CHAPTER I.

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LA SORCIÈRE.

J. MICHELET.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY WOODFALL AND KINDER,

ANGEL COURT, SKINNER STREET.

THE WITCH OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

FROM THE FRENCH OF J. MICHELET.

BY L. J. TROTTER.

(_The only Authorized English Translation._)

LONDON:

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.,

STATIONERS' HALL COURT.

MDCCCLXIII.

PREFACE.

In this translation of a work rich in the raciest beauties and defects

of an author long since made known to the British public, the present

writer has striven to recast the trenchant humour, the scornful

eloquence, the epigrammatic dash of Mr. Michelet, in language not all

unworthy of such a word-master. How far he has succeeded others may be

left to judge. In one point only is he aware of having been less true

to his original than in theory he was bound to be. He has slurred or

slightly altered a few of those passages which French readers take as

a thing of course, but English ones, because of their different

training, are supposed to eschew. A Frenchman, in short, writes for

men, an Englishman rather for drawing-room ladies, who tolerate

grossness only in the theatres and the columns of the newspapers. Mr.

Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details,

moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with

themes of general talk. The coarsest of these have been pruned away,

but enough perhaps remain to startle readers of especial prudery. The

translator, however, felt that he had no choice between shocking

these and sinning against his original. Readers of a larger culture

will make allowance for such a strait, will not be so very frightened

at an amount of plain-speaking, neither in itself immoral, nor, on the

whole, impertinent. Had he docked his work of everything condemned by

prudish theories, he might have made it more conventionally decent;

but Michelet would have been puzzled to recognize himself in the poor

maimed cripple that would then have borne his name.

Nor will a reader of average shrewdness mistake the religious drift of

a book suppressed by the Imperial underlings in the interests neither

of religion nor of morals, but merely of Popery in its most outrageous

form. If its attacks on Rome seem, now and then, to involve

Christianity itself, we must allow something for excess of warmth, and

something for the nature of inquiries which laid bare the rotten

outgrowths of a religion in itself the purest known among men. In

studying the so-called Ages of Faith, the author has only found them

worthy of their truer and older title, the Ages of Darkness. It is

against the tyranny, feudal and priestly, of those days, that he

raises an outcry, warranted almost always by facts which a more

mawkish philosophy refuses to see. If he is sometimes hasty and

onesided; if the Church and the Feudal System of those days had their

uses for the time being; it is still a gain to have the other side of

the subject kept before us by way of counterpoise to the doctrines

now in vogue. We need not be intolerant; but Rome is yet alive.

Taken as a whole, Mr. Michelet's book cannot be called unchristian.

Like most thoughtful minds of the day, he yearns for some nobler and

larger creed than that of the theologians; for a creed which,

understanding Nature, shall reconcile it with Nature's God. Nor may he

fairly be called irreverent for talking, Frenchman like, of things

spiritual with the same freedom as he would of things temporal.

Perhaps in his heart of hearts he has nearly as much religious

earnestness as they who call Dr. Colenso an infidel, and shake their

heads at the doubtful theology of Frederic Robertson. At any rate, no

translator who should cut or file away so special a feature of French

feeling would be doing justice to so marked an original.

For English readers who already know the concise and sober volumes of

their countryman, Mr. Wright, the present work will offer mainly an

interesting study of the author himself. It is a curious compound of

rhapsody and sound reason, of history and romance, of coarse realism

and touching poetry, such as, even in France, few save Mr. Michelet

could have produced. Founded on truth and close inquiry, it still

reads more like a poem than a sober history. As a beautiful

speculation, which has nearly, but not quite, grasped the physical

causes underlying the whole history of magic and illusion in all ages,

it may be read with profit as well as pleasure in this age of vulgar

spirit-rapping. But the true history of Witchcraft has yet to be

written by some cooler hand.

