00:01:37.600Yeah. So my book that's coming out is called The Disenchantment, and it's set in 17th
00:01:43.380century France. And it takes inspiration from basically two things that were going on at
00:01:49.000the time historically. One is the Affair of the Poisons, which was this incredible scandal
00:01:54.420that happened during the reign of Louis Quatorze, where it was believed that there had been this
00:02:02.220rash of poisonings of really prominent people. And there was a huge investigation into it. And a lot
00:02:07.780of really inflammatory allegations got kind of tossed around. And so that's one starting point
00:02:13.160for the novel. But the other starting point is the women's salon culture of the time.
00:02:17.860There were a huge number of really influential kind of proto-feminist women writers who wrote these amazing stories that haven't always been remembered and who were also very kind of outspoken about advocating for women's rights.
00:02:36.280And they lived these incredibly scandalous lives and kind of defied conventions at the time in order to live in a way that was like freer and more acceptable to them than the society at the time really would have allowed for.
00:02:50.460A lot of them wrote specifically fairy tales. And one woman who I was specifically inspired by was Madame Delnoye. Her first name is Marie-Catherine, which is the first name of the hero of the disenchantment.
00:03:06.720And a few details of my protagonist's life are taken from her life. But Madame Deneuil, Marie-Catherine Deneuil, was this amazing, fabulous, she's best remembered for her fairy tales, but she also wrote these extensive and very kind of made up and fictionalized memoirs.
00:03:27.120So she was myth-making about her life, even while she was still alive.
00:03:31.060And actually people, her contemporaries were writing about her and myth-making about her life during her life itself.
00:03:40.200And so there's this huge, there's some facts about her life that are known.
00:03:43.600And there's also a huge amount of stuff that's basically fiction, which she contributed to.
00:03:51.980It's like your comments at the end of your book.
00:03:54.100You talk about her a little bit and like what your inspirations were.
00:03:57.120And so I was like, oh, who's this ma'am? Delanoi. And so I was just like, I quickly looked her up
00:04:00.920online and I was just like, oh my goodness, what an interesting person. It's like, was she a spy?
00:04:05.200But she also wrote these fairy tales. Yeah.
00:04:08.520Yeah. She's fascinating and was maybe a spy. It's a little bit unclear. They're literally,1.00
00:04:14.720despite the huge amount of stuff that she wrote about herself and that people were writing about
00:04:19.040her, they're literally 20 years of her life where we just don't know what she did. We don't even
00:04:22.880know what country she was in. So she's born around 1650. Her exact date of birth is not known.
00:04:30.060But in 1666, she was married to this guy, François Lamotte. She would have been between 13 and 15 at
00:04:39.360the time. She was very, very young. And there's a story that her father actually arranged for her
00:04:45.560to be abducted from her convent school by Lamotte. It's not totally clear if this is true. It gets
00:04:51.300repeated in a lot of sort of older introductions to her work, her collections of fairy tales.
00:04:58.220But it's thought that actually, this might be from a memoir that was not written by her that
00:05:04.280was sort of written about her by another contemporary author. And during her lifetime,
00:05:08.760she actually, she changed the name that she published under occasionally. And there's one
00:05:13.640book where she writes a preface where she says, I have begun using my full name to publish my work
00:05:20.140because I have discovered that some other people were using it to publish novels that were not by
00:05:24.220me. And so it's not totally true. It's not totally clear whether the story about her abduction from
00:05:30.020the convent school is true or whether it's a fiction. I think the contemporary, like at this
00:05:36.060point, we think it's probably fictional. Her father basically would have been able to arrange her
00:05:42.340marriage, regardless of whether she consented to it. And she was very young at the time.
00:05:50.660And her husband, François Lamotte, who was the Baron d'Henoy, was 36 years older than her.
00:05:57.440So it was not a happy marriage. He was sort of not very well liked, even by his contemporaries.
00:06:05.040It wouldn't necessarily have been unusual for him to marry a girl who was so much younger than him.
00:06:10.760but he was also sort of, he had huge gambling debts and he was known to be not an incredibly
00:06:17.600pleasant person. So she's married to him as a young teenager and it's a very unhappy marriage.
00:06:27.840She has, directly after her marriage, she has four children in the course of about three years.
00:06:33.260two of them die. Then in beginning, two years after her marriage in 1668, she has what's called
00:06:42.320a separation of goods from her husband. And this is basically a legal arrangement that preserves
00:06:47.200her property that she brought into the marriage from his debts because he had very, very extensive
00:06:54.100debts and was terrible with money. Now, the year after this separation of goods goes into place
00:07:01.280in 1669, he is accused of treason. And the thing he's accused of treason for is speaking out
00:07:09.100against taxes imposed by the king. At the time, this was like les majestés. It was a horrible
00:07:14.400offense. He could have been executed for it. Wait, so he spoke out not against the king0.99
00:07:19.060specifically, but he spoke out against the taxes? Yeah, against taxes imposed on the nobility.
00:07:24.480So he gets supposedly caught complaining a little bit too much about his taxes.
00:07:28.560And he spends three years in the Bastille, during which presumably Marie-Catherine had a great time being free from her terrible husband.
00:07:38.560But after three years of imprisonment, he is able to successfully convince the court of his innocence.
00:07:44.640And the two men who accused him, who are often considered to be lovers of Marie-Catherine and her mother, they are imprisoned in turn and are actually executed.
00:07:58.820and I said a moment ago that he was not very popular he's actually so unpopular that when
00:08:06.000like when certain people are describing this scandal around the time that it happened they
00:08:12.320talk about his accusers while they're saying like oh yeah they falsely accused this guy of treason
00:08:16.560they're like but they were the nicest dudes like so great like he was it was not it was not like
00:08:23.260there was a huge amount of sympathy for the Baron d'Oloy, unfortunately for him. But he was able to
00:08:29.700free himself eventually. And at this point, it's a little bit unclear what happens. So Marie-Catrine's
00:08:37.740mother flees to England. And Marie-Catrine possibly follows her. But this is the period0.69
00:08:46.800where we get like 20 years where we don't know exactly what she was doing. So the story about
00:08:52.620what happens is Marie-Catherine and her mother supposedly have these two lovers and they
00:08:58.520arranged to have them accuse Marie-Catherine's horrible husband of treason. And this works for
00:09:05.220some time, but as their case is falling apart, one of them confesses and says that he was paid
00:09:11.980to do it. And that's why he made the accusation. And so the police come to arrest Marie-Catherine's
00:09:18.260mother and also to arrest her. They come to Marie-Catherine's house while she is asleep and
00:09:24.960she leaps out of bed, jumps out of a back window in her house and flees through a church and
00:09:33.080escapes detection by hiding under the beer in the church. And then she follows her mother to
00:09:37.860England and then to Spain. Wait, hiding under the what in the church? Under the beer. What's that?
