The Sorceress, by Jules Michelet, [1939], at sacred-texts.com
The Sorceress, by Jules Michelet, [1939], at sacred-texts.com
THE Jesuits were much to be pitied. So favourably regarded at Versailles, "masters of all they surveyed" 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 Pâris 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 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 successive 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 manifestations, 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-Comté, a man of keen intelligence and no little ability, who for all his austerity of external demeanour was yet an agreeable 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,
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 confessor 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 primâ facie most diametrically opposed to the temperament of these Provençal 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, enervated 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 Rémusat, 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 Foundation, 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 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. 2
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 Ollioules, 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 speaking the aristocratic, the official language, French. 3
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.
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 halfway 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 Mlle. Gravier, daughter of a former Contractor of Government Works in the Royal Arsenal. This lady had a friend and familiar, a sort of shadow accompanying her wherever she went, Mlle. 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, Mlle. Cadière, a tradesman's daughter, Mlle. Laugier, a sempstress, Mlle. Batarelle, 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 Rémusat, 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, Mlle. Reboul, in order to gratify her kinswoman, 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 Mlle. Catherine Cadière, a delicate, 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 indispensable 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 latter not over well-disposed towards the former, envious of the government employé 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 fortifications. 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 amphitheatre 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 daylight,—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, 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 l’Hôpital 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 Cadière, huckster and second-hand dealer. The only entrance was through the shop, and there was one room on each floor. The Cadières were honest, pious folks, and Madame Cadière 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. 5 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
[paragraph continues] XIV., when all calamities, a cruel winter, plague and famine, were concentrated simultaneously on the ruin of fair France! The trees of Provence themselves were not spared. Intercommunication ceased entirely, and the roads swarmed with starving mendicants! Toulon shuddered, ringed round with robbers who intercepted all traffic.
To cap all, Madame Cadière 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 pretty, but it is very certain she was dainty and charming, possessing all the engaging contrasts of young Provençal maidens and their twofold nature. At once vivacious and dreamy, gay and melancholy, a well-conducted, pious child, with harmless interludes of frivolity. At intervals between the long church services, if she was taken to visit the bastide with other girls of her own age, she raised no difficulties
about doing as they did, singing, dancing, or touching the tambourine. But such days were rare. More often her great pleasure was to climb to the very top of the house (p. 24), to get nearer the sky and catch a glimpse of daylight, perhaps to see a little bit of sea, or a pointed summit of the great waste of surrounding mountains. These were solemn then as now, but at that date somewhat less forbidding in aspect, less bare and denuded of trees, sparsely clothed in the refreshing green of arbute trees and larches.
This dead city, at the time of the Plague, numbered 26,000 inhabitants, an enormous mass of humanity to be crowded into so minute a space. Besides, from this space must be subtracted the ground occupied by a ring of great monasteries and convents built up against the town walls, Minims, Oratorians, Jesuits, Capuchins, Recollets, Ursuline Sisters, Visitandines, Bernardines, Refuge, Good Shepherd, and right in the centre of the town the enormous House of the Dominicans. Add in the parish churches, presbyteries, episcopal palace, etc., and it will be evident the clergy filled all the room, while the people had next to nothing.
Easy to see how fiercely the disease, concentrated in so small a focus, must have burned. Moreover, its own good nature was fatal to the town, which magnanimously took in refugees from the stricken city of Marseilles. These were just as likely to bring the Plague with them as certain bales of wool which were held responsible for the introduction of the contagion. The notables were panic-stricken and on the point of flight; they were for scattering over the country, when the chief of the Consuls, M. d’Antrechaus, a brave-hearted hero, stopped them, sternly asking, "And the people, gentlemen, what is to become of them, if, in this poverty-stricken town, the rich desert the place and take their purses with them?" 6 He succeeded in staying the panic and forced everybody to remain. The horrors of Marseilles
were attributed to the free communication permitted between the inhabitants; so D’Antrechaus tried an exactly opposite system, viz. to isolate the citizens, to shut each household up in its own domicile. At the same time two enormous hospitals were established, one in the roadstead, one on the mountainside. Whoever did not go to one or the other of these was bound to remain within doors under penalty of death. D’Antrechaus for seven long months kept his stupendous wager, performing the seemingly impossible task of keeping and feeding in their own houses a population of 26,000 souls. For all this time Toulon was a sepulchre, nothing stirring all day long after the morning distribution of bread and the removal of the dead that followed it. The doctors most of them perished, and all the magistrates except D’Antrechaus. The gravediggers died to a man, and were replaced by deserters under sentence of death. These wretches displayed a savage haste and brutality; the bodies of the dead were thrown from the fourth story, head downwards, into the carts. A mother had just lost her daughter, a little girl. Horrified at the thought of seeing the poor little corpse treated in this violent fashion, she gave the men money to carry it decently downstairs. On the way the child came to itself and opened its eyes. She was taken upstairs again, and recovering completely, actually became the grandmother of the learned M. Brun, already referred to as the author of the admirable History of the Port of Toulon.
