wag;
,-tfc,
UNIVERSITY OF
ILLINOIS LIBRARY
AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
BOOK8TACKS
THE SORCERESS
OUR plea is not for a life of perverse disputings or busy prosely-
tising, but only that we should learn to look at one another with a
clear and steadfast eye, and march forward along the paths we
choose with firm step and erect front. The first advance towards
either the renovation of one faith or the growth of another, must be
the abandonment of those habits of hypocritical conformity and
compliance which have filled the air of the England of to-day with
gross and obscuring mists.
JOHN MORLEY, On Compromise , chap, iv., p. 200.
A STUDY IN MIDDLE AGE SUPERSTITION
Sorceress
A COMPLETE'TRANSLATION FROM
THE FRENCH OF
JULES MICHELET
BY
A. R. ALLINSON, M.A.
LONDON
Gbe 3mperial press
10 ESSEX STREET, STRAND
PLYMOUTH
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON
PRINTERS
CONTENTS
Jntco5uctton
P
For one Sorcerer, ten thousand Sorceresses" The Sorceress the only
Physician the people knew Mediaeval Reign of Terror The Sor-
ceress was the offspring of popular Despair And Satan was hers
Satan, Prince of this World, Healer, Reformer Satan's School and
its Professors, Sorceress, Shepherd, Hangman His decline and fall .
ffirst
CHAPTER I
DEATH OF THE GODS
Christianity believed the world to be on the point of death The world
of demons The Bride of Corinth . . . 17
CHAPTER II
WHAT DROVE THE MIDDLE AGES TO DESPAIR
The People makes itself Legends But originality is prohibited The
People defends its lands But is made a serf of . 26
CHAPTER III
THE LITTLE DEMON OF THE HEARTH AND HOME
Promiscuity of the primitive villa An independent hearth and home
The serf's wife True to the old gods Robin Goodfellow . . 37
CHAPTER IV
TEMPTATIONS
The Serf invokes the Spirit of Hidden Treasures Feudal raids and cruel
feudal customs The goodwife's Brownie turns into a demon after all . 48
xv
Contents
CHAPTER V
DIABOLICAL POSSESSION
PAGE
Gold gains the mastery in 1300 The peasant wife in alliance with the
Demon of gold Foul terrors of the Middle Ages The Lady of the
Village Hatred and rivalry of the Lady of the Castle . . . 58
CHAPTER VI
THE PACT WITH SATAN
The serfs wife gives herself to the Devil The Sorceress and the Blasted
Heath . . . . . ... 72
CHAPTER VII
KING OF THE DEAD
She calls back the spirits of loved ones dead Conception of Satan
softened and mollified . . . ... 78
CHAPTER VIII
PRINCE OF NATURE
Rigours of the Mediaeval Winter relax The Sorceress submits to Oriental
influences Conceives Nature . . . . 86
CHAPTER IX
SATAN THE HEALER
Diseases of the Middle Ages The Sorceress utilises poisons for their
cure The Solanacece (Herbs of Consolation) Women for the first
time cared for medically . . . ... 94
CHAPTER X
CHARMS AND LOVE-POTIONS
Blue Beard and Griselda The Castle a suppliant to the Sorceress Her
cunning ways . . . . . . . 106
CHAPTER XI
COMMUNION OF REVOLT WITCHES' SABBATHS
THE BLACK MASS
The old semi-Pagan Sabasia The Black Mass, and its four Acts : Act
I. The Introit, the Kiss of Devotion, the Banquet ; Act II. The
Offertory, Woman at once Altar and Sacrifice . . . .116
Contents
CHAPTER XII
SAME CONTINUED LOVE AND DEATH SATAN DISAPPEARS
PAGE
Act III. Incestuous love-making ; Act IV. Death of Satan ; the Sor-
ceress flies to rejoin her lover in Hell . ... 127
Second 3Boofc
CHAPTER- 1
THE SORCERESS IN HER DECADENCE SATAN MULTIPLIED
AND VULGARISED
Sorceresses and Sorcerers employed by the Great The Chatelaine a
Werewolf Last of the love-potions . . . . 139
CHAPTER II
PERSECUTIONS
The Malleus Makficarum Satan master of the World . . . 149
CHAPTER III
A HUNDRED YEARS' TOLERATION IN FRANCE
Spain begins when France leaves off A reaction ; the Lawyers show
themselves as good at burning as the Priests . ... 163
CHAPTER IV
THE BASQUE WITCHES, 1609
They direct their own Judges in the way they should go . .170
CHAPTER V
SATAN TURNS ECCLESIASTIC, l6lO
Diversions and Distractions of the Modern "Sabbath" . . 179
CHAPTER VI
GAUFFRIDI, l6lO
Priests prosecuted for Sorcery by the Monks Conventual jealousies . 188
CHAPTER VII
THE NUNS OF LOUDUN URBAIN GRANDIER, 1633, 1634
An eloquent and popular Priest ; suspected of Sorcery Morbid and
extraordinary manifestations among the Nuns of Loudun . . 209
xvii
Contents
CHAPTER VIII
THE NUNS OF LOUVIERS AND SATANIC POSSESSION
MADELEINE BAVENT, 1640-1647
PAGE
Illuminism ; the Devil plays Quietist Duel between the Fiend and the
Physician . . . . ... 227
CHAPTER IX
SATAN TRIUMPHANT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . 241
CHAPTER X
FATHER GIRARD AND CHARLOTTE CADIERE . . . 249
CHAPTER XI
CHARLOTTE CADIERE AT THE CONVENT OF OLLIOULES . . 279
CHAPTER XII
TRIAL OF CHARLOTTE CADIERE, 1730, 1731 . . .302
Epilogue
Satan and Jesus, is a Reconciliation possible ? The Sorceress has
perished, but the Fairy survives, and will survive Imminence of a
Religious Renovation . . . ... 326
motes ano Elucidations
1. The Inquisition . . . . . . 331
2. Method of Procedure . . . . . . 334
3. Satan as Physician . . . ... 337
4. Last Act of the Witches' Sabbath . . . 338
5. Literature of Sorcery and Witchcraft . ... 341
6. Decadence, etc. . . . ... 343
7. The spot where the present book was completed . . . 345
PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES . . ... 348
THE SORCERESS
A STUDY IN MIDDLE AGE SUPERSTITION
INTRODUCTION
"For one Sorcerer, ten thousand Sorceresses" The Sorceress the only
physician the people knew Mediaeval Reign of Terror The Sorceress
was the offspring of popular despair And Satan was hers Satan, Prince
of this World, Healer, Reformer Satan's school and its professors:
Sorceress, Shepherd, Hangman His decline and fall.
PRENGER said, before 1500: "We should speak
of the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers;
the latter are of small account." So another
writer under Louis XIII.: "For one Sorcerer, ten
thousand Sorceresses."
" Nature makes them Sorceresses," the genius peculiar to
woman and her temperament. She is born a creature of En-
chantment. In virtue of regularly recurring periods of exalt-
ation, she is a Sibyl ; in virtue of love, a Magician. By the
fineness of her intuitions, the cunning of her wiles often fan-
tastic, often beneficent she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least
and lowest lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.
All primitive peoples start alike ; this we see again and again in
the accounts given by travellers. Man hunts and fights. Woman
B
Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
contrives and dreams ; she is the mother of fancy, of the gods.
She possesses glimpses of the second sight, and has wings to soar
into the infinitude of longing and imagination. The better to
count the seasons, she scans the sky. But earth has her heart
as well. Her eyes stoop to the amorous flowers ; a flower her-
self in her young beauty, she learns to know them as playfellows
and intimates. A woman, she asks them to heal the men she
loves.
Pathetic in their simplicity these first beginnings of Religion and
Science! Later on, each province will be separated, we shall see
mankind specialise as medicine-man, astrologer or prophet,
necromancer, priest, physician. But in these earliest days woman
is all in all, and plays every part.
A strong and bright and vigorous religion, such as was Greek
Paganism, begins with the Sibyl, to end with the Sorceress. The
first, a virgin fair and beautiful, brilliant in the full blaze of dawn,
cradled it, gave it its charm and glamour. In later days, when
sick and fallen, in the gloom of the Dark Ages, on heaths and in
forests, it was concealed and protected by the Sorceress ; her
dauntless pity fed its needs and kept it still alive. Thus for
religions it is woman is mother, tender protectress and faithful
nurse. Gods are like men ; they are born and they die on a
woman's breast.
But what a price she paid for her fidelity ! . . . Magian queens
of Persia, enchanting Circe, sublime Sibyl, alas ! how are you
fallen, how barbarous the transformation you have suffered ! . . .
She who, from the throne of the Orient, taught mankind the virtues
of plants and the motions of the stars, she who, seated on the
Delphic tripod and, illumined by the very god of light, gave oracles
to a kneeling world, is the same that, a thousand years later, is
hunted like a wild beast, chased from street to street, reviled,
buffeted, stoned, scorched with red-hot embers ! . . .
The clergy has not stakes enough, the people insults, the child
stones, for the unhappy being. The poet, no less a child, throws
3ntrobuction
yet another stone at her, a crueller one still for a woman.
Gratuitously insulting, he makes her out always old and ugly.
The very word Sorceress or Witch calls up the image of the Weird
Sisters of Macbeth. Yet the cruel witch trials prove exactly the
opposite; many perished just because they were young and pretty.
The Sibyl foretold the future; but the Sorceress makes it.
Here is the great, the vital distinction. She evokes, conjures,
guides Destiny. She is not like Cassandra of old, who foresaw the
coming doom so clearly, and deplored it and awaited its approach;
she creates the future. Greater than Circe, greater than Medea,
she holds in her hand the magic wand of natural miracle, she has
Nature to aid and abet her like a sister. Foreshadowings of the
modern Prometheus are to be seen in her, a beginning of industry,
above all of the sovereign industry that heals and revivifies men.
Unlike the Sibyl, who seemed ever gazing towards the dayspring,
she fixes her eyes on the setting sun ; but it is just this sombre
orb of the declining luminary that shows long before the dawn
(like the glow on the peaks of the High Alps) a dawn anticipatory
of the true day.
The Priest realises clearly where the danger lies, that an enemy,
a menacing rival, is to be feared in this High-priestess of Nature he
pretends to despise. Of the old gods she has invented new ones.
Beside the old Satan of the past, a new Satan is seen burgeoning in
her, a Satan of the future.
For a thousand years the people had one healer and one only,
the Sorceress. Emperors and kings and popes, and the
richest barons, had sundry Doctors of Salerno, or Moorish and
Jewish physicians ; but the main body of every State, the whole
world we may say, consulted no one but the Saga, the Wise
Woman. If her cure failed, they abused her and called her a
Witch. But more generally, through a combination of respect
and terror, she was spoken of as the Good Lady, or Beautiful
Lady (Bella Donna), the same name as that given to fairies.
3
Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
Her fate resembled that which still often befalls her favourite
herb, the belladonna, and other beneficent poisons she made use
of, and which were antidotes of the great scourges of the Middle
Ages. Children and ignorant passers-by curse these sombre
flowers, without understanding their virtues, scared by their sus-
picious colour. They shudder and fly the spot ; yet these are
the Comforting plants (Solanacea), which wisely administered,
have worked so many cures and soothed so much human agony.
They are found growing in the most sinister localities, in lonely,
ill-reputed spots, amid ruins and rubbish heaps, yet another re-
semblance with the Sorceress who utilises them. Where, indeed,
could she have taken up her habitation, except on savage heaths,
this child of calamity, so fiercely persecuted, so bitterly cursed
and proscribed ? She gathered poisons to heal and save ; she was
the Devil's bride, the mistress of the Incarnate Evil One, yet how
much good she effected, if we are to credit the great physician of
the Renaissance! Paracelsus, when in 1527, at Bale, he burned
the whole pharmacopoeia of his day, declared he had learned from
the Sorceresses all he knew.
Had they not earned some reward ? Yes ! and reward they
had. Their recompense was torture and the stake. New punish-
ments were devised for their especial benefit, new torments
invented. They were brought to trial en masse, condemned on
the slightest pretext. Never was such lavish waste of human life.
To say nothing of Spain, the classic land of the auto da fe, where
Moor and Jew are always associated with Witches, seven thousand
were burned at Treves, and I know not how many at Toulouse;
at Geneva five hundred in three months (1513); eight hundred at
Wurgburg, in one batch almost, and fifteen hundred at Bamberg,
both of these quite small bishoprics ! Ferdinand II. himself, the
bigot, the cruel Emperor of the Thirty Years' War, was forced to
restrain these worthy bishops, else they would have burned all
their subjects. I find, in the Wurzburg list, a wizard of eleven,
a schoolboy, and a witch of fifteen, at Bayonne, two sorceresses
of seventeen, damnably pretty.
4
Sntrobuctfon
Mark this, at certain epochs the mere word of Sorceress or
Witch is an arm wherewith Hate can kill at discretion. Female
jealousy, masculine avarice, are only too ready to grasp so con-
venient a weapon. Such and such a neighbour is rich? . . .
Witch ! witch ! Such and such is pretty ? . . . Ah ! witch ! We
shall see Murgin, a little beggar-girl, casting this terrible stone
at a great lady, whose only crime was being too 7 beautiful, the
Chatelaine de Lancinena, and marking her white forehead with
the death sign.
Accused of sorcery, women anticipate, if they can, the torture
that is inevitable by killing themselves. Remy, that worthy
judge of Lorraine who burned eight hundred of them, boasts of
this Reign of Terror : " So sure is my justice," he declared,
" that sixteen witches arrested the other day, never hesitated, but
strangled themselves incontinently."
In the long course of study for my history during the thirty
years I have devoted to it, this horrible literature of Sorcery, or
Witchcraft, has passed through my hands again and again. First
I exhausted the Manuals of the Inquisition, the asinine collec-
tions of the Dominicans the Whips, Hammers, Ant-Swarms,
Fustigations, Lanterns, etc., to give some of the absurd titles
these books bear. Next I read the men of the Law, the lay
judges who take the place of these monks, and who despise them
without being much less idiotic themselves. I say a word or two
of these elsewhere ; for the present I have only one observation to
make, viz. that from 1300 down to 1600, and even later, the
administration of justice is identically the same. With the excep-
tion of one small interlude in the Parlement of Paris, we find
always and everywhere the same ferocity of folly. Ability and
talent make no difference. The wise and witty De Lancre, a
magistrate of Bordeaux under Henri IV., a man of enlightened
ideas in politics, directly he has to deal with witchcraft, falls back
to the level of a Nider or a Sprenger, two imbecile monks of the
fifteenth century.
5
Sorceress: a Stub^ in Superstition
One is filled with amazement to see all these widely different
epochs, all these men of varying cultivation, unable to make one
step in advance. But the explanation is simple ; they were one
and all arrested, let us rather say, blinded, hopelessly intoxicated
and made cruel savages of, by the poison of their first principle,
the doctrine of Original Sin. This is the fundamental dogma of
universal injustice : "All lost for one alone, not only punished
but deserving punishment, undone even before they were born
and desperately wicked, dead to God from the beginning. The
babe at its mother's breast is a damned soul already."
Who says so? All do, even Bossuet. A Roman theologian
of weight, Spina, Master of the Sacred Palace, formulates the
doctrine in precise words : " Why does God permit the death of
the innocent? He does so justly. For if they do not die by
reason of the sins they have committed, yet they are guilty of
death by reason of original sin }>1
From this monstrous theory two consequences follow, in
justice and in logic. The judge is always sure of doing justice;
anyone brought before him is inevitably guilty, and if he defends
himself, doubly guilty. No call for Justice to sweat, and rack its
brains in order to distinguish true and false ; in every case the
decision is a foregone conclusion. The logician likewise and the
schoolman may spare themselves the trouble of analysing the soul
of man, of examining the phases through which it passes, of con-
sidering its complexity, its internal disparities and self-contradic-
tions. No need, as we feel ourselves bound to do, to explain
how, by slow and subtle degrees, the soul may grow vicious
instead of virtuous. These refinements, these doubts and diffi-
culties and scruples, if they understood them at all, how they
would laugh at them, and shake their heads in scorn, and how
gracefully would the fine long ears that ornament their empty
pates waggle to and fro !
Particularly when the Compact with the Devil comes into ques-
tion, that ghastly covenant where, for some small ephemeral gain,
1 De Strigibus, ch. 9.
6
3ntro&uctton
the soul sells itself into everlasting torment, we philosophers
should endeavour to trace out the accursed path, the appalling
ladder of calamities and crimes, capable of having brought it so
low. But our theologian can ignore all such considerations !
For him Soul and Devil were created for each other; so that at the
first temptation, for a caprice, a sudden longing, a passing fancy,
the soul flies headlong to this dreadful extremity.
Nor can I see any traces of modern writers having made much
inquiry into the moral chronology of Sorcery. They confine
themselves far too much to the connections between the Middle
Ages and Classical Antiquity. The connection is real enough,
but slight and of quite minor importance. Neither the ancient
Enchantress, nor yet the Celtic and Germanic Seeress, are yet the
true Sorceress. The harmless Sabasia (festivals of Bacchus
Sabasius), a miniature rustic "Sabbath" which survived down
to Mediaeval times, are far from identical with the Black Mass of
the fourteenth century, that deliberate and deadly defiance of
Jesus. These gloomy conceptions were not passed on down the
long thread of tradition ; they sprang ready made from the
horrors of the time.
From when does the Sorceress date ? I answer unhesitatingly,
" From the ages of despair."
From the profound despair the World owed to the Church.
I say again unhesitatingly, "The Sorceress is the Church's
crime."
I pass over the string of plausible explanations by which the
priests attempt to mitigate her guilt : " Weak and frivolous by
nature, open to every temptation, women were led astray by
concupiscence." Alas ! in the wretchedness and famine of those
dreadful times, this was no force sufficient to rouse to demoniac
frenzy. Loving women, jealous and forsaken,, children driven
out of doors by a cruel stepmother, mothers beaten by their sons
(all hackneyed subjects of legendary tales), may indeed have been
tempted to invoke the Evil Spirit; but all this does not constitute
7
Sorceress: B Stub\> in Superstition
the Sorceress, the Witch. Because the unhappy creatures call
upon Satan, it does not follow that he accepts their service.
They are still far, very far, from being ripe for him. They have
yet to learn to hate God.
To understand this better, read the accursed Registers still
extant of the Inquisition, not in the extracts compiled by
Llorente, Lamotte-Langon, etc., but in what is extant of the
original Registers of Toulouse. Read them in their vapid same-
ness, their dismal aridity, their shocking unconscious savagery.
A few pages, and you are cold at heart, a cruel chill strikes
home to the vitals. Death, death, always death, you feel it in
every page. You are already in the tomb, or immured in a little
chamber of stone with damp-stained walls. The happiest gate
is death. The dreadful thing is the in pace. One word recurs
continually, like a bell of horror tolled, and tolled again, to
drive the dead in life into despair, always the same word,
Immured.
Dread apparatus for crushing and annihilating souls, cruel press
for breaking hearts. The screw turns, and turns, till breath fails
and the very bones crack, and she springs from the horrid engine
a mystery in an unknown world !
The Sorceress has neither father nor mother, neither son, nor
mate, nor kindred. She appears none knows from whence, a
monster, an aerolite from the skies. Who so bold, great God ! as
to come nigh her?
Where is her lurking-place? In untracked wilds, in im-
penetrable forests of bramble, on blasted heaths, where en-
tangled thistles suffer no foot to pass. She must be sought by
night, cowering beneath some old-world dolmen. If you find
her, she is isolated still by the common horror of the country-
side; she has, as it were, a ring of fire round her haunts.
'Tis hard to credit it, but she is a woman still. Even this
fearful life has its spring of womanhood, its feminine electricity,
in virtue of which she is dowered with two gifts
8
3ntrotwction
The half-sane, half-insane madness, illuminism, of the seer,
which according to its degree is poetry, second sight, preternatural
vision, a faculty of speech at once simple and astute, above all
else the power of believing in her own falsehoods. This gift is
unknown to the male Sorcerer ; the Wizard fails to comprehend
its very elements.
From it flows a second, the sublime faculty of solitary con-
ception, that parthenogenesis our physiologists of to-day recognise
as existing among the females of numerous species. The same
fecundity of body is no less procreative where conceptions of the
spirit are involved.
All alone, she conceived and brought forth. Whom or what?
Another of her own kind, so like the original as to cheat the eyes.
Child of hate, conceived of love; for without love nothing
can be created. The Sorceress, terror-struck as she is at her
strange offspring, yet sees herself so faithfully reproduced, finds
such content in contemplating this new idol, that instantly she
sets it on the altar, worships it, immolates herself to it, giving
her own body as victim and living sacrifice.
We shall often and often find her telling the judge : " There is
only one thing I am afraid of, not to suffer enough for him." 1
Do you know how the newborn infant salutes the new world
he enters ? With a horrid scream of laughter. And has he not
good cause to be glad, there on the free and open plains, far
from the dungeons of Spain, and the immured victims of
Toulouse ? His in pace is wide as the world itself. He comes
and goes, roaming where he will. His the boundless forest ! his
the vast heath that stretches away to the farthest horizon ! his
the round world and the riches thereof ! The Sorceress calls
him tenderly, " Robin, Robin mine ! " from the name of that
gallant outlaw, the gay Robin Hood, that lived under the green-
wood tree. Another pet name she loves to give him is Verdelet,
Joli-Bois, Vert-Bois. The green woods, indeed, are the frolic-
1 Lancrc.
9
Gbe Sorceress: a Stu&\> in Superstition
some scamp's favourite haunts ; one glimpse of bush and briar,
and he is off, a wild truant of Nature.
The astounding thing is that at the first essay the Sorceress
really and truly made a living being. He has every mark of
actuality. He has been seen and heard, and everybody can
describe him.
The saints, those children of affection, the sons of the house,
pay little heed, only watch and dream ; they wait in patient wait-
ing, confident of getting their share of the Elect in God's good
time. The small degree of activity they possess is concentrated
within the narrow circle of Imitation the word sums up the
Middle Ages. But for him, the bastard all curse, whose share is
only the lash, he has no thought of waiting. He is for ever
prying and searching, never an instant still, trying all things in
heaven and earth. He is to the last degree curious and in-
quisitive, scrutinising, rummaging, sounding, poking his nose
everywhere. At the solemn Consummatum est he grins, and
makes a derisive mow. His word is always " Not yet ! " and
" Forward still ! "
All the same, he is not hard to please. Nothing rebuffs him ;
what Heaven throws in his way, he picks up with alacrity. For
instance the Church has rejected Nature as something impure and
suspect. Satan seizes on it, and makes it his pride and ornament.
Better still, he utilises it, turns it to profit, originates the arts from
it, accepting gladly the great name they would fain cast at him as a
stigma and a disgrace, that of Prince of this World.
" Alas for them that laugh ! " they had declared with startling
unwisdom ; for what was this but giving Satan a fine initial
advantage to start with, the monopoly of laughter, and proclaim-
ing him amusing ? Let us say necessary at once ; for laughter is an
essential function of human nature. How support life at all,
if we cannot laugh, at any rate when we are in sorrow ?
The Church, which sees in our life below only a test and trial
for one to come, takes care not to prolong it needlessly. Her
10
Jntrotwction
medicine is resignation, a waiting and a hoping for death. Here
is a great field opened to Satan; he becomes physician, healer of
living men. Nay more! consoler as well; he has the compassion
to show us our dead, to evoke the shades of the dear ones we
have loved and lost.
Another trifle the Church has cast away and condemned
Logic, the free exercise of Reason. Here again is an appetising
dainty the Enemy snaps up greedily.
The Church had built of solid stone and tempered mortar a
narrow in pace, vaulted, low-browed and confined, lighted by the
merest glimmer of day through a tiny slit. This they called the
schools. A few shavelings were let loose in it, and told " to be
free " ; they one and all grew halting cripples. Three hundred,
four hundred years, only made them more helplessly paralysed.
Between Abelard and Occam the progress made is nil !
A pretty tale, to say we must look there for the origin of the
Renaissance ! The Renaissance came about, no doubt of that ;
but how ? by the satanic effort of men who broke through
the vault, the struggles of condemned criminals who would see the
light of heaven. It came about in the main far away from schools
and scholastics, in that school of wild nature where Satan lectured
a truant band of Sorceresses and shepherd lads.
A dangerous curriculum, if ever there was one ! But its very
risks stimulated the love of knowledge, the frantic longing to see
and know. It was there began the black sciences, the forbidden
Chemistry of poisons, and the accursed thing, Anatomy. The
shepherd, first to scan the stars, along with his discoveries in
Astronomy, brought to the common stock his sinister recipes
and his experiments on animals. Then the Sorceress would
contribute a corpse filched from the nearest graveyard ; and
for the first time at the risk of the stake men could con-
template that miracle of God's handicraft " which " (as M. Serres
so well said) "we hide in silly prudishness instead of trying to
understand."
The only Doctor admitted to these classes, Paracelsus, noted a
ii
Sorceress: a Stufcp in Superstition
third as well, who now and again would glide in to join the sinister
conclave, bringing Surgery with him as his contribution. This
was the surgeon of those gentle times, the Public Executioner,
the man of unflinching hand, whose plaything was the branding-
iron, who broke men's bones and could set them again, who could
slay and make alive, and hang a felon up to a certain point and
no further.
This criminal University of the Sorceress, the Shepherd, and the
Hangman, by means of its experiments a sacrilege every one em-
boldened the other and rival seat of learning and forced its scholars
to study. For each was fain to live; and otherwise the Witch would
have monopolised all, and the Schoolmen turned their backs for
good and all on Medicine. The Church had to submit, and wink
at these crimes. She allowed there were good poisons (Grillandus);
she permitted dissection in public, though reluctantly and under
dire constraint. In 1306 the Italian Mondino opened and
dissected a woman, and another in 1315. It was a solemn and
beneficent revelation, the veritable discovery of a new world, far
more so than Christopher Columbus's. Fools shuddered, and
howled in protest ; wise men dropped on their knees.
With victories like these to his credit, Satan could not but live.
Alone the Church would never have had strength to crush him.
Fire and stake were of no avail, but a certain line of policy was
more successful.
With no little astuteness the kingdom of Satan was divided
against itself. In opposition to his daughter and bride, the
Sorceress, was set her son, the Healer.
The Church, deeply and from the bottom of her heart as she
hated the latter, none the less established his monopoly, to secure
the Sorceress's ruin. She declares, in the fourteenth century,
that if a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a
Witch and must die.
But how should she study publicly ? Imagine the scene, at
once ludicrous and terrible, that would have occurred if the poor
12
3ntrotmctfon
savage creature had ventured to enter the schools ! What merri-
ment and wild gaiety ! In the bale-fires of St. John's day, cats
chained together were burned to death. But think of the Sor-
ceress bound to this caterwauling rout of hell, the Witch screaming
and roasting in the flames, what a treat for the gentle band of
young shavelings and sucking pedants !
We shall see Satan's decadence all in good time, a sorry tale.
We shall see him pacified, grown a good old sort. He is robbed
and pillaged, till at last, of the two masks he wore at the Witches'
Sabbath, the foulest is adopted by Tartuffe.
His spirit is everywhere. But for himself, for his own person-
ality, in losing the Witch, he lost all. The Wizards were bores,
and nothing more.
Now that his fall has been so far consummated, do his foes
quite realise what they have done? Was he not a necessary
actor, an indispensable factor in the great engine of religious
faith, something out of gear nowadays? Every organism that
works well is double, has two sides ; life is hardly possible other-
wise. A certain balance between two forces is necessary, forces
mutually opposed and symmetrical, but unequal. The inferior*
acts as counterpoise, corresponding to the other. The superior
grows impatient at the check, and is for abolishing it altogether.
But the wish is a mistaken one.
When Colbert, in 1672, shelved Satan with so little ceremony,
forbidding the Judges of the Realm to hear cases of Witchcraft,
the Norman Parlement, in its obstinate conservatism, its sound
Norman logicality, demonstrated the dangers attending such a
decision. The Devil is nothing less than a dogma closely bound
up with all the rest. Touch the vanquished of the ages are
you not touching the victor too ? Doubt the acts of the one is
not this paving the way to doubt those of the other, those very
miracles he did to fight the Devil? The pillars of heaven are
based in the abyss. The rash man who shakes this infernal
foundation may well crack the walls of Paradise.
Colbert paid no heed ; he had so many other things to do.
13
She Sorceress: a Stito\> in Superstition
But it may be the Devil heard. And his wounded spirit is greatly
consoled. In the petty trades where he now gains his living
Spiritualism, Table-turning, and the like he resigns himself to
insignificance, and thinks, at any rate, he is not the only time-
hallowed institution that is a-dying.
FIRST BOOK
CHAPTER I
DEATH OF THE GODS
Christianity believed the world to be on the point of death The world
of demons The Bride of Corinth.
JHERE are authors who assure us that a little while
before the final victory of Christianity a mysterious
voice was heard along the shores of the ^Egean
sea, proclaiming : " Great Pan is dead ! "
The old universal god of Nature is no more. Great the
jubilation ; it was fancied that, Nature being defunct, Temptation
was dead too. Storm-tossed for so many years, the human soul
was to enjoy peace at last.
Was it simply a question of the termination of the ancient
worship, the defeat of the old faith, the eclipse of time-honoured
religious forms ? No ! it was more than this. Consulting the
earliest Christian monuments, we find in every line the hope
expressed, that Nature is to disappear and life die out in a word,
that the end of the world is at hand.
The game is up for the gods of life, who have so long kept up
a vain simulacrum of vitality. Their world is falling round them
in crumbling ruin. All is swallowed up in nothingness : " Great
Pan is dead ! "
It was no new evangel that the gods must die. More than one
ancient cult is based on this very notion of the death of the
gods. Osiris dies, Adonis dies it is true, in this case, to rise
c 17
Sorceress: a Stub\> in Superstition
again. yEschylus, on the stage itself, in those dramas that were
played only on the feast-days of the gods, expressly warns them,
by the voice of Prometheus, that one day they must die. Die !
but how? vanquished, subjugated to the Titans, the antique
powers of Nature.
Here it is an entirely different matter. The early Christians,
as a whole and individually, in the past and in the future, hold
Nature herself accursed. They condemn her as a whole and in
every part, going so far as to see Evil incarnate, the Demon him-
self, in a flower. 1 So, welcome and the sooner the better the
angel-hosts that of old destroyed the Cities of the Plain. Let
them destroy, fold away like a veil, the empty image of the world,
and at length deliver the saints from the long-drawn ordeal of
temptation.
The Gospel says : " The day is at hand." The Fathers say :
"Soon, very soon." The disintegration of the Roman Empire
and the inroads of the barbarian invaders raise hopes in St.
Augustine's breast, that soon there will be no city left but the
City of God.
Yet how long a-dying the world is, how obstinately determined
to live on ! Like Hezekiah, it craves a respite, a going backward
of the dial. So be it then, till the year One Thousand, but not
a day longer.
Is it so certain, as we have been told over and over again,
that the old gods were exhausted, sick of themselves and weary
of existence? that out of sheer discouragement they as good as
gave in their own abdication ? that Christianity was able with a
breath to blow away these empty phantoms ?
They point to the gods at Rome, the gods of the Capitol,
where they were only admitted in virtue of an anticipatory death,
I mean on condition of resigning all they had of local sap, of
renouncing their home and country, of ceasing to be deities
1 Compare Muratori, Script. It., i. 293, 545, on St. Cyprian ; A. Maury,
, 435.
18
>eatb of tbe (Sofcs
representative of such and such a nation. Indeed, in order to
receive them, Rome had had to submit them to a cruel operation,
that left them poor, enervated, bloodless creatures. These great
centralised Divinities had become, in their official life, mere
dismal functionaries of the Roman Empire. But, though fallen
from its high estate, this Aristocracy of Olympus had in nowise
involved in its own decay the host of indigenous gods, the crowd
of deities still holding possession of the boundless plains, of
woods and hills and springs, inextricably blended with the life of
the countryside. These divinities, enshrined in the heart of oaks,
lurking in rushing streams and deep pools, could not be driven
out.
Who says so? The Church herself, contradicting herself
flatly. She first proclaims them dead, then waxes indignant
because they are still alive. From century to century, by the
threatening voice of her Councils, 1 she orders them to die. . . .
And lo ! they are as much alive as ever !
" They are demons . . . " and therefore alive. Unable to
kill them, the Church suffers the innocent-hearted countryfolk
to dress them up and disguise their true nature. Legends grow
round them, they are baptised, actually admitted into the Chris-
tian hierarchy. But are they converted? Not yet by any
means. We catch them still on the sly continuing their old
heathen ways and Pagan nature.
Where are they to be found ? In the desert, on lonely heaths,
in wild forests ? Certainly, but above all in the house. They
cling to the most domestic of domestic habits ; women guard
and hide them at board and even bed. They still possess the
best stronghold in the world better than the temple, to wit the
hearth.
History knows of no other revolution so violent and unsparing
as that of Theodosius. There is no trace elsewhere in antiquity
of so wholesale a proscription of a religion. The Persian fire-
1 See Mansi, Baluze ; Council of Aries, 442 ; Tours, 567 ; Leptines, 743 ;
the Capitularies, etc. Gerson even, towards 1400.
19
Sorceress : a Stubp in Superstition
worship, in its high-wrought purity, might outrage the visible
gods of other creeds ; but at any rate it suffered them to remain.
Under it the Jews were treated with great clemency, and were
protected and employed. Greece, daughter of the light, made
merry over the gods of darkness, the grotesque pot-bellied
Cabiri ; but still she tolerated them, and even adopted them as
working gnomes, making her own Vulcan in their likeness.
Rome, in the pride of her might, welcomed not only Etruria,
but the rustic gods as well of the old Italian husbandman. The
Druids she persecuted only as embodying a national resistance
dangerous to her dominion.
Victorious Christianity, on the contrary, was fain to slaughter
the enemy outright, and thought to do so. She abolished the
Schools of Philosophy by her proscription of Logic and the
physical extermination of the philosophers, who were massacred
under the Emperor Valens. She destroyed or stripped the
temples, and broke up the sacred images. Quite conceivably
the new legend might have proved favourable to family life, if
only the father had not been humiliated and annulled in St.
Joseph, if the mother had been given prominence as the trainer,
the moral parent of the child Jesus. But this path, so full of
rich promise, was from the first abandoned for the barren ambition
of a high, immaculate purity.
Thus Christianity deliberately entered on the lonely road of
celibacy, one the then world was making for of its own impulse
a tendency the imperial rescripts fought against in vain. And
Monasticism helped it on the downward slope.
Men fled to the desert ; but they were not alone. The Devil
went with them, ready with every form of temptation. They
must needs revolutionise society, found cities of solitaries, it
was of no avail. Everyone has heard of the gloomy cities of
anchorites that grew up in the Thebai'd, of the turbulent, savage
spirit that animated them, and of their murderous descents upon
Alexandria. They declared they were possessed of the Devil,
impelled by demons, and they told only the truth.
E>eatb of the
There was an enormous void arisen in Nature's plan. Who
or what should fill it ? The Christian Church is ready with
an answer: The Demon, everywhere the Demon Ubique
Dcemon. 1
Greece no doubt, like all other countries, had had its energumens,
men tormented, possessed by spirits. But the similarity is
purely external and accidental, the resemblance more apparent
than real. In the Thebaid it is no case of spirits either good or
bad, but of the gloomy children of the pit, wilfully perverse and
malignant. Everywhere, for years to come, these unhappy hypo-
chondriacs are to be seen roaming the desert, full of self-loathing
and self-horror. Try to realise, indeed, what it means, to be
conscious of a double personality, to really believe in this second
self, this cruel indweller that comes and goes and expiates within
you, and drives you to wander forth in desert places and over
precipices. Thinner and weaker grows the sufferer; and the
feebler his wretched body, the more fiercely the demon harries it.
Women in particular are filled, distended, inflated by these
tyrants, who impregnate them with the infernal aura, stir up
internal storm and tempest, make them the sport and plaything
of their every caprice, force them into sin and despair. ,
Nor is it human beings only that are demoniac. Alas ! all
Nature is tainted with the horror. If the devil is in a flower,
how much more in the gloomy forest ! The light that seemed so
clear and pure is full of the creatures of night. The Heavens full
of Hell, what blasphemy ! The divine morning star, that has
shed its sparkling beam on Socrates, Archimedes, Plato, and
once and again inspired them to sublimer effort, what is it now ?
a devil, the great devil Lucifer. At eve, it is the devil Venus,
whose soft and gentle light leads mortals into temptation.
I am not surprised at such a society turning mad and savage.
1 See the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, and the authors quoted by A.
Maury, Afagie, 317. In the fourth century the Messalians, believing them-
selves to be full of demons, were constantly blowing their noses, and spitting
unceasingly, in their incredible efforts to expectorate these.
21
ZThc Sorcerese: a Stnfcp in Superstition
Furious to feel itself so weak against the demons, it pursues them
everywhere, in the temples and altars of the old faith to begin
with, later in the heathen martyrs. Festivals are abolished ; for
may they not be assemblages for idolatrous worship ? Even the
family is suspect ; for might not the force of habit draw the
household together round the old classic Lares? And why a
family at all? The empire is an empire of monks.
Yet the individual man, isolated and struck silent as he is, still
gazes at the skies, and in the heavenly host finds once more the
old gods of his adoration. " This is what causes the famines,"
the Emperor Theodosius declares, " and all the other scourges of
the Empire," a terrible dictum that lets loose the blind rage of
the fanatic populace on the heads of their inoffensive Pagan
fellow-citizens. The Law blindly unchains all the savagery of
mob-law.
Old gods of Heathendom, the grave gapes for you ! Gods of
Love, of Life, of Light, darkness waits to engulf you ! The cowl
is the only wear. Maidens must turn nuns ; wives leave their
husbands, or if they still keep the domestic hearth, be cold and
continent as sisters.
But is all this possible ? Who shall be strong enough with
one breath to blow out the glowing lamp of God ? So reckless
an enterprise of impious piety may well bring about strange,
monstrous, and astounding results. . . . Let the guilty tremble !
Repeatedly in the Middle Ages shall we find the gloomy
story recurring of the Bride of Corinth. First told in quite early
days by Phlegon, the Emperor Hadrian's freedman, it reappears
in the twelfth century, and again in the sixteenth, the deep
reproach, as it were, the irrepressible protest of outraged Nature.
"A young Athenian goes to Corinth, to the house of the man
who promises him his daughter in marriage. He is still a Pagan,
and is not aware that the family he hopes to become a member
of has just turned Christian. He arrives late at night. All are
in bed, except the mother, who serves the meal hospitality de-
2)eatb of the (Bobs
mands, and then leaves him to slumber, half dead with fatigue.
But hardly is he asleep, when a figure enters the room, a
maiden, clad in white, wearing a white veil and on her brow a
fillet of black and gold. Seeing him, she raises her white hand
in surprise : ' Am I then already so much a stranger in the
house ? . . . Alas ! poor recluse. . . . But I am filled with
shame, I must begone.' ' Nay ! stay, fair maiden ; here are
Ceres and Bacchus, and with you, love ! Fear not, and never
look so pale ! ' 'Back, back, I say ! I have no right to happi-
ness any more. By a vow my sick mother made, youth and life
are for ever fettered. The gods are no more, and the only sacri-
fices now are human souls.' 'What! can this be you? You,
my promised bride I love so well, promised me from a child ?
Our fathers' oath bound us indissolubly together under Heaven's
blessing. Maiden ! be mine ! ' ' No ! dear heart, I cannot.
You shall have my young sister. If I groan in my chill prison-
house, you in her arms must think of me, me who waste away in
thoughts of you, and who will soon be beneath the sod.' ' No !
no ! I call to witness yonder flame ; it is the torch of Hymen.
You shall come with me to my father's house. Stay with me,
my best beloved ! ' For wedding gift he offers her a golden cup.
She gives him her neck-chain ; but chooses rather than the cup
a curl of his hair.
" 'Tis the home of spirits ; she drinks with death-pale lips
the dark, blood-red wine. He drinks eagerly after her, invok-
ing the God of Love. Her poor heart is breaking, but still she
resists. At last in despair he falls weeping on the bed. Then
throwing herself down beside him : ' Ah ! how your grief hurts
me ! Yet the horror of it, if you so much as touched me ! White
as snow, and cold as ice, such alas ! and alas ! is your promised
bride.' ' Come to me ! I will warm you, though you should 'be
leaving the very tomb itself. . . . ' Sighs, kisses pass between
the pair. ' Cannot you feel how I burn ? ' Love unites them,
binds them in one close embrace, while tears of mingled pain
and pleasure flow. Thirstily she drinks the fire of his burning
23
Sorceress : a tub in Superstition
mouth ; her chilled blood is fired with amorous ardours, but
the heart stands still within her bosom.
" But the mother was there, though they knew it not, listening
to their tender protestations, their cries of sorrow and delight.
' Hark ! the cock-crow ! Farewell till to-morrow, to-morrow
night ! ' A lingering farewell, and kisses upon kisses !
" The mother enters furious, to find her daughter ! Her lover
strives to enfold her, to hide her, from the other's view ; but she
struggles free, and towering aloft from the couch to the vaulted
roof: ' Oh ! mother, mother ! so you begrudge me my night of joy,
you hunt me from this warm nest. Was it not enough to have
wrapped me in the cold shroud, and borne me so untimely to the
tomb ? But a power beyond you has lifted the stone. In vain
your priests droned their prayers over the grave ; of what avail
the holy water and the salt, where youth burns hot in the heart ?
Cold earth cannot freeze true Love ! . . . You promised ; I am
returned to claim my promised happiness. . . .
" ' Alack ! dear heart, you must die. You would languish here
and pine away. I have your hair ; 'twill be white to-morrow. 1 . . .
1 At this point of the story I suppress an expression that may well shock
us. Goethe, so noble in the form of his writings, is not equally so in the
spirit. He quite mars the wonderful tale, fouling the Greek with a gruesome
Slavonic notion. At the instant when the lovers are dissolved in tears, he
makes the girl into a vampire. She curses because she is athirst for blood, to
suck his heart's blood. The poet makes her say coldly and calmly this im-
pious and abominable speech : " When he is done, / will go on to others ;
the new generation shall succumb to my fury. "
The Middle Ages dress up this tradition in grotesque garb to terrify us
with the devil Venus. Her statue receives from a young man a ring, which
he imprudently places on her ringer. Her hand closes on it, she keeps it as
a sign of betrothal ; then at night, comes into his bed to claim the rights it
confers. To rid him of his hellish bride, an exorcism is required (S. Hibb.,
part iii. chap. iii. 174). The same story occurs in the Fabliaux, but absurdly
enough applied to the Virgin. Luther repeats the classical story, if my
memory serves me, in his Table-talk, but with great coarseness, letting us
smell the foulness of the grave. The Spaniard Del Rio transfers the scene
from Greece to Brabant. The affianced bride dies shortly before the wedding-
day. The passing-bell is tolled ; the grief-stricken bridegroom roams the
fields in despair. He hears a wail ; it is the loved one wandering over the
24
Mother, one last prayer ! Open my dark dungeon, raise a
funeral pyre, and let my loving heart win the repose the flames
alone can give. Let the sparks fly upward and the embers
glow ! We will back to our old gods again.' "
heath. . . . "See you not," she cries, "who my guide is?" "No !" he
replies, and seizing her, bears her away to his home. Once there, the account
was very near growing over tender and touching. The grim inquisitor, Del
Rio, cuts short the thread with the words, " Lifting the veil, they found a
stake with a dead woman's skin drawn over it." The Judge Le Loyes,
though not much given to sensibility, nevertheless reproduces for us the
primitive form of the legend. After him, there is an end of these gloomy
story-tellers, whose trade is done. Modern days begin, and the Bride has
won the day. Buried Nature comes back from the tomb, no longer a stealthy
visitant, but mistress of the house and home.
CHAPTER II
WHAT DROVE THE MIDDLE AGES
TO DESPAIR
The people makes itself legends But originality is prohibited The people
defends its lands But is made a serf of.
I
JE ye like unto new-born babes" {quasi modo
geniti infantes] ; be little children for innocence
of heart, and peacefulness and forgetfulness of
all causes of offence, calm and serene, under
the hand of Jesus.
Such is the sweet counsel the Church gives this stormy world
on the morrow of the great catastrophe. In other words :
" Volcanoes, scoriae, ashes, lava, grow green and lush with grass.
Fields burned up with fire, come, carpet yourselves with flowers."
One circumstance, it is true, then was promised the peace that
revivifies, all the schools were ended, the path of logic aban-
doned and deserted. A method of infinite simplicity rendered
all discussion futile, and set before the feet of all the easy down-
ward road they must needs follow henceforth. If the Credo was
of doubtful interpretation, still life was all traced out plainly
enough in the track of legend. The first word, and the last, was
the same, Imitation.
"Imitate, and all will be well; only repeat and copy^' Yes!
but is this really and truly the way of genuine infancy, the infancy
that vivifies the heart of man, makes him find new sources of
refreshment and fertility ? To begin with, I can see in this world
that moulds childhood and infancy only attributes of senility ,
26
Mbat 2>ro\>e tbc flM&Me Hses to Bee-pair
over-refinement, servility, impotence. What is this literature
compared with the sublime monuments of Greeks and Jews ?
even compared with the Roman genius ? We find precisely the
same literary decline that befell in India, from Brahminism to
Buddhism ; a garrulous verbiage succeeding to lofty inspiration.
One book plagiarises another, till presently they cannot even
copy correctly. They rob one from the other, and the marbles
of Ravenna are torn down to adorn Aix-la-Chapelle. The whole
fabric of society is of a piece ; the bishop who is lord of a city,
the barbarian prince of a half-savage tribe, model themselves on
the Roman magistrature. Our monks we think so original, are
only repeating in their monastery the villa of an earlier day, as
Chateaubriand well observes. They have no notion of fashion-
ing a new society, any more than of refertilising the old. Mere
imitators of the Eastern monks, they would fain have had their
dependants poor monkish taskmen, a sterile population of celi-
bate lay brothers. It was in their despite family life renewed
itself, and so renewed the world.
When we observe how quickly these old monks are ageing,
how in a single century the level drops from the wise monk
St. Benedict to the pedant Benedict of Ariane, we clearly realise
that these gentry were purely and entirely innocent of the grand
popular creation that grew up about the ruins; I refer to the
Lives of the Saints. The monks wrote them, but it was the
people made them. This young vegetation may throw its luxuri-
ance of leaf and blossom ove.r the crumbling walls of the old
Roman building converted into a monastery, but it does not
grow out of it, we may be very sure. It has its roots deep in the
soil ; the people sowed it there, the family worked the ground,
all took a hand in its production men, women, and children.
The precarious, restless life of those times of violence made these
poor countryfolk imaginative, ready to put faith in their own
dreams that consoled them in their misery, wild dreams, teem-
ing with wonders and full of absurdities, equally ludicrous and
delightful.
27
Sorceress: a Stut> in Superstition
These families, living isolated in the woods or on the moun-
tains (as men live still in the Tyrol and the High Alps), coming
down to the plains but one day in the week, were filled with the
hallucinations their loneliness encouraged. A child had seen
this, a woman had dreamed that. A brand-new Saint arose in
the district ; his story ran through the countryside, like a ballad,
in rough-and-ready rhyme. It was sung and danced at evening
under the oak by the fountain. The priest who came on Sunday
to say Mass in the forest chapel found the legendary song in
every mouth already. Then he said to himself : " Well ! after
all, the tale is a beautiful one and an edifying ; ... it does
honour to the Church. Vox populi, vox Dei / . . . But how-
ever did they come across it ? : ' Then would they show him
authentic witnesses, of unimpeachable veracity, the tree, the
rock, that saw the apparition, the miracle. What more could be
said after that ?
Reported at the Abbey, the legend will soon find a monk, good
for nothing better, whose only craft is the pen, both curious and
credulous, ready to believe anything and everything miraculous.
He writes it all out, embroiders the simple tale with his vapid
rhetoric, spoils it somewhat. But at any rate here it is duly
recorded and recognised, read in refectory, and before long in
church. Recopied, loaded, overloaded with embellishments,
often grotesque embellishments, it will descend from age to age,
till at last it takes honourable rank and place in the Golden
Legend.
Even to-day, when we read these beautiful tales, when we listen to
the simple, artless, solemn melodies into which these rustic popu-
lations put all their young enthusiasm, we cannot but recognise a
very real inspiration, and bewail the irony of fate when we think
what was to be their eventual lot.
These people had taken literally the Church's touching appeal:
"Be ye as little children." But they applied it to the very thing
least dreamed in the original conception. The more Christianity
28
Hfflbat H)rove the fllMbMe Hges to Despair
had feared and abhorred Nature, the more these folk loved her
and held her good and harmless, even sanctified her, giving her
a part to play in the legend.
The animals which the Bible so harshly calls hairy beasts, and
which the monk mistrusts, fearing to find demons incarnated in
them, come into these charming tales in the most touching way,
as, for instance, the hind that warms and comforts Genevieve de
Brabant.
Even apart from the life of legends, in everyday existence, these
humble fireside friends, these gallant helpers in the day's work,
gain a higher place in men's esteem. They have their proper
rights, 1 and their proper estate. If in God's infinite goodness
there is room for the lowliest, if He ever seems to have a prefer-
ence for such out of pity, why should not my ass be allowed in
church ? He has his defects, no doubt, which makes him only
the more like me. He is a sturdy fellow to work, but thick-
skulled; he is intractable and obstinate, in one word, he is my
very counterpart.
Hence those grand festivals, the most beautiful of the Middle
Ages, of the Innocents, of Fools, of the Ass. It is the very people
of that day which in the ass presents its own likeness in person
before the altar, ugly, ludicrous, and down-trodden ! Truly a
touching sight! Led by Balaam, he enters solemnly between the
Sibyl and Virgil, 2 enters to bear witness. If of old he kicked
against Balaam, this was because he saw flashing before him the
sword of the old Law. But here the Law is abrogated and done
with, and the world of Grace seems to open wide its doors to
receive the lowliest, the simple ones of the earth. The people
1 See J. Grimm, Rechts Aliei-thitmer, and Michelet, Origines du Droit.
- From the ritual of Rouen. See Ducange, under Festutn ; Carpentier,
under Kalendie, and Martene, iii. 1 10. The Sibyl was crowned, followed
by Jews and Gentiles, by Moses and the Prophets, Nebuchadnezzar, etc.
From the earliest times, and from century to century, the seventh to the
sixteenth, the Church endeavours vainly to proscribe the great popular festivals
of the Ass, of the Innocents, of Children, and of Fools. She meets with no
success, previously to the rise of the modern spirit.
29
Sorceress: B Stu^ in Superstition
believes it all in the innocency of its heart. Hence the sublime
canticle, in which it addressed the ass, as it might have addressed
itself :
A genoux, et dis Amen !
Assez mange d'herbe et de foin !
Laisse les vieilles choses, et va !
Le neuf emporte le vieux !
La verite fait fuir 1'ombre !
La lumiere chasse la nuit ! l
What insolence and wrong-headedness ! Is this what they
required of you, disobedient, unruly children, when they told
you to be as little children ? They offered you milk ; you drink
strong wine instead. They would lead you gently, bridle in hand,
by the narrow way. Gentle, timid creatures, you seemed afraid
to put one foot before another. Then behold ! of a sudden the
bridle is broken . . . one leap, and you swap over the course.
Ah ! how unwise it was to let you invent your saints, and raise
your altar, then bedeck and. load and bury it in flowers, till its
original form is all but indistinguishable. What can be discerned
is the old heresy, long ago condemned by the Church, the innocence
of Nature. An old heresy do I say ? Nay ! rather a new heresy
that will live many a long day yet, the emancipation of man-
kind.
Now listen and obey :
It is expressly forbidden to invent, to create. No more origin-
1 " Down on your knees, and Amen say !
Enough you've eat of grass and hay !
Leave go old things, and up, away !
The new world puts the old to flight !
Truth turns the gloomy dusk to light !
Dawn's brightness drives away the night ! "
Vetustatem novitas,
Unibram fugat claritas,
Nocteni lux elhninat.
(Rouen Ritual.)
30
Mbat Drove the flMtole Hges to Despair
ality ; no more legends ; no more new saints. There are enough
already. Forbidden to innovate in the forms of worship with
new melodies ; inspiration is prohibited. Any martyrs that
should come to light are to keep quiet in their graves, and wait
with becoming humility till the Church recognises them. For-
bidden for clergy or monks to confer on peasants the tonsure
that enfranchises them. Such the narrow, timid spirit of the
Carlovingian Church, 1 which deliberately contradicts herself,
gives herself the lie, now says to little children, " Be ye old
men ! "
What a change is here ! But can it be meant seriously ? Did
they not tell us to be young ? Nay ! the priest is no longer
identical with the people. A mighty divorce is beginning, an
infinite gulf of separation. Henceforth the priest, a great lord
now or a prince, will sing the Office in a golden cope, using the
sovereign tongue of the great empire that is no more. We, poor
cattle of the field, having lost the language of mankind, the only
one God will deign to hear, what can we do now but low and
bleat, in company with the innocent companion that never scorns
us, that in winter-time warms us in the stall and covers us with
his fleece? We will live with the dumb beasts, and be dumb
ourselves.
In very truth, we have then the less need to go to Church. But
she will not let us off; she orders us back, to listen to words we
cannot understand.
From that day forth a monstrous fog, a heavy, grey, leaden fog,
enwraps the world. Say, for how long? for a thousand long,
dreary, terrible years ! For ten whole centuries, a languor no
previous age has known oppressed the Middle Ages, even to
some extent later times, in a condition midway between sleep and
waking, under the empire of a dismal, an intolerable phenomenon,
that convulsion of supreme boredom we call a yawn.