00:09:42.520like the like one of like one of the altars okay um she kind of like crawls under it and the police
00:09:47.860don't see her okay so this is this is a story it's not it's not totally clear like is this what
00:09:55.000happened because she made up so many things and so many people made up things about her
00:09:59.060but supposedly she jumps out the back window of her house and she takes refuge in a church
00:10:04.160And then she disappears for 20 years. We don't know exactly what she does.
00:10:10.840In about 1885, she reappears in Paris. And for a while, she lives in a convent. She's spent a while in the convent of the Hospitalière on Rue Mouffetard. And we know this because she sends a promissory note from there to her seamstress saying that she owes her a bunch of money.
00:10:37.580and that's sort of the return address. She says she owes her over a thousand livres which was
00:10:43.980like a huge amount of money at the time and she promises to pay within six months and then at
00:10:49.780some point after that she's able to purchase a house on Rue Saint-Benoir and this is where she0.99
00:10:58.420starts hosting a salon that is frequented by artists and aristocrats and other female writers
00:11:05.500of the time. And she becomes famous for her fairy stories. And around this time, she starts
00:11:11.860publishing her work. She publishes first these two kind of religious tracks where she details
00:11:18.520all of her sins sort of vaguely. At the time, there was this sort of religious penitence in
00:11:25.660vogue at the court. And so she's writing these very kind of like, like almost genre fiction of
00:11:31.840like confessionals, but it's not totally clear how much of them is, you know, was based on her
00:11:39.120actually feeling especially penitent about what she did and how much of it was just sort of
00:11:43.200this might sell because she did need money. And she does end up later in her life being a very
00:11:48.840popular novelist and basically financing her children's lives through her writing.
00:11:54.240So when she was like, we don't know where she was for 20 years, her children and her husband were
00:12:00.200But we're all just still in Paris, just kind of like growing older.
00:12:04.780Well, she says that she's got well, at some point she goes to Spain and she takes at least one of her daughters with her.
00:12:10.600OK. She also has two more children during that time who like her husband was definitely not their father.
00:12:17.600She had them in like sometime after they were separated in 1776 and 1777.
00:12:25.640So again, like kind of close together, but quite a while after her husband had been imprisoned and she had, you know, separated from his residence and they were and he had he had basically at the time like disowned her.
00:12:38.720And he said that, like, her children, you know, he only acknowledged he only ever acknowledged two of the children that she had.
00:12:44.700And so she has these two daughters who were born significantly after she leaves her husband.0.89
00:12:49.820Of course, she couldn't get a divorce. But yeah, if you read her memoirs about traveling in Spain, it's really interesting because once or twice she mentions traveling with her daughter.
00:13:04.420but she her daughter doesn't figure very prominently in the story in many ways they're
00:13:10.940sort of they're travelogues but they almost don't read as memoirs they're full of these like
00:13:18.080kind of amazing inventions about like the you know the exotic people and um adventures in spain
00:13:26.420but the things that you might expect her to deal with like how many of your children were you
00:13:32.780traveling with and what that was like are just sort of not mentioned and instead she makes up
00:13:39.040these wonderful stories like she's talking about traveling through Catalan and she says that there
00:13:44.220is this tribe of Catalan boat girls who as children their families sends them to be brought
00:13:53.440up in this community of women and their trade is they are these Amazons who ferry travelers down
00:14:01.180the rivers and they each man their boats and they had these huge oars and they're kind of decked0.99
00:14:08.240out in these beautiful embroidered veils with gold jewelry and pearls. And, you know, some of
00:14:14.460them eventually get married and have to leave, but they have sort of grandmother matriarchs0.99
00:14:19.380of the boat girl tribe. And she tells this whole story about the boat girls and then is like,
00:14:25.360oh, also my cook hit on one of them and they tried to beat him to death with oars.
00:14:31.180like um and you're gonna look okay okay mary and katrina suspect this maybe didn't happen
00:14:39.520but it's uh you know it's amazing it's sort of it's the there are these incredibly fanciful
00:14:48.020stories and if you try to read them for information about her life it's incredibly
00:14:53.020difficult to get any information about her life from them so she has two mystery children who are
00:14:58.760both daughters. And then she returns to Paris and begins publishing her work. And she starts with
00:15:08.680this sort of penitential fiction. And very quickly, she leaves that behind. And she starts
00:15:13.620writing her scandalous memoirs about all the things that she's seen on her travels.
00:15:19.420And she also begins writing fairy tales.
00:15:24.860So I want to talk about, I know you're about to talk about this, but I just wanted to clarify
00:15:28.280because when I was reading just like really quickly, just to be kind of like, who is this
00:15:32.180person who inspired this book? She was one of the earliest people who wrote fairy tales, right?
