La Voisin - Activity

Activity

During her work as a fortune teller, she noticed the similarities between her customers wishes about their future: almost all wanted to have some one fall in love with them, that some one would die so that they might inherit, or that their spouses would die, so that they might marry some one else. Initially, she told her clients that their will would be true if it was also the will of God. Then, she started to recommend to her clients some action that would make their dreams come true. These actions were initially to visit the church of some particular saint; eventually, she started to sell amulets and recommend magical practices of various kinds. The bones of toads, 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.

Finally, she started to sell aphrodisiacs to those who wished for people to fall in love with them, and poison to those who wished for some one to die. Her knowledge of poisons was not apparently so thorough as that of less well-known sorcerers, or it would be difficult to account for Louise de La Vallière's immunity. The art of poisoning had become a regular science at the time, having been perfected, in part, by Giulia Tofana, a professional female poisoner in Italy, only a few decades before La Voisin.

She arranged black masses, where the clients could pray to the Devil to make their wishes come true. During at least some of these masses, a woman performed as an altar, upon which a bowl was placed: a baby was held above the bowl, and the blood from it was poured in to the bowl. She had a large network of colleagues and assistants, among them Adam Lesage, who performed allegedly magical tasks; the priests Étienne Guibourg and abbé Mariotte, who officiated at the black masses; and poisoners like Catherine Trianon.

La Voisin had many clients among the aristocracy and made a fortune from her business. Among her noted clients were countess de Soissons, duchess de Bouillon; Comtesse de Gramont ("la belle Hamilton"), François-Henri de Montmorency, duc de Luxembourg, princesse Marie Louise Charlotte de Tingry, marchioness Benigne d'Alluye, countess Claude Marie du Roure, count de Clermont-Lodéve, countess Jacqueline de Polignac, duchess Antoinette de Vivonne, Marquis Louis de Cessac, Marquis Antoine de Feuquieres and Marechal de la Ferthe.

La Voisin resided at Villeneuve-sur-Gravois, where she received her clients. She tended to her clients all day, and entertained at parties with violin music in her gardens at night, attended by Parisian upper class society. The house also included a furnace for the bodies of dead babies, who were then buried in the garden. She regularly attended at the services at the church of the Jansenist abbé de Sant-Amour, principal at the Paris University, and godmother of her daughter was the noblewoman de la Roche-Guyon. She supported a family of six, including her mother, and among her lovers were the executioner Andre Guillaume, Latour, vicomte de Cousserans, count de Labatie, the alchemist Blessis, the architect Fauchet and the magician Adam Lesage. At one point, Adam Lesage tried to induce her to kill her husband, but she regretted the plan and aborted the process. La Voisin was interested in science and alchemy and financed several private projects and enterprises, some of them made by con artists who tried to fool money out of her. Privately, she suffered from alcoholism, was apparently abused by Latour, and engaged in severe conflicts with her rival, poisoner Marie Bosse.