The indefatigable church bell rings out the accustomed hours,
1 See the Capitularies passim.
31
Gbe Sorceress : a Stuty) in Superstition
and folks yawn ; a nasal chant drones on in antiquated Latin,
and folks yawn. Everything is foreseen ; no room is left for
hope in all the world. Day after day events will recur in iden-
tically the same way. The inevitable oppression of to-morrow
makes men yawn before to-day is done, and the never-ending
perspective of days, and years, of weary sameness still to come,
weighs on the spirits beforehand and sickens of life. From brain
to stomach, from stomach to mouth, the automatic, the fatally
irresistible, convulsion travels, distending the jaws in an endless
and cureless gape. A veritable disease, which pious Bretons
openly avow, imputing it, it is true, to the Devil's machinations.
He lies crouching in the woods, say the Breton peasants ; to the
herdsman as he passes with his beasts, he sings Vespers and
all the other Offices, and sets him yawning, yawning till' he is
like to die. 1
To be old is to be feeble. When the Saracens, when the
Northmen, threaten us, what will be our fate, if the people is still
old and decrepit ? Charlemagne weeps unavailing tears, and the
Church with him, confessing that the holy relics, against these
barbarian demons, can no longer protect the altars. 2 Were it
not well to appeal to the arm of the intractable child they were
going to bind, the arm of the young giant they were fain to
paralyse? A self- contradictory movement marks the ninth
century throughout, at one time the people is held back, at
another pushed forward, at one time feared, at another appealed
to for help. With the people's aid, by the people's hands,
barriers are thrown up, shelters contrived, to stop the barbarian
invaders, to protect the priests, and the saints, escaped from their
churches.
1 A very famous Breton (Renan), last man of the Middle Ages, but who
was nevertheless a friend of my own, on the occasion of the quite ineffectual
journey he made for the conversion of Rome, received brilliant offers when in
the Eternal City. "What would you have?" the Pope asked him. "One
thing and one thing only : a dispensation from the Breviary ... I am sick
to death of it." Such was Hincmar's well-known admission.
32
Wbat Drove tbe flM&Me H$es to Despair
Despite the Bald Emperor's prohibition, a castle-keep rises on
the mountain height. There the fugitive arrives, "Take me in,
in God's name, at any rate my wife and children. I will camp
with my bestial in your outer bailey." The castle restores his
courage and he feels himself a man at last. It shelters him ; he
defends it, and so protects his protector.
In earlier days the poor, under stress of famine, surrendered
themselves to the rich and powerful as serfs. Now it is very
different ; he gives himself as vassal, that is to say, brave and
valiant champion. 1
He gives himself, yet remains his own man, keeping the right
to renounce his allegiance. " I am for higher things ; the world
is wide. I too, as well as another, may raise my castle on the
steep. ... I have defended the outside ; I shall know how to
guard my head in the inside."
Here we have the grand, noble origin of the Feudal world.
The man of the keep received his vassals, but said to them,
" You shall leave me when you will, and I will even help you
to do it, if needful; so far, indeed, that if you are mired, I
will get down off my horse myself to succour you." This is
the ancient formula word for word. 2
But one morning what is this I see ? Do my eyes deceive me ?
The Lord of the Valley sallies forth to raid the lands round about,
sets up landmarks none may overpass, and even invisible lines of
demarcation. "What is it? What does it mean?" ... It
means that the kordship is enclosed : " The Feudal Lord, under
lock and key, holds all immured, between sky and earth."
Alas ! alas ! By virtue of what right is the vassus (the valiant
man, that is) henceforth to be a prisoner ? Nay ! vassus, they
will maintain, may equally be equivalent to slave.
1 A distinction too little appreciated, too little noticed, by writers who
have enlarged upon personal surrender, " recommendation " to a superior,
etc.
- Grimm, Rechts Alterthiimer ; Michelet, Origines du Droit,
D 33
Gbe Sorceress : a tnt>\> in Superstition
In the same way servus, meaning servant (often a high-born
servant, a Count or Prince of the Empire), will signify for the weak
and lowly, a serf, a villein whose life is valued at a denier.
This is the hateful net they are taken in. But yonder on his
plot of ground is one who maintains his land is free, an allod
(allodium, aleu), a " fief of the sun." He sits on his boundary-
stone, crushes his hat down firm on his head, and watches the
Feudal Lord, the Emperor himself, pass by. 1
" Go your ways, ride on, Emperor, you sit tight in your saddle,
and I on my boundary-stone yet tighter. You pass, but I
remain. . . . For I am Freedom."
But ... I have not the heart to tell the man's eventual fate.
The air thickens round him, and his breath fails more and more.
He seems bewitched. He cannot move, he is as if paralysed.
His beasts too grow thinner and thinner, as though a spell were
on them. His servants die of hunger. His land is fallen barren.
He is hag-ridden o' nights.
Still he holds on ; he says, " A poor man's house is his
castle."
But they will not leave him alone. He is cited, and must
answer, to the Imperial Court. He repairs thither, a survival
from a vanished world, a spectre of the past, a thing unrecog-
nisable. " What is it ? " the younger men ask each other. " He
is neither Seigneur nor serf! Why, then, what is he? He is
nothing."
" ' Who am I ? ' ask you ? I am he who built the first castle-
keep, and defended it in your behoof ; he who v leaving its walls,
strode bravely to the bridge to meet the heathen Northmen. . . .
More than that, I dammed the river, I reclaimed the alluvial waste,
I created the very soil, like God who made ' the dry land appear.'
. . . This soil, who shall drive me off it ? "
"Nay, my friend," answered his neighbour, "you shall not be
driven off it. You shall cultivate it still, this soil . . . only on
other conditions from what you think. . . . Remember, good
1 Grimm, on the word aku (allodium).
34
Mhat Drove tbe rtMfcMc RQCB to Despair
friend, how in the heedlessness of youth (it is fifty years agone
now) you wedded Jacqueline, a little maid of my father's serfs.
. . . Remember the maxim : 'Who treads my hen, is my cock.'
You belong to my hen-roost. Come, off belt and away sword !
. . . Henceforth you are my serf."
There is no invention here ; it is all bare truth. The atrocious
story recurs over and over again in the Middle Ages. And what
a bitter weapon of tyranny it was ! I have abridged and omitted
much, for every time one returns to these incidents, the same
sharp point of pity and indignation pierces the heart.
One there was who, under so dire an outrage, fell into such a
passion of fury he could find never a word to say. 'Twas like
Roland betrayed at Roncesvaux. All the blood of his body rose
to his throat and choked him. . . . His eyes flashed fire, his
poor dumb mouth, dumb but so fiercely eloquent, turned all the
assemblage pale. . . . They shrank back in terror. . . . He was
dead. His veins had burst. . . . His arteries shot the red blood
into the very faces of his murderers. 1
This instability of condition and tenure, this horrid, shelving
declivity, down which a man slips from free man to vassal, from
vassal to servant, from servant to serf, is the great terror of the
Middle Ages, the basis of its despair. There is no way of escape ;
one step, and the man is lost. He is an alien, a waif and
stray ) a head of wild game; serfdom or death, these are the only
alternatives. The heavy soil clogs the feet, and entangles and
engulfs the passer-by in its miry depths. The poisoned air kills
him, lays its dead hand on him, turns him into a dead man, a
nonentity, a brute beast, a life priced at ten farthings, a life any-
1 This is what happened to the Comte d'Avesnes, when his free land was
declared a mere fief, and himself a mere vassal, the man of the Comte de
Hainault. Read also the terrible history of the Grand Chancellor of Flanders,
the First Magistrate of Bruges, who for all this was nevertheless claimed, and
successfully claimed, as a serf (Gualterius, Scriptores Rerum Francicarum,
xiii. 334.)
35
Gbe Sorceress: a Stu&\> in Superstition
one may take and expiate the murder for ten farthings down.
Such were the two main, external features of Mediaeval wretched-
ness, the two great hardships that drove men to give themselves
to Satan. Now to look at the internal aspect, to examine the
foundations of life and character, and sound the depths of human
existence, at the same unhappy period.
CHAPTER III
THE LITTLE DEMON OF THE HEARTH AND
HOME
Promiscuity of the primitive villa An independent hearth and home The
serfs wife True to the old gods Robin Goodfellow.
[(HE early centuries of the Middle Ages, when the
legends were in making, give all the impression of
a dream. Among rustic populations, deeply sub-
missive to the Church and of a gentle spirit (the
legends themselves attest this), we would gladly assume a high
degree of innocence. Surely it must have been God's own time,
this. Nevertheless, in the Penitentiaries, where the most ordinary
sins are noted down, strange and dishonouring forms of depravity
are mentioned too, of rare occurrence under the reign of Satan.
This is due to two causes utter ignorance, and the habit of
living in common, which brought near relatives into the closest
contiguity. They seem to have had scarce an inkling of our
morality. Their own, in spite of ecclesiastical prohibitions, appears
to have been that of the Patriarchs, of the remotest antiquity,
which looks upon marriage with strange women as wicked, and
only allows the kinswoman to be a lawful bride. Allied families
formed only a single household. Not daring as yet to disperse
their dwellings over the wastes that surrounded them, tilling merely
the outlying demesne of a Merovingian palace or of a monastery,
they retired every night together with their beasts under the roof
of a vast villa. Hence inconveniences similar to those of the
37
Gbe Sorceress: H Stufc^ in Superstition
ergastulum of classical antiquity, in which slaves were herded
promiscuously. More than one of these communities still existed
in the Middle Ages, and even later. The Lord of the Soil recked
little of what resulted from the arrangement. He regarded as
forming a single family this tribe, this mass of human beings
"getting up and going to bed together," "eating bread off one
platter and meat out of one pot."
In this indiscriminate way of living, woman met with very little
care or protection ; the place she occupied was an extremely
humble one. True, the virgin, the ideal woman, rose higher
from century to century, but the woman of real life counted for
mighty little in these rustic communities, these massed aggregates
of men and cattle. Such was the unhappy but inevitable out-
come of a state of things which could only change for the better
when the common habitation was subdivided, when at length
men plucked up courage to live apart, in separate hamlets, or to
settle as isolated cultivators of fertile lands at a distance, and
build huts in clearings of the forest. The separate hearth created
true family life ; the nest made the bird. Henceforth they have
ceased to be chattels they are living souls. . . . The wife and
mother has come into existence.
A touching moment. At length she has a home; she can
therefore be pure and holy at last, poor creature. She can brood
quietly over a thought, and undisturbed, as she sits spinning,
dream dreams while he is abroad in the forest. The hut is
wretched enough, damp and ill-built, and the winter wind whistles
through it ; but to make up for all defects it is silent. There are
dim corners in it where her dreams can find a lodgement.
She is an owner now, possesses something of her very own.
Distaff, bed, chest is all the household has, as the old song says. 1
1 Trois pas du cote du bane,
Et trois pas du cote du lit,
Trois pas du cote du coffre
Et trois pas, revenez ici.
38
Xtttlc Demon of tbc Ibcartb anfc Ibome
But soon a. table will be added, a bench, or a couple of stools. . . .
A poorly appointed house ! but its furniture includes a living
soul. The firelight heartens it ; the consecrated bush of box
guards the bed, to which is often added a pretty bunch of
vervain. The lady of this palace sits spinning at her door,
watching a few sheep the while. They are not rich enough yet to
keep a cow ; but this will come in time, if God blesses the house.
The forest, a bit of pasture land, a hive of bees that feed on the
heath are their livelihood. They do not grow much wheat yet,
having no certainty of reaping a crop so long in growing. This
life, poverty-stricken as it is, is yet less hard upon the wife. She
is not broken with fatigue, made old and ugly before her time, as
she will be when the time of farming on a large scale has
arrived. And she has more leisure too. Beware of judging her
in any way by the coarse literature of the Noels and fabliaux, the
silly laughter and licence of the broad tales composed at a later
date. She is alone, without neighbours. The evil, unhealthy
life of dark little shut-in towns, the prying into each other's
affairs, the pitiful, perilous scandal-mongering, none of this is
begun yet ! There is no old harridan yet, coming creeping at
dusk down the narrow, gloomy street to tempt the young wife
and tell her someone is a-dying of love for her. The serfs wife we
are describing now has no friend but her dreams, no one to
gossip with but her beasts or the forest trees.
They talk to her, we know not what about. They awake in
her things her mother told her, her grandmother old, old things
that for century after century have been handed on from woman
to woman. Harmless memories come back of the ancient spirits
of the country, a gentle, genial family religion, which in the
common life just quitted and its noisy promiscuity, had doubtless
" Three steps towards the bench,
Three steps towards the bed,
Three steps towards the chest,
And three steps back again."
(Old French song of The Dancing- Master.)
39
Sorceress: H tufc\> in Superstition
lost most of its force, but which now returns like a ghost and
haunts the lonely cabin.
A strange, dainty world of fairies and elves, made to appeal to
a woman's soul. Directly the great stream of invention that pro-
duced the saintly legends runs dry and stops, these other legends,
older and equally poetical, but in a totally different way, come to
share their vogue with them, and reign softly and secretly in
gentle hearts. They are the woman's especial treasure, which
she fondles and caresses. A fairy is a woman too, a fantastic
mirror in which she sees her own self, only fairer and daintier
than the reality.
What were the Fairies ? What we are told is that in old days,
queens of the Gauls, proud and fantastic princesses, at the
coming of Christ and His apostles, were wickedly impertinent
and turned their backs. In Brittany they were dancing at the
time, and never stopped. Hence their cruel sentence ; they
are doomed to live on till the Day of Judgment. 1 Many of them
are reduced to the tiny dimensions of a rabbit or a mouse ; for
instance, the kowrig-gwans (fairy dwarfs), who at night-time, at
the foot of old Druidical stones, ring you round with their elvish
dances ; or, to take another example, the lovely Queen Mab, who
makes her royal coach out of a walnut-shell. They are a trifle
capricious, and sometimes mischievously disposed, and what
wonder, considering their unhappy destiny ? Whimsical and tiny
as they are, they possess a heart, and crave to be loved. Some-
times kindly, sometimes the reverse, they are full of fancies. At
the birth of a child they come down the chimney, endow the
babe with gifts good or bad, and fix its fate. They love good
spinsters, and spin divinely themselves. To spin like a fairy, the
goodwives say.
In the Fairy Tales, disencumbered of the absurd ornaments
the latest editors have dressed them out in, is found the people's
1 The authorities of all dates have been brought together in M. Alfred
Maury's two learned books, Les fees, 1843, and La Magie, 1860. Consult
also, for the North, Grimm's Mythologie.
40
Xtttle Demon of the Ibcartb anfc 1bomc
very inmost heart. They mark a poetical period between the
coarse promiscuity of the primitive villa and the licence of the
days when a rising bourgeoisie produced the cynical fabliaux.
These Tales have a historical side, recalling the great famines,
in the ogres and so on. But as a rule they float in a higher ether
than common history, soaring on the wings of Fantasy through
the realms of eternal Poesy, expressing the desires of men's
hearts, which are ever the same and have an unchanging history
of their own.
The longing of the poor serf to get breathing time, to find rest,
to discover a treasure that shall end his wretchedness, recurs
again and again in them. More often still, by a nobler aspira-
tion, this treasure trove is a soul to boot, a treasure of sleeping
love that must be awaked, as in " The Sleeping Beauty "; though
often the charming heroine is found hidden under a mask by
reason of a fatal spell. Whence that touching Trilogy, that
admirable crescendo, Riqitet of the Tuft, Ass's Skin, Sleeping
Beatity. Love will take no denial ; under all these hideous dis-
guises, it pursues, and wins, the hidden fair one. The last of
these three tales reaches the true sublime, and I suppose no one
has ever been able to read it without tears.
A very real and very genuine passion underlies it, that of
unhappy, quite hopeless love, one that cruel Nature often sows
between pure souls of too widely separated ranks, the poignant
regret of the peasant woman that she cannot make herself fair
and desirable, to be loved of the knight ; the stifled sighs of the
serf, as looking down his furrow, he sees riding by on a white
horse a too, too charming vision, the beautiful, the adored, mis-
tress of the castle and the lands he tills. It is like the Eastern
fable, the melancholy idyll of the impossible loves of the Rose
and the Nightingale. But there is one great difference ; the bird
and the flower are both beautiful, equal even in beauty. But
here the inferior being, so low placed in the scale of rank, con-
fesses humbly, " I am plain and homely, a monster of ugliness ! "
The pity of it ! . . . But all the same, with a persistency and
Sorceress: H tnty> in Superstition
a heroic power of will unknown to the East, and by the very
ardour of his longing, he breaks through the silly obstacles in
his way. He loves so truly he is loved in turn, this monster ;
and Love makes him beautiful.
There is an infinite tenderness in it all. This soul of enchant-
ment turns her thoughts to others besides herself; and is eager
to save all nature and all society as well. All the victims of
those rough days are her especial favourites, the child beaten
by a cruel stepmother, the youngest sister scorned and ill-treated
by the others. She extends her pity even to the lady of the
castle herself, compassionating her for being in the hands of the
ferocious baron, Blue Beard. She commiserates the brutes, and
comforts them for the misery of still wearing the shapes of
animals. They must be patient, a brighter time is coming ; one
day their captive souls will take wings and be free, lovable and
beloved. This is the other side of dss's Skin and other similar
stories. Here at any rate is evidence of a woman's tender-
heartedness. The rude field labourer is brutal enough with his
beasts ; but woman is different, she sees something else than
beasts in them. She judges them as a child does, observes
the human and spiritual elements in them, ennobles the whole
animal world with her sympathy. Oh ! happy spell ! Lowly as
she is, and convinced of her own plainness, yet she has invested
all Nature with her beauty, and the charm of her personality.
But is she so plain, this little peasant wife, whose dreaming
imagination feeds on all these fancies? I have described her
life, how she keeps house, how she spins as she watches her
sheep, how she trips to the forest and gathers her little bundle of
firewood. No very hard work is hers as yet; she is not the
repulsive-looking countrywoman of a later time, disfigured by
unremitting labour in the wheat fields. Neither is she the heavy
citizen's dame, fat and indolent, of the towns, who formed the
subject of so many appetising stories amongst our forefathers.
Our heroine is timid, and has no sense of security ; soft and
42
little Demon of tbe Ibeartb anfc Ibome
gentle, she is conscious of being in God's hand. On the
mountain crag she sees the black and lowering castle, whence a
thousand dangers may at any moment descend. She fears and
honours her husband ; a serf elsewhere, by her side he is a king.
For him she keeps the best, living on almost nothing herself.
She is slim and small, like the pictured saints in church windows.
The meagre fare of those days is bound to make fine-strung
creatures, but having only a frail vitality. Witness the enormous
infant mortality. These pale-faced blossoms are nothing but
nerves. At a later date this will break out in the epileptic
dances of the fourteenth century. At present, in the twelfth and
thereabouts, two weaknesses are connected with this condition of
semi-starvation : at night, somnambulism, and by day, hallucina-
tion, dreamy reverie, and the gift of tears.
All innocence as the woman is, still she has a secret we have
said so before a secret she never, never confesses at church.
She carries shut within her breast a fond remembrance of the
poor ancient gods, 1 now fallen to the estate of spirits, and a feel-
ing of compassion for them. For do not for an instant suppose,
because they are gods, they are exempt from pain and suffering.
Lodged in rocks, in the trunks of oaks, they are very unhappy in
winter. They greatly love heat, and prowl round the houses ;
they have been surprised in stables, warming themselves beside
1 Nothing can be more touching than this fidelity to the old faith. In spite
of persecution, in the fifth century, the peasants used still to carry in proces-
sion, under the form of poor little dolls of linen and flour, the deities of the
great old religions Jupiter, Minerva, Venus. Diana was indestructible,
even in the remotest corner of Germany (see Grimm). In the eighth century
some pagan processions are still performed. In some humble cabins, sacrifices
are still made and auguries taken, etc. (fnaifutus paganiarutit , Council of
Leptines in Hainault). The Capitularies threaten death in vain. In the
twelfth century Burchard of Worms mentions the various prohibitions and
declares they were all unavailing. In 1389 the Sorbonne once more con-
demns the remaining traces of Paganism, and about 1400 Gerson (Contra
Astral.) mentions Astrology as an actual superstition still obstinately sur-
viving.
43
Gbe Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
the cattle. Having no more incense, no more victims, poor
things, they sometimes take some of the housewife's milk. She,
good managing soul, does not stint her husband, but diminishes
her own portion, and when evening comes, leaves a little cream
behind in the bowl.
These spirits, which no longer appear except by night, sadly
regret their exile from the day, and are eager for lights. At
nightfall the goodwife hardens her heart and sallies out fearfully,
bearing a humble taper to the great oak where they dwell, or the
mysterious pool whose surface will double the flame in its dark
mirror to cheer the unhappy outlaws.
Great heavens ! if she were discovered ! Her husband is a
prudent man, and has a holy terror of the Church's anger ; he
would most certainly beat her, if he knew. The priest makes
fierce war on the poor spirits, and hunts them out of every
corner. Yet surely they might be let live in peace in the old
oaks. What harm do they do in the forest ? ' But no ! Council
after Council launches its anathemas against them. On certain
days the priest even goes to the oak, and mumbles prayers and
sprinkles holy water to drive away the evil spirits.
What would become of them if there were no kind soul to pity
them ? But she is their protection ; good Christian as she is, she
yet has a warm corner in her heart for them. None other is to
be trusted with sundry little intimate secrets of her woman's
nature, innocent enough secrets for a chaste wife like her, but
which the Church would be sorely scandalised if it heard. They
are her confessors, to whom she does not fear to make these
touching feminine confidences. She thinks of them as she lays
the Yule log on the fire. It is Christmas, but it is the old Feast
of the Spirits of the North as well, the Feast of the Longest
Night. The same of the Vigil of May Night, \hQpervigilium of
Maia, when the mystic tree is planted. The same again, the
fires of St. John's Eve, the true festival of life and flowers and
new-born love. Above all, the childless wife makes it a duty to
love these feasts, and observe them piously. A vow to the Virgin
44
little Bcmon of tbe Ibcartb anfc Ibome
might not perhaps be successful ; she is hardly in full sympathy
with such a case. Whispering low, the anxious wife prefers to
address her prayer to some old-world deity, adored as a rustic god
of yore, and whom such-and-such a church has been good-natured
enough to make into a saint. 1 Thus bed and cradle, the tenderest
mysteries a chaste and fond soul broods over, all this is still the
province of the gods of ancient days.
Nor are the spirits ungrateful. One day she wakes, and lo !
without her putting a hand to anything, the household tasks are
done. She is struck dumb, crosses herself, and says nothing.
When her man is gone to work she asks herself what it means,
but can find no answer. It must be a spirit. "What is he?
what is he like ? . . . Oh ! how I should love to see him ! . . .
But I am afraid. . . . They say folks die who see a spirit."
Meantime the cradle moves, rocks all by itself. . . . She is lost
in wonder, and presently hears a tiny, soft, soft voice, so low she
might almost think it spoke within her own breast. It says,
" Dear, dearest mistress, if I love to rock your child, 'tis because
I am a little child myself." Her heart beats wildly, but soon she
gathers better courage. The harmless innocence of the act
makes the spirit seem harmless too; he must be good and
gentle, one God must surely tolerate at least.
Henceforth she is no longer alone. She plainly feels his
presence, and he is never far from her. He rubs against her
skirt, she can hear the rustle he makes. He is for ever on the
move about her, and evidently cannot quit her side. If she goes
to the stable, there he is again. And she is almost sure, the other
day, he was in the butter-firkin. 2
1 A. Maury, Magie, 159.
2 This is one of the little glutton's favourite hiding-places. The Swiss,
who know his likings, to this day make him presents of milk. Their name
for him is troll; among the Germans he is called kobold, nix ; among the
French, follet, goblin, lutin ; among the English, Puck, Robin Goodfellow.
Shakespeare makes him oblige sleepy maidservants by pinching them black
and blue to wake them in the mornings.
45
Sorceress: a tut>\> in Superstition
What a pity she cannot catch him and have a good look at
him ! Once, all of a sudden, when she stirred the live embers,
she thought she saw him dancing an elfin dance among the
sparks. Another time she all but captured him in a rose. Small
as he is, he works away, sweeping and tidying and sparing her a
world of trouble. All the same he has his faults. He is volatile
and over-bold, and if he were caught he would most likely escape.
Also he sees and hears too much. Sometimes he repeats in the
morning some little word she has said quite low, low down, at
bedtime, after the light was out. She knows for certain he is
very indiscreet, and most inquisitive. It troubles her to feel
herself followed about everywhere; she complains how annoying
it is, and likes it all the while. Sometimes she will threaten him
and send him about his business. At last she is really alone, and
quite reassured at the thought. But next moment she feels on
her cheek a light caressing breath, a touch like a bird's wing. He
was under a leaf, the rogue. . . . He laughs, and his sweet voice
no mockery in it now tells her his delight in having stolen a
march on his modest, modest mistress. Now she is really angry;
but the rascal only trills, " No ! no ! little mistress, darling little
mistress, you are not angry, not at a thing like that ! "
She is ashamed and dares say no more. But she has her
suspicions he loves her over-well. Her scruples are awaked,
and she loves him all the more. At night she thought she felt
him in bed, that he had slipped in between the sheets. She was
afraid, offered a prayer to God, and pressed close to her good-
man's side. What is she to do? She has not the heart or the
courage to tell the priest. So she tells her husband, who laughs
at first in sheer incredulity. Then she confesses a little more,
that Robin Goodfellow is a sly fellow, sometimes too bold by
half. ..." What matter ? he is so wee ! " Thus her husband
himself reassures her.
Are we also to be reassured, we who can see more plainly?
Yes ! she is still perfectly good and innocent. She would shudder
to imitate the great lady up yonder in the castle, who under her
46
little IDemon of the Ibeartb anfc Ibonic
very husband's eyes, has her court of lovers and her page. Still
we must allow the elfin lover has made good progress already.
Impossible to have a less compromising page than one who can
lie hid in a rose. And there is much that is love-like about him
too. Few can be more encroaching; so tiny he is, he can slip
in anywhere.
He slips even into the husband's heart, pays court to him,
wins his good graces. He looks after his tools, works in his
garden, and of evenings for his reward, behind the child and the
cat, crouches in the chimney corner. His little voice makes
itself heard, for all the world like a cricket's, but he is seldom
seen, except when a struggling beam of light falls upon a par-
ticular crack where he loves to lie. Then they catch a glimpse,
or think they do, of a sharp, whimsical little face; and cry, "Ah,
ha ! little one, we saw you."
All very well to tell them at church they must beware of evil
spirits, that one they think quite harmless, one that slips into the
house like a puff of wind, may really and truly be a demon.
They take good care not to believe a word of it. Why ! his
littleness is proof enough of innocence ; and certainly they have
prospered more since he came. The husband is as sure of it as
the wife, perhaps surer. He is firmly convinced the dear, frolic-
some little Brownie makes the happiness of their home.
47
CHAPTER IV
TEMPTATIONS
The serf invokes the Spirit of Hidden Treasures Feudal raids, and cruel
feudal customs The goodwife's Brownie turns into a demon after all.
HAVE omitted ffom the above picture the deep
shadows of that cruel period, as these would have
darkened it unduly. I refer especially to the
uncertainty in which the rustic household habitu-
ally lived as to its lot, the suspense, the chronic terror of the
savage violence that might burst at any moment on their un-
offending heads from the castle above.
The feudal regime involved precisely the two things of all
others that go farthest to make a hell on earth ; on the one hand,
the extreme of immobility, the man was nailed to the soil, and
emigration utterly impossible; on the other, a high degree of
uncertainty as to the continuance of existing conditions.
Optimistic historians who talk so glibly of fixed quit-rents, and
charters, and purchases of emancipation, forget the paucity of
guarantees forthcoming for it all. So much is bound to be paid
to the Feudal Lord, but he can take all the rest too, if he likes.
This is called in so many words the right of prehension. Work
away, goodman ! And while you are abroad in the fields, the
dreaded troop from the heights may swoop down on your house
and carry off what it pleases "for the service of the Seigneur."
No wonder, if you look at him, the fellow is gloomy over his
48
furrow, and hangs his head ! . . . Yes ! and he is always like
that, with anxious brow and heavy heart, like a man constantly
expecting bad news.
Is he pondering revenge ? Not he ; but two thoughts fill his
mind, two anxieties trouble him alternately. The first, " In what
condition will you find your house when you go back to-night ? "
The other, " Ah ! if only the clod I turn would let me see a
treasure underneath ! if the kind Devil would give me wherewith
to buy our freedom ! "
It is said that at this appeal (like the Etruscan " genius " that
emerged one day from under the ploughshare in the shape of a
child) a dwarf, a gnome, would often lift its tiny figure from the
soil and standing up in the furrow ask him, " What will you of
me then ? " But the poor man^ would be dumbfoundered, and
wanted nothing now. He turned pale and crossed himself, and
then the whole vision was gone.
Was he sorry afterwards ? Did he never say to himself, " Fool,
fool, do you mean then to be for ever unhappy?" I can well
believe it, but I am no less convinced an unsurmountable barrier
of terror prevented him from going further. I do not think for
an instant, as the monks would have us believe, who have given
accounts of Sorcery and Witchcraft, that the pact with Satan was a
mere caprice, a sudden impulse of a lover or a miser. We need
only consult common sense and human nature to be certain
of the contrary, that people never resorted to such extremes
except as a last resource, in utter despair, under the awful
pressure of unending wrong and wretchedness.
" But," they tell us, " these excessive miseries must have been
largely diminished as we near the days of St. Louis, who forbade
private wars between great lords." My own opinion is exactly
the opposite. During the eighty or a hundred years which inter-
vened between this prohibition and the English Wars (1240-
1340), the seigneurs, no longer having their customary amusement
of burning and pillaging the lands of the neighbouring lord, were
E 49
Gbe Sorceress: H tub in Superstition
ferocious in the treatment of their vassals. St. Louis's peace was
their war.
The ecclesiastical seigneurs, the monkish seigneurs, and the
like, make the reader of the Journal d 1 Etudes Rigault (published
recently) fairly shudder. The book gives a revolting picture
of wild, barbarian licence. The monkish seigneurs showed
especial violence towards the nunneries. The austere Rigault,
Confessor of the sainted King and Archbishop of Rouen, makes
a personal investigation into the condition of Normandy. Every
night he rides up to the door of a fresh monastery. Everywhere
he finds the monks leading the bold, bad life of feudal nobles,
going armed, drinking, duelling, hunting recklessly over waste
and corn-land alike, the nuns living with them in indiscriminate
concubinage, and everlastingly with child by them.
Such was the Church ! What must the lay nobles have been ?
What was the inside like of those gloomy towers that, viewed
from the plain below, inspired mere panic terror? Two tales,
true history doubtless both of them, Blue Beard and Girselda,
tell us something. What was he for his vassals, his serfs, this
torturer, who treated his own family with such refinement of
cruelty? We can judge from the only one of them brought
to trial, and that not till the fifteenth century, Gilles de Ritz, the
kidnapper of children. Sir Walter Scott's Front de Boeuf, the
barons of melodrama and romance, are poor creatures compared
to these terrible realities. The Templar in Ivanhoe is an equally
feeble and an entirely artificial portrait. The author has not dared
to face the foul actualities of celibacy among the Knights of the
Temple, and of life inside the fortified castle, where very few
women were allowed, as being mere useless mouths. The
Romances of Chivalry give exactly the opposite of the truth.
Indeed, it has often been observed how literature in many cases
expresses the entire contrary of contemporary life and character ;
as, for instance, the insipid pastoral plays of the Florian type that
held the stage during the Terror of the Revolutionary Period.
The domestic arrangements of these mediseval castles, where
50
{Temptations
they can still be traced, tell us more than all the books put
together. Men-at-arms, pages, serving-men, packed together at
night under low-browed vaults, by day stationed on the battle-
ments, on narrow terraces, suffering the most atrocious boredom,
found breath and life only in their sallies on to the plain below
no longer now warlike expeditions against neighbouring lands,
but hunting parties, #m-hunting parties, exactions, outrages,
without number on the households of the surrounding serfs. The
Lord knew perfectly well himself that a mass of men like this
without women could only be kept in hand on condition of
occasional licence.
The appalling notion of a hell where God uses the wickedest
souls, the most sinful of all there, to torture the less sinful,
delivered up to them as playthings, this noble dogma of the
Middle Ages was literally realised. Men felt instinctively God
was far from them. Each razzia was another proof of the
domination of Satan, a convincing proof it was to him they
must henceforth address their prayers.
To add insult to injury, there was much coarse laughter and
ribald wit indulged in. "But surely the serf women were too
unattractive," it may be objected. The answer is, it was no
question of beauty ; the pleasure consisted in outraging, beating,
and making women cry. As late as the seventeenth century, the
great Court ladies would almost die of laughing to hear the Duke
of Lorraine describe how his fellows raided peaceable villages,
killing and torturing every woman, old women included.
Outrage was especially rife, as may be supposed, among the
well-to-do households, of a relatively superior rank, which were to
be found among the serfs, families of serfs supplying mayors to
the community from generation to generation, such as are found
as far back as the twelfth century taking the first place in the
villages. The nobility hated, mocked, and would fain have
ruined these. Their new sense of moral dignity was an un-
pardonable offence ; it was unforgivable that their wives and
daughters should be chaste and virtuous women. What right
U, OF ILL LIB,
Sorceress: H Stut> in Superstition
had they to be respectable? Their honour was not theirs to
keep. Serfs of the body, that was the cruel phrase everlastingly
thrown in their teeth.
It will be hard to believe in days to come that, among Chris-
tian people, the Law did a worse thing than any it did to the
slaves of Antiquity, that it expressly sanctioned as a right the
most deadly outrage that can wring a human being's heart.
The ecclesiastic seigneur, no less than the lay, possesses this
foul prerogative. In a parish in the neighbourhood of Bourges,
the cure, being a seigneur, laid express claim to the firstfmits of
every bride, though in practice he was quite willing to sell his
wife's virginity to the husband for money down. 1
The theory has been too readily accepted that this outrage was
only formal, never actually done. But the price named in certain
countries for release from it was far beyond the means of almost
any peasant. In Scotland, for instance, the Feudal Superior
claimed "several cows," an enormous, an impossible price.
Thus the poor young peasant's wife was at her Lord's discretion.
Moreover, the Fors du Beam state in so many words that the
right was literally exacted. " The peasant's eldest son is always
reckoned the Seigneur's child, for he may be of his engendering." 2
All feudal customs, even where this is not mentioned, in-
variably impose an obligation on the newly made bride to go up
to the castle to present the marriage meat-offering. An odious
practice to force the poor trembling creature thus to run the
gauntlet of anything it might enter the heads of the wild pack of
insolent, wifeless retainers that harboured there to do to her.
One can still see the shameful scene, the young husband
bringing his bride to the castle. One can imagine the guffaws of
1 Lauriere, ii. 100, under word Marquette ; Michelet, Origines du Droit,
264. .
2 This work was not published till (1842) subsequently to the Origines
(1837).
52
^Temptations
the knights and squires, the ribald tricks of the pages, that wel-
comed the unhappy pair. " At any rate the presence of the Lady
of the Castle will keep them in check," you say. Not a bit of it.
The fair chatelaine the romances would have us think so delicate, 1
but who was quite capable of taking command of the garrison in
her Lord's absence ; who was used to judging, punishing, ordering
torture or death; who had a hold over the Baron himself by
means of the fiefs she brought him she was no tender-hearted
protectress, least of all for a serf, who perhaps was a pretty
woman too. Flaunting publicly, as was the habit of the time,
her favoured knight and her page, she was not sorry to justify
the liberties she allowed herself by similar misdemeanours on
her husband's part.
She will be no obstacle to the game in hand, the amusement
they are getting out of the poor trembling fellow eager to redeem
his wife. They begin by bargaining with him, laughing at the
agonies of the " hard-fisted peasant," and end by sucking his
very marrow and blood. Why this dead set at the pair? Be-
cause he is fittingly dressed, an honest man of respectable
position, a notable person in his village. Because she is pious,
chaste, and modest, because she loves him, because she is afraid
and in tears. Her pretty eyes ask for pity, in vain.
The unfortunate man offers all he possesses, even the dowry
itself. . . . No use ! it is not enough. Angered at the injustice
of such harsh treatment, he urges, " But my neighbour, he paid
nothing." . . . Ho ! ho ! argufying now, the insolent scoundrel !
Then the whole pack crowds round him, shouting; sticks and
brooms belabour him with a hail of blows. Finally he is hustled
and kicked out of doors, and they scream after him : " Jealous
brute, with your ugly, lenten looks, who's stealing your wife?
1 This delicacy and refinement is well instanced in the treatment the
ladies of the Court were for inflicting with their own hands on Jean de
Menny, their poet, the author of the Roman de la Rose (about 1500). They
would certainly have carried out their intention, had it not been for the witty
poet's clever subterfuge.
53
Sorceress: a Stufc^ in Superstition
You shall have her back to-night, and to cap the favour, with
child ! . . . Say thank you ; why ! you're nobles now. Your
firstborn will be a Baron ! " All crowd to the windows to see
this ludicrous figure, death in his heart, wedding-clothes on his
back. . . . Peals of laughter pursue him, and the roystering
mob, down to the meanest scullion, gives chase to the "poor
cuckold ! " l
The man would have died on the spot of rage and chagrin,
but for one hope, of the Devil's help. He goes home alone,
and finds his house, how empty, how deserted ! No ! not empty ;
there is someone there. Satan sits at the hearth-side.
Presently she returns too, pale, disordered, in pitiful estate !
. . . She throws herself on her knees, and craves his pardon.
At this the man's heart is like to burst. ... He puts his two
arms round her neck, and weeps and sobs and cries aloud till the
very walls tremble. . . .
Still her coming brings God back to the house. Whatever
she may have endured, she is pure, innocent, and holy yet.
Satan will get nothing to-day. The Pact is not ripe for signing
yet.
Our silly national Fabliaux and ridiculous Contes without
exception assume that under this mutual injury and all sub-
sequent ones she will have to affront, the wife is on the side of
her outragers and against her husband ; they would have us
believe that the poor girl, bullied and shamefully used, made a
mother in spite of herself, is delighted and overjoyed at it all.
Can anything be more improbable ? No doubt rank, politeness,
elegance were likely enough to seduce her ; but no one took the
1 Nothing can be merrier than the old French Contes ; but they have a
certain monotony. The jokes are limited to three : the injured husband's
despair, the squalls of the victim of the lash, the grimaces of the fellow on
the gallows. The first is funny ; the second sets you laughing till you cry ;
but there ! the third caps all, and you hold your sides in inextinguishable
merriment ! Mark now, the three are only one after all. It is always the
man who is down, the weakling that can be outraged without risk of retalia-
tion, the person who is incapable of self-defence.
54
{Temptations
trouble to use these means. They would have much fine fun
indeed of anyone who for a serf's wife should have played the
high-bred lover. All the rout, chaplain, cellarer, down to the
very serving-men, thought they were honouring her by outrage.
The humblest page fancied himself a great Lord, if only he
seasoned his love-making with insults and blows.
One day, when the poor woman had been maltreated in her
husband's absence, she was heard to exclaim, as she recoiled her
long hair, " Oh, miserable Saints of wood, of what avail to make
vows to them? Are they deaf? or are they grown old? . . .
Why have I not a Spirit to protect me, strong and powerful, if
an evil Spirit, I cannot help it ? I see them many a one carved
in stone at the church door. What are they doing there ? Why
do they not fly to their proper home, the castle yonder, to carry
off these miscreants and roast them in hell ? . . . Oh for strength
and power ! Who can give me these ? I would gladly give my
whole self in exchange. . . . Alas ! what could I give ? What
have I to give? I have nothing left. Woe on me, body and
soul, on my soul that is but ashes ! Why why cannot I have,
instead of my elfin friend, who is good for nothing, a great,
strong, powerful Spirit ? "
"Oh, sweet little mistress mine, 'tis by your fault I am so
small, and I cannot grow bigger. . . . And besides, if I were
big, you would never have liked me, never have allowed me near
you, and your husband even less. You would have had me
driven off by your priests and their holy water. ... I will be
big and strong if you wish. . . . Mistress mine, Spirits are
neither big nor little, strong nor weak. At desire, the tiniest can
become a giant."
"Why? How?"
" Nothing simpler. To turn your Spirit into a giant, you have
but to give him a gift."
" A gift ! What gift ? "
"A sweet woman's soul."
55
Gbe Sorceress: a Stubs in Superstition
" Oh, horror ! Who are you, say ? And what is this you
ask ? "
" Nay, such gifts are made every day. . . . Would you price
yourself higher than the lady yonder of the castle? She has
pledged her soul to her husband, to her lover; nevertheless
she gives it again all to her page, a child, a little silly lad. I am
far more than your page ; I am more than any serving-boy. In
how many things have I been your little maid and tirewoman?
Nay, do not blush, do not be angry. . . . Let me tell you only,
I am all about you, and already perhaps within you. For how
else should I know your thoughts, even the very thought you
hide from your own self ? . . . Who am I ? I am your little
soul, that talks unconcernedly to your great, your proper soul.
. . . We are inseparable. Do you rightly know how long I
have been with you? For more than a thousand years. For
I was your mother's, and her mother's, your grandmother's and
great-grandmother's. ... I am the genius of the hearth and
home."
"Tempter! tempter! . . . but what will you do ?"
" I will make your husband rich, and you powerful, so that
folk shall fear you."
"What say you? Are you then the demon of hidden
treasures ? "
" Why call me demon, if I am but doing a just work, a task
of kindness and gentle piety? . . . God cannot be everywhere,
He cannot be always at work. He likes to rest sometimes, and
leaves us, the Spirits, to see to little matters, to correct the in-
advertences of His Providence, the miscarriages of His justice.
. . . Your husband is an instance, poor hardworking, deserving
mortal, who toils and moils himself to death, and gains the
barest living. God has not had time yet to think of him. . . .
Albeit a trifle jealous, still I love him, my good host, and pity
him. He can no more, he must give in. He will die like your
children, killed already by dire poverty. Last winter he was ill.
What will become of him next winter ? "
56
{Temptations
Then she put her face between her two hands, and wept for
long hours. At last, when she had no more tears left, though
her sobs still shook her breast, he said, " I ask nothing. . . .
Only, I beseech you, let us save him between us."
She had made no promise, but she belonged to him from that
hour forth.
57
CHAPTER V
DIABOLIC POSSESSION
Gold gains the mastery in 1300 The peasant wife in alliance with the
Demon of Gold Foul terrors of the Middle Ages The Lady of the
Village Hatred and rivalry of the Lady of the Castle.
|UT the terrible age is the age of gold. By this
I mean the cruel epoch when gold first got the
mastery. The date is 1300, in the reign of Philippe
le Bel of France, a king at once of gold and iron,
it would appear, a great monarch that never opened his mouth,
that seemed to have a dumb spirit, but at the same time a
mighty arm, strong enough to burn down the "Temple," long
enough to stretch to Rome and with iron gauntlet to give the
first buffet to the astonished Pope.
Henceforth gold is High Pope, and god of all, and not
without good reason. The movement began in Europe with the
Crusades ; wealth is not deemed wealth unless it has wings and
is capable of moving freely hither and thither, admits of rapid
exchange. The King, to strike his far-off blows, needs gold and
gold only. The army of gold, the army of the King's treasury,
spreads far and wide over the whole face of the land. The great
Baron, who has brought home dreams of splendour from the
East, is ever longing for its marvels, damascened weapons,
oriental carpets and spices, horses of pure Arab blood. For all
this he must have gold. When the serf brings in his wheat, his
58
Diabolic possession
Lord spurns him with his foot, crying, "That is not all I want;
I would have gold."
From that day the world is changed. Hitherto, in the midst
of many evils, there was at any rate peace and security so far
as the levies were concerned. As years were good or bad, the
quit-rent followed the course of nature and the quality and
quantity of the harvest. If the Lord of the Soil said, "Tis a
fine tribute you offer," the answer was, " My Lord, God has given
no more."
But gold ! alas ! where to find gold ? . . . We have no army
to raid it from the rich cities of Flanders. Where are we to dig
the earth to win its treasure ? Ah ! if only we had the Spirit of
hidden treasures l to be our guide !
1 Demons afflict the world throughout the whole period of the Middle Ages.
But Satan does not assume his definitive character before the thirteenth
century. "Pacts with the Evil One" M. A. Maury observes, "are very
rarely found before this epoch." I can quite believe it ; for how conclude
a covenant with a being that really and truly does not as yet exist ? Neither
of the two contracting parties, in fact, was ripe for the agreement. For the
human will to come to this appalling extremity of selling itself for all eternity,
it must needs have first grown desperate. The merely unhappy man is still
far from despair ; it is the being who is utterly and hopelessly wretched, who
has complete consciousness of his own wretchedness, and consequently full and
complete agony of suffering, without any expectation of relief, it is he and he
only who knows what despair is. Desperation in this sense may be predicated
of the poor man of the fourteenth century, who is asked to perform the im-
possible, to pay quit-rent and taxes in money. In the present chapter and
the succeeding one, I have noted the incidence, sentiment and progress of
despair, capable of leading up to the horrible covenant of the Pact with
Satan, and what is even worse than the pact pure and simple, the appalling
condition and profession of Sorcery or Witchcraft. The word is used freely
enough, but the thing is still exceptional, being nothing more nor less than a
marriage with the powers of Evil and a sort of consecration to the Devil. To
make my descriptions more easily comprehensible, I have connected the
details of this subtle and difficult piece of analysis by a thin thread of fictitious
narrative. However, after all the framework is of small importance ; the essen-
tial point is to realise that such enormities did not arise (as writers have tried
to make us believe) from mere heedlessness and thoughtlessness, from the weak-
ness of fallen human nature, from the chance temptations of concupiscence.
Their existence implied the fatal overmastering pressure of an age of iron, the
irresistible constraint of grim necessities, required that Hell itself should
appear a shelter, an asylum, a relief, as contrasted with the Hell of this
world.
59
Gbe Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
While all are in despair, the peasant wife with the elfin ally is
already seated on her sacks of wheat in the neighbouring little
market town. She is all alone, the rest of her village cronies are
still busy making up their minds.
She sells at what price she will. Even when the others do
arrive, the cream of the custom goes to her ; some mysterious,
magic attraction draws all to her, and no one even thinks of
beating down her terms. Before the appointed day, her husband
carries his quit-rent in good solid coin to the feudal elm.
" Astonishing ! astonishing ! " all the neighbours cry. . . . For
sure the Devil must be in the Dame ! "
They laugh, but she is far from sharing their mirth. She is
sad and sore afraid. Pray as she will, strange tingling, creeping
sensations disturb her rest, and set her trembling in her bed.
She sees grotesque and horrible shapes about her. The Familiar
Spirit, once so tiny and so gentle, is grown a wilful tyrant.
Terrified at his boldness, she is restless and angry and fain to
rise. She submits, but with sighs and groans ; she feels her loss
of independence, and exclaims, "Alack ! I am no longer my own
woman now ! "
" Well ! well ! " cries the Baron, in high satisfaction, " here's
verily a peasant with some sense at last; he positively pays in
advance. I tell you, I like you, man ! Can you cast accounts?"
" Yes ! a little." " Well, then, 'tis you shall settle accounts with
all my folk. Every Saturday you shall take your seat under this
elm to receive their moneys. On Sunday morning, before Mass,
you must bring up the proceeds to the castle."
A mighty change this, truly ! The goodwife's heart beats high
when, Saturday come, she sees her poor husband, mere labourer
and serf that was, sitting like a little lord himself under the shadow
of the feudal tree. A trifle dazzled and confused at first, he gets
used to the position finally and assumes an air of gravity. Nor
is it safe to poke fun at him ; the Baron means him to be respected.
When he comes up to the castle, and rivals are for laughing at him
60
diabolic possession
and playing him some nasty trick or other in their jealousy, " You
see yonder embrasure," says the Baron ; " the rope you may not
see, but it is all ready. The first to lay a hand on him, shall
dangle out of the one at the end of the other, and so I tell you,
shut and stump."
The saying is repeated, and there settles round them a sort of
atmosphere of terror, everyone louts low, very low indeed to them;
but they are avoided and shunned when they walk the roads.
The neighbours strike into bye -paths with a furtive air and a
pretence of not seeing them. The change makes them proud
just at first, but soon saddens them, as they realise their isolation
in the midst of village society. She with her delicate perception
sees plainly enough the hate and scorn the Castle bears her, the
hate and fear of her companions of the countryside. She feels
herself between two dangers, in a terrible loneliness. No protec-
tion but the Baron, or rather the money they provide him with ;
but to get this money, to stimulate the peasant's reluctance, to
overcome the vis inertice, he offers, to drag something even from
those who have nothing, what persistent pressure, what threats,
what harshness, are required ! The goodman was never meant
for such a trade; his wife encourages him, urges him, saying, "Be
stiff with them, cruel if needs must. Strike hard. Else you will
be behindhand with your payments. And then we are indeed
undone ! "
Such the anxieties of the day, trifling in comparison with the
torments of the night. She has all but lost the power of sleeping.
She gets up, and paces up and down, prowling about the house.
All is quiet ; and yet how changed the house is ! It has lost all
its old pleasant sense of security and gentle innocence ! What is
the cat ruminating over as she lies before the fire, feigning to be
asleep and blinking her half-shut yellow eyes at me ? The goat
with her long beard and her wily, sinister looks, knows a deal
more than she says. And the cow, half seen in the moonlit stall,
why does she gaze at me askance in that mysterious way ? . . .
How uncanny it all is !
61
Sorceress: a Stufc$ in Superstition
She shudders, and lies down again by her husband's side.
" Lucky man, how sound he sleeps ! . . . But I have done with
sleep ; I shall never sleep again ! " . . . Nevertheless she drops off
at last. But then, how she suffers ! Her importunate friend is at
her ear, eager, tyrannical. He persecutes her without mercy ; if
she drives him off a moment by the sign of the cross or a prayer,
he is back again directly in some other shape. " Behind me,
Satan ! Beware ! I am a Christian soul. . . . No ! not that ; you
must not do that."
Then in revenge he assumes a hundred hideous forms. He
glides a shining serpent over her bosom, dances a loathly toad
on her belly, or with a bat's pointed beak steals horrid kisses from
her shuddering mouth. . . . He is trying every art to drive her to
extremities, to force her, vanquished and exhausted, to assent at
last to his vile propositions. But she is not beaten yet ; she will
not say, Yes ! She prefers to suffer her nightly tortures, the never-
ending martyrdom of the awful struggle.
" How far can a Spirit be incarnate too ? . . . Are his foul
attempts corporeal realities or no ? Would she be doing carnal
sin if she yielded to her persecutor? Would it be actual and
veritable adultery?" . . . Subtle questions these he asks at
times to unnerve and undermine her resistance. "If I am
nothing but a breath, a vapour, a puff of wind (as many Doctors
of the Church teach), why so fearful, little trembling soul ? and
what has your husband to say in the matter ? "
One of the worst torments of pious souls throughout the
Middle Ages is that many doubts we should deem frivolous and
purely academical were then burning questions, agitating and
terrifying men's minds, taking the form of visions, sometimes of
fierce arguments with the Devil, or agonising debates with a
tortured conscience. The Demon, for all his furious manifesta-
tions in the case of demoniacs, nevertheless remains a Spirit
down to the very end of the Roman Empire, and up to the time
62
Biabolic posseesion
of St. Martin, in the fifth century. On the invasion of the
barbarians, he grows barbarian too, and more and more carnal
and corporeal, so much so that he takes to stone-throwing, and
amuses himself with pelting to pieces the bell of St. Benedict's
cloister. The Church, to frighten off the savage encroachers on
ecclesiastical property, makes the Devil more and more frankly
incarnate, teaching men to believe he will torment sinners, not
merely as soul acting upon soul, but materially in their flesh, that
they will suffer actual bodily tortures, not the flames of an ideal
hell, but every exquisite pang of physical pain that blazing brands,
the gridiron, and the red-hot spit can inflict.
This conception of diabolic torturers, tormenting the souls of
the dead with material agonies, was a perfect gold-mine for the
mediaeval Church. The survivors, torn with grief and pity, asked
eagerly, " Cannot we, from this world to that, redeem these
unhappy souls? Cannot we expiate their offences by dint of
fines and imposition, as is done in earthly matters ? " The bridge
between the two worlds was Cluny, the Cluniacs from their first
foundation (about 900) having at once grown into one of the
richest of the monastic orders.
So long as God punished in person, making His hand heavy
on sinners, or at any rate striking by sword of an angel (according
to the noble antique phrase), it was not so horrible. The hand
of the Lord was severe, a Judge's hand, but still a Father's too.
The angel when he struck was still pure and clean as his own
sword. But it is by no means so when the ministers of execution
are foul demons. They are very far from imitating the angel that
burned Sodom, but only after quitting the city. They remain,
and their hell is a horrid Sodom, where Damned Souls, more
deeply stained with sin than the sinners given into their power,
find an odious pleasure in the torments they inflict. This
doctrine men saw inculcated in the artless sculptures carved
around church doors, from which they learned the dreadful
lesson how fiends experience a wanton delight in causing pain.
Under pretext of punishment, the devils work out on their
63
Gbe Sorceress: a tnb in Superstition
victims the most revolting caprices. A profoundly immoral
conception, and a truly damnable, this, of justice, falsely so-
called, favouring the coarser part, making its perversity yet more
perverse by handing it over a plaything to torment, corrupting
the very demons themselves !
A cruel, cruel time ! Think how black and lowering was the
sky ; how it weighed on the heads of mankind ! Think of the
poor little children, their minds filled with these dreadful notions,
trembling with terror in the very cradle ! Think of the pure,
innocent girl, shuddering lest Damnation lurk in the pleasure she
involuntarily finds in the workings of the Spirit ; of the wife, as
she lies in the marriage-bed, tortured by the same assaults,
resisting, yet ever and anon feeling the stir within her ! . . . A
horrid experience, known to those who have the tapeworm. To
be conscious of a twofold life, to feel the horrid thing moving
within one, now violently, now with a silky, undulatory creeping
that is even worse, and recalls the sensations of seasickness, till a
man dashes away in frenzy, horror-struck at himself and his own
body, longing only to escape, to die. . . .
Even at such times as the Demon was not actively tormenting
her, the woman subjected to his assaults might be seen gloomily
roaming around, a prey to melancholy thoughts. For there is no
hope left of cure. His entry is irresistible ; he penetrates every
where like a foul miasma. Is he not the Prince of the Air, the
Prince of Storms, of internal no less than of external storm?
We find this coarsely, but vigorously, portrayed under the arch
of the great doors of Strasburg Cathedral. At the head of the
company of Foolish Virgins, their leader, the woman of sin who
is enticing them down to the abyss, is full, swollen out, with the
Demon, who hideously distends her body and escapes from
beneath her skirts in a black cloud of dense, stifling smoke.
This distension is one cruel mark of Diabolical Possession,
at once a punishment and a boast. She carries her belly thrust
forward, the proud wanton of Strasburg, and her head well
64
2>iabolic possession
thrown back, triumphing in her hideous grossness, rejoicing in
her monstrous deformity.
She is not like this yet, the woman we are describing. But she
is already puffed out with the Devil, and with evil pride in her
new fortunes. Sleek and fair, she walks the street, her head high,
her face expressing pitiless disdain and scorn of the very earth
she treads on. Her neighbours are afraid, and both hate and
admire her.
Our village dame says plainly by mien and look : " Tis I
should be the Lady of the Castle ! . . . What is she at, I would
know, in the high tower yonder, wanton, idle jade, among all
those men, and her husband so far away ? " A rivalry springs
up ; and the village, which hates her, is proud of her none the
less. " The Lady of the Castle is Baroness ; but ours is Queen
. . . more than Queen, something none dare name. . . ." Terrible
and fantastic her beauty, a cruel beauty, compact at once of pride
and pain. The Foul Fiend in person glares out of her eyes.
She is his in a sense, but only in a sense as yet. She is herself
still, and steadfastly refuses to surrender her personality. For
the moment she is neither the Devil's nor God's. True the
demon may enter into her, permeate her whole being in subtle
vapours; but so far he has really won nothing, for her will is
still unsubdued. She is possessed, bedevilled; but Satan is
still very far from having got her in his power. At times he will
practise on her atrocious, but quite unavailing, torments. He will
kindle a flame of fire in bosom and belly and bowels ; she
writhes and struggles in agony, but nevertheless defies him.
" No ! vile torturer, I will not yield up my identity, I will not!"
" Beware ! I will lash you with a whip of scorpions ; I will
tear your flesh so savagely, you will thenceforth go in tears, pierc-
ing the shuddering air with your screams."
The succeeding night he does not come. Next morning (it is
Sunday morning) her husband went up to the castle, and re-
turned a picture of desperation. The Baron had told him : "A
F 65
Sorceress: a tub in Superstition
stream that trickles drop by drop will never turn the mill. . . .
You bring me a farthing at a time, what use is that ? . . . I
must be starting in a fortnight. The King is marching on
Flanders, and I have not so much as a war-horse ready, for my
old, charger goes lame since the tourney. See to it ; I must have
a hundred silver pounds." " But but where to find them, my
Lord ? " " Sack the whole village as you will. I will give you
men enough. . . . Tell your oafs they are ruined men unless the
money comes and yourself shall be the first to die. ... I am
sick of you. You have a woman's heart ; you are a craven and
a sluggard. You shall pay dear for your cowardice and slackness.
Look you ! only a straw turns the scale that I don't keep you
here, that you never see your home again. . . . 'Tis Sunday; they
would have a good laugh down yonder to see you dancing in the
air over my battlements."
The unhappy wight repeats this to his wife. In sheer despair
he prepares for death, and recommends his poor soul to God.
She is as terrified as he, and can neither rest nor sleep. But what
can she do ? She is deeply sorry now she sent the Spirit away.
If only he would come back again ! . . . Next morning at her
husband's rising, she falls back exhausted on the bed. In an
instant she feels a ponderous weight on her breast ; she pants
and almost chokes. The incubus slips lower, presses the woman's
belly, while simultaneously she feels her arms gripped by a pair
of hands that are like steel. " You wished for me. . . . Well !
here I am. Ha! cruel recreant, at last, at last your soul is
mine ? " " Nay ! but, great sir, is it mine to give ? My poor
husband ! You used to love him. . . . You said so. ... You
promised. . . ." " Your husband ! come, have you forgotten ? . . .
are you so sure you have always kept your will steadfast for him ?
. . . For your soul, I ask you for it out of mere complacence, for
indeed 'tis mine already. . . ."
" Not so, great sir," she answers back, her pride rekindling
spite of her sore strait. " Not so ! my soul is mine, my hus-
band's, consecrated by my marriage vow. . . ."
66
Diabolic possession
"Little fool, little fool ! you are incorrigible ! Even now, under
the goad, you persist in struggling ! . . . I have seen it, your
soul, I know it by heart, every hour of the day and night, and
better than you do yourself. Day by day I have watched your
first essays at resistance, your times of grief and of despair ! I
have noted your hours of discouragement, when you murmured
to yourself, 'Who can resist the irresistble ? " I have been
present at your periods of yielding too. You have suffered
something, and cried a little, but never very loud. ... If I
have claimed your soul of you, 'tis because it is a lost soul
already. . . .
" Now your husband is on the verge of ruin. . . . How save
him ? I will take compassion on you. . . . You are mine ; but
I would have more, I would have you give yourself to me,
avowedly and of your own free will. If not, his ruin will be
consummated."
She answered soft and low, through her sleep : "Alackaday !
my body and my miserable flesh, take them, take them, to save
my husband. . . . But my heart, never. None has ever had it
yet, and I cannot give it."
So said, she lay waiting her fate, resigned. ... Then he threw
her two words, saying : " Remember, in them is your only
safety." Then she shuddered from head to foot, rigid with
horror to feel herself empaled by a fiery bolt, inundated by an
ice-cold flood. ... A piercing scream, and she found herself
lying in her astonished husband's arms, drenching him with her
tears.
She tore herself violently away, and sprang from the bed,
trembling at the thought of forgetting the two indispensable
words. Her husband was terrified ; for she did not so much as
see him, but kept throwing the savage looks of a Medea at the
chamber walls around her. Never was her beauty more resplen-
dent. In the dark pupil and the yellow-tinctured white of her
fierce eyes flashed a gleam no man would dare encounter, the
sulphurous lava glow of a volcano.
67
Gbe Sorceress: a Stufcp in Superstition
She marched straight to the town. The first of the two words
' was green. She saw hanging at the door of a shop a green robe,
green, colour of the Prince of this World. It was old and
worn, but once on her shoulders shone forth new and dazzling.
She marched, without a word of inquiry, straight to the house of
a Jew, and knocked loudly. The door is opened cautiously, and
the poor Jew discovered sitting on the ground, half smothered
in the ashes. "Good sir, I must have a hundred silver pounds!"
"Why! lady, how should I lend such a sum? The Prince Bishop
of this city, to force me tell where my gold lies hid, has had my
teeth drawn one by one. 1 . . . Look, see my bleeding gums."
"I know, I know; but it is just the means to destroy your
Prince Bishop I come to you for. When the Pope is buffeted,
the Bishop will scarce stand firm. Who says so? It is the word
of Toledo." 2
The Jew hung his head. She stooped over him and breathed
softly in his ear. . . . She was in deadly earnest, and the Devil to
back her to boot. A strange wave of heat filled the room ; even
the old man felt as if a fountain of fire had shot up before his
eyes. "Lady," he cried, gazing at her from under his brows,
"Lady, poor, ruined as I am, I had a few pence in reserve to buy
meat for my unhappy children." "You will never repent it,
Jew. ... I will swear you the great oath, the oath that kills. . . .
What you lend me you shall have back in one week, in good'
time, at earliest morn. ... I swear it by your great oath, and
mine, a mightier watchword still, Toledo.
1 This was a method in high favour for compelling the Jews to disgorge.
John Lackland, King of England, had frequent recourse to it.
2 Toledo would seem to have been the Holy City of the Sorcerers and
Sorceresses, a countless host in Spain. Their relations with the Moors, highly
civilised as was this people, and with the Jews, a wise folk and in those days
x masters of all Spain (as agents of the Royal Exchequer), had given the
Sorcerers a high culture, and they formed at Toledo a sort of university of
their own. By the sixteenth century they had been Christianised, changed
and modified, reduced to mere white magic. See the Deposition du sorcier
Ackard, sieur de Beaumont, mtdecin en Poileu (Evidence of the Wizard
Achard, Sieur de Beaumont, a leech in Poitou), in Lancre, Incredulity, p. 781.
68
Diabolic possession
A year passed. She was grown stout and rosy, resplendent
like fine gold. Men marvelled at her fascination, and admired r
and obeyed her with one consent. By a miracle of Satan, the
Jew was become open-handed, ready to lend money at the
smallest sign. She it was, and she alone, kept up the castle as
well by her credit in the city as by the terror her harsh exactions
inspired in the village. The triumphant green robe was every-
where, coming and going, every day seeming newer and more
splendid. Her own person assumed an almost superhuman
beauty, instinct with victory and haughty insolence. One prodigy
there was that startled beholders, and each said wonderingly, " A
grown woman, and she grows taller, more stately, day by day ! "
Meantime a new development ; the Seigneur is returned.
The Lady of the Castle, who for long durst not come down for
fear of confronting the lady of the plain, has mounted her milk-
white palfrey. She comes to meet her husband, with all her folk
about her, draws rein and gravely greets him.
First and foremost she exclaims, " Ah ! how wearily have I
waited you ! how could you leave your faithful bride to languish
so long in lonesome widowhood? . . . And yet, and yet, I can-
not give you place by my side this night, an you grant me not
one boon." " Ask it, ask it, fairest lady ! " returned the knight,
laughing gaily. " But ask quickly. . . . Verily I am in haste to
have you in my arms, lady mine. ... I wot you are grown more
beautiful than ever ! "
Then she spoke low in his ear, and none knows what it was
she said. But before climbing to the castle, the good Baron set
foot to earth before the village church, and went in. Under the
porch, standing at the head of the village grandees, he sees a
lady he fails to recognise, though he louts low before her. Proud
as Lucifer, she wore towering above the heads of the men the
lofty two-peaked coif of the period, the Devil's bonnet, as it was
often called on account of the double horns that formed its
ornament. The great lady blushed hotly, and passed on eclipsed
and looking small and homely by comparison. Then furious she
69
Gbe Sorceress: a Stub^ in Superstition
hissed under her breath. " Yes ! there she stands, your vassal,
your serf all the while ! 'Tis the last straw ; all rank and order
is overset, and asses bray insult at horses ! "
Coming out, the bold-faced page, the favourite, draws a poniard
from his girdle, and dextrously, with a single slash of the keen
blade, slits the fine green robe from waist to feet. 1 She came
near fainting at the cruel outrage, while the crowd stood staring
and amazed. But they soon understood, when they saw the
Baron's retainers one and all dash forward to hunt the prey. . . .
Swift and pitiless fell the whistling lashes. . . . She flies, but
feebly; she is already a trifle unwieldy. Barely ten paces, and
she stumbles. Her best friend and gossip has thrown a stone
in her path to trip her feet. ... At this a shout of brutal
laughter ; but she lies cowering, screaming shrilly. . . . But the
pages are remorseless, and whip her to her feet again with their
lashes. The noble, gallant pack join in, and pick out the
tenderest spots for biting. At long last, a haggard figure in
the dreadful procession that welters round her, she reaches her
own house-door, to find it shut ! With hand and foot she knocks
and kicks, shrieking, " Good husband, quick ! oh, quick ! open,
open ! " But yet she hung there, spread-eagled, like the wretched
1 Such is the monstrous and cruel outrage we find quite commonly
employed in those rough times. In the Gallic and Anglo-Saxon laws it is
laid down as the penalty for immodesty (Grimm, 679, 7 11 j Sternhook, 19,
325 ; Ducange, iii. 52 ; Michelet, Origtnes, 386, 389). Later on, the same
affront is shamefully and unjustly inflicted on honest women, tradesmen's
-wives beginning to show overmuch spirit, whom the nobles wish to humiliate.
The snare is familiar into which the tryant Hagenbach enticed the honourable
dames of the superior bourgeoisie of Alsace, probably in mockery of their rich
and royal costume, all of silk and cloth of gold. Again, I have mentioned
in my Origines (p. 250), the extraordinary right which the Sire de Pace,
in Anjou, claimed over the fair (honest) women of the neighbouring lands.
These were bound to bring him to his castle four deniers and a rose wreath,
and to dance with his officers. A perilous enterprise for them, one in which
they had much reason to fear meeting with some such dire insult as that
of Hagenbach. To force them to come, the threat is added that the
recalcitrant will be stripped and branded with the Baron's arms on their
naked flesh.
70
diabolic possession
barn-door owl you see nailed to a farmer's door, while the blows
continued to rain down on her unceasingly. Not a sound within
the house. Was the husband within ? or was it that, scared for
his riches, he dared not face the crowd, dared not risk the pillage
of his goods ?
Under all these outrages and blows and sounding buffets she
fell swooning at last. Then she sat crouching on the chill stones
of the threshold, naked, half-dead, her long hair barely covering
her bleeding flesh. Then one of the castle party cries enough ;
"We have no wish to kill her."
So they leave her, and she runs to hiding. But in spirit she
sees the gay doings in the Castle Hall. The Baron, giddy-headed
as he is, could not help exclaiming, " Nay ! I am half sorry for it
all." But the chaplain says smoothly, " If the woman is possessed^
as they say she is, my Lord, your duty to your good vassals, your
duty to all the countryside, is to deliver her up to Holy Church.
It is awful to see, since these scandals of the Templars and of
the Pope, the progress the Devil is a-making. Against him one
thing- only avails, the stake. ..." A Dominican interrupts,
" Excellent well, your Reverence, you have spoke excellent well.
Deviltry deviltry is heresy of the first degree. Like the heretic,
the devil-possessed must be burned alive. Still sundry of our
good Fathers do not trust now even to the stake itself entirely.
Wisely and well they would fain before all have the erring soul
slowly and surely purged, tried, tamed by fastings, lest it be
burned in its unrepentant pride and go triumphing to the stake.
If you, my Lady, in your piety and sweet charity, if yourself
would take the task of working in this our sister's stubborn heart,
setting her for some years or so in pace in a brave dungeon of
which you only should hold the key, you might indeed by firm
discipline and proper torments, save her poor soul, shame the
Foul Fiend, and at last yield her up, chastened and humbled,
into the hands of Mother Church."
CHAPTER VI
THE PACT WITH SATAN
The serf's wife gives herself to the Devil The Sorceress and the
Blasted Heath.
NLY the victim lacked. All knew the most accept-
able gift they could ofier the chatelaine was to
deliver the unhappy creature into her power. Right
tender the gratitude she would have shown the man
who had given her this proof of devotion, handed over to her
mercy the poor bleeding limbs of her rival.
But the prey was on the alert. A few moments more and she
would have been spirited away, imprisoned for good and all with-
in the stone walls of a dungeon. She snatched up a tattered
cloak lying in the cattle-shed to cover her nakedness, took wings,
so to speak, and before midnight struck, found herself leagues
away, far from any thoroughfare, on a desert heath all thistles
and brambles. The heath skirted a wood, where, under the
glimpses of an uncertain moon, she was able to scrape together
a few acorns, which she munched and bolted like a wild beast.
Centuries seemed to have passed since yesterday; she was
another woman altogether. The proud beauty, the queen of the
village, was no more ; her very soul and its every outward mani-
festation was utterly changed. She pounced on the acorns like
a famished wild boar, sat squatted at her food like an ape.
Thoughts, scarcely human, were crowding through her brain,
when she hears, or thinks she hears, a screech-owl's hoot,
72
Gbe pact with Satan
followed by a. shrill peal of laughter. She is startled ; but there !
'tis perhaps only the mocking jay that can imitate every sound,
and delights in these deceptions.
The weird laugh is heard again. Where it comes from she
cannot tell. It seems to issue from an old hollow oak.
But now she hears words plainly articulated, " Ah, ha ! so you
are come at last. . . . Very unwilling you were to come; you
never would have come at all had you not found yourself in the
extremity of direst straits. . . . You must needs, proud lady, be
whipped to the enterprise, and cry and whine for mercy, mocked,
scorned, an outcast and a byword to your own husband. Where
would you be this night, if I had not pitied you and shown you
the in pace, the dungeon they wre making ready for you in the
castle crypts ? . . . Late, late in the day, you come to me, old
woman, old witch, they call you now. . . . You were young once,
and you treated me ill then, me your little Robin Goodfellow
that was so eager to serve you. . . . Your turn now (if I will
have you) to serve me, and kiss my feet.
" You were mine from your birth up ; the roguery you hid so
well, the diabolic charm you could not hide, made you mine.
I was your lover, your husband. Your own has shut the door in
your face. But I will be kinder ; I welcome you to my domains,
my free and open plains and spreading forests. . . . What do
I gain, you ask ? Have I not long had you in my power at pro-
pitious seasons ? Have I not overwhelmed, possessed you, filled
you with the flame of my desire ? I have changed, renewed the
very blood in your veins. There is not an artery in your whole
body I do not circulate through. You cannot tell yourself how
completely and entirely you are my bride. But your wedlock has
not yet been solemnised with all the formalities due. I am a
stickler for propriety, a gentleman of scruples. . . . We must be
made one for all eternity."
"Great sir, situated as I am, what can I, what should I say?
Oh, indeed I have felt, I have felt only too plainly, since many a
day, that you are my destiny, my only and inevitable destiny.
73
Gbe Sorceress : a Stufcp in Superstition
Artfully have you caressed and favoured and enriched me, to
bring me to ruin at the last. Yesterday, when the black hound
bit my poor naked limbs, his teeth burned in my flesh . . . and
I cried, ' It is he ! ' The same evening, in the Castle Hall, when
that Herodias debauched and overawed the board, someone was
there ready to pander to her hate and promise her my blood . . .
and it was you again ! "
" True enough ! but 'tis I likewise that saved you, and led you
hither. And why did I so ? Because I would fain have you all
my own, with none to interfere between us. Frankly, your
husband was an offence to me. And you, you would be for ever
bargaining, making terms. Quite other is my way ; my maxim
is, all or nothing ! That is why I have tormented you a trifle,
disciplined, chastened you, to ripen you for my embraces. . . .
I am particular, and pick and choose ; I do not, as folk think,
accept every silly soul that may be ready to give itself to my
power. I am for select souls, at the right toothsome crisis of
fury and despair. . . . Look you ! I must needs tell you, I like
you well, as you are to-day ; you are more desirable than ever
before, you are a delectable soul for Satan. . . . Ah ! how long,
how long I have loved you ! . . . But to-day I am hungry, hungry
for you ! . . .
" I will deal largely and liberally with you. I am not one of
those husbands who make bargains with their future bride. If
you would merely be rich, rich you should be on the instant.
If you would merely be a queen, step into the place of Queen
Jeanne of Navarre, it should be done, and none should say me
nay and verily the King would lose little in the pride and wilful-
ness of his spouse. 'Tis a greater destiny to be my wife. But
there, say what you would have yourself."
" Great sir, I want nothing but the power of working ill."
" Ah, a charming, a right charming answer ! . . . How well
you merit my love ! . . . Truly that comprehends everything, both
the Law and the Prophets. . . . Seeing you have chosen so wisely,
you shall be given into the bargain all the rest to boot. You
74
pact witb Satan
shall know all my secrets. You shall see the foundations of
the earth. The world shall come to you, and pour out gold at
your feet. . . . More, here I give you the true diamond, my
bride, the brilliant of first water, Revenge. ... I know, you gipsy,
I know your most hidden wish ; our two hearts beat as one in
this. . . . That is the thing will ensure me final and certain
possession of you. You shall see your lady enemy on her knees
before you, asking mercy and beseeching, happy if only you would
hold her pardoned, doing the same she did once to you. Yes,
she shall weep . . . and you shall say No ! with a condescending
smile, and hear her cry in her agony, ' Death and damnation, ah
me ! ' . . . Then comes my turn to act."
"Great sir, I am your servant. ... I was ungrateful once,
I confess. For indeed you have always been over good to me.
I am yours, I am yours, my master and my god ! I want no
other. Gracious is the light of your countenance, and your
service a sweet service of delight."
With this she falls grovelling, and adores him from the
ground ! . . . First she does him homage according to the
Templar^' rite, symbolising the utter abnegation of self and self-
will. Her master, the Prince of this World, the Prince of the
Gales of Heaven, breathes himself into her being like a rushing
mighty wind. She receives at once and together the three sacra-
ments, reversed and desecrate, Baptism, Priesthood, and Mar-
riage. In this new church, the exact opposite of its counterpart,
the Church of God, everything is reversed. Patient and sub-
missive, she bore the cruel initiation, 1 her spirit borne up and
comforted by the one word, " Revenge ! " Far from the infernal
levin exhausting her energies, making her weak and ailing, it
made her more strong and terrible, and brought fire from her
eyes. The moon, that had modestly veiled her face an instant,
1 This will be found explained later. We must beware of the pedantic
additions of the moderns in the seventeenth century. The tinsel ornaments
fools tack on to so awful a reality only serve to lower Satan to their own
poor level.
75
Gbe Sorcereea : H Stub^ in Superstition
shuddered to see her now. Swollen out horribly with the hellish
vapour, with fire and fury, and (a new circumstance) with an
unholy longing of desire, she showed for a moment enormous in
her excessive proportions, and of an awe-inspiring beauty. She
gazed around her, . . . and nature itself seemed changed. The
trees had found a language of their own, and told her tales of ages
long ago. The herbs were simples now. Plants that yesterday
she kicked away contemptuously like hay, were become beings
that spoke to her of healing.
Next day she woke in full security, far, far out of her enemies'
reach. They had sought her fruitlessly, finding only a few
fluttering rags of the fatal green robe. Had she in her despair
leapt into the torrent ? Had she been carried off bodily and
alive by the Demon ? None knew. In either case she was
damned, there could be never a doubt of that. The Lady of the
Castle was comforted not a little they had not found her.
Had they met her, they would hardly have known her, so
mightily was she changed. Her eyes alone remained the same,
not bright and flashing, but filled with a strange, appalling,
sombre glow. She was afraid, herself, of terrifying others ; she
did not drop them, but she looked askance, to mask their
sinister effect by the obliquity of her gaze. Suddenly grown dark
of skin, she might to all appearance have passed through the
flames. But such as gazed more heedfully, felt that the flame
was rather an internal one that an unclean and consuming fire
glowed in her bosom. The flaming bolt Satan had driven
through her, still glowed within, and threw, as if from a sinister,
half-veiled lamp, a grim, but still perilously enticing, reflection.
Men drew back shuddering, but did not quit her, and their senses
were stirred and troubled.
She found herself at the entrance of one of those caves of the
troglodytes that occur in such numbers in certain hills of the
centre and west of France. It was the border marches, then
a wild stretch, between the land of Merlin and the land of the
Faery Queen. Open heaths, stretching limitless on every side,
76
pact witb Satan
bore present witness to old-time wars and everlasting forays, the
terrors of plunder and violence that kept the countryside yet
unpeopled. There the Devil was at home; of the scattered
inhabitants, the most part were his fervent disciples, his devotees.
For all the fascination the rugged brushwoods of Lorraine, the
dark pine forests of the Jura, the salty wastes of the Burgos, may
have exercised over him, his favourite haunt was perhaps these
western borderlands of France. It was not merely the home
of the dreamy shepherd, of the satanic accoupling of she-goat
and goat-herd, but the scene of a close conspiracy with Nature
deeper than elsewhere, of a more intimate comprehension of
healing drugs and noxious poisons, of mysterious relations, the
connecting link of which has never been fathomed, with Toledo
the learned, that university of diabolic arts.
It was the beginning of winter. His cold breath, stripping the
trees, had piled up heaps of leaves and twigs of dead wood. All
this she found ready at the mouth of her gloomy shelter.
Traversing a stretch of forest and a quarter of a league of heathy
waste, one came down within hail of a group of hamlets a runlet
of water had brought into existence. " Behold your kingdom,"
the voice within her whispered. A beggar-woman to-day, to-
morrow you shall be queen of all this countryside."
77
CHAPTER VII
KING OF THE DEAD
She calls back the spirits of loved ones dead Conception of Satan softened
and mollified.
|T first she was not greatly touched by these
promises of future greatness. A hermitage with-
out God, torturing memories that assail her in the
deep solitude, the losses she had borne and the
insults she had endured, her sudden, cruel widow-
hood, her husband who had left her alone to her shame and
humiliation, all this saddened and overwhelmed her. A play-
thing of destiny, she saw herself like the wretched weeds of the
waste, without root, beaten and buffeted by the north wind,
tormented, cruelly battered this way and that ; she seemed a
poor fragment of coral, dull, grey, and angular, that possesses
only coherence enough to be the better shattered. Children
stamp on it, and men in mockery call it " The wind's wife."
She laughs wildly and bitterly, as she likens herself to these
things. But from the recesses of the darkling cave comes a
voice, " Ignorant and foolish, you know not what you are say-
ing. . . . This weed that thus goes fluttering down the wind
has good right to scorn all the fat, common herbs of the field. It
has no abiding place or root, but 'tis complete, sufficient to itself,
bearing everything, flower and seed within itself. Be you like it ;
be your own root, and in the very face of the whirlwind, you
shall yet blossom and bear flowers, our own flowers, such as
spring from the dust of tombs and the ashes of volcanoes.
78
Ikino of the Beat*
" The first flower of Satan, I give it you this day, that you
know my earliest name, the token of my antique might. I was, I
am the King of the Dead. . . . How have I been traduced ! . . .
Tis I alone (an infinite boon that should have won me altars of
thanksgiving), I alone, that bring the Lost Ones back to
earth. . . ."
To penetrate the future, to call up the past, to anticipate or to
resuscitate the days that fly so fast, to enlarge the present by
what has been or what will be, two things these sternly proscribed
in the Middle Ages. In vain ; in this Nature is irresistible and
prohibition unavailing. To offend against such law is to be a
man. He would be none, who should stay for ever bound to
his furrow, with downcast eyes and gaze confined to the next
pace he takes behind his plodding oxen. No ! we men must
always, as we go, be looking inquiringly higher, and farther, and
deeper. This earth, yes ! we measure it painfully and meticu-
lously, but we spurn it too and cry constantly, " What have you
in your bowels ? What secrets ? What mysteries ? You give us
back duly the grain we entrusted to you ; but you never return
us that human harvest, the dead loved ones we have lent you.
Shall they not germinate too, our friends, our lovers, that we
have planted there? If only for one hour, one instant, they
might come back to us ! "
Ourselves too shall soon be of that terra incognita, whither they
have already gone. But shall we see them again ? Shall we be
with them ? Where are they ? What is their life yonder ?
They must indeed, my dead dear ones, be close captives not to
vouchsafe even a sign ! And what shall / do to make them
hear? My father, whose only joy I was and who loved me so
exceedingly, why, why does he never come to me ? . . . On
this side and on that, only sore constraint,' and bitter captivity
and mutual ignorance ! A gloomy night where we look for one
ray of light in vain ! 1
1 This ray does shine to some extent in the ImmortalitJ and the Foi
Nouvelle of Dumesnil ; del et 7'erre by Reynaud, Henri Martin, and others.
79
Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
These never-ceasing ponderings of human nature, which in
Antiquity were merely sad, became in the Middle Ages cruel,
bitter, demoralising, making men's hearts to grow faint within
them. It would seem as though the world had set itself deliber-
ately to degrade the soul and render it "cribbed, cabined, and
confined " to the measure of a coffin. The servile mode of burial
between four planks of deal is well adapted to accomplish this ;
suggesting as it does an uneasy sense of suffocation. The dear
one who has been coffined thus, if he comes back in dreams, is
now no light, radiant shadow, centred in the aureole of a better
and lighter place, but a tortured slave, the unhappy prey of a
horrid, clawed hell cat, bestiis the text itself says, Ne tradus bestiis,
etc. ("Deliver us not to the beasts"}. Hateful and impious
thought, that my father, so good and so lovable ; my mother, so
looked up to by all, should be the playthings of this horror ! . . .
You laugh at this to-day. But for a thousand years it was no
laughing matter, but one for bitter burning tears. To this day
one cannot write of these blasphemies without the heart swelling,
and the very pen and paper grating a protest of fierce indignation !
Another truly cruel innovation was to have displaced the Feast
of the Dead from Spring-time, to which Antiquity assigned it, to
fix it in November. In May, where it stood originally, the dead
were buried in flowers. In March, where it was put later, it
marked, with the commencement of ploughing, the first awaking
of the lark ; the dead man and the living seed were put in the
earth simultaneously, with the same hope of revivification. But,
alas ! in November, when all field work is ended for the year, the
weather overclouded and gloomy for months to come, when
mourners returned to the house, and a man sat down by his fire-
side and saw the place opposite for ever empty . . . what an aggra-
vation of sadness was here ! . . . Plainly by choosing this period
already mournful enough in itself, this period of the obsequies of
dying nature, the fear was that else man would not have grief
enough of his own to make him properly mournful ! . . .
80
of tbe Beafc
The calmest of us, the busiest, however much distracted by
the activities and anxieties of life, have strange moments at times.
In the twilight of dark winter mornings, at nightfall, coming
down so fast to engulf us in its gloom, ten years, twenty years
afterwards, feeble, mysterious voices sound in your heart of
hearts, " Greeting, dear one ; 'tis we ! ... So you are still
living and working on, as always. ... It is well ! You are not
bowed down with the grief of losing us ; you can do well without
us. ... But we, we can never forget you. . . . The ranks are
closed up again, the vacant place obliterated. The house that
was ours is full of life, and we bless its prosperity. All goes well,
better than in those far-off days when your father carried yon
in his arms, when your little girl in her turn asked you, ' Cany
me, father, carry me ! ' . . . But there, you are weeping. . . .
Enough, farewell to meet again."
Woe is me ! they are gone, after uttering this gentle, heart-
breaking plaint. But is it a just one ? Not so ! a thousand
times rather would I forget myself than forget them ! And yet,
cost what it may to say it, we must allow that certain charac-
teristics escape us, are already less perceptible; certain features
of the dear face are, not effaced indeed, but darkened, faded.
A hard thing, a bitter and a humiliating, to feel oneself so fugitive
and feeble, as quick to lose impressions as the unremembering
waters ; to realise that at long last we are losing that treasured
grief it was our hope to keep intact for ever ! Give it back, give
it back, I implore ; I value so fondly that gracious source of
tears. . . . Restore, I beseech you, those cherished images. . . .
If nothing else, make me at least dream of them by night !
Many a one says so in drear November. . . . And, while the bells
are tolling, and the dead leaves raining down, they disperse from
the church door, whispering low to each other, " Do you know
this, neighbour ? There lives up yonder on the moors a woman
they speak both good and ill of. For my own part, I dare not
say ; but she has strange powers over the under-world. She calls
G 81
Gbe Sorceress: a tufc\> in Superstition
up the dead, and they answer her summons. Ah ! if only she
could (innocently, mind you, without offending God), if only she
could bring back my loved ones that are dead ! . . . I am all
alone, you know ; I have lost all I had to live for in this world.
But who is this woman ? Who knows her ? Whence she is, from
heaven or from hell ? I will never, never visit her," yet all the
while he is dying to go. " I will never risk my immortal soul by
going near her. Those woods, besides, are haunted ; many a time
men have seen in the heath things that were not there to see. . . .
Remember poor Jacqueline, who wandered there one night to
search for a strayed sheep of hers. She came back a mad woman.
I will never go."
Nevertheless, hiding the fact one from the other, many of the
men do go. Scarce as yet do the women dare to confront the
risk. They think of the dangerous road, ask many questions of
such as have been there already. The Pythoness is not like the
Witch of Endor, who called up Samuel at Saul's bidding; she
shows no shadowy forms, but she gives the cabalistic words and
beverages of might that will compel the dead to come back once
more in dreams. How many sorrows come to her. Even the
old grandmother of eighty, frail and tottering, would fain see her
little grandson once again. By a supreme effort, not without
remorse for committing such a sin when so near the tomb, she
drags herself to the witch's hut. The savage-looking place, rough
with its yews and briars, the bold, dark beauty of the implacable
Proserpine she finds there, all frightens her. Prostrate and
trembling on the earth, the poor old woman weeps and prays.
No answer is vouchsafed ; but when at length she dare raise her
head a little, she sees hell itself has been weeping in sympathy.
This simple impulse of pure natural feeling set poor Proserpine
blushing. Indignant at her own weakness, " Degenerate creature,
weakling soul," she ejaculates, "you that came hither in the
fixed design of working ill and only ill. ... Is this the result of
your master's teaching ? Ah ! how he will laugh me to scorn ! "
82
Iking of tbc
" Nay, not so. Am I not the great shepherd of shades, to bid
them come and go, to open them the gate of dreams ? Your
Dante, when he paints my portrait, forgets my true attributes.
Adding a grotesque and superfluous tail, he never sees how I
hold in very deed the shepherd's rod of Osiris, and have inherited
his caduceus from Mercury. They thought to build an impass-
able wall to block absolutely the road from one world to the
other ; but my feet are winged, and I flew lightly over the
obstacle. Vilely calumniated, called a ruthless monster, I have
yet felt the prick of pity, succoured the afflicted, and consoled
sorrowing lovers and mothers bereaved of their little ones.
Spirit of evil, I have yet felt compassion and pitiful revolt against
the harshness of the new God."
The Middle Ages and its chroniclers, Churchmen to a man,
have been careful not to avow the hidden, but profound, changes
taking place in popular sentiment. It is plain that Pity now
appears ranged on the side of Satan. Even the Virgin, the ideal
of grace, makes no appeal to this need of every feeling heart, nor
the Church either. Evocation of the Dead is indeed expressly
forbidden. While all the books go on dilating glibly either of the
swinish Satan of the earliest conceptions or else of the clawed
demon, king of torments, of a later age, the Devil has taken quite
another aspect for the unlearned, who write no books. He has
something of the classical Pluto, but pale and majestic, by no
means deaf to prayers, granting to the dead return and to the
living to see their dead once more, he approximates closer and
closer to his sire or grandsire, Osiris, the shepherd of souls.
This change involves many others. Men confess with their
lips the official hell of the Churches, the fiery furnaces and boiling
cauldrons ; but in their hearts do they really believe it all ? Is it
possible to reconcile a hell thus complacent towards sorrowing
hearts with the awful traditions of a place of torment ? One con-
ception neutralises the other, without entirely obliterating it, the
resultant being a compound picture, vague and shadowy, des-
tined to assimilate more and more nearly to the Virgilian idea
83
Gbe Sorceress: a Stut> in Superstition
of the infernal regions. An incalculable relief this to the over-
burdened spirit ; above all a sweet alleviation for unhappy women,
whom this terrible dogma of the torture of their loved ones kept
for ever weeping and uncomforted, their whole life one long-
drawn moan of horror.
The Sibyl was pondering the master's words when a small, light
step makes itself heard. The day is barely dawning yet, after
Christmas Day, getting on for the New Year. Tripping over the
crackling, frosty grass, a small woman, with fair face and yellow
hair, draws near with trembling limbs ; reaching the door, she
sinks fainting on the threshold, scarce able to breathe. Her black
dress proclaims plainly enough she is a widow. Medea's piercing
look strikes her nerveless and speechless ; yet is her story manifest,
no mystery left unrevealed in all her shrinking form. Then the
Sorceress in confident tones, "Dumb, little one? Yet, what need to
speak, and you would never find words to tell. I will say it for you.
. . . Well, then, you are dying for love ! " Recovering some little
presence of mind, clasping her hands, all but falling to her knees,
she makes her confession, avowing everything. She had suffered
and wept and prayed, and all without a word. But those Christ-
mas merry-makings, those family reunions at the festive season, the
ill-concealed satisfaction of happy wives pitilessly flaunting a sanc-
tioned love, brought back the old cruel smart to her heart. . . .
Alack! what should she do? . . . If only he could come back to
comfort her for an instant ! " I would give my life for the boon
... let me die, if I may but see him once again ! "
" Go back to your house, and shut the door close. Draw the
shutter too against prying neighbours. Quit your mourning
weeds and put on your wedding dress. Lay his place at table ;
yet he will not come. Sing the song he made for you, and sang
so often ; yet he will not come. Draw from the chest the coat
he wore last and kiss it, and say, ' The worse for you, the worse
for you, if you refuse to come ! ' And without an instant's
tarrying, drink this wine ('tis bitter, but a sovran sleeping-draught)
84
Iking of the Beafc
and lay you down in the bridal bed. Then, have no fear, he
will come."
She would not have been a woman, if she had not next morn-
ing, glowing with soft happiness, whispered the miracle softly in
the ear of her bosom friend. "Not a word of it to any, I
beseech you. . . . But he told me himself, if I wear this dress,
and sleep without once waking, every Sunday night he will come
back to me."
A happiness not without sore risk ! What would happen the
venturesome woman, if the Church found out she was a widow
no longer ? that, raised up by love, the spirit of her mate comes
back to comfort his forlorn wife ?
A most unusual thing, the secret is well kept ! The word goes
round among her friends and neighbours never to betray a
mystery so tender. Indeed, it concerns them one and all; for
who is there has not suffered, who is there has not wept tears of
bereavement? Who but sees with joy unspeakable this bridge
built to connect the two worlds of life and death ?
" Oh, good, kind Sorceress ! . . . Good Spirit of the Depths !
blessings, blessings on you both ! "
CHAPTER VIII
PRINCE OF NATURE
Rigours of the Mediaeval Winter relax The Sorceress submits to Oriental
influences Conceives Nature.
|HE winter is hard, long, and dismal in the gloomy
north-west. Even after it seems well ended, it
suffers relapses, like a pain that has been stifled,
yet stings afresh and rages intermittently. One
morning, and all Nature awakes bedecked with sparkling ice-
needles. In this bitter, ironical beauty of a day that sets all
living things a-shivering, the vegetable world seems turned to
stone, losing all the soft charm of its mobile variety and stiffen-
ing in rigid crystals.
Our poor Sibyl, sitting benumbed at her wretched fire of dead
leaves, buffeted by the cutting wind, feels her very heart cower
under the cruel lash of the weather. Her loneliness oppresses
her, but is a tonic too. Her pride is roused, and with it comes
a strength that warms her heart and kindles her spirit. Alert,
bright, eager, her sight grows keen as the ice-needles themselves ;
and the world, that world that makes her suffer so, is as trans-
parent to her as glass. She triumphs over it as over a conquered
province.
Is she not its queen ? Has she not courtiers in plenty to pay
her reverence? The ravens are manifestly obedient to her ser-
vice. In solemn, dignified array they come, like augurs of old
times, to tell her the news of the day. The wolves slink by
86
prince of IRature
timidly, greeting her with furtive, sidelong looks. The bear (not
so uncommon then) will now and then take his seat ponderously,
with his heavy, good-natured mien, at the threshold of the cave,
like a hermit paying visit to a brother hermit, as we see so
often pictured in the Lives of the Thebaid Fathers.
All, birds and beasts that man scarce knows except in connec-
tion with killing and the chase, all are outlaws like herself.
There is a mutual understanding. Is not Satan the outlaw of
outlaws? and he gives his followers the joy and wild liberty
of all free things of Nature, the rude delight of being a world
apart, all-sufficient unto itself.
Fierce, keen joys of solitude, all hail ! . . . The whole earth
seems shrouded in a white winding-sheet, imprisoned under a
load of ice, chained down by relentless icicles, all alike, and all
sharp and cruel. Especially after 1 200 the world was close shut
like a transparent sepulchre, where everything stands horribly
motionless and, as it were, petrified with cold.
It has been said that " a Gothic church is a complex crystal-
lisation," and it is true. About 1300, architecture, sacrificing
all it possessed of living variety and graceful caprice, enters into
rivalry with the monotonous prisms of the Spitzberg. 'Tis a true
and terrible image of the dead city of adamantine crystal, within
which a dreadful dogma thinks it has succeeded in burying
human life.
But, no matter how strong the supports and buttresses and abut-
ments that sustain the edifice, one thing sets it tottering. Not the
noisy batterings from without, but a something soft and yielding in
the foundations, something that affects the seemingly unyielding
crystal with a gradual, almost imperceptible, thaw. What is it?
the flood of warm human tears a lowly, pitiful world has shed,
a sea of weeping? What? a breath of the future, a mighty,
invincible resurrection of the natural life. The fantastic pile,
crumbling already in many a joint, groans to itself in tones not
devoid of terror, " 'Tis the breath of Satan, the breath of Satan."
8?
Gbe Sorceress : B Stub^ in Superstition
Picture a glacier on the flank of Hecla, and we shall see a
like process. The ice lies over a volcano, not one receding to
make sudden and fierce eruption, but for all that a centre of
slow heat, gradual, gentle, stealthy in its operation, which warms
the icy mass caressingly from beneath, whispers it softly to come
down, and down it comes.
The Sorceress has good cause for laughter, if from her shade
she sees yonder, in the full light of day, how profoundly ignorant
of the true facts are Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas. They
make out that Satan progresses by dint of terror or cunning.
They represent him a grotesque and coarse-minded being, such
.as he was in his earliest days, when Jesus could still drive him to
enter into the herd of swine. Or else, as an alternative, they
show him a subtle reasoner, a scholastic logician, a phrase-
mongering jurist. If he had been nothing else, only a beast,
or else a rhetorician, if his only alternatives had been the mire
of the sty, or the vain distinctions of empty logic, he would soon
have perished of sheer hunger.
The triumph is too easy a one when they show him us in
Bentolo, pleading against the Virgin, who soon has him non-
plussed, condemned, and cast in costs. It is presently discovered
that here on this earth precisely the opposite is what really
happens. By a supreme effort and final success he wins over
his adversary herself his fair adversary, woman seducing her
by an argument that is no mere play of words, but a living
reality, entrancing and irresistible. He lays in her hand the
precious fruit of Science and of Nature.
No call for so much disputation, no need for special pleading ;
he has only to show himself, the embodiment of the "gorgeous
East," a veritable Paradise Regained. From Asia, that men
thought they had abolished, rises a new -dawn of incomparable
splendour, whose rays strike far, very far, till they pierce the
heavy mists of the West. Here is a world of nature and art
that brute ignorance had called accursed, but which now starts
prince of mature
forth to conquer its conquerors in a peaceful war of love and
maternal charm. All men yield to the spell ; all are fascinated,
and will have nothing that is not from Asia. The Orient showers
her wealth upon us ; the webs, and shawls, and carpets of ex-
quisite softness and cunningly blended colours of her looms, the
keen, flashing steel of her damascened blades, convince us of our
own barbarism. But far more than this, the accursed lands of
the infidel, where Satan holds domain, possess, in sign manifest
of Heaven's blessing, the best products of all Nature, the very
elixir of the creative powers of God, the first of vegetables and
the first of beasts, coffee and the Arab steed. Nay ! beside this,
a whole world of treasures, silk, and sugar, and all the best of
wonder-working herbs that cheer men's hearts, and console and
soften their woes.
Towards the year 1300 all this comes to a head. Spain her-
self, won back by the barbarous Goths, yet ever dreaming of the
Moors and Jews of old, testifies for her heathen conquerors of
an earlier day. Wherever the Mussulmans, those sons of Satan,
are at work, all is prosperity, water-springs bursting from the soil,
and the earth all carpeted with flowers. Under the stimulus of
good, honest, happy work, the land is glorified with those
wondrous vines that make men forget their griefs and recover
their serenity, seeming to drink in with the noble liquor happi-
ness itself and Heaven's sweet compassion.
When Satan offers the brimming cup of life and happiness, in
all this world of fasting mankind, is there one being of sanity
strong enough, where sanity is so rare, to receive all this without
giddiness, without intoxication, without a risk of losing self-
control ?
Is there a brain, that not being petrified, crystallised in the
barren dogmas of Aquinas, is still free to receive life, and the
vigorous sap of life? Three Wizards 1 essay the task; by innate
1 Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Arnold of Villeneuve the last-named dis-
coverer of the art of distilling spirit from the grape.
89
Sorceress: a tnfc\> in Superstition
vigour of mind, they force their way to Nature's source ; but bold
and intrepid as their genius is, it has not, it cannot have, the
adaptability, the power, of the popular spirit. So Satan has re-
course to his old ally, Eve. Woman is the one thing left in the
world most replete with nature. She has never lost certain aspects
of roguish innocence that mark the kitten and the precocious
child. In virtue of this side of her character, she is better
adapted, more congruous, to the comedy of human life here
below, more fitted for the great game the universal Proteus is
about to play.
But how light-minded, how fickle-hearted is woman, so long as
she is not struck serious, steadied by grief! Our lady of the
heath, outlaw from society, rooted in her savage waste, at anyrate
gives us something to take hold of. Remains to be seen whether
chafed and embittered, her heart full of hate and venom, she will
back to nature and the soft pleasant ways of life? If she does,
it will for sure be harshly and inharmoniously, often by round-
about ways of ill. She is wild and fierce and rough, from the
very fact of her utter helplessness amid the welter of the storm.
When from the genial warmth of springtide, from the air, from
the depths of earth, from flowers and their voiceless tongues,
the new revelation rises round her on every side, she is at first
seized with giddiness. Her bosom swells nigh to bursting ; the
Sibyl of knowledge has her ordeal, as her sisters had, the Cu-
maean, the Delphic Sibyl. Pedants may declare, "It is the
Aura, the air merely that fills her to bursting, and that is all.
Her lover, the Prince of the Air, puffs her out with fancies and
lies, wind, smoke, and infinite emptiness," but they are wrong and
their simile absurdly mistaken. The truth is just the opposite ;
the cause of her intoxication is that no emptiness at all, but
reality, actuality, definite form and substance, have taken shape
over-suddenly in her bosom.
Have you ever seen the Agave, that rude, harsh native of the
African plains, spiky, bitter, sharp-thorned, with pointed spears
90
prince of mature
instead of leaves ? This Aloe loves and dies every ten years. One
morning, the wondrous flower-shoot, so long growing silently and
voluptuously within the rude exterior of the plant, bursts forth
with a sound like a gunshot and soars heavenward, a veritable
tree in itself, full thirty feet high, encrusted with sad-looking
blossoms.
Something analogous is experienced by the gloomy Sibyl, when
one morning of spring, a late, and for that very reason a more
vigorously fecundating spring, all round her burst the infinite
explosion of new life.
And all this reacts on her, is done for her sake. For each
creature whispers low, " I am for that being that has compre-
hended me."
The contrast! . . . She, bride of the desert and black despair,
fed on hate and vengeance, lo ! she finds all these innocent
creatures inviting her to smile. The trees, bending before the
south wind, do her gentle reverence. All the grasses of the field,
with their divers virtues, perfumes, healing drugs or poisons
(more often than not one and the same thing), offer themselves,
murmuring, " Gather me, gather me ! "
Everything speaks manifestly and by invisible signs of love.
" 'Tis all a mockery surely ! . . . I had been ready prepared for
Hell, but not for this strange festival. . . . Spirit, dread Spirit,
are you indeed the Spirit of terror I have known, the cruel trace
of whose passage I can still feel (though I scarce know what
it is I really feel), the wound that burns still within me ? . . .
" Nay ! it is no more the Spirit I longed for in my frenzied
rage, ' He that pronounces the everlasting No' Here I find him
cooing a soft Yes of love and sweet intoxication and giddy
joy. . . . What means it? Can he be the wild, the reckless,
startled soul of life and its delights ?
" They said great Pan was dead. But lo ! he is here, living in
Bacchus, in Priapus, grown impatient at the long tarrying of
desire, menacing, burning, fecundating. . . . No ! no ! away
with the cup from my lips. Mayhap I should but be drinking
Sorceress: a tuty> in Superstition
the troubled dregs therein ; mayhap but a bitter despair the more
to add to my fixed despair ! "
Meanwhile, wherever the woman appears, she is the sole and
only object of love. All follow her, all for her sake scorn the
females of their own kind. Why speak in particular of the
black he-goat, her so-called favourite? The feeling is universal,
common to one and all. The stallion neighs for her, breaks from
all restraint, imperils her safety. The dreaded lord of the plains,
the black bull, if she passes him, bellows his right to see her
vanish in the distance. Nay, the very birds of the air swoop to
her feet, and deserting their kind, with fluttering wings make her
overtures of their love.
Her grim lord and master's domination has taken a new and
unexpected form. By a fantastic transformation he is changed
of a sudden from King of the Dead, as men deemed him, to
King of Life.
" Nay ! " she cries ; " leave me my hate. I asked this, and
nothing more. Let me be feared, an object of dread. . . .
Fear is the stigma of my beauty the beauty that accords best
with the snaky blackness of my elf-locks, with my features
furrowed by anguish and blasted by the lightning flash. . . ."
But here sovereign Evil hisses in her ear in low, insidious
whispers, " Ah ! but you are more beautiful than ever, more
moving in your frenzied passion ! . . . Shout, curse ! 'Tis a spur
to desire. Deep calls to deep. Steep and slippery and swift
is the path from rage to voluptuous delight ! "
Neither anger nor pride were to save her from these seductions.
Her safety came from the immensity, the infinitude of her desire.
No single passion would suffice. Each single life is limited,
weak and impotent. Away, courser of the plains ! away, bull of
the prairies ! away, ardours of the feathered tribe ! Away, feeble
creatures ! of what avail are ye to one that craves the infinite ?
She feels a woman's overmastering caprice. And what is the
92
prince of IRaturc
object of her caprice? Why, the All, the great, the illimitable
All of the universe at large.
Satan had failed to foresee this prodigious longing, a longing
that could find appeasement with no single living creature.
This was something beyond even his powers, a mysterious im-
pulse without a name, without a possibility of realisation. Yield-
ing to these vast, unbounded aspirations, deep and limitless as
the ocean, she falls softly asleep ; losing all memory of past
wrongs and suffering, all thoughts of hate and vengeance, in
involuntary, as it were reluctant, innocence, she lies wrapt in
slumber on the herbage, as any other tender creature a lamb, a
dove might have done, her limbs relaxed, her bosom open to
the heaven, loved, but I cannot, I dare not, say loving.
So she slept and dreamed ... a beautiful, a wonderful dream.
She dreamed 'tis a thing hard to set down in words how
a wondrous monster, the genius incarnate of life universal, was
absorbed in her; she dreamed that henceforth Life and Death
and all Nature were shut within her body, that at the cost of, oh !
what infinite travail, she had conceived in her womb great
Nature's self.
93
CHAPTER IX
SATAN THE HEALER
Diseases of the Middle Ages The Sorceress utilises poisons for their cure
The Solanacea (Herbs of Consolation) Women for the first time cared
for medically.
HE silent, sombre drama of the Bride of Corinth is
repeated literally and exactly from the thirteenth
to the fifteenth centuries. In the gloom of night
which still broods over the world, the two lovers,
Man and Nature, meet again and embrace with transports of joy ;
and lo ! at the self-same instant, to their horror, see themselves
smitten with appalling scourges ! Still, as of old, we seem to hear
the bride telling her lover, "All is over. . . . Your locks shall be
white to-morrow. ... I am a dead woman, and you shall die."
Three horrid afflictions in three successive centuries. In the
first, the loathsome disfigurement of the outward form, skin
diseases, leprosy. In the second, an inward curse, weird nervous
excitations, epileptic dances. These die down, but the blood
grows tainted, chronic ulcerations pave the way to syphilis, that
scourge of the sixteenth century.
The diseases of the Middle Ages, so far as we can get vague
and unsatisfactory glimpses of them, were predominantly hunger,
languor, and poverty of blood, the emaciation men admire in
mediaeval sculpture. The blood was thin as water, and scrofu-
lous complaints were bound to be all but universal. With the
exception of Arab or Jewish physicians, hired at great cost by the
94
Satan the Ibealer
rich, medical treatment was unknown, the people could only
crowd to the church doors for aspersion with holy water. On
Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores, crying for help,
and words were all they got : " You have sinned, and God is
afflicting you. Thank Him ; you will suffer so much the less
torment in the life to come. Endure, suffer, die. Has not the
Church its prayers for the dead?" Feeble, fainting, neither
hoping nor caring to live, they followed this advice to the letter,
and dropped into the grave in sheer indifference to life.
A fatal despair, a wretched death in life, that could not but
prolong indefinitely these times of lead, and constitute a fatal
bar to all progress. What could be worse than this facile resigna-
tion, this docile acceptance of death, this impotence and total
absence of energy and aspiration? Better far the new epoch,
those last years of the Middle Ages, which at the price of
atrocious sufferings, at last inaugurates for mankind the possibility
of renewed activity, the resurrection of desire.
The Arab philosopher Avicenna maintains that the prodigious
outbreak of diseases of the skin which marks the thirteenth
century resulted from the use of those excitants whereby men at
that period sought to awake, or to revive, the flagging energies of
love. No doubt the hot, inflammatory spices, imported from the
East, were not without effect ; while the newly discovered art of
distillation and various fermented liquors then first coming into
use may likewise have exerted an influence in the same direction.
But another and a mightier fermentation, and a much more
general one, was taking place. From the bitter internal conflict
of two worlds and two spirits a third survived which silenced
them both. Waning Faith, nascent Reason were in the death
grip ; between the two combatants another intervened and
mastered mankind, the unclean, fierce spirit of their eager,
passionate appetites, the cruel emanation of their furious
ebullition.
Finding no outlet, whether in bodily gratifications or in a free
95
Gbe Sorceress: a Stubs in Superstition
play of mind, the sap of life is dammed back and putrefies.
Without light or voice or speech, it yet spoke in pains of body,
in foul eruptions of the skin. Then a new and terrible thing
follows ; baulked desire, unsatisfied and unappeased, sees itself
checked by a cruel spell, a hideous metamorphosis. 1 Love
that was drawing nigh, blindly, with arms thrown wide, steps
back shuddering. Yes ! love may fly ; but the fury of the tainted
blood persists, the flesh burns in agonising, itching torments,
while more agonising still, the inward conflagration rages, fanned
by the breath of despair.