00:15:37.940Yeah. So of course, fairy tales exist for a long time as an oral tradition. She is said to be the
00:15:44.060person who made up the term fairy tale. So before her, they would have been called a couple different
00:15:50.160things. Sometimes they're called blue stories. Sometimes they're called mother goose tales,
00:15:54.700but they you know there were all of these ways to talk about a fairy tale or a folk tale
00:15:58.900but fairy tale was not the word that was used um she is said to have been the person who invented
00:16:03.620that term how do you say that in french how do you say fairy tale in french okay which literally
00:16:09.200means fairy story yeah okay yeah yeah story stories about fairies yeah and there was a huge
00:16:15.420there was a huge boom in fairy tales at the time like uh perrot is one of the is like the male
00:16:22.020author who's most famous as a collector of fairy tales. But a lot of contemporary fairy tale
00:16:27.500writers were women. And it was partially because they became popular in salons. They could be told0.87
00:16:34.660aloud and kind of reenacted and acted out. And people would get together and tell stories and
00:16:40.660sometimes play dress up and impersonate the characters from the stories. But they supposedly
00:16:46.960began as this sort of like collective salon storytelling phenomenon. And then people began
00:16:52.540writing them down and publishing collections of them. You mentioned earlier that she was one of
00:16:57.680the people who was involved in this salon culture, right? So this was all hand in hand. It's like
00:17:02.400the fairy tales, writing the fairy tales, like these salons. And you said it was like women1.00
00:17:06.080salons? Yeah. Most salons were really run by women. One of the earliest salons that was very
00:17:13.360famous was the Salon of Madame de Rambouillet. That would have been, you know, she was like a
00:17:20.100high-ranking noble lady. And she started having these parties in her house that would happen once0.99
00:17:24.940a week. And she would receive her, like she'd invite a ton of people and the closest friends
00:17:30.560of hers would be allowed to kind of come into her bedroom and chat with her while she lay in bed.0.99
00:17:36.180And they were, but they were these kind of oases of witticism and often of kind of feminism.1.00
00:17:42.560The women who frequented these salons were called Précieuses. And in kind of in retrospect, they were very kind of ridiculed by a lot of the male classical writers of the time.
00:17:56.260they were you know kind of made fun of for being sentimental and frivolous and like you can find a
00:18:02.880lot of sort of derogatory writing about them and you know and partially this was because the style
00:18:09.820of the salon writing was often very kind of you know it was very over the top and dramatic and
00:18:16.880like there was a lot of incredible stories of like romance and wit and adventure um and it went at
00:18:24.660Like these went out of style during the Enlightenment when more realistic style, more kind of realistic and out of artist style was preferred.
00:18:31.080But also a lot of the writing about them was basically misogyny, that like there were these women who were writing novels and they were incredibly popular and admired.
00:18:41.740And they were very, very outspoken about basically women's liberation, at least if you were kind of an upper class noblewoman.
00:18:50.160And they were aware that, like, they were disenfranchised and that they could, you know, they many of them had been sort of had an experience with unhappy marriages.
00:19:01.940Like like Madame Del Noy, married at a very, very young age to a man who was horrible to her.
00:19:09.480She was not she never attempted to pretend that she liked that situation.
00:19:15.840She was very, you know, she was very outspoken about the fact that this was terrible for her.
00:19:21.420And so you had these women who were saying, like, well, marriage, as it exists in France for women, is essentially slavery.
00:19:27.480And they were demanding a more kind of equal participation in public society.
00:19:32.700And lots of male intellectuals at the time did not like that.
00:19:38.240And there is a male comment commentator at the time.
00:19:42.200I forget. He's one of two. I forget if he's Guest de Balzac or Nicolas Boulot, but he writes, actually, he dismisses the entire novel because novels were so frequently written by women.
00:19:56.360He says, you know, novels are immoral because they reverse the natural order and they make men subordinate to women instead of the other way around, as it should be.
00:20:07.000And he was able to say this because at the time, like, there were so many female novelists and the novelist was sort of such a such a female dominated genre that he just sort of dismisses it out of hand.0.53
00:20:18.040And in addition to the sort of like, you know, the intellectual writing that was coming out of these salons, there was also a certain amount of scandals. So Madame Delnoy in particular was, according to rumor, involved around the turn of the century in this murder involving her close friend, Angélique Tiquet.
00:20:42.400So Madame Tiquet, she was an orphaned heiress, and she was married off to a man who seems to
00:20:48.820have been basically after her for money when she was, again, like Madame D'Onoi, quite young.
00:20:54.720And he basically abused her. And their relationship got worse and worse until she
00:21:00.300was desperate to get away from him. And she hired a servant to kind of confront him on the street
00:21:08.520when he was getting out of his carriage and shooting with a pistol.
00:21:11.220Unfortunately, he survived and knew who had attacked him,
00:21:23.380And it's not, at the time it was rumored that Madame Delnoy,0.98
00:21:27.480who, you know, had a couple decades previously been embroiled in this scandal0.92
00:21:33.200about trying to get rid of her own husband,0.99
00:21:35.220it was rumored that Madame Delnoy had helped her plot.
00:21:38.520his death. But the accusation never really stuck to her. Only Madame de Tiquet was ever tried for
00:21:45.500it. That's one scandal that kind of comes out of the salon culture. Another would be the affair of1.00
00:21:52.440the poisons, which my book writes about, deals with quite a lot. And that was involved with
00:21:58.740another woman's salon. That would be Madame de Fonti, who ran one of the most kind of celebrated1.00
00:22:05.120salons at the time but it became embroiled in this incredible kind of witch hunt almost um
00:22:13.580so how what was the connection of that salon so i know um i've i've talked about the affair of
00:22:20.080poisons a bit i did an episode about love was an a while ago oh my god i love that love was an who
00:22:26.140like i feel i feel like i'm the only person who's like i'm kind of on love was inside oh no everyone
00:22:31.140this is to my podcast is too um so i just want to say to to the listeners like love was that shows
00:22:35.680up in your book so like she's there i was just like it's love was that i was excited but yeah
00:22:40.060she shows up in my book and she's one of the only people who i really tried to make everything that
00:22:45.780was about her accurate like there's a lot of stuff where i was like i want to um i want to be able to
00:22:50.980invent things um but with love was i went through and was like and you know um read all the accounts
00:22:56.160of her death and tried to make, um, the version of them that are in the book conform to them.
