from Shann's creepy creations. Go and check her out. We've also have like a hand in a skull thing over there. You'll see that in a minute in another shot when we reveal the co host , but it is so brilliant. We are so grateful for this Shannon. Thank you so much for sending it in. It's so perfect for After Dark and now she has pride of place in the shot on YouTube. So if you're not watching on YouTube and you're just listening on the podcast, go and watch on YouTube and you'll see our new Teresa Dall in the background right . Guest co host reveal time . A few weeks ago, I was teasing who we might have come in to Act as the guest cohost. And I felt a little bit bad I posted a picture going, who do you think this might be? Now it was a brilliant cohort that went down an absolute storm with all of you guys, but everybody guessed wrong and they guessed consistently wrong and the same person the entire time and that was who the guest co host is this month. The one and only Dr. Kate Lister Hello after Darkas I have blackmailed her into joining the Dark Side and now here she is that she has no choice but to be here. She is, of course, as you bloody well know, the host of Betwixt the Sheets also here on After Darkness was going to say no history hit, we don't own the whole network. We just it's our own podcast. Let's see it. But she also has a really incredible new book out called Flick History of Female Pleasure. Have I said the whole title correctly? Yeah, yes. And we are and I know you're going to be so excited that Kate is here for the next four episodes and we're going to be discussing all kinds of sex history, yes, but also dark history we're going to be melding. It's the perfect crossover episode between After Dark and Batrix. Thanks for coming Babe. Anytime, it's a pleasure to be here. I was frankly a little insulted and I wasn't invited earlier, but well, I was just about to say well we saved the best to last because you are the last one before money comes back. But then if I say that that's insulting to everybody else. So we saved the best for now. No, we saved the yeah, everyone's the best. Everyone's best and you're here now. That's how that's gonna work. Next , thank you. I think I should have been a politician. That's just that. Let's move past this. Let's go with politicians say we have to move past this. And this one always hand, whatever that is in the thumb, the thumb on the hand. Came here, I was nearly going to wear what you wore, a very similar outfit. And in other YouTube episodes, you'll see there's even the red tie. That's that's a great coincid.ence But just I went for this instead. I went for like just, you know, oh, it would have freaked people out if we were two wins. Actually, that was a missed opportunity. You should have coordinated to be like exactly the same , not even just kind of right. Okay. Enough pre amble tittle tattle. Poison. Poison. Poison is afoot. Now give me a little bit of an introduction as to what I can expect from this episode because I was looking over the briefing notes last night and it is twists, turns , ins, outs, loads of names. And I was surprised at you because the last time we did something on the Twix together, you did not like having to use the French names. There's a lot of French names. That's so fun. I need to apologize to apologize to everybody at the start of this is I am gonna butcher the French language. It's my Achilles heel. I'm better with Icelandic than I am with French. Also coming off by the way. Also coming up. Just you know that episode of Friends with Joey's trying to speak French I'm so sorry. You don't need to correct me in the comments. I know I'm awful at it. I was just about to say we're showing a rage by referencing friends, but actually loads of everyone watches friends now because it's su whnatever,. I haven I' meant, seen it in years, but it was sad when it ended. I was there for the original ending of that as well. Right, seventeenth century Europe , we are in an age of poisons . I am going to throw back to another after dark episode, which I never remember any of them, but my notes tell me that Julia Tafana is also an afterdark episode. Tafana. Yeah, the woman who is selling poisons in Italy. That's her. For wives to get out of unhappy marriages quite conveniently, we'd go to her say, Could you give me something in the machine? Yeah. And then suddenly you're free of all of your problems . It was an afterdark episode. I don't remember but she, 's now that you've said that I remember it. But yeah, that was it. Then we also did an episode with Blessing Adams poisoned fish episode. I can't help you with that. I don't know why. I know Blessing Adams , she great's. She is yeah. But poison fish fish. I would say it's probably great and you should go and listen to it. And then oh, poison in the Tower of London with Mishia You and yes, I do remember that one because we love Misha and After Dark, we've had it back a couple of times. But we're not talking about any of those things today. Those are some old episodes. Thank God because we don't remember any of them. Well, I don't know what you're about to talk about either. I just wing my way through these things, Kate. It just comes to me as it happens. But we are talking about pois on. We are talking about women and poison and why there is such a historical link between those two like why is it when we think about historical female murderers poison really comes into frame pretty quickly. I think it was Agatha Christie who coined the phrase that poison is a woman's weapon and I don't think that's actually borne out by the evidence criminologists can weigh in. I think that it's very an accessible, inclusive murder weapon is poison, but it's known as being a woman's weapon for a few reasons. I think that number one there, is this really, really long history of women getting out of terrible, terrible marriages by poisoning their husbands. That you see that cropping up all over the place. In fact, poisoning syndicates were discovered all over Europe right up until the twentieth century. They were big in hungry. Poison syndicate. That's where there would be a central poisoner like Juliana Tifana who would sell poison for women to kill their husbands. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like they're all colluding together. No, it's coming from this. It's like a pyramid scheme. Yeah, it's like yeah, basically a weird poisoning pyramid scheme. Yeah. And it was big in Hungary and you've got them cropping up well into the twentieth century and they were known as angel mak . That's interesting. But like that, not that I would advocate poisoning anybody, please don't do that. It's a bad idea. But you can kind of see how that would in a system where women have to get married, their security and financial security is dependent on them getting married. And there's no way of getting divorced and you're going to lose all of your rights, all of your money, your access to your children, everything as soon as that's happened. There is no way out or is there? And I do think that really that's such a good point because it is your entire life. And if you were in seventeenth century England or Italy or Hungary, as you're saying there, it's like, well, do I sit here again not, advocating anybody is doing this? But I'm just saying you can kind of see the mindset of going, do I just sit here and accept this for literally the rest of my ? Or if he dies, I would get all of the money, I would get everything and then I would be a widow and I don't have to deal with this. So you can see how that rather horrendous trade in poisons arose. And there is a really long history of women poisoning their husbands. Then you've got the fact that poison is quite an intimate method of killing and it's put in food which is historically read as being a feminine thing, the preparing of food, the cooking of food, the serving of food. And there's something particularly nasty about like the weapon is striking right at that place where you should feel the most comfortable and the most trusting because we eat food from people that we trust. So I think that's where it comes from. And also you don't have to use physical strength to be able to use poison. You can do it then you can run away. So if I was going to have to murder somebody would be poisoned because I am very physically weak. I don't think you're as weak as you think you are. I think I think you could smother somebody if you really wanted to. I mean maybe maybe at some point we should have an arm wrestle and I can show you how weak I am. Okay Right. Come back after the break and be like, no, it would be poisoned. That was awful. No, he actually fell on the ground. As soon as I touched him, he was gone. That was it. So I'm going to introduce now one of the main protagonists for this episode. It is Marie Madeleine Marguerite Dobre . She is born in sixteen thirty. I know that to the Dobray family . Tell me why she is important in this. episode All right, so this is all leading up to the infamous it was called The Affair of the Poisons and it was this huge scandal that rocked French society right from the very, very top down to the absolute bottom. Marie D'Arby wasn't in that scandal, she was the precursor to it. She lit the touchpaper . What was particularly shocking about her is that she was an aristocrat . She was born to wealth, she was born to money f.ather Her was like the prefect of Paris. He's really high up in the law courts. He's got loads of money. And she would marry a guy who became a marquise and she becomes the marquise to Branvilliers. And she there was not a lot of love, there was not a lot of love in this marriage. It was set up for financial convenience. The guy's name was Goblin. Goblin Antoine Ant Goblin. Goblin, yes, again, sorry, French people . But listen, Goblin's in there. Let's be honest. Goblin is in there. His name is Goblin. Yeah, right. So she has a typically well to do childhood. Later on, things come out that suggest that she was being sexually abused from about the age of seven. She never says he's done it. She's also accused of incest with her brothers. So there's some weird stuff going on. She marries this guy, he's awful with money. He's terrible with money and he's having a fair. So he's spending all of her money, she starts an affair as well with a soldier with a handsome young soft soldier. Fair play. Fair play by the name of Sanquoi, his name is, right? Not too bad on that one. So Sanquois is also not good with money and Madeline Marie realizes one thing very, very quickly, which is that a sugar baby is quite expensive . Yeah, like they cost a lot of money. That's why I don't have one. The only reason maxed out, quite frankly . More of a more of a splendor infant. No, that sounded awful. Sorry, I didn't know where that went . Leave it in, but nothing got to do with me . I must say Shane is four years younger than me, so you know , yeah. Right. You know, a splendid teenager. Okay. So anyways, no way to redeem that I just just leave that and move on. Moving on Moving on. Right. Okay, so she's got this expensive lever . She looks around at her family and she thinks I need more money. Yeah, I need more money. Like, I've got this loser husband who's spending all my money and is spending footing food m aroundoney his mistresses. I've got this sugar baby who's spending everything work and I get money from. I'm only a woman. I'm only a woman. I'm only a woman. And then she thinks, hang on . Hang on, if my dad died Oh, she's gone after her dad. I thought you were going to say she was gonna go after Antoine. Goblin. No . If my dad dies , I'll inherit . So she no brothers? Oh, she has brothers. We'll get to them. Okay, go on, yeah., right