City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker

Tucker’s recounting of Voisin’s recipes and techniques – heaven help the pigeons and frogs of the city – concocted behind her house in cauldrons bring to mind the three witches of “Macbeth.” Women from all walks of life visited Voisin for fortunes, potions, charms, and “assistance” with husbands, lovers, fathers, brothers, and rivals. Whether they were seeking love, luck, or retribution Voisin had a remedy. Near the Court of Miracles lived Marguerite Voisin. Tucker takes the reader to the Montogueil quarter, “the most impoverished and godforsaken place in Paris.” Place names in the quarter are straight out of a fairy tale. For instance, there is la rue au Bout du Monde (the Street at the End of the World) and a legendary house of thieves and apprentices, half-buried in the ground, accessed by a rickety bridge, and hiding a warren of tunnels and caverns, known as the “Court of Miracles.” Equally riveting are the stranger-than-fiction details of the underbelly of early-modern Paris.

Juicy court gossip and the tangled love lives of royalty and hangers-on against the backdrop of an expanding Versailles is fascinating. Court life and the machinations of Louis XIV’s many mistresses are lavishly described. “City of Light” is more than a biography of La Reynie’s career. Mud taxes, animal regulations, fines for emptying chamber pots into the streets, and a special tax to place lanterns along the streets (creating the “city of light”) slowly improved the quality of life in Paris, even while causing grumbling among the citizenry. A flurry of ordinances cleaned the streets and lit the night. In 1667 Nicolas La Reynie was appointed lieutenant general of police with the objective of imposing law and order on the disordered city of Paris. Combining the research skills of an academic and a storyteller’s flair, Vanderbilt Professor Holly Tucker brings the crime-riddled Paris of the late 1600s to life in the excellent history “City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris.” At its center is the “Affair of the Poisons” which touched both the glittering heights and impoverished lows of French society.

City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker