CHAPTER VI. Some Magical Prosecutions

SOME MAGICAL PROSECUTIONS

The Greek author of the allegorical Tablet of Cebes gives expression to this admirable conclusion: “There is one only real good to be desired, and this is wisdom; there is but one evil to fear, and it is madness.” Moral evil, wickedness and crime are indeed and literally mania. Father Hilarion Tissot has therefore our heartfelt sympathy when he proclaims without ceasing in his extravagantly daring pamphlets that in place of punishing criminals we must take them under our charge and cure them. But, sympathy notwithstanding reason rises in protest against excessively charitable interpretations of crime, the consequence of which would be to destroy the sanction of morality by disarming law. We liken mania to intoxication, and seeing that the latter is nearly always voluntary, we applaud the wisdom of judges who punish the misdemeanours and crimes committed in the state of drunkenness, not regarding the voluntary loss of reason as an excuse. There may come even a day when the self-induced condition will be counted as an aggravating circumstance and when the intelligent being who by his own act sets himself outside reason will find that he is also outside the pale of law. Is not law the reason of humanity? Woe to him who gets drunk, whether with wine, pride, hatred, or even love. He becomes blind, unjust, the sport of circumstance; he is a walking scourge and living fatality; he may slay or violate; he is an unchained fool, and let him be denounced as such. Society has the right of self-defence; it is more than a right, it is duty, for society has children.

These reflections are prompted by the magical prosecutions of which we have to give some account. The Church and Society have been too often charged with the judicial murder of fools. We admit that the sorcerers were fools, but theirs was the folly of perversity. If some innocent but diseased persons have perished among them, these things are misfortunes for which neither Society nor the Church can be held responsible. Every man who is condemned according to the laws of his country and the judicial forms of his time is condemned justly, his possible innocence being henceforth in the hands of God: before men he is and must remain guilty.

In a remarkable romance, called The Sorceresses’ Sabbath, Ludwig Tieck depicts a holy woman, a poor old creature outworn by macerations, mentally enfeebled by fasts and prayers, who, being full of horror at sorcerers, yet disposed by excess of humility to accuse herself of all crimes, ends in believing that she is a witch, confesses it, is convicted by error and prejudgment, and finally is burnt alive. What would such a history prove, supposing that it were true? Neither more nor less than the possibility of a judicial blunder. But if such mistakes are possible in fact they cannot be so in equity, or what would become of human justice? Socrates condemned to death might have had recourse to flight and his own judges would have furnished the means, but he respected the laws and resolved therefore to die.

The severity of certain sentences must be blamed to the laws and not the tribunals of the middle ages. Was Gilles de Laval, whose crimes and their punishment have been narrated, condemned unjustly, and must he be absolved as a fool? Were those horrible imbeciles innocent who composed philtres from the fat of little children? Moreover, Black Magic was the general mania of this unfortunate epoch. By their incessant application to questions of sorcery, the very judges occasionally ended by thinking that they also had committed the same crimes. The plague became epidemic in many localities and executions seemed to multiply the guilty.

Demonographers like Delancre, Delrio, Sprenger, Bodin, and Torreblanca give reports of many prosecutions, the details of which are equally tedious and revolting. The condemned creatures were mostly hallucinated and idiotic, but they were wicked in their idiocy and dangerous in their hallucination. Erotic passion, greed and hatred were the chief causes which brought about disorder in their reason: they were indeed capable of anything. Sprenger says that sorceresses were in league with midwives to secure dead bodies of new-born children. The midwives killed these innocents at the very moment of their birth, driving long needles into the brain. The babe was said to have been still-born and was buried as such; on the night following, the stryges dug up the ground and removed the corpse, which they stewed in a pan with narcotic and poisonous herbs, afterwards distilling this human gelatine. The liquor did duty as an elixir of long life, and the solid part—pounded and incorporated with soot and the grease of a black cat—was used for magical rubbing. The stomach turns with loathing at such abominable revelations, and pity is silenced by anger; but when one refers to the trials themselves, sees the credulity and cruelty of judges, the lying promises of mercy employed to extract admissions, the atrocious tortures, obscene examinations, shameful and ridiculous precautions, and finally the public execution, with the derisive ministrations of a priesthood which surrendered to the secular arm and asked mercy on those whom it had just condemned to death, amidst all this chaos one is forced to conclude that religion alone rests holy, but that human beings are all and equally either idiots or scoundrels.