L. T.

_May 11th, 1863._

CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 1

To One Wizard Ten Thousand Witches 1

The Witch was the sole Physician of the People 4

Terrorism of the Middle Ages 5

The Witch was the Offspring of Despair 9

She in her Turn created Satan 12

Satan, Prince of the World, Physician, Innovator 13

His School--of Witches, Shepherds, and Headsmen 15

His Decline 16

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.--THE DEATH OF THE GODS 19

Christianity thought the World was Dying 20

The World of Demons 24

The Bride of Corinth 26

CHAPTER II.--WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR 30

The People make their own Legends 31

But are forbidden to do so any more 35

The People guard their Territory 38

But are made Serfs 40

CHAPTER III.--THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE 43

Ancient Communism of the _Villa_ 43

The Hearth made independent 44

The Wife of the Serf 45

Her Loyalty to the Olden Gods 46

The Goblin 53

CHAPTER IV.--TEMPTATIONS 57

The Serf invokes the Spirit of Hidden Treasures 58

Feudal Raids 59

The Wife turns her Goblin into a Devil 66

CHAPTER V.--POSSESSION 69

The Advent of Gold in 1300 69

The Woman makes Terms with the Demon of Gold 71

Impure Horrors of the Middle Ages 75

The Village Lady 78

Hatred of the Lady of the Castle 84

CHAPTER VI.--THE COVENANT 88

The Woman-serf gives Herself up to the Devil 90

The Moor and the Witch 93

CHAPTER VII.--THE KING OF THE DEAD 96

The dear Dead are brought back to Earth 97

The Idea of Satan is softened 103

CHAPTER VIII.--THE PRINCE OF NATURE 106

The Thaw in the Middle Ages 108

The Witch calls forth the East 109

She conceives Nature 112

CHAPTER IX.--THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN 116

Diseases of the Middle Ages 116

The _Comforters_, or Solaneæ 121

The Middle Ages anti-natural 128

CHAPTER X.--CHARMS AND PHILTRES 131

Blue-Beard and Griselda 133

The Witch consulted by the Castle 137

Her Malice 141

CHAPTER XI.--THE REBELS' COMMUNION--SABBATHS--THE BLACK MASS 143

The old Half-heathen Sabasies 144

The Four Acts of the Black Mass 150

Act I. The Introit, the Kiss, the Banquet 151

Act II. The Offering: the Woman as Altar and Host 153

CHAPTER XII.--THE SEQUEL--LOVE AND DEATH--SATAN DISAPPEARS 157

Act III. Love of near Kindred 158

Act IV. Death of Satan and the Witch 165

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.--THE WITCH IN HER DECLINE--SATAN MULTIPLIED AND MADE

COMMON 168

Witches and Wizards employed by the Great 172

The Wolf-lady 174

The last Philtre 179

CHAPTER II.--PERSECUTIONS 180

The Hammer for Witches 181

Satan Master of the World 193

CHAPTER III.--CENTURY OF TOLERATION IN FRANCE: REACTION 198

Spain begins when France stops short 199

Reaction: French Lawyers burn as many as the Priests 203

CHAPTER IV.--THE WITCHES OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY 207

They give Instructions to their own Judges 212

CHAPTER V.--SATAN TURNS PRIEST 218

Jokes of the Modern Sabbath 221

CHAPTER VI.--GAUFFRIDI: 1610 228

Wizard Priests prosecuted by Monks 232

Jealousies of the Nuns 234

CHAPTER VII.--THE DEMONIACS OF LOUDUN: URBAN GRANDIER 255

The Vicar a fine Speaker, and a Wizard 263

Sickly Rages of the Nuns 264

CHAPTER VIII.--THE DEMONIACS OF LOUVIERS--MADELINE BAVENT 277

Illuminism: the Devil a Quietist 277

Fight between the Devil and the Doctor 285

CHAPTER IX.--THE DEVIL TRIUMPHS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 294

CHAPTER X.--FATHER GIRARD AND LA CADIÈRE 303

CHAPTER XI.--CADIÈRE IN THE CONVENT 339

CHAPTER XII.--TRIAL OF CADIÈRE 367

EPILOGUE 395

Can Satan and Jesus be reconciled? 396

The Witch is dead, but the Fairy will live again 399

Oncoming of the Religious Revival 399

INTRODUCTION.