00:23:02.740So I'm curious to know, because what I recall about when I was reading up on La Vozen is like
00:23:08.480the circles in which she was dealing, like there is sort of like lower class girls and women and
00:23:14.320stuff like abortions and things she was doing. And then you're talking about the, um, the salon0.64
00:23:18.360culture, which is more like higher class people. So what's, what was the connection between the
00:23:22.880affair of the poisons in the salons? Yeah. So the way the affair of the poisons kind of,
00:23:28.340you know, the reason it became so incredibly big is because there started to be these connections0.51
00:23:37.580between la voisin's circle of like kind of working class women and fortune tellers
00:23:43.140and these really influential nobles. Early on when the fortune tellers of the affair of the1.00
00:23:50.960poisons first began being arrested, there were two women who were brought up as having
00:23:56.040purchased poison from one or the other of the fortune tellers in order to get rid of husbands1.00
00:24:02.860they hated. And these were Madame de Poulayon and Madame de Lefertier. These were noble women who0.99
00:24:09.540were from the families of parliamentary nobles. So there's this division in French culture between
00:24:15.320nobles of the sword who are generally from like older families and who are ennobled through like
00:24:20.500their military history, and nobles of the robe who are active in the legislature and the parliament
00:24:26.320and who are often ennobled a little bit more recently. And so these two women, Poulayon and
00:24:33.060Le Fertier, are from families of nobles of the robe. And Madame de Poulayon in particular
00:24:38.660was kind of famous for being kind of scandalously outspoken. She was married off very much against1.00
00:24:44.900her will and kind of really attempted to get away from her husband for quite a long time she was
00:24:50.900going to her father and saying like you know i hate him i can't live with him like please
00:24:55.420do something to get me out of here um and of course everyone in her family was like that is
00:25:00.400just tough luck for you like we do not care you you're married to him you have to live with him0.99
00:25:05.740and so supposedly she went to this fortune teller and purchased arsenic to poison him with she0.99
00:25:13.240wasn't successful. When the fortune tellers are arrested, her name comes out. And suddenly it's
00:25:19.500this huge scandal because French society basically doesn't believe that the legislature is going to
00:25:26.160be that, you know, that the sort of court system is going to be able to try these women effectively
00:25:31.580because they're so closely related to people in the government. And so they're the first two1.00
00:25:39.960noble women who are outed as having purchased poison. But what happens is there's this crackdown
00:25:47.480on all of the Parisian fortune tellers. And the police start questioning people who have been
00:25:53.860arrested and basically going out and arresting all of their associates. And what happens is as
00:26:01.080more and more people get arrested, and there's more of a panic, a lot of people start trying to
00:26:07.940figure out new people who they can incriminate the whole thing is like it's a really it's a
00:26:12.660Salem witch trials vibe yeah in a big way where it's just like absolutely yeah just people who
00:26:17.840to save themselves they start naming other people who weren't necessarily anyone but maybe it's
00:26:22.160someone who they already had beef against or it's somebody who just to save their own so it's like
00:26:26.560it's it just reminds me of that so much yeah exactly like it starts it starts out as this
00:26:31.140sort of like um you know people name people who they had grudges against and like their competitors
00:26:36.040And then as it gets bigger and bigger, they start trying to figure out like how they can maybe save themselves by like offering a bigger fish.
00:26:49.880And so a lot of these fortune tellers had ties to nobles and to salon culture because like they were doing magic tricks and they were telling fortunes and they were like offering beauty ointments and things like that.
00:27:04.260And so they start naming more and more noble clients and saying, well, actually, this person didn't just come to me to get her poem read. She came to me for abortions, or she came to me for poison to kill her family, or she came to me for black magic, you know, that was much more extreme than just getting your fortune told.
00:27:28.500And so there start to be accusations not just against these two women, who it seems likely did purchase poison, but from really kind of prominent courtiers at the time, like Madame de Soissons and a number of other people.
00:27:46.360And finally, it gets up to the king's mistress, Madame de Montespin. But a lot of these people were involved in the salon of Madame de Fontey. And Madame de Fontey, she was a noble woman who ran this very popular salon at the time.
00:28:02.660But she had actually invited at least one of the key figures in the Affair of the Poisons, the magician Lesage, to come and do magic tricks at the salon. And so he was this, his life story is incredibly interesting.
00:28:18.820He was a lover of Madame de Poison, but he had been a magician operating in Paris a few decades earlier. He was caught and he was convicted basically of blasphemy. And he was sentenced to forced labor in perpetuity on the French galley ships in the Mediterranean.
00:28:40.100So at this point, France still had a fleet of ships that were warships. They were run by slave labor. Most of it supplied by convicts, some of them criminals like Lesage, some of them Huguenots who were there because of religious persecution.
00:28:56.780so these ships were basically being sentenced to them was a death sentence it was expected that
00:29:04.900you would work until you died but lesage is sentenced to them and he returns and when people
00:29:11.140figure this out they like when the police figure this out they freak out because that was not
00:29:17.660supposed to happen and so they begin to suspect that he had a powerful protector probably he
00:29:24.200didn't. The records aren't incredibly good, but it seems that what likely happened is that there
00:29:29.220were a series, there were several galley ships that were involved in kind of a decisive naval
00:29:33.860battle. And some of the people and the remaining convicts on them were pardoned for their service
00:29:41.500in that particular battle. It seems like Lesage was probably one of them, but it's not entirely
00:29:46.660clear. At the time, they just think like, oh my God, he got sentenced to this, you know, what
00:29:53.080should be a death sentence, he should still be in the Mediterranean, and somehow he's back in Paris.
00:29:58.360And so people think either, you know, either he really can do black magic, or he has a protector.
00:30:04.580That's what I was gonna say, because you said, like, people started thinking he had a protector.
00:30:07.520And I thought you were gonna say people started thinking he's immortal or something.
00:30:11.300Yeah, because he I mean, because he said that he, you know, he, when he went into the salons,
00:30:15.600what he was doing was saying, so it was doing these magic tricks where he said, like,
00:30:19.700Like, you know, you write all of your secret desires down on this piece of paper and I'll throw it into the fire and then my familiar spirits will retrieve the paper and start to do your wishes.
00:30:32.000And he had this whole sort of system of prestidigitation where he would like substitute, crumple up the paper and he'd substitute it for a little ball, a little packet full of gunpowder and toss that into the fire.
00:30:43.560so it would make this dramatic explosion. And then later, he'd be able to take the paper back
00:30:49.500in the person's own writing and be like, you know, the angels gave this back to me. Is this
00:30:54.960what you asked for? And it was really impressive. He had this whole sort of, he was able to tell
00:31:00.320these stories and convince people that he was actually this powerful magician. And once he
00:31:06.040was arrested and he realized that he was in quite a bit of trouble, he started doing that. And just
00:31:11.900any person whose name he had. He said, oh, yes, she went to Lavoisin for this service. Lavoisin
00:31:19.960was doing Black masses for her. They were sacrificing infants. You know, I knew about,1.00
00:31:25.260you know, I only ever did sort of the fake kind of magic, but everyone else was doing it for real.