Okay. She'll inherit something though. She'll inherit something and so the money will come down to her. She'll get something, right? Yeah . And this is a really weird quirk of the French aristocracy at this time is they're so rich and they're so dependent on servants. They rare, they don't seem to poison people themselves. They hire servants to do it, which seems like a real weak link in this chain. Telling somebody you're gonna it's like hiring somebody else. But that's what she does. She hires a servant and places the servant and his name is Gascon and places him in her father's house and he slowly poisons him. Now I will say it does say something about because we talked at the outset of this about women and access to domestic goods But actually , although she would have had access to those domestic goods, it also says something about her status as an aristocrat. She's going, yeah, I mean, sure there's access to food here, but I ain't prepping that. I'm not going to do it. Just go and get it would look very weird if I started cooking. Yeah. So Gaston's in there with his kneading all the dough and whatever people do. And then so if we get him, although I mean, you talked about affairs and that she was taking lovers as well. She would need to have been trusting Gaston explicitly in order to be like here kill who is essentially your master as well. Yeah, she would have done it. But that's what happens and he poisons the father over a long period of time. He dies. Oh, I should probably say that the father did know about her affair with Sanquois, and at one point he has him arrested and put into the bastel to try and stop the affair. So she was also it might have been motivated by revenge as well. She was really angry at him. Dad dies, she gets a bit of money. Because of the poisoning. Because of the poisoning. Right, okay. I think it's like they say that he died of gout. I think that 's what written that kind of normal seventeenth century way they're like, I don't have gout. Yeah, yeah. What consumption? Consum ably anything. It could be anything, poisoned. So she gets some money but burns for it pretty quick and then she realizes the reason she hasn't got all the money is because she has two brothers. Oh, and now I see where this is going. She see, and then she goes, God, damn it, I need more money. I need more money. They were dead. They were dead. And I would get the rest of it. So she now hires more servants. Not Caston again. I think it is Caston, but there's another guy called Hamlin who goes and she's got two brothers, one's called Anton and one's called Francois . And she places the servants in their house and again poisons them. Can I just say the most stereotypical French? Really? That's how I remember them dog at Caston, Francois , Pierre is going to make an appearance. Good. I'm delighted, yeah. Right. So she's going after the brothers , they die, but now it looks a bit weird . Now even by the standards of the time people going, I don't think that's gout. Jeez, the scout is running through that family like I never saw before. It's Weird Like they've all died really close together . I don't think it's gout. Like, especially the brothers because they had this really long drawn out and like all the symptoms are really they're probably not that old, right? Not the brothers . And was twenty four. She's sort of sat there just like, what? What? It's gout. It's terrible . It's plagued the family for generations. So now people are starting to ask questions and they arrest the servant Hamlin who cracks. There's a lot of torture in this story. Oh , right. Okay, so the French don't fuck about like here no, they don't. L inike this country it was like torture sanctioned only in very, very particular cases. And then it's like to try and extract information which is dodgy anyway. The French just go, let's torture everyone. They don't fingernails. But they do and they torture people as punishment as well. So you can't even tell them something to stop. They just they just go for it. Right. So Hamlin cracks and explains that he was hired to do to poison people eventually. And the other thing that happens around this time is Sanqua ups and dies. Oh, the sugar baby, right? Is that suspicious? It's weird, but it doesn't seem to be that suspicious, right? It seems like he might have died fucking about with his own poisons , but we don't know. It's just one of those many just he died. Yeah, he just died. And she's not going to benefit from him dying because they're legally died. She liked she liked him. So we don't think there's anything suspicious about that, but he just does the dumbest thing. She must have just been sat there just like you at you had one job. He was horribly in debt. The bailiffs go around to the house. Things were already a bit hot because of all these brothers and people dying . They find a case that he is written on if I die this has to go to Madeline Daubrey. It belongs to her. Don't look at it. That's basically what it says. Don't look at it. Don't look at it. The bailiffs do look at it and find it's full of poison. Right. And like basically like notes and instructions how to poison your dad you absolute idiot. So he's so now it's completely linked to her. And I think this was the point that they started to torture Hamlin and he just gives up everything and she's liked it. Marie Madeleine is liked . She goes she goes to England at one point and then she's moving around Europe. They catch her eventually when she's hiding out in a convent. And so she's kind of like in England terms she's coming in and the restoration kind of time sixteen sixties this is when there's a royal family back in in England and she's just plodding around doing she just on the run is. She getting money from her sister. She comes back to France and they do finally get her and arrest her. And then they torture her as well and it's really nasty. They basically do like water torture and they strap her down and they force it, drink buckets and buckets of water with like a fun. It's awful. It's horrible. And so she does confess, but the confession is sort of like, well, you'd say anything, wouldn't you? Really at this point? And then we get all of these crazy rumors that start to swirl around that she was actually trying to poison her children and she's trying to poison her actual husband and then stories emerged that she was volunteering at the hospital and she was experimenting on the patients there. Stop. We don't know if that's true . It's definitely a rumor at the time. Tabloid journalism. It could it could it seems like she was working at the hospital and I don't know. I don't know like a kind of a patrony nurse a patron rich aristocratic I'm being a benevolent person here but also that may be poisoned also I might be testing the poisons. I don't know if that's true but there's certainly a rumour that was flying around at the time. She confesses the story gets way out of control, she's sentenced to be tortured and then executed. She's going to she's going to be beheaded in public and then her body's going to be burnt and she goes to her death basically saying I don't know why I'm in trouble. Everybody does this is one of the things that she says and she alludes to the fact that the poisoning is a much, much bigger issue than just her. Like she's kind of genuinely perplexed of just like, But everybody's doing this. Why am I in so much trouble? But the whole of Paris is scandalized because she's rich. This is a rich woman, a member of the aristocracy, poor people. They just do this shit all the time. We don't really care about them, but a rich person it. That was so, so shocking and watching a marquise beheaded and then publicly burnt. It was absolutely. People were terrified. So then it starts off this like fear that poisoning is widespread in Paris. And they've always thought of it as more of an Italian thing . The Italians just yeah, yeah, yeah. But it kind of goes away after she's executed , but it doesn't go all the way away. I love this because basically I love a bit of a camp bitch in one sense because she gives a spoiler before she dies going as you just said , You think this is bad? Yeah , will you see what everybody else is doing? Yeah, now take the head. Thanks very much. That's pretty camp. Like that is she is giving you story, she's giving you backstory, she's giving you legacy and then she's giving you death and I'm like , I'm here for it all . But what is fascinating about this is that this is only the tip of a very dark iceberg. That could be the episode in itself , couldn't it? But it's not. So join us after this break where we'll talk about the affair of the poisons. Right, so you mentioned there that it kind of dies away for a little bit after she's, you know, she leaves this cliffhanger and then it's like okay she mentioned something a bit weird but then some of those things start to percolate a little bit and start to come to the surface. Talk us through what happens there. Right. So the first thing that you need to know is that this is Paris France, sixteen seventy. And if you are in many ways, it is a place of culture and it is the enlightenment and we've got philosophers coming in and artists and moving, but they're a very small percentage of it. By the time you get to how actually people live their lives in the slums of Paris, there is a lot of superstition, there's a lot of belief in magic and witchcraft and potions and so it's not everybody was having an enlightenment moment. These kind of beliefs are still absolutely there. So this all comes crashing down. So a woman called Magdalene Delasange gets busted having faked a marriage and then poisoned the guy she said that she was married to. Oh, for money? For money, yeah, absolutely, absolutely for money. For poison. And she gets arrested and this should just be sort of an open and shutcase of just, it's somebody doing something crap, she's not particularly rich, but she is a fortune teller. She makes her money as lots of people do at this time, telling fortunes, predicting the future, a bit of herbalism on the side , all that kind of stuff. She gets arrested and the problem that the French authorities have, in fact, anyone that uses this kind of method of torture, is that people will say anything to stop you doing that or to delay their execution. So she starts to say that no, don't don't kill me. I can tell you things. I've got I've got more things and then she says that there's a plot. There's a big poisoner plot to kill the king. And then the chief of the police, a guy called Lereney, who is really interested in this. And he's like, Oh my god, like there is there's a huge, huge plot and that seems to corroborate an anonymous letter that has been found that said that there was a poisonous plot, a random letter. So to him he's like, Oh my god, this is it. So she's talking all kinds of crap to try and save her skin. And she starts mention ing other fortune tellers and other they're like they're abortionists and they are wise women and they are magicians, people that you would go to if you wanted a love spell or like your palm red. She starts to mention all of these names and then it starts to sound like there is a real network in Paris. And the one that's really central to this is a woman who's called Catherine Monvoisin, but she's known as La Voisin. And she is at the center of it and she's somebody that you would go to if you wanted a love spell or if you wanted an abortion or your palm read or all this kind of stuff. And this kind of thing has been going on in Paris and indeed Europe for Yeah. Hundreds hundreds of years. It's almost like a trade. Yeah, and for the longest time, it was just like it's not it's nothing harmful. It's just, you