What remedy does Christian Europe find for this double evil ?
Death, captivity; nothing else is better. When bitter celibacy,
hopeless love, fierce thwarted passion, bring you to an unhealthy,
morbid state ; when your blood grows corrupt, down with you
into an in pace, or build your lonely cabin in the desert. You
shall live, warning-bell in hand, that all may flee your presence.
" No human being must see you ; no consolation can be yours.
If you approach too near, death is the penalty ! "
Leprosy is the last degree, the apogee, of the scourge ; but a
thousand other terrible and cruel ills only less hideous abound
everywhere. The purest and the fairest of womankind were
stricken with detestable eruptions that were looked upon as
1 Leprosy was supposed due to the Crusades, to be an importation from
Asia ; but as a matter of fact Europe had only herself to thank for the scourge.
The war persistently waged by the Middle Ages against the flesh and against
cleanliness was bound to bear fruit. More than one female saint is commended
for having never washed even the hands ; how much less the rest of the body !
An instant's nakedness would have been a mortal sin. The worldling faith-
fully follows these precepts of the cloister. The society of those days, so
subtle and refined, which makes sacrifice of marriage and appears animated
only by the poetry of adultery, retains singular scruples on this simple point
of personal ablutions, dreading every form of purification as a defilement.
Never a bath known for a thousand years ! We may be quite certain not one
of those knights, those fair and ethereal ladies, the Percivals, Tristrams,
Iseults, ever washed. Hence a cruel accident, highly unpoetical in such
romantic surroundings, the furious itches that tortured our thirteenth-century
ancestors.
the visible sign of sin or a direct punishment from God. The
men had recourse to means mere loss of life would never have
led them to adopt ; prohibitions were forgotten, and the old
consecrated medicines forsaken, and the holy water that had
proved so useless. They visited the Witch, the Sorceress. From
force of habit, as well as from fear, they still frequented the
churches ; but the true church was henceforth her hut, her
haunt in heath, in forest, and in desert.' Thither it was they now
carried their prayers.
Prayers for healing, prayers for some joy of life. At the first
symptoms that showed the blood corrupted, they would away in
great secrecy, at furtive hours, to consult the Sibyl : " What must
I do ? What is this I feel within me ? . . . I am burning ; oh !
give me something to calm my blood. ... I am burning ; give
me something to appease my intolerable longing."
A bold, guilty step they repent them of when evening comes.
It must indeed be pressing, this new and fatal constraint ; the
fire must indeed be agonising, to make all the saints so utterly of
no avail. But then the trial of the Knights Templars, the trial
of Pope Boniface, have unmasked the Sodom that lurked under
the altar stones. A Pope a Sorcerer, a friend of Satan, and finally
carried off by the Foul Fiend : this turns all men's notions upside
down. Not without the Devil's help surely could the Pope, who
is no longer Pope in Rome, in his city of Avignon, Pope John
XXII., a cobbler's son of Cahors, amass more gold than the
Emperor himself and all the kings of the earth ! Like Pope, like
Bishop ; did not Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, win a boon of the
Devil, the death of the King of France's daughters ? ... It is
not death we ask for, but pleasant things, life, health, beauty,
pleasure, things of God, that God refuses us. ... Well, then,
suppose we were to get them by the favour of the Prince of this
World 1
That great and puissant doctor of the Renaissance, Paracelsus,
when he burned the wise books of ancient medicine en masse,
H 97
Sorceress: a tufc\> in Superstition
Greek, Jewish, and Arab, declared he had learned nothing at all
but from popular medicine, from the good women, 1 from shep-
herds, and hangmen. The latter were often clever surgeons,
setters of broken or dislocated bones, and accomplished farriers.
I have little doubt but that his admirable book, so full of
genius, upon the Diseases of Women, the first ever written on this
important, profound, and touching subject, owed its special merits
to the experience of women themselves, those women whose help
their sisters were used to appeal to, I mean the Sorceresses who
in every country fulfilled the office of midwives. No woman in
those days would ever have consulted a male physician, trusted
to him, or told him her secrets. Sorceresses were the only ob-
servers in this field, and, for women in particular, were the sole
and only practitioners.
The most certain fact we know as to their methods is that they
made great use, for the most various purposes, as calmants and
as stimulants, of a wide family of herbs, of doubtful repute and
perilous properties, which proved of the most decided advantage
to their patients. These are appropriately known as the Sola-
nacea (herbs of consolation). 2
A profuse and familiar family of plants, the majority of whose
species are to be found in extreme abundance, under our feet, in
1 The polite, flattering name fear conferred upon the Sorceresses.
- It is cruel to note the ingratitude of mankind. A thousand other plants
have usurped their place, a hundred exotic herbs have been preferred by
fashion, while these poor, humble Solanacea that saved so many lives in
former days have been clean forgotten with all the benefits they conferred.
Who indeed has any memory for such things ? Who recognises the time-
honoured obligations men owe to innocent nature ? The Asclepias acida, or
Sarcostemtiia (flesh-plant), which for five thousand years was the consecrated
host of Asia, the palpable god-made flesh of all that continent, which gave five
hundred millions of the human race the blessedness of eating their god, the
same plant that the Middle Ages knew as the Poison-killer (Vincevenenum),
has never a word of recognition in our books of botany. Who knows but
two thousand years hence mankind will have forgotten the virtues of wheat ?
See Langlois, on the soma of India, and the horn of Persia (Mhn. de
F Academic des Inscriptions, xix. 326).
98
Satan tfoe Ibealer
the hedgerows, in every field. So numerous a family, that a single
one of its genera embraces eight hundred species. 1 Nothing in
the world easier to detect, nothing commoner. Yet these herbs
are for the most part very risky to employ. Audacity was
required to determine the doses, it may well be the audacity of
genius.
To begin at the bottom of the ascending scale of their
potency. 2 The first to be named are simply pot-herbs, good to
eat, and nothing more, aubergines, tomatos, inappropriately
called love-apples. Others of these harmless varieties are the
quintessence of all that is calming and soothing, the mulleins
(shepherd's club), for instance, so useful for fomentations.
Next in the scale you will find a plant already open to
suspicion one that many believed a poison ; a herb honey-sweet
at first, afterwards bitter, that seems to say in the words of
Jonathan, " I have tasted a little honey, and behold ! for this I
die." Yet this death is useful it is the deadening of pain. The
bitter-sweet, that is its name, was bound to be the first essay of a
bold homoeopathy, 'which by slow degrees aspired to the most
dangerous poisons. The slight irritation, the pricking sensations
it produces, sufficed to point it out as remedy for the predominant
maladies of the period, viz. diseases of the skin.
The fair girl, in despair at seeing herself marked with hateful
blotches, carbuncles, spreading eruptions, came weeping for
1 Diet. d'Histoire Naturelle of M. d'Orbigny ; article Morelles (Night-
shades), by M. Duchartre, after Demal, etc.
2 I have not been able to find this scale detailed in any work I have
consulted. It is the more important, inasmuch as the witches who undertook
this series of experiments, at the risk of being branded as poisoners, un-
doubtedly began with the weakest, and advanced little by little to the more
powerful. Thus each degree of potency gives a relative date, and allows us
to establish in this very obscure subject an approximative chronology. I
propose to say more of this in the following chapters, when I come to speak
of the Mandragora and the Datura. I have followed particularly Pouchet,
Solanecs et Botanique generate (Solanacese and General Botany). In this
important monograph M. Pouchet has not disdained to draw from the ancient
writers, Matthiole, Porta, Gessner, Sauvages, Gmelin, etc.
99
Sorceress: H Stub^ in Superstition
succour in her affliction. With married women the scourge was
still more cruel. The bosom, the most delicate thing in all
nature, and its vessels, which form an interlaced flower of incom-
parable perfection below the skin, 1 is, by virtue of its liability to
congestion and blocking of the veins and arteries, the most
exquisite instrument of pain, pain keen, pitiless, and never
ceasing. How willingly would she have welcomed any and every
poison to gain relief! No stopping to bargain with the Witch
who promised a cure, and between whose hands she was ready at
once to place the poor painful, swollen organ.
After the bitter-sweet, too feeble a medicament for such a case,
came the black mulleins, possessing a somewhat greater activity.
This would afford relief for a day or two. But at the end of that
time the poor woman would be back again with tears and suppli-
cations. " Well, well ! you must return once more this even-
ing. ... I will find you something. You decide to have it;
but 'tis a deadly poison."
The Sorceress was running a terrible risk. Nobody at that
time had a suspicion that, applied externally or taken in very
small doses, poisons are remedies. All the plants which were
confounded together under the name of Witches' herbs were
supposed ministers of death. Found in a woman's hands, they
would have led to her being adjudged a poisoner or fabricator of
accursed spells. A blind mob, as cruel as it was timid, might
any morning stone her to death, or force her to undergo the
ordeal by water or noyade. Or, worst and most dreadful fate of
all, they might drag her with ropes to the church square, where
the clergy would make a pious festival of it, and edify the people
by burning her at the stake.
She makes the venture for all that, and starts in search of the
fearsome herb, slipping out late at night or early in the morning,
when she is less afraid of being observed. But a little shepherd
1 See plate in that excellent and quite inoffensive work, the Cours de
Physiologie of M. Auzouz.
100
lad was there, who tells the village, " If you had seen her as
I did, gliding among the fallen stones of the old ruin, glancing
from side to side, muttering some unintelligible gibberish to
herself the while ! . . . Oh, I was rarely frightened, I tell you. . . .
If she had caught me, I should have been done for. . . . She
might have turned me into a lizard, or a toad, or a bat. . . . She
gathered a villainous-looking herb, the ugliest I ever saw, a pale,
sickly yellow, with stripes of black and red, like flames of hell-
fire. The dreadful thing was that all the stem was hairy, like a
man's hair, long, black, snaky hair. She tore it up roughly,
with a groan, and in an instant I lost sight of her. She could
not have run so fast, she must have flown away ! . . . What an awful
woman ! What a danger for all the countryside ! "
Doubtless the plant looks terrifying. It is the henbane
(kyoscyamus), a cruel and deadly poison, but at the same time an
excellent emollient, a soothing, sedative plaster, that relaxes and
softens the tissues, relieves the pain, and often cures the patient.
Another of these poisons, the belladonna, doubtless so named
out of gratitude, was sovran for calming the convulsions that
sometimes occur in childbirth, superadding peril to peril and
terror to terror at this supreme crisis. But there ! a motherly
hand would slip in this soothing poison, 1 lull the mother to sleep,
and lay a spell on the door of life ; the infant, just as at the
present day when chloroform is administered, worked out its own
freedom, by its own efforts, and forced its way to the world
of living men.
This belladonna cures the convulsive dancing of the limbs by
setting up another dance, a venturesome homoeopathy that could
not but be terrifying at the first blush. In fact it was Medicine
spelt backwards, as a rule the exact opposite of that which the
Christians knew and thought the only efficacious kind, the
medicine of the Jews and Arabs.
1 Madame La Chapelle and M. Chaussier have returned to these practices
of old-fashioned popular medicine with great advantage to their patients
(Pouchet, balances, p. 64).
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Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
How came the great discovery ? No doubt by simple applica-
tion of the great satanic principle that everything should be done
backwards, precisely in the reverse way to that employed by the
world of religion. The Church had a holy horror of all poisons ;
Satan utilises them as curative agents. The Priest thinks by
spiritual means (Sacraments, prayers) to act even upon the body.
Satan, acting by contraries, employs material means for acting
even on the soul ; he gives potions to secure forgetful ness, love,
reverie, any and every state of mind. To priestly benedictions
he opposes magnetic passes by dainty female hands that lull pain
and anguish to sleep.
Through change of treatment, and still more of clothing (no
doubt by the substitution of linen for wool), skin diseases lost
much of their virulence. Leprosy diminished, but at the same
time seemed to strike inwards and produce more deep-seated
mischief. The fourteenth century oscillated between three
scourges, epileptic convulsion, the plague, and those ulcerations
which, if we are to believe Paracelsus, paved the way for syphilis.
The first named was by no means the least formidable danger.
It broke out about the year 1350, under the appalling form of
St. Guy's dance (St. Vitus's dance, chorea], having this strange
peculiarity, that the complaint was not, so to speak, individual ;
those suffering from it, as if carried away by one and the same
galvanic current, would grasp each other by the hand, group
themselves in huge, endless chains, and whirl, and whirl, like
Dervishes, till they died of exhaustion. The spectators would
roar with laughter at first, then presently caught by the contagion,
would give in and join the mighty stream, and swell the awful
band of dancing maniacs.
What would have happened if the malady had persisted in
the same way as leprosy did for a long period, even in its
decline ?
The answer is, it was a first step, an approximation, towards
epilepsy ; and if this first generation of sufferers had not been
Satan tbc Ibcalcr
cured, it would have produced a second definitely and distinctly
epileptic. The imagination shudders at the thought ! all Europe
packed with madmen, maniacs, idiots ! We are not told how the
complaint was treated, and finally arrested. The particular
remedy recommended at the time, the expedient of falling on
the dancers with kicks and fisticuffs, was infinitely well adapted
to aggravate the cerebral disturbance and lead to actual epilepsy.
We cannot doubt there was another treatment practised that
was never voluntarily mentioned. At the period when Sorcery
and Witchcraft were at their point of highest activity and repute,
the very extensive employment of the Solanacece, and especially
of belladonna, was the most marked general characteristic of the
remedial measures taken to combat this class of disease. At the
great popular gatherings, the Witches' Sabbaths, we shall describe
later, the Witches' herb, infused in hydromel, beer, as well as in
cider 1 and perry, the strong drinks of the West, set the crowd
dancing, but in wanton, luxurious measures, showing no trace of
epileptic violence.
But the greatest revolution the Sorceress brought about, the
chief movement of all in contradiction, in direct contradiction to
the spirit of the Middle Ages, is what we might well call a re-
habilitation of the belly and its digestive functions. They boldly
proclaimed the doctrine that "nothing is impure and nothing
unclean." From that moment the study of physical science
was enfranchised, its shackles loosed, and true medicine became
a possibility.
That they carried the principle to mischievous lengths no one
can deny; indeed, the fact is self-evident. Nothing is impure
but moral evil. Everything physical is pure; nothing physical
can properly be excepted from examination and study, pro-
hibited in deference to an empty idealism, or worse still a silly
feeling of repulsion.
1 Then quite a new beverage. It first began to be manufactured in the
twelfth century.
103
Gfoc Sorceress: H Stub^ in Superstition
Here above all had the Middle Ages displayed their most
essential characteristic, what we may call anti-Nature, splitting up
the unity of created things, and drawing distinctions, constituting
castes, classes, hierarchies. Not only according to this is the
spirit noble, the body not noble, but there are actually particular
parts of the body which are noble, and others not, plebeian it
would appear. Similarly, Heaven is noble, the Abyss not. Why ?
" Because heaven is high." But heaven is neither high nor low ;
it is above us and beneath us at once. And the Abyss, what
is it ? Nothing ; a figmept of the imagination. The same foolish
conceptions as to the macrocosm of the universe and the micro-
cosm of the individual human being.
All is of a piece; solidarity rules throughout. The belly is
the servant of the brain, and feeds it ; but it is no less true that
the brain, working ceaselessly to make the sugar required in the
processes of digestion, 1 is no less active to assist the belly.
Abuse was lavished upon them ; filthy, indecent, shameless,
immoral, were only some of the epithets levelled at the Sorceress.
For all that it can confidently be affirmed her first steps in the
direction indicated were a happy revolution in all that is most
moral, in kindness and human charity. By a monstrous per-
version of ideas, the Middle Ages regarded the flesh, in its
representative, woman (accursed since Eve), as radically impure.
The Virgin, exalted as virgin, and not as Our Lady, far from
raising actual womanhood to a higher level, had degraded it,
starting men on the path of a barren, scholastic ideal of purity
that only led to ever greater and greater absurdities of verbal
subtlety and false logic.
Woman herself even came eventually to share the odious
prejudice and to believe herself unclean. So she lurked in
hiding at the hour of childbirth, blushed to love and give happi-
ness to men. Woman, so sober as a rule in comparison with the
opposite sex, who in almost every land is a vegetarian and an eater
1 This is the great discovery that makes Claude Bernard's name immortal.
104
Satan the Ibcaler
of fruits, who sacrifices so sparingly to the natural appetites, and
by her milk and vegetable diet wins the purity of the innocent
substances that are her food, she of all others was fain to ask
pardon almost for existing at all, for living and fulfilling the
conditions of life. A submissive martyr to false modesty, she
was for ever torturing herself, actually endeavouring to conceal,
abolish, and annul the adorable sign of her womanhood, that
thrice holy thing, the belly of her pregnancy, whence man is
born in the image of God everlastingly from generation to
generation.
Mediaeval medicine concerns itself exclusively with the
superior, the pure being (to wit man), who alone can be
ordained priest, and incarnate the living God upon the altar.
Animals, too, occupy some of its attention ; indeed, it begins
with them. But does it ever think of children? Very seldom.
Does it pay any heed to women ? Never !
The Romances of those days, with their subtle refinements,
represent the exact opposite of the everyday world. Apart from
the courts of kings, and high-born adultery, the main subject-
matter of these tales, woman is always the poor, patient Griselda,
born to exhaust every sort of pain and humiliation, often beaten,
never properly cared for.
The Devil only, woman's ally of old and her confidant in the
Garden, and the Witch, the perverse creature who does everything
backwards and upside down, in direct contradiction to the world
of religion, ever thought of unhappy womanhood, ever dared to
tread custom underfoot and care for her health in spite of her
own prejudices. The poor creature held herself in such lowly
estimation ! She could only draw back blushing shyly, and
refuse to speak. But the Sorceress, adroit and cunning, guessed
her secrets and penetrated her inmost being. She found means
to make her speak out at last, drew her little secret from her and
overcame all her refusals and timid, shamefaced hesitations.
Submit to treatment ! She would sooner die, she said. But the
barbarous Witch knew better, and saved her life.
105
CHAPTER X
CHARMS AND LOVE POTIONS
Blue Beard, and Griselda The Castle a suppliant to the Sorceress
Her cunning ways.
||O not conclude too hastily from what I have said in
the preceding chapter that my purpose is to white-
wash, to clear of all blame whatever, the gloomy
bride of the Evil One. She often effected good,
but was equally capable of grievous mischief. Great and irre-
sponsible power is always liable to abuse; and in this case
she queened it in a very true sense for three long centuries
during the interregnum between two worlds, the old dying
world and the new one whose dawn was still faint on the
horizon. The Church, destined later on to recover something
of its vigour (at any rate as a fighting force) in the struggles
of the sixteenth century, is still wallowing in the mire in the
fourteenth. Read the convincing picture of its condition given
us by Clemangis. The nobility, swaggering in novel and sump-
tuous forms of defensive armour, meets only the more dismal
disaster at Crecy and Poitiers and Agincourt. The French
nobles prisoners in England ! What an opportunity for the
scoffers ! Bourgeoisie, even peasantry, are dissolved in mocking
laughter, and shrug contemptuous shoulders. This general and
compulsory absenteeism of the seigneurs afforded no small en-
couragement, in my opinion, to the Witches' Sabbaths. These had
always existed, but under the new conditions they grew into huge
popular festivals.
1 06
(Tbarms anb OLovc potions
Think of the power wielded by Satan's Chosen Bride ! She
can heal, prophesy, predict, conjure up the spirits of the dead,
can spell-bind you, turn you into a hare or a wolf, make you find
a treasure, and most fatal gift of all, cast a love charm over you
there is no escaping ! Awful attribute, more terrible than all the
rest put together ! How should a headstrong spirit, more often
than not a wounded spirit, sometimes one altogether soured by
disappointment, fail to use such a weapon for the satisfaction of
hatred and revenge, and sometimes for the indulgence of perverse
and foul proclivities ?
The secrets of the Confessional were no secrets to her, secrets
of sins committed and of sins to come. Every man is her slave
by her knowledge of some shameful incident of his past, and his
still viler aspirations for the future. She is the confidante of
deformities of body and of mind, and of the lascivious ardours of
a poisoned and heated blood, of morbid, overmastering longings
that fiercely torment the flesh with a thousand needle-pricks of
concupiscence.
All come to her, and make her their shameful avowals with a
reckless and brutal candour. They seek the boon of life, of
death, of healing medicines and poisonous drugs. To her comes
the poor weeping girl who has been betrayed, to ask means for
procuring abortion. To her the stepmother (an incident of
the commonest in the Middle Ages) to complain how her first
husband's brat eats and eats and will not die. To her the woe-
begone matron, worn out year after year with children that are
only born to die. Appealing to her compassion, she is told the
way to paralyse pleasure at the supreme instant and make it
barren. On the other hand, there comes a stripling, ready at any
cost to buy the sovran brew that will trouble a high-born lady's
heart, and making her forget distinctions of rank and place, turn
her gentle looks towards her little page.
The marriage of the period has only two types or forms, both
of them extravagant and outre.
107
Gbc Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
The proud " heiress of broad lands," who brings a dowry, a
throne, or a rich fief, an Eleanor of Guyenne, will maintain under
her very husband's nose, her court of lovers, and will do very
much what she pleases. Leaving on one side romance and
poetry, let us look the facts in the face. The reality is terrible
enough, culminating in the wild orgies of the daughters of Philippe
le Bel, and the excesses of the cruel Isabella, who had her
husband, Edward II., impaled by her lovers' hands. The effron-
tery of the feudal dame comes out in a devilish fashion in the
two-horned headdress of state occasions, and other shameless
modes of dress.
But in this century when the classes begin to intermix to some
degree, the woman of inferior origin who wedded a baron had good
reason to fear harsh treatment. This is shown in the story, per-
fectly true and authentic, of Griselda, the lowly, gentle, patient
Griselda. The tale, quite serious and historical in my own
belief, of " Blue Beard " gives the popular form of the same
legend. The wife he kills so often and so often replaces can
only have been a vassal. There would have been a different tale
to tell with the daughter or sister of a baron, in a position to
avenge her wrongs. If I am not mistaken in this highly probable
conjecture, we must conclude this story to be of the fourteenth
century rather than to belong to an earlier period, when a great
lord would never have stooped to take a wife beneath him in
consequence.
One very remarkable thing in the touching story of Griselda is
that under all her trials she appears not to have the consolation
either of religion or of another lover. She is manifestly faithful,
chaste, and unsullied. It never occurs to her to find comfort in
fixing her love elsewhere.
Of these two types of mediaeval women the Great Heiress on
the one hand, Griselda on the other it is exclusively the former
that has her cavalieri seruenfc, that presides at Courts of Love,
that favours the humblest of lovers, and (like Eleanor) pronounces
the famous dictum, regarded as undisputable in those days : " No
love possible betwixt married folk/'
1 08
Cbarme aito Xovc potions
Hence a secret hope, secret, yet ardent and masterful, that
springs in many a young heart. End as it may, even in his
giving his soul to the Evil One, the young lover will rush head
down into the bold emprise. Be the keep guarded ever so well,
there will always be a loophole for Satan to creep in. The game
is perilous indeed ; is there the shadow of a chance ? Why,
no ! says Prudence. Ah ! but if Satan says " Yes " ?
Nor should we forget how great the distance feudal pride set
between noble and noble. Words are deceptive ; knights were
very far from being all alike.
The Knight Banneret, who led a whole army of vassals to join
the King in the field, looking down his long table, saw with un-
mitigated contempt the poor lackland knights who sat at its
lower end. This epithet of "lackland" was a mortal insult in
mediaeval times, as in the instance of John Sans Terre, John
Lackland, of England. How much more so the common varlets,
squires, pages, etc., who fattened on the orts from the high
table ! Seated at the lower end of the Great Hall, close to the
door, they scraped the platters the great folks, sitting by the
warm hearth, sent down to them, often empty. It never even
entered the head of the lordly Seigneur that these humble
inferiors could have the hardihood to lift their eyes to the fair
lady mistress, the proud heiress, sitting there on the dais by her
mother's side, "under a chaplet of white roses." While surpris-
ingly ready to condone the advances of some stranger lover, who
was the fair chatelaine's avowed champion and wore her colours,
he would have punished cruelly one of his own dependants who
should have had the audacity to aim so high. This is the ex-
planation of the savage jealousy shown by the Sire de Fayel,
angered beyond all bounds, not because his wife had a lover, but
because the said lover was one of his own domestics, the
seneschal (common caretaker) of his castle of Coucy.
The deeper, the more impassable the gulf fixed between the
Lady of the Fief, the great heiress, and the squire or page, who
had only a shirt to call his own, for his very coat he received
109
Gbe Sorceress: B Stnfc^ in Superstition
from his lord and master, the stronger, it would seem, was the
temptation for Love to overleap the abyss.
The gallant's imagination was fired by the seeming impos-
sibility of success. At length, one day he found himself free
to leave the fortress; he hurried to the Witch's dwelling to ask her
advice and aid. Would a philter avail, a charm to fascinate the
senses ? If not, must he make an express pact with the Devil ?
The awful thought of selling himself to Satan had no terrors for
him. " It shall have our best consideration, young sir. Mean-
time return ; you will find there is some change come about
already."
The change is in himself. A vague, mysterious hope stirs
within him ; everything shows it in his own despite, the deep
glances of his lowered eyes that flash with an uneasy flame.
Someone easy to guess who is quick to note the symptoms
before others; her gentle heart is touched, she throws him a
passing word of pity. . . . Oh, joy ineffable ! Oh, kind-hearted
Satan ! charming, adorable Witch-wife ! . . .
He cannot eat or sleep till he has been to see her again. He
kisses her hand with deepest respect, almost grovels at her feet.
Let her ask him what she will, order him what she please, he will
obey. Would she have his gold chain, the ring he wears on his
finger his dying mother's gift, he will give them without an
instant's hesitation. But she is naturally spiteful, full of malicious
hate for the Baron, and finds it only too delightful to stab him in
the dark.
An undefined feeling of impending trouble haunts the castle.
A voiceless tempest, without lightning or thunder, broods over it,
like an electric cloud on the surface of a swamp. Not a sound
to break the silence; but the Lady Chatelaine is overwrought,
she is sure some supernatural power has been at work. Why
this youth more than another, perhaps handsomer and better
bred, and already renowned for noble exploits ? There is some-
thing surely underneath all this. Has he thrown a spell over
Cbarms anb Xovc potions
her, used a love-charm ? . . . The question only stirs her heart
to wilder emotion.
The Sorceress's spite finds good stuff to feed on. She was
always queen of the village ; now the castle comes and puts
itself in her power, and that just where its pride runs the direst
risk of humiliation. For us, the interest of such an intrigue is
the gallant effort of a generous heart to attain its ideal, its protest
against social barriers and Fate's injustice. For the Sorceress
it is the pleasure, deep and keen, of degrading her proud neigh-
bour, perhaps avenging slights of her own, the pleasure of paying
back to the Seigneur in the same coin the wrongs he has inflicted
on her sister vassals, to indemnify herself, by a lad's audacity,
for the outrageous right the Lord of the Soil possesses, the jus
prima noctis. There can be no doubt whatever, in these in-
trigues where the Sorceress played her part, that she was many
a time actuated by an underlying grudge, natural enough to the
peasant, who is invariably a leveller at heart.
It was always something gained, and something considerable,
to have humiliated the great lady to the love of a domestic. Jean
de Saintre and Cherubino must not mislead us. The youthful
dependant in a mediaeval castle performed the basest offices of the
household. The chamber servant or valet, properly so called,
did not yet exist, while on the other hand few serving-women,
or none at all, were to be found in fortified places. Every
office is performed by these young hands, which are in nowise
degraded thereby ; service, particularly corporal service, rendered
their liege lord and lady only honours and exalts. Nevertheless
it could not but place a young nobleman at times in situations
decidedly melancholy, prosaic, and we may go as far as to say
ridiculous. Little recked the Lord of the Castle. His good lady
must verily and indeed have been bewitched by the Devil not
to see what her eyes rested on day after day, her favourite
engaged in filthy and menial offices.
in
Sorceress: H tnfc\> in Superstition
It is characteristic of the Middle Ages, this bringing face to
face of the sublime and the ridiculous. Where poetry is reticent
we may glimpse the truth from other quarters. Mingled with
these ethereal passions much coarseness of circumstance is very
plainly to be seen.
Everything we learn about the charms and love-potions
employed by Witches and Sorceresses shows how fantastic these
were, often wilfully fantastic, shamelessly compounded of sub-
stances one would suppose least likely to awake the sentiment of
love. These women went to extraordinary lengths, without the
infatuated being they were making a plaything of ever having his
eyes opened to the truth.
Philters were of many and very different sorts. Some were
intended to 'excite and trouble the senses, like the aphrodisiacs
so freely abused to the present day by Eastern peoples. Others
were dangerous, and often treacherous, drugs administered to
cloud the wits and deprive the victim of all power of self-control.
Some, again, were tests or proofs of passion, defiances to try how
far the greediness of desire was capable of carrying the senses,
making lovers accept as the most supreme of favours, as a sort of
mystic communion, the least agreeable of matters coming from
the loved one's person.
The rude structure of mediaeval castles, made up as these were
of great halls and little else, made a public function of domestic
life. It was only reluctantly, as it were, and at a much later
date that privacy was consulted by the contrivance of bower and
oratory in some tower of the vast pile. It was easy to watch the
chatelaine's daily habits ; then, on some day chosen for the
purpose, after careful observation, the bold pretender, acting on
the Witch's suggestion, could strike his blow with every hope
of success, drugging the posset and slipping the love-potion in the
cup.
Still, it was at best a rare and perilous undertaking. A far
easier course was to filch some trifle the fair lady would never
miss or give a thought to, to gather with scrupulous care the
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Cbarme aitf love potions
almost invisible parings of a nail, to collect reverently the comb-
ings of her hair, a strand or two from her lovely head. These
were carried to the Sorceress, who would often demand (as do
somnambulists of the present day) such and such an article of
the most intimate nature, imbued, as it were, with the wearer's
personality, but which she would never have given of her own
free will ; for instance, a fragment torn from a garment long worn
and soiled which she had moistened with the sweat of her body.
All this, remember, smothered with adoring kisses and wistfully
regretted. But it must be ruthlessly burned and reduced to
ashes to serve the required purpose. One day or another, looking
at the garment again, the keen-sighted fair one would notice the
tiny rent, would guess its meaning with a tender sigh, but say
never a word to betray her knowledge. . . . The charm had
taken effect !
One thing is certain, that if the lady hesitated, felt some linger-
ing respect for her marriage vow, this life lived within such narrow
bounds, where each saw the other so continually, and dividing
distances were so short, though so all-important, must soon have
grown into a veritable torture. Even where she had yielded, still,
in presence of so many observers, her husband and others not
less jealous, happiness was doubtless rarely secured. Hence
many a piece of frenzied folly, the result of unsatisfied desire.
The less actual intercourse was possible, the more profound the
longing for a symbolic union. This a morbid fancy sought to find
in all sorts of extravagances, equally unnatural and unreasonable.
Thus, to create a means of secret intercommunication between two
lovers, the Witch would prick out on the arm of each the shapes
of the letters of the alphabet. When one wished to transmit
a thought to the other, all he had to do was to revive, restore, by
sucking the blood to them, the letters forming the word desired.
Simultaneously the corresponding letters, so it was believed, on
the other's arm were suffused with blood.
Sometimes in these outbursts of mad folly lovers would drink
i 113
Gbe Sorceress: a tub\> in Superstition
each other's blood, to effect a mystic communion which, it was
supposed, made their two souls one. Coucy's heart, devoured
by his widow, and which she " found so good, she never ate more
in her life," is the most tragic instance of these monstrous sacra-
ments of cannibal affection. But when the absent lover did not
die, but it was love died within him, then the lady would away to
consult a Witch and beseech her for means to bring him back and
bind him to her.
The magic incantations of Theocritus and Virgil continued to
be used even in . the Middle Ages, but were rarely efficacious.
The attempt was tried to bring back the recreant lover by another
charm, also apparently imitated from an Antique model. Re-
course was had to the magic cake, the confarreatio^ which from
furthest Asia to furthest Europe was ever the sacrament of love.
But the aim here was to bind more than the soul, to bind the
flesh, to create an identity of substance, so that, dead to all other
women, he should live and breathe for one and one alone. The
ordeal was no trifle. "Take it or leave it," was the Witch-wife's
answer to all remonstrances; and her proud client grew instantly
submissive, and suffered her to strip her to the skin, this being an
indispensable condition in all these ceremonies.
What a triumph for the Sorceress ! And above all, if the lady
was one who had treated her despitefully in former days, what
a fine piece of revenge and retaliation ! The woman has her
lying stark naked under her hands. Nor is this all. On her loins
she lays a board, and on it a miniature oven, in which she bakes
the magic cake. ..." Sweet friend, I can bear no more. Quick,
quick, I cannot stay like this ! " " Nay, madam, 'twas bound to
be so you must needs burn. The cake is a-baking ; 'twill be
heated of your very body, the hot flame of your passion ! "
The rite is ended, and we have the magic cake of antiquity, of
Hindoo and Roman marriage, seasoned and hotly spiced with
the lewd spirit of Satan. She does not say, like Virgil's sorceress :
" Come back, Daphnis, come back to me ! Oh, bring him
back to me, my songs ! " But she sends him the cake, all im-
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Cbarms anfc Xovc potions
pregnated with her pain, and heated with her love. . . . Scarce
has he bitten it when a strange tumult, a giddiness, confuses his
senses. . . . His heart beats wildly, his blood boils, his face is
suffused with blushes, his whole body burns. Love's madness
seizes him once more, and inextinguishable desire. 1
1 I am going too far when I say inextinguishable. We find fresh philters
often become necessary. For the frantic Witch, in the mocking malignity of
her heart, will have the charm made literally of the fair lady's body. She
forces her to the humiliation of supplying her lover with strange elements for
an unholy communion. The great noble outraged Jews and serfs, and even his
humble neighbours, tradesmen and the like (see St. Simon on his brother's
case) with certain disgusting substances, which in this case the lady is com-
pelled by the Sorceress to supply as ingredients for the philter required. A
veritable torture for her proud heart ; but all that comes from her, from the
great and noble lady, is received by her adorers on bended knee. See below
note extracted from Sprenger.
CHAPTER XI
COMMUNION OF REVOLT WITCHES'
SABBATHS THE BLACK MASS
The old semi-Pagan Sabasia The Black Mass, and its four Acts : Act I.
The Introit, the Kiss of Devotion, the Banquet ; Act II. The Offertory,
Woman at once Altar and Sacrifice.
JITCHES' Sabbaths. We must use the plural, for it
is obvious the word has denoted very different
things at different epochs. Unfortunately, we
possess detailed accounts of such scenes only of
quite late date, reign of Henri IV. 1 By that time it had de-
generated into little more than a huge carnival of lust, under
pretence of magic rites. But even in these descriptions of an
institution so far gone in decay are to be found certain marks
of extreme antiquity that bear witness to the successive periods
and divers forms through which it had already passed.
We may start with one fact that admits of no doubt, that for
many centuries the serf lived the furtive life of the wolf and the
fox, that he was a nocturnal animal, meaning by this, exhibiting
the least activity possible by day, being really alive only at night.
1 The least unsatisfactory is that given by Lancre. He is a man of wit
and perspicacity, and being manifestly in relations with certain young
witches, was in a position to know the whole truth. Unfortunately, his
Sabbath is confused and overloaded with the grotesque ornaments of the age.
The descriptions of the Jesuit Del Rio and of the Dominican Michaelis are
ridiculous, impossible portraits of a pair of silly, credulous pedants. In that of
Del Rio are found an incredible number of platitudes and absurdities. Still,
taking the thing as a whole, it contains some interesting and valuable traces of
antiquity, which I have been able to turn to account.
116
Witcbee' Sabbatbs
Still, up to the year 1000, when the people is still busy canon-
ising its saints and framing its legends, the life of daylight
continues to be of interest to him. His nocturnal Sabbaths are
merely an unimportant relic of Paganism. He honours and fears
the moon, exerting as she does an influence over the productions
of the soil. Old women are her devotees, and burn little candles
in honour of Dianom (Diana-Luna-Hecate). Goat-footed Pan
still chases women and children, under a mask, it is true, the
black face of the ghostly Hallequin (Harlequin). The festival of
the Pervigilium Veneris is scrupulously observed on May ist.
On St. John's day the he-goat of Priapus-Bacchus-Sabasius is
slaughtered in celebration of the Sabasia. All this without a
thought of mockery. It is the serf's harmless carnival.
But, as we approach the year 1000, the Church is all but closed
against him by difference of language. In noo her officers
become unintelligible to him. Of the mysteries performed at the
church doors, what he remembers best is the comic side, the ox
and the ass, etc. He makes carols out of this material, but with
an ever-increasing spice of mockery in them true "Sabbatic"
literature.
We may well believe the great and terrible revolts of the twelfth
century were not without influence on these mysteries and this
nocturnal life of Werewolf and Moonrakes, of the Wild Game of
the Woods, as the cruel barons style it. These revolts may likely
enough have often begun in such moonlight festivals. The Holy
Sacraments of insurrection among serfs drinking each other's
blood, or eating earth by way of host 1 were doubtless often
celebrated at the Witches' Sabbath. The Marseillaise of the
period, sung more by night than by day, is perhaps a " Sabbatic
Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont
Tout aussi grand coeur nous avons !
Tout autant souffrir nous pouvons ! 2
1 At the battle of Courtrai. See also Grimm, and Michelet's Origines.
2 "We are men as much as they !
We have a heart as big as they !
We can suffer no less than they ! "
117
Sorceress: a tub\> in Superstition
But the ponderous coffin lid falls back again in 1200. The
Pope sits atop, and the King, both exerting enormous pressure,
and poor mankind is immured within without hope of escape.
Does the old nocturnal life survive? Undoubtedly, and more
vigorous than ever. The old Pagan dances are revived, more fast
and furious than ever. The Negroes of the Antilles, after an
intolerable day of heat and exhausting labour, forgot all their
sorrows in moonlight dances. The serf did likewise ; but with
his revelry were inevitably mingled fierce anticipations of the
delights of vengeance, sarcastic buffooneries, mockeries, and
caricatures of the lord and the priest. A whole literature of the
dark side of nature, that knew never a word of that of its brighter
aspects, and little even of the fabliaux of the intermediate
bourgeois classes.
Such was the essence of the "Sabbath " before 1300. For it to
assume, as it did later, the astounding character of an open war
against the god of those times, much more was needed, two things
in fact, that the lowest depths of despair should be sounded, and
that all sense of revenge should disappear,
This consummation is only reached in the fourteenth century,
during the Great Schism when the Papacy had migrated to Avignon,
and the two-headed Church seemed no longer a Church at all,
when all the nobility of France and the King himself are crestfallen
prisoners in England, squeezing the uttermost farthing out of their
vassals to provide their ransom. Then it is the Sabbaths adopt
the imposing and grimly terrible ceremonial of the Black Mass, the
Holy Sacrament turned inside out, so to speak, when Jesus
Christ is defied, called up to strike his impious worshippers dead.
if he can. This devilish piece of play-acting would have been
impossible in the thirteenth century, when it would have raised
a shudder of pious horror. Later again, in the fifteenth, when
every sentiment was outworn, even that of suffering, an outburst
of the sort could never have taken place ; men's spirits were un-
equal to so monstrous a creation. It belongs essentially to the
century of Dante.
Ill
Blacfc
It was, I hold, the invention of a moment, the frenzied out-
break of a maddened brain, lifting impiety to the level of popular
indignation. To realise what this indignation was, we must
remember how the people, brought up by the clergy themselves in
the firm belief of the credibility and possibility of miracles, so far
from supposing God's laws immutable, had for centuries expected
and hoped for a miracle, that never came. In vain men called
for this miraculous intervention in the day of their despair and
utmost need. From that hour forth Heaven seemed but the ally
of their savage tyrants and oppressors, itself a tyrant as blood-
thirsty as any.
Hence the Black Mass and the Jacquerie.
The original framework of the Black Mass was elastic and
could find room for a thousand variations of detail ; nevertheless
it was strongly put together, and in my opinion all of a piece.
I was enabled to retrace the course of this grim drama in 1857
in the Histoire de France, where I recomposed its four successive
Acts, an easy enough task. Only, at that date, I was too lavish
in leaving it a superfluity of those grotesque ornaments and after-
growths the primitive Witches' Sabbath borrowed from modern
times, and failed sufficiently to indicate how much belongs to the
old framework, so gloomy and so terrible in its grim simplicity.
The date of this general framework is fixed beyond a doubt by
sundry abominable characteristics of an accursed age, as also
by the dominant place woman holds in it, a marked peculiarity
of the fourteenth century.
It is the special note of this century that woman, very far from
being enfranchised as she is, yet reigns as its queen, and this in a
hundred rude forms. She inherits fiefs in those days, brings a
dowry of kingdoms to the Sovereign. She sits enthroned in this
world, and still more in the skies. Mary has supplanted Jesus.
St. Francis and St. Dominic beheld the three worlds lying in her
gracious bosom. In the immensity of her grace she drowns the
guilt of sin ; what do I say, she abets sin. Read the legend of
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Sorceress: H tnt>\> in Superstition
the nun whose place in choir the Virgin keeps for her, while
she goes to see her lover.
In the sublimest heights, in the lowest depths, it is woman,
always woman. Beatrice is in heaven, ringed about by the stars,
while Jean de Meung, in the Roman de la Rose, is preaching the
indiscriminate enjoyment of women. Pure, degraded, woman is
everywhere. We may say of her what Raymond Lulle says of
God : " What part is He of the Universe ? The whole."
But in the skies, in the realm of poetry, the woman that is
exalted is not the fertile mother, the parent glorified with children.
It is the virgin, Beatrice, sterile, and dying young.
A fair English damsel, they say, visited France about 1300, to
preach the redemption of women, who deemed herself the
Messiah of that creed.
The Black Mass, in its primary aspect, would seem to be this
redemption of Eve from the curse Christianity had laid upon her.
At the Witches' Sabbath woman fulfils every office. She is
priest, and altar, and consecrated host, whereof all the people
communicates. In the last resort, is she not the very God of the
Sacrifice as well ?
There are many popular elements in it all, and yet it does not
come solely and entirely from the people. Your peasant respects
force and force alone ; he holds women in light esteem. This is
seen only too plainly in all the old French " Coutumes " (see
Michelet's Origines). He would never have given woman the
dominant place she here occupies, had she not taken it of her
own initiative.
I should be quite ready to believe the Sabbath, in its con-
temporary shape, was the creation of woman's efforts, of a woman
driven to desperation, such as was the Sorceress of those days.
In the fourteenth century she sees opening before her a long
and terrible career of punishment and torments three hundred,
four hundred years lighted up with blazing faggots ! Subsequently
Gbe Black
to the year 1300 her medicines are adjudged to be mischievous,
her remedies condemned as poisons. The harmless spells where-
by the lepers of that time thought to alleviate their lot lead to
the massacre of these unhappy beings. Pope John XXII. has a
bishop flayed alive on suspicion of sorcery. Under such a system
of blind and indiscriminate repression, to venture little, to venture
much and far, is all one, and the risk the same. The very
danger incurred increased the Sorceresses' recklessness, and led
them to do and dare everything.
Fraternity of man with man, defiance of the Christians' heaven,
worship of Nature's God under unnatural and perverted forms,
such the inner significance of the Black Mass.
The altar was raised to the Spirit of the revolted serf, " to Him
who has suffered wrong, the Proscribed of ancient days, unjustly
driven out of Heaven, the Great Creator of the earth, the Master
that makes the plants germinate from the soil." Under such
titles as these the Luciferians, his adorers, did him honour, and,
if we are to credit a not improbable conjecture, the Knights of
the Temple likewise.
The great marvel of all, in those times of utter poverty, is that
means were forthcoming for the nocturnal feast of fraternity which
could never have been provided by day. The Sorceress, at her
own sore peril, induced those in better circumstances to con-
tribute, and collected the offerings they made. Charity, as a
satanic virtue, being at once crime and conspiracy, and assuming
the aspect of revolt, exercised a mighty influence. Men stinted
their meals by day to contribute to the nocturnal feast where rich
and poor met at a common table.
Imagine the scene, a wide heath, often in the neighbourhood
of an old Celtic dolmen, at the edge of a wood. The picture is
twofold, on one side the heath brightly lighted up, and the
crowds of people feasting ; on the other, towards the wood, the
choir of this church whose vault is the open heaven. The choir
Sorceress: a tut>\> in Superstition
I speak of is a knoll rising somewhat above the surrounding
country. Midway between the two, resinous fires burn with
yellow tongues of flame and ruddy embers, making a vague,
fantastic veil of smoke.
In the background the Sorceress set up her Satan, a great
wooden Satan, black and shaggy. In virtue of his horns and the
he-goat that stood by his side, he might have passed for Bacchus ;
but his virile attributes unmistakably proclaimed him Pan and
Priapus. A darkling countenance, that each saw under a differ-
ent aspect. While some beheld only an incarnate terror, others
were moved by the haughty melancholy that seemed to enfold
the Exile of Eternity. 1
Act the First, The superb Introit Christianity borrowed of
antiquity, usual at all ceremonies where the people wound in
and out in long-drawn file under the temple colonnades, before
entering the sanctuary, this the ancient god, come back to his
own again, appropriated for his services. Similarly, the lavabo .
was copied from the old Pagan rites of purification. All this
Satan claimed as his own by right of ancient use.
His Priestess is always The Aged, this being a title of honour,
but she may as an actual fact be quite young. Lancre speaks of
a Sorceress of only seventeen, a pretty woman and atrociously
cruel.
The Devil's Bride must not be a mere child ; she should be
full thirty years of age, with the face of a Medea and the beauty
of Our Lady of Sorrows; her eye deep-set, tragic, and restless,
her hair a dark untamable torrent, falling round her shoulders
wildly like writhing snakes. Perhaps to crown all, the vervain
crown above her brow, the funereal ivy, and the violets of death.
She bids the children stand aloof, till the feast. The office
begins.
1 This comes from Del Rio, but is not, I should suppose, exclusively
Spanish. It is an antique trait and characteristic of primitive inspiration.
Farcicalities come later.
122
Blacfc
" I will enter in, to this altar. . . . But, Lord, preserve me
from the Traitorous and the Overbearing" (the Priest and the
Seigneur).
Then comes the denial of Jesus, homage to the new Master
and the feudal kiss, as at the receptions of neophytes by the
Templars, where all and everything is yielded without reserve,
shame, dignity, or choice, with this outrageous aggravation of
insult added to the repudiation of their God " that they love
Satan's backside better."
It is his turn now to consecrate his priestess. The wooden
god welcomes her as of old Pan and Priapus did their female
adorers. Agreeably to the Pagan ceremonial, she gives herself to
him, sits a moment on him, like the Pythia on the tripod of the
Delphic Apollo. She thus absorbs breath, soul, life from him by
way of this mimic impregnation. This done, with equal solem-
nity she purifies her person. Henceforth she is the living altar of
the shrine.
The Introit is ended, and the office interrupted for the banquet.
In contrast with the nobles' merrymakings, where they sit sword
by side, here at the feast of brothers not a weapon is to be seen,
not so much as a knife.
To safeguard the peace, each has a woman with him. Without
a woman no guest is admitted. Relation or no, wife or no,
old, young, makes no matter ; but a woman each must have.
What liquors went round the board ? Mead ? beer ? wine ?
heady cider, or perry? Who can say? The last two, at any
rate, first came into use in the twelfth century.
Beverages to delude the mind, with their dangerous admixture
of belladonna, did these appear at the board as yet ? The
answer is undoubtedly No ! Children were present. Besides,
excessive disorder of the faculties would have hindered the
dance that was to follow.
This dance, this whirling frenzy, the notorious " Witches'
Round," was amply sufficient by itself to complete the first stage
123
Sorceress: a Stubs in Superstition
of intoxication. The performers danced back to back, arms be-
hind the back, without seeing their partner, though back often
came in contact with back. Little by little each man lost all
knowledge both of self and of her he had beside him. Old age
and ugliness were abolished by a veritable satanic miracle; she
was still a woman, still lovable and confusedly loved.
Act the Second. At the moment when the crowd, united in one
and the same giddy madness, felt itself drawn into a single per-
sonality as well by the subtle influence of the feminine element as
by a vague, undefinable emotion of fraternity, the service was
resumed at the Gloria. Altar and host came on the scene.
Under what form ? That of woman incarnate. By her pros-
trate body and humiliated person, by the vast silken net of her
hair, draggled in the dust, she (that proud Proserpine) offered
up herself a sacrifice. On her loins a demon performed Mass,
pronounced the Credo, deposited the offertory of the faithful. 1
In later times all this was an exhibition of indecency. But in
the fourteenth century, that period of calamity, the dread epoch
of the Black Death, and famine after famine, the days of the
Jacquerie, and the robberies and cruelties of the Great Com-
panies, for a people exposed to so many perils, the effect was
nothing if not serious. The whole assemblage had the worst to
fear in case of surprise. The Sorceress herself ran the extremest
risk, and in this act of defiant daring was in a very true sense
giving away her life. Nay ! worse, she was facing a perfect hell
of possible torments, tortures one dares scarcely so much as
1 This highly important point, that woman was herself the altar, and that
the office was performed on her, we know from the trial of La Voisin,
published by M. Ravaisson, senior, among the other Bastille Papers. In
these imitations, of recent date, it is true, of the Witches' Sabbath, carried
out for the amusement of the great nobles of the Court of Louis XIV., there
is no doubt that the antique and classical forms of the primitive Sabbath
were reproduced, even in respect of a point such as this, where the ancient
ceremonial may very likely have been discontinued during the intermediate
period.
124
Black
speak of. Torn with pincers and broken on the wheel, the
breasts amputated, the skin flayed off little by little (as was done
to the Sorcerer Bishop of Cahors), roasted before a slow fire and
limb by limb, she might have to endure an eternity of agony.
All present must indeed have been deeply stirred, when over
the body of the devoted being thus submitting to voluntary self-
humiliation, prayer and offering were made for the harvest.
Wheat was presented to the Spirit of the Earth, who makes the
crops grow. Birds let loose no doubt from the woman's bosom
bore the God of Liberty the signs and supplications of the
unhappy serfs. What was the boon they craved ? That we, we
their far-away descendants, might win enfranchisement. 1
What was distributed by way of host at this strange eucharist ?
Not the burlesque and abominable stuff we shall find so used in
Henri IV.'s day ; but most probably the same confarreatio we
have met with in philters, the sacrament of love, a cake baked
on her body, on the victim who to-morrow might as likely as not
pass through the fire herself. It was her life, her death, they ate.
The morsel was impregnated already with the savour of her
burning flesh.
Last of all, they laid on her two offerings apparently of human
flesh, representations of the last dead and the last born respec-
tively of the community. They shared the merit of the woman
who was at once altar and sacrifice, and the assemblage (symboli-
cally) communicated in both these novel elements. Triple the
sacrifice, and human in all three ; in Satan's dim and gloomy
rites the people was the sole object of adoration to the people.
Here was the true sacrifice, and it was accomplished at last.
Woman, having given her very flesh to the crowd to eat, had
ended her task. She rose to her feet again, but did not leave the
spot till she had firmly stablished and as it were ratified the
1 This charming offering of wheat and birds is peculiar to France (Jaquier,
Flagellans, 57 ; Soldan, 225). In Lorraine, and no doubt in Germany also,
black animals were offered up, black cats, black goats, black bulls.
125
Sorceress: a Stnty) in Superstition
authenticity of it all by appeal to the lightning, a defiance cast in
the face of the God whose empire she had usurped.
In ribald mockery of the words : Agnus Dei, etc., and the
breaking of the wafer in the Christian Eucharist, she had a
skinned toad brought to her which she then tore in pieces. With
eyes rolling horribly and looks upturned to heaven, she decapi-
tated the toad, repeating these strange words : " Ah ! Philip?- if
only I had you between my hands, I would treat you the same ! "
Jesus making no reply to her defiance, no lightning stroke en-
suing, He was deemed vanquished. The nimble troop of demons
would seize this moment for astonishing the crowd with small
miracles that impressed and terrified the credulous. Toads
perfectly harmless creatures, but which were believed to be
deadly poisonous were bitten and freely mangled between their
teeth. Unharmed they would leap over blazing fires and red-
hot embers, to amuse the populace and set them laughing at the
fires of hell.
Laughing? was the people moved to laughter, the ceremonial
so tragic, so bold, and reckless as it was? Impossible to say;
but there can be no doubt whatever hers was no laughing mood
who first did and dared it all. The bonfires could not fail but
call up the image of those that might ere long blaze round the
stake of her own doom. Hers, too, the weighty responsibility of
safeguarding the succession of satanic sovereigns, of training up
the Sorceresses of the future.
1 Lancre, 136. Why the name Philip, I have no idea. It is as impossible
to give a reason as to say why Satan, when he names Jesus, calls him little
John, or Janicot. Can it be she says Philip here, from the odious name
of the King who gave France a hundred years of English wars, who in-
augurated at Crecy the series of national defeats and cost the country the
first invasion of her soil ? The long, almost uninterrupted, period of peace
that had gone before made war all the more horrible to the masses. Philippe
de Valois, author of this interminable war, was held accursed, and perhaps
left behind him in this popular ritual a never-forgotten word of malediction.
126
CHAPTER XII
SAME CONTINUED LOVE AND DEATH-
SATAN DISAPPEARS
Act III. Incestuous love-making; Act IV. Death to Satan The Sorceress
flies to rejoin her lover in hell.
(HE people is enfranchised and emboldened. The
poor serf, free for once, is king for a few hours'
space. But his time is short ; already the night is
passing, the stars verging to their setting. Very
soon the cruel dawn will send him back to slavery, set him
once more, under the malignant eye of his taskmaster, under
the shadow of his lord's castle and that of the Church, to the
monotonous labour, the everlasting weary round regulated by
the two bells, whereof the one says Ever and the other says
Never. Each peasant among them, with glum, submissive looks
and an air of jog-trot habit, will be seen sallying forth to his day's
work.