00:31:32.560He clearly thought that this might save himself. And a lot of his stories were incredibly
00:31:39.840contradictory. He was brought, the French legal system at the time relied on confrontation
00:31:45.440between accused people and witnesses. And a lot of the noble men and women who were accused
00:31:53.520were sort of brought into confrontation with Lesage or with Lavoisin or with other fortune
00:32:00.480tellers who Lavoisin and Lesage had implicated. The accusers didn't necessarily recognize them.
00:32:06.840And so it seems like a lot of it was, you know, very overblown. But Lesage just kept making things up. And eventually he started saying that he had heard rumors that Lavoisin and several other of the female fortune tellers had been intimately involved with Madame de Montespan, who was the king's mistress at the time, and that she had bought love potions from them,
00:32:32.580that she had had um uh black masses performed sometimes it's said over her own body and
00:32:39.420sometimes it's over she uses somebody else's stand-in but this would this would be like a
00:32:43.860like a ritual mass where you use a naked woman as the altar instead of a traditional altar which at
00:32:50.580the time was like very much blasphemy like it would have been if it would have been a very big
00:32:55.860deal. He starts implicating in her all of all of those things. And finally, he claims that there
00:33:02.760was a plot to poison the king, because the king had taken this much younger woman, Mademoiselle
00:33:08.560de Fontange, as his lover. And Madame de Montespin was incredibly jealous. And so she was going to0.84
00:33:17.400send a man with poisoned gloves that would kill her. And at the same time, la voisin was supposed
00:33:25.580to go and present this poison petition to the king. And theoretically, it would kill them both
00:33:30.780at the same time so that it would look as if the king had died and Mademoiselle de Fontange had0.65
00:33:35.600died of grief. Mademoiselle de Fontange did die a little bit before these accusations came out,
00:33:42.080probably from complications of childbirth. She got pregnant during her affair and she had an
00:33:47.260incredibly difficult childbirth and sort of never recovered. But at the time, there was no way
00:33:53.260to reliably test for poison. And so it was as soon as these accusations about poison started
00:34:00.100coming out, it was believed that someone had poisoned her. Hey, there's just so much going on
00:34:05.880simultaneously in Paris. I'm like, of course, this is like you wrote a novel because there's
00:34:11.540these like overlapping things, the salon culture, and then the affair of the poisons as well. Do
00:34:15.500you know what became of Madame Darnay after all of this? She lived until 1705. She ran her for her
00:34:22.560Salon for some time. She wrote a number of several fairy tale collections, and then also a number of
00:34:30.120historical novels, which were like these, you know, like her memoirs and like the fairy tales,
00:34:36.880they were these very kind of elaborate confections of like adventure stories. They were not trying
00:34:43.260to be historically faithful. She wrote a couple books that were more sort of like historically
00:34:49.220accurate, but they didn't sell. And so she went back to writing her kind of incredible adventure
00:34:56.060stories. She lived until about 1705, which would mean that she died in kind of middle age. She
00:35:03.840would have been not quite 60 at the time. So she died relatively young, but basically she was able
00:35:12.580to live independently and maintain herself on the income from her writing. And despite all of
00:35:19.200scandals that she was in, she was never really officially implicated in everything. She was
00:35:24.800adopted into the Academia de Ricovrati, which was a Paduan academy that was notable for accepting
00:35:31.920women scholars and artists long before the Académie Française ever did. And so many of the
00:35:38.140kind of famous women and artists of the time were made members of this academy because France
00:35:42.700wouldn't, you know, wouldn't honor them in any official way.
00:35:45.300And what happened to the other salon runner, the Madame, was it DeFonti?
00:38:32.940And so she was able to basically continue
00:38:35.640with her life and running her salon in a somewhat more subdued fashion. So almost none of the
00:38:43.660noble women involved in the Affair of the Poisons were officially convicted. A number of them,
00:38:51.380however, were exiled from Paris and were made to kind of go live in convents or to go live
00:39:00.020outside of the city. What happened at the end of the Affair of the Poisons is as the allegations
00:39:07.860against Madame de Montespan became more and more dramatic, King Louis got very nervous about them.
00:39:20.920The idea that he might have been subject to love magic and that this could have affected him
00:39:29.420and that he could have been kind of intimately involved with a woman who was practicing Satanism
00:39:36.460was incredibly inflammatory. And so basically, he tried to suppress it. The people who were
00:39:45.340doing the interviews of the fortune tellers and taking evidence were instructed to write down
00:39:51.700anything that involved Madame de Fontespan on loose sheets of paper instead of in the official
00:39:57.640book so that they could be removed easily, so that there would be no official record.
00:40:02.360And at a certain point, it was ordered that no more fortune tellers would be brought to trial.
00:40:09.900And so Lesage is never officially brought to trial. He lives out his life in prison,
00:40:16.700in solitary confinement, because it was believed that it would be too explosive to continue the
00:40:22.480investigation. A similar thing happens kind of horrifically to Lavoisin's daughter, who is
00:40:28.880arrested around the time that her mother was and kind of avoids giving very much testimony
00:40:34.560for quite some time. And then after her mother's executed, she sort of starts talking and she
00:40:42.820starts making up these very, like, very, very wild inflammatory stories that it seems like,
00:40:50.500were probably mostly not true. There's a lot of disagreement about how much weight should be put
00:40:58.700on her testimony. I find a couple of things interesting about her testimony. And one of
00:41:06.460them is that a certain amount of the stories she tells are very close to stories about a slightly
00:41:15.840earlier famous woman poisoner named Madame de Trinvillet. So Marie Montpoisin, la voisin's
00:41:21.480daughter, will say, for instance, that her mother poisoned her and her father several times, but
00:41:26.720regretted it and sent them an antidote. And that's a story that comes from the life of this earlier
00:41:33.260poisoner, Madame de Trinvillet, who is another woman who I think is fascinating. But she would
00:41:38.200say stories like that. And she kind of elaborated on Lesage's stories about the Black masses.
00:41:45.260And they kind of, you know, it's this echo chamber where they kind of bounce off each other.