know, people, folklore, magic, that kind of stuff, but now in the grip of this, it starts to seem like it's a poisoning syndicate and worse night's witchcraft. And women. And women, right? So there's another woman called Marie Bossay and another one called Marie Vigoro, and they're also brought in. sort They' ofre in the same trade as La Voisin. And now all these women are being pitted against one another and they start blaming each other. She did it, she did it, she did it. And the stories are getting madder and madder. The stories about how like La Vozanna' gots a thousand aborted fetuses buried in her garden and that she would burn children alive and that there was Satanistic ritual sacrifices and that baby's blood was drunk and that people wanted to poison people go to her wanting poisons and like the stories are getting madder and madder all these women are saying this. It's very salemwich trials. It is before Yeah and more dramatic. More dramatic but the thing is that like you know that when and they will find you guilty of this , you're going to be sentenced to be horrendously tortured and then burnt to death. Yes. That's what you know. So but you also know that if you keep giving them information, it'll probably delay your trial date. It might make you useful to them. And also you want to blame other people. It wasn't me, it wasn't me. It's La Voise, she was the worst of the worst . And then things start so it's kind of contained at this point of like, Oh my god, we've got this poisoned syndicate in the slums of Paris. It's terrible. And the police guy, Lorenie opens up, it's called the chambre alant, the burning chamber. And it's yeah, well ba bom and it's like this court that's specially set up to deal with this situation. So at the moment they think that it's just fortune tellers in Paris and now they start rounding up everybody who is involved in that trade. And as these things happened to begin with it was fortune tellers. But then by the time we got to the end of it, it's like somebody who saw somebody who might have had their palms re d at one time. It's like getting increasingly and it might have been contained except for the fact that these women realized if they start dropping big names , now we're going to start getting some attention. So when they were going, it was Stacy down the road or it was John that I knew from school. That's no good. But now they start dropping names, marquis, duchesses, countesses , really, really big names. And now it's freaking Larini outs. Can I ask? Yeah, they start yes you're allowed this when they start dropping these names, are they saying they're the targets or that they're doing the poisoning? Both. Both. So they're saying that really, really influential people at court are coming to them, asking for spells, charms , sometimes asking to kill people, asking for love powder . The biggest name that gets dropped into this Madame de Montespin. Okay . She is the favorite mistress of Louis XIV. So we've gone right to the top. To the top of this to give her her full name. Are you ready for this? Go on. Francois Attinise de Rochesois de Montemar de Macquise de Montespan. Don't tell me I got that wrong. Don't tell me I got that wrong. Just clap me and be on your age. Here can I tell you a little anecdote about Frenchness? Yes. So again, yes. So we are in two thousand one. I started university and I was doing history, but my minor degree was French, right? And you only do it for a year and I nearly failed it. I passed to by one percent or something. Because I was good at the literature and history bit of it, but I was really bad at the grammar. Really, really bad at the grammar. Anyway , but on day one you have to introduce yourself and you're in a small class and blah blah blah blah blah. And I was like, everyone's going around introducing themselves and I was like, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready for this. I'll do my introduction. And I thought I was being like immersive in the world of what I was doing here. And I introduced myself as Antoine rather than Antony. Now, I wasn't trying to make people think my name was Antoine. I just was like, That's the French of my name. Bearing mind, I'm seventeen years old , okay? Just bear that in mind . And then I had to spend the rest of that year in French class just going along with the idea that my name was Antoine and not Antony. Oh I know I know it was embarrassing. You didn't correct anybody? I didn't really know not another French to be able to correct any gosless Excuse me actual Moja Mel and Tony Na Tantoine. Oh, English came in there. Yeah, I was like but so mortified. You even think about it now I'm sweating. You know that kind of way where you're just like, what jesus, Aonnty, you could have said just what your actual name was but I thought I was being, you know, like really dedicated to the to the French tongue. Yeah, I can understand that. So there's still people wandering around that think that you're called Antoine. I can't imagine they think much about me I was there for a year. If they do, they need to have a word with themselves. I have an image of La Vocean. And if I remember correctly, I think La Voisson means the neighbor, maybe or something like that. What does it mean? I think it might mean the neighbor. Right. Okay. Again, you can tell me if I'm wrong about that because I'm not fluent in French. But so here we have her in this picture from the time and she is centered in the image. You'll put this on social media. And she's a very homely looking woman. She doesn't look particularly dangerous. She looks like she's, you know , kind of a working woman. She's dressed very simply. Her face looks kind of very pen itent actually , but she's surrounded by what looks like devils and serpents and dragons and all this kind of thing . And there it has it down at the end almost handwritten. It looks