POISONING AS A PINE ART.

Otago Witness, Issue 2201, 7 May 1896, Page 49

POISONING AS A PINE ART.

Chimes and' Superstitions Made Possible in the Past by Ignorance of MEBiOINE.

The noble art of poisoning had been flourishing since history began. The c trlieat monarchs had need of it. Even before the Roman Empire had developed the full perfections of the trade, the republic bad produced a female monster, Hieronyma Sparra, who was the chief agent for those 150 Roman dames who had, as Livy says, poisoned their various relatives: And for a long while the drug remained the same ; for Locusta's fatal powders and the deadly grains in Mithridates's ring were of 'the same white arsenio that solved political problems in the seventeenth centuiy. This and the cheaper yellow variety formed the staple of the Italian poisoners' trade, which only refiaed upon the various methods with which the same drug could be need as time went on. It was a gruesome emblem for a great Italian house, that serpent of the Viscontis. Little wonder that when old Gian Galeazzo's daughter came to marry the brother of the young King of France all the woes of the distracted country the madness of the King himself, were put down to Italy, " that old enchantress,- with the fatal gift of beauty." -And when, in the next centary, Catherine de Medicis came out from Florence to the throne of France, it was felt that from the 'country of the Bargias no good thing could" come. Rene, the Florentine, and Cosmo Ru'ggieri' were in her train ; the " Court perfumers" — inncoent appellation, yet not without quggestiveness. When into the midst of a medical and scientific ignor-ance-as gross as has been indicated, these subtle influences penetrated can it be wondered- at that the French Court became little better than the charnel-house of the Borgias themselves? The spectre of a hideous death stalked everywhere about the land, a contagion ° of fe&r paralysed' the sources of life; Jeanne d' Albert, the mother of the fam0.0.3 Henry of Navarre, died after wearing her present, of some perfumed gloves ; Court ladies perished miserably after tasting the royal sweet meats and confectionery. Tnearsanic was working well ; and as it could solve «very mystery, so all of the thousand illnesses— then so inexplicable — were justly, and unjastly, too, put down to it.

The doctors and the druggists wera powerless alike to prevent attack or to heal or to discover traces after death. Some few of the noblest intellects of the age, like Ambroise Pare, strove to discover antidotes. Bub they were powerless against the mass of ignorance and superstition which they had to fight, against the unscrupulous audacity of those who swept away remorselessly all obstacles to their own- power by the secret and unerringly fatal methods of the poison. The Jews were popularly supposed to distribute the deadly drugs which the Italians fabricated, and that their trade was flourishing may be inferred from the confession of a prisoner that besides two Pope 3no less than 60) lesser notabilities had been done to death by the sole agency of the squa tofana, the poison most fashionable early in the seventeenth century.

Between 1631 and 1682 a few royal ordinances vainly tried to regulate the promiscuous sale of poisonous druga, but nothing availed to stem the tide of crime. Through the vapours of the crucible?, above the lerpous mists of the alembics, peered the bright, cruel eyes of the Bcinvilliers, a woman beautiful as tne mornIng, with a ghoulish vampire in her heart. In the attics of the poor and in the salons of the rich she plied her hideous trade and watched unmoved the tortures of the victims she had doomsd to agonising death. The shrisks and blasphemies of Buffering humanity seemed but to enhance the bloom upon her cheeks ; she seemed to sleep the better for the sight of bloodshot eyes that strained and started in their sockets while the poison slowly burnt its way until the quivering flesh grew still. There was a taint within her, kindred with the grave, inhuman, horrible; that recklessness in crime and hideous triumphing in others' anguish which seems to be the mark of female wickedness in all its most appalling forms. For as sin, in any shape, shows more repulsive in a woman— the natural home of beauty and of good— than In more brutal man, so there are, apparently, in the ungoverned weaknesses of a wicked woman far deeper abysses of loathsome criminality than are possible to the coarser fibre of the male. Saoh criminals would in these days be meroifully recognised as monomaniacs, but in the seventeenth century no such knowledge served to lessen the general panic Throughout the whole nation, from the seat; of outraged justice to tha vary steos of. . the polluted alter, the

plague-spot left nothing undefined. And the evil grew greater as tho usual phenomenon of imitative orime followed the same fatal course. Aa weaker intellects are prone to follow stronger minds, so lower criminals are found to copy the great exemplars of their hideous trade. Men and women murdered and looked on and died themselves until the very air seemed tainted with the touoh of death. It was found necessary even to olose the confessionals, for the priests found the burden of their secrets too heavy for them to bear, and there seemed no limits possible to the spread of accusation if once a crime came up for strict inquiry.