In the year 1598 a priest of Limousin, named Pierre Aupetit, was burned alive for ridiculous confessions extracted from him by torture. In 1599 a woman named Antide Collas was burned at Dôle because there was something abnormal in her sexual conformation, and it was regarded as explicable only by a shameful intercourse with Satan. Repeatedly put to the torture, stripped, scrutinised by doctors and judges, overwhelmed with shame and suffering, the unfortunate being confessed everything that she might somehow end it all. Henri Boguet, judge of Saint-Claude, relates how he caused a woman to be tortured as a sorceress because there was a piece missing from the cross of her rosary, and it was a certain sign of witchcraft in the view of this ferocious maniac. A child of twelve years, brought up by the inquisitors, accused his own father of taking him to the Sabbath. The father died in prison as the result of his sufferings, and it was proposed to burn the boy, which was opposed by Boguet—who made a virtue of the clemency. Rollande de Vernois, thirty-five years old, was imprisoned in such a freezing dungeon that she promised to admit herself guilty of Magic if she might be allowed to go near a fire. As soon as she felt its warmth she fell into frightful convulsions, accompanied by fever and delirium. In this condition she was put to the torture, made every required statement, and was dragged in a dying condition to the stake. A storm broke out, extinguished the fire, and thereupon Boguet gloated over the sentence which he had pronounced, since she who in appearance was thus protected by heaven must really and incontestably be aided by the devil. This same judge burnt Pierre Gaudillon and Pierre le Gros for travelling by night, the one in the form of a hare and the other in that of a wolf.

But the prosecution which caused the greatest stir at the beginning of the seventeenth century was that of Messire Louis Gaufridi, curé of the parish of Accoules, at Marseilles. The scandal of this affair created a fatal precedent, which was only followed too faithfully. It was a case of priests accusing a priest, of a minister dragged before a tribunal of his associates in the ministry. Constantine had said that if he found a priest dishonouring his calling by some shameful sin he would cover him with his own purple, which was a beautiful and royal saying, for the priesthood ought to be stainless, even as justice is infallible in the presence of public morality.

In December 1610 a young woman of Marseilles went on a pilgrimage to Sainte-Baume in Provence, and there fell into ecstasy and convulsions. She was named Magdelaine de la Palud. Louise Capeau, another devotee, was similarly seized some short time after. The Dominicans and Capuchins believed that it was possession by the devil and had recourse to exorcisms. The result was that Magdelaine de la Palud and her fellow-victim presented that spectacle which was renewed so often a century later during the epidemic of convulsions. They screamed, writhed, begged to be beaten and trampled under foot. One day six men walked successively over the breast of Magdelaine without the slightest suffering on her part. While in this state she made confession of the most extraordinary licentiousness, saying that she had given herself, body and soul, to the devil, to whom she had been affianced by a priest named Gaufridi. So far from incarcerating the distracted girl, she obtained a hearing, and the exorcising monks despatched three Capuchins to Marseilles for the purpose of secretly acquainting the ecclesiastical superiors with the state of affairs at Sainte-Baume, the object, if possible, being to bring the curé Gaufridi thither and confront him with the supposed demons.

Furthermore, the monks put on record the infernal inspirations of the two hysterics, which were discourses full of ignorant and fanatical devotion, presenting religion as this was understood by the exorcists themselves. In a word, the possessed women seemed to be relating the dreams of those who exorcised them: it was precisely the phenomena of table-rapping and mediums in our own days. The devils assumed names not less incongruous than those of the spirits in America; they declaimed against printing and books, delivering sermons worthy of the most fervent and illiterate Capuchins. In the presence of demons made in their own image and their own likeness, the fathers were confirmed in the fact of the possession and in the veracity of the infernal spirits. The phantoms of their diseased imaginations assumed bodily shape and living manifestation in the two women, whose obscene admissions at once stimulated their curiosity and their indignation, full of secret lust. Such were their dispositions when the unhappy Louis Gaufridi was at length brought before them.

Gaufridi was an all too worldly priest, of agreeable countenance, weak character and more than dubious morality. He had been the confessor of Magdelaine de la Palud and had inspired her with an insatiable passion, which, being changed by jealousy into hatred, became a fatality and drew the unfortunate priest into its whirlpool of madness, by which he was carried ultimately to the stake. Whatsoever was said by the accused in his own defence was turned against him. He called on God and Christ Jesus, on the Blessed Mother of Christ and the precursor St. John Baptist; but they answered: You are excellent at reciting the Litanies of the Sabbath. By God, you understand Lucifer; by Jesus Christ, Beelzebub; by the Holy Virgin, the apostate mother of Antichrist; by St. John Baptist, the false prophet and precursor of Gog and Magog.