like Catherine De Haze. That was her real name. That's a real name. Known as Lavoson. Okay, yeah. So what we have here is this idea of and you know, there's a winged kind of devil holding up her image. So we have this idea that darkness devildum witchcraft, as you're kind of describing there is taking shape in these everyday women they're just walking amongst us, but actually they're trying to bring down the whole system. This was a witch hunt. Yeah . This absolutely was at one point the king allows them to be interrogated for witchcraft. So it's brought in and that's what they're prosecut ed with. And La Voisin really gets all of the heat on her. She's the one that's blamed for absolutely everything and she's held up as this awful, despicable, horrendous creature who's doing all these terrible things and is threatening everyone I. don't know. Maybe she wasn't very nice, but I don't think she was doing the things that she was accused of doing. I could nearly guarantee you she didn't know a fellow with leather looking wings. No, no, almost certainly. Almost certainly. Okay, before we get to the trial or tribunal more probably specifically. Let's talk a little bit about the French royalty because you were making a case there before I went off and told you about my French first year lessons that it was starting to reach royalty, aristocrats . And so that starts to change things. How does the scandal got to do these poisons start to impact that level of society ? Right. So the thing is the scandal is already big, people are being rounded up and arrested . And Lorini is taking this really, really seriously and is making a big deal about how he's going to purge Paris of all of these horrendous poisoners and witches. Now they start naming big names, big names like right up to Madame de Monteban and kind of everybody underneath that as well and that poses a big problem because he has to go after them as well. He can't not do that. He can't just say well because they're rich I'm going to I'm going to let you go can't do that. So he starts having to br ing them in. Now this is very different because they can hire lawyers and things to defend themselves. Some of them freak out, some of them do stand their ground and it's like I absolutely what the hell are you talking about? And that makes the court look faintly ridiculous. But once they've got onto Madame de Montespan, the favourite mistress of Louis XV , now all hell breaks loose because they've got their big name now and they start to say things like she was involved in a r itual sacrifice, that there was a magician, a defrocked priest who cut baby's throats open over her naked body and that it was like it's really like it's as extreme as it possibly can be. And obviously, Louis is being told all of this, he knows all of this. And as soon as it hits Monte Span, he shuts it down. What he tries to do is he tries to get all records relating to her name taken out, like redacted. And it's very difficult for us to imagine today, but imagine that there is a huge scandal in which children are being hurt and very, very rich people are at the heart of this. And then it goes right up to the very top of government and instead of releasing all of the information, they release heavily redacted files and then just try to move on. Don't know what you're talking about It's very, very difficult for us to imagine how hard that would be. And then imagine like some big cultural names are being implicated in this as well. People you never thought would be involved in it. Yes. It's very much like that . So now Lorini is angry as well because he can't properly investigate this if he can't refer to Monteban. Yeah. He can't. And it may have been one of the reasons why these women keep saying her name because they kind of know that is that he's not going to prosecute them because it's too close to the king. And eventually the king shuts it all down and eventually all the files are burnt, but not before like thirty seven people are burnt to death. Okay as witches. We're gonna come to how that process comes about . I think where we find ourselves now is such a pivotal point in this history because we are essentially at Versailles, not just Versailles, but we have we have penetrated the walls of Versailles now. And of course, in that atmosphere, we have people vying for position to get as close as possible to the absolute monarch, by the way. This is also, you know, you talk about the idea of belief and superstition and witchcraft, but like they believed the king was divinely appointed by God. So it's not that weird to think that actually somebody might have other powers elsewhere . And so now they're all vying for these positions . The king is upset that Monte Span has been implicated here. Yeah. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about how those executions came about and what exactly it did to power structures in seventeenth century France. Right, so you said Louis moves to shut this shit down . But at the same time we know that there are executions afoot . So between the shutting down and making this go away , someone quite a few people are going to pay a price here . So how does that come about? How do we get investigations even if it's not into Monte Span? So it's mostly poor people that are investigating fortune tellers, anyone who has any connection with that. Like I said, by the end of it, the accusations getting increasingly tenuous. At the center of this is La Voisin , Marie Bossay and Marie Vigeraux, and a few other magicians who were in this as well. Women? No, no, there were men involved there was was there one guy whose name escapes me and there was another one who was a defrocked priest but they're all kind of being lumped in together so it isn't just all women they are all executed quite horribly as well. They are burnt alive and some of the methods are really