Blood Work (21 page)

Within weeks of the transfusions, Perrine testified, her husband's behavior became erratic. He went from one cabaret to another, where he drank, smoked, and flirted with other women. The dutiful Perrine claimed that she helped her husband nurse his hangovers. She mixed “strong water” (a form of alcohol) in his broth in order to help relieve his headaches. And, as final proof of her affections, she quietly told Ormesson that she had even bedded him four times in the weeks following his transfusions. Ormesson asked the widow if her decision to bed her husband was one of which his doctors would have approved. No, she explained, they had expressly forbidden the couple to have intercourse, for fear that the act would overheat the husband's blood and invite his frenzy to return.
⁸

And the neighbors had more incriminating stories to tell. At all hours shouts and screams could be heard from the Mauroy home as the couple fought bitterly. But now Mauroy was not the only one to become violent during their disputes. According to these witnesses, Perrine “gave [her husband] many strokes…[and] having once received a box on the ear from him, she said, he should repent it, or he should die on it.”
⁹
The neighbors testified that Perrine made good on her promises. They claimed that she “made a show of tasting [her broths] herself” to reassure her increasingly suspicious husband that his food was safe. Yet on more than one occasion, one witness had seen her cast “down on upon the ground, what she had in the spoon.”
¹⁰
What was more, neighbors had seen “certain Powders” in Perrine's home, powders that—they were sure—were poisonous. Later in the trial Denis also testified that he had heard Mauroy scream in terror when he and Emmerez had arrived at his home to perform the
third transfusion. The man howled with panic that his wife had been making plans to get rid of him.

On the face of things, the evidence against Perrine Mauroy was meager and based only on hearsay. One is also left to wonder why an otherwise shrewd enough woman would have been so public with her animosities, at least according to the neighbors. Moreover, if she had been part of the higher classes to whom she was now pleading her case, the evidence would have not been enough to implicate her directly in what was increasingly looking like murder by poison. Yet justice in seventeenth-century France was not blind, particularly not in the courts of the Châtelet, where judges had seen and heard every crime imaginable among the populace. Perrine was not only less articulate and had fewer resources than Denis, she had also been accused of a crime that the king's police chief, Nicolas de la Reynie—and by extension his judges—could not have loathed more: poison.

As the Duc de Saint-Simon, the celebrated memoirist of Louis XIV's reign, remarked: “It seems that there are, at certain moments, crimes which become the fashion, like clothes. Poisoning was
à la mode
at this time.”
¹¹
The most famous yet most elusive figure in the lethal world of poison was Catherine Deshayes. Operating under the name La Voisin, Deshayes lived in the village of Villeneuve, on the outskirts of Paris at the dead end of the abysmal rue Saint-Denis. For decades she had opened her home to a parade of women seeking assistance in seducing love interests, removing rivals from their paths, or eventually snuffing out a lover, a husband, or a wealthy relative. There was no adulterous condition that an “inheritance powder” or “soup from Saint Denis” could not cure.
¹²

Despite Reynie's brutal attempts to crack down on criminal activities in Paris, the police chief had frustratingly little control over La Voisin's network of sorcery and poison. While Perrine
Mauroy was supposedly preparing deadly powders for her husband, the king's premier mistress herself was making her first visit to La Voisin. Between 1666 and La Voisin's arrest in 1679, the Marquise de Montespan regularly employed the sorceress's services to cast love spells and to create custom love potions so that she might retain the king's ever-fickle affections. After three years of secret court hearings, La Voisin was publicly beheaded in 1682—but not before more than four hundred people, many from the highest levels of Parisian society, had been accused of dabbling in poison. The Marquise de Montespan was among them. She was accused of sticking pins in a wax doll to punish Louis XIV for his affairs, and even of discussing with La Voisin the possibility of poisoning him. Louis was said to have been devastated by this news and other stories of evil in his court, but Montespan was never punished formally for her transgressions. She spent the last years of her life in self-exile at a convent in the provinces, far from the probing and accusatory eyes of the court.

