Pascal Hérault. Empoisonnement à la Maison-Dieu: Médecine et justice en Poitou à l'époque de Louis XIV. La Crèche, France: Geste Éditions, 1999. 252 pp. Ill. Fr. F. 110.00 (paperbound, 2-910919-89-7).
"Poisoning in the Monastery." Pascal Hérault evokes Brother Cadfael and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose before he proceeds to his judicial and monastic archives to track the tenacious path of criminal law in the tiny hamlet of Montmorillon southeast of Poitiers in 1679. More as an investigatory lawyer than as a social historian, Hérault assiduously follows Judge François Dalest's interrogations of Guillaume Champignolle, the clubfoot (alias Jacques Foureau), accused of poisoning Madeleine Rozet, matron of the monastery hospital.
In fact, Champignolle/Foureau poisoned several servants at the table along with Madame Rozet, though all five survived. Following the code, Judge Dalest condemned the confessed criminal to penance, a heavy fine, and death. However, the confirmation of the Parlement of Paris was required by law, and poor Foureau was shipped off to the Île de la Cité, where the Parlement confirmed the local sentence, and ordered additionally that the body be burned and the ashes scattered to the winds. Hérault reminds us that criminal punishments in the ancien régime were meant to be public displays and to act as deterrents. The final sentence was executed before the Augustinian monastery in Montmorillon.
Unfortunately for the historian, the case was relatively straightforward and did not generate a large number of testimonials from the monastery and the adjacent village. Therefore, Hérault was unable to use his case to give depth and immediacy to the collective mentality of this rural society. Montmorillon cannot be revealed in the way that Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou was from the records of the Inquisition. Nor can Hérault effectively relate this provincial poisoning to the rash of poisonings at Versailles and elsewhere in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, he does his best to re-create the rural milieu and employs every shred of evidence to reconstruct the mental world surrounding the case. Thus he attempts to deduce popular anxiety from chronic shortages of grain and waves of disease dating back to 1610; he exposes the weight of the regular clergy in the social profile of the village; he evokes the memory of possession at nearby Loudun in 1630; he suggests that the accused's previous poisoning of Madame Rozet's cat may reflect the symbolism of sex and Satan (he cites Robert Darnton); he hints that Foureau's change of name and earlier life as a winegrower may hide identity problems à la Martin Guerre; and he identifies every drug and utensil in the apothecary's shop that supplied the "club-footed one" with the arsenic for Madame Rozet's soup. This apothecary's inventory may be this book's most important contribution to the history of medicine.
Just how successful is Hérault in using his judicial and
monastic records to re-create the world of the local monastery and the
village? His effort is heroic—bolstered by plans and pictures of
the monastery-hospital (including beds and altars), maps of the region,
reproductions of every key interrogation and confession, scalpels from
Diderot's Encyclopédie, and even a pauvre infirme
of Jerome Bosch. Nevertheless, the judicial chronicler, a tribute to
Brother Cadfael, triumphs
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over the social historian. Without more testimony, without more witnesses,
the mental-cultural world cannot be fully and authentically recaptured. At
Montmorillon the royal judiciary and police, with minimal resources,
were remarkably efficient and did not, alas, generate enough paper for
the historian.
Robert Forster
Johns Hopkins University (emeritus)