It was said by Sprenger, before the year 1500, "_Heresy of witches_,

not of wizards, must we call it, for these latter are of very small

account." And by another, in the time of Louis XIII.: "To one wizard,

ten thousand witches."

"Witches they are by nature." It is a gift peculiar to woman and her

temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy

she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her

subtlety, by a roguishness often whimsical and beneficent, she becomes

a Witch; she works her spells; does at any rate lull our pains to rest

and beguile them.

All primitive races have the same beginning, as so many books of

travel have shown. While the man is hunting and fighting, the woman

works with her wits, with her imagination: she brings forth dreams and

gods. On certain days she becomes a seeress, borne on boundless wings

of reverie and desire. The better to reckon up the seasons, she

watches the sky; but her heart belongs to earth none the less. Young

and flower-like herself, she looks down toward the enamoured flowers,

and forms with them a personal acquaintance. As a woman, she beseeches

them to heal the objects of her love.

In a way so simple and touching do all religion and all science begin.

Ere long everything will get parcelled out; we shall mark the

beginning of the professional man as juggler, astrologer, or prophet,

necromancer, priest, physician. But at first the woman is everything.

A religion so strong and hearty as that of Pagan Greece begins with

the Sibyl to end in the Witch. The former, a lovely maiden in the

broad daylight, rocked its cradle, endowed it with a charm and glory

of its own. Presently it fell sick, lost itself in the darkness of the

Middle Ages, and was hidden away by the Witch in woods and wilds:

there, sustained by her compassionate daring, it was made to live

anew. Thus, of every religion woman is the mother, the gentle

guardian, the faithful nurse. With her the gods fare like men: they

are born and die upon her bosom.

* * * * *

Alas! her loyalty costs her dear. Ye magian queens of Persia;

bewitching Circe; sublime Sibyl! Into what have ye grown, and how

cruel the change that has come upon you! She who from her throne in

the East taught men the virtues of plants and the courses of the

stars; who, on her Delphic tripod beamed over with the god of light,

as she gave forth her oracle to a world upon its knees;--she also it

is whom, a thousand years later, people hunt down like a wild beast;

following her into the public places, where she is dishonoured,

worried, stoned, or set upon the burning coals!

For this poor wretch the priesthood can never have done with their

faggots, nor the people with their insults, nor the children with

their stones. The poet, childlike, flings her one more stone, for a

woman the cruellest of all. On no grounds whatever, he imagines her to

have been always old and ugly. The word "witch" brings before us the

frightful old women of _Macbeth_. But their cruel processes teach us

the reverse of that. Numbers perished precisely for being young and

beautiful.

The Sibyl foretold a fortune, the Witch accomplishes one. Here is the

great, the true difference between them. The latter calls forth a

destiny, conjures it, works it out. Unlike the Cassandra of old, who

awaited mournfully the future she foresaw so well, this woman herself

creates the future. Even more than Circe, than Medea, does she bear in

her hand the rod of natural miracle, with Nature herself as sister and

helpmate. Already she wears the features of a modern Prometheus. With

her industry begins, especially that queen-like industry which heals

and restores mankind. As the Sibyl seemed to gaze upon the morning, so

she, contrariwise, looks towards the west; but it is just that gloomy

west, which long before dawn--as happens among the tops of the

Alps--gives forth a flush anticipant of day.

Well does the priest discern the danger, the bane, the alarming

rivalry, involved in this priestess of nature whom he makes a show of

despising. From the gods of yore she has conceived other gods. Close

to the Satan of the Past we see dawning within her a Satan of the

Future.

* * * * *

The only physician of the people for a thousand years was the Witch.

The emperors, kings, popes, and richer barons had indeed their doctors

of Salerno, their Moors and Jews; but the bulk of people in every

state, the world as it might well be called, consulted none but the

_Saga_, or wise-woman. When she could not cure them, she was insulted,

was called a Witch. But generally, from a respect not unmixed with

fear, she was called good lady or fair lady (_belle dame_--_bella

donna_[1]), the very name we give to the fairies.

[1] Whence our old word _Beldam_, the more courteous meaning

of which is all but lost in its ironical one.--TRANS.

Soon there came upon her the lot which still befalls her favourite

plant, belladonna, and some other wholesome poisons which she employed

as antidotes to the great plagues of the Middle Ages. Children and

ignorant passers-by would curse those dismal flowers before they knew

them. Affrighted by their questionable hues, they shrink back, keep

far aloof from them. And yet among them are the _comforters_

(Solaneæ) which, when discreetly employed, have cured so many, have

lulled so many sufferings to sleep.

You find them in ill-looking spots, growing all lonely and ill-famed

amidst ruins and rubbish-heaps. Therein lies one other point of

resemblance between these flowers and her who makes use of them. For

where else than in waste wildernesses could live the poor wretch whom

all men thus evilly entreated; the woman accursed and proscribed as a

poisoner, even while she used to heal and save; as the betrothed of

the Devil and of evil incarnate, for all the good which, according to

the great physician of the Renaissance, she herself had done? When

Paracelsus, at Basle, in 1527, threw all medicine into the fire,[2] he

avowed that he knew nothing but what he had learnt from witches.

[2] Alluding to the bonfire which Paracelsus, as professor of

medicine, made of the works of Galen and Avicenna.--TRANS.

This was worth a requital, and they got it. They were repaid with

tortures, with the stake. For them new punishments, new pangs, were

expressly devised. They were tried in a lump; they were condemned by a

single word. Never had there been such wastefulness of human life. Not

to speak of Spain, that classic land of the faggot, where Moor and Jew

are always accompanied by the Witch, there were burnt at Trèves seven

thousand, and I know not how many at Toulouse; five hundred at Geneva

in three months of 1513; at Wurtzburg eight hundred, almost in one

batch, and fifteen hundred at Bamberg; these two latter being very

small bishoprics! Even Ferdinand II., the savage Emperor of the Thirty

Years' War, was driven, bigot as he was, to keep a watch on these

worthy bishops, else they would have burned all their subjects. In the

Wurtzburg list I find one Wizard a schoolboy, eleven years old; a

Witch of fifteen: and at Bayonne two, infernally beautiful, of

seventeen years.

Mark how, at certain seasons, hatred wields this one word _Witch_, as

a means of murdering whom she will. Woman's jealousy, man's greed,

take ready hold of so handy a weapon. Is such a one wealthy? _She is a

Witch._ Is that girl pretty? _She is a Witch._ You will even see the

little beggar-woman, La Murgui, leave a death-mark with that fearful

stone on the forehead of a great lady, the too beautiful dame of

Lancinena.

The accused, when they can, avert the torture by killing themselves.

Remy, that excellent judge of Lorraine, who burned some eight hundred

of them, crows over this very fear. "So well," said he, "does my way

of justice answer, that of those who were arrested the other day,

sixteen, without further waiting, strangled themselves forthwith."

* * * * *

Over the long track of my History, during the thirty years which I

have devoted to it, this frightful literature of witchcraft passed to

and fro repeatedly through my hands. First I exhausted the manuals of

the Inquisition, the asinine foolings of the Dominicans. (_Scourges_,

_Hammers_, _Ant-hills_, _Floggings_, _Lanterns_, &c., are the titles

of their books.) Next, I read the Parliamentarists, the lay judges who

despised the monks they succeeded, but were every whit as foolish

themselves. One word further would I say of them here: namely, this

single remark, that, from 1300 to 1600, and yet later, but one kind of

justice may be seen. Barring a small interlude in the Parliament of

Paris, the same stupid savagery prevails everywhere, at all hours.

Even great parts are of no use here. As soon as witchcraft comes into

question, the fine-natured De Lancre, a Bordeaux magistrate and

forward politician under Henry IV., sinks back to the level of a

Nider, a Sprenger; of the monkish ninnies of the fifteenth century.

It fills one with amazement to see these different ages, these men of

diverse culture, fail in taking the least step forward. Soon, however,

you begin clearly to understand how all were checked alike, or let us

rather say blinded, made hopelessly drunk and savage, by the poison of

their guiding principle. That principle lies in the statement of a

radical injustice: "On account of one man all are lost; are not only

punished but worthy of punishment; _depraved and perverted

beforehand_, dead to God even before their birth. The very babe at the

breast is damned."

Who says so? Everyone, even Bossuet himself. A leading doctor in Rome,

Spina, a Master of the Holy Palace, formulates the question neatly:

"Why does God suffer the innocent to die?--For very good reasons:

even if they do not die on account of their own sins, they are always

liable to death as guilty of the original sin." (_De Strigibus_, ch.

9.)

From this atrocity spring two results, the one pertaining to justice,

the other to logic. The judge is never at fault in his work: the

person brought before him is certainly guilty, the more so if he makes

a defence. Justice need never beat her head, or work herself into a

heat, in order to distinguish the truth from the falsehood. Everyhow

she starts from a foregone conclusion. Again, the logician, the

schoolman, has only to analyse the soul, to take count of the shades

it passes through, of its manifold nature, its inward strifes and

battles. He had no need, as we have, to explain how that soul may grow

wicked step by step. At all such niceties and groping efforts, how, if

even he could understand them, would he laugh and wag his head! And,

oh! how gracefully then would quiver those splendid ears which deck

his empty skull!

Especially in treating of the _compact with the Devil_, that awful

covenant whereby, for the poor profit of one day, the spirit sells

itself to everlasting torture, we of another school would seek to

trace anew that road accursed, that frightful staircase of mishaps and

crimes, which had brought it to a depth so low. Much, however, cares

our fine fellow for all that! To him soul and Devil seem born for each

other, insomuch that on the first temptation, for a whim, a desire, a

passing fancy, the soul will throw itself at one stroke into so

horrible an extremity.

* * * * *

Neither do I find that the moderns have made much inquiry into the

moral chronology of witchcraft. They cling too much to the connection

between antiquity and the Middle Ages; connection real indeed, but

slight, of small importance. Neither from the magician of old, nor the

seeress of Celts and Germans, comes forth the true Witch. The harmless

"Sabasies" (from Bacchus Sabasius), and the petty rural "Sabbath" of

the Middle Ages, have nothing to do with the Black Mass of the

fourteenth century, with the grand defiance then solemnly given to

Jesus. This fearful conception never grew out of a long chain of

tradition. It leapt forth from the horrors of the day.

At what date, then, did the Witch first appear? I say unfalteringly,

"In the age of despair:" of that deep despair which the gentry of the

Church engendered. Unfalteringly do I say, "The Witch is a crime of

their own achieving."

I am not to be taken up short by the excuses which their sugary

explanations seem to furnish. "Weak was that creature, and giddy, and

pliable under temptation. She was drawn towards evil by her lust."

Alas! in the wretchedness, the hunger of those days, nothing of that

kind could have ruffled her even into a hellish rage. An amorous

woman, jealous and forsaken, a child hunted out by her step-mother, a

mother beaten by her son (old subjects these of story), if such as

they were ever tempted to call upon the Evil Spirit, yet all this

would make no Witch. These poor creatures may have called on Satan,

but it does not follow that he accepted them. They are still far, ay,

very far from being ripe for him. They have not yet learned to hate

God.

* * * * *

For the better understanding of this point, you should read those

hateful registers which remain to us of the Inquisition, not only in

the extracts given by Llorente, by Lamothe-Langon, &c., but in what

remains of the original registers of Toulouse. Read them in all their

flatness, in all their dryness, so dismal, so terribly savage. At the

end of a few pages you feel yourself stricken with a chill; a cruel

shiver fastens upon you; death, death, death, is traceable in every

line. Already you are in a bier, or else in a stone cell with mouldy

walls. Happiest of all are the killed. The horror of horrors is the

_In pace_. This phrase it is which comes back unceasingly, like an

ill-omened bell sounding again and again the heart's ruin of the

living dead: always we have the same word, "Immured."

Frightful machinery for crushing and flattening; most cruel press for

shattering the soul! One turn of the screw follows another, until, all

breathless, and with a loud crack, it has burst forth from the machine

and fallen into the unknown world.

On her first appearance the Witch has neither father nor mother, nor

son, nor husband, nor family. She is a marvel, an aerolith, alighted

no one knows whence. Who, in Heaven's name, would dare to draw near

her?

Her place of abode? It is in spots impracticable, in a forest of

brambles, on a wild moor where thorn and thistle intertwining forbid

approach. The night she passes under an old cromlech. If anyone finds

her there, she is isolated by the common dread; she is surrounded, as

it were, by a ring of fire.

And yet--would you believe it?--she is a woman still. This very life

of hers, dreadful though it be, tightens and braces her woman's

energy, her womanly electricity. Hence, you may see her endowed with

two gifts. One is the _inspiration of lucid frenzy_, which in its

several degrees, becomes poesy, second-sight, depth of insight,

cunning simplicity of speech, the power especially of believing in

yourself through all your delusions. Of such a gift the man, the

wizard, knows nothing. On his side no beginning would have been made.

From this gift flows that other, the sublime power of _unaided

conception_, that parthenogenesis which our physiologists have come to

recognise, as touching fruitfulness of the body in the females of

several species; and which is not less a truth with regard to the

conceptions of the spirit.

* * * * *

By herself did she conceive and bring forth--what? A second self, who

resembles her in his self-delusions. The son of her hatred, conceived

upon her love; for without love can nothing be created. For all the

alarm this child gave her, she has become so well again, is so happily

engrossed with this new idol, that she places it straightway upon her

altar, to worship it, yield her life up to it, and offer herself up as

a living and perfect sacrifice. Very often she will even say to her

judge, "There is but one thing I fear; that I shall not suffer enough

for him."--(_Lancre._)

Shall I tell you what the child's first effort was? It was a fearful

burst of laughter. Has he not cause for mirth on his broad prairie,

far away from the Spanish dungeons and the "immured" of Toulouse? The

whole world is his _In pace_. He comes, and goes, and walks to and

fro. His is the boundless forest, his the desert with its far

horizons, his the whole earth, in the fulness of its teeming girdle.

The Witch in her tenderness calls him "_Robin mine_," the name of that

bold outlaw, the joyous Robin Hood, who lived under the green bowers.

She delights too in calling him fondly by such names as _Little

Green_, _Pretty-Wood_, _Greenwood_; after the little madcap's

favourite haunts. He had hardly seen a thicket when he took to playing

the truant.[3]

[3] Here, as in some other passages, the play of words in the

original is necessarily lost.--TRANS.

* * * * *

What astounds one most is, that at one stroke the Witch should have

achieved an actual Being. He bears about him every token of reality.

We have heard and seen him; anyone could draw his likeness.

The Saints, those darling sons of the house, with their dreams and

meditations make but little stir; _they look forward waitingly_, as

men assured of their part in Elysium. What little energy they have is

all centred in the narrow round of _Imitation_; a word which condenses

the whole of the Middle Ages. He on the other hand--this accursed

bastard whose only lot is the scourge--has no idea of waiting. He is

always seeking and will never rest. He busies himself with all things

between earth and heaven. He is exceedingly curious; will dig, dive,

ferret, and poke his nose everywhere. At the _consummatum est_ he only

laughs, the little scoffer! He is always saying "Further," or

"Forward." Moreover, he is not hard to please. He takes every rebuff;