Gaufridi was put to the torture and promised mercy if he would sign the declarations of Magdelaine de la Palud. Distracted, circumvented, broken, the poor priest signed whatever was required; it was sufficient for his burning, and this was the object in view. This also was the frightful spectacle which the Provençal Capuchins gave to the people as a lesson in violating the privileges of the sanctuary. They shewed how priests are killed, and the people remembered later on. A rabbi who witnessed the prodigies which went before the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus exclaimed: “O Holy Temple, what is it that possesses thee, and why frighten thyself in this manner? “Neither Chair of Peter nor bishops protested against the murder of Gaufridi, but the eighteenth century was to come, bringing the Revolution in its wake.

One of the possessed women who had destroyed the curé of Accoules testified that the demon was leaving her to prepare the murder of another priest, whom she named prophetically in advance and in the absence of all personal knowledge: this was Urbain Grandier. It was then the reign of that terrible Cardinal de Richelieu, for whom absolute authority alone could guarantee the salvation of states; unfortunately his tendencies were political and subtle rather than truly Christian. One limitation which characterised this great man was a certain narrowness of heart, which made him sensible to personal offence and also implacable in revenge. And further, that which he was least ready to pardon in talent was independence; while he preferred men of parts for auxiliaries rather than flatterers, he took a certain pleasure in destroying whatsoever desired to shine apart from him. His ambition was to dominate all; Father Joseph was his right hand and Laubardemont his left.

There was then in the provinces, at Loudun, an ecclesiastic of remarkable genius and exalted character, possessed also of learning and talent but lacking in circumspection. Made to please multitudes and attract the sympathies of the great, he might on occasion have become a dangerous partisan; protestantism was at that period bestirring in France, and the curé of St. Peter’s at Loudun, predisposed to the new ideas by his dislike of ecclesiastical celibacy, might prove at the head of such a party a preacher more brilliant than Calvin and not less daring than Luther. He was named Urbain Grandier. Serious differences with his bishop had already given instances of his ability and his inflexible character, but by mischance it was maladroit ability, since from enemies who were powerful he had appealed to the King and not, unhappily, to the Cardinal. The King held that he was right, but it remained for the Cardinal to teach him how far he was wrong. Grandier meanwhile had gone back in triumph to Loudun, and had indulged in the unclerical display of entering the town bearing a branch of laurel. From that time he was lost.

The Lady-Superior of the Ursuline nuns at Loudun was named Mother Jeanne des Anges in religion, otherwise, Jeanne de Belfiel, grand-daughter of the Baron de Cose. She could not be termed fervent in piety, and her convent was not to be ranked among the strictest in the country; in particular, nocturnal scenes took place which were attributed to spirits. Relatives withdrew boarders, and the house was on the point of being denuded of all resources. Grandier was responsible for certain intrigues and was a little careless regarding them, while he was much too public a character for the idleness of a small town not to make a noise over his shortcomings. The pupils of the Ursulines heard them discussed mysteriously by their parents; the nuns spoke of them, deploring the scandal and dwelling over much upon him through whom it arose; of that which they talked by day they dreamed by night; and so it came about that at night they saw him appear in their dormitories under circumstances which were conformable with his alleged morals; they uttered cries, believed themselves obsessed, and in this manner the devil was let loose among them.

The directors of the nuns, who were mortal enemies of Grandier, did not fail to perceive the advantage they could draw from the affair in the interests of their rancour and in those of the convent. They began to perform exorcisms—at first privately and afterwards in public. The friends of Grandier felt that there was a plot hatching, and were anxious that he should exchange his benefice, in order to leave Loudun, believing that everything would quiet down when he was gone. But Grandier was brave and could not tolerate yielding to calumny; he remained therefore and was arrested one morning as he entered his church, clothed in sacerdotal vestments. He was treated forthwith as a State prisoner; his papers were seized, seals were placed on his effects, and he was conducted, under a strong guard, to the fortress at Angers. Meanwhile a dungeon was prepared for him at Loudun which seemed intended for a wild beast rather than a man. Richelieu, informed of everything, had despatched Laubardemont to make an end of Grandier and forbade the parliament to take cognisance of the affair.