At least let them enjoy their momentary respite ! Let each
one of earth's disinherited sons be fully happy for once, and find
his utmost dreams fulfilled ! . . . What heart so miserable, so dead
and withered, as not to have some day-dreams, some wild aspira-
tions, to say sometimes, "Ah! if only such or such a thing
could happen " ?
The only detailed descriptions we possess are comparatively
modern, as I have already mentioned, dating from a period of
peace and prosperity, viz. the last years of the reign of Henri IV.,
127
Sorceress: a tub\> in Superstition
when France was once more flourishing. These were years of
luxury and plenty, altogether different from the black days when
the Witches' Sabbath was first organised.
If we were to trust implicitly to M. Lancre and his fellows, we
should picture this Third Act to our mind's eye as a sort of
Rubens' kermesse, a wild, confused orgy, a vast masked ball,
giving licence to every sort of illicit intercourse, and particularly to
incest between closely connected relatives. According to these
authors, whose only wish is to inspire horror and make their
readers shudder, the chief end of the whole festival, its main
lesson and express doctrine, was incest; they would have us
believe that at these huge gatherings (sometimes as many as
twelve thousand souls were present) the most monstrous acts
were openly committed before the assembled spectators.
This is hard to believe. The very same writers tell us other
facts which seem diametrically opposed to such cynicism. They
say the folk only came there in couples, that they only sat at the
feast two by two, that supposing an individual arrived unaccom-
panied, a young demon was actually told off on purpose to
shepherd the lonely visitor and do the honours of the festival.
They inform us that jealous lovers were not afraid to attend
and bring with them their fair companions, curious to see the
strange sight.
Again we have seen how the great majority attended by
families, their children accompanying them. These they sent
away only for the First Act, not for the banquet or the religious
(or rather anti-religious) ceremonial, and not even for the Third
Act here in question. This proves the existence of a certain
degree of decency. Besides, the performance was twofold. The
family groups remained on the brilliantly lighted heath. It was
only beyond the fantastic curtain of pitchy smoke clouds that a
darkling outer region began, to which those who wished could
slip away.
Judges and inquisitors, bitterly hostile as these were, are forced
to admit that a noble spirit of gentleness and peace prevailed
128
Black
generally. Of the three things that shocked decorum so much
at the feasts of the nobles nothing was found here. No brawling,
no duels, no tables stained with blood. No vile treachery in the
name of gallantry to outrage the brother in arms. Lastly, the
foul promiscuity of the Templars, for all that has been said to
the contrary, was unknown, indeed unneeded ; at the Sabbath
woman was everything.
With regard to incest, we must distinguish. Then every con-
nexion with relations, even such as are held the most legitimate
in our days, was reckoned a crime. Modern law, which is charity
personified, understands the human heart and the good of
families. It permits the widower to marry his wife's sister, in
other words, to give his children the best and kindest of new
mothers. It permits the uncle to afford his niece necessary
protection by making her his wife. Above all, it permits
marriage with a female cousin, a trusty and familiar bride, often
the object of affection since childhood, companion of youthful
sports, and an acceptable daughter-in-law to the mother, who has
long ago taken her to her heart. In the Middle Ages all this
was incest !
The peasant, whose affections never go beyond his own family
circle, was driven to sheer desperation. In the sixth degree even,
it would have been held monstrous to wed his cousin. Impos-
sible to marry in his own village, where the ties of relationship
imposed so many barriers ; he was bound to look elsewhere,
further away. But in those days intercommunication was of
the slightest, mutual knowledge non-existent, and neighbours
cordially detested. Different villages, on fete days, would fight
each other without a notion why they did so, as is the case
to this hour in countries ever so little removed from each other.
A man would hardly dare to go look for a wife at the very spot
where the battle had occurred, and the peril of wounds and
death confronted.
Another difficulty. The feudal lord of a young serf would not
allow him, if he wished, to marry in the fief of a neighbouring
K 129
Sorceress: H tut>\> in Superstition
baron. He would have become the serf of the wife's over-lord,
and so been lost to his own.
Thus while the priest barred the cousin, the feudal lord forbade
the stranger; and so many men never married at all.
The result was precisely what they most wished to guard
against. At the Witches' Sabbath the natural affections had
their way in double force. There the young man encountered
once more the girl he knew and loved already, who when he was
a lad of ten had been called his little wife. Be sure he liked
her best, and treated the canonical objections with supreme
indifference.
A thorough study of mediaeval family life throws entire discredit
on all those rhetorical declamations we hear about a wide general
promiscuity affecting crowds of human beings. The exact oppo-
site is perceived to be the case, that each separate little group,
constituted on the narrowest basis and in the most concentrated
form, is to the last degree averse to admit any foreign element
whatever.
The serf, anything but jealous towards his own kinsfolk, but
miserably poor and wretched in his circumstances, is excessively
apprehensive of worsening his lot yet further by multiplying a
long family he cannot possibly feed. The priest and the baron
both would have him augment the number of their serfs, would
like to see his wife everlastingly with child ; and the strangest
sermons were preached on this subject, 1 occasionally savage
recriminations and murderous threats indulged in. All this only
made the husband more obstinate in his precautions. As for the
wife, who poor creature could never hope to rear children under
such conditions, and found only cause for tears in their arrival,
she dreaded nothing so much as pregnancy. She only ventured
to attend the nocturnal festival on the express assurance repeated
1 It is only a very short while ago that my witty and accomplished friend,
M. Genin, brought together a mass of most curious information on the point
in question.
130
Blacfc flDass
again and again that " no woman ever returned therefrom heavier
than she came." 1
They came no doubt, but drawn to the ceremony by the
banquet, the dance, the gay lights, and the love of amusement ;
in no way by the incitements of the flesh. Some indeed found
only found pain and suffering there ; while others abhorred the
icy purification that followed instantly on the act of love to
nullify its effects. No matter; they were ready to undergo any-
thing rather than increase their poverty, bring another unfortunate
into the world, give the over-lord another serf.
Strong was the common determination, trusty the mutual
agreement that limited love to the family and excluded the
stranger from all participation. No reliance was felt but in kins-
folk united in the same serfdom, who, sharing the same burdens,
were duly careful not to increase these.
Hence no general movement of population, no mixing and
mingling confusedly of divers elements; but, on the contrary,
only a series of narrow and mutually exclusive family groups.
This very fact was bound to render the Witches' Sabbath power-
less as an instrument of revolt, ineffectual as a means of stirring
and combining the masses. The family, careful above all things
to avoid a prolific offspring, secured its object by strict limitation
in matters of love to very near relations, in other words, to those
pledged to the same interest. A sad, depressing, unhallowed
state of things, darkening and degrading the sweetest moments
of life. Alas, alas ! even in love and marriage all was mere
squalid wretchedness and revolt against untoward circumstance.
Society was very cruel. Authority kept on saying, " Marry " ;
but it made marriage next door to impossible, as well by excess
of abject poverty as by the senseless rigour of canonical prohibi-
tions.
1 Boguet, Lancre, all the authorities are at one on this point. A flat
contradiction on Satan's part, but a state of things entirely agreeable to the
serf, the peasant, the poor man. The Devil makes the harvest sprout, but
renders woman barren ; wheat in abundance, but never a child.
Gbe Sorceress: a Stu&p in Superstition
The result was the exact opposite of the purity the Church
was for ever preaching. Under a Christian disguise, the old
patriarchal system of Asia was the only existing reality.
The eldest son only could marry. The younger brothers and
the sisters all worked under him and for him l In the isolated
mountain farmsteads of the south, far removed from all inter-
course with neighbours or other women, the brothers lived with
their sisters, who were their servants and belonged to them body
and soul, a state of morals corresponding to that described in
the Book of Genesis, and analogous to the marriage customs of
the Parsees and the usages subsisting to this day among some of
the pastoral tribes of the Himalayas.
What was even more shocking was the lot of the mother of the
family. She found herself unable to marry off her son ; she
could not unite him with a kinswoman and so make sure of
a daughter-in-law who would have some consideration and
respect for her. Her son would marry, if marry he could, a girl
from a distant village, often a hostile one; then her arrival was
a veritable and terrible invasion, whether to the children of the
first bed or to the poor mother, who often found herself turned
out of doors by the stranger. It will scarce be credited, but
there is no doubt about the fact. At best she was ill treated,
driven ignominiously from the fireside and the domestic board.
A Swiss law expressly forbids depriving the mother of her
place at the chimney corner.
She dreaded above all things the event of her son's marrying.
Yet her lot was not much more tolerable supposing he did not.
She was just as much an inferior servant of the young master of
the house, who succeeded to all his father's rights, even to that of
beating her. I have myself seen instances at the present day
in the south of France of this horror, a son of twenty-five
chastising his own mother when she got drunk.
1 A very common condition of things in France, I have often been told by
the learned and accurate M. Monteil.
132
Xovc anfc Bcatb
How much more in these ruder times ! ... It was more likely
to be the son that would return from village merrymakings in
a condition of semi-intoxication, scarcely knowing what he was
after. Same bedchamber, same bed for two was an absolutely
unknown luxury. The mother was far from feeling secure. He
had seen his friends married, and the sight had roused his evil
passions. Hence floods of tears, extreme prostration, the most
deplorable self-abandonment. The unhappy woman, thus
threatened with violence by her only god, her son, wounded
in her fondest affections, reduced to such a hideous, unnatural
plight, was in despair. She would try to sleep, to feign un-
consciousness. Then there happened, without either quite
realising the enormity, what so often happens to this day in
the poor quarters of great cities, where some poor creature,
constrained by terror or perhaps by blows, submits to the last
indignity. Submissive henceforth, and spite all her scruples, far
too readily resigned, the mother became the victim of a piteous
servitude. A shameful and an agonising, anxious life, for year
by year, the discrepancy of age would increase, and more and
more tend to separate them. A woman of thirty-six could still
hold the affections of a boy of twenty ; but at fifty, alas ! and at
a more advanced age still, what then ? From the Great Sabbath,
when distant villages met together, he might any day bring home
a strange woman to be the young mistress of the house an un-
familiar, hard outsider, without heart or pity, who would rob her
of her son, her fireside, her bed, all the household gods she had
got together by her own labour.
By what Lancre and others tell us, Satan held it a great merit
on the son's part to remain faithful to his mother, made this
particular crime into a virtue. If this is true, we may easily
guess the reason how one woman naturally stood up for another,
how the Sorceress was a ready partisan- on the mother's side,
to help her keep her hearth against the son's wife, who, stick in
hand, would have turned her out to beg her bread.
Lancre goes further and declares, "never was thoroughpaced
Sorceress: a Stub\> in Superstition
Witch yet but was the child of incest, born of mother and son."
The same rule held good in Persia for the birth of the genuine
Mage, who must be the offspring, so men said, of this odious
mystery of iniquity. In this way the lore of the Wise Men, the
magic of the East, was confined to the narrowest limits, within a
family that was renewed perpetually from its own blood.
By an impious misreading of Nature, they believed themselves
to be copying in this hateful ritual the innocent mystery of the
rustic year, the ever-renewed cycle of vegetation growth, whereby
the corn, reaped and again sown in the furrow, comes up once
again as corn.
Less monstrous forms of union (of brother and sister),
common among the Jews and Greeks, were unloving and very
seldom fruitful. Very wisely they were abandoned before long,
and would never have been resorted to again, but for the spirit
of revolt which, exasperated by ridiculous prohibitions, drove
men recklessly into every extreme most violently contrasted with
use and wont.
In this way unnatural laws, acting on the evil passions, the
hate, of mankind, produced unnatural crimes.
A hard, an accursed time ! and the inevitable mother of
despair !
So far so good, or rather so bad ; but lo ! the dawn of a
brighter day is all but come. In a moment, the hour strikes
that puts all evil spirits to flight. The Sorceress feels the
gloomy flowers of sin withering on her brow. Farewell her
royal state ! her very life, it may be ! ... What would happen if
the dayspring found her still exposed to its beams ?
What will she make of Satan? a flame of fire? a heap of
ashes ? He asks nothing better. He knows very well, the wily
schemer, that to live, to be born again, the only way is to die.
Shall he die, the mighty evoker of the dead, he who gave
weeping friends the only joy they knew in this world, the dream,
the image of their vanished dear ones ? Nay ! he is very sure to
live.
134
Satan Disappears
Shall he die, the mighty spirit who finding Creation accursed
and Nature lying rejected in the mire, that Nature which the
Church had tossed disdainfully from her lap like an unlovely,
unloved foster-child, took her up again and laid her softly in his
bosom ? Nay ! the thing cannot be.
Shall he die, the sole and only healer of the Middle Ages, that
age of sore disease, who saved the people by his poisons and told
them to " Live on, foolish folk, love on " ?
As he is assured of life, the sturdy rogue, he dies quietly and
comfortably enough. He "slips off this mortal coil" like a
conjuring trick, dexterously burns his fine black goat-skin, and
vanishes in a flash of fire and the brilliant light of the coming
dawn.
But she, she who made Satan, who made everything, good and
ill alike, who fostered and favoured so many causes, love, self-
devotion, crime ! . . . What is her fate ? Behold her all alone
on the deserted heath !
She is far, very far, from being, as represented, the horror of
all mankind. Many will bless her name. 1 More than one has
found her fair, more than one would sell his share of Paradise if
he dared but approach her. . . . But round about her is a great
gulf, the admiration she excites passes all bounds, and the terror
is excessive of this all-puissant Medea, of her wondrous deep-set
eyes and the voluptuous snaky ringlets of coal-black hair that
flood her shoulders.
Alone for ever ; for ever loveless and alone ! Who and what
is left her ? Naught but the dread Spirit who stole away from her
side but now.
"Well, then, good Satan, let us away. ... I am in haste to
be in those regions down below. Hell is better than earth.
Farewell this world and all its shows ! "
She who first invented, first played the awful drama, could
hardly survive her companion long. Satan, submissive to her
behest, had near by and ready saddled a gigantic black horse,
1 Lancre speaks of Sorceresses who won both love and adoration.
135
Gbe Sorceress: a tut> in Superstition
whose eyes and nostrils shot fire. She sprang to his back with
one bound, and away. . . .
The eyes of the bystanders followed her vanishing form. . . .
The good folks asked in terror, " Oh, what, what will become of
her ? " As she went she laughed, a horrid peal of fiendish mirth,
and disappeared from sight like an arrow from a bow. Men fain
would know, but know they never shall, what was the unhappy
creature's final doom. 1
1 This is almost exactly the end of an English Witch whose history is told
by Wyer.
136
SECOND BOOK
CHAPTER I
THE SORCERESS IN HER DECADENCE-
SATAN MULTIPLIED AND VULGARISED
Sorceresses and Sorcerers employed by the Great The Chatelaine a
Werewolf Last of the love-potions.
|OW we have another type altogether, a delicate
Devil's plaything, the little Witch-wife, child of the
Black Mass; she has quite superseded the grim
Sorceress of an earlier day, blossoming into being,
with all the wily ways and sportive grace of a kitten. The very
opposite of her predecessor, she is soft and silky, stealthy of
approach and shy, treading so softly, softly, and loving, above all
things, to be caressed. Nothing Titanic about her, that is very
clear; on the contrary, she is a low-minded, tricky creature, a
wanton from her very cradle, bursting with every naughty, dainty
caprice. Her whole life will be but the expression of a certain
midnight hour, a dark and evil moment, when a vile reverie that
would have excited a mere horror of disgust by daylight, took
form in the licence of dreams.
Born with such a secret in her very blood, possessing an
instinctive knowledge of evil, with looks that pierce so far and so
low, she will respect neither thing nor person in this world, and
barely so much as think of religion. Satan himself will not
move her hugely, for after all he is a Spirit, and her tastes are
pronounced, confined exclusively to material pleasures.
As a child, she loved dirt. Grown a big girl and a pretty, she
139
Gbe Sorceress: H Stub^ in Superstition
was a wonder of nastiness. In her Sorcery will become the
strange laboratory of a strange, mysterious alchemy. From a
very early period she handles, by predilection, repulsive matters,
drugs and medicaments to-day, to-morrow nauseous intrigues.
This is her element, love and disease; she will turn out an apt
go-between, a clever, bold experimenter. She will be persecuted
for alleged murders, for the concoction of poisonous brews ; but
unjustly. Her instinct by no means lies in that direction ; she
has no hankering after death. Malevolent as she is, she yet loves
life, prefers to heal the sick, and prolong existence. She is
dangerous in another way, in two other ways. She will sell
recipes to produce sterility, perhaps abortion. On the other
hand, with her wild, reckless wantonness of fancy, she will be only
too ready to help women to their ruin by her accursed potions,
and find a cruel joy in crimes of the sort.
What a contrast to the other ! She is a mere trafficker after
all ; while the other was Antichrist, the Demon, the Spirit of
Revolt, the wife of Satan, and, in a sense, his mother. For did
he not wax great from her and her inward might ? But the latter
Witch is, at most, the Devil's daughter, inheriting two attributes
from him her uncleanness and her love of handling life. Such
is her lot ; she is an artist in this line, and a successful one and
mankind is her raw material !
They say of her she will perpetuate her race by incest, whereof
she sprang herself. But there is no need ; without intervention
of any male, she will bear an innumerable breed. In less than
fifty years, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, under
Charles VI., a prodigious contagion spreads far and wide.
Whoever believes himself to possess secret remedies, mysterious
recipes; whoever thinks he can divine the future, whoever has
dreams and waking reveries, dubs himself the favourite of Satan.
Every light-headed, silly woman adopts as her own the imposing
name of Witch.
A dangerous title, but a lucrative one, readily enough given by
140
Sorceress in ber Decadence
the hatred of the populace, which assails with alternate insults
and prayers her unknown powers. It is no less readily accepted,
often actually claimed. When children pursue her in the streets
with gibes, and women shake their fists at her, and hurl the word
at her as if it were a stone, she turns upon them and says proudly,
" Yes ! you say true ; a Sorceress I am ! "
The trade is improving, and men are taking it up, a new come-
down for the art and mystery. The humblest of Witch-wives still
retains something of the Sibyl. But these self-styled Wizards,
sordid charlatans, commonplace jugglers, mole and rat catchers,
casting spells over cattle, selling secrets they do not possess,
infect the age with a foul, black, smothering smoke of fear and
foolish terror. Satan becomes common, his vogue enormously
increased, but in what low, sordid conditions ! A poor triumph
indeed, for he only grows dull and tiresome. Yet the people flock
to him, will scarce endure any God but him ; but his old self,
his old dignity, are gone for ever.
The fifteenth century, for all its two or three great discoveries,
is yet, I take it, a tired, outworn, exhausted century, lacking in
ideas.
It starts grandly enough with the Royal Sabbath of St. Denis,
the mad, wild, gloomy festival Charles VI. gave in the Abbey of
St. Denis to celebrate the reinterment of Duguesclin, who had
been in his grave many a long year. For three days and three
nights Sodom caroused over the tombs of the dead. The mad
King, not yet the imbecile he afterwards became, forced all the
kings, his ancestors, their dry bones dancing in their coffins, to
share his revel. Grim Death, whether he would or no, was made
a pandar and added a horrid spur to the wanton pleasures of the
Court. There in all their effrontery flaunted the base fashions of
the period, when great ladies, their height exaggerated by the
" devil's coif," or double-horned headdress of the day, threw the
belly into unnatural prominence, so that one and all seemed
pregnant an admirable device, by-the-by, for concealing the fact
141
Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
if it were really so. 1 The mode was dear to women, and lasted
a good forty years. The young nobles on their side were just as
shameless, and exposed their persons in an equally disgusting
fashion. Whilst women wore Satan on their brows in the twin-
peaked cap, knights and pages displayed his symbol on their feet
in those pointed shoes that turned up like so many angry
scorpions. Under the guise of animals, they disported them-
selves in brazen travesty of the basest lusts of beasts. It was
there Gilles de Retz, the infamous kidnapper of children, himself
a page at the time, first learned his monstrous vices. These
great ladies and mistresses of broad fiefs were bold-faced
Jezebels every one, more shameless even than the men; they
would not so much as deign to wear a mask, but exposed their bold
faces quite unveiled. Their sensual rage, their mad ostentation
of debauch, their outrageous defiance of all decency, were for
King, for all, for reason, life, body, soul, the sheer abyss and
bottomless pit of hell.
And what was the result? The whipped curs of Agincourt,
that poor etiolated generation of nobles who in miniatures make
us shiver to this day to see beneath their tight-laced doublets
their wretched, thin, shrunken limbs. 2
I commiserate the Sorceress from the bottom of my heart,
who on the Great Dame's return from the King's feast will have
to be her confidante and the minister of her pleasures, for be
sure she will demand mere impossibilities of her.
In her castle, it is very true, she is alone, the only, or almost
the only woman there, in a whole houseful of unmarried men.
1 Even in a painting representing the most mystical of subjects, in a work
of genius, the Holy Lamb of Van Eyck (known as John of Bruges), all the
virgins look as if they were in child. Such was the grotesque mode of the
fifteenth century.
2 This excessive thinness of persons 'worn out and enervated by excesses
is enough to spoil, in my eyes, all the superb miniatures of the Court of
Burgundy, the Due de Berry, etc. The subjects are such deplorable creatures
that no beauty of execution can make these pictures really pleasing and
successful works of art.
142
Sorceress in ber IDecabence
By what the romances tell us, the Lady Chatelaine would seem
to have delighted in collecting round her a court of pretty girls ;
but history and our own common sense say just the contrary.
Queen Eleanor was not so silly as to set the Fair Rosamond as a
counterfoil to her own beauty. These queens and great ladies
were as abominably jealous as they were licentious instance the
story related by Henri Martin of one who had a maid her
husband admired overmuch, outraged to death by the common
soldiery. The high-born dame's power over men, we repeat,
depended on her being alone and without rivals. Let her be as
old and ugly as you please, she is the dream of one and all.
The Sorceress enjoys fine sport in rousing her to abuse this
divinity of hers, to make mock of this herd of besotted and
submissive males. She makes her dare every extreme, and treat
them like brute beasts. Her will lays a spell on them ; down
they go on all fours, cringing apes, lumbering bears, nasty dogs,
swine, ready to obey every caprice, to welcome every outrage of
their mistress Circe.
All this only moves her to pity and sick disgust ! She spurns
away the crawling animals with her foot ; they are base and foul
enough, but too innocent for her. Then she finds a grotesque
remedy for her satiety ; as they are all so impotent to please her,
she chooses a lover more impotent still, a little lad to lavish her
caresses upon. The idea is worthy of the Witch who suggested
it, to blow into precocious flame the spark of naughtiness lurk-
ing in the innocent child slumbering in the pure sleep of boy-
hood. This is the ugly story of Jehan de Saintre, type of the
Cherubinos and other miserable dolls and playthings that women
have corrupted in times of decadence.
Under so many pedantic ornaments and trappings of senti-
mental morality, the sordid cruelty that underlies the proceeding
is evident enough. It is killing the fruit by nipping the flower
in the bud. It is, in a sense, the very thing often cast up against
the Sorceresses, that "they ate children." At any rate, it is
drinking their life blood. With all her tender ways and motherly
143
Sorceress: B tub\> in Superstition
affectations, the fair lady whose caresses are so soft is a vampire
to drain the blood of her weakling victim, nothing more nor
less ! The result of the horrid process the romancer tells us
himself. Saintre, the story says, grows up a very perfect knight,
yes ! perfectly frail and feeble, so that eventually he is braved
and defied by the lout of a peasant abbe, in whom the fair lady,
coming at length to a better mind, finds what suits her wishes
best. _
These vain caprices serve only to augment her ennui, to set
an edge to the empty feeling of satiety. Circe, surrounded by
her beasts, utterly bored, utterly jaded, would fain be a beast
herself. She feels wild impulses working, and shuts herself up
in a lonely tower of the castle keep. Thence she throws sinister,
questioning look over the gloomy forest. She is a prisoner, and
knows all the savage fury of a she-wolf kept chained. " Hither
instantly, the Witch-wife ! I want her, I want her. Come,
quick!" and before two minutes have gone by, "What! is she
not here yet ? "
Ah ! here she is. " Now listen carefully. ... I have a caprice
(an irresistible hankering, you understand), a hankering to strangle
you, to drown you, or deliver you up to the bishop, who has long
been wanting you. . . . You have one way of escape, and one
only to satisfy another hankering of mine, to change me into a
she-wolf. I am so tired of my life. I cannot sit still any longer ;
I long, at any rate o' nights, to gallop free in the forest. I would
be done with submissive fools that wait on me, and dogs that
deafen me, and blundering horses that jib and refuse the wood-
land paths."
"But, dear lady, suppose they caught you?" . . . "Insolent
woman ! I tell you, you shall die the death." "But surely you
know the history of the werewolf woman whose paw was cut
off. 1 ... I should be so grieved to see such an accident ! "
1 This dreadful idea was not unfamiliar to the great ladies of those days,
the high-born prisoners in mediaeval castles. They were hungry and thirsty
. 144
Satan fHMiltiplieb anb
"Tis my affair, I tell you ; and I will listen to no excuses. . . .
Come, time presses ; I have begun to yelp and howl already.
. . . Oh ! the joy of it, to go hunting all alone, by the light of the
moon, and all alone to pull down the hind with my strong jaws
yes ! and men too, if they come across my path ; to bite little
tender children, and women too, women best of all! to make
my teeth meet in their flesh ! . . . How I hate them all. . . .
But none of them as bitterly as you. Never start back, I won't
bite you : you move my disgust too sorely, and besides, you
have no blood in your veins. . . . Blood, blood ! I must have
blood ! "
No way of refusal is open, " Nothing easier, my lady. To-
night, at nine o'clock, you shall drink the brew. Then lock
yourself up in your chamber. While they think you there, you
will be another creature, flying through the woods."
So said, so done ; and next day the lady finds herself worn out
and utterly exhausted, at the very end of her powers. She must
have covered, last night, a full thirty leagues. She has hunted
and killed. She is all covered with blood; but perhaps this
only comes from the brambles she has torn herself against.
A great source of pride, and no less of danger, to her who has
done this miracle. Nevertheless her mistress, who demanded it,
receives her very gloomily. " Sorceress ! Sorceress ! what an awful
after freedom, and the cruelties of absolute freedom. Boguet relates how, in
the mountains of Auvergne, a hunter one night fired at a she-wolf, missing
a vital spot, but cutting off one of the animal's paws. The beast made off,
limping on three legs. Presently the hunter went to a neighbouring castle to
ask hospitality of the nobleman who lived there. The latter, on seeing him,
asked if he had enjoyed good sport. In answer to the question he was for
drawing from his game-bag the wolf's pad he had just shot off; but what was
his astonishment to find, instead of an animal's foot, a human hand, and on
one of the fingers a ring, which the nobleman instantly recognised as his
wife's ! He went to her immediately, and found her wounded and conceal-
ing her forearm. It was hanclless ; the one the hunter had brought in was
fitted to it, and the lady was forced to confess it was indeed she who, under
the form of a she-wolf, had attacked the hunter, and afterwards escaped,
leaving a paw behind on the field of battle. The husband had the cruelty to
give her up to justice, and she was burned at the stake.
L I 45
Sorceress: a tut>\> in Superstition
power you possess ! I should never have thought as much ! But
now I am terrified and horror-struck. . . . Ah ! they do well to
hate you ! 'Twill be a good day when you are burned. I will
be your death, when so I please. My peasants this very evening
would whet their scythes on you if I said one word of the
night's doings. . . . Away with you, you vile, black, ugly wretch."
She is hurried by the great folks, her patrons, into strange
adventures. Having only the castle to rely on to guard her from
the priest, and be some surety against the stake, how can she
refuse aught her formidable protectors ask? Suppose, for
instance, the Baron, just back from the Crusades and from
Nicopolis, and an amateur of Turkish ways, calls her to him,
and entrusts her with the charge of kidnapping children for him,
what is she to do? These razzias, carried out on such a large
scale in Greek lands, where on occasion two thousand pages
would enter the seraglio at one time, were by no means unknown
to the Christians, to the English barons from the twelfth century
onwards, at a later date to the knights of Rhodes and of Malta.
The infamous Gilles de Retz, the only one who was brought
to trial, was punished not for having carried off his serfs' little
boys to his castle (not an uncommon occurrence in those days),
but for having sacrificed them to Satan. The Sorceress who
acted as agent in these crimes, though she could hardly know
the fate reserved for the victims, found herself between two
dangers. On one side the peasants' pitchfork and scythe, on
the other the tortures of the Baron's tower, which a refusal would
inevitably have brought down on her head. De Retz's myrmidon,
that terrible Italian of his, 1 was as likely as not to have pounded
her to death in his mortar.
1 See my History of France, and above all the learned and precise little
book by our lamented Armand Gueraud, Notice stir Gilles de fiat's,
Nantes, 1855 reprinted in the Biographic Bretonne of M. Levot. From it
we see that the purveyors of this horrid supply of children to the monster
were more often than not men. There was a La Meffraye mixed up in
the business as well, was this a Sorceress? We are not told. M. Gueraud
146
Satan flIMUtipliefc anb
On all sides danger, and gain to compensate the danger. No
situation could well be more full of temptations. The Sorceresses
themselves often did not deny the ridiculous powers the populace
credited them with. They admitted that by means of a doll or
mannikin pierced with needles, they could beivitch anyone they
pleased, making them get thinner and thinner till they pined away
and died. They confessed that with the mandragora, torn up by
the roots at the gibbet's foot (by the tooth of a dog, they declared,
which invariably died of the effects), they could overthrow the
reason, change men into beasts, turn women light-headed and
insane. Even more terrible was the frenzied delirium produced
by the thorn-apple or Datura, which sets men dancing till they
die, 1 makes them unhesitatingly submit to a thousand shameful
horrors, of which they have no present consciousness, and no
subsequent recollection.
Hence savage excesses of hate on the one hand, and no less
violent extremities of terror on the other. The author of the
Marteau des Sorcieres (Hammer of the Sorceresses), Sprenger,
records with horror how he saw, at a season of heavy snow, when
the roads were all broken up, a whole population of wretched
beings, frantic with fear and cursed with calamities only too real,
crowding all the outskirts of a small German town. You never
saw, he says, pilgrimages nearly so numerous to Our Lady of
Grace, or Our Lady of Eremites. All these poor folks, foundered
in the deep ruts, stumbling, blundering and falling, were on their
was to have published the trial. Such a publication is much to be desired,
but printed in extenso, in its genuine form and unmutilated. The MSS. are
at Nantes and at Paris. My learned friend, M. Dugast-Matifeux, informs me
a copy is in existence more complete than these originals in the archives of
Thouars.
1 Pouchet, Solanees et Bolanique Gdnerale ; Nysten, Diet, de Afedecine
(edit. Littre and Robin), article Datura. Thieves are only too ready to
make use of these decoctions. One day they made the hangman of Aix and
his wife, whom they wished to rob of their money, take a dose of this nature.
The two victims fell into so extraordinary a state of delirium that they passed
the whole of one night dancing absolutely naked in a graveyard.
H7
Gbe Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
way to the Witch's hut, to implore pity of the Devil. What feel-
ings of pride and transport must have filled the Witch-wife's heart
to behold all this multitude grovelling at her feet ! l
1 This pride and exultation sometimes led her into the most reckless disso-
luteness. Hence the German saying, " The Witch in her garret showed her
comrade fifteen fine lads in green coats, and bade her ' Choose ; they are all
for you."' Her triumph was to exchange the respective parts, and inflict as
tests of love the most disgusting outrages on the nobles and grandees she thus
degraded. It is well known that queens, as well as kings, and high-born
ladies (in Italy as late as in the eighteenth century. Collection Maurepas )
xxx. in) used to receive in audience and hold court at the moment of per-
forming the most repulsive of nature's functions, and made their favourites
undertake the most unpleasant offices for them. In a spirit of fantastic
worship, these latter adored everything that came from their idol, and fought
for the vilest duty about her person. If only she were young and pretty, and
disdainful, there was no mark of attachment so humiliating and abominable
her domestic pets (her cicisbeo, her chaplain, a love-sick page) were not ready
to submit to, under the absurd notion that a philter possessed the more virtue
in proportion to its disgusting quality. This is humiliating enough for poor
humanity, but what are we to say to the astounding fact that the Sorceress,
without being either well-born or pretty or young, a pauper rather, and very
likely a serf, dressed in mere filthy rags, by sheer downright cunning and
some inexplicable charm of abandoned wantonness and unholy fascination,
deboshed and degraded so low the gravest personages of the time ? Certain
monks of a monastery on the Rhine, one of those proud German houses where
none could enter without four hundred years of nobility behind him, make
this dismal admission to Sprenger : " We have seen her bewitch three of our
Abbots one after the other, and kill the fourth, avowing with brazen
effrontery, ' I have done it, and I will do it again, and they shall never
escape me, because they have eaten . . .'"etc. ( Comederunt meant "they
have eaten my ..." Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, Hammer of the Sor-
ceresses, qutzstio vii. p. 84). The worst of it all for Sprenger and what most
made him despair, is the fact of her being so well protected, no doubt by
these infatuated devotees, that he could not burn her. ' ' Fateor quia nobis
non aderat ulciscendi aut inquirendi super earn facultas ; idea adhuc superest."
" I confess we had no means of insisting on her punishment, or a
proper inquiry into her crimes, wherefore the woman is still alive."
148
CHAPTER II
PERSECUTIONS
The Malleus Maleficarum Satan master of the World.
HE Sorceresses took small pains to hide their pro-
ceedings. They rather boasted of their powers ; and
it is out of their own mouths Sprenger gathered a
large proportion of the strange stories which adorn
his Manual. The said Manual is a highly pedantic work, follow-
ing with grotesque servility the formal divisions and subdivisions
in use among the Thomist logicians, yet at the same time the
single-minded, earnest and serious production of a man quite
genuinely frightened, a man who in the awful duel between God
and the Devil, in which the former generally allows the Evil
One to get the best of it, sees no other possible remedy but to
pursue the latter firebrand in hand, burning with all practicable
speed those mortal frames wherein he chooses to take up his
abode.
Sprenger's sole merit is to have compiled a work more complete
than any of his predecessors, the compendium of a vast and
elaborate system, the crown of a whole literature. The old Peni-
tentiaries, or manuals for the use of confessors in their inquisition
into various sins, were succeeded by the Directories for the inquisi-
tion of heresy, the greatest of all sins. But for the chiefest heresy
of all, which is Witchcraft or Sorcery, special Directoria or manuals
were compiled, the so-called Hammers (Mallei] for the detection
and punishment of Witches and Sorceresses. These manuals,
149
Sorceress: H tut>\> in Superstition
continually enriched by the zeal of the Dominicans, reached their
highest perfection in the Malleus of Sprenger, a work which
governed the author himself in the conduct of his great mission
to Germany, and for a century remained the guide and beacon-
star of the tribunals of the Inquisition.
What was it led Sprenger to study these questions ? He relates
how being at Rome, in the refectory where the monks lodged
pilgrims, he saw two such from Bohemia, a young priest namely
and his father. The old man was sighing and supplicating for a
successful issue to his journey. Sprenger, moved to pity, asks him
the cause of his distress. The reason he says is this ; his son is
possessed by the Devil, and at great trouble and expense he has
brought him to Rome, to the tombs of the saints and martyrs.
"And this son, where is he?" demands the monk. " There, beside
you." "I was startled at the answer, and shrank back. I examined
the young priest and was surprised to see him eating his dinner
with a quiet, unassuming air and answering very gently any remarks
addressed to him. He informed me that having spoken somewhat
roughly to an old woman, this latter had cast a spell upon him.
The spell was under a tree; but under what tree the Witch
absolutely refused to say." Sprenger, still in a spirit of pity and
good will, proceeded to lead the patient from church to church
and from relic to relic. At each shrine visited, exorcism, frenzy,
loud cries and wild convulsions, gibberish in every language under
heaven and many uncouth gambols, all this before the eyes of the
public, which followed the pair, wondering, admiring, and shudder-
ing. Devils, common enough in Germany, were less familiar in
Italy, and in a few days' time Rome was talking of nothing else.
This affair, which caused no small sensation, no doubt drew the
general attention upon the Dominican Father concerned in it.
He studied the subject, complied all the various Mallei and other
manuscript manuals, and became the great authority on questions
of Demonology. His great work, the Malleus Maleficarnm, would
seem to have been composed during the twenty years intervening
150
persecutions
between this adventure and the important mission entrusted to
Sprenger by Pope Innocent VIII. in 1484.
It was highly important to select an adroit personage for this
mission to Germany, a man of intelligence and tact, who should
prevail over the repugnance felt by Teutonic honesty towards the
dark, subterranean system he was endeavouring to introduce.
Rome had met with a rude check in the Low Countries, which put
the Inquisition on its mettle in those regions, and resulted in its
being altogether excluded from France. Toulouse, as a former
stronghold of the Albigensians, was the only exception, being
subjected to all the rigours of the Holy Office. About the year
1460 a Penitentiary of Rome, who had become Dean of Arras,
determined to strike terror among the Chambres de Rhetorique
(Chambers of Rhetoric), or Literary Unions, which were begin-
ning to discuss matters of religion. He burned one of these
Rhetoricians as a Sorcerer, and with him sundry rich citizens, and
even knights. The nobility was furious at this attack on its
privileges, while the voice of public opinion spoke out loudly and
plainly. The Inquisition was scouted, abominated, held accursed,
particularly in France. The Parlement of Paris shut the door
rudely in its face ; and Rome, by her bad management, threw
away this opportunity of introducing into the north of Europe the
reign of terror inseparable from the methods of the Inquisition.
The moment seemed better chosen in 1484. The Holy Office,
which in Spain had assumed such terrible proportions, and over-
shadowed royalty itself, seemed by this time to have become
a conquering institution, well capable of walking alone and bound
to penetrate everywhere and subjugate everything to itself. True,
it encountered an obstacle in Germany in the jealous opposition
of the ecclesiastical princes, who, possessing tribunals of their
own, had never shown themselves very ready to revive the
Roman Inquisition. But the present situation of these princes,
the very grave anxiety which the popular movements of the time
occasioned them, made them less recalcitrant. All the Rhine
Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
country and Suabia, even the eastern parts towards Salzburg,
seemed undermined with sedition. Every instant insurrections
of the peasantry were breaking out. Everywhere beneath the
surface there seemed to lurk a vast subterranean volcano, an
unseen lake of fire, which, now here, now there, betrayed its
existence by outbursts of fire and flame. The foreign Inquisition,
far more dreaded than the native variety, came very opportunely
on the spot to terrorise the country and break down rebellious
spirits, burning as Sorcerers to-day the very men who would
likely enough to-morrow have been insurgents. It formed an
excellent popular weapon to overawe the people, an admirable
device for drawing off dangerous humours. This time the storm
was to be diverted upon the Sorcerers, just as in 1349 and on
so many other occasions its fury had been directed against the
Jews.
Only a man was indispensable. The inquisitor who was to
bell the cat, who before the jealous courts of Mayence and
Cologne, before the scoffing populace of Frankfort or Strassburg,
was to set up his tribunal, was bound to be a person of in-
telligence and good sense. His personal tact and dexterity had
to counterbalance, to make men forget in some measure, the
odious nature of his office. Moreover, Rome has always piqued
herself in choosing her men well. Indifferent to abstract questions,
anything but indifferent to concrete individualities, she has
always believed, and she was justified in believing, that success
in practical affairs depended on the particular and special character
of the agents accredited to each country. Was Sprenger the
right man in the right place ? To begin with, he was a German,
and a Dominican, assured beforehand, therefore, of the support
of that formidable order and all its monastic houses and schools.
A worthy son of the schools was indispensable, a good Schoolman,
a master of the Sumnia Theologia, soundly trained in his Aquinas,
never at a loss for a text to clinch the argument. Sprenger was
all this, and more than this, to wit a pedantic fool.
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persecutions
" It is often stated, both in speech and writing, that dia-bohts is
derived from dia> two, and bolus, a bolus or pill, because swallow-
ing body and soul at one gulp, the Devil makes of the two only
one pill, one single mouthful. But (he continues with all the
gravity of Sganarelle), according to the Greek etymology, diabolus
signifies clausits ergastulo (imprisoned in a dungeon), or else
defluens (whence Devil ?), that is to say falling, because he fell
from heaven."
What is the derivation of malefice (sorcery) ? " It comes from
maltficiendo (ill -doing), which signifies male de. fide senliendo
(ill-thinking on matters of faith)." A remarkable piece of etymo-
logy, but one of far-reaching consequences. If sorcery is the
same thing as heresy, why ! every sorcerer is a heretic, and every
freethinker a sorcerer ; and the Church is justified in burning as
sorcerers any and every body who should dare to hold unorthodox
opinions. This is precisely what they had done at Arras, and
they were for establishing little by little the same good custom
everywhere.
Here lies Sprenger's real merit, which is beyond dispute. He
is a fool, but an intrepid fool ; boldly and unflinchingly he lays
down the least acceptable doctrines. Another man would have
tried to elude, attenuate, soften objections, but this is not his
way. Beginning on the first page, he sets down openly and dis-
plays one by one the natural, self-evident reasons there are for
disbelieving the satanic miracles. This done, he adds coldly,
" Merely so many heretic mistakes." And never pausing to refute
the reasons given, he copies out the texts on the other side,
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Bible, legends, canonists, and commen-
tators. First he shows you what common sense has to say, then
pulverises it by weight of authority.
His duty accomplished, he sits down calm, serene, triumphant,
and seems to say, " Well ! what have you to say now ? Would
you be so daring now as to use your reason ? . . . Can you
doubt, for instance, that the Devil amuses himself by interfering
153
Gbe Sorceress: H Stu^ in Superstition
between man and wife, when never a day passes but the Church
and the canonists allow this as a ground for separation ? "
There is no reply to this, and nobody will so much as whisper
an objection. Sprenger in the first line of this Manual for the
use of Judges, formally declaring the smallest doubt as an act
of heresy^ the judge's hands are tied. He feels there must be
no trifling ; that supposing he were so unfortunate as to experi-
ence some temptation in the way of compunction or tender-
heartedness, it would be his bounden duty to begin by condemn-
ing himself to a death at the stake.
The method is everywhere identical. Good common sense
first of all, followed by a direct frontal attack, a downright,
unhesitating negation of common sense. It would seem natural
enough, for instance, to say that, love being in the soul already,
it is hardly necessary to assume the mysterious intervention of
the Evil One to be required. Is not this fairly self-evident?
Not so, says Sprenger, distinguo. "The man who splits the wood
is not the cause of its burning, but only an indirect cause. The
wood-splitter is love (on this point see Dionysius the Areopagite,
Origen, John of Damascus, etc., etc.). Love therefore is only
the indirect cause of love."
This it is to be a scholar. It is no second-rate school that
could produce such a pupil. Cologne only, Louvain and Paris'
owned machinery fully adapted to mould the human brain. The
School of Paris was strong indeed ; for culinary Latin, what could
rival Gargantua's Janotus ? But even mightier was Cologne,
famed queen of darkness that supplied Ulrich von Hiitten with
the type of the Obscuri Viri of his world famous satire, the
reactionaries and ignoramuses that have always been so fortunate
and so fertile a tribe.
This solid, stolid Schoolman, so full of words and so void of
sense, sworn foe of nature no less than of human reason, takes
his seat with superb confidence in his books and his learned
gown, in the dust and dirt and litter of his gloomy court. On
persecutions
the desk before him he has on one side the Summa Theologice,
on the other the Directorium. This is his library, and 'he laughs
at anything outside its limits. He is not the sort of man to be
imposed upon, or to waste his time upon Astrology or Alchemy,
follies not so foolish after all, destined in time to lead to
genuine observation of Nature's laws. Why, Sprenger is actually
a sceptic, and has doubts about the old recipes. Albertus Magnus
declares positively that sage in a fountain is sufficient to bring
about a great storm ; he shakes his head. Sage ? don't tell me ;
I beg you have me excused. It needs only a little experience to
see in this a trick of Him who would fain deceive and cajole us
all, the wily Lord of the Air ; but he will get the worst of it, he
has to deal with a Doctor of the Church more cunning than the
Prince of Cunning himself.
Would I could have seen in the flesh this typical specimen of
the judge and the prisoners brought before his tribunal! Were
God to take creatures from two different planets and set them
face to face, they could not be more sharply contrasted, more un-
known one to the other, more completely lacking in a common
language. The old Witch-wife, a ragged skeleton of a woman,
with haggard eyes alight with malice, a creature thrice tempered
in the fires of hell, the grim, lonely shepherd of the Black Forest
or the solitudes of the High Alps, such are the wild beings pre-
sented to the cold, dull eye of the pedant, to be judged by the
light of his school-bred intellect.
Nor will they, be it said, keep him long sweating in his bed of
justice. They will tell all they know without torture. The ques-
tion will be applied later on, never fear, but only as a comple-
ment and ornament, as it were, to the depositions. They readily
expound and relate in due order whatever they have done. The
Devil is the bosom friend of the shepherd, and the Witch's bed-
fellow. She says as much, with a conscious smile and a glance
of triumph, evidently enjoying the horror of the audience.
The old creature is a mad woman surely, and the shepherd as
Sorceress: H Stufc^ in Superstition
mad as she. A couple of besotted fools, you say? Not so,
neither ; far from it. On the contrary, they are keen and subtle-
witted, both of them, beings who can hear the grass grow and
see through stone walls. Another thing they can perceive plainer
still is the monumental pair of asses' ears that nod over the
learned Doctor's cap. His dominant emotion towards them is
fear ; for, brave as he pretends to be, he is trembling all the
while. He himself allows that the priest very often, unless he
takes good heed, when he exorcises the Demon, only determines
the evil spirit to change its abode and pass into the body of
God's minister himself, finding it a more flattering morsel to in-
habit the person of one consecrated to Heaven. Who knows
but these simple-minded devils of shepherds and sorceresses
might be taken with the ambition to enter into an Inquisitor?
He is far from feeling so bold as his confident mien would indi-
cate, when in his biggest voice he asks the Witch-wife, " If your
master is so all-powerful, why do / not feel his assaults ? " " As
a fact," the poor man confesses in his book, " I felt him only
too plainly. When I was at Ratisbon, how often he would come
and rap at my window-panes ! How often he would stick pins in
my cap ! Then there were a hundred evil visions, dogs, apes,
and so forth, without end."
But the Devil's greatest delight, for he is nothing if not a
logician, is to pose the learned Doctor out of the mouth of the
false-hearted hag with embarrassing arguments and tricky ques-
tions, from which his only escape is by imitating the cuttle-fish,
that avoids his pursuers by troubling the water and making all
his neighbourhood as black as ink. For instance, " The Devil is
active only so far as God suffers him to be so ; then why punish
his instruments?" Or else, "We are not free agents; God
allows the Devil, as with the Patriarch Job, to tempt and drive us
into sin, to force us by blows even. Is it just to punish one who
is thus constrained?" Sprenger gets out of the difficulty by
saying, "You are free beings," here follows a long array of
156
persecutions
texts. " You are bond-servants only by reason of your pact
with the Evil One." To which the reply again would be only
too easy, " If God allows the Evil One to tempt us to make a
pact, it is He makes the said pact possible," and so on, and
so on.
"I show over-much good nature," he declares, "in listening to
these gentry at all ! Tis a fool's part to argue with the Devil."
The populace agrees with him to a man. All applaud the pro-
ceedings ; all are eager, excited, impatient for sentence and
execution. Hangings are common enough ; but this Sorcerer
and Sorceress, it will be a tasty treat to see how the pair will
sparkle and splutter like brands in the burning.
The judge has the people on his side. There is no sort of
difficulty ; under the rules of the Directorium, three witnesses
were sufficient. How fail to get three witnesses, especially to
bear false witness? In every tattling town, in every ill-natured
village, witnesses are as common as blackberries. Besides, the
Directorium is an old-fashioned book, a century behind date. In
this fifteenth century, an age of such enlightenment, everything is
improved. If no witnesses are forthcoming, the public voice is
enough, the general cry of popular indignation I 1
This sincere cry of suffering and of fear, the lamentable plaint
of the unhappy victims of bewitchment, moves Sprenger strongly.
Do not for a moment suppose him a mere unfeeling pedant, a
man of dry, unsympathetic hardness. He has a heart, and that
is the very reason why he is so ready to kill. He is very pitiful
and full of lovingkindness. He pities intensely the weeping
1 Faustin Helie, in his learned and instructive Traitt de F instruction
criininelk (vol. i. 398), has explained with perfect lucidity the way in which
Innocent III., about 1200, abolished the safeguards of accusation, till then
held indispensable, in particular the liability to a charge of slander on the
part of the accuser. These safeguards were superseded by various subter-
ranean modes of procedure, Denunciation^ Inquisition, etc. See Soldan for
instances of the appalling ease with which these latter methods were applied.
Verily blood was poured out like water.
'57
Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
wife, a pregnant mother but now, whose babe the Witch stifled
in her womb with a look of her evil eye. He pities the poor
farmer on whose crops she has brought down the blighting hail.
He pities the husband who, no Sorcerer himself, is convinced his
wife is a Sorceress, and drags her, a rope round her neck, before
Sprenger, who promptly has her burned.
With a cruel man there might be means of escape ; but this
good, charitable Sprenger leaves no room for hope. His human-
ity is so overpowering, you must just be burned, there is no help
for it, or at any rate an extraordinary degree of address, a
presence of mind of the readiest, is needed. One day a com-
plaint is lodged with him by three good ladies of Strassburg,
who on the same day and at the same moment felt themselves
struck by an invisible assailant. How did it happen ? The only
person they can accuse is an ill-looking fellow, who has cast a
spell over them, it would seem. Summoned before the inquisitor,
the man protests, swearing by all the saints he does not even
know the ladies in question, has never so much as set eyes on
them before. The judge refuses to believe him ; neither tears
nor oaths are of the slightest avail. His great compassion for the
ladies made him inexorable, and the man's denial only roused
his anger. He was already rising to order the fellow to the
torture-chamber, where he would have confessed no doubt, as
the most innocent constantly did, when he got leave to speak
and said, "I do indeed recollect how yesterday at the hour
named, I struck . . . who was it I struck ? ... no Christian
women, but three cats that ran at me savagely biting my legs."
Then the judge, like a man of sagacity as he was, saw it all.
The poor man was innocent ; without a doubt the ladies on
such and such days were changed into cats, while the artful
Fiend amused himself by setting them at good Christians' legs
to work the ruin of these latter and get them taken for Sorcerers.
A less perspicacious judge would never have guessed that.
But you could not always count on having a man of such
penetration on the bench. So -it was highly necessary there
158
persecutions
should lie always ready on the desk of the tribunal a good
guide-book or manual for fools, to make manifest to simpler
and less experienced inquisitors the wiles of the Enemy of
Mankind and the means of frustrating them, in fact the same
system of deep and artful strategy which the great Sprenger
had employed to such good purpose in his Rhenish campaigns.
To this end, the Malleus was printed in a pocket edition,
generally of a size then uncommon, viz. small i8mo. It would
not have been seemly for the judge to have been seen fumbling
over the leaves of a great folio lying on his desk, while all the
court gaped at him ; but he could quite well and without any
fuss consult out of the corner of his eye and thumb furtively
under cover his pocket manual of folly.
The Malleus^ like all the books of this kind, contains a strange
admission, namely that the Devil is gaining ground, in other
words that God is losing it ; that the human race, saved by Jesus
Christ, is becoming the conquest and prey of Satan. The latter,
only too manifestly, is making progress, as legend after legend
proves. What an advance he has made since the times of the
Gospel, when he was too happy to take up his abode in the
swine, down to the period of Dante, when a Theologian and a
Lawyer, he argues with the saints, and pleads his case, and as
final conclusion of a victorious syllogism, says, as he carries off
the soul in dispute, with a triumphant laugh, " Ah ! ha ! you did
not know I was a Logician."
During the earlier years of the Middle Ages he still waits
for the death agony before taking the soul and carrying it off.
St. Hildegard (circa uoo) believes "that he cannot enter into the
body of a living man, if he did, the members would fall to pieces;
it is the shadow and vapour of the Devil only that enter in."
This last glimmer of common sense disappears in the twelfth
century. In the thirteenth we find a prior so terribly afraid of
being taken off alive that he has himself guarded day and night
by two hundred men-at-arms
'59
Sorcerees: H tufc\> in Superstition
Then begins a period of ever-increasing terrors, when mankind
relies continually less and less on Divine protection. No longer
is the Demon a stealthy, furtive Spirit, a thief of the night gliding
about in the darkness, but an undaunted foe, the bold ape of
God, who under God's own sun, in the open light of day,
mimics the works of His hands. What authority is there for
the statement, legends, tradition? Not these only, but the
gravest Doctors of the Church. The Devil transforms all
creatures, Albertus Magnus declares. St. Thomas Aquinas goes
further still. "All the changes capable of occurring naturally
and by way of genus, these the Devil can imitate." A startling
admission truly, which in so grave a mouth amounts to nothing
less than the setting up of another Creator in face of the
accredited Artificer of the Universe ! " But," he goes on, " what-
ever can come to pass without germination, a changing of man
to beast, the raising to life of a dead man, acts like these the
Devil cannot perform." This is indeed to reduce God's domain to
small proportions; strictly speaking, He has nothing left Him but
miracles, events of rare and altogether special occurrence. But
that daily miracle, life, is no more his exclusively ; the Devil, his
imitator, shares the realm of Nature along with Him.
So far as Man is concerned, whose weak vision draws no
distinction between Nature as created by God and Nature as
created by the Devil, this is a bi-partition of the Universe.
Henceforth a dreadful uncertainty must brood over everything.
The innocency of Nature is lost. The limpid spring, the white
flower, the little bird, are they really of God's making, or merely
mocking- imitations, so many snares to catch mankind ? . . .
Retro Satanas ! All nature comes under suspicion. Both
creations, the good no less than the doubtful, are darkened and
degraded. The shadow of the Evil One obscures the light of
day, and hangs looming over every department of human life.
To judge by appearances and men's apprehensions, he not merely
shares the world with God, but has usurped it in its entirety.
Such is the state of things in Sprenger's day. His book is full
160
persecutions
of the most melancholy admissions with regard to the impotency
of God. He allows /'/, is his phrase, to be so. To allow so
complete an illusion, to let it be believed that the Devil is every-
thing, God nothing, is really more than merely to allow ; it is to
proclaim the damnation of a world of unhappy souls utterly
defenceless against so grave an error. No prayers, no acts of
penitence, no pilgrimages are of any avail ; no ! not even (he
admits the fact) the Sacrament of the Altar. What an admission
of weakness, what a loss of prestige ! Nuns, after full and free
confession, the host actually in their mouths, are forced to own
that at that very moment they feel the fiendish lover, shameless
and unabashed, troubling their senses and refusing to quit his
hold over them. And, cross-questioned, they added with tears
and sobs that the Foul Fiend has their bodies, because he
possesses their souls already.
The Manichaeans of old, the Albigensian heretics of a later time,
were accused of believing in the power of Evil which contended
against the 'Good, making the Devil the equal of God. But now
he is more than the equal ; if God, incarnate in the consecrated
host, can avail nothing, why ! then the Devil must be the stronger
and more effectual of the two.
I no longer wonder at the extraordinary aspect presented by
the world at that date. Spain with gloomy ferocity, Germany
with the terrified and pedantic rage the Malleus bears witness to,
pursue the insolent and victorious usurper in the persons of the
wretched creatures whom he chooses to take up his abode in ; the
stake and the rope are ruthlessly employed against the fleshly
tabernacles that have given him shelter. Finding him over-strong
for them in the soul, persecutors are fain to drive him out of the
bodies of men. But where is the use ? Burn one Sorceress, he
makes good his hold on another ; nay ! sometimes (if we are to
believe Sprenger) he seizes the very priest who is exorcising him,
and wins a special triumph in the actual person of his judge.
The Dominicans, driven almost to despair, recommended
M 161
Sorceress: H Stnfcp in Superstition
intercessions to the Virgin, unceasing repetitions of the Ave
Maria. Still Sprenger admits even this remedy to be ephemeral.
A suppliant may be whipped off between two Aves. Hence the
invention of the Rosary, the chaplet of the Aves, by the help of
which the devotee can mumble on mechanically for an indefinite
time, While the mind is occupied elsewhere. Whole nations
adopt this first attempt in the art whereby Loyola will essay to
lead the world, and of which his Exercitia are the ingenious if
rudimentary beginnings.
All this might seem to contradict what we said in the preced-
ing chapter as to the decay of Sorcery. The Devil is now popu-
lar, and active everywhere ; he appears to have won the day.
But does he really profit by his victory ? Does he gain in actual,
substantial influence ? Yes ! from the new point of view of that
scientific revolt that is to give us the bright, light-bringing
renaissance. No ! from the point of view of the old darksome
spirit of Sorcery. The diabolic legends, in the sixteenth century,
both more numerous and more widely diffused than ever, show a
marked tendency towards the grotesque. Men tremble, but they
laugh at one and the same time. 1
1 See my Mtmoires de Luther, for the Kilcrops and the like.
162
CHAPTER III
A HUNDRED YEARS' TOLERATION IN
FRANCE REACTION
Spain begins when France leaves off A reaction ; the lawyers show them-
selves as good at burning as the priests.
JHE Church always granted the judge and the
accuser a right to the confiscated property of those
condemned for Sorcery. Wherever the Canon
Law remains powerful, trials for Witchcraft multi-
ply, and enrich the clergy. Wherever lay tribunals make good
their claim to try such cases, the latter grow fewer and fewer and
finally disappear, at any rate for a hundred years in France,
between 1450 and 1550.
A first gleam of light is visible as early as the middle of the
fifteenth century, and it emanates from France. The revision of
the case against Jeanne d'Arc by the Parlement and her rehabili-
tation set me thinking about dealings with spirits, good or evil,
and the mistakes committed by the ecclesiastical tribunals. A
vile Sorceress in the eyes of the English and in those of the
wisest Doctors of the Council of Bale, for the French she is a
Saint and a divine Sibyl. The rehabilitation of the Maid of
Orleans inaugurates in France an era of toleration. The Parle-
ment of Paris likewise rehabilitates the so-called Vauclois of
Arras. In 1498 the same body dismisses as a mere madman a
wizard brought before its bar. Not a single condemnation for
Sorcery was registered under Charles VIII., Louis XII., or
Francois I.
163
Sorceress: B tnb\> in Superstition
Just the opposite in Spain ; here under the pious Queen
Isabella (1506), under Cardinal Ximenes, they begin burning
Witches. Geneva, then governed by its Bishop (1515), burned
five hundred in three months. The Emperor Charles V., in his
Germanic Constitutions, tries in vain to establish the principle
that " Sorcery, as causing injury to property and person, is a civil
matter, not an ecclesiastical." In vain he abolishes confiscation of
goods, except in the case of High Treason. The smaller Prince
Bishops, of whose revenues Sorcery supplied a principal source,
go on savagely burning all the same. The microscopic bishopric
of Bamberg sends six hundred individuals to the stake in one
batch, and that of Wurzburg nine hundred ! The procedure is
of the simplest. To begin with, apply torture to the witnesses,
and build up a travesty, a caricature of evidence, by dint of pain
and terror. Then drag a confession from the accused by ex-
cruciating agonies, and believe this confession against the direct
evidence of facts. For instance, a Sorceress confesses she had
recently dug up a child's dead body from the churchyard, to use
it in her magic compounds. Her husband says, " Go to the
churchyard and look ; the child is there now." The grave is
opened, and the body found intact in its coffin. Yet the judge
decides, against the testimony of his own eyes, that it is only an
appearance, an illusion of Satan. He credits the woman's con-
fession in preference to the actual fact, and the poor creature is
burned. 1
Things reached such a pass among these worthy Prince
Bishops that later on the most bigoted emperor there ever was,
the Emperor of the Thirty Years' War, Ferdinand II., is forced
to interfere and establish at Bamberg an Imperial Commissioner
to see the rights of the empire are not infringed and that the
episcopal judge shall not open these trials by tortures which
made the result a foregone conclusion and led straight to the
stake.
1 See Soldan in confirmation of this true story, and for facts about Germany
generally.
164
a Tbuufcrefc gears' toleration in f ranee
The Witches were very easily convicted on their own confessions,
sometimes, without any application of torture. Many were really
half-witted. They were quite willing to admit transforming them-
selves into beasts. The Italian Sorceresses often turned into
cats they said so themselves and, slipping under the doors of
houses, would suck children's blood. In the region of great
forests, Lorraine and the Jura, women readily became wolves and
devoured travellers, if we are to believe their own accounts, even
when there were no wayfarers travelling the roads to devour.
Anyway they were burned. Young girls would solemnly declare
they had sacrificed their maidenhood to the Devil, and on exami-
nation be found virgins still. They were burned likewise. Not
a few seemed positively to want to go to the stake, and the sooner
the better, the result of insanity, frenzy, sometimes of despair.
An English Witch on being led to the stake, tells the crowd not
to blame her judges. " I wanted to die. My family shunned me,
my husband repudiated me. If I lived, I should only be a dis-
grace to my friends. ... I longed for death, and I lied to gain
my end."
The first avowed plea for toleration against the dull-witted
Sprenger, his horrible Manual and his persecuting Dominicans,
was advanced by a lawyer of Constance, Molitor by name. He
maintains for one thing with excellent good sense the un-
reasonableness of taking the confessions of Sorceresses seriously,
inasmuch as from the nature of the case it was the Father of Lies,
and none other, who spoke by their mouth. He made fun of the
pretended miracles of the Devil, and asserted they were mere
figments of the imagination. Indirectly again the mockers,
Ulrich von Hiitten and Erasmus, in the Satires they composed
upon the imbecility of the Dominicans, dealt a severe blow to the
Inquisition. Cardau says straight out, " In order to succeed to
the goods of the victims, identically the same persons acted as
accusers and judges, condemned the innocent to death, and to
bolster up their case were ready to invent a thousand fables."
165
Sorceress: B tufc\> in Superstition
The Apostle of Toleration, Chatillon, who maintained, against
Catholics and Protestants alike, that we should not burn heretics,
to say nothing of sorcerers, started men's minds in a better path.
Agrippa, Lavatier, Wyer above all, the illustrious physician of
Cleves, said very justly that, if these unhappy beings, the
Sorceresses, are the Devil's playthings, as they are said to be,
it is first and foremost the Devil we must deal with, that we
should try to cure them rather than burn them off-hand. Before
long sundry Parisian doctors push their incredulity as far as to
maintain that all the devil-possessed, all the Sorceresses, are
nothing more nor less than impostors. This was going too far ;
the great majority were really sufferers from disease, dominated
by a morbid hallucination.
The gloomy reign of Henry II. and Diane de Poitiers ended
the days of toleration ; heretics and Sorcerers alike are sent to
the stake under the fair Diane's influence. Catherine de Medicis
on the contrary, surrounded as she was by Astrologers and
Magicians, was all in favour of shielding these proteges of hers.
They multiplied apace; Trois-Echelles, brought to trial under
Charles IX., reckons them by the hundred thousand, and declares
all France to be bewitched.
Agrippa and others maintain that all Science is contained in
Magic white Magic of course, be it understood. But the terror
of fools and the rage of fanatics make small distinction between
white and black. Against Wyer, against the genuine men of
science, against light and toleration, a violent reaction of dark-
ness and obscurantism arises from a quarter one would least of all
have expected. The magistracy, which for nearly a whole
century had shown itself just and enlightened, now largely in-
volved in the Catholic Bond of Spain and the fiercely bigoted
Ligue, prove themselves more priestly than the priests. While
driving the Inquisition out of France, they match it and would
fain eclipse it with their own severities. Indeed, they went so far
that on a single occasion and single-handed the Parlement of
1 66
IRcaction
Toulouse burned four hundred human bodies at the stake.
Imagine the horror of it ; think of the thick, black smoke from
all this burning flesh, picture the masses of fat that amid yells
and howls melt in horrid deliquescence and pour boiling down
the gutters ! A vile and sickening sight such as had not been
since the broilings and roastings of the Albigensians !
But even this is not enough for Bodin, the Legist of Angers,
and the furious antagonist of Wyer. He begins by declaring
the Sorcerers are so many they could in Europe alone make
another host of Xerxes, an army of eighteen hundred thousand
men. Then he expresses a similar wish to Caligula's, that all
these two millions of men had one common body, so that he,
the redoubtable Bodin, might judge them and burn them all at
one fell swoop.
Presently a rivalry springs up. The lawyers begin to complain
that the priest is often too closely connected with Sorcery himself
to be a trustworthy judge. And there is no doubt the jurists do
for a time seem surer even than the clergy. The Jesuit pleader,
Del Rio, in Spain, Remy (1596) in Lorraine, Boguet (1602) in
the Jura, Leloyer (1605) in Marne, are incomparable persecutors,
men to make Torquemada die of envy.
Lorraine was swept by a dreadful contagion, as it were, of
Sorcerers and Visionaries. The populace, driven to despair by
the everlasting depredations of marching armies and marauding
bands, had long ceased to pray to any deity but the Devil.
Many villages, in their terror, distracted between two horrors, the
Sorcerers on the one side and the judges on the other, longed, if
Remy, Judge of Nancy, speaks truth, to quit their lands and all
they possessed and fly to another country. In his book dedicated
to the Cardinal de Lorraine (1596), he claims positively to have
burned within sixteen years eight hundred Sorceresses. " So
good is my justice," he says, " that last year there were no less than
sixteen killed themselves rather than pass through my hands."
167
Gbe Sorceress: H tub in Superstition
The priests were humiliated. Could they have done any
better than this layman themselves? Accordingly the monks,
Lords of Saint-Claude, when they found their subjects addicted
to Sorcery, chose another layman, the worthy Boguet, to act as
their judge. In this dreary Jura country, a poverty-stricken
district of meagre pastures and barren pine-woods, the serfs were
for ever devoting themselves to the Devil out of sheer hopeless-
ness. To a man they worshipped the black cat.
Boguet's book (1602) became an authority of the greatest in-
fluence and importance. The lawyers of the Parlement studied
this golden book of the little judge of Saint-Claude as the manual
and mainstay of their practice. Boguet is in very deed a typical
Legist, scrupulous even according to his lights. He inveighs
against the bad faith displayed in these trials ; he will not have
the advocate betray his client, nor the judge promise the accused
a pardon to lure him on to his death. He disapproves of the
very untrustworthy tests to which Witches were still habitually
compelled to submit. " Torture," he says, " is both useless and
unnecessary. They never give in under it." Lastly, he possesses
humanity enough to have them strangled before being cast into
the flames, always excepting in the case of the female were-
wolves, "whom we must take every precaution to burn alive."
He refuses to believe Satan willing to make pact with children.
" Satan is cunning, and he knows far too well that under fourteen
the bargain with a minor would be liable to forfeiture on the
ground of insufficient age and discretion." Then children are
safe from the stake ? Not at all ; for he contradicts himself on
this point, declaring elsewhere that this leprosy can only be
cleansed by burning all, even to babes in the cradle. He would
have come to that if he had lived longer. He turned the whole
countryside into a desert. Never was judge more conscientious,
more thorough, more bent on extermination.
But it was in the Parlement of Bordeaux that the paean of
victory of lay jurisdiction rose loudest in Lancre's book, entitled,
Inconstance des Demons (1610 and 1613). The author, a man of
168
IRcaction
intelligence and ability, and a Counsellor of the Parlement
named, relates triumphantly the successful battle against the
Devil he had waged in the Basque country, where in less than
three months he has worked off I forget how many Witches and,
more important still, three priests. He looks with contemptuous
pity on the Spanish Inquisition, which at Loyrono, on the frontier
of Navarre and Castile, not far from his own district, has had a
trial dragging on for two years, ending finally with a poor,
miserable little auto-da-fe, from which a whole host of women got
off scot-free.
169
CHAPTER IV
THE BASQUE WITCHES, 1609
They direct their own judges in the way they should go.
(HIS high-handed execution of priests shows plainly
enough that M. de Lancre was a man of an enter-
prising and independent spirit. The same is true
of him in politics. In his book Du Prince ("Of
the Prince") 1617, he makes no bones about declaring that "the
Law is above the King."
Never have the Basques been better characterised than in his
work L? Inconstance des Demons, above mentioned. In France
no less than in Spain, the privileges they enjoyed really consti-
tuted them a virtual republic. The French Basques owed nothing
whatever to the King beyond the obligation of serving him under
arms; at the first tuck of drum they were bound to put two
thousand men in the field, under their own Basque captains.
The clergy were of small weight or account, and did little in the
way of punishing Sorcerers, being in the trade themselves. The
priests used to dance, wear swords, and take their mistresses
with them to the " Sabbath." These mistresses were the priests'
sacristanesses or ben'edictes, the female officials who kept the
church in order. The cure quarrelled with no one, said his
White Mass for God day by day, and a-nights the Black Mass
for the Devil, sometimes actually in the same church (Lancre).
The Basques of Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a reckless and
fantastic race, and marked by an incredible degree of audacious
170
Basque Wlitcbes, 1609
daring, accustomed as they were to visit the wildest seas in
pursuit of the whale fishery, made many widows. Moreover, they
crowded in numbers to the colonies founded by King Henri IV.,
and formed the empire of Canada, leaving their wives behind in
the care of God or the Devil, as the case might be. As for the
children, these sailors, a very upright and godfearing set of men,
would have made more account of them, if they could only have
been more sure on the question of fatherhood. Returning after
their long periods of absence, they would reckon up the time and
count the months, and invariably found themselves quite out of
their calculations.
The women, pretty, bold-eyed and imaginative creatures, would
pass the whole day in the churchyards, sitting on the tombs and
gossiping of the Witches' Sabbath, which they were going to
attend so soon as night fell. This was the passion, the infatua-
tion of their lives.
Nature makes them Sorceresses from the cradle, these daugh-
ters of ocean nurtured on weird and fantastic legends. They
swim like fishes, every one of them, and sport boldly amid the
Atlantic rollers. Manifestly their master the Prince of the Air,
king of winds and wild dreams, the same who inspired the Sibyl
and whispered the secrets of the future in her ear.
The very judge that burns them is all the while charmed with
their fascinations. " When you see them pass," he writes, " their
hair flying in the wind and brushing their shoulders, so well
adorned and caparisoned are they, as they go, with their lovely
locks, that the sun glancing through them as through a cloud,
makes a flashing aureole of dazzling radiance. . . . Hence the
dangerous fascination of their eyes, perilous for love no less than
for witchery."
This worthy citizen of Bordeaux and amiable magistrate, the
earliest type of those polished men of the world who ornamented
and enlivened the Bench in the seventeenth century, plays the
lute in the intervals of judicial business, and even sets the
Sorceresses dancing before having them burned. He writes well
171
Gbe Sorceress: a Stnb^ in Superstition
and in a style of much greater lucidity than any of his fellows.
And yet at the same time we discern in his case a fresh source of
obscurity, arising inevitably from the circumstances of his day,
viz. that among so great a number of Witches, all of whom the
judge cannot of course condemn to the stake, the greater part
are quite clever enough to understand he is likely to show indul-
gence towards such as shall best enter into his preconceived
ideas and feed his peculiar passion. What passion was this?
First and foremost, a common failing enough, love of the mar-
vellous and horrible for its own sake, the pleasure of being
startled and terrified, and added to this, it must be admitted, the
fun of indecent revelations. A touch of vanity besides ; the more
formidable and fierce these women are artful enough to make the
Devil appear, the more is the judge flattered and exalted who
can master so fell an adversary. He savours the sweets of
victory, gloats over his silly success, poses triumphant amid all
this foolish cackle.
The finest example is to be found in the Spanish official report
of the auto-da-fe at Logrono (November gth, 1610), as given in
Llorente. Lancre, who quotes it not without envy, and is by way of
depreciating the whole thing, yet admits the unspeakable charm
of the fete, its magnificence as a spectacle, and the profound
effect of the music. On one scaffold stood the condemned
Sorceresses, a scanty band, and on another the crowd of the
reprieved. The repentant heroine, whose confession was read
out, stuck at nothing, however wild and improbable. At the
Sabbaths they ate children, hashed ; and as second course dead
wizards dug up from their graves. Toads dance, talk, complain
amorously of their mistresses' unkindnesses, and get the Devil
to scold them. This latter sees the Witches home with great
politeness, lighting the way with the blazing arm of an unbaptised
infant, etc., etc.
Witchcraft among the French Basques showed a less fantastic
aspect. It would seem that with them the ;t Sabbath" was little
more than a fete on a large scale, which everybody, including
172
Gbe Basque Mitcbes, 1609
even the nobles of the country, attended in search of amusement.
In the front rank appeared a row of veiled and masked figures,
believed by some to be Princes. " In former days," Lancre
says, " only the simple, dull-witted peasantry of the Landes were
to be seen at these assemblages. Now people of quality are to
be found there." By way of compliment to these local nota-
bilities, Satan would frequently, under such circumstances, elect
a Bishop of the Sabbath. Such is the title the young Seigneur
Lancinena received from him, with whom the Devil was graciously
pleased personally to open the ball.
Thus influentially supported, the Sorceresses reigned supreme,
exercising over the country an almost incredible domination by
means of the terrors of the imagination. Numbers of persons
came to believe themselves their victims, and actually fell seri-
ously ill. Many were attacked by epilepsy, and started barking
like dogs. One small town alone, Acqs, counted among its inhabi-
tants as many as forty of these unhappy creatures. Such was the
terrible relationship that bound them under the Witch's influence,
that on one occasion a lady, called as a witness, at the mere
approach of the Sorceress, whom she could not even see, began
barking furiously, and was utterly unable to stop herself.
Those who were accredited with so formidable a power were
masters of the situation, and no man durst shut his door against
them. A magistrate even, the Criminal Assessor of Bayonne,
allowed the " Sabbath " to be held at his house. The Seigneur
de Saint-Pe, Urtubi, was constrained to celebrate the festival
at his castle. But so much were his wits shaken by the event
that he became firmly persuaded a Witch was sucking his blood.
Terror lending him courage, he and another baron hastened to
Bordeaux and appealed to the Parlement there. The latter body
obtained the King's orders that two of its members, Messieurs
d'Espagnet and de Lancre, should be despatched to judge the
Sorcerers and Sorceresses of the Basque provinces. They were
given plenary powers, subject to no appeal ; and setting to work
with unexampled vigour, in four short months tried from sixty to
Sorceress: H Stnb\> in Superstition
eighty Witches, besides examining five hundred more equally
marked with the Devil's stigmata, but who figured in the courts
only as witnesses (May to August, 1609).
It was an enterprise by no means devoid of danger for two
men and a few soldiers to proceed to such measures in the midst
of a lawless and headstrong population, and a mob of sailors'
wives, notoriously a reckless and violent set of women. A second
risk came from the priests, numbers of whom were Sorcerers them-
selves, and whom the lay Commissioners were bound to bring to
trial in spite of the fierce opposition of the clergy.
On the judges' arrival many fled with all speed to the
mountains. Others put a better face on the matter and re-
mained, declaring it was the judges who would be burned. So
undismayed were the Witches, that actually in court they would
doze off in the "Sabbatical" sleep, and openly describe on
awakening how before the judges' very eyes they had been
enjoying the delights of satanic intercourse. Several declared,
" Our only regret is that we cannot properly show him how we
burn to suffer for his sake."
When questioned they would affirm they could not speak,
that Satan rose in their throats and obstructed their utterance.
The younger of the two Commissioners, Lancre, the same
who writes these accounts, was a man of the world, and the
Witches were not slow to perceive that with such a judge to
deal with there were possible loopholes of escape. The phalanx
was broken. A beggar-girl of seventeen, Little Murgin, as she
was called (Margarita), who had found in Sorcery a profitable
speculation, and who, while scarce more than a child herself, had
been in the habit of bringing children and offering them to the
Devil, undertook along with her companion one Lisalda, a girl
of the same age to denounce all the rest. She told everything,
and wrote it all down, with all the vivacity, exaggeration, and
fiery emphasis of a true daughter of Spain, along with a hundred
indecent details, whether true or false. She both terrified and
Gbe Basque Witcbes, 1009
diverted the judges, twisting them round her little finger and
leading them whither she pleased like a pair of dummies. They
actually entrusted this vicious, irresponsible, passionate girl with
the grim task of searching the bodies of young women and boys
for signs of the spot where Satan had put his mark. The place
was recognised by the fact of its being insensible to pain, so that
needles could be driven into it without extracting a cry from the
victim. A surgeon tortured the old women, Margarita the
younger ones, who were called as witnesses, but who, if she
declared them marked in this way, might easily find their way
to the bench of the accused. An odious consummation truly,
that this brazen-browed creature, thus made absolute mistress of
the fate and fortune of these unhappy beings, should go pricking
them with needles at her pleasure, and might adjudge, if such
were her caprice, any one of their bleeding bodies to a cruel
death !
Such was the empire she had gained over Lancre she actually
induced him to believe that while he slept in his house at
Saint-Pe, surrounded by his serving-men and escort, the Devil
entered his chamber at night, and said the Black Mass there;
that the Witches forced their way under his very bed-curtains to
poison him, but had found him too securely guarded by God.
The Black Mass was served by the Baroness de Lancinena, with
whom Satan had casual intercourse in the judge's apartment
itself. The object of this pitiful tale is pretty plain ; the beggar-
girl bears a grudge against the Great Lady, who was likewise
a pretty woman, and who, but for this slanderous story, might
also have gained some ascendency over the gallant functionary.
Lancre and his colleague were appalled, but continued to
advance from sheer dread of the dangers of drawing back.
They ordered the royal gallows to be planted on the very spots
where Satan had kept Sabbath, a proceeding well calculated to
strike terror and convince all men of the tremendous power they
derived from being armed with the King's authority. Denuncia-
Sorceress: a Stuty) in Superstition
tions came pouring down like hail. All the women of the
countryside came filing in unceasingly to lay accusations one
against the other. Eventually the very children were brought
and made to give incriminating evidence against their own
mothers. Lancre decides with all due gravity that a witness of
eight years old is capable of affording good, sufficient, and
trustworthy evidence.
M. d'Espagnet was unable to give more than a passing moment
to the business, being due in a short time in the States of Beam.
Lancre, infected in spite of himself by the fierce energy of the
younger Witches who hurried to denounce their elder sisters, and
who would have been in sore peril themselves had they failed to
get these latter burned, pushed on the trials whip and spur
at full gallop. A sufficient number of Sorceresses were con-
demned to the flames. Finding their fate sealed, they too had
spoken out at last, and scattered denunciations right and left.
As the first batch were on their way to the stake, a ghastly scene
occurred. Executioner, officer, and police all thought their last
day was come. The crowd rushed savagely upon the carts,
to force the unhappy occupants to withdraw their accusations.
Men held daggers at their throats, while many of them almost
perished under the nails of their infuriated sisters.
Eventually, however, justice was satisfactorily vindicated.
This done, the Commissioners proceeded to a more arduous and
delicate task, viz. the trial of eight priests who had been arrested.
The revelations of the young Witches had thrown a flood of
light on their lives and morals, and Lancre speaks of their
dissolute morals as one who has full knowledge at first hand.
Not only does he reproach them with their gallant doings at the
nocturnal " Sabbaths," but insists particularly upon their relations
with their sacristanesses, those church-dames or benedictes, as
they were called, mentioned on a previous page. He even
condescends to repeat vulgar tales, how the priests sent the
husbands to Newfoundland, and imported from Japan the devils
who yield up the wives into their hands.
176
Gbe Basque Wttcbes, 1609
The clergy were much exercised, and the Bishop of Bayonne
would have resisted, if he had dared. Failing sufficient courage,
he kept away, appointing his Vicar-General to watch the case for
him. Luckily the Devil helped the accused more efficiently
than the Bishop. He can unlock every door; so that it hap-
pened one fine morning that five out of the eight escaped. The
Commissioners, without further loss of time, burned the three
that were left.
All this took place about August, 1609. The Spanish
Inquisitors, who were holding their trials at Logrono, did not on
their side reach the final auto-da-fe before November 8th, 1610.
They had had far more difficulties to contend with than their
French confreres, in view of the prodigious, the appalling num-
ber of the accused. Impossible to burn a whole population !
They consulted the Pope and the greatest Church dignitaries of
Spain, and it was decided to beat a retreat. The understanding
was that only obstinate criminals should be sent to the stake,
such as persisted in their denials, while all who confessed should
be let go. The same method, the application of which had
hitherto always saved priests brought to trial for incontinence of
opinion or of conduct. Their concession was held sufficient,
supplemented by a trifling penance (see Llorente).
The Inquisition, of uncompromising severity towards heretics,
and cruelly hard on the Moors and Jews, was much less harsh
where the Sorcerers were concerned. These latter, shepherds in
a great many cases, were in no way involved in opposition to
Mother Church. The degraded, sometimes bestial amusements
of goat-herds occasioned little anxiety to the enemies of liberty
of conscience.
Lancre's book was composed mainly with the object of
demonstrating the vast superiority of the public justice of
France, the justice administered by laymen and members of the
legal Parlements, to that of the priests. It is written currente
N I 77
Gfoc Sorceress: H tnt>\> in Superstition
calamo, in a light, easy, happy style, clearly manifesting the
author's satisfaction at having honourably extricated himself
from a serious danger. He is something of a Gascon, boastful
and vain of his own achievements. He relates with pride how,
on the occasion of the "Sabbath" following the first execution
of Witches, the children of the latter came to lay complaint of
their treatment before Satan. He replied that their mothers
were not burned at all, but alive and happy. From the depths
of the smoky cloud the children actually thought they heard their
mothers' voices declaring they were now in full and complete
happiness. Nevertheless, Satan was afraid, and kept away for
four successive " Sabbaths," sending as his substitute a quite
subordinate imp. He did not put in an appearance again until
the 22nd of July. When the Sorcerers asked him the reason of
his absence, he told them, " I have been to plead your cause
against Janicot (Little John, this is the name he bestows on
Jesus). I have won my case ; and the Witches still remaining in
prison will not be burned."
The Prince of Lies was once more shown to be a liar ; and
the victorious judge assures us that when the last of them was
burned, a swarm of toads was seen to escape from her head.
The assembled people fell upon these with stones so furiously
that the Sorceress was really more stoned than burned to death.
But, in spite of all their efforts, they failed to account for one
great black toad, which avoiding alike flames and sticks and
stones, escaped, like a demon as he was, to a place where he
could never afterwards be discovered.
178
CHAPTER V
SATAN TURNS ECCLESIASTIC, 1610
Diversions and distractions of the modern "Sabbath."
HATEVER the appearance of fanaticism and
satanic possession still displayed by the Sorceresses,
it is quite plain both from Lancre's account and
others of the seventeenth century that by this
time the WitcheV Sabbath was become primarily a matter of
money -making. They levy contributions which are virtually
compulsory, demand payment from those present, and fine the
absent. At Brussels and in Picardy they pay in accordance
with a fixed tariff anyone bringing in a new member to the con-
fraternity.
In the Basque countries there is no attempt made at conceal-
ment. Assemblages are held twelve thousand strong, including
persons of every class, rich and poor, priests and nobles. Satan,
a nobleman himself, over and above his triple horns, wears a
laced hat, like a gentleman. By this time he has found his old
throne, the Druid stone, too hard a seat, and has given himself a
good gilded armchair. Does this mean he is growing old ?
Nimbler than in his young days, he plays all sorts of pranks and
gambols, springs up like a Jack-in-the-box from the depths of a
huge crock, officiates, legs kicking in the air and his head down-
wards.
He is for having everything done decently and in order, and
defrays the expenses of the arrangements and decorations. Be-
179
Gbe Sorceress: a Stub^ in Superstition
sides the usual yellow, red, and blue fires that amuse the eyes
and alternately reveal and conceal the flying shadows, he enter-
tains the ear with strange music, " in especial certain little bells
that tickle" the nerves, like the penetrating vibrations of some
particular harmonies. To crown his magnificence, Satan has
silver plate brought for use at the feast. His very toads display
an affectation of refinement and elegance, and like little lords,
come to the festival tricked out in green velvet.
The general appearance is that of a huge fair, a vast masked
ball, when the disguises are of the thinnest. Satan, who knows
his world, opens the dance with the Bishop of the "Sabbath,"
or else the King and Queen, dignitaries established on purpose
to flatter the bigwigs, the rich or noble personages who honour
the assembly by their presence.
All is changed from the old grim festival of revolt, the sinister
orgy of serfs, of Jacques as they were nicknamed, communicating
by night in love, by day in murder. The frenzied Sabbatical
Round no longer forms the one and only dance. It is sup-
plemented by Moorish dances, lively or languishing, amorous
and obscene, in which girls trained for the purpose, such as the
Murgin and the Lisalda mentioned above, simulate and parade
the most lust-provoking actions. These dances, it is said, were
the irresistible attraction which among the Basques inevitably
drew to the Witches' Sabbath all the world of women, wives,
maids, and widows, the last especially in great numbers.
Apart from these diversions and the feast to follow, it would
be difficult to account for the unbounded popularity the
" Sabbath " enjoyed. Loveless love was the dominant note ; the
festival was expressly and avowedly a celebration of female
sterility. This Boguet establishes beyond a doubt.
True, Lancre tells a different tale in one place, in order to
scare women away and make them afraid of being got with child.
But as a rule he is more sincere, and agrees with Boguet. The
cruel, indecent examination he undertook of the Witches' persons
is good and sufficient proof of his belief in their sterility, and
1 80
Satan turns Ecclesiastic, 1610
that sterile pas'sive love is the foundation-stone of the "Sabbatical"
observances.
This could not but have cast a gloom over the festival, if the
men had had hearts. It was the mad women who flocked there
to dance and feast that paid for all ; but they were resigned to
their fate, their sole aspiration being not to leave the place preg-
nant. True enough they bore the burden of wretchedness and
poverty far more than men did ; and Sprenger tells us the dismal
cry that as early as his day would escape them in the very act of
love, "May the Devil have the fruit of our embrace ! " Yet in his
time (1500) living cost but a penny a day, while at the later period
here referred to (1600), under Henri IV., it was difficult to keep
body and soul together at ten times that expense. Throughout
the whole century, the desire, the craving for sterility is for ever
on the increase.
This mournful reserve, this fear of mutual love, must have
rendered the " Sat>bath " a cold, wearisome function, had not the
expert mistresses of the ceremonies, who managed the entertain-
ment, exaggerated the burlesque element, and diverted the
spectators with many a ludicrous interlude. Accordingly the
opening ceremony of the " Sabbath," the world-old scene, coarse
and realistic, of the pretended fecundation of the Chief Sorceress
by Satan (in former days by Priapus), was followed by another
travesty, a lavabo?- a cold purification (to chill and sterilise),
which she received not without grimaces expressive of shuddering
and mortal chill, the whole forming a broad farce in which the
Sorceress usually substituted an attractive-looking understudy for
herself, the Queen of the "Sabbath," some young and pretty
married woman.
1 The instrument employed is thus described by Boguet (p. 69) : it is cold,
hard, very slender, a little longer than a finger, evidently a camda. In
Lancre (pp. 224, 225, 226) it is much improved, less liable to inflict injury ;
it is an ell long and bent, part is of metal, the other part flexible, and so on.
Satan, on the Basque borders, midway between two great monarchies, is well
posted in the progress of this art, already very fashionable among the fine
ladies of the sixteenth century.
181
Gbe Sorceress: a Stufc^ in Superstition
Another distraction, no less abominable, centred round the
black wafer, the black radish, the subject of a thousand coarse
witticisms in ancient Greek days, when it was used as an instru-
ment of punishment upon the man-woman or puthic and the
young debauchee who went with other men's wives. Satan sliced
it into little discs which he then solemnly swallowed.
The grand finale was, according to Lancre, which means, no
doubt, according to the two hussies who made him believe
whatever they pleased, a very astonishing thing to happen
before so numerous an assemblage. Incest would seem to have
been publicly, indiscriminately, and ostentatiously indulged in,
by way of reproducing the old satanic conditions needed to
originate the Sorceress that is to say, the mother's impregnation
by her own son. But this horror was not only unnecessary by
this time, when Sorcery had become hereditary in certain fixed
and legally descended families, but impossible in fact, a thing
altogether too shocking to be endured. PoSsibly merely a
travesty of it was acted, a grotesque kind of miracle-play between
a comic Semiramis and a dotard Ninus.
There was another and probably a more serious feature, a
comedy of real and actual life, and one that points strongly to
the presence of persons of high rank and corrupt morals,
his was an odious sort of practical joke, a cruel and coarse
mystification.
They would entice to the festival some ill-advised married
man, whom they proceeded to intoxicate with their deadly brews
(datura, belladonna, and the like), till he was spellbound and lost
all power of motion and speech, but not the use of his eyes.
His wife, also spellbound, but in a different way, with erotic
beverages and reduced to a deplorable state of self-abandonment,
would then be shown him naked and unashamed, patiently
enduring the caresses of another before the indignant eyes of
her natural protector, who could not stir a finger to help her.
His manifest despair, his unavailing efforts to speak, his
violent struggles to move his torpid limbs, his dumb rage, his
182
Satan turns Ecclesiastic, 1610
rolling eyes, all provided the spectators with a cruel pleasure, not
dissimilar, be it said in passing, to that afforded by certain
comedies of Moliere's. In the present instance the play was
all palpitating with actuality, and was easily pushed to the last
extremities of sin and shame. Doubtless the shame was followed
by no after effects, as was the invariable rule at these Witches'
Sabbaths, and next day's recollections were but dim in the brains
of the now sobered victims ; but the spectators, the actors, were
they likely to forget ?
These criminal doings show plainly the aristocracy is now at
work, bearing no resemblance whatever to the old fraternity
of serfs, the primitive " Sabbath," impious and impure no
doubt, but free, open, and aboveboard, where everything was
voluntary and done by universal consent.
Satan, always corrupt, is evidently going from bad to worse.
The Evil One is growing a polite, adroit, soft-handed gentleman,
and the change only leaves him a more false-hearted and
filthy-minded villain than before. What a new and strange
departure is this for a Witches' Sabbath, to find him hand and
glove with the priests ! What of the cure who brings his
benedicte, his sacristaness, to the feast, who burlesques the holy
offices, says the White Mass in the morning and the Black Mass
at night ! Satan, Lancre says, recommends him to debauch his
penitents, his spiritual daughters. Simple-minded magistrate,
who actually seems unaware that for a good century now Satan
has well understood and made good profit of the advantages
offered by the Church. The Devil has turned Confessor,
Director of Consciences ; or if you like it better, the Confessor
has turned Devil.
Just recall, my worthy Lancre, the series of trials beginning in
1491, which it may well be did something towards teaching the
Parlement of Paris toleration. This body discontinues almost
entirely the practice of sending the Devil to the stake, realising
that he is no more now than a mask, a cloak, to cover priestly
offenders.
183
Gbe Sorceress: H Stub^ in Superstition
Not a few nuns fall victims to his new ruse of borrowing the
face and figure of a beloved confessor. We may instance the
case of Jeanne Pothierre, a nun of Le Quesnoy, a woman of
middle age, forty-five years old, but, alas ! only too susceptible.
She declares her passion for her father confessor, who takes good
care not to listen to her, and runs away to Falempin, a place at
some leagues' distance. The Devil, who never sleeps, at once
recognises his advantage, and seeing her (in the chronicler's
words) "pricked by the thorns of Venus, he cunningly adopts
the form of the said father, and returning night after night to the
convent, enjoys her favours, deceiving her so thoroughly that she
declares herself to have been had by him she had kept count
four hundred and thirty-four times. 1 ..." Her subsequent
repentance met with no little compassion, and she was speedily
relieved from the agonies of shame, a good walled dungeon being
at once provided for her in the near neighbourhood, at the
Castle of Selles, where she expired in a few days, dying a
peaceful, edifying death as a good Catholic should.
What could be more touching ? . . . But after all the incident
was a trifling thing compared with the notable Gauffridi affair,
which occurred at Marseilles while Lancre was still busy at
Bayonne.
The Parlement of Provence had no occasion to envy the
successes of their confreres at Bordeaux. The lay jurisdiction
once more seized the opportunity of a trial for Sorcery to
institute a systematic reform of ecclesiastical morals, and under-
took a searching scrutiny into the cloistered life and mysterious
secrets of the nunneries. The opportunity was a rare and
exceptional one, involving as it did, and was bound to do, a
remarkable concurrence of circumstances, a series of savage
jealousies and acts of reprisal between priest and priest. But for
this indiscreet and passionate violence, a passion and violence we
shall see breaking out again and again on subsequent occasions,
1 Massee, Chronique du Monde (1540), and the Chroniclers of Hainault,
Vinchant, etc.
184
Satan turns Ecclesiastic, 1610
we should possess no information whatever as to the real destiny
of the vast population who live and die within these gloomy
walls, and never hear one word of what takes place behind
convent bars and within the portals the father confessor is alone
privileged to enter.
The Basque priest Lancre depicts, so volatile and worldly,
tripping sword on thigh to dance at the nocturnal " Sabbath," his
sacristaness by his side, was not an object of great concern or
apprehension to the authorities. He was not of the sort the
Spanish Inquisitors took such pains to screen, and for whose
peccadilloes that stern conclave showed itself so indulgent. It is
clear enough from what Lancre hints, in spite of all his reticence,
there is something else behind. The States General of 1614, too,
when they lay it down that priests ought not to try priests, are
likewise thinking of something else. Here lies the mystery, the
veil of secrecy that is rudely torn asunder by the Parlement of
Provence. The father confessor of nuns, their tyrant and the
irresponsible disposer of soul and body alike, fascinating them by
all sorts of sinister acts such is the figure revealed at the trial of
Gauffridi, and at a later date in the dreadful affairs of Loudun
and Louviers and others which Llorentz and Ricci and the rest
have made us acquainted with.
The tactics adopted were invariably the same to extenuate
the scandal and mislead the public by concentrating its attention
on the accidental form and diverting it from the essential
substance. When a priest was tried for Sorcery, every pains was
taken to lay stress on his doings as a Wizard, and juggle into the
background his priestly character, in such a way as to put all the
mischief down to the magic arts employed, and ignore the
natural fascination exercised by a man occupying a position of
absolute domination over a herd of women abandoned to his
good pleasure.
The first of these sad affairs, that of Gauffridi, it was impossible
to hush up. The thing had broken out in mid-Provence, in that
land of light where the sunshine penetrates every crevice. The
185
Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
principal scene of the events that followed was not only Aix and
Marseilles, but the well-known locality of La Sainte-Baume (The
Holy Balm), a much-frequented place of pilgrimage, to which
a crowd of curious devotees now resorted from every part of
France to look on at the duel to the death to be fought out
between two nuns afflicted with diabolical possession and be-
tween their respective demons. The Dominicans, who interfered
in the matter as Inquisitors, deeply compromised themselves on
this occasion through the keen attention they drew to the event
by the marked partiality displayed by them in favour of one
of the two combatants. For all the pains the Parlement sub-
sequently displayed in order to arrive at an early settlement of
the affair, the monks found themselves bound in honour to
explain and excuse the attitude they had adopted. Hence the
important book of the monk Michaelis, a strange medley of truth
and myth, in which he exalts Gauffridi, the priest he sent to the
stake, as the Prince of Magicians, not only of all France, but
of Spain, Germany, England, Turkey, as well; in fact, of the
whole habitable world.
Gauffridi appears to have been a man of agreeable manners
and many accomplishments. A native of the mountains of
Provence, he had travelled widely in the Low Countries and in
the East. He enjoyed the best of reputations at Marseilles,
where he served as priest at the Church Des Acoules. His
Bishop thought highly of him, and the most pious ladies selected
him as their Confessor. He possessed, we are told, a singular
aptitude for winning the love of all such.
Nevertheless, he would probably have preserved his good
repute intact had not a certain noble Provengal lady, a woman
blinded by passion, and whom he had already ruined, pushed
her infatuation to such lengths as to confide to his care (with
a view, perhaps, to her religious education) a charming child
of twelve, named Madeleine de la Palud, a pretty blonde of a
gentle and affectionate disposition. Gauffridi lost his head, and
failed to respect either her tender age or the sweet innocence and
utter confidence of his pupil.
1 86
Satan turns Ecclesiastic, 1610
But presently she grew into a woman, and realised her
calamity ; how, noble as she was, she was bound to an inferior by
an unworthy tie and could now never hope for marriage. In
order to keep her, Gauffridi said he could wed her before the
Devil, if he could not before God. He flattered her pride by
telling her he was the Prince of the Magicians, and that she
should be the Queen. He placed on her finger a silver ring,
engraved with cabalistic signs. Did he take her with him to the
Witches' Sabbath, or did he merely make her think she had
been there, clouding her mind with magic potions and magnetic
spells? This much at least is certain, that the poor child, torn
between credulity and doubt, tormented by anxiety and terror,
became from this time liable to fits of insanity and subject on
occasion to epileptic seizures. Her overmastering dread was of
being carried off alive by the Devil. She dared not stay longer
in her father's house, and took refuge at the Convent of the
Ursuline Sisters of Marseilles.
187
CHAPTER VI
GAUFFRIDI, 1610
Priests prosecuted for Sorcery by the monks Conventual jealousies.
|F all the Religious Orders, that of the Ursulines
seemed the calmest, the least liable to give way to
irrational impulses. The Sisters were not idle,
employing a portion of their time in the education
of little girls. The Catholic reaction, which had started with
all the lofty aspirations of the Spanish cloister towards an ecstatic
perfection, quite incapable of realisation under existing condi-
tions, and had recklessly built a host of convents Carmelite,
Feuillantine, and Capuchin had soon found its vigour exhausted.
The poor girls they immured so rigorously within monastic walls
as a way to get rid of them, died off promptly, and by this rapid
mortality showed up the cruelty of families in lurid colours. What
killed them was not the mortifications they were called upon to
endure, so much as sheer ennui and despair. After the first burst of
enthusiasm, that dread disease of the cloister (described as early
as the fifteenth century by Cassien), leaden ennui, the gloomy
ennui of afternoons, the tenderly melancholy ennui which loses
itself in vague languors and dreamy reverie, quickly undermined
their health. Others were more like mad women ; their blood
was so hot and turbulent it seemed to choke them.
A nun, to die decently, without causing her relatives overmuch
remorse, should take about ten years to the business, this is the
average duration of life in monastic establishments. Some re-
188
(BauffriM, 1610
laxation of discipline thus became a necessity, and men of sense
and experience realised that, to prolong their days, occupation
must be found for them and they should not be left too much
alone. St. Frangois de Sales founded the Visitandines, whose
business was to visit the sick, always going in pairs. Cesar de Bus
and Romillion, who had brought into existence the Doctrinaire
Fathers (Priests of the Doctrine), in connexion with the Oratorians,
now founded what might be styled the Sisters of the Doctrine, the
Ursulines, teaching nuns to whom these priests acted as Con-
fessors. All were under the general supervision of the Bishops, and
to a limited, a very limited degree, monastic, not being as yet
confined to the cloister. The Visitandines could go freely abroad,
while the Ursulines received visitors, at any rate their pupils'
relatives. Both were in intimate communication with the world
outside, under the direction of well-reputed Confessors. The
underlying danger of all this was mediocrity. Both Oratorians
and Doctrinaires had produced men of conspicuous ability, it is
true, but the general spirit of the Order was systematically ordinary,
moderate, careful to avoid too lofty a flight. The founder of the
Ursulines, Romillion, was a man of ripe age, a convert from
Protestantism, who had gone through, and seen through, all
phases of religious emotion. He believed his young Provengal
Sisters to be already as discreet as himself, and hoped to keep his
little flock contentedly browsing on the meagre pasturage of a
monotonous and unemotional faith, as understood by the good
Oratorians. This was opening the door wide to ennui, and one
fine morning the mine exploded.
The Provengal mountaineer, the" traveller and mystic, the man
of disconcerting energy and passion, Gauffridi, who visited the
convent as Madeleine's Director, produced a very unlooked-for
effect there. The nuns felt his mastery, his inherent power, and
no doubt from hints dropped by the silly love-sick child, discovered
it was nothing less than a diabolic power. One and all are terror-
stricken, several love-stricken into the bargain. Imaginations are
heated, heads turned. Presently we have five or six of the Sister-
189
Sorceress: H Stufc^ in Superstition
hood weeping, screaming, howling, convinced they are in the
Devil's grip already.
If only the Ursulines had been confined to their cloister,
immured within the convent walls, Gauffridi, as their sole
Director, would doubtless have found means to bring them to
reason. It might have ended, as it did in the Convent of
Le Quesnoy in 1491, by the Devil, who is always ready enough
to take the shape of the beloved object, constituting himself,
under the guise of Gauffridi, lover-general of the nuns. Or else,
as happened in the Spanish nunneries Llorente describes, he
would .have persuaded them that the priest sanctifies by his
priesthood those he loves, and that sin with him is a form of
consecration. This was a doctrine widespread in France, and
prevalent even in Paris, where these priests' mistresses were called
" the sanctified." l
Did Gauffridi, finding them all in his power, confine himself
to Madeleine? Did he not go on from love to licence? Im-
possible to say, though the act of accusation certainly mentions
a nun who was not brought forward at the trial, but who re-
appeared at its conclusion, as having given herself to the Devil
and to him.
The Ursulines were a house open to all, where anyone could
come and scrutinise whatever was doing. Besides, were they not
under the safeguard of their spiritual fathers, the Doctrinaire
priests, honourable, and what is more, jealous men?
The founder himself was on the spot, indignant and despairing.
What a calamity for the rising Order, which at that very moment
was prospering so well and making headway in all parts of France !
Its special pride and distinction was discreetness, good sense,
placidity ; and lo ! without an instant's warning sheer midsummer
madness ! Romillion would fain have hushed up the whole
scandal. He had the young women privately exorcised by one
of the Doctrinaire Fathers ; but the devils made small account of
exorcists of that feather. The little fair-haired Madeleine was
1 Lestoile, edit. Michaud, p. 561.
190
(BauffriM, 1610
possessed by no less a. fiend than Beelzebub, a high-born devil,
the demon of pride, who did not deign so much as to open his
teeth.
Among the possessed was one girl in particular, the special
protegee of Romillion, a young woman of twenty to twenty-five,
highly educated and well trained in polemics. Born a Protestant,
but having neither father nor mother, she had fallen under the
influence of the Father, like herself a converted Protestant. Her
name, Louise Capeau, has a bourgeois ring about it. She was
gifted, as appeared only too plainly later on, with a remarkable
intellect, passionate determination, and, be it added, terrific force
of character. For three whole months she sustained, to say
nothing of the diabolic storms raging within, a desperate struggle
that would have killed the strongest man in a week.
She declared she had three devils, Verrine, a good-natured
Catholic devil, and a volatile, one of the demons of the air ;
Leviathan, a bad-hearted devil, a freethinker and a Protestant ;
lastly, one she admits to be the demon of impurity. But there
is yet another she forgot to mention, the demon of jealousy.
She hated with a vindictive hatred the little pretty, fair-haired
favourite, the proud, well-born Madeleine. This latter, in her
mad fits, had claimed to have attended the " Sabbath," and to
have been crowned Queen there. She said she had been adored
by the others, and had been loved, by the Prince himself. . . .
Prince ! what Prince ? Louis Gauffridi, Prince of the Magicians.
Louise, whom such an avowal stung like a whip, was too much
enraged to doubt its truth. Maddened, she believed the other's
mad words, that she might thereby work her ruin. Her demon
was backed up by the other demons in all these jealous hearts.
With one voice they all chimed in, declaring that Gauffridi was
indeed the King of the Wizards. Then it was noised abroad
everywhere a great capture had been made, nothing less than a
Priest-King of the Magicians, the Prince of Magic in all lands.
Such was the fatal diadem of fire and iron these she-devils forced
on his brow.
191
Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
All men lost their heads, even Romillion. Whether from
hatred of Gauffridi, or fear of the Inquisition, he withdrew the
matter from the Bishop's hands, and carried his two devil-
possessed nuns, Louise and Madeleine, to the Convent of
La Sainte-Baume, the Prior of which was Father Michaelis, a
Dominican and Pope's Inquisitor in the papal territory of
Avignon, claiming to exercise the same office also for the
whole of Provence. The primary question was only one of
exorcising the evil spirits ; but as the two women were bound to
accuse Gauffridi, the latter was on the high-road to fall under the
disciplinary powers of the Inquisition.
Michaelis was to preach the Advent sermons at Aix before the
Parlement there assembled. He at once saw how well these
dramatic occurrences would serve to bring him into prominence,
and seized the opportunity offered with all the eagerness our
modern pleaders at Assizes display when a sensational murder
comes their way or a curious case of crim. con.
The correct thing in affairs of this sort was to carry on the
drama throughout Advent. Christmas-time, and Lent, and only
come to the burning in Holy Week, on the eve of the great
festival of Easter Day. Michaelis reserved his chief efforts for the
final Act, entrusting the bulk of the work to a protege of his, a
Dominican from Flanders, one Doctor Dompt, a Louvain man,
who was already practised in exorcism, and well posted in these
follies.
Besides, the very best thing the Fleming could do was to do
nothing at all. In Louise he had a redoubtable helper, three times
as zealous as the Inquisition, endowed with a fierce untiring
energy and a burning eloquence, wild indeed and sometimes
grotesque, but always terror-striking, a veritable brand of hell.
The matter resolved itself into a duel between the two devils,
between Louise and Madeleine, fought out in public.
Simple folk who came there on pilgrimage to the Holy Balm
a worthy goldsmith, for instance, and a draper, both natives of
Troyes in Champagne were ravished to see Louise's demon
192
(BauffriM, 1610
belabour the other demons so cruelly and cudgel the Magicians.
They positively wept for joy, and wended homewards giving
thanks to God.
A terrible sight, for all that (terrible even as depicted in the
heavy, colourless, official report as drawn up by the Flemish
Doctor), to watch the unequal contest, to see the stalwart Louise,
both an older and a stronger woman than her adversary, a true
Provencal, as hard as the stones of her own desert of the Cran,
day by day pelt and pummel and demolish her shrinking victim,
so young and childish-looking, but already so sore a sufferer, love-
sick and shame-sick, writhing in the pains of epilepsy. . . .
The Fleming's volume, together with the additional matter
supplied by Michaelis, in all some four hundred pages, is a brief
abstract of the invectives, insults, and menaces which the woman
vomited unceasingly for five long months, as well as of her
sermons, for she would preach on any and every subject, the
sacraments, the coming appearance of Antichrist, the frailty of
women, etc., etc. This over, in the name of her devils she
would take to raving again, twice every day renewing her torture
of poor Madeleine, without ever taking breath, without for one
instant checking the awful torrent of her words, till the other,
utterly confounded, " one foot in hell," to use her own words, fell
into convulsions, knocking the floor with her faltering knees, and
fainting body, and drooping head.
Louise is three parts a mad woman, it cannot be denied ; no
amount of knavery could have enabled her to keep the lists so
long. Nevertheless her bitter jealousy teaches her, wherever she
can find a chance to stab her victim's heart and wound her
feelings, a dreadful lucidity is expressing herself.
All ordinary laws are clean upset. This impious, devil-ridden
creature communicates as often and as freely as she will. She
rates and rebukes personages of the highest dignity. The
venerable Catherine de France, Lady President of the Ursulines,
comes to see the wonder, questions her and instantly convicts her
of downright misstatement and silly misconception. Thereupon
o 193
Gbe Sorceress: a Stnb^ in Superstition
the woman turns insolent and ends the matter by retorting, in the
name of her devil, " Well ! is not the Devil the Father of Lies ? "
A friar, a man of sense, who is present, takes her at the word,
and retorts, " Then you are lying ! " and turning to the exorcists,
" Why do you not stop this woman's mouth ? " He gives them an
account of a certain Martha, a woman at Paris who had falsely
pretended to diabolic possession. For answer, they make her
communicate in his presence. The Devil taking Communion, the
Devil receiving God's body in the Sacrament ! . . . The poor
man is staggered, and humbles himself before the Inquisition.