nasty. Hamlin, the servant who kind of kicked this all off with Madame D'Arubri, he got broken on the wheel. It's really, really nasty way to go. So people are paying the price and then there's people are just locked in prison just awaiting trial, hundreds of them. Like due process isn't a great thing at this point. So they're just kind of languishing in jail wondering what the hell is going on. The king moves to shut this down, but now he has to also distance himself from Monte Span. Right, because she's the name has been solid and we can see how this stuff works todayay I alluded to the Epstein list, but like look at how that taint works. Even people like how many pictures do you see circulating of like you met Jeffrey Epstein? It's like they may have just met him apart and shaking his hand but that picture's there, the name is there. Absolutely. And now there's a tint to it, isn't there? People it doesn't matter if like maybe that was the only time you met him is if your name is in that file, then there is a mark on you. We are recording this in May twenty second ofs may twenty six. And at this moment in time, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is clinging on for dear life for various and many reasons, but central to that is his ite tenuous links it is to the Epstein Files because he's not in the Epstein files , but somebody he appointed to his government is in the Epstein Files by lots . And so this is the tint you're talking about. aly It under, itmines authority . Do you make that mistake, you hang out with that person? That's it. That's not. And you don't distance yourself enough from that. Then you kind of get to understand the position that Louis, even as an absolute monarch, he is surrounded by these powerful aristocrats and you can understand the tenuous position it puts him in. I love this. I have some stats here from what you're talking about about court life at this time and what's going on in terms of the numbers. And one of the things that's talking about during these investigations is that the court was hung in black, lit by torches, that's so dramatic. But here's some numbers. They had four hundred forty two suspects overall , three hundred sixty seven orders of arrest , about thirty, as you're saying, thirty odd people were sentenced to death for witchcraft and poisoning. Two additionally died during torture . Shidload, I think that's the official numerical gauge. Shidload of courti flee into exile . Loads of other people are sentenced to hard labour and the numbers it's not exactly as with all of these things it's hard to know the exact numbers of all of the things that are being really impacted by, but certainly the point being with all of these numbers and allusions to numbers is this is widespread. Yeah. This is it's all people are talking about across French high society low and high. It's huge. And also there's a culture of fear now as well of like , do you believe what's happening? And suddenly it just seemed like that anybody could be poisoned, anybody could be a victim. Who is this mysterious cabal of poisoners who go all the way up to high society and people are believing the worst conspiracy theories and it's a really, really frightening and scary time. We can be very blasse about the history when we're talking about history, but to watch someone being burnt to death holy fuck. Like that's it would have been terrifying then it'd be terrifying now. And they're watching that like quite regularly happen and these people and of course they're admitting it as well. That's the that's the really scary thing is that they go yep, definitely I did that, please don't torte me anymore but they did and they do. And it wrecks French society and then it just has to get shut down by the king. It has to, he can't let this get to him. Monteban is accused of going to buy love spells to keep the king's interest, but also of trying to poison his new favorite mistress. There's always a new favorite mistress . Now, what is the impact of this, do you think? Like what does it tell us about that society , courtly society and wider society in the mid to late seventeenth century in France? What is this letting us see about that period of time? How fragile it is, I suppose that it can be very easy crumble very easily and also that this is a time that's supposed to be of like enlightenment and reason and thought and then just everything comes crashing down with these accusations of witchcraft and poison. The thing is is I think that some of it might have been true Like it's very easy for us to look back and go it was all complete nonsense that never happened. But you do have to remember is that they had a really strong belief in magic and potions and that you could affect the future. They would have been going to palm readers. They would have been going to Fortune tellers. It was very fashionable . You might go and get somebody to brew you a love spell if you wanted to keep the king's attention. People might do that. They might go to somebody to say, Could you give me some poison? We know that po isoning syndicates existed. I mean, it was all I don't think that there were black masses and babies being sacrificed by the king's mistress, but I wouldn't put it past her to have paid for a love potion. Can I ask as well just as a way of closing the conversation out? We started talking about Marie Dubray and then we're finishing with Lavoson and the king and all that. Is there ever a direct that we know of a direct illusion back to Marie Dubray? Do they ever go? Well , she said this. She kept saying there was a network or is it just used afterwards as a Oh yeah she actually and she happened to say this. Is it kind of coincidental link or do they refer back? It was the same police officer Lorenie who is investigating all of this. So he would have been, I don't think there's anything on record