If the conduct of the Curé of Saint-Pierre had been that of a worldling, the demeanour of Grandier, a prisoner on a charge of Magic, was that of a hero and a martyr: so does adversity reveal great souls, and it is much easier to withstand suffering than prosperity. He wrote to his mother: “I bear my affliction with patience and pity yours more than my own. I am very unwell, having no bed; try to have mine brought me; for if the body does not rest the mind gives way. Send me also my breviary, a bible, and St. Thomas for my consolation. For the rest, do not grieve; I hope that God will vindicate my innocence.”

There is no question that God does sooner or later take the part of persecuted innocence, but He does not invariably deliver it from enemies on earth, save indeed by death. This lesson was about to be learned by Grandier. On our own part, do not let us represent men worse than they are in fact; his enemies did not believe in his innocence; they pursued him with fury, but he whom they pursued was for them a great criminal.

The phenomena of hysteria were little understood at the time, and somnambulism was quite unknown; the convulsions of nuns; their bodily motions exceeding all normal human power; their astonishing evidences of second sight were things of a nature to convince the least credulous. A well known atheist of the day, being the Sieur de Kériolet, counsellor in the parliament of Brittany, came to witness the exorcisms and to deride them. The nuns, who had never seen him, addressed him by name and published sins which he supposed to be unknown to anyone. He was so overwhelmed that he passed from one extreme to another, like all hot-headed natures; he shed tears, made his confession and dedicated his remaining days to the strictest asceticism.

The sophistry of the exorcists of Loudun was that absurd unreason which M. de Mirville has the courage to sustain at the present day: the devil is the author of all phenomena which cannot be explained by known laws of Nature. To this illogical maxim they joined another which was, so to speak, an article of faith: the devil who has been duly exorcised is compelled to speak the truth and can therefore be admitted as a witness in the cause of justice.

The unfortunate Grandier was not therefore delivered into the hands of malefactors but rather of raving maniacs, who, strong in their rectitude of conscience, gave the fullest publicity to this incredible prosecution. Such a scandal had never afflicted the church—howling, writhing nuns, making the most obscene gestures, blaspheming, striving to cast themselves on Grandier like the Bacchantes on Orpheus; the most sacred things of religion mixed up with this hideous spectacle and drawn in the filth thereof; amidst all Grandier alone calm, shrugging his shoulders and defending himself with dignity and mildness; in fine, pallid, distraught judges, sweating profusely, and Laubardemont in his red robe, hovering over the conflict, like a vulture awaiting a corpse: such was the prosecution of Urbain Grandier.

Let us say for the honour of humanity that one is compelled to assume good faith in exorcists and judges alike, for such a conspiracy as would be involved in the legal murder of the accused is happily impossible. Monsters are as uncommon as heroes; the mass is composed of mediocrities, equally incapable of great virtues and great crimes. The holiest persons of the day believed in the possession at Loudun; even St. Vincent de Paul was not unacquainted with its history and was asked to give his opinion about it. Richelieu himself, though he might in any case have found some way of getting rid of Grandier, ended by believing him guilty. His death was the crime arising from the ignorance and prejudice of the period; it was a catastrophe rather than a murder.

We spare our readers the details of his tortures: he remained firm, resigned, patient, although confessing nothing; he did not even affect to despise his judges but prayed mildly for the exorcists to spare him: “And you, my fathers,” he said to them, “abate the rigour of my torments, and reduce not my soul to despair.” Through this moan of complaining nature, one discerns all the meekness of the Christian who forgives. To hide their emotion, the exorcists replied with invectives, and the executioners wept. Three nuns, in one of their lucid moments, cast themselves before the tribunal, crying that Grandier was innocent, but it was believed that the devil was speaking by their mouth, and their declaration only hastened the end. Urbain Grandier was burnt alive on August 18, 1634. He was patient and resigned to the end. When he was taken from the cart, his legs being broken, he fell heavily face down on the earth without uttering a single cry or groan. A Franciscan, named Father Grillau, squeezed through the crowd and raised up the sufferer, whom he embraced weeping: “I bring you,” said he, “the blessing of your mother: she and I pray God for you.” “Thank you, my father,” answered Grandier; “you alone pity me; console my poor mother and be a son unto her.” The provost’s lieutenant, deeply affected, then said to him: “Sir, forgive me the