00:41:49.180And as soon as one allegation comes up, someone else elaborates on it.
00:41:53.200For Marie Montfoisin, she only started saying the really kind of inflammatory stories after she knew that her mother had been executed.
00:42:04.120And that, to me, at the time, she says that it's because she was so afraid of her mother's powers and black magic that she wouldn't, you know, that she was terrified to speak while she was alive.
00:42:13.740But I've always thought that, you know, she she waited until after she knew that her mother couldn't be hurt by what she said, that it couldn't you know, it couldn't have any possible effect on her trial.
00:42:25.160And then she said whatever she could think of that, you know, she thought might get herself off.
00:42:29.920So I was just going to ask, what was her motivation for doing that?
00:42:32.120And that would be like she was throwing her mother under the bus to make herself to free herself, to make herself seem innocent.
00:42:38.160I think that she thought that if she appeared to cooperate fully and she said that she hadn't, I think I think she realized that the police were looking for these very inflammatory stories.
00:42:48.080And she at a certain point, she decided, like, OK, maybe if I tell them what they want to hear, you know, I'm maybe I'll be treated a little bit more lightly.
00:42:57.680And, you know, once her mother was dead, it seemed it maybe seemed to her that she couldn't hurt her anymore and it wouldn't matter what she said about her.
00:43:06.080it didn't work. Like Lesage, she spent the rest of her life in solitary confinement.
00:43:11.280How did you come across all of this? Like, do you have a background in French history
00:43:16.020or what, just a casual interest? Like, how did you come to learn all this stuff such that it
00:43:21.800would then become your novel? It started out, I don't have, I don't really have a background
00:43:26.280in French history. I have a background in comparative literature and also in fiction.
00:43:30.380so when I was I when I was getting my MFA I took a class like I took a class on fairy tales
00:43:38.540and we didn't really read Madame Del Noy's work work in it but her name came up and I was curious
00:43:44.920about her so I went and looked her up and I realized that she was the author or one of the
00:43:50.840authors in this collection of French fairy tales that I'd had as a little girl that I had read and
00:43:58.300kind of loved and also been like sort of gently traumatized by because they are these they're
00:44:04.300these incredibly dark fairy tales if you're used to sort of like a lot of contemporary fairy tales0.64
00:44:09.700she was very very she writes these very very vivid stories about women uh be like trying to
00:44:18.140escape forced marriages quite frequently and they're like the trials that her heroines go
00:44:25.300through are just like so extreme and sometimes they end happily but you know to me they always
00:44:30.940seem this like there is this kind of implicit social commentary in them because whether or not
00:44:40.380the stories end happily some of them are kind of you know have the happy marriage ending
00:44:44.220and some of them are tragic but regardless of whether the ending is technically happy or not
00:44:50.340many of them have this sort of sadism in them where like the level of trial and tribulation
00:44:58.840that the heroine has to go through in order to get the happy ending and like the things that
00:45:03.320happen along the way kind of make you rebel against the marriage ending where you're just
00:45:08.620like this is not worth it yeah she has this wonderful fairy tale called behind in the wood
00:45:15.880And in it, there's a sort of disinherited princess who, you know, she gets cast out and another woman assumes her identity and tries to take her place. And she gets, she's cursed so that every day she has to be a deer who roams through the forest.
00:45:31.340And then at night, she has this faithful lady in waiting who they live in this little cottage and she returns and turns back into her human form at night.
00:45:40.640And the prince that she's supposed to marry goes out hunting in the wood and finds her in her deer form and like obsessively tries to hunt her and kill her.
00:45:48.960And every night she goes back to her lovely, faithful woman friends and they have this like idyllic life in this woodland cottage.
00:45:57.740And of course, the happy ending is that she ends up marrying the prince and is, you know, transformed into being not a dear anymore.
00:46:03.060And like, it's all very happy. But you're reading it and you're just like, oh, like, this is so horrific.
00:46:09.060Like, make this prince go away. Live a happy life with your girlfriend.
00:46:14.440There's this despite the structure of the fairy tale that kind of like, you know, puts her back into acceptable society and like gives her an appropriate level of her social class and things like that.
00:46:23.880you know there's this kind of alternate life for her that you can see in it and this tragedy that
00:46:30.580you know that it's not going to end that way even if the fairy tale technically has a happy ending
00:46:35.040and so I found that really fascinating about her but yeah once I once I realized that I had read
00:46:41.380her stories as a kid I just I started reading everything that I could find about her and then
00:46:45.860I started reading everything that I could find about the period and it was you know I'm definitely
00:46:49.580an amateur historian. But I just started finding it so fascinating.
00:46:55.000Had you written historical fiction before? I think you've written short stories. This is
00:47:07.740Yeah. I found it was a thing that happened that was comforting is I went and saw this
00:47:17.780reading by Marlon James. And someone asked him how he researches his historical fiction,
00:47:24.760which his historical novels are amazing. And I had read them and loved them. But somebody
00:47:29.020in the audience asked him, how do you research historical fiction? And he said, well, I have a
00:47:33.600terrible time of it because I just read everything that I can find. And if I don't know how people
00:47:40.440brushed their teeth, then I don't feel confident writing about their lives because I don't know
00:47:47.760I have to, you know, I have to understand all the daily details of their lives before I can
00:47:51.220live in that world. And I remember him saying it, saying that, and I was like, oh, I feel so much
00:47:55.960more confident about my historical project now, because I too have been obsessively reading about
00:48:01.480like, you know, what did the place settings at the dinner tables look like at that time?