The poor little Cadière girl was then precisely the same age as this rescued victim of the Plague, viz. twelve, an age abounding with so many perils for her sex. The universal closing of the churches, the suppression of all Feasts and Holy Days (Christmas above all, so merry a time at Toulon), all this was for the child the end of the world. She seems never to have really recovered the shock, and the same is true of the town. It never lost its deserted look; all was ruin and mourning, a city of widows and orphans and crowds of desperate men. In the midst of all, a grand, a gloomy spectre, D’Antrechaus, who had witnessed
the death of all he cared for, sons, brothers, and fellow-magistrates, and who had nobly ruined himself,—so much so that he had to live at his neighbours' tables, the poor disputing among themselves the honour of feeding him.
The child informed her mother she would never wear the fine clothes she had again, and they were sold. All she cared for now was to tend the sick, and she was for ever enticing her mother to the Hospital situated at the bottom of their street. A neighbour, a little girl of fourteen, Laugier by name, had lost her father, and was living in great poverty with her widowed mother. Catherine went to see her constantly, taking her her food and clothes and everything she could. She asked her parents to pay the expenses of apprenticing Laugier to a sempstress, and such was her ascendency over their minds they did not refuse this heavy outlay. Her piety, her loving little heart, made her all-powerful. Her charity was a passion; she not only gave money, but affection as well. She would fain have made Laugier as perfect a character as herself, and took delight in having her near her, and often sharing her bed with her. Both had been received among the Daughters of St. Theresa, a tertiary order which the Carmelites had organised. Mlle. Cadière was the shining light of the affiliation, and at thirteen seemed a fully trained Carmelite Sister. She had borrowed from a Visitandine certain books of mysticism which she devoured eagerly. The girl Laugier, at fifteen, offered a marked contrast, showing no predilection for anything but eating, and looking pretty. She was this, and for this reason had been made sacristaness of the Chapel of St. Theresa,—an appointment which gave great opportunities for familiarities with the priests. So much so that when her behaviour earned her a well-deserved threat of expulsion from the congregation, a higher authority, a Vicar-General, was so indignant as to declare that, if this were done, he would lay an interdict on the chapel (pp. 36, 37).
Both the girls shared the temperament of their native Provence, one of excessive nervous excitability, and from very early
years had been subject to what were locally styled vapours of the womb. But the effects were quite different in each,—to the last degree carnal in Laugier, a greedy, indolent, violent-tempered creature, purely cerebral in the case of the pure, gentle-minded Catherine, who as the result of her ill-health or her vivid imagination absorbing her whole nature, had no conception of sex whatever. "At twenty, she was like a child of seven." All her thoughts turned to prayer and almsgiving, and she refused to entertain the idea of marriage. The mere word set her weeping, as if she had been asked to desert God.
Someone had lent her the Life of her Patron Saint, St. Catherine of Genoa, and she had bought a copy of the Château de l’Ame (Fortress of the Soul) of St. Theresa. Few Confessors cared to follow her in this excursion into mysticism, and those who talked ineptly of these holy things offended her. She could find satisfaction neither in her mother's Confessor, a priest attached to the cathedral, nor in a Carmelite Father, nor yet in the old Jesuit Sabatier. At sixteen she had as her Director a priest of St. Louis, a man of high-strung piety. She spent whole days in church, till her mother, by this time a widow and who required her help, pious woman as he was herself, used to punish her when she came home at last. But it was no fault of hers; she forgot everything in her ecstatic trances. The girls of her own age looked upon her as so saintly a being that sometimes at Mass they believed they saw the Holy Wafer, drawn by the attraction of her love and longing exercised, fly to her and enter in between her lips of its own accord.
Her two younger brothers entertained widely divergent sentiments towards Girard. The elder of the two, the one at the Preachers' College, felt for the Jesuit the antipathy characteristic of the Dominican Order. The other, who was studying for the priesthood with the Jesuits, regarded Girard as a saint and a great man, and had made him his peculiar hero. Catherine loved her youngest brother, who was a weakling in health like herself. His never-ending praises of Girard were bound to take
effect. One day she encountered him in the street, and seeing him so grave and serious and yet so kind and benignant-looking, an inner voice cried within her, Ecce homo (behold the man, predestined to direct your conscience). The following Saturday she went to confess to him; "and he told me, 'Mademoiselle, I have been expecting you.'" She was filled with wonder and emotion, never dreaming her brother might have warned him, but thinking the mysterious voice had spoken to him as well, and that both shared this celestial boon of heavenly admonitions (pp. 81, 383).
Six summer months rolled by without Girard, who confessed her every Saturday, having made any advances. The scandal attaching to the old Jesuit Sabatier was sufficiently deterrent. It would have been his more prudent course to be content with the more obscure attachment, and stick to the Guiol woman, a very mature charmer it is true, but a very devil incarnate for ardour and enterprise.