The sight is too much for him, and he dares not say another
word.
One of Louise's favourite devices is to terrorise her audience,
crying out suddenly, "I can see Magicians there, . . . there!"
setting each individual trembling for his skin.
Triumphant at La Sainte-Baume, she extends her efforts to
Marseilles. Her Flemish exorcist, now reduced to the extra-
ordinary office of secretary and confidant of Satan, writes to her
dictation five letters :
To the Capuchins of Marseilles, urging them to call upon
Gauffridi to repent and be converted ; to the same Capuchins,
directing them to arrest Gauffridi, bind him hand and foot with
a stole, and hold him prisoner in a certain house she designates ;
letters to the moderates, to Catherine de France, to the Doc-
trinaire Fathers, who themselves were for declaring against her.
Eventually, reckless and regardless of consequences, she insults
her own Lady Superior. "You told me," she says, "when I left
you, to be humble and obedient . . . Well ! I give you back
your own advice ! "
Verrine, Louise's devil, demon of the air and the wind, was for
ever whispering in her ears mad words of folly and senseless
pride, that wounded friends and enemies alike, and even the
Inquisition. One day she deliberately made fun of Michaelis,
who she said was kicking his heels at Aix preaching in the
desert, while all the world was thronging to La Sainte-Baume
194
(Banff riM, 1610
to hear her. " Preach away, Michaelis ! your Words are true
enough, but fall on deaf ears, while Louise, who has never
studied Theology, has comprehended the summum bonum and
attained perfection ! "
She was filled with savage self-satisfaction, above all at her
victory over Madeleine, whose spirit she had broken. One phrase
had contributed more to this result than a hundred sermons,
the cruel, brutal words, "You will be burned!" (December lyth).
From that day the poor girl lost all heart, and said whatever
the other wished, became, in fact, her abject and submissive
slave. She grovelled to everybody, asked pardon of her mother,
of her Superior Romillion, of the audience, of Louise herself. If
we are to believe what the latter says, the trembling girl drew
her aside and besought her to take pity on her, not to be too
harsh upon her.
The other, as gentle as a rock, as merciful as a reef of the
sea, felt that she was hers, to do what she would with her. So
she seized her victim, enveloped and strangled her, robbing her
of the few sparks of vitality still left her, a second enchantment,
the reverse of Gauffridi's, a possession by fear and horror. The
poor fainting creature stepped on beneath the rods and whips,
and day by day they urged her further along the agonising road
of repeated accusations, repeated attempts on the life of the man
she still loved.
Had Madeleine shown a firm front, Gauffridi would undoubt-
edly have escaped ; for everybody was set against Louise.
Michaelis, even at Aix, the effect of whose sermons she had
quite eclipsed and whose dignity she had treated so lightly,
would sooner have quashed the proceedings altogether than leave
the prestige with this woman.
Marseilles was ready to defend Gauffridi, terrified as its citizens
were to see the Inquisition of Avignon pushing its advances so
far as actually to seize a native of their town inside their own
walls.
The Bishop in particular, and the Chapter, were for defending
195
Sorceress : a tub in Superstition
a priest of their own diocese. Their contention was that the
whole affair meant nothing more than a piece of jealousy between
rival confessors, another example of the well-known animus
of the monks against the secular priests.
The Doctrinaire Fathers for their part would fain have hushed
up the whole matter, being bitterly grieved at the scandal. Not
a few of their number were so deeply chagrined they came near
leaving all and quitting their House altogether.
The ladies were indignant, especially Madame Libertat, the
lady of the Chief of the Royalists, who had surrendered Marseilles
to the King. All bewailed Gauffridi's fate, and declared none
but the Foul Fiend could attack so pure a lamb of God.
The Capuchins, whom Louise so peremptorily ordered to
arrest him, were (like all the Orders connected with St. Francis)
enemies of the Dominicans. They were jealous of the promi-
nence given the latter by the events which had occurred amongst
them. Moreover, their wandering life, which brought the
Capuchin Fathers into such frequent contact with women, often
involved them in questions of morals. They had an instinctive
dislike to people's looking so closely into the private lives of
ecclesiastics. They took sides for Gauffridi. Persons possessed
of the Devil were not such rare phenomena it was impossible to
get hold of one, and they soon found what they required. Their
new protegee's devil, under Franciscan influence, said precisely
the opposite of what St. Dominic's devil had announced. He
said, and they wrote it down in his name, " That Gauffridi was
in no sense a Magician, and could not be arrested."
This was quite unexpected at La Sainte-Baume. Louise was
nonplussed, and could only say, that apparently the Capuchins had
not made their devil swear to speak the truth, a poor retort,
which, nevertheless, was backed up by the trembling Madeleine.
This latter, like a whipped hound, trembling in dread of a
repetition of the thrashing, was capable of anything, even of
biting and tearing. Indeed, it was by her instrumentality that
Louise in this emergency bit savagely and cruelly.
196
(Bauffrifci, 1610
All she said herself was that the Bishop was, unknowingly,
hurting God's cause, exclaiming likewise "against the Sorcerers
of Marseilles," without mentioning any names. But the cruel
and fatal word she put into Madeleine's mouth. A woman who
had two years before lost her child was denounced by the
latter as having strangled it. The accused, fearing torture, fled
or kept herself in hiding. Her husband and father arrived in
tears at La Sainte-Baume, no doubt hoping to move the Inquisi-
tors. But Madeleine dared not withdraw what she had once
said, and only repeated the odious charge.
Who was safe? From the moment the Devil was elected
avenger of God's anger, and they started writing down under his
dictation the names of those in danger of the flames of ecclesi-
astical punishment, each man shuddered at every hour at the
horrid nightmare of the blazing stake.
Marseilles, confronted with so presumptuous an invasion of its
privileges by the Papal Inquisition, should by right have looked
for aid from the Parlement of Aix. Unfortunately the Marseillais
were only too well aware of their own unpopularity at Aix. The
latter city, a small place dominated by officialdom and full
of magistrates and nobles, has always looked with jealous eyes on
the wealth and magnificence of Marseilles, the Queen of the
South. As a matter of fact, it was the adversary of the Marseillais,
the Papal Inquisitor, who in order to anticipate Gauffridi's
appeal to the Parlement, was the first to have recourse to its
assistance. It was an intensely bigoted body, the bigwigs of
which were chiefly nobles enriched in the preceding century
at the time of the massacre of the Vaudois. Moreover, as lay
judges, they were delighted to see an Inquisitor of the Pope
create a precedent of the sort, and admit that where a priest was
concerned and a question of alleged Sorcery involved, the
Inquisition could only proceed so far as the preliminary examina-
tion. It was as good as a formal resignation on the part of the
Inquisitors of all their ancient privileges. Another point which
pleasantly flattered the vanity of the men of Aix, as it had done
197
Sorceress: a tut>\> in Superstition
in the case of those of Bordeaux, was this, that laymen though
they were, they had been set up by the Church herself as censors
and reformers of ecclesiastical morals.
In this business, where everything seemed bound to be extra-
ordinary and miraculous, not the least miraculous feature was
to see so savage a demon grow suddenly complimentary towards
the Parlement, and turn politic and diplomatic. Louise en-
chanted the King's friends by a panegyric of the late King,
Henri IV. (who would have thought it possible ?) was canonised
by the Devil. One fine morning, a propos of nothing, she broke
out into eulogiums " of that pious and sainted monarch who had
but now risen to the skies."
An alliance of this sort between two such old enemies as the
Parlement and the Inquisition, the latter henceforth assured
of the assistance of the secular arm, of soldiery and executioner,
a special commission despatched by the Parlement to La Sainte-
Baume to examine the victims of diabolical possession, to hear
their depositions and accusations, and draw up lists, was indeed
a terrifying eventuality. Louise made no more ado, but de-
nounced the Capuchins, Gauffridi's champions, in so many words,
and declared "they- would be punished temporally" in their
persons and in their flesh.
The unhappy Fathers were quite broken-spirited, and their
Devil had not another word to say. They went to the Bishop to
tell him they could not really very well refuse to produce
Gauffridi at La Sainte-Baume and make a formal act of sub-
mission ; but this done, that the Bishop and Chapter might
reclaim him and bring him once more under the protection of
the episcopal jurisdiction.
Another effect, moreover, had no doubt been calculated upon,
namely that the sight of the man they had loved so deeply would
shake the equanimity of the two women, that the redoubtable
Louise herself would be deeply moved by the promptings of her
heart.
As a matter of fact her sensibility was awakened at the
(BauffrtM, 1010
approach of her guilty lover, and the Fury would seem to have
shown a moment's weakness. I know of nothing more ardent
than her supplication to God to save the man she has herself
been driving to his death, " Great God, I offer you all the sacri-
fices ever offered since the beginning of the world, and that shall
be offered to the end of time ... all for Louis ! . . . I offer
you all the tears of the Saints and all the ecstasies of the angels
... all for Louis ! I would there were more souls yet, that
the oblation might be more complete . . . all, all for Louis !
Pater de coelis Deus, miserere Ludovici ! Fili redemptor mundi
Deus, miserere Ludovici ! " (O God the Father of Heaven,
have mercy upon Louis ! O God the Son, Redeemer of the
world, have mercy upon Louis !)
Vain compassion ! and sinister, to boot ! . . . What she
would fain have had, was that the accused should not harden his
heart) but plead guilty, in which case he was certain to be
burned under the existing jurisprudence of the country.
Louise herself was at the end of her forces, incapable of-further
effort. The Inquisitor Michaelis, humiliated at owing his success
solely to her, and exasperated with his Flemish exorcist, who had
allowed himself to fall so completely under her ascendency and
let all the world see into the secret springs of the drama,
Michaelis was now coming finally to crush Louise, to rescue
Madeleine and, if he could, set her in the other's place in the
popular imagination. The attempt was not ill conceived, and
implies a certain comprehension of the appropriate mise en scene.
Winter and the Advent season had been occupied by the awful
Sibyl, the wild Bacchante. In the gentler weather of a Provencal
springtide, in Lent, would have figured a more touching person-
ality, a soft, feminine demon incarnate in a sick girl and speaking
from trembling lips. The child coming as she did of a dis-
tinguished family, the nobility took an interest in her case and
the Parlement of Provence.
Far from listening to his Flemish colleague, Louise's man,
Michaelis, when the former tried to enter the privy council of the
199
Sorceress: a tub\> in Superstition
Parlement, slammed the door in his face. A Capuchin, another
fresh arrival, cried out at the first word Louise uttered in his
presence, " Silence, accursed Devil ! "
Meantime Gauffridi had arrived at La Sainte-Baume, where he
cut a very poor figure. A man of sense and ability, but weak
and sinful, he foresaw but too plainly the inevitable termination
of a popular tragedy of the sort, and in the cruel catastrophe
beheld himself abandoned, betrayed by the child he loved. He
gave himself up to despair, and when confronted with Louise,
stood before her as if she were his judge, one of those old
ecclesiastical judges, cruel and subtle in his inexorable logic.
She put doctrinal questions to him, to all of which he answered
yes, granting her even the most disputed points, for instance
" that the Devil may be believed in a Court of Justice on his
word and oath."
This lasted only a week from the ist to the 8th of January;
then the clergy of Marseilles claimed him. His friends, the
Capuchins, stated they had visited his lodging, and found noth-
ing there connected with Magic. Four Canons of Marseilles
arrived armed with authority to take him, and carried him home
again.
Gauffridi was brought very low ; but neither did his adversaries
occupy a particularly proud position. Even the two Inquisitors,
Michaelis and the Fleming, were scandalously in disagreement.
The partiality of the latter for Louise and of the former for
Madeleine went beyond mere words and was embodied in action.
All this chaos of accusations, sermons, revelations, which the
Devil had dictated by the mouth of Louise, the Fleming, who
had written it down, maintained was in its integrity, and without
exception God's own words, and feared any interference with it.
He avowed much distrust of his chief Michaelis, dreading lest,
in the interests of Madeleine, he should falsify these papers in
such a way as to ruin Louise. He defended them with all his
might, shut himself up in his room and stood a regular siege.
Michaelis, who had the members of the Parlement on his side,
(BauffriM, 1610
could only get hold of the manuscript by using the King's name
and breaking in the door.
Louise, who was afraid of nothing, was for setting up the Pope
against the King. The Fleming laid complaint against his chief
Michaelis before the Papal Legate at Avignon. But the prudent
Papal Court shrunk back terrified before the scandal of seeing
one inquisitor levelling accusations against another. The
Fleming found no support, and had nothing else to do but
to submit. Michaelis, to make him hold his tongue, gave him
back the papers.
Those of Michaelis which form a second portfolio, sufficiently
dull and uninteresting and not to be compared for an instant
with the other, are full of Madeleine and nothing else. They
play music to her by way of calming her agitation. They note
with the utmost care whether she eats or refuses her food. They
fuss round her, in fact to excess, often in not " over-edifying
particulars. They ask her strange questions about the Magician,
and about the localities of her person which might bear the
Devil's mark. She was also actually examined. Though it would
seem this had been done already at Aix by the physicians and
surgeons of the Parlement (p. 70), Michaelis, in his extreme zeal,
examined her again minutely at La Sainte-Baume, and gives his
observations in detail (p. 69). No matron was called in. The
judges, lay and monkish, agreed for once, and having nothing
to fear from each other's surveillance, mutually consented, it
would seem, to wink at this neglect of the proper formalities.
But they had a stern judge in Louise, who, with her character-
istic outspokenness, branded these indecencies with fiery words :
" They that were swallowed up by the Deluge had not done so
wickedly as these men ! . . . Nothing to equal the enormity was
ever related of Sodom and Gomorrah ! . . ."
She said further, " Madeleine is delivered over to impurity ! "
And indeed this was the saddest feature of all. The poor mad
creature, blinded by her love of life, her joy at not being burned
after all, or perhaps with some confused feeling that it was she
20 1
Sorceress: H Stufc^ in Superstition
now who could influence her judges, sang and danced at times
with a shameful, indecent, alluring freedom of mien and gesture.
The old Doctrinaire priest, Romillion, blushed for his Ursuline
protegee. Shocked at seeing the judges admire her long hair, he
said it must be cut off, and this stumbling-block removed.
She was gentle and submissive in her more composed hours,
and they would have made another Louise of her if it had been
possible. But her devils were vain and amorous ; not eloquent
and fierce like her rival's. When they should have been preach-
ing they spoke only silly trivialities. So Michaelis was forced to
play the piece by himself. As Inquisitor-in-Chief, feeling bound
to far outdo his subordinate, the Fleming, he declared he had
already drawn out of the child's body an army of six thousand
six hundred and sixty devils, only a hundred now remaining.
The better to convince the public, he made her bring up the
charm or spell she had swallowed, so he said, and extracted
it from her mouth in the form of a glutinous, sticky substance.
Who could hold out against this ? The audience was left dumb-
foundered and convinced.
Madeleine was now on the high-road to save her life. The
only obstacle lay in her own impudence ; she kept continually
saying injudicious things likely to rouse her judges' jealousy and
exhaust their patience. She confessed that every object reminded
her of Gauffridi, that he was constantly before her eyes. She did
not try to hide her erotic dreams. "Last night," she would say, "I
was at the ' Sabbath,' and the Magicians were adoring my statue,
which was gilt all over. In its honour each of them made an
offering of their blood, which they got by cutting their hands
with lancets. He, he was there, on his knees, a rope round his
neck, beseeching me to come back to him and not to betray
him. . . . But I held back. . . . Then he said, ' Is there any
here ready to die for her ? ' ' Yes, I am,' cried a young man, and
the Magician immolated him."
Another time she saw him praying her just for one of her
beautiful golden hairs. " And when I refused he said, ' Well,
give me half a hair at any rate.'"
202
(Bauffrtfci, 1610
Meantime she assured them she was always firm in her
resistance. But lo ! one day, the door happening to stand open,
the virtuous convert is away at top speed to rejoin Gauffridi once
more.
She was recaptured, at least her body was. But her soul ?
Michaelis was puzzled how to recapture it. By a happy inspira-
tion, he thought of her magic ring. This he took from her, cut
it in pieces, ground it to powder and burned it. Moreover,
suspecting that her obstinacy, unaccountable in so gentle a
creature, was fostered by invisible Sorcerers who slipped un-
perceived into the room, he stationed a man-at-arms there, a
stalwart fellow armed with a sword, who lashed out in every
direction and hacked the invisible tempters into bits.
But the best medicine towards Madeleine's conversion was the
death of Gauffridi. On February 5th, the Inquisitor visited Aix
to preach the Lenten sermons, saw the judges and stirred them
up to action. The Parlement, readily adopting his suggestions,
sent to Marseilles to arrest the rash offender, who seeing himself
so well supported by the Bishop, the Chapter, the Capuchins
and everybody, had never supposed they would venture on so
bold a step.
Madeleine from one quarter, Gauffridi from another, arrived
at Aix. Such was her excitement they were forced to bind her ;
her state of agitation was terrible, and anything might happen.
A very bold experiment with a girl in her morbid condition was
tried, to give her one of those frights that throw a woman into
convulsions, that are sometimes fatal. A Vicar-General of the
Archbishop's mentioned that there was in the Archiepiscopal
Palace a dark, narrow charnel-house, what in Spain they call
a pudridero, such as we see at the Escorial. In former days a
quantity of old bones of dead men whose names were forgotten
had been thrown there to rot. Into this sepulchral vault they
brought the trembling girl, and exorcised the demon within her
by putting these cold dead bones in contact with her cheeks.
She did not die of horror, but from that time she was absolutely
203
Sorceress: a Stub^ in Superstition
at their disposal ; they had got what they wanted, the death of
conscience, the extermination of all that was left of moral sense
and free will.
She became a pliant instrument, ready to do whatever was
desired, with a flattering alacrity seeking to guess what would be
agreeable to her masters. They showed her Huguenots, and she
cursed them. They confronted her with Gauffridi, and she told
him by heart the counts of accusation against him more glibly
than the King's officers could have done. Nor did this in any
way prevent her snarling and snapping like a wild beast when
she was taken to church and set to stir up the populace against
Gauffridi by making her devil blaspheme in the name of the
Magician. Beelzebub would exclaim by her mouth, " I forswear
God, in the name of Gauffridi, I forswear God," and so on.
Then, at the instant of the elevation of the host, " On me be
the blood of the Just One, on me, in the name of Gauffridi ! "
A grim partnership, whereby this twofold devil damned the
one out of the mouth of the other ; for whatever he said through
Madeleine, was surely imputed to Gauffridi. So that this crowd
was eager and anxious to see the stake make a speedy end of the
blasphemer, whose impiety, dumb though he remained, yet spoke
loudly and hatefully by Madeleine's voice.
The exorcists asked her a cruel question, one they could have
answered far better themselves than she could : " How is it,
Beelzebub, you speak so ill of your bosom friend?" Her
answer was in these appalling terms : " If there are traitors among
men, why not among demons? When I feel myself with
Gauffridi, I am his to do whatsoever he bids me. But when you
force me, I betray him and make a mock of him."
However, she could not keep up this vein of horrid mockery.
The demon of terror and servility seemed to have entered into
every fibre of her soul, but there was room left for despair.
She could no longer take the least nourishment ; and these good
folks who for five months had been racking her with exorcisms
and who pretended they had relieved her of six or seven thousand
204
(BauffrlM, 1610
devils, are obliged to admit she had no wish left but to die, and
eagerly sought any means of suicide. Her courage failed, that
was all. Once she pricked herself with a lancet, but had not
determination enough to push it home. Another time, she
grasped a knife, and when this was taken from her, tried to
strangle herself. She drove needles into her flesh, ending by a
mad attempt to force a long pin through one ear into her head.
What befell Gauffridi ? The Inquisitor, who is so full of
details about the two women, has next to nothing to tell us
about him, passing lightly over so risky a subject. What little
information he does give is strange enough. He relates how
his eyes were bandaged while they searched with needles all over
his body to find, the insensible spot that meant the Devil's mark.
On the bandage being removed, he learned with wonder and
horror that in no less than three different places the needle had
been driven home without his knowing it ; so that he was
manifestly marked triply with the sign of Hell. And the
Inquisitor adds,, " If we were at Avignon, the man would be
burned to-morrow."
He saw his case was desperate and offered no defence. His
only idea now was that some enemies of the Dominicans might
perhaps save his life, and he expressed a wish to confess to
the Oratorians. But this newly founded Order, which might
fairly be called the media via of Catholicism, was too cold and
too prudent to take such an affair in hand, to say nothing of its
having already gone so far and reached such a desperate pass.
Next he turned again for succour to the Begging Order, and
making confession to the Capuchins, admitted all, and more than
all the truth, hoping to buy his life at the price of infamy. In
Spain, he would undoubtedly have been relaxed, barring a
period of penance in some monastery. But the French Parle-
ments were more severe, and made a point, besides, of proving
the superior integrity of the lay jurisdiction. The Capuchins,
not over-firm themselves on the question of morals, were not of
the sort to draw down the lightning on their own heads. They
205
Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
made much of Gauffridi, kept him safe and offered him consola-
tion day and night, but solely to the end that he might be
induced to confess himself a Magician, and so, the practice of
magic arts remaining the main count of accusation, a decent veil
might be drawn over the crime of seduction by a confessor, an
incident so compromising for the clergy.
Thus eventually his own friends, the Capuchins, by persistency,
by gentle treatment and soft words, drew from him the fatal
admission, which, so they said, was the salvation of his soul,
but which very certainly meant giving his body to the stake.
The man being settled and done with, they made an end with
the two girls, who, however, were not to be burned. The finale
was a broad farce. Before a great assembly of the clergy and
Parlement Madeleine was brought forward ; then addressing her,
they formally called upon her devil, Beelzebub, to quit the field,
or else give satisfactory reasons for his contumacy. He had no
reply to make, but departed ignominiously.
Then Louise was produced, with her devil Verrine. But
before driving out a spirit so friendly to the Church, the monks
regaled the gentlemen of the Parlement, who were novices in
these matters, with an exhibition of the savoir-faire possessed
by the devil in question, making him go through an extra-
ordinary pantomime. " How do the Seraphim and Cherubim
and Thrones do before God ? " " Difficult ! difficult ! " Louise
answered; "they have no bodies." However, on the order
being repeated, she did her best to obey, imitating the flight
of the first, the divine ecstasy of the others, and finally the
adoration of all, bending low before her judges, and prostrating
herself head bowed to the earth. All saw the far-famed Louise,
so proud and so indomitable, humiliated, kissing the floor, and
with arms outstretched lying her length on the cold stones.
An extraordinary exhibition, foolish and indecent to the last
degree, by which she was made to expiate her redoubtable
success with the populace ! Even now she partially won over
the Assembly again by an adroit stab she administered to
206
(BauffriM, 1610
Gauffridi who was present in chains. " At the present moment,"
she was asked, "where is Beelzebub, the devil expelled from
Madeleine ? " "I see him plainly, there at Gauffridi's ear," was
her cruel answer.
Enough surely of these horrors and abominations? Why
inquire what the unhappy man said under torture? For he was
subjected to the question, both ordinary and extraordinary. The
revelations he must have made would no doubt throw consider-
able light on the dark and mysterious history of nunneries.
The Parlement greedily collected all such particulars, as weapons
that might prove useful, but they kept them to themselves
"under seal of the Court."
The Inquisitor Michaelis, much blamed by public opinion for
so much animosity that was hardly distinguishable from petty
jealousy, was recalled by his Order, which was sitting in Assembly
at Paris, and did not see Gauffridi's execution. The latter was
burned alive at Aix four days later (April 3oth, 1611).
The reputation of the Dominicans, which had suffered in this
affair, was not much mended by another case of diabolic possession
which they got up at Beauvais (November of the same year) in
such a way as to give themselves all the honours of war, and a
report of which they printed at Paris. As one chief objection
against Louise's devil had been that he could not talk Latin, this
new victim of the Fiend, Denise Lacaille, could gabble a few
words of that language. They made a great ado, frequently
showed the woman in procession, and even took her from
Beauvais to Notre-Dame de Liesse. But there was no enthu-
siasm ; this Picard pilgrimage had none of the dramatic effects,
the terrors of La Sainte-Baume. The Lacaille woman, for all
her Latin, did not possess the burning eloquence of her
Provenal predecessor, and had neither her fiery spirit nor her
savage energy. The only result of the whole thing was to give
the Huguenots something to laugh at.
What became of the two rivals, Madeleine and Louise ? The
first, or rather her shadow, was kept within the papal territory,
207
Gbe Sorceress: a Stufc^ in Superstition
for fear of her being induced to talk about the dismal and disre-
putable affair. She only appeared in public to be stared at as an
edifying example of penitence, and was employed generally along
with a number of poor women in cutting wood to be sold for
charitable purposes. Her family were ashamed of her and had
cast her off and deserted her.
As for Louise, she had declared during the trial, " I shall win
no glory from it all. . . . The trial ended, I shall die ! " But
she was wrong; she did not die, but went on killing instead.
The murderous devil that was in her raged more savagely than
ever. She began deliberately to denounce by name, Christian
name and surname, all whom she imagined mixed up with Magic
and Sorcery, among others a poor young girl, by name Honoree,
" blind of both eyes," who was burned alive.
" Let us pray God," says the good Father Michaelis, in con-
clusion, " that all may redound to His glory and the glory of His
Church " !
208
SSfa
CHAPTER VII
THE NUNS OF LOUDUN URBAIN GRANDIER
1633* 1634
An eloquent and popular priest ; suspected of Sorcery Morbid and extra-
ordinary manifestations among the nuns of Loudun.
|N the Memoires cFEtat composed by the renowned
Father Joseph, known to us only in fragments,
having doubtless been prudently suppressed as too
instructive, the worthy Father explained how in
the year 1633 he had had the good fortune to discover a heresy,
an enormously widespread heresy, affecting a countless multitude
of confessors and directors of consciences.
The Capuchins, an admirably organised legion of defenders of
the Church, good watch-dogs of the holy flock, had scented out
and unearthed, not in the deserts, but in mid-France, in the
centre, at Chartres, in Picardy and 'everywhere, a formidable
quarry, the alumbrados of Spain (tlluminati or Quietists), who too
fiercely persecuted in that country, had taken refuge in France,
and who among women, and above all in the nunneries, were
instilling the soft poison ticketed later on with the name of
Molinos.
The wonder is the thing had not been discovered sooner. It
could not very well be hidden, being so widely disseminated ;
the Capuchins swore that in Picardy alone (a land where the
women are weak and the blood more fiery than in the South
itself) this mania of mystic love had sixty thousand professors.
Was the whole body of clergy involved then ? all the confessors,
P 209
Sorceress: B Stnb\> in Superstition
all the directors ? It must no doubt be understood that the
official directors of consciences were supplemented by a great
number of laymen burning with the same zeal for the salvation
of female souls. One of this class, who was conspicuous at a
later date no less for talent than for bold originality, was the
author of the Delices Spirituelles (Spiritual Joys), Desmarets de
Saint-Sorlin.
It is impossible to realise or understand the enormous power
exercised by the Confessor over nuns, a hundred-fold more abso-
lute at this time than in any previous age, unless the new con-
ditions of the period are taken into account.
The reforms decided upon at the Council of Trent with regard
to the closer seclusion of the inmates of Religious Houses, which
had been largely ignored under Henri IV., when nuns enter-
tained their fashionable friends, gave balls and danced at them,
etc., these reforms began to be seriously enforced under Louis
XIII. Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, or rather the Jesuits who
acted through him, insisted upon a high degree of external pro-
priety. Need we say all entry into convents was prohibited for
the male sex? One man, and one man only, went there every
day, penetrating not only into the house, but wherever he wished,
into each cell, this comes out clearly in several cases, especially
in the evidence given by David at Louviers. This reformation,
this close seclusion, shut the door in the face of the world at large
and excluded all inconvenient rivals, giving the right of familiar
intercourse with Religious Women and the exclusive opportunity
of influencing their minds to the Father Confessor.
What was likely to follow ? This may be problematical, a
matter of speculation, to dreamers ; but practical men, and
doctors, know better. As early as the sixteenth century the
physician Wyer makes it clear enough to us by very plain ex-
amples. In his Book IV. he cites numerous cases of nuns
having gone mad with love ; while in Book III. he mentions a
well reputed Spanish priest, who having gone by chance when at
Gbe Huns of Xoubun
Rome into a convent of nuns, left it a maniac, declaring that as
brides of Christ, they were his, those of the priest, Christ's Vicar.
He had Masses said praying that God might grant him the grace
to wed soon with the convent in question. 1
If a mere passing visit could produce such an effect, we can
understand what must have been the state of mind of the regular
Director of nunneries of women, when he was alone with them,
in the seclusion of the cloister, could spend all day with them, and
receive at any hour the perilous confidences of their languors and
weaknesses.
Nor are temptations of the senses the only factor to be
reckoned with in these cases. We must likewise take account
of the ennui and the irresistible craving to vary the conditions of
existence, to escape from a monotonous life by the indulgence
of some caprice or some fancy. Then what an age of new
discoveries, of novelties of all sorts, it was ! Travel, the Indies,
discoveries of new worlds ! Printing ! last but not least, Ro-
mances ! . . . When everything is on the move out of doors,
every mind on the stretch, how suppose it possible to endure the
crushing uniformity of monastic life, the long, weary services,
unrelieved by anything more exciting than a dull sermon intoned
through the nose ?
Even laymen, in the midst of so many distractions, demand
insistently of their confessors the pleasing variety of an occa-
sional escapade, absolution for a certain degree of inconsistency
of life.
The priest is hurried along by the current, and constrained to
concede point after point. A vast, various, and learned literature
develops out of Casuistry, or the art of making everything per-
missible, a rapidly progressive literature moreover, in which
yesterday's leniency would seem stern severity to-day.
Casuistry was for the laity, Mysticism for the cloister.
The complete suppression of individuality and the death of
1 Wyer, bk. iii. ch. 7.
211
{The Sorceress: a tub\> In Superstition
free will, this is the great principle of Mysticism. Desmarets
gives us very clearly the true moral purport of it all. The pious
devotee, he says, sacrificed in and for himself and annihilated,
exists henceforth only in God. Henceforth he can do no wrong.
His higher part is so divinely perfect, he has no consciousness
left of what the other part is doing. 1
One would have supposed that the zealous Father Joseph,
after uttering so loud a cry of alarm against these corruptors
of morals, would not have stopped there, that a full and searching
inquiry would have been held, that this countless host, that in
one province alone numbered sixty thousand Doctors of the
Church, would be made known and minutely scrutinised. But
no! they simply disappear, and no news is to be heard of them.
Some, it is said, were cast in prison ; but no trial was held,
nothing done to break the deep silence. To all appearance,
Richelieu had no mind to fathom the matter. For all his
tenderness for the Capuchins, he was not so blinded by partiality
as to follow their lead in a matter which would have put into
their hands the duty of making inquiry into the conduct of all
the confessors in the country.
As a rule, the monk both envied and hated the secular clergy.
1 A very old doctrine, which reappears frequently in the Middle Ages. In
the seventeenth century it is common in the French and Spanish cloisters,
nowhere more clearly and naively expressed than in the lessons of a Normandy
angel to a nun, reported in the papers relating to the Louviers affair (see
following chapter). The angel teaches the nun in the first place "contempt
for the body and indifference to the flesh. So much did Jesus despise the
flesh that He exposed it naked to flagellation and open to the eyes of all
men. . . ." He teaches her "complete abandonment of soul and will, holy,
blessed, purely passive obedience ; for example, the Blessed Virgin, who
feared not Gabriel, but obeyed, and conceived. . . . Herein she exposed
herself to no risk. For a spirit can cause no impurity. Quite the contrary,
he purifies." At Louviers this noble doctrine was in the ascendant as early
as 1623, and was taught systematically by a confessor of ripe age and well-
supported authority, Father David by name. The gist of his teaching was
" to kill sin by sin, the better to return to a state of innocence. This is what
our first parents did." Esprit de Bosroger (Capuchin), La Pitte affligci
(Piety Afflicted), 1645; pp. 167, 171, 173, 174, 181, 189, 190, 196.
Tflrbain (SranMcr, 1033, 1634
He was absolute master of the women of Spain ; but was less
appreciated by their French sisters on account of the dirtiness of
his person ; they preferred to call in the priest, or the Jesuit
Father, an amphibious director, so to speak, half monk, half man
of the world. If once Richelieu let loose the pack on Capuchins,
Recollets, Carmelites, Dominicans, and the rest, no one would be
safe among the clergy either. What director, what priest, how-
ever well meaning, had not on occasion used yea, and abused
the pleasant jargon of the Quietists when dealing with his
penitents ?
Richelieu took good care not to worry the clergy at a time
when he was already preparing for the General Diet at which he
asked for a contribution for the war. One prosecution was
allowed the monks, and only one, against a cure, but a cure
accused of Magic, which made it competent to confuse issues
(as in the Gauffridi affair) to such good purpose that no single
confessor, no single director, recognised the case as being like
his own, and each could say in perfect security, " I have nothing
to do with it."
Thanks to these judicious precautions, a certain degree of
obscurity really envelopes the case of Urbain Grandier. 1 The
historian of the affair, the Capuchin Tranquille, proves conclu-
sively and satisfactorily he was a Sorcerer, and more than a
Sorcerer, a Devil, and he is entitled in the documents of the
trial (as they might have said of the goddess Ashtoreth) Grandier
of the Dominations !
1 The work entitled L Histoire des diablcs de Loudun (History of the
Devils of Loudun), by the Protestant Aubin, is a serious and painstaking
book, and its statements are confirmed by the Official Reports even of Lau-
bardemont. On the contrary, Tranquille's book is a grotesque production.
The Procedure is in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris. M. Figuier has
given a lengthy and excellent account of the whole matter (Histoire du
merueilleux, History of the Miraculous). I am, as the sequel will show,
against the judges, but by no means in favour of the condemned. It is
absurd to make a martyr of him, out of dislike for Richelieu. The fact is he
was a fool, a fop, and a libertine, who deserved, not the stake, but imprison-
ment for life.
213
Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
Menage, on the contrary, taking a diametrically opposite view,
is almost ready to rank him in the list of great men falsely
accused of Magic, among the martyrs of liberty of conscience.
To see somewhat more clearly into the affair, we must not
isolate Grandier, but let him occupy his proper place in the great
diabolic Trilogy of those days, of which he and his doings
formed only the Second Act ; we must seek enlightenment on his
case from the First Act, played out in Provence, as we have seen,
in the dreadful business of La Sainte-Baume that ruined Gauffridi,
and further enlightenment again from the Third Act, the affair
of Louviers, which was a copy of Loudun (in the same way as
Loudun had copied La Sainte-Baume), and which in its turn
produced a Gauffridi and an Urbain Grandier.
The three affairs are one and identical. In all of them the
libertine Priest, in all the jealous Monk and the maniac Nun by
whose mouth they make the Devil speak, and all end in the
same way, by the death of the Priest at the stake.
One difference throws a strong light on these matters, and lets
us have a clearer view than we can ever obtain in the fetid dark-
ness of the Spanish and Italian monasteries, the fact that while
the nuns of these lands of Southern sloth were astonishingly
passive and readily submitted to the life of the seraglio and worse
things still, 1 their French sisters were of a very different temper.
Their personality was vigorous, ardent, exacting ; very devils (in
no figurative sense) at once of jealousy and hate, they were
equally indiscreet, loquacious, and spiteful. Their revelations
were very precise, so extremely so towards the end as to arouse
universal shame and disgust, the result being that in the course
of thirty years three several scandals, forced into prominence by
sheer horror and indignation, eventually died out drearily and
ignominiously amid the groans of sick repulsion.
It was hardly at Loudun, in mid-Poitou, among the Huguenots
and exposed to their scrutiny and jeers, in the very town where
they held their great National Synods, that we should have
1 See Del Rio, Llorente, Ricci, etc.
214
IHrbain (Branfcier, 1033, 1034
expected a great scandal for the Catholics to have occurred.
But it was just in these old Protestant towns that the latter were
accustomed to live like conquerors in a subdued country, allow-
ing themselves a very wide liberty of action, not unnaturally
supposing that people so often massacred and only recently
defeated, would enter no protests. The Catholic inhabitants,
magistrates, priests, monks, a few nobles and a handful of
artisans, lived apart from the rest of the population quite like
a colony of conquering aliens. This colony was further sub-
divided, as might be guessed, by the opposition existing between
priests and monks.
The monks, a haughty and numerous band, as missionaries
among a heretic population took the wall of the Protestant
inhabitants, and acted as confessors to the Catholic ladies of the
town. Such was the state of things when one day there arrived
from Bordeaux a young cure, a pupil of the Jesuits, a cultivated
and agreeable man, writing well and speaking better. He made
a sensation in the pulpit, and soon afterwards in society as well.
He was a native of Mantes and a born dialectician, but by educa-
tion a Meridional, with the well-oiled tongue of Bordeaux and
all the boasting, light-hearted effrontery of a Gascon. In a very
short time he had contrived to set the whole of the little town
by the ears, having the women on his side, the men against him,
all or very nearly all. He waxed superb, insolent, and in-
supportable, lost to all sense of proper reverence. He rained
torrents of sarcasm at the Carmelites, and held forth publicly in
the pulpit against the monks in general. The crowds were
suffocating when he preached. Dignified and richly dressed, he
paraded the streets of Loudun like a Father of the Church,
while by night in a quieter way he would be lurking down back
alleys or slipping in by back doors.
The women were at his beck and call. The wife of the
" Avocat du Roi " was not insensible to his graces, and far more
so the daughter of the " Procureur Royal," who had a child by
215
Gbe Sorceress: H Stut>$ in Superstition
him. Nor was this enough ; this triumphant squire of dames,
pushing his advantage farther and farther, began to assail the
denizens of the nunneries.
There were to be found everywhere at that period Sisters of the
Ursuline Order, nuns vowed to the education of the young, lady
missionaries in a Protestant land, expert at flattering and winning
over the mothers and drawing the little girls under their influence.
The Ursulines of Loudun formed a small convent of the
daughters of poor but noble houses. The convent itself was
ill supplied with this world's goods ; the community having been
endowed, at its first foundation, with little more than the house
itself, a former Huguenot college. The Lady Superior, a person
of good family and very well connected, burned with zeal to raise
the status of her convent, to increase its numbers, to enrich and
make it famous. She would very possibly have chosen Grandier,
the man of the hour, for Confessor and Director, if she had not
already had in these capacities a priest who possessed influence
in the district for quite other reasons, being nearly related to the
two principal magistrates. The Canon Mignon, such was his
name, had no little influence over the Lady Superior. Both he
and she learned in confession (the Ladies Superior of Convents
used to confess the inmates) the hateful truth that the younger
nuns dreamed of nothing else but this Grandier who was so much
talked about.
Thus the Confessor whose authority was menaced, the husband
whose honour was attacked, the father whose feelings were out-
raged, all these united their jealousy and indignation at the wrong
done to family life, and swore a great oath to be Grandier's
undoing. To attain this object, they had only to give him rope
enough, as the saying is, and he would hang himself. Nor was it
long before a scandal exploded that made noise enough to shake
the town down pretty nearly.
The nuns, in the old Huguenot mansion they were settled in,
did not feel altogether at their ease. Their boarders, children
216
inrbain (Sranfcier, 1633, 1634
of the townsfolk, the younger Sisters possibly helping them, had
found it a diverting amusement to terrify their companions by
playing at ghosts, phantoms, and apparitions. Discipline was not
over-strict among this miscellaneous collection of little girls,
the spoilt children of rich parents. At night they would be
scampering up and down the corridors, till they frightened both
themselves and each other. Some were really ill with the effects,
if not in body, at any rate in mind. But the object of all these
terrors and illusions, complicated by the town talk they heard
only too much of during the day, the ghost of these agitated
nights was always Grandier. Several declared they had seen him,
felt him of nights at their side, venturesome and victorious, and
that they only awoke to full consciousness when it was too late.
Was it all a case of self-deception, or some trick of the
novices? Was it really Grandier, who had bribed the portress
or boldly climbed the convent walls? The matter has never
been cleared up.
However, from that moment the three champions of family
honour felt they had their man in their power. First of all they
got from among the number of their humbler protegees two
worthy souls to make declaration they could endure no longer
to have as cure a debauchee, a sorcerer, a demon, a freethinker,
who at church " bent one knee only and not two," a man who
laughed at rules and regulations, and granted dispensations
contrary to the Bishop's prerogatives. This last cleverly imagined
charge set the Bishop of Poitiers against him, otherwise the
natural defender of the priest, while giving up the latter to the
malevolence of the monks.
The whole case was got up with consummate ability, it must
be confessed. While having him accused by a couple of poor
parishioners, it was found a further help to get him cudgelled
by a nobleman. In this age of duelling the man who took
a cudgelling inevitably lost ground with the public and was
humiliated in the eyes of the fair sex ; and Grandier fully realised
the severity of the blow his prestige had received. Loving
217
Gbe Sorceress : a Stu&\> in Superstition
notoriety as he did, he went straight to the King himself, and
throwing himself on his knees, claimed satisfaction for the insult
to his cloth. The King was a pious king, and would probably
have granted what was asked, had there not been people about
him who told his Majesty it was a question of intrigue and the
reprisals of injured husbands.
Brought before the Ecclesiastical Tribunal of Poitiers, Grandier
was condemned to penance and to be banished from Loudun,
in other words, degraded and dishonoured as a priest. However,
the Civil Tribunal reopened the case, and found him innocent.
He had, moreover, on his side the superior ecclesiastical authority
to which Poitiers was subordinate, viz. the Archbishop of Bor
deaux, Sourdis. This warlike prelate, an admiral and a gallant
sailor quite as much as a priest, or more so, merely shrugged his
shoulders at the tales of these peccadilloes. He acquitted the
cure, but at the same time gave him the very judicious advice
to go and live anywhere else rather than at Loudun.
This was just what the proud priest had no sort of mind to do.
He was for savouring his triumph on the scene of battle and
marching past before the ladies. He re-entered Loudun in broad
daylight, drums beating and flags flying ; he carried a laurel
brand as he walked, and all the fairest eyes of the city looked
at his progress from the windows.
Not satisfied with this silly triumph, he now began to threaten
and hint at compensation. His enemies, thus driven to bay and
now in peril themselves, remembered the Gauffridi affair, in
which the Devil, the Father of Lies, had been duly and honourably
rehabilitated and accepted in court as a good truth-telling
witness, worthy of credit and belief on 'the part both of the
Church and the King's servants. In their desperate strait, they
invoked a devil ; and he came prompt to command, putting in
his first appearance in the Ursuline convent.
The thing was risky, of course, but then, how many were
interested in its success ! The Lady Superior very soon found
218
ITlrbain (BranMcr, 1033, 1634
her convent, poor and obscure till now, attracting the eyes
of the Court, the provinces, the whole world of France.
The monks saw in it the triumph of their cause over their
rivals the priests; and an opportunity for reviving those fights
with the Devil so popular in the preceding century, very often
(as at Soissons) held before the church doors, and in which
the populace with mingled terror and exultation beheld God's
victory over his diabolic adversary, the admission "that God
is in the elements " dragged reluctantly from the Devil, and
the Huguenots convinced and brought to confusion out of the
Demon's own mouth.
In this tragi-comedy the exorcist represented Almighty God,
or if not quite that, at any rate the Archangel treading down
the Dragon. He would step down from the platform, exhausted
and dripping with sweat, but triumphant, to be borne shoulder
high by the crowd and receive the blessings of the women who
wept for joy to see such things.
This was why something of Sorcery must always be an ingredient
in legal cases of this sort; the Devil supplied the only really
interesting motif. Of course he could not always be shown leaving
the accused's body in the form of a black toad, as at Bordeaux
in 1 6 10 ; but at any rate the mise en scene was grand and imposing
enough. The grim loneliness of poor Madeleine, the honours of
La Saint-Baume, in the Provence business, were no insignificant
factors of success. Loudun had for its part the noisy rout and
delirious frenzy of a whole army of exorcists distributed among
several different churches. Last but not least, Louviers, as we
shall see presently, by way of reviving interest in these rather out-
of-date proceedings, inaugurated a series of midnight episodes,
where the devils disguised as nuns, by the flickering torchlight,
dug pits and extracted from them the magic talismans that had
been there secreted.
The Loudun affair began with the Lady Superior and a lay
Sister in attendance upon her, who fell into convulsions and
219
Sorceress: H 5tnt> in Superstition
indulged in long diabolic rigmaroles. Other nuns copied them,
especially one bold spirit who recreated the role formerly
played by Sister Louise at Marseilles, representing the same devil,
Leviathan, the head demon of all cunning and calumny.
The little town is shaken to its foundations. The monks of all
colours take possession of the nuns, divide them between them,
proceed to exorcise them by threes and fours. They partition the
churches between them, the Capuchins alone possessing them-
selves of two. These are crowded to excess, the whole female
population flocking thither, and among the frightened, excitable
congregation thus formed, more than one woman is heard scream-
ing she also feels devils working within her. Six young women
of Loudun are possessed ; while the mere recital of these dreadful
doings produces a like effect on two more at Chinon.
Everywhere it formed the absorbing subject of conversation,
at Paris, at Court. The Queen of France, a Spaniard by birth
and a woman of ardent imagination and enthusiastic piety, sends
her own Almoner ; more important still, Lord Montagu, the old
papal partisan and her Majesty's faithful servant, who saw every-
thing and believed everything, reported everything to the Pope.
The miracle was proved and confirmed; with his own eyes he had
seen the wounds on a nun's body, the stigmata impressed by the
Devil on the hands of the Lady Superior.
What had the King of France to say to it all ? All his devotion
was turned in the direction of the Devil, to Hell, to religious fear;
and it is said Richelieu was delighted to keep it concentrated
there. I doubt this myself; the devils were essentially Spanish
and of the Spanish faction, if they had talked politics at all, it
would have been against Richelieu. It may be this was what he
dreaded ; at any rate he paid them the compliment of sending
his niece to display a proper interest in the matter.
The Court was ready to believe ; but it was not so on the
spot, at Loudun. The local devils, wretched plagiarists of the
demons of Marseilles, merely repeated by rote in the morning
220
Wbatn (Branfcier, 1633, 1634
what had been taught them overnight from the well-known
Manual of Michaelis. They would never have known what to
say, had not secret exorcisms, carefully rehearsed every evening
for next day's comedy, taught them the proper graces of deport-
ment and style for an effective appearance in public.
A firm and determined magistrate, the Bailli of the town,
detected the fraud and came in person to expose its perpetrators,
threatening and denouncing them. The Archbishop of Bordeaux
tacitly coincided, when Grandier appealed to him. He sent an
order to regulate the exorcists' zeal at any rate and put an end to
their arbitrary proceedings ; more than this his surgeon, who
visited the young women, declared them not to be possessed at
all. According to him they were not mad, not even touched
with insanity, but undoubted impostors and arrant shams.
Thus the century continues the great duel of Doctor against
Devil, of Science and Enlightenment against the spirit of False-
hood and Obscurantism. We saw its commencement with
Agrippa and Wyer; and now another physician, a man called
Duncan, gallantly continued the same struggle at Loudun, and
fearlessly printed the statement that the whole affair was only
deserving of ridicule.
The Devil, reputed so stubborn, showed the white feather and
uttered not another word. But the angry passions of both sides
were too much excited for things to stop here. The tide flowed
so strong in Grandier's favour that those attacked now became
the attacking party. A kinsman of the accusers, an apothecary,
was brought to book by a rich and well-born lady of the town,
whom he had stated to be the cure's mistress, and was con-
demned, as a common slanderer, to make proper reparation.
The Lady Superior felt herself on the verge of ruin. It
could easily have been proved, what an eye-witness saw later
on, that her so-called stigmata were merely painted on, the
colouring being freshened up every day. But she was related
to a member of the King's Council, Laubardemont, and he
saved her. At the moment he was entrusted with a commis-
Sorceress: a tut> in Superstition
sion to clear the ground at Loudun ; and he now got himself
nominated to bring Grandier to trial. The Cardinal was given
to understand that the accused priest was the cure and friend
of the Cordonniere de Loudun, one of the numerous agents of
Marie de Medicis; that he had constituted himself secretary to
his parishioner and had under her name composed a scandalous
and unworthy pamphlet.
For the matter of that, Richelieu would gladly have shown
himself magnanimous and treated the matter with contempt, but
it was hardly possible for him to have done so. The Capuchins
and Father Joseph speculated on this ; for Richelieu would have
given him a fine hold over him with the King, if he had shown a
want of proper zeal. A certain M. Quillet, who had kept a care-
ful eye on things, went to see Richelieu and warned him. But
the Cardinal was afraid to listen to him, and appeared so ill-
disposed towards his would-be benefactor that the latter judged
it prudent to take refuge in Italy.
Laubardemont arrives on December 6th, 1663, with unlimited
discretionary powers, and his arrival marks the commencement
of a reign of terror. He is the King's direct representative,
wielding the whole weight of the Government of France, a
grim, ponderous sledge-hammer, to crush a fly.
The magistrates felt the affront; and the Lieutenant Civil
notified Grandier of his intention to arrest him on the morrow.
The latter paid no heed, and was duly arrested, instantly hurried
out of the place without legal formalities of any sort, and thrown
into the dungeons of Angers. Subsequently he was brought
back again and confined (of all places in the world) in the house
and bedchamber of one of his personal enemies, who had the
windows walled up in an attempt to suffocate him. The detest-
able examination carried out on the suspected Sorcerer's person
by driving in needles to discover the Devil's mark, was conducted
by the very hands of his accusers themselves, who thus exacted
222
Illrbain (Branbicr, 1633, 1634
a preliminary vengeance on him, a foretaste of more deadly
penalties to follow.
He is dragged to the churches to confront the mad women,
to whom Laubardemdnt's arrival has restored the power of
speech. There he finds a band of furious Bacchanals whom
the condemned apothecary was busy intoxicating with his
potions, throwing them into such paroxysms of rage that on one
occasion Grandier came near perishing under their nails.
Unable to vie with the eloquence of the Devil-possessed
Louise of Marseilles, they made up for the want of it by
impudent cynicism. A vile sight truly ! young girls, taking
advantage of the devils supposed to be prompting them to let
loose the floodgates of their sensual delirium for the public
delectation ! For it was this and nothing else that attracted such
crowds ; they came to hear from Women's mouths things that no
modest female lips ever dare to utter.
And the absurdity of these scenes increased part passu with
the odiousness. The scraps of Latin that were whispered in their
ears they pronounced all wrong. The public said scornfully that
the devils had not passed their Fourth Standard. The Capuchins,
not in the least disconcerted, replied that if the demons were
weak in Latin, they spoke Troquois to perfection and very fine
Double Dutch.
This ignoble farce, when seen from a distance of sixty leagues,
from Saint-Germain or the Louvre, appeared something miracu-
lous, terrifying, and appalling. The French Court wondered and
shuddered; while Richelieu (no doubt to win popularity) con-
descended to a cowardly proceeding, having both exorcists and
nuns paid for what they did.
So signal a favour encouraged the cabal, which now lost all sense
of decorum and moderation. Words of senseless folly were
succeeded by shameful acts. The exorcists, under pretext of
the fatigued condition of the nuns, sent them on pleasure ex-
cursions outside the town, sometimes themselves accompanying
223
Gbe Sorceress: a Stufc^ in Superstition
them. The result was one of the number became enceinte, or at
any rate seemed to be so. At the end of the fifth or sixth month
this appearance vanished completely, and the demon that was in
her confessed the trick he had played, in order to bring discredit
on the poor nun by an illusory pregnancy. It is the learned
historian of Louviers who supplies us with this fragment of the
history of Loudun. 1
It is credibly affirmed that Father Joseph arrived incognito, but
seeing the case was hopeless, quietly withdrew again. The Jesuits
also came, performed sundry exorcisms without much success,
noted which way the wind of public opinion blew, and likewise
beat a retreat.
But the monks, the Capuchins above all, were so deeply
involved that only one course was left them, to save their own
skins by inspiring terror in their neighbours. They laid cunning
snares to catch the stout-hearted Baitli and his lady, whom they
would fain have ruined and so stifled any retributive measures on
the part of justice. Lastly, they urged the Commission to press
the case against Grandier to a conclusion. Things were at a
standstill, even their allies the nuns failing them at this crisis.
After their fearful orgy of carnal frenzy and their shameless cries
for human blood, two or three of them had swooned away, and
filled with a sick disgust at their own vileness, became a horror
and a loathing to themselves. In spite of the awful fate they
must expect if they spoke out, in spite of the certainty of ending
in a dungeon, 2 they openly declared within the church walls that
they were lost souls, that they had played into the Devil's hands,
that Grandier was an innocent man.
They ruined themselves, but did nothing to stop the course of
events ; and a general protest addressed by the town to the
King was equally unavailing. Grandier was condemned to be
burned (August i8th, 1634). So savage was his enemies' temper
that before he went to the stake, they insisted on a second appli-
1 Esprit de Bossuet, p. 135.
2 Such was still the custom. See Mabillon.
inrbain (Branfcier, 1633, 1634
cation of the needle to every part of his body in search of the
Devil's mark. One of the judges would actually have liked his
nails to be torn off, but the surgeon refused.
His persecutors dreaded the final scene and the victim's last
words from the scaffold. Having found among his papers a
written argument against the celibacy of the clergy, the same
men who had pronounced him a Sorcerer, now thought him a
freethinker. They remembered the bold words the martyrs of
freedom of thought had hurled at their judges' heads, recalling
the last, tremendous words of Giordano Bruno x and Vanini's
dying defiance. So they arranged a compromise with Grandier.