of him going, look, see she said that , but he investigated all of this. So he'd been hot on the trail right from the beginning from the early days of this, and there's no doubt that the Marquise de Branville's case influenced what went on and as you said, set the stage for this. Look, there's more people doing this. And what these is, there probably was . Life was cheap and as we said right at the beginning, poison is a horrendously effective way to get rid of a lot of problems for it. It was called inheritance powder at the time. There's something like that. There's such people were doing this. So you've got this half mixture of truth but also like nonsense and paranoia and fear, but a culture of palmistry and like folkloric stuff that people have been doing for centuries which now all of a sudden looks like witchcraft . It's very easy I think as well to forget the difference in seventeenth century France between how we view the correspondence between life and death now and how they viewed it then and how murder and killing and killing they wouldn't always have associated with murder , how those things were more part of everyday life . People are armed, people are wearing their swords for a reason . There are expectations of what taking a life could mean than we have today . So we do see this thing of going, oh my God, you have to sit down and plot the demise , the murderous demise of somebody else . That's a very twenty first century mindset on the ending of one's life in many ways. And we, I think , is what that's one of the things that we would find difficult to put ourselves in that mindset and we can't, of going how , as humans, could have manipulated the lifespan in the seventeenth century, there were different parameters. Yeah. Murder was still murder was still illegal. Don't get me wrong, there were still laws in place , but the ways in which we were late to death in the seventeenth century, it's not the same. It's not the same at all. You would have been surrounded by death. You would certainly have known people that died, siblings probably would have died. It'd be absolutely everywhere. And now today we're much more compassionate and we have, you know, like lives matter and all lives are important, not in seventeenth century France. No, no, if talked to an aristocrat, they couldn't give a shit about you. Yeah. They would unplug your life support machine to charge their phone. They could not give . And famously they, had phones and life support machines , Francis. Like life is cheap. And as we said right at the beginning is that there are systems set up where the only way that you might be able to get out of something is to kill somebody . Don't do it, like no again, I think we said that quite a bit. This is a wonderful thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great , like I haven't availed it myself, but at least I know it's there. Dick, don't be like going to find fortune tellers and palmists in the Yorkshire area. Have you ever been to an Etsy witch? Not been to. Have you ever employed an Etsy witch? I have never employed sometimes when I get a bad review I think about doing it because you can't you can't reply publicly but you can curse people privately. I've never done it, but I hear people all the time now are like go to an Essi Witch. Yeah, yeah. Well, you want to be careful because if there's another Bruha , they'll be the first people called in. Oh yeah, good. Yeah. Cursing people were on very shaky ground at the minute. But then things you'd have to admit it. And then like maybe this podcast would be played back of like you were laughing there. You were talking about going to CNN which is that something that could be evidence and you can see how this just all snowballs ridiculously. Listen, they'll go for you before they go for me . Yeah, yeah, that is that is no way that they can you'll be you'll reckon Yeah. And I'll just kind of disappear. You'll just play the male privilege card, just excuse me, patriarchy. She's a woman over there. There is no way that I will do it. She talks about sex get her. Yeah, have you listened to her podcast The Filth? I would stand a chance . No, not doing it. Right, that's enough of us for this episode. Thank you for joining us on After Dark. If you are not already joining us on YouTube, we now film and broadcast all of these episodes. So if you're only listening on podcast platforms, go over to our YouTube channel and you can find us there. If you have an idea for an episode, you can email us on afterdark at historyhit. com. You can find me at Antony Delaney History, Kate. Where can they find you? Oh, they can find me at Dr. Kate Lister. On TikTok and Definitely on Instagram. I think TikTok is slightly different. I think it's just Kate listed, but it's got the blue tick so you'll know me. Finder. She's there. I'm there . And it is the first of four episodes that we're going to be doing with Kate. You're going to find far more sexy dark histories in the coming weeks . Leave us a five star view wherever you get your podcast. It helps other people to discover us as well. And if you're in the mood to discover, have you heard of betwixt the sheets? Kate, tell them what they can find on your very own podcast? They can find a lot of sex, scandal and the history of society. We have a bit of a giggle reading around in the pants of history. that's good. You said that's a thing, isn't it? I'm just not yeah. fifteenth . And also award winning if you don't mind. I am award winning. Yes, yes, finally, not award nominated . Endlessly award nominated award nominated. We're still in that racket. She broke through She's the pioneer. It's only the worst is just I got we never won. That's what you have now? I have now. Yep, award winning. Right, go and listen to Patricks of the Sheets, listen to us and watch us on YouTube, and I'll see you next time. Thank you