The Affair of the Poisons—as this sordid case was eventually called—had more than convincingly shown how easily death could be orchestrated in late-seventeenth-century France. Rich and poor alike had ready access to local “sorceresses” of varying social standing who created secret and deadly herbal distillations containing mandrake, ergot, opium, juniper, and other substances. According to existing documents related to the Denis trial, the widow Mauroy had chosen a less exotic way to dispose of her husband. Perrine gave her husband broths loaded with arsenic, which had the advantage of killing its victims slowly and imperceptibly. Readily available in apothecary shops for use as rat poison, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were indistinguishable from those of other maladies that regularly haunted early Europeans: cholera, dysentery, and plague.

Denis and Emmerez had made no note of diarrhea and vomiting during their last fateful visit to the Mauroy home. However, both said that Mauroy had looked more emaciated than usual and, of course, had exhibited intensely delusional behavior. Furthermore, police investigators claimed that a cat had died not long after having been administered “powders” from a vial they had found at the Mauroys' while collecting evidence against Perrine. However, the most damning evidence of all was Mauroy's mental state itself. Arsenic is harmful to the nervous system, and common symptoms of arsenic poisoning include delirium, tremors—and seizures.

Having heard all the testimony against Perrine, Judge Defita exonerated Denis of all accusations that his transfusions had killed Mauroy. The widow was formally charged with murder and promptly taken away. Beaten and abused as Perrine had been during most of her marriage, this fact was not taken into account in the judge's ruling. From this point forward she disappears from the historical record. This leaves us to assume that she spent her last days—however many there were—in one of the Grand Châtelet's horrific prison cells. Life had not been kind to Perrine, and early modern justice would do her no favors.

 

A
lthough Judge Defita had declared Perrine fully responsible for her husband's death, he also confidently stated his belief that she likely had help. Perrine seemed an improbable candidate for such a well-thought-out plan. Moreover it was clear that she barely had the resources to take care of basic needs, much less purchase poison. As much evidence as had been presented against Perrine Mauroy, some key aspects of the case remained unclear. Defita asked three questions: Where did the widow get the powders that the neighbors had seen? Why did she give them to her husband? And most important of all, by whose suggestion?

Denis had stated in his initial complaint and in the trial at the
Châtelet that Perrine had tried to blackmail him. The widow admitted that some physicians had visited her in the days following her husband's death and had offered her a large amount of money in return for filing a murder case against Denis. Likewise, during the trial one of the neighbors testified that a Paris physician had also visited his home and offered him twelve pieces of gold “if he would depose that Mauroy died in the very act of the transfusion.”
¹³
While all the witnesses made reference to these mysterious physicians at some point during the trial, the conspirators' identities were never formally revealed in the court proceedings.

Most people familiar with the case or the controversies surrounding transfusion in France in the 1660s would have had their own suspicions regarding the identities of the “Enemies of the Experiment,” as Denis called them. And Denis himself may have whispered their names to Commissioner Le Cerf when he made his initial complaint. In the end Defita declared that the matter of Perrine's accomplices was “important enough to inquire into the bottom of it.” For the unnamed physician and others who “solicited her with money to prosecute those that had made the operation and who had been seen with her,” a day would soon be set to appear personally before the Criminal Lieutenant.
¹⁴

Denis breathed a sigh of relief. The court had sided in his favor, and it seemed likely that Perrine's accomplices would be brought to justice. But he could not have been prepared for what followed next. Defita concluded his judgment by stating unequivocally that, from this point forward, “no transfusion should be made upon any human body but by the approbation of the physicians of the Parisian Faculty [of Medicine].”
¹⁵
The irony of the situation was clear to Denis and to all: The judge had just placed the future of transfusion in the hands of men who would never again allow it to be performed.

Denis refused to let the matter drop. He remained convinced
of the usefulness of transfusion—and especially of his right to perform experiments to perfect it. Soon Denis was making the rounds of various members of the medical school. He was not only pleading his case but collecting signatures. One month later he was proud to report that seven or eight physicians out of a body of over a hundred had signed.
¹⁶

When it became clear that his petition would be insufficient to bypass the Châtelet ruling, Denis turned once again to his benefactor, Henri de Montmor. The nobleman's reputation in the scientific community and in social circles had been tarnished in the wake of the new Academy of Sciences, but his connections in the legal world of late-seventeenth-century France remained strong. As a lawyer who had held the title of Master of Requests in parliament, Montmor understood French judicial procedures and knew where strategic opportunities were to be found.
¹⁷
And, just as important, the nobleman had the means to foot Denis' ever-mounting legal bills.

With Montmor's help Denis appealed Châtelet's de facto ruling against transfusion to parliament. Sitting across the river from the Châtelet on the Île de la Cité, parliament was the country's highest and most prestigious legal body. In contrast to the Grand Châtelet, where citizens of any ilk could bring their complaints to commissioners and where the city's worst criminals were brought to die, the proceedings of parliament were largely
huis-clos
(closed-door) affairs. It served as a supreme court of sorts for high-profile criminal cases, which were tried in the turreted Chambre de la Tournelle.

While there was certainly a criminal component to his case, Denis and his lawyers instead brought their appeal to the Grand'Chambre, which took on all cases involving corporate bodies such as hospitals, guilds, and universities. In doing so the transfusionist had made clear his intention to take on the
Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. Parliament had shown itself willing to go against the medical school a year earlier when it declared—against the strong resistance of the faculty—that antimony and other chemical remedies were permissible in medical practice. Denis remained hopeful that the parliament would stand up once again, and rule that transfusion need not fall within the jurisdiction of the intensely traditionalist school.

Broadsides were plastered on the walls of buildings in the Latin Quarter and throughout the main thoroughfares of Paris. These large, cheaply printed posters had once shared the extraordinary news of the madman Mauroy's remarkable cure by transfusion.
¹⁸
Now they were covered with new ones announcing the upcoming hearing at parliament. Blood transfusion was on trial, they declared. And all of Paris waited eagerly to hear what the verdict would be.

The trial that took place on November 28, 1669, was closed to the public, but it was by no means a small affair. Well-dressed coachmen navigated elaborately decorated carriages through the large gates of the parliament complex as they delivered some of the highest-ranking men of French society to the illustrious Grand'Chambre. Crown princes and dukes joined the archbishop of Paris as ex officio members of the court. They all settled into the richly upholstered chairs that awaited them. And a “world of other great persons, men and women” murmured to each other eagerly as they waited for the show to begin.
¹⁹

If the courtroom's gold-leaf mirrors, its embellished walls, and heavy drapery looked fit for a king, it was because they were. It was here in the Grand'Chambre that the French kings had held critical
lits de justice
(literally, beds of justice). The king traveled from his stately home at the Louvre to meet formally with parliament when he did not see eye to eye with its leaders there. Since the 1661 trial of Nicolas Fouquet and what amounted to
the unceremonious dismissal of the legendary
parlementaire
Olivier Lefèvre d'Ormesson, the judges and lawyers in this highest French court had become decidedly more docile. Official meetings between the king and the courts became fewer and farther between as the young Louis XIV successfully consolidated his power as Sun King: No one dared go against him, and he would soon have no further need for the
lits de justice
.
²⁰

Denis should have known that transfusion stood no chance in the king's courts. But the line between an overabundance of hope and quixotic delusion is rarely clear. Throughout the course of his career, the transfusionist failed to recognize the extent to which the culture of medicine and science in the seventeenth century was organized according to a strict hierarchy built around money, power, and reputation. As an outsider by both birth and training, Denis also failed to appreciate how unyielding this closed world was. He delighted in breaking its rules and was convinced that, one day, he would be accepted in the inner sanctum on his own terms, in his own way, and entirely for who he was. He could not have been more wrong.