00:48:07.020Well, and like in your book, the one of the characters is a painter. And so you research
00:48:11.160like how, how was paint made? Like the, oh my God. Yeah. The amount of detail is evident when
00:48:16.940you read the novel it's just like you yeah I felt very like confident that you were not making these
00:48:22.000things up like this was yeah um and it was and it was amazing because like once you like once you
00:48:27.100start doing the research you kind of intuitively like what you start to intuitively understand
00:48:31.800how the world works and that lets you know sort of like what avenues of possibility are open to
00:48:39.600these characters what would they have perceived as being open to them there's a really there's a
00:48:44.680really major plot twist at the end of the novel that hinges on how paint is made. Because I was
00:48:49.480doing research on different historical pigments and I got to this passage and I was like, oh my
00:48:54.660God, I understand how my novel ends now. And so can you describe, tell everybody what your novel
00:49:02.680is about. Just describe the novel. Now that we know like the time and place where it's set,
00:49:07.340like, and sort of the, some of the inspirations of some of the characters in it. Yeah. How would
00:49:11.460you describe the book to people? Okay, so the novel is the story of Marie-Catrine, who, as you
00:49:17.140would probably guess, her name is inspired by Madame Delnoy. She's living in Paris, and she's
00:49:23.000a woman from the minor nobility. She is, like her namesake, has been married off as a teenager
00:49:28.640to a baron, the baron de Cardenoy. Cardenoy, by the way, is also taken from a contemporary novel
00:49:37.200of the period where the Comtesse de Cartenois in that story is a woman who's trying to escape
00:49:45.420from an abusive husband. And she doesn't have a very happy ending in the novel that she comes
00:49:50.520from. And I thought that I would borrow her name and give her a happier one. But so anyway,
00:49:54.520Marie-Catherine de Cartenois, she is baroness in 17th century Paris, and she is in sort of
00:50:02.560equilibrium in her unhappy marriage to her husband. She hates him. He basically has gotten
00:50:08.960to the point where he hates her. The affair of the poison of the poisons is in full swing. So
00:50:13.800not only do they detest each other mutually, but he is incredibly paranoid that she is going to
00:50:19.040poison him. And not entirely without reason, because she is in secret conducting an affair
00:50:28.180with another woman. Her name's Victoire, and she is a member, a sort of member of the much higher
00:50:36.440nobility, who is an heiress and has a lot more freedom because of her social station than Marie
00:50:43.740Catherine does. Victoire is this kind of wild, rebellious, kind of cross-dressing woman who's,0.89
00:50:51.680for the time, very frank about the fact that she is a lesbian, and she's able to do these scandalous0.99
00:50:57.440things that Marie-Catherine would never dream of. They have a very close friendship and they are0.99
00:51:02.060lovers. And this is sort of the situation that she's resigned to, that she'll be able to kind
00:51:08.600of find this piece of happiness outside of her marriage and, you know, kind of survive by living
00:51:14.900a life that is independent from her husband as much as would have been possible for the time
00:51:19.920period. And her equilibrium, however, is destroyed when her husband gets wind of the fact that she's
00:51:28.100having an affair. He doesn't yet know exactly who with, but he hears these rumors and he is
00:51:34.200incensed by them. And she writes to Victoire to warn her that they might be discovered. And Victoire,
00:51:42.980being this kind of impulsive, gallant, heroic person, confronts him in the street with a pistol0.97
00:51:50.380and kills him. And then the rest of the novel is about trying to cover up that murder. Because it's
00:51:57.360the affair of the poisons, his death creates a lot of attention and scandal. And the police are
00:52:05.140immediately interested in Marie-Catherine because they were known to have been somewhat estranged.
00:52:10.040And so Marie-Catherine, who is also in the novel Teller of Fairy Tales, decides that she is going to create an alternate story of her husband's death that will save her and save her lover.
00:52:23.660um and the rest and so the rest of this the rest of the novel is i've been calling it kind of a
00:52:27.900reverse murder mystery um because instead of discovering who did it you're trying um it's
00:52:33.460about the the pair of them marie-katrine and victoire trying to make up a murder mystery
00:52:40.940narrative that will satisfy the police i think it's such a beautiful way to um have a character
00:52:46.620who is a storyteller, who ends up having to create a story in real life.
00:52:52.660Yeah. And it, you know, it resonated with me because so many of the, you know, so many of
00:52:58.520the salon women, like Madame Zolnoy, were storytellers, and they told stories about
00:53:04.420their own lives, and they did this myth-making of themselves while they were alive. And then0.57
00:53:08.580you get this sort of, this dark side of that in someone like Lesage, where he is also a
00:53:15.120storyteller, but at the end of his life, kind of the last significant stories that he tells
00:53:22.700are the ones that get all of his associates condemned. It, you know, it appeared to me as
00:53:28.800the situation where like you have this, like you have these sort of stories about like freedom and
00:53:33.020about the kind of lives that you might live, that you might be able to live kind of outside of the
00:53:37.720control of the state and the patriarchy and all of that. And also you have these stories that are
00:53:42.360told sort of in service to this really awful, like violence and repression. And the tension
00:53:49.340between those two things was really interesting to me. And tell me more about the lesbian love
00:53:54.360story. Like, was that inspired by stuff that you read about, like, you know, you were talking about
00:53:58.740these women only spaces, the salons and stuff, like I have to assume that there would have been
00:54:03.480women having relationships with women in and around this time. Absolutely. Yeah. So as far
00:54:08.960as Madame Del Noy, there's no particular record of her having relationships with women, although
00:54:14.200there are a couple of her fairy tales that are quite homoerotic. I mentioned Behind in the Wood,
00:54:21.060where the princess and her lady in the waiting have this kind of very idyllic domestic relationship
00:54:27.940where they live in a cottage in the woods. There's also a wonderful fairy tale called Belle Belle,
00:54:32.780or um or the chevalier fortinet um which is about a girl who disguises herself as a knight
00:54:39.240she goes into service to this king and the king's sister falls in love with her
00:54:43.020the the king's sister she's sort of an evil queen like she's she's treated as the antagonist of the
00:54:49.660tale but like the way that her kind of impassioned crush on this on this cross-dressed knight
00:54:55.820is described is um just so sort of like over the top and sensuous and like extreme that you're kind
00:55:04.320of like well okay she's the villain but like given the conventions of the time she kind of had to be
00:55:09.700the villain it's not clear that it's really that there's really like all that much condemnation
00:55:15.760there you know so there's so there's some sort of homerobicism in her fairy tales but actually0.60
00:55:20.180there were other women who were sort of much more known as having affairs with other women. And one0.68
00:55:26.500of them is the Comtesse de Murat, who is kind of one of the inspirations for Victoire in the novel.
