Do You like book The Affair Of The Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, And Satanism At The Court Of Louis XIV (2004)?
The sensational subtitle of this book does it an injustice, because its author made a serious effort to sweep away the layers of rumours and scandal, and reduce the "affair of the poisons" to its true proportions. More than an account of crime, this is the story of an aberration in policing. Probably Louis XIV and the man he appointed to fight what looked like a wave of poisoning and blasphemy, La Reynie, were moved by a genuine desire to eradicate a serious threat to French society. But they were soon lead astray by their reliance on increasingly fantastic "confessions" of people who had nothing to lose, acccounts that were often extracted by torture or the threat of torture. The author has carefully studied the surviving legal documents, and they reveal how the "affair" was as much a construct of the imagination than a real criminal problem. Although some genuine cases of poisoning were revealed during the investigation.It is a very thorough book, which manages to get through a lot of background infomation and remain highly readable. One can question that it was really necessary to include an account of the mistresses of Louis XIV. There is some relevance to it, because Madame de Montespan was dragged into the scandal. But then, so was the Marquis de Luxembourg, and yet the book does not contain an account of the relation between the sun king and his generals.
—Emmanuel Gustin
This is the French version of the Salem Witch Trials, except it took place about a decade earlier and lasted longer -- the French are always so avant-garde. In a nutshell: there's mass hysteria over poisonings, which results in setting up a judicial commission. (It's really investigative and judicial.) This casts a wide investigative net that ensnares not only the usual suspects, but also some important figures at Court. Incredible claims are made. People are tortured, have hands chopped off, are beheaded, and burned. (I came away from this thinking, "Yeah, the guillotine really was a humane invention.") Legal trivia aside: The French had an interesting way of using torture to extract confessions or information: only after a defendant had been convicted would he be tortured. He'd be allowed to rest (this is usually when the defendant would offer up more information). *Then* he'd be executed.
—Shelley
This is a fascinating book, when I ordered I thought it was HF. It's a non-fiction book about a period of time I knew nothing about. The first crime in the book is about the Marquise Brinvilliers who was convicted of poisoning her father, her brothers and attempting to poison others in 17th c. France. Mme. Brinviller was a well connected Frechwoman and her crime and trial mesmerized France at the time. I was looking at Wikipedia about the first crime in the book and found that Dumas wrote a short work about Marquise Brinvillier, the famous female French poisoner. The Dumas work is part of his Celebrated Crime series and free at manybooks.net! True crime, 17th c. France and Dumas!
—Bernadette