'When I was grown up,' said Marguerite Monvoisin, 'my mother was no longer reluctant to trust me, and I was present at this sort of mass, and saw that the lady was stark naked on the mattress, with her head hanging down, supported by a pillow on an overturned chair, the legs too hanging over, a napkin on the belly, a cross on the napkin, and the chalice on the belly.' She adds that this lady was Madame de Montespan. 'At the mass of Madame de Montespan,' said Marguerite in the course of another examination, 'a child was presented which apparently had been prematurely born, and it was put into a basin. Guibourg cut its throat, poured the blood into a chalice, and consecrated it with the wafer, finished his mass, then proceeded to take the child's entrails. My mother next day carried the blood and wafer to Dumesnil to be distilled, in a glass vessel which Madame de Montespan took away.' These facts were confirmed on October 23, 1680, by the confrontation of Marguerite Monvoisin with Guibourg--with this variation, that Guibourg tried to shuffle on to La Voisin the butchery of the child. 'Guibourg said that it was not true that he had opened the child, because it would have stained his alb: he found the child already opened. 'The girl Voisin, on the contrary, declared that he cut open the heart himself, took out some clotted blood, and put it into the vessel into which the other blood and the rest had been put, which Madame de Montespan took away; and that to make the clotted blood go in, a common glass was broken, which, with its foot knocked off, was made to act as a funnel. 'Guibourg said that he did not open the child's stomach, but that having found it open, he did in fact draw out the entrails and open the heart to get out the blood that was in it, and that he put it into a crystal vase with some portions of the consecrated wafer: the whole was carried off by the lady on whose body he had said mass; and that he always believed the lady was Madame de Montespan.' This picture is fraught with so much horror that we could not bring ourselves to admit its authenticity if the evidence of Marguerite Monvoisin and the Abbé Guibourg were not corroborated by confessions extorted from other accomplices of these crimes, who were arrested at different dates and examined separately--Lesage, Lacoudraye, Delaporte, Vertemart, Françoise Filastre, the Abbé Cotton--confirmed by the declarations of several witnesses who had picked up, before the trial, fragments of talk which escaped the accused. La Reynie emphasises the fact that the declarations of Lesage and the girl Monvoisin were made at an interval of sixteen months, and without their having had any opportunity during those months of communicating with each other.