00:55:32.700She was another writer of fairy tales and a novelist. And like Madame D'Aulnoy, she wrote
00:55:38.900very scandalous sensational fictional memoirs. And one of the things that she wrote about was
00:55:45.180having affairs with other women and so she tells these amazing stories about like cross-dressing
00:55:51.400and disguising herself as a man and having affairs with women as a man there's one uh there's one
00:55:57.800story in the memoir where she's she's seeing a married woman in her male persona and she goes
00:56:05.020you know she goes to her bedroom and hen you know and goes to bed with her and then their her husband
00:56:10.440interrupts and so she just seduces him too you know he's uh and so she told these like very
00:56:17.100very racy stories and was uh eventually exiled from paris partially because she was a little
00:56:23.700bit too critical of the mistress of the king who replaced madame de montespa she wrote some
00:56:30.240satirical things about her that were not appreciated but she also got in trouble for
00:56:36.020liking the ladies a little bit too much.
00:56:38.520She is also, I know, I was listening recently to, you did a podcast on the Chevalier d'Eon.
00:59:20.840When you look at just sort of like the years in which her first four children were born, I think it's safe to assume that, like, she suffered quite a bit of sexual violence. And it would have been sexual violence that was completely sanctioned by the state, by her family. It would have felt like she had no recourse.
00:59:38.880So I don't think you can say that like, you know, it was exactly a good time for women's liberation. But despite the kind of terrible legal status of women at the time, there were these women who were very influential in terms of art and who were able, you know, there's this other current in society that is running against the sort of repressive current.
01:00:04.500And there's a long history of that. Their French writers will write quite extensively about what they call the Querelle des Femmes, which is this sort of proto-feminist movement. It's often said as starting with Christine de Pizan, who was a woman writer from several generations earlier, who writes this feminist text called The Book of the City of Ladies, where it's basically a political and theological argument for the idea that women should have social equality with men.
01:00:31.660And so this was a political movement that existed in French society and in European society more generally for a very, very long time. And there were women who were able to carve out much freer lives for themselves than we usually think about when we think about what the past was like for women.
01:00:52.380do you see a connection and this might be a facile understanding of it but there was this
01:01:00.040salon culture and there were the women and they were writing and then the affair of the poisons
01:01:03.880happens and you mentioned that a lot of the women or some of the women who were accused
01:01:07.420wound up being sent to convents or they went into exile was part of this maybe a reaction against
01:01:12.340this sort of sense of liberation of women or queer people or whatever like the affair of the
01:01:17.340poisons was a way to kind of just like it was a backlash in a way against that yeah yeah there was
01:01:22.040a huge there was a huge backlash i mean the effect yeah the affair of the poisons was one1.00
01:01:26.980of several things that sparked a huge backlash against basically the participation of women in
01:01:32.400society um and a lot of you know obviously there were salons that content that continued long after
01:01:39.200the affair of the poisons but many of the women who were prominent writers and who were outspoken
01:01:44.100and who were outspoken critics of the politics at the time many of them end up getting sent
01:01:48.720two convents, not necessarily directly related to the affair of the poison, but as part of this0.89
01:01:53.860backlash against kind of women's independence. And one thing that is directly related to the
01:02:00.380affair of the poisons that helps kind of create this sea change in society is the king's adoption,
01:02:08.060King Louis XIV's adoption of a new mistress. At the time of the affair of the poisons,
01:02:13.120He was sort of he had a very tempestuous relationship with Madame de Montespan, who has been who had been his long term mistress and who had had like several children by him and who was considered to be like almost the unofficial queen.
01:02:26.140She was so influential at court. And during the affair to the affair of the poisons, he really you know, it really destroyed his relationship with her, which was already somewhat rocky.
01:02:36.300but he begins developing a much closer relationship with the woman who would be his
01:02:43.220last mistress and eventually his morganatic wife. That's Madame de Matinot, who began as a close
01:02:50.120friend of Madame de Montespan. And she was the kind of destitute noblewoman who was given the1.00
01:02:56.980job of raising the king's illegitimate children, basically as a favor by Madame de Montespan,0.51
01:03:02.860because she needed something to live on. And she began her life as kind of a salon woman.0.88
01:03:10.240She was known as a witch. She was known as, you know, a very kind of intellectual,
01:03:17.700accomplished woman. Interestingly, she grew up in a convent school, and she writes about having
01:03:24.940basically a romantic relationship with one of the nuns there. But she eventually, she hated being in
01:03:31.580the convent. She found it too restrictive. And so she eventually marries this much older man
01:03:37.100because she figures it's the only way that she'll be able to avoid becoming a nun.
01:03:41.880And he dies and leaves her a widow and leaves her very poor. At some point in her life,
01:03:48.020she has this very severe religious conversion. She has a very, very conservative confessor.
01:03:56.300And he basically tells her the role of women as ordained by God is not to participate in public society. You should mortify your pride. You are much too proud of your intellect. You are much too proud of your wit.
01:04:10.560you enjoy being charming and intelligent in company and you should instead make yourself0.99
01:04:18.040dull and boring as a religious exercise. And she really kind of embraces this and she takes it to0.59
01:04:26.980heart and becomes very influential in the education of women and starts, she founds a1.00
01:04:33.260girls' convent school, and it runs it kind of in this manner of like, women should be meek and1.00
01:04:41.540silent. And the role of a woman is not to be intellectual, and it's not to be active, it's to1.00
01:04:47.640be submissive to men. And her influence over the court, as she becomes closer and closer to Louis,
01:04:55.900really kind of changes what's acceptable for women in that society. And a lot of the
01:05:02.560amazing rebellion and hijinks and cross-dressing and scandalousness that was, if not acceptable,0.74
01:05:11.820at least going on, gets sort of tamped down during the reign of her influence.
01:05:19.040I love the time period. I mean, your book takes place over, I'm not sure,
01:05:23.200a finite amount of time as these two women are covering up the crime. But it's just like this
01:05:27.220moment in time in this place where it's like things could have gone this way or they could
01:05:31.680have gone this way. And you were just describing the way that they went, which is like, you know,
01:05:34.980more repressive for women. But it's like, it was an exciting time where people like your character
01:05:38.580Victoire was, you know, cross-dressing and just kind of like doing your own thing.0.80
01:05:43.760Yeah. There's this moment where it really feels like the world is going to open up and there are0.96
01:05:47.720going to be these huge changes in society. And then it kind of doesn't happen.