The King himself, that Louis XlV_who posed as the first and greatest monarch of his time, stood appalled upon the brink of the abyss which suddenly opened before him when he began seriously to investigate the thousand soandals of his Court. His Prime Minister, Hngues de Lionne ; his Chancellor, D'Aligre; his brother's wife, the English Princess Henrietta — all had perished in the agonies of death by poison. La Valliere and Fontanges only just escaped.

It was the astounding revelations of the trial of La Voisin which first brought this horrible conviction to the King's mind. This woman, whose real name was Catherine Deshayes, stands at the head and front of that band of dastardly assassins whose machinations were at the heart of almost every Court of Europe. In her hand she held at one time' the existence of every man and woman of importance at the Court. By, direct poison, by the most ghastly mockery of the medicinal art, by every appeal to the worst and most degrading forms of superstition, this fiend controlled the destinies of the State and worked for the moulding of her own fortunes. Wherever she might walk she left a tiail of death — death in its most revolting shapes. By terror, by cupidity, by an appeal to that thirst for power and pleasure innate in every unprincipled voluptuary, she played upon the passions of the men and women of her time. She had the genius, too, to realise — and turn invariably to her own advantage — that strange and incoherent craving of humanity in all ages to find the secret of a power greater than itself, to overthrow the limitations of mere mortal intellect. In this general craving that exists and has existed always there are at times crises of exceptional excitement. Of such a crisis La Voisin was the prophetess. Wer unmogliches geglaubt, harm unmogliches verrichten. Men askod of witchcraft aud the arts of bell the pleasures and the knowledge which the realities around them could not satisfy.

But, with all this, it must not be thought that Catherine Dashayes wasted her time on unsubstantial theories or useless queßts for the elixir or the philosopher's stone. Her aims were, far more practical. And it adds the last sordid touch of horror' to the baseness of her character to realise that she encouraged vice and crime and blasphemy and superstition simply to make her fortune with the ' good " gold coins her guilty patrons brought her. At her conviction she confessed to being within' some thousand crowns of her ideal, a palace in Venioa and a life of idle.lnxary.

The utter, demoralisation of a period which could harbour and even nourish so monstrous a creature in it* midst well-nigh baffles the imagination. But it is a fact that before the great- house in the deserted and ill-famed Quartier dcs Bonnes Nouvellas the line of carriages and chairs drew up each night, and each night saw a fresh visitor to the Temple of Death, from ' Le FeTon, the barrister's wife," to Monte3pan herself, the favourite of the King. Poisons for hated husbands, philtres for deaired swains, remedies for tainted bodies outworn .with criminal debauch — all could be had for good gold money from our discreet La Voisin. . And it is among the wives of lawyer* and. of doctors that the prophetess has greatest popularity. She is secure from vengeance, for the horrible alliance of complicity in crime binds her to the interests of all that stand for truth and justice in the land. It 'seemed indeed as if the Tree of France, that noble growth of centuries, were rotten already at its base, and would soon be pluokad up— like a brand for the burning— by the Revolution, that was not long in coming. Of the many victims of La Voisin there is no space to speak. But one of them, the actres3 Da Pare, by her association with Moliere, with La Fontaine, and Ricine, had achieved a celebrity through their ienown even before her death procured her universal pity. That was an age when one party In politics determined to beat the other by fair means or by foul, and there is but little doubt that it was to the disappointment of the opposite side at her brilliant success in securing an alliance between France and Eogland that the young Henrietta, daughter of King Charles, owed her terrible and sudden death by a poisoned cap of coffee. It was Bossuet who comforted her dying hours, and it was at her funeral sermon that his famous sentence resounded in the vaults of old St. Denis— " Madame se meurt; madame cst morte 1 "

Bousuet was a brilliant exception to the pedantry and narrowness of the average ecclesiastic of his time. There is little marvel that in the struggle towards a greater knowledge and emancipation the professors of the new medicine should have found it difficult to continue within the pale of a Church which refused the mere right of inquiry and research. To their unflinching zeal and industry were due, as much as to any single influence, tho breaking up of that reign of terror of which Brinvilliers and La Voisin were the Hecates. Bub it would seem as if in superstition, as in so many other matters, there are some still unexplained oycles of recurrence in the history of human thought. And so, in the next century, we have the crisis, similar in form, though far less fatal in degree, typified by Swedenborg, by' Cagliostro, by Masmor, till in our own times the same yearning for tha unknowable, the superhuman, the immortal baa produced Blavatsky, has made the " spiritualist " possible on the one hand, the " hypnotist " on the other. But never so clearly as in the seventh centary, nowhere so fatally as in Franoe, have the horrible results of general ignorance, of fanaticism, and of unbridled licentiousness combined been made so manifest. Those results were the prisoners from Italj,— T.A.CL ta tha New Xwk World,