He was told that, if he kept a judicious silence, he should be
spared the flames and should be strangled before the pile was
kindled. The weak priest, a man of the flesh, yielded yet
another and a .last concession to the feeble flesh, and promised
not to speak. He never opened his lips either on the road to his
death or on the scaffold itself. Then when they saw him securely
tied to the stake, everything ready and the embers so arranged
as to wrap him swiftly in flame and smoke, a monk, his own
confessor, without waiting for the executioner, set light to the
faggots. The deluded victim had only time to exclaim, "Ah,
you have cheated me ! " before the rolling smoke rose round him
and through the furnace of his torment only his shrieks were
audible.
Richelieu in his Memoirs passes lightly over the affair, being
evidently ashamed of the whole matter. He leaves it to be
understood that he acted according to the reports supplied him,
following the voice of public opinion in what he did. But there
can be no doubt that by subsidising the exorcists, by giving the
rein to the Capuchins' violence and ensuring their triumph
throughout the country, he had directly encouraged knavery
1 These words, which he addressed to his judges after hearing his sentence
pronounced, were: " This sentence, delivered in the name of a God of mercy,
is perhaps more a cause of fear to you than to me." He was burned at the
stake at Rome, February I7th, 1600.
Q 225
Sorceress: H tnb in Superstition
and imposture. Gauffridi, whose role had -been recreated by
Grandier, is soon to appear once more under still fouler circum-
stances in the affair of Louviers.
This very year of 1634 the devils, driven out of Poitou, appear
in Normandy, copying and recopying the old absurdities of La
Sainte-Baume, devoid equally of originality, fresh initiative, and
creative imagination. The wild, fierce Leviathan of Provence,
as travestied at Loudun, has lost his southern verve, and can only
conclude the affair by making nuns and virgins speak volubly
the vile language of the Cities of the Plain. Alas ! presently, at
Louviers, he will lose even this much of his old audacity ; we
shall find him succumbing to the heaviness of the northern
atmosphere and growing a poor, mean-spirited creature of tricks
and subterfuges.
226
CHAPTER VIII
THE NUNS OF LOUVIERS AND SATANIC
POSSESSION MADELEINE BAVENT, 1640-1647
Illuminism ; the Devil plays Quietist Duel between the Fiend and the
Physician.
AD not Richelieu refused to order the inquiry de-
manded by Father Joseph against the thirty
thousand illuminati among the Father Confessors,
we should doubtless have had some strange reve-
lations as to the internal life of the convents and the morals of
the nuns inhabiting them. Failing this, the history of events at
Louviers, more instructive than anything told us about Aix or
Loudun, proves that confessors, although possessing in Illumin-
ism a new instrument of corruption, by no means neglected the
old tricks of Sorcery, diabolic apparitions, angelic visitations, and
the like. 1
1 It was only too easy to deceive women who wished to be cajoled. Celi-
bacy was now more difficult than in the Middle Ages, the monastic fastings
and bleedings being largely discontinued. Many died of a life so cruelly in-
active and so liable to nervous over-excitation. The unhappy women took
little pains to hide the martyrdom they suffered, but spoke of it to the other
Sisters, to their Confessor, to the Virgin herself, a circumstance deserving
our sympathy and pity far more than our ridicule. We read in a report of an
Italian Disciplinary Commission such an avowal on the part of a nun, who
said naively to the Madonna, "of your gracious favour, Holy Virgin, grant
me some one I may sin with " (in Lasteyrie, Confession, p. 205). It formed
a genuine embarrassment for the Director, who, no matter what his age, was
in real peril. The story of a certain Russian convent is well known, how a
man who had penetrated within its doors did not come out alive. In the
227
Gbe Sorceress: H Stufc^ in Superstition
Of three successive Directors of the Convent of Loudun, within
thirty years, the first, David, is one of the illuminati, a Molinist
(before Molinos) ; the second, Picart, has dealings with the Devil
and uses magic arts ; the third, Boulle, acts under the guise of
an angel.
The great authority on the whole affair is a book entitled,
Histoire de Magdelaine Bavent, Religieuse de Louviers, avec son
inter rogatoire, etc. (History of Madeleine Bavent, a Nun of
Louviers, together with her Examination, etc.), 410 : Rouen,
I652. 1 The date of this work accounts for the perfect freedom
with which it is written. During the " Fronde," a stout-hearted
priest, an Oratorian, having found the nun in question in the
prisons of Rouen, conceived the bold idea of writing down at her
dictation the history of her life.
Madeleine was born at Rouen in 1607, and was left an orphan
at nine years old. At twelve she was bound apprentice to a
tradeswoman of the city, a worker in linen. The Confessor of
the establishment, a Franciscan, was absolute master of the
house, the linen-worker, who was chiefly employed in making
French Houses the Director went inside, indeed it was his duty to do so,
every day. The general belief among Religious Women was that a holy man
can only sanctify, and a pure being purify. The people called them in
mockery " the Sanctified " (Lestoile). This was a matter of very serious
conviction in convents (see the Capuchin Esprit de Bosroger, ch. xi. p. 1 56).
1 I do not know a more important, a more terrible book, or one better de-
serving to be reprinted (Bibliotheque Z, ancien 1016}. It is the most striking
of all such histories. Another work, La Piett affligee (Piety Afflicted), by
the Capuchin Esprit de Bosroger, is a book that must live for ever in the
annals of human folly and dulness. I have extracted from this, in the pre-
ceding chapter, some surprising statements which might well have involved
its being burned by the common hangman ; but I have carefully refrained
from reproducing the amorous liberties which it makes the Archangel Gabriel
take with the Virgin, his dove-like kisses, and so on. The two admirable
pamphlets of the stout-hearted Surgeon Yvelin are to be found in the Bib-
liotheque de Sainte-Genevieve. The Examen and the Apologie are bound
up with other documents in a volume inappropriately labelled Eloges de
Richelieu (Letter x. 550). A duplicate of the Apologie occurs also in the
volume numbered Z 899 in the same collection.
228
noabclcinc Bavent, 1640-1647
nuns' robes, depending wholly on the Church's patronage. The
monk made the apprentice girls, who were drugged probably with
belladonna and other Wizards' potions, believe he was taking
them to the "Sabbath" and marrying them to the great devil
Dagon. He had his will of three of them, and Madeleine, at
fourteen, made the fourth.
She was filled with ardent piety, especially towards St. Francis.
A Franciscan convent had just been founded at Louviers by a
lady of Rouen, widow of the King's Procureur Hennequin,
hanged for malversation. The lady hoped by this good work to
do something for the salvation of her husband's soul, and with
this view consulted a holy man, an aged priest by name Father
David, who superintended the new foundation. Outside the
gates of the town, buried in the woods surrounding Louviers, the
convent, a poor place gloomily situated, and established under
such tragic circumstances, seemed a fit place for the austere life.
David himself was known by a strange, violent book he had com-
posed against the abuses that disgraced the Religious Houses,
the Fouet des Paillards (A Whip for Wantons), as it was called. 1
Nevertheless, this stern moralist had some very curious notions
as to what constituted purity. He was an Adamite, preaching
the nudity Adam practised in his innocence. Obedient to his
teaching, the Sisters of the convent at Louviers, by way of sub-
jugating and humiliating the novices and breaking them in to
discipline, required (no doubt in summer-time) these young Eves
to resume the condition of our first mother. They made them take
exercise in this state in certain private gardens, and even appear
so in chapel. Madeleine, who had succeeded at sixteen in being
received as a novice, was too proud (too pure-minded perhaps so
far) to submit to* this strange way of living. She incurred the
displeasure of the authorities and was scolded for having en-
deavoured, at Communion, to hide her bosom with the altar-
cloth.
She was equally reluctant to unveil her soul, and would
1 See Floquet, Par/, de Normandie, vol. v. p. 636.
229
Sorceress: a tut> in Superstition
not confess to the Lady Superior (p. 42), a usual practice in
convents and one that the Abbesses found greatly to their
liking. She preferred to entrust the care of her soul to the old
priest, David, who separated her from the other Sisters, while
he returned the compliment by entrusting his body to her when
he was ill. He did not hide from her his private, inner doctrine,
the conventual theory of Illuminism : "The body cannot con-
taminate the soul ; we must, by means of sin, which makes us
humble and cures our pride, kill sin," etc. The nuns, saturated
with these doctrines, and unobtrusively putting them in practice
among themselves, appalled Madeleine with their abominable
doings (p. 41 and elsewhere). She withdrew and kept apart
from the rest, living in the outer purlieus of the convent, having
secured the post of touriere. 1
She was eighteen when David died. His advanced age can
scarcely have allowed him to go very far with Madeleine, but the
cure Picart, his successor, pursued her with ardent importunity.
At confession he spoke of nothing but love, and made her
Sacristaness, that he might be able to be with her alone in the
convent chapel. She did not like him ; but the Sisters forbade
her any other confessor, for fear of her divulging their little
mysteries. This put her completely in Picart's hands. He
assailed her when she was ill, when she was almost on her death-
bed ; moreover, he assailed her through her fears, leading her to
believe that David had handed on to him certain diabolical
talismans. Last of all, he assailed her through her feelings of
compassion, shamming sick himself and beseeching iTer to visit
him in his room. From that moment he was her master, and
it would seem, confused her wits with magic potions. She
dreamed of the Witches' Sabbath, fancied herself carried off
thither in his company, where she was at once altar and victim.
And it is only too true she was so in sad reality !
1 i.e. the nun who attends to the turning-box of a convent, by means of
which communication is kept up with the outside world.
230
Bavent, 1640-1647
But Picart was not satisfied with the barren pleasures of the
" Sabbath," but, defying scandalous tongues, boldly got her with
child.
The nuns, whose turpitude he knew, were afraid of him.
Besides which they were bound to him by their worldly interests;
it was his credit, his energy, the alms and gifts he attracted from
all quarters, which had enriched their convent. He was even
now building them a great church. The affair- of Loudun has
sufficiently shown what were the ambitions and mutual rivalries
of these Houses and the jealous eagerness they displayed to out-
vie one another. Picart, in virtue of the goodwill of rich patrons,
found himself promoted to the role of benefactor and sacred
founder of the convent. " Dear heart," he declared to Madeleine,
" 'tis I am building this magnificent church. After my death you
will see wonders. . . . Will you not do as I wish?"
He was a great lord, and carried things with a high hand. He
paid down a dowry for her, and from a mere lay Sister raised her
to the position of a full-blown Sister, so that, being no longer in
charge of the turning-box, and living within the convent itself,
she might conveniently be delivered or contrive abortion, as
the case might be. Provided with certain drugs, and possessed
of certain secrets, convents could dispense with the necessity of
calling in medical aid. Madeleine declares {Examination, p. 13)
she bore several children. What became of these infants she
does not say.
Picart, already an oldish man, dreaded Madeleine's fickleness,
fearing she might form a new connexion with some other con-
fessor, to whom she could pour out her remorse. He adopted
a hateful means of attaching her irrevocably to himself. He
made her swear an oath pledging herself to die when he should
die, and be with him where he should go. The poor, faint-hearted
creature endured agonies of terror. Would he drag her with him
into the tomb? would he set her in Hell alongside of him-
self? She fully believed herself a lost soul. She became his
231
Gbe Sorceress: a Stub^ in Superstition
chattel, his familiar spirit bound to do his will, and he used
her and abused her for every vile purpose. He prostituted
her in a fourfold orgy, carried out with his vicar Boulle and
another woman. He made use of her to win over the other
nuns by a magic talisman. The sacred wafer, dipped in Made-
leine's blood and buried in the convent garden, was a sure
way of agitating their senses and eluding their wits.
It was the very same year that Urbain Grandier was burned,
and all France was talking of nothing else but the devils of
Loudun. The Penitentiary of Evreux, who had been one of
the actors in that drama, brought back appalling accounts of
what had occurred to Normandy. Madeleine felt herself pos-
sessed, assailed, battered, by devils ; a cat with fiery eyes pursued
her with amorous advances. Little by little other Sisters caught
the contagion, and began to experience strange, supernatural
stirrings. Madeleine had asked help of a Capuchin, and later
on of the Bishop of Evreux. The Lady Superior, who could
not but be aware of the fact, was rather glad than otherwise,
seeing the glory and riches a similar affair had brought to the
Convent of Loudun. But for six years the Bishop was deaf
to all such appeals, being no doubt afraid of Richelieu, who
was trying at the time to initiate a reform of the Religious
Houses.
His wish was to put an end to all these scandals. Only at
his death and that of Louis XIII., in the general confusion
that followed, under the Queen and Mazarin, did the priests
really take up their dealings with the supernatural again, and
resume their struggle with the Devil. Picart was dead, and
interference looked less hazardous now in an affair in which
that dangerous man might have involved many others in his
own guilt. To fight the visions of Madeleine, another visionary
of the same sort was sought for, and soon found. A certain
Anne of the Nativity was introduced into the convent, a woman
of sanguine and hysterical temperament, on occasion shown,
a savage and half a madwoman, actually insane enough to believe
232
Bavcnt, 1640-1647
her own lies. It was a stand-up fight, regularly arranged like
a bout between two bulldogs ; and the pair fell to sacrificing
each other with outrageous calumnies. Anne declared she saw
the Devil standing stark naked by Madeleine's side. Madeleine
swore that she had seen Anne at the Witches' Sabbath, along
with the Lady Superior, the Mother Delegate, and the Mother
of the Novices. Not that there was a single novel feature ;
it was all a rechauffe of the two famous cases at Aix and Loudun.
Both had the printed reports 9f those trials, and followed them
slavishly, without a trace of discrimination or originality.
The accuser Anne and her devil Leviathan had the countenance
of the Penitentiary of Evreux, one of the chief actors in the
Loudun affair. ,By his advice the Bishop of Evreux orders the
exhumation of Picart's body, so that his corpse being removed
from the neighbourhood of the convent may remove the devils
along with it. Madeleine, condemned without a hearing, is to be
degraded, and examined to discover on her body the satanic
sign-manual. Her veil and robe are torn off her wretched body,
which is left to be the butt of an unworthy curiosity, ready to pry
into her very vitals to find excuse to send her to the stake.
The Sisters would entrust to no hands but their own this cruel
search, in itself a terrible punishment. These virgin nuns, in the
guise of matrons, verified her condition, whether pregnant or
no, then shaved her in every part of her person, and pricking with
their needles, driving them deep in the quivering flesh, sought
if there was anywhere a spot insensible to pain, as the devil's
mark is bound to be. But every stab hurt ; failing the crowning
triumph of proving her a Witch, at any rate they had the satisfac-
tion of gloating over her tears and cries of agony.
But Anne was not satisfied yet ; on the testimony of her devil,
the Bishop condemned Madeleine, whom the examination vindi-
cated from the suspicions entertained, to be immured in an in
pace for life. Her removal, it was alleged, would calm the other
nuns. But it was not so. The Devil raged only the more
233
Sorceress: B Stub^ in Superstition
furiously ; and a score of the Sisters were soon screaming,
prophesying, and struggling.
The sight attracted the curious in crowds from Rouen, and
even from Paris. A young surgeon of the latter city, Yvelin by
name, had already been a spectator of the farce perpetrated at
Loudun, and now came to watch the one at Louviers. He was
accompanied by a magistrate, a very clear-headed man and an
Assistant Counsellor at Rouen. They devoted a steady and
persevering attention to the matter, establishing themselves in the
town and studying the phenomena systematically for seventeen
days.
From the very first day they detected the imposture. A
conversation they had had with the Penitentiary on entering
the town was repeated to them (as a special revelation) by the
devil in possession of Anne of the Nativity. On every occasion
they accompanied the crowd to the convent garden. The scene
and its accessories were extremely striking ; the shades of night,
the torches, the trembling and smoky lights, all produced effects
which had been lacking at Loudun. The mode of procedure,
however, was of the simplest; one of the possessed would declare,
" You will find a talisman at such and such a spot in the garden."
A hole was dug at the place indicated, and the charm duly
discovered. Unfortunately, Yvelin's friend, the sceptical magis-
trate, refused to quit the side of the principal performer, the nun
Anne. On the very edge of an excavation they were going to
open up, he grasps her hand, and opening the fingers, finds the
talisman (a little black thread) concealed there, which she was
on the point of throwing into the hole.
Exorcists, Penitentiary, priests, and Capuchins, who were all
present, were covered with confusion. The intrepid Yvelin, on
his own authority, commenced an inquiry and saw to the bottom
of the whole thing. Among fifty-two nuns there were, he
declared, six under possession, diabolic or otherwise, who would
seem to have deserved a taste of discipline. Seventeen others,
under a spell, were merely victims, a troop of young women
234
flDabeleine Bavent, 1640-1647
affected by the morbid excitement characteristic of cloister life.
He details the symptoms with precision ; the girls are otherwise
normal, but hysterical, suffering from extreme disturbances and
derangements of the womb, to all intents and purposes lunatic
and deranged. Nervous contagion had destroyed their wits, and
the very first thing to do is to isolate them from each other.
Next he scrutinises with a Voltairean keenness the various
signs by which the priests recognise the supernatural character
of the possession under which they labour. They prophesy;
granted, but things that never happen. They translate tongues ;
granted, but without understanding the original (for instance, ex
parte Virginis is made to mean "the departure of the Virgin").
They know Greek before the populace of Louviers, but cannot
speak a word of it before the doctors at Paris. They make extra-
ordinary leaps and perform feats of strength, the easiest in the,
world, climbing a great tree-trunk a child of three could negotiate.
In one word, the only thing they do really terrible and unnatural
is to say filthy abominations no man would ever soil his lips
with.
The surgeon was really doing a great service to humanity by
tearing away the mask from them. For the business was being
pressed, and more victims would soon have been added. Besides
the talismans, papers were discovered which were attributed to
David or Picart, and in which such and such individuals were
declared Sorcerers and marked down for death. Everybody
trembled, and the terror of ecclesiastical pains and penalties
gained ground from day to day.
The evil days of Cardinal Mazarin were now come, and the
first essays in ruling of the weak Anne of Austria. Order and
good government were things of the past. " There was only one
phrase left in the whole French language, La Reine est si bonne
(the Queen is so good-natured)." This good nature it was gave
the clergy their chance to gain the upper hand ; lay authority
being interred with Richelieu, bishops, priests, and monks
235
Sorceress: B Stut>\> in Superstition
were going to govern instead. But the impious audacity of the
magistrate and Yvelin was like to compromise this agreeable
hope. Voices of lamentation and protest reached the good
Queen, not the voices of the victims, but those of the scamps
and impostors caught red-handed in their trickeries. The Court
must go into mourning for the dire outrages done to the sacred
cause of Religion !
This was a blow Yvelin was far from expecting, believing his
favour at Court to be firmly based, as for ten years he had
enjoyed the title of Surgeon to the Queen. Before his return
from Louviers to Paris, his adversaries won from the weakness of
Anne of Austria the appointment of other experts, of their own
choosing, an old dotard in his second childhood, a Diafoirus of
Rouen and his nephew, two clients of the clergy. These did
not fail to find that the affair of Louviers was supernatural, above
and beyond all human skill.
Any other man but Yvelin would have been discouraged.
The Rouen experts, who were physicians, treated as altogether
an inferior this mere barber-surgeon, this quack ; while the Court
gave him no support. He only stiffened his back and wrote
a pamphlet, which will live. In it he accepts the great duel
between Science and the Clergy, and declares (as Wyer had done
in the sixteenth century) "that in such-like matters the proper
judge is not the Priest, but the man of Science." After much
difficulty he found a printer to risk putting it in type, but no one
willing to sell it. Accordingly the heroic young fellow set himself
in broad daylight to the task of distributing the little book. He
posted himself at the most frequented spot in Paris, on the
Pont Neuf, and standing at the feet of Henri IV., presented his
brochure to the passers-by. There they could read the official
report of the scandalous deceit, the magistrate seizing in the
very hand of the female devils the unanswerable evidence of
their own infamy.
To return to the unhappy Madeleine. Her enemy, the Peni-
tentiary of Evreux, the same who had ordered her to be pricked
236
flfcafceleine Bavent, 1640-1647
personally marking the place for the needles! (p. 67) now carried
her off as his prey, and deposited her in the depths of the
episcopal in pace at that town. Beneath a subterranean gallery
was a cellar at a lower level still, beneath the cellar a dungeon
where the prisoner lay rotting in damp and darkness. Her
unfeeling companions, making sure she must soon perish in the
dreadful place, had not common kindness enough to provide her
with a little linen to dress her ulcer with (p. 45). She suffered
both from pain and from her filthy condition, lying as she did in
her own excrements. The perpetual darkness was disturbed by
a dreadful scampering of hungry rats, the object of much terror
in prisons, as they will sometimes gnaw off the helpless prisoners'
noses and ears.
But the horror even of these fearful surroundings did not equal
that inspired by her tyrant, the Penitentiary. Every day he would
come into the cellar overhead, to speak down the orifice of the
in pace, threatening, ordering, confessing her in her own despite,
making her say this and that against other people. Presently she
left off eating entirely. He was afraid she was going to die, and
took her out of the in pace for a brief while, lodging her in the
cellar above. Then, furious at Yvelin's brochure, he threw her
once more into the foul sewer down below.
This glimpse of light, this gleam of hope, kindled and so soon
extinguished, all added to her despair. The ulcer had now
closed, and her strength was somewhat recruited. She was seized
with a heartfelt, wild desire for death. She swallowed spiders,
she merely vomited, without further bad effects. She pounded
glass and gulped it down, but in vain. Putting her hand on an
old blunt knife, she tried hard to cut her throat, but could not
succeed. Next, choosing a softer place, her belly, she forced the
iron into her inwards. For four whole hours she worked, and
writhed and bled. But nothing answered her hopes ; even this
wound soon closed. To crown her woes, the life that she hated
so, grew stronger within her. Her heart was dead indeed, but
what of that ?
237
Sorceress: a Stut>\> in Superstition
She became a woman once more, and alas ! desirable still, a
temptation for her gaolers, brutal fellows of the Bishop's household,
who, in spite of the horrors of the place, the unhealthy and unclean
condition of the wretched creature, would come to take their
pleasure of her, deeming any outrage permissible on a Witch.
An angel came to her succour, so she declared. She defended
herself both from men and rats, but not from her own evil
passions. A prison degrades the character. She began to dream
about the Devil, to call upon him to visit her, to implore the
renewal of the shameful, agonising delights he used to wring her
heart with in the old days at Louviers. But he would come back
no more ; the power of dreams was done in her, her senses de-
praved indeed, but dulled and dead. Only the more eagerly did
she recur to the thought of suicide. One of the gaolers had
given her a poison to destroy the rats that infested her cell. She
was on the point of swallowing it, when an angel stayed her hand
(was it an angel or a demon ?), reserving her for an existence of
crime.
Now fallen into the most abject condition, to indescribable
depths of cowardice and servility, she signed interminable lists of
crimes she had never committed. Was she worth the trouble of
burning? Many renounced the idea, and the implacable Peni-
tentiary was the only one who still thought seriously of adopting
such a course. He offered money to a Wizard of Evreux they
had under lock and key if he would give such evidence as to
ensure Madeleine's death (p. 68).
But henceforth she could be utilised in quite a different way,
as a false witness, an instrument of lying and slandering. Every
time it was desii'ed to ruin a man she was haled to Louviers,
to Evreux, the accursed phantom of a dead woman who went
on living only to be the death of others. In this fashion she was
brought along to kill with the venom of her tongue a poor
man by name Duval. The Penitentiary dictated, and she said
her lesson obediently after him ; he told her by what sign she
should recognise Duval, whom she had never seen. She duly
238
fl&afcelefnc Bavcnt, 1640-1047
identified him, and affirmed she had seen him at the Witches'
Sabbath, and he was burned on her testimony !
She confesses to this atrocity, and shudders to think she must
answer for it before God. After a while she fell into such
contempt they did not so much as deign to watch her. The
doors stood wide open ; sometimes she had the keys in her own
possession. Where, indeed, should she have fled, now she was
grown a mere object of horror to all mankind ? From henceforth
the universe rejected the odious creature and spued her out ; her
only world was her dungeon.
Under the anarchy of Mazarin and his "good-natured"
mistress, the Parlements were the sole and only authority left.
That of Rouen, till then the most favourable of them all towards
the clergy, yet waxed indignant at the insolence of their present
proceedings, the way they were domineering and burning. -By
a mere decree of the Bishop's, Picart had been exhumed and his
body cast into the common sewer. Now it was the vicar
Boulle's turn, and they were trying him. The Parlement heark-
ened to the appeal of Picart's family, and condemned the Bishop
of Evreux to return the body at his own cost to the tomb at
Louviers. It summoned Boulle to appear before it, discharged
his case, and on the same occasion finally removed the unhappy
Madeleine Bavent from Evreux, and took her also to Rouen.
There was much reason to fear the Parlement might call up
both the surgeon Yvelin and the magistrate who had detected the
nuns, flagrante delicto, in their imposture. Appeal was instantly
made to Paris ; and. Mazarin threw the aegis of his protection
over his fellow-rascals. The whole affair was to be laid before
the King's Council, an easy-going tribunal, which had neither
eyes nor ears, and whose first care was invariably to bury, to hush
up, to make a cloud of darkness, in any question of law and
justice.
Simultaneously, soft-spoken priests, in the dungeons of Rouen,
comforted Madeleine, received her confession, and for penance
ordered her to ask pardon of her persecutors, the Sisters of
239
Gbe Sorceress: B tub\> in Superstition
Louviers. Henceforward, come what might, Madeleine, thus
tongue-tied, could not be brought up to bear witness against
them. This was a distinct triumph for the clergy, a triumph
which the Capuchin, Esprit de Bosroger, one of the charlatan
exorcists, has celebrated in his Pi'ete affligee, a grotesque monument
of human folly, in which, quite unknowingly, he incriminates the
very people he believes himself to be defending. We have seen
a little above (in a note) the noble words of the Capuchin in
a passage where he gives as lessons of the angels a series of
shameful maxims that would have utterly shocked Molinos.
The Fronde was, as I have said before, a revolt in favour of
integrity of living. Fools have seen in it only the formal and
ludicrous side, but the real basis was a solemn and serious moral
reaction. In August, 1647, at tne fi rst breath of free criticism,
the Parlement took action, and cut the knot. It decreed :
imprimis, that the Sodom of Louviers should be destroyed, the
young women dispersed and sent home to their families ; secundo,
that henceforward the Bishops of the Province should send four
times a year Confessors Extraordinary to all nunneries to make
sure that these filthy abuses were not being repeated.
Still a sop was needed for the clergy. They were given the
bones of Picart to burn, and the living body of Boulle, who, after
making a proper expression of contrition in the cathedral, was
drawn on a hurdle to the Fish-market, and there delivered to the
flames, August 2ist, 1647. Madeleine, or rather her dead
carcass, remained in the prisons of Rouen.
240
CHAPTER IX
SATAN TRIUMPHANT IN THE SEVEN-
TEENTH CENTURY
jHE Fronde was essentially Voltairean. The Vol-
tairean spirit, as old as France really, though long
kept in abeyance, breaks out in Politics, and very
soon afterwards in Religion. The King, with all
his greatness, tries in vain to impose a solemn and serious atti-
tude on his subjects. The undercurrent of mocking laughter is
always audible.
Does it all mean nothing more then but laughter and derision ?
Far from that; it is the beginning of the reign of Reason.
Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton triumphantly established
the dogma of reason, of faith in the unchangeabkness of the Laws
of Nature. The Miraculous dares no more show its face on the
stage, or if it does, it is promptly hissed off.
To put it better still, the fantastic miracles of casual caprice
have had their day, and the great, universal, the standing Miracle
of Nature appears instead, the more divine from the very fact of
its definite subjection to law and order.
It marks the final victory of a general Revolt. So much may
be seen in the bold forms assumed by these earliest protests, in
the irony of Galileo, in the absolute scepticism from which
Descartes starts to build up his system. The Middle Ages would
have said, " It is the Spirit of the Wily One, the Foul Fiend."
No mere negative victory, however, but positive and firmly
based.
R 241
Sorceress: H Stub\> in Superstition
The Spirit of Nature and the Sciences of Nature, those pro-
scribed outlaws of an earlier day, there is no resisting their
restoration to power. It is Reality and hard fact chasing away
the empty shadows of mediaeval darkness.
Foolishly men had said, "Great Pan is dead." Then presently,
seeing he was alive still, they had made him into a god of evil ;
and in the gloom and chaos of those days the mistake was pos-
sible enough. But lo ! he is alive now, and with a life in har-
mony and sweet accord with the sublime and immutable laws that
guide the stars of heaven, and no less surely govern the deep
mystery of human life.
Two things may be predicated of this epoch, apparently, yet
not really, contradictory : the spirit of Satan has prevailed, but
Witchcraft is doomed.
Magic of every kind, whether diabolic or divine, is sick unto
death. Sorcerers and Theologians, both are equally impotent.
They are reduced to the condition of empirics, vainly imploring
of some supernatural accident or the caprice of a Gracious
Providence, those marvels that Science asks only from Nature,
from Reason.
The Jansenists, with all their ardent zeal, obtain in a whole
century but one insignificant, rather ludicrous, miracle. More
unfortunate still, the Jesuits, rich and powerful as they are, cannot,
at any price, get even one, but must rest content with the visions
of a hysterical girl, Sister Marie Alacoque, a being of a quite ab-
normally sanguine idiosyncrasy. In face of such a show of im-
potence, Magic and Sorcery may well take heart of grace for their
own failures.
Observe how in this decay of faith in the Supernatural, infi-
delity of" one kind ensues upon infidelity of the other. The two
were bound together in the thoughts and fears of the Middle
Ages. They continued closely bound together in ridicule and
contempt. When Moliere made fun of the Devil and his " boil-
ing cauldrons," the Clergy were sorely disturbed ; they felt instinc-
242
Satan triumphant in Seventeenth Century
lively that faith in Paradise was being depreciated to a correspond-
ing degree.
A purely lay Government, that of the great Colbert (who for a
long period was king in all but name) takes no pains to conceal
its contempt for these outworn questions. It purges the gaols of
the Sorcerers the Parlement of Rouen still went on accumulating
within their walls ; eventually forbids the Courts to take cognisance
of charges of Witchcraft at all (1672). The said Parlement pro-
tests, and protests with great plainness of speaking, that a repudia-
tion of Sorcery implies risk to a great many other things as well.
Who throws doubt on the nether mysteries, shakes belief in many
a soul in the mysteries of heaven.
The Witches' Sabbath disappears ; and why ? The reason is,
it is everywhere henceforth ; it is a part of men's ordinary habits ;
its practices are those of everyday life.
It was said of the "Sabbath," "No woman ever returned from
it in child." The Devil and the Witch-wife were reproached with
being sworn foes of generation, of hating life and loving death
and annihilation. And lo ! it is precisely in the sanctimonious
seventeenth century, when Witchcraft is a-dying, 1 that love of
barrenness and fear of giving birth form the most general of
diseases.
If Satan is a reading man, he has good cause to laugh when he
peruses the Casuists, his successors and continuators. Yet a
difference there is between them. Satan in dread days of old
1 I do not regard La Voisin as a Sorceress, nor as a true Witches' Sabbath
the travesty she performed to amuse blase noblemen of high rank, Luxem-
bourg and Vendome, her pupil, and the like. Reprobate priests, allies of La
Voisin's, would say the Black Mass secretly for their benefit, undoubtedly with
even more obscene details than it had ever included in old days when cele-
brated before a multitude. In some wretched female victim, a living altar,
Nature was pilloried. A woman given up to vile mockery ! what an abomina-
tion ! . . . a sport far less of men than of her sister women's cruelty, of
a Bouillon, brazen, abandoned creature, or of the dark Olympe, deep-dyed in
crime and learned in poisons (1681).
243
Gbe Sorceress: H Stub^ in Superstition
was careful for the hungry, and pitiful for the poor. But these
others have pity only for the rich man. Croesus with his vices
and luxury and life at Kings' Courts, is needy, grievously poor, a
beggar. He comes in Confession, humble, yet menacing, to
extract from the learned Father a licence to sin, within the
bounds of conscience. Some day will be written (if anyone has
the courage to write it) the surprising history of the cowardly ex-
pedients of the Casuist eager not to lose his penitent and the
disgraceful subterfuges he is ready to resort to. From Navarro
to Escobar, a strange bargaining goes on at the expense of the
wife, and some points are still left opea to dispute. But this is
not enough ; the Casuist is fairly beaten, and gives up everything.
From Zoccoli to Liguori (1670-1770), the defence of nature is
abandoned altogether.
The Devil had, as everyone knows, when attending the Witches'
Sabbath, two faces, one above, gloomy and terrible, the other
behind, ludicrous and grotesque. Nowadays, having no more
use for it, he will of his generosity give the latter to the Casuist.
What must vastly divert Satan is the fact that his most faithful
followers are to be found in those days among respectable folks,
in serious households, ruled and governed by the Church. 1 The
woman of the world, who raises the fortunes of her house by
means of the great resource of the period, profitable adultery,
laughs at prudence and boldly follows the promptings of nature.
The pious family follows merely its Jesuit Confessor. To pre-
serve and concentrate the family fortune, to leave a rich heir, the
1 Voluntary sterility is continually on the increase in the seventeenth
century, especially among the more carefully regulated families, subjected
to the strictest discipline of the Confessional. Take even the Jansenists.
Follow the history of the Arnaulds, and see the steady ratio of decrease
among them, to begin with, twenty children, fifteen children ; then five !
and eventually not one. Can it be this energetic race (their blood mingled
moreover with the gallant Colberts) finishes in enervation ? Not so. The
fact is it has little by little limited its output, so to speak, in order to make a
rich eldest son, a great Lord and King's Minister. The end is gained, and
the race dies of its ambitious carefulness, undoubtedly duly planned and
purposed.
244
Satan {Triumphant in Seventeenth Centun>
crooked ways of the new spirituality are entered upon. In shadow
and secret, the proudest wife, at her prie-Dieu, ignores her seif-
respect, forgets her true nature, and follows the precept of
Molinos : " We are set here below to suffer ! One thing only, a
pious indifference, at long last, softens and lulls our pain, and
wins us respite. What is this respite ? It is not Death. We
feel to some extent what goes on beside us ; without joining in
it, or responding to its stimulus, we yet hear an echo of its move-
ment, vague and gentle. Tis a sort of happy accident of Grace,
which soothes and thrills us, never more so than in those abase-
ments where free will is all eclipsed."
What refinement, what depth is here. . . . Poor Satan ! how
are you outdone ! Bow down, and admire, and own the sons of
your own engendering.
The doctors, who are in an even more true sense his lawful
sons, who sprung from the popular empiricism known as Witch-
craft, these his chosen heirs, to whom he left his noblest patri-
mony, are far too ready to forget the fact. They are basely
ungrateful to the Witches who paved their way for them.
They do more. On this fallen monarch, their father and the
author of their being, they inflict some sore lashes. . . . Tu
quoque, file mi f (You too, my son !) . . . They supply the
mockers with some cruel weapons to use against him.
Already the physicians of the sixteenth century derided the
Spirit, which in all ages, from Sibyls to Witches, tormented
women and harassed them with windy troubles. They main-
tained this is neither Devil nor God, but even as the Middle Ages
said, " the Prince of the Air." Satan, it would seem from them,
is simply a form of disease !
Satanic possession, they declared, was simply a result of the
close, sedentary life, dull and yet harassing and exasperating, of
the cloister. The 6,500 devils that dwelt in Gauffridi's Made-
leine, the legions of demons that fought and struggled in the
bodies of the tormented nuns of Loudun and of Louviers,
245
Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
these doctors call them physical disturbances and nothing more.
" If /Eolus makes the earth shake," Yvelin asks, " why not a girl's
body ? " The surgeon who attended La Cadiere (the subject of
our next chapter) says drily, " Nothing else in the world but a
choking of the womb."
What a strange come-down ! The terror of the Middle Ages
put to rout by the simplest of remedies, exorcisms a la Moliere,
in fact, flying helter-skelter, to be seen no more !
Nay ! this is assuming too much. The question is not so
simple as all that. Satan has other aspects besides, of which the
doctors see neither the highest nor the lowest, neither his grand
revolt in Science, nor those extraordinary combinations of pious
intrigue and stark impurity he contrives towards 1 700, uniting in
one conglomerate Priapus and Tartuffe.
Historians suppose themselves to know the eighteenth century,
and yet they have never observed one of its most essential
characteristics.
The more its surface, its higher levels, were civilised, illumin-
ated, saturated with light, the more hermetically sealed and closed
was the vast underlying region of the ecclesiastical world, of the
convent, of credulous womanfolk, morbidly ready to believe any-
thing and everything. In anticipation of Cagliostro, Mesmer and
the magnetisers who will come with the later years of the century,
not a few priests make a profit out of the Sorcery of a departed
age. All their talk is of bewitchments, the dread of which they
spread broadcast, and undertake to drive out devils by means of
various indecent exorcisms. Many play the wizard, well assured
the risk is small and burnings henceforth an impossibility. They
know themselves sufficiently safeguarded by the civilisation of the
times, the toleration preached by their enemies the Philosophers,
and the light indirferentism of the scoffers, who think the last
word has been said, when they have raised a laugh. But it is
just this laughing attitude which enables such-like dark schemers
to go on their way unafraid. The new spirit is that of the Regent,
246
Satan {Triumphant in Seventeenth Century
sceptical and good-naturedly tolerant. It is conspicuous in the
Lettres Persanes, and saturates through and through that all-
powerful journalist who fills the century, Voltaire. Once let
human blood flow, and his whole heart revolts ; at all else he
laughs. Little by little the guiding principle of the world at large
apparently comes to be, " Punish nothing, and make fun of
everything."
The spirit of toleration is such as to suffer Cardinal Tencin to
live openly as his own sister's husband ; such as to ensure the
ruling spirits of the convents in peaceful, undisturbed possession
of the nuns in their charge, so completely so indeed that cases
of pregnancy amongst the latter were regularly announced, and
births formally and legally declared, 1 The same spirit of toler-
ance excuses Father Apollinaire, caught in a vile and shameful
act of exorcism, 2 while Cauvrigny, the gallant Jesuit, idol of the
provincial nunneries, expiates his intrigues merely by a recall to
Paris, in other words by a summons to higher preferment.
Similar was the punishment accorded the notorious Jesuit,
Father Girard ; he deserved hanging, but was loaded with
honours instead, and died in the odour of sanctity. Indeed this
is one of the most curious occurrences of the century, marking
exactly the characteristic methods of the period, the rough-and-
ready combination of the most contradictory modes of procedure.
1 For instance, the most noble Chapter of the Canons of Pignan, who had
the honour to be represented in the "Estates" of Provence, were equally
proud of their recognised right to possess the nuns of that country. There
were sixteen canons ; and the Provost's offices received in a single year from
the nuns sixteen declarations of pregnancy (Histoire manuscrite de Besse, by
M. Renoux). This publicity had at any rate this advantage, that the especial
crime of Religious Houses, to wit infanticide, was bound to be less common.
The nuns, quietly submitting to what they held to be a necessary accident of
their profession, at the cost of a trifle of shame, were humane and good
mothers. At any rate they did not kill their children. The nuns of Pignan
put theirs out to nurse with the peasants, who were ready to adopt them,
make what use they could of them and bring them up with their own family.
Thus it conies that not a few farmer folk thereabouts are known down to the
present day as descendants of the ecclesiastical nobility of Provence.
2 Garinet, p. 344.
247
Sorceress: a tut>\> in Superstition
The perilous suavities of the Song of Songs formed, as usual, the
preface, followed up by Marie Alacoque and her ecstasies, by the
wedlock of Bleeding Hearts, seasoned with the morbid, unctuous
phrases of Molinos. Girard supplemented all this with the dia-
bolic element and the terrors of bewitchment. He was the
Devil, and the Exorcist to boot. The dreadful conclusion of the
whole affair was that the unhappy woman he so barbarously im-
molated, far from obtaining justice, was harried to her death.
Eventually she disappeared, probably imprisoned under a lettre
de cachet, and cast for the rest of her days into a living tomb.
248
CHAPTER X
FATHER GIRARD AND CHARLOTTE CADIERE
HE Jesuits were much' to be pitied. So favourably
regarded at Versailles, " masters of all they sur-
veyed " at Court, they had not the smallest prestige
in the eyes of Heaven, not the most insignificant
miracle to show. The Jansenists enjoyed an abundance at
any rate of moving legends. Unnumbered crowds of sick folk,
of the afflicted, the lame, the paralytic, found at the tomb of
the Deacon Paris a moment's healing and relief. The unhappy
French people, bowed down under an appalling succession of
scourges, the Grand Monarque, in the first place, then the
Regency and Law's wondrous system, which between them
reduced such multitudes to beggary, this unhappy people came
to implore salvation of a poor man of righteousness, virtuous if
weak-witted, a saint in spite of his many ridiculous attributes.
And when all is said and done, why jeer ? His life is indeed far
more touching than ludicrous. No need for wonder if these
good folks were moved to awe and veneration at their benefactor's
tomb, and straight forgot their ills. True the cure was hardly
ever permanent ; still, what matter ? The miracle had actually
occurred, the miracle of genuine devotion, and loving faith, and
heartfelt gratitude. Later on, an alloy of charlatanry was infused
in it all; but at that time (in 1728) these extraordinary scenes of
popular enthusiasm were still perfectly sincere.
The Jesuits would have given their ears to own the smallest of
249
Sorceress: a Stub^ in Superstition
these miracles which they refused to credit. For more than half
a century they had been at work decking with fables and pretty
tales their legend of the Sacred Heart, the story of Marie
Alacoque. For five -and -twenty or thirty years they had been
striving to persuade the world that their ally, James II., not
content with curing the King's evil (in his quality as King of
France, which he never was), amused himself after his death
in making the dumb to speak, the halt to run, the squint-eyed to
see straight. Unfortunately, after cure, their outlook was more
oblique than ever; and as for the dumb, it was discovered,
alas ! that the individual who played this part was a known and
proved impostor, a woman who had been caught red-handed
in cheatery. Her habit was to travel the countryside, and at
every chapelry renowned for the holiness of its patron saint,
to be miraculously healed and receive the alms of the edified
worshippers, going through the same performance at each suc-
cessive shrine.
For miracle-working, give us the South for choice, a land
abounding in superstitious women, quickly stirred to nervous
excitement, good subjects for somnambulism, miraculous mani-
festations, the holy stigmata, and the like.
The Jesuits had at Marseilles a Bishop of their own kidney,
Belzunce, a man of good heart and courage, famous ever since
the date of the Great Plague, but credulous and extremely
narrow-minded, under shelter of whose authority much might
be attempted that would otherwise have been over-risky. As
his right-hand man they had established a certain Jesuit from
Franche-Comte, a man of keen intelligence and no little ability,
who for all his austerity of external demeanour was yet an agree-
able preacher in the florid, somewhat worldly style ladies admire.
A true Jesuit, competent to win success in either of two ways,
whether by feminine intrigue or by the most straight-laced piety,
Father Girard had otherwise neither youth nor good looks to
recommend him. He was a man of forty-seven, tall, dry-as-dust,
tired-looking ; he was rather deaf, had a squalid look about him,
250
jfatbcr $iratf> airt Charlotte CaMere
and was for ever spitting (pp. 50, 69, 254). 1 He had been a
teacher up to the age of thirty-seven, and still retained some of
the tastes he had learned among schoolboys. For the last ten
years since the Great Plague, that is to say he had been a con-
fessor in nunneries. He had been highly successful, and had
acquired a large measure of ascendency over his penitents by
imposing on them the very regimen that seemed prima facie most
diametrically opposed to the temperament of these Provencal
nuns, viz. the doctrine and discipline of mystic self-annihilation,
passive obedience, and the absolute and utter abnegation of self.
The fearful incidents of the Plague had broken their spirit, ener-
vated their heart, and affected them with a sort of morbid languor.
The Carmelites of Marseilles, under the direction of Girard,
carried this species of mysticism to great lengths, at their head
a certain Sister Remusat, who was reputed a veritable saint.
The Jesuits, in spite of all this success, or perhaps just because
of it, removed Girard from Marseilles. They were anxious to
employ him in the task of raising the status of their House at
Toulon, which sorely needed it. Colbert's magnificent Founda-
tion, The Seminary of Naval Almoners, had been entrusted to
the Jesuits to gradually wean the young priests attached to it
from the mischievous ascendency of the Lazarist Fathers, to whose
spiritual superintendence they were in almost every instance
subject. But the two Jesuits appointed were far from competent
for the task. One was a fool, the other one (Father Sabatier)
a man of a singularly violent temper, notwithstanding his years.
He had all the blunt insolence of the old type of naval martinet,
and scorned any sort of moderation. He was blamed by people at
Toulon, not for keeping a mistress or even going with a married
woman, but with doing so openly, insolently, and outrageously, in
such sort as to drive the injured husband to despair. His chief
1 Dealing with a matter which has been the subject of so much contro-
versy, I shall quote freely, especially from a folio volume entitled, Procedure
du P. Girard tt de la Caditre, Aix, 1733. To avoid a multiplicity of foot-
notes, I merely give in my text the page of the book in question.
251
Gbc Sorceress: H Stu^ in Superstition
wish was that the latter should before all things realise his shame
and feel all the pangs of marital jealousy. Eventually things were
pushed so far that the poor man died of chagrin. 1
However, the rivals of the Jesuits afforded even greater cause
for scandal. The Observantine Fathers, who acted as spiritual
directors to the nuns of Saint Claire of Ollionles, lived in open
concubinage with their penitents ; nay ! they were not satisfied
with this iniquity, but even failed to respect the little girls who
were pupils at the nunnery. The Father Superintendent, one
Aubany, had violated one, a child of thirteen, afterwards flying
to Marseilles to escape the vengeance of her relatives.
Girard, now nominated director of the Seminary of Toulon,
was destined, by his apparent austerity of character and his very
real dexterity of management, soon to regain ascendency for the
Jesuits over a body of monks so deeply compromised and of
parish priests of small education and of a very common stamp.
In this land where men are rough and hasty, often harsh in speech
and rugged in appearance, women appreciate highly the gentle
gravity of men of the North, liking and admiring them for speak-
ing the aristocratic, the official language, French. 2
Girard on his arrival at Toulon must have known the ground
thoroughly well already. He already possessed a devoted ally
there, a certain Madame Guiol, daughter of a cabinet-maker in a
small way of business ; she was in the habit of paying occasional
visits to Marseilles, where she had a daughter in a Carmelite
convent. This woman put herself absolutely at his disposal, as
much as and more than he wished ; she was well on in years (forty-
seven), extremely hot-spirited, utterly corrupt and unscrupulous,
ready to serve him in any capacity, whatever he did or whatever
he was, be he saint or sinner.
1 Bibliotheque de la ville de Toulon, Pieces et Chansons manuscrites, I vol.
folio, an extremely curious collection.
2 That is the tongue of Northern and Central France, descended from the
old Langue d'O'il, as contrasted with the Langue d'Oc, still spoken in the
South. The latter is often called a. patois, but it is really a distinct language.
252
jfatber <Birar& anfc Charlotte Catnere
Besides her daughter in the Carmelite convent at Marseilles,
she had another who was a lay sister with the Ursulines of Toulon.
The Ursulines, a society of teaching nuns, constituted in all
localities a nucleus of social intercourse ; their parlour, which
was frequented by their pupils' mothers, formed a half-way house
between the cloister and the world outside. Here by the Sisters'
complacence, no doubt, Father Girard came in contact with the
ladies of the town, amongst the rest with a lady of forty, and
unmarried, a certain Mile. Gravier, daughter of a former Con-
tractor of Government Works in the Royal Arsenal. This lady had
a friend and familiar, a sort of shadow accompanying her wher-
ever she went, Mile. Reboul, her cousin, daughter of a ship's
captain, who was her heir and who, though of pretty near the
same age (thirty-five), quite expected to succeed to her property.
Round these two grew up by degrees a little coterie of Father
Girard's female admirers, who chose him as their Confessor.
Young girls were sometimes admitted, for instance, Mile. Cadiere,
a tradesman's daughter, Mile. Laugier, a sempstress, Mile. Bata-
relle, daughter of a waterman of the port. Books of devotion
were perused, and occasionally little suppers indulged in. But
nothing interested them so strongly as a series of letters in which
were recounted the miracles and ecstasies of Sister Remusat, who
was still living at the time. (She died in February, 1730.) What
a crown of glory for good Father Girard, who had led her so
near to Heaven ! The letters were read and admired with tears
and exclamations of delighted wonder. If not literally ecstatic
as yet, these women were surely not far from the confines of
ecstasy. And indeed, Mile. Reboul, in order to gratify her kins-
woman, was already in the habit occasionally of producing strange
phenomena in herself by the familiar device of quietly holding her
breath and pinching her nose with her fingers. 1
Of this band of women, old and young, the most serious-
minded was undoubtedly Mile. Catherine Cadiere, a delicate,
1 See the Trial ; also Swift, Mechanical Operations oj the Spirit.
253
Sorceress: a Stufc\> in Superstition
invalidish young girl of seventeen, entirely devoted to piety and
works of charity, and showing a sad, thin face, which seemed to
declare that young as she was she had felt more deeply than any
the great misfortunes of the time, the calamities of Provence and
her native Toulon. This is easily accounted for. She was born
during the terrible famine of 1709, while just at the epoch when
a girl is growing into a woman, she witnessed the appalling scenes
of the Great Plague. These two sinister events, quite beyond
the range of ordinary experience, seemed to have left a permanent
mark on her personality.
This melancholy blossom was a pure product of Toulon, of the
Toulon of that date. To understand its genesis, it is indispens-
able to recall what this town is now, and was then.
Toulon is a thoroughfare, a place of embarkation, the gateway
of a vast harbour and a gigantic naval arsenal. This is what
first strikes a traveller's eye and prevents him seeing Toulon
itself. Still there is a town there, a city of venerable antiquity.
It contains two distinct populations, officials and functionaries
from other parts, and the genuine Toulonnais, the later not over
well-disposed towards the former, envious of the government
employe and not unfrequently disgusted at the arrogance of naval
men, all this concentrated within the gloomy streets of a place
still shut in and half strangled by the narrow girdle of its fortifica-
tions. The most striking feature of the little black-browed town
is its situation midway between two great oceans of brilliancy,
the wondrous mirror of the roadstead and the majestic amphi-
theatre of its bare mountains of a dazzling grey that well-nigh
blinds your eyes at midday. All the more gloomy seem the
streets. Except such as run directly to the harbour and derive
some light from its expanse, these are in deep shadow all day long.
Grimy alleyways of small hucksters' shops, poorly set out, and the
goods all but invisible to anyone coming from the glare of day-
light, such is the general aspect. The centre of the town is a
labyrinth of intricate lanes, hiding a number of churches and old
monastic buildings, now turned into barracks. Turbulent brooks,
254
Jfatbcr (Sirarb anb Charlotte Cabiere
heavy and foul with household refuse, rush fiercely down the
middle of the narrow ways. The air is stagnant, and you are
surprised, in so dry a climate, to find so much damp everywhere.
In front of the new theatre an alley known as the Rue de FHopital
connects the Rue Royale, itself a narrow thoroughfare, with the
still narrower Rue des Canonniers (St. Sebastian), seeming at the
first glance to be a cul-de-sac. Still the sun does cast one look
into it at high noon, but finds the spot so dismal he instantly
passes overhead and restores the lane to the shadowy dimness
proper to it.
Among its black-browed houses the smallest was that inhabited
by the Sieur Cadiere, huckster and second-hand dealer. The
only entrance was through the shop, and there was one room on
each floor. The Cadieres were honest, pious folks, and Madame
Cadiere a very mirror of perfection. Nor were these good people
in absolute poverty; not only was the little house their own
property, but like most of the bourgeois of Toulon city, they
possessed a bastide. This generally includes a building of sorts
and a small rocky messuage producing a trifle of wine. In the
great days of the French navy, under Colbert and his son, the
prodigious activity of the port was highly profitable to the town.
The wealth of France poured thither in a constant stream. All
the great lords who passed that way were accompanied by their
household and domestic servants, a wasteful crew that left many
fine pickings behind. But all this came to an abrupt conclusion,
and an activity artificially fostered came to a dead stop. There
was not money enough even to pay the Arsenal artificers' wages,
while the ships of war under repair were left indefinitely on
the stocks, and the hulls eventually sold for what they would
fetch. 1 Toulon suffered severely under the effects of all this.
During the siege of 1707 the place seemed only half alive. But
how much worse the dreadful year of 1709, the '93 of Louis XIV.,
when all calamities, a cruel winter, plague and famine, were
concentrated simultaneously on the ruin of fair France ! The
1 See an excellent MS. dissertation by M. Brun.
255
Sorceress: B Stnfc^ in Superstition
trees of Provence themselves were not spared. Intercommunica-
tion ceased entirely, and the roads swarmed with starving mendi-
cants ! Toulon shuddered, ringed round with robbers who
intercepted all traffic.
To cap all, Madame Cadiere found herself pregnant in this
terrible year. She had three boys already. Of these the eldest
remained at home to help his father in the shop. The second
was a pupil at the Preachers' College, being intended for a
Dominican monk, or Jacobin, as the name was. The third was
studying for the priesthood at the Jesuit Seminary. Husband
and wife both desired a girl, while the latter prayed God she
might turn out a saint. She spent her nine months in constant
prayer, fasting or else eating nothing but rye bread. Eventually
she bore a daughter, Catherine, who was an extremely delicate
and, like her brothers, a rather unhealthy child. No doubt the
damp, ill-ventilated house, as well as the insufficient diet of a
saving and more than abstemious mother, had something to say
to -this. Her brothers suffered from glandular swellings, which
sometimes broke out into open sores, and little Catherine had
the same in her childish days. Without being exactly ill, she
showed the invalidish prettiness common with sickly children.
She grew tall without growing strong. At an age when other
girls feel their strength and activity overflowing, and experience
all the exhilaration of youth, she was already declaring, " I have
not long to live."
She had the small-pox, which left her somewhat marked. We
do not know if she was p 
