Sorceress on the Seine

So I'm never sure what I'm going to write about on any given day until I've gone on Wikipedia and read the brief description of what happened 'on this day' and seen who was born, and who died and so on. Anyway, on some days, nothing of real interest happens (or it was just wars and stuff and I am so sick of military history) and on other days, like today, loads has happened. 

For example, today marks the anniversary of George Washington's birth; the anniversary of the refounding of the Serbian Kingdom; the opening of the first Woolworth's; the day the Last Invasion of Britain began (which apparently has to be capitalized...); the first national conventions of both the Republican Party and the Prohibition Party (in separate years) and Dolly the sheep was cloned (yay, science!). So all of these things are clearly very Important and Significant and such and so I was wondering how I was going to get through the mountains of information out there about them and condense it down to a few paragraphs. Also, most of these are quite famous events, so a lot of people already know loads about them, which would probably make reading this quite boring.

But then, tucked away under the 'people who died on this day' section, I discovered Catherine Monvoisin, French sorceress. And I do love magic and fantasy, so I now present the life and times of a witch (who actually is pretty interesting!)

Catherine wasn't originally a witch. Born Catherine Deshayes, around 1640, she grew up around Paris and married a jeweller called Monvoisin. Unfortunately, Mr. Monvoisin wasn't a very good jeweller and they didn't have very much money at all, so Catherine started supplementing their income by practicing medicine - giving abortions or delivering babies as a midwife to women who needed them. This was not enough, however, so Catherine gave herself the name La Voisin and started practicing 'witchcraft'. At first, this was just face and palm reading, but soon she was providing love potions and poisons, and putting on shows, assisted by the magician Lesage (who was also her lover) and a renegade priest, who would perform a black mass - a parody of the Christian mass.

The ingredients lists for her love potions have been uncovered by historians, and well...I'm just glad I didn't have to try one of the poisons.  But anyway, if you maybe have a little crush on someone who's not reciprocating, why not slip a little something in a drink for them? The little somethings you could slip in could include: bones of toads, teeth of moles, Spanish flies, iron fillings (um...?), human blood or the dust of human remains. It'll totally work.

Anyway, these potions became very popular with the many mistresses of Louis XIV, four of whom at some point went to La Voisin and asked her to supply them with a poison to kill one of the other mistresses (and at one point, even the King himself). Maybe. Possibly. The 'evidence' for this is circumspect at best and even at the time, it could never be proven. 

However, sadly for La Voisin, the King's sister-in-law had died in 1676, and her death had been attributed to poison, supposedly given to her by the 'witch' Madeleine de Brinvilliers. Though it was later proven that her death was a result of a perforated peptic ulcer (do yourself a favour and don't Google image search that. Really.) the panic as a result of her 'poisoning' was still at its peak in Paris in 1679.

When La Voisin was accused of trying to kill one of the King's mistresses, she was swept up in a tide of fear and hysteria, and was naturally found guilty, even though no one could come up with any proper evidence. She was executed on 22 February 1680, burned at the stake for being a witch.