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Catherine Monvoisin (maiden name Catherine Deshayes, and popularly known as "La Voisin"), was a French sorceress, who was one of the chief personages in the infamous "affaire des poisons" which disgraced the reign of Louis XIV.
Her husband, Monvoisin, was an unsuccessful jeweller, and she took to practising divination techniques such as chiromancy and face-reading in order 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 abortions and provided love powders, potions and poisons. She was promiscuous throughout her marriage, and one of her chief accomplices was one of her lovers, the magician Lesage (real name, Adam Coeuret). Her love powders included such ingredients as the bones of toads, the teeth of moles, Spanish flies, iron filings, human blood and the dust of human remains.
Gradually, the great ladies of Paris flocked to La Voisin, who accumulated enormous wealth. Her clients included: Olympe Mancini, the Comtesse de Soissons (who sought the death of the king's mistress, Louise de La Vallière); her sister Marie Anne Mancini, the Duchesse de Bouillon; François Henri de Montmorency-Bouteville, the Duc de Luxembourg; Françoise-Athénaïs, the Marquise de Montespan (another of the king's mistresses); and the Comtesse de Gramont ("La Belle Hamilton"); among many others.
La Voisin was eventually caught up in the Poison Affair ("L'affaire des poisons"), a murder scandal in France during the reign of King Louis XIV which launched a period of hysterical pursuit of murder suspects, during which a number of prominent people and members of the aristocracy were implicated and sentenced for poisoning and witchcraft.
The furor began in 1675 after the trial of Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was forced to confess to poisoning her father and siblings. She was sentenced to death and, after torture with the water cure (being forced to drink sixteen pints of water), was beheaded and burned at the stake. This case drew attention to a number of other mysterious deaths, and many fortune-tellers and alchemists suspected of selling not only divinations, séances and aphrodisiacs, but also "inheritance powders" (i.e. poison), were rounded up and tried.
La Voisin's testimony implicated a number of important individuals in the French court, particularly the king's mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, who she claimed had bought aphrodisiacs and performed black masses with her in order to gain the king's favour. La Voisin was convicted of witchcraft and poisoning and was burned in public on the Place de Grève in the centre of Paris in 1680.
Everything came to a fiery end for Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin — a 40-year-old fortune teller, accused sorceress, and convicted serial killer better known as "La Voisin" ("The Neighbor") — on February 22, 1660.
After finding her guilty of poisoning and witchcraft, French authorities executed La Voisin by burning her at the stake before a crowd of onlookers at the Place de Grève in Paris.
The decree came on the heels of the Affair of the Poisons, a bizarre and shocking murder scandal among French aristocracy in which La Voisin proved to be the central figure.
During her trial, La Voison proudly declared that she had ritually sacrificed more than 2,500 infants and children to Satan.
She went on to claim that she took out thousands of other victims by way of "inheritance potions," which were nothing more than poisons she sold to jealous lovers and greedy family members.
La Voisin even boldly declared that numerous members of King Louis XIV's court and other highborn Paris power brokers, along with scores of Catholic clergymen, had paid handsomely for her "divination" services and to participate in her blood-soaked "Black Sabbat" ceremonies.
Still, she never named any specific names, even after being tortured barbarically for days on end.
It was a long and freaky road to all that, though. La Voisin was born penniless and married a deadbeat at 20. She used her husband's failed jewelry store to build a strong business of her own by practicing folk medicine and performing abortions.
From there, she peddled astrological readings and spell-castings, along with "aphrodisiacs" and other occult-based concoctions, to the wealthiest and most prominent women of Paris.
Soon enough, La Voisin and her enchantments became the toast of the town.
As La Voisin's reputation escalated, so did the elaborateness of her operations and outrageousness of her undertakings.
She attracted a cult of worshipful followers, and hired poisoners to insure her "spells" worked. To secure a steady supply of infants for sacrificial purposes, she even created a home for unwed mothers financed by her upper-crust clients!
Sick and evil? Yes. Kind of impressive at the same time? Well ... make your own call.
La Voisin mounted her pricey, exclusive Black Sabbat liturgies in an underground temple inside her stately home. She is said to have served as the high priestess, adorned in a purple cloak embroidered with 200 eagles. Even then, under those weird circumstances, fashion really mattered in Paris.
Gnarly touches included a prayer book bound in human flesh, urine in place of holy water, and fresh-caught toads serving as croaking communion wafers. The altar was a live, nude girl. If the client who requested the rite was female, she herself provided altar duties.
Each Sabbat climaxed with a priest holding a baby aloft and slitting the child's throat, then draining the blood into a chalice atop the human altar.
Believe it or not, these things got to be pretty popular with 17th-century France's equivalent of Le Kardashians.
In fact, in 1667, Madame de Montespan, the official royal mistress of the King Louis himself, hired La Voisin to perform a Black Sabbat that she hoped would secure her position in the palace.
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It seemed to work — for a while (kings are no different than any other male big shots, after all).
Five years later, Madame de Montespan employed La Voisin's Black Sabbat services again. After Louis XIV's eyes continued to wander despite their previous spell, Madame de Montespan wanted him poisoned, but a botched plan led to the king's sister-in-law, the Duchess d'Orleans, ingesting the toxic brew instead.
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The king demanded swift and savage justice. Numerous noblemen and women fled the country. Among those left behind, along with the occult practitioners with whom they acted in cahoots, the court executed 36 individuals found guilty of being somehow connected to the Satanic shenanigans.
The most notable among those, of course, was La Voisin. Still, to her last moments, she never ratted out Madame de Montespan or any of her other other clients. Even while literally going down in flames, honor among witches runs hot.
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