It was Charlotte herself who, in all innocence, made the first advances toward her Father Confessor. Her brother, the hotheaded Jacobin, had thought good to lend to a lady of his acquaintance, and circulate through the town, a satiric piece entitled, La Morale des Jésuites (Morals of the Jesuits). The latter soon got wind of it, and Sabatier swore he would write to Court to demand a lettre de cachet to clap the obnoxious Jacobin in prison. His sister is anxious and alarmed, and goes with tears in her eyes to beg and implore Father Girard's intervention. On her coming to him again after a short interval, he tells her, "Courage, mademoiselle; your brother has nothing to fear; I have arranged the matter." She was melted by his kindness, and Girard was not slow to perceive his advantage. A man of such influence, the King's friend, and God's favoured instrument, and who had shown himself so good and kind! What more moving for a young and generous heart? He took his courage in both hands, and said (but still in his usual equivocal phraseology), "Put yourself in my hands; give yourself up wholly and entirely
to me." Without a blush, in her angelic purity of mind, she promised "I will," understanding merely that she was to have him henceforth for sole and only director of her conscience.
What did he propose to do with the girl? Would he make her his mistress, or his tool for charlatanry? Doubtless Girard was drawn both ways, but I believe his inclination was to adopt the second alternative. He had a wide choice, and could find sensual gratification elsewhere without the same risk. Mlle. Cadière was protected by a God-fearing mother; she lived with her relations, a married brother and the two Churchmen, in a house of the most confined dimensions, the only means of entering which was through the elder brother's shop. She scarcely ever went abroad except to church. Great as was her simplicity, she divined by a sort of instinct anything that was impure and houses of a dangerous character. A band of women, penitents of the Jesuit Fathers, were fond of meeting at the top of a certain house, where they indulged in little gormandisings and foolishness of other sorts, shouting in their Provençal dialect, "Long live the Jesuiticals!" A neighbour, disturbed by the noise, came on the scene and surprised them lying flat on their bellies (p. 56), singing and eating fritters,—the expenses, it was said, being all defrayed from the alms-box. Mlle. Cadière was invited to join this coterie, but was disgusted by what she saw, and never came again.
She was only open to attack on the spiritual side, and Girard's designs seemed limited to getting the mastery of her soul. To win her subjection, to make her accept the doctrines of passive obedience he had taught at Marseilles, such apparently was all he wanted. He thought example would be more efficacious than precept, and instructed the woman Guiol, his familiar spirit and abject servant, to carry the young saint to that town, where Mlle. Cadière had a friend of her girlhood, a Carmelite nun, daughter of Madame Guiol. The astute schemer pretended, by way of inspiring her companion with confidence, that she too experienced ecstatic stirrings of spirit, and fed her with a string
of ridiculous tales. She told her, for instance, how on one occasion finding a cask of wine turned sour in her cellar, she fell to her prayers, and instantly the wine grew good again. Another time she felt a crown of thorns wounding her brow, but to comfort her the angels had served up a good dinner, which she enjoyed along with Father Girard.
Charlotte secured her mother's permission to visit Marseilles with her good friend, the excellent Madame Guiol, Madame Cadière paying expenses. It was in the hottest month of that blazing climate, in August (1729), a season when the whole countryside is burnt up, and offers a landscape of bare rocks and gravel reflecting the fierce sunlight. The poor girl's brain, parched by the heat and weakened by the fatigues of travelling, received only too readily the sinister impressions of conventual mortification. The most striking type of this was afforded by the afore-mentioned Sister Rémusat, little better than a corpse already, and who actually died shortly afterwards. Charlotte was lost in admiration of such high perfections, while her artful companion plied her with the alluring suggestion of following in her steps and succeeding to her prestige.
During her temporary absence, Girard, left behind in the hot, stifling oven of Toulon, had lamentably deteriorated. He was constantly visiting the little Laugier girl, who also thought she had ecstasies, to comfort her,—which he did so effectually that all of a sudden she found herself enciente! When finally Mlle. Cadière came back to him all spirituality and mystic ecstasy, Girard, whose feelings were widely different, entirely carnal in fact and pleasure-seeking, "cast over her a breath of desire" (pp. 6, 383). She was kindled by it, but (it is evident) in her own peculiar fashion, in a spirit of purity, holiness, and generosity, anxious to spare him from a fall, devoting herself to save him to the point of being ready to die for him (September, 1729).
One of the privileges attaching to her sanctity was a gift of seeing to the bottom of men's hearts. It had several times been her lot to discover the secret life and private morality of her
confessors, and warn them of their faults,—rebukes which some of them, astounded and disconcerted, had taken in a contrite spirit. One day during this summer, seeing Madame Guiol on her way home, she suddenly accosted her with the words, "Ah! bad woman, what have you been doing?" "And she was quite right," Guiol admitted subsequently herself. "I had just been doing a sinful act." What was this act? Probably the betrayal of Laugier to Father Girard's passion. We are strongly tempted to think so, seeing how ready she was next year to do the same with the girl Batarelle.
Laugier, who often shared Charlotte Cadière's bed, may very likely have made her the confidante of her happiness and described the holy man's love-making and fatherly caresses,—surely a harsh trial for the good child and a cause of much searching of heart. True she was thoroughly well acquainted with Girard's great axiom, That with holy men every act is holy. But on the other hand her innate sense of right and wrong and all her previous upbringing compelled her to believe that an inordinate complacency towards any created being was a mortal sin. This agonising perplexity between two contradictory doctrines was too much for the poor girl; she suffered fearful storms of doubt, and firmly believed herself possessed of the Devil.
Here again she showed the goodness of her heart. Without humiliating Girard, she told him she had the vision of a soul tormented by the lusts of the flesh and in peril of mortal sin, that she felt in her an imperative need to save this soul, to offer the Evil One victim for victim, to acquiesce in diabolic possession and sacrifice herself in lieu of the other. He raised no objection, but permitted her to be possessed, but for a year only (November, 1729).
She was aware, like everybody else in the place, of the scandalous intrigues of the old Jesuit, Father Sabatier, a reckless, insolent transgressor, without a trace of Girard's judicious prudence. She saw the contempt into which the Jesuits (whom she
counted as the pillars of the Church) could not but fall. One day she said to Girard, "I have had a vision,—a storm-tost sea, a ship full of souls, beaten about by the tempest of unclean thoughts, and on the deck two Jesuit priests. I cried to the Redeemer, whom I saw in Heaven, 'Lord! save them, and drown me . . . I take all the shipwreck on myself.' And Almighty God granted my prayer."
Never once, during the course of her trial and when Girard, now her bitterest enemy, was seeking her death by every means, did she recur to these visions. Never did she condescend to expound these parables, whose meaning was so plain, her nobility of spirit shrinking from all speech of the kind. She had vowed herself, according to her own conviction, to certain damnation. Shall we say that, out of pride, deeming herself virtually dead and unaffected by carnal emotions, she defied the uncleanness the Demon was staining the man of God with. One fact is beyond doubt, she had no precise knowledge of sensual concerns, that in all this mystery she foresaw nothing but pain and demoniac tortures. Girard was cold and cruel, utterly unworthy of such devotion. Instead of being melted, he played on her credulity by means of an ignoble trick. He slipped into the box where she kept her papers one in which God informed her that for her sake He would in very deed save the ship. But the wily priest took care not to leave this ridiculous document there; by repeated study of it she might have discovered it was a forgery. The same angel that had brought the paper carried it off again next day.
With the same want of proper feeling Girard, seeing her agitated and unable to pray, gave her unconditional leave, without a thought of possible consequences, to communicate as often as she chose, every day, in different churches. The result was to make her worse; bursting with the Demon already, she was but setting the two enemies side by side within her distracted body, where they fought an evenly matched battle. She felt as if she must die under the horrid strain; she fell in a dead
faint, remaining in this condition for several hours. By December she hardly left the house at all, being indeed pretty much confined to her bed.
Girard had only too good excuses for visiting her, and he observed considerable prudence, always getting her young brother to conduct him to her room, at any rate as far as the door. The sick-room was at the top of the house, and the girl's mother always remained discreetly in the shop downstairs. He could be alone with her as much as he pleased, and if he chose might turn the key in the lock. By this time she was very ill, and he treated her like a child, leaning forward a little over the head of the bed, taking her face between his hands and kissing her as a father might,—a caress which she invariably received with respect and affectionate gratitude.
Pure as she was, she was intensely sensitive. The slightest contact, which another girl would never have noticed, produced a condition of unconsciousness,—a mere touch near the bosom was enough. Girard observed the fact, and it suggested bad thoughts. He threw her at will into this sort of sleep, without her entertaining a thought of stopping him. Her confidence was complete; her only feeling was one of reluctance and something of shame to take such freedoms with so holy a man and waste so much of his precious time. His visits grew longer and longer, and the result to be foreseen soon followed. The poor girl, ill as she was, intoxicated Girard beyond all power or self-control. Once, on awaking, she found herself in a highly ridiculous and highly indecent posture; another time she caught him caressing her person.
She blushed, groaned, remonstrated. But he told her with the utmost effrontery, "I am your master, your God. . . . You are bound to endure all things in the name of obedience." Towards Christmas, in the festal season, he laid aside his last scruples. On waking she exclaimed, "Great God! how I have suffered!"
"I am sure you have, poor child!" he answered in a tone of pity.
[paragraph continues] Henceforth she complained less, but was never able to account to herself for what she felt in her sleep. 7
Girard understood better, but not without terror, what he had done. In January or February an only too significant sign warned him she was with child. To cap his difficulties, Laugier also found herself in the same condition. The religious meetings and picnics, so to speak, above mentioned, accompanied as they were by a somewhat indiscreet indulgence in the cheap but seductive wine of the country, had been followed primarily by a state of mental excitation naturally to be expected among so inflammable a race, by a condition of contagious ecstasy. With the more cunning and experienced it was all pretence; but with Laugier, a young girl of a sanguine and headstrong temperament, the ecstasy was real. She exhibited in her little room at home veritable excesses of delirium and swooning fits, particularly when Father Girard came to see her. Her pregnancy began a little after that of Charlotte Cadière, no doubt about the time of the Twelfth Night celebrations. 8
The danger was imminent. The girls did not live in a desert; they were not buried in a convent, where everybody was concerned to hush the matter up, but in the glaring light of an inhabited quarter,—Laugier surrounded by inquisitive friends and neighbours of her own sex, Cadière in the bosom of her own family. Her brother, the Jacobin, began to look suspiciously on the lengthy visits her confessor paid her. One day he insisted on staying by her, when Girard arrived; but the latter put him out of the room, and his mother indignantly turned her son out of the house.
Things were ripening for an explosion. No doubt but the young man, so harshly treated, driven from home, bursting with resentment, would go to complain loudly to his masters, the Preaching Fathers. The latter, quick to seize so excellent an
opportunity, would hasten to repeat the scandal, and set to work surreptitiously to rouse the town against the Jesuit. This latter took a sudden and extraordinary resolution, to retaliate by a bold stroke and save his skin by crime. The man of pleasure was turned into a man of sin.
He knew his victim intimately. He had seen on her person the traces left by the scrofulous sores she had suffered from as a child. These do not heal cleanly like an incised wound, the skin always remains reddened at the spot, exceptionally thin and tender. Such marks she had on her feet, and another in a sensitive, dangerous place, just under the breast. He conceived the devilish idea of reopening these wounds, and giving them out as stigmata, like those of St. Francis and other saints had received from Heaven, holy men who, aspiring to imitation of the Crucified and complete conformity with His blessed body, came to bear the mark of the nails and of the lance-thrust in the side. Were not the Jesuits in despair at having nothing to offer in opposition to the miracles of the Jansenists? Girard felt sure of delighted acceptation of so unexpected a miracle, and he could hardly fail to be supported by the members of his own order and their house at Toulon. One, the old Sabatier, was ready to believe anything; he had already been Charlotte's confessor, and the fact had redounded to his honour. Another, Father Grignet, was a pious fool, who would see whatever he was told to. If the Carmelite Fathers thought good to entertain any doubts, why, they should have a hint from such high quarters that they would deem it prudent to keep these to themselves. Even the Jacobin Cadière, hitherto his persistent and jealous enemy, would find it best to change his attitude, and credit a circumstance that would redound so much to the glory of his family and constitute him the brother of a saint.
"But surely," it will be objected, "the thing may be explained on natural grounds. Countless examples, perfectly well authenticated, are known of genuine stigmata." 9
Probability points the other way. Directly she noticed what had occurred, she was vexed and ashamed, fearing Girard would be annoyed at this revival of her childish complaint. She hurried to consult a neighbour, a Madame Truc, who dabbled in medicine, and bought of her (pretending it was for her young brother) an ointment that cauterised the wounds.
What method did the cruel priest employ to make the wounds? Did he use his nails? did he resort to a small knife he always had with him? Or else did he draw the blood to the surface in the first instance, as he undoubtedly did afterwards, by vigorous sucking? The victim was unconscious, but not insensible to pain; there cannot be a doubt she felt the pangs in her sleep.
She would have deemed it a deadly sin not to tell Girard everything, and however much afraid of displeasing and disgusting her friend, she informed him of the facts. He looked, saw, and began the comedy he had resolved to play, reproaching her for wishing to get cured and so opposing the will of God. "’Tis the celestial stigmata," he cried, and dropping on his knees, fell to kissing the wounds on the girl's feet. For her part, she crosses herself, bows to the earth, cannot credit the thing. Girard is only the more earnest and scolds her for her incredulity; then he makes her show him her side and is lost in admiration of the wound there. "I, too, am marked," he tells her, "but my stigmata are eternal."
Thus is she constrained to believe herself a living miracle. What helped her to acquiesce in so strange a marvel was the circumstance that Sister Rémusat had just died. She had seen her in glory, and her heart borne aloft by angels. Who was to be her successor on earth? Who was to inherit the sublime gifts that had been hers, the celestial privileges she had been so richly endowed with? Girard offered Charlotte Cadière this succession, and corrupted her by appealing to her pride.
Henceforth she was a changed woman. In a spirit of vainglory she sanctified all she experienced in the way of bodily
derangements. Repulsions and shudderings natural to pregnancy, but the meaning of which she utterly failed to grasp, she put down to violent activities of the Spirit within her. The first day of Lent, being at table with her family, she suddenly beholds the Lord. "I would fain lead you to the Desert," he tells her; "to have you share in the ineffable ardours of the Forty Days, to have you share in my pain and agony. . . ." The vision left her trembling, afraid to think of the sufferings she must undergo. But she, and she only, can be sacrifice in herself for a whole world of sinners. She dreams of blood, sees nothing but blood, beholds Jesus as it were a sieve distilling blood. She spat blood herself, and lost still more in another way. But simultaneously her nature seemed transformed, and the more she suffered, the more she began to feel the pricks of love. On the twentieth day of Lent she sees her own name joined with Girard's. Then at last pride, stirred and stimulated under the new feeling that had come over her, pride teaches her comprehension of the especial domination Mary (Womanhood) has over God.
She knows how much the angel is inferior to the least and lowliest saint, whether male or female. She sees the palace of the Almighty's glory, and is joined in union with the Lamb of God! . . . To cap her illusion, she feels herself lifted from the ground, rises several feet in the air. She can scarce believe it, but a credible witness, Mlle. Gravier, assures her of the fact. All the neighbours come to marvel and adore, Girard bringing with him his colleague Grignet, who drops on his knees and weeps for joy.
Not venturing to see her every day at home, Girard would have her pay frequent visits to the Church of the Jesuit Fathers. Thither she would drag her feeble limbs at one o'clock, after the morning services were over, during the dinner hour. No one was in the building at that time, and Girard gave himself up, before the altar, in front of the cross, to transports which the abominable sacrilege only made more ardent. Did his victim feel no scruples? Can she really have been hoodwinked? Her conscience
would seem, with all her exalted enthusiasm, which was still sincere and genuine enough, to have already grown somewhat dulled and darkened. Underlying the bleeding stigmata, the cruel favours of the celestial bridegroom, she began to find mysterious compensations. Her swoons were blissful periods, in which she declared she enjoyed agonies of ineffable delight and a mystic flood of grace, culminating "at last in perfect and complete consent" (p. 425).
At first she was surprised and agitated at these novel experiences, and spoke of them to Madame Guiol. But the latter only smiled, telling her she was a little fool to make so much of nothing, and adding cynically that she felt just the same things herself.
Thus did these faithless friends do their best to corrupt a young girl of great natural goodness, and whose belated senses only awoke at last under the odious, overmastering constraint of religious authority misapplied.
Two things stir our sympathy in her pious dreams. The first is the pure and holy ideal she formed in her own mind of a union of faithful hearts, firmly believing she saw the name of Girard and her own united together for all eternity in the Book of Life. Another touching feature is the way her kind heart, her pretty childish ways, show through all her aberrations. On Palm Sunday, seeing all assembled round the merry domestic board, she wept for three hours without stopping to think that "on the same day nobody invited Jesus to dinner."
Nearly all through Lent she was all but unable to eat, her stomach rejecting even the little food she did take. During the last fortnight of the time she fasted rigorously, and reached the last degree of weakness. Will it be believed that Girard, far from leaving the dying girl to breathe her last breath in peace, actually began to practise fresh violence upon her? He had prevented her wounds from closing; and now a new one made its appearance in her right side. Finally, on Good Friday, to crown the cruel farce, he made her wear a crown of iron wire, which,
piercing her forehead, set drops of blood coursing down her face. It was all done with hardly an attempt at secrecy. First of all he cut off her long hair, which he carried away with him. The crown he had ordered of a certain Bitard, a tradesman of the port, who made bird-cages. She never showed herself to those who came to see her wearing this crown; only the effects were visible, the drops of blood staining her face red. The marks of these were imprinted on napkins, and the Veronicas thus manufactured were taken away by Girard to be presented no doubt to pious clients of his.
The girl's mother was involved in spite of herself in the imposture. Nevertheless she began to be afraid of Father Girard, becoming more and more convinced the man was capable of anything, while someone (very likely Madame Guiol), very much in his secrets, had told her that, if she said one word, her daughter would not have twenty-four hours to live.
As for Charlotte herself, she never spoke anything but the truth on this point. In the account she dictated of the events of this Lenten season she says expressly it was a crown with sharp points, which was pressed down on her head, and so caused the bleeding.
Nor did she make any concealment where the little crosses she was in the habit of giving her visitors came from. According to a pattern Girard supplied her with, she ordered these from one of her relatives, a carpenter in the Arsenal.
She lay, on Good Friday, for four-and-twenty hours in a swoon (which they called an ecstasy), given up to Girard's tender mercies, and various debilitating and dangerous practices on his part. Already he saw this saint and martyr, this miraculous and transfigured being, showing more and more evident marks of pregnancy. He desired, yet feared, the violent solution of the difficulty by means of abortion. This he tried to provoke by a daily administration of perilous potions and certain reddish-brown powders.
Her death would have been most satisfactory to him, and the best solution of his embarrassments. Failing this, he would like to have removed her from her mother's influence, and buried her in a convent. He was well acquainted with these establishments, and like Picart (see above in the Louviers affair), with what adroitness and discretion things of the sort are hushed up within their walls! He wanted to send her either to the Carthusian nunnery of Prémole, or to the house of St. Claire of Ollioules. He even broached the subject on Good Friday but she seemed so feeble they dared not let her leave her bed. Eventually, four days after Easter, Girard being present in her bedroom, she had a painful evacuation, and was suddenly relieved of a heavy lump of what appeared to be coagulated blood. Girard took up the vessel, went to the window, and carefully examined it. But the girl, who had no suspicions about what had occurred, called the serving-maid, and gave her the vessel to empty. "What foolish rashness!" Girard could not help exclaiming, and he was imprudent enough to repeat the same remark again afterwards (pp. 54, 388, etc.).
We do not possess equally precise details with regard to Laugier's miscarriage. She first noticed the fact of her pregnancy during this same Lent, having previously experienced strange convulsions and the beginnings of stigmata of a ludicrous sort, one being a small wound she had given herself with a pair of scissors when working at her trade as a seamstress, the other an open cutaneous sore in the side (p. 38). Suddenly her pious ecstasies turned into blasphemous despair. She spat on the crucifix; she cried out against Girard, screaming, "Where is he, that devilish father, who has brought me to this pass? . . . It was easy enough to abuse a poor girl of twenty-two! . . . Where is he? He should come here, and not leave me in the lurch like this." The women about her were themselves Girard's mistresses. They went in search of him, but he was afraid to face the angry transports of the girl he had betrayed.
[paragraph continues] The good dames, whose interest it was to minimise the scandal, could surely find some means of settling the matter quietly without his interfering.
Was Girard a wizard, as was alleged at a later stage? Really the hypothesis would seem almost credible when we see how easily the man, without being either young or handsome, had fascinated so many female hearts. But strangest of all was the fact that, after compromising himself so deeply, he could still defy public opinion. For the time being he seemed to have bewitched the whole town.
As a matter of fact, the Jesuits were recognised as being immensely powerful, so that no one cared to join issue with them. It was even deemed a trifle dangerous to speak ill of them in whispers. The main body of ecclesiastics consisted of comparatively insignificant monks belonging to Mendicant Orders, possessing neither influential connections nor high-placed protectors. Even the Carmelites, for all their jealousy and the chagrin they felt at losing Charlotte Cadière, even they said nothing. The girl's brother, the young Jacobin, moved by his mother's scared remonstrances, fell back on measures of politic circumspection, made friends with Girard, and eventually became his creature as completely as the other brother had done,—going so far even as to second him in carrying out an extraordinary manœuvre calculated to foster a belief that Girard was possessed of the gift of prophecy.
Any small opposition he had to fear was from the very individual he seemed to have the most completely subjugated. Charlotte, though still his obedient servant, yet began to exhibit some faint signs of an independence soon to assert itself. On April 30th, during a country expedition which Girard had politely organised for his lady friends, and to which, in company with Madame Guiol, he sent his band of young devotees, Charlotte Cadière fell into a state of profound reverie. Moved by the beauties of springtide, so especially delightful in these parts, she
lifted up her heart to God, declaring with an accent of genuine piety, "You only, my Lord and Saviour! . . . I want no one but you only! . . . Your angels cannot content me." Then presently, one of her companions, and a very light-hearted young woman, having in Provençal fashion hung a little tambourine round her neck, Charlotte did as the rest did, romped, danced, threw a rug round her by way of girdle, played the strolling gipsy, and generally indulged in a hundred innocent frivolities.
She was strangely moved. In May she got her mother's leave to make a journey to La Sainte-Baume to visit the church of the Magdalene, the saint par excellence of penitent young women. Girard allowed her to go, but only under escort of two trusty emissaries to look after her, viz. Guiol and Reboul. On the road, however, though still falling occasionally into the old ecstasies, she was evidently grown weary of being the passive instrument of the fierce spirit (infernal or divine) which troubled her peace. The termination of her year of diabolical possession was now approaching; and, indeed, she appeared to have regained her emancipation already. Once outside the gloomy streets of her native Toulon, which cast so strong a spell over her spirit, and restored to the free air of the country, to the sights of Nature and the light of the sun, the captive recovered her own soul, made head against the alien soul indwelling in her, dared to be herself and exercise her own free will. This was far from edifying the two spies Girard had set over her, who immediately on returning from this brief expedition (from May 17th to 22nd) warned him of the alteration. This he was able to verify for himself; for she struggled now against the state of ecstasy, reluctant it would seem to obey any impulses but those of reason and common sense.
He had supposed her his, by his personal fascination, by his authority as a priest, last but not least by the fact of possession and carnal habit. Now he found his hold was gone; the tender soul, which after all had not so much been conquered as surreptitiously
surprised, was reasserting its natural bent. This wounded him to the quick; his old trade of schoolmaster, the despotism he had wielded over children whom he could chastise at will, and subsequently over nuns not less at his mercy, had left deep in his heart a harsh, jealous love of domineering. He made up his mind to regain his power over Charlotte Cadière at any cost, and punish her first essay at revolt,—if revolt it can be called, this timid aspiration of a downtrodden soul to lift its head again.
On May 22nd, when, as her habit was, she confessed to him, he refused her absolution, saying she was so much to blame he must next day inflict a great, a very great penance on her.
What penance was it to be? Fasting? But she was already weak and exhausted. Long prayers, another usual form of penance, were not approved of by the Quietists; in fact, directors holding their tenets actually forbade them. There only remained corporal punishment, the discipline of the rod. This was very generally, indeed lavishly employed—in convents no less than in schools, being short, sharp, and easy of application. In rude and simple times the church itself was often the scene of such executions; and we see in the old Fabliaux, those naïve records of mediæval manners and customs, how the priest, after confessing husband and wife, would proceed without more ado on the spot, behind the confessional box, to lay the lash across their backs. Schoolboys, monks, nuns, all were chastised in the same homely fashion. 10
Girard felt sure a girl like Charlotte Cadière, unused to humiliation, and modest in the highest degree (all she had undergone was in her sleep and unconsciously to herself ), would suffer excessively from a shameful chastisement, which would infallibly break her spirit and destroy whatever spring was yet left her. She was bound perhaps to be even more deeply mortified than another would have been, to suffer (if the truth must be told) in her vanity as a woman. She had borne so much, fasted so rigorously!—and then her miscarriage had come as a climax. Her body, naturally delicate, seemed little better than a shadow. The more certain was she to dread letting any part of her poor emaciated, marred, and aching person be seen. Her legs were swollen, and she suffered from a little infirmity of the flesh that could not but humiliate her extremely.
We have not the heart to relate in detail what followed. It may be read in the three depositions she made, so naïve and so manifestly sincere. Not being under oath, she makes it a duty to declare even matters which it was for her own interest to conceal, even such as might be most cruelly abused to her own disadvantage.
First Deposition, made in reply to unexpected questioning before the Ecclesiastical Judge, who was sent to pay her a surprise visit; here we have throughout words springing naturally from a young and innocent heart, speaking as in face of God Himself.
Second Deposition, before the King, that is to say, before the magistrate representing him, the King's "Lieutenant Civil and Military" at Toulon.
Third and Last Deposition, before the High Court of the Parlement of Aix (pp. 5, 12, 384 of the "Trial" folio).
Observe that all three, in remarkably close agreement, are printed at Aix, under the eyes of her enemies, in a volume, the intention of which is (as I shall prove later on) to minimise Girard's criminality and draw the reader's mind to every circumstance unfavourable to Charlotte Cadière. And yet whoever
issued it has found himself unable to help giving these depositions, which tell so crushingly against the man he favours.
With monstrous inconsistency, Girard first terrorised the unhappy child, then with a brusque change of front, shamefully and barbarously took foul advantage of her panic fear. 11
There is no question here of love as an extenuating circumstance. Far from it; he did not love her, which adds to the horror of it all. We have seen the cruel drugs he administered, and shall presently see how he abandoned her in her need. He begrudged her her superiority to the other degraded women he had to do with; he hated her for having (how innocently!) tempted him and compromised his reputation. Above all, he could never forgive her for keeping her soul her own. His only wish was to break her spirit; yet he was filled with hope to hear her say, "I feel I shall not live long,"—a phrase she often made use of now. Scoundrel and libertine!—showering dishonouring kisses on her poor broken body, longing she were well dead all the while!
How did he account to her for these atrocious contrasts of caresses and cruelty? Did he represent them as trials of her patience and tests of obedience? Or did he appeal boldly to the real basis, the fundamental doctrine, of Molinos’ teaching, "That it is by dint of sinning sin must be killed?" Did she believe it all? Did she not realise at all that these pretensions of justice, expiation, penitence, were nothing more nor less than a cloak for licentiousness?
After a while she preferred not to realise it, in the extraordinary crisis of moral deterioration she underwent after May 23rd, and in June, under the effects of the hot, enervating time of year. She owned him her master, partly from fear of him, partly out of a strange, slavish sort of love, persisting in the farce of receiving at his hands day by day light penances for her
lapses. Girard treated her very cavalierly, not even taking the trouble to hide from her his relations with other women. He was for sending her to a convent. Meantime she was his plaything; and knowing this, she yet suffered him to have his will of her. Weaker and weaker, more and more debilitated by repeated shame and suffering, a prey to ever-increasing melancholy, she had little left to live for, and would often repeat the words (no ill tidings to Girard), "Ah! I feel, I feel I shall die before very long!"
231:1 Dealing with a matter which has been the subject of so much controversy, I shall quote freely,—especially from a folio volume entitled, Procédure du P. Girard et de la Cadière, Aix, 1733. To avoid a multiplicity of footnotes, I merely give in my text the page of the book in question.
232:2 Bibliothèque de la ville de Toulon, Pièces et Chansons manuscrites, 1 vol. folio,—an extremely curious collection.
232:3 That is the tongue of Northern and Central France, descended from the old Langue d’Oïl, 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.
233:1 See the Trial; also Swift, Mechanical Operations of the Spirit.
235:5 See an excellent MS. dissertation by M. Brun.
237:6 See M. d’Antrechaus’ book, and the excellent little pamphlet by M. Gustave Lambert.
247:7 pp. 5, 12, etc.
247:8 pp. 37, 113.
248:9 See in particular A. Maury, Magie.
256:10 The Dauphin himself was whipped cruelly. The young Boufflers (a boy of fifteen) died of chagrin at having suffered the same indignity (Saint-Simon). The prioress of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, threatened by her superior "with disciplinary chastisement," appealed to the King; for the credit of the convent she was relieved of the disgrace of a public whipping, but sent back to the superior for proper measures to be taken, and doubtless the punishment was duly inflicted on the quiet. By degrees it came to be recognised more and more how dangerous and immoral the practice was. Fear and shame led to degrading supplications and unworthy compromises. This had come out only too clearly in the famous trial which under the Emperor Joseph revealed the secret places of the Jesuit colleges, the report of which trial was reprinted later under Joseph II., and again in our own day.
258:11 This is put in Greek in the book of Depositions, and falsified twice over, on p. 6 and again on p. 389, in order to extenuate Girard's guilt. The most exact version here is that of her deposition before the "Lieutenant-Criminal" of Toulon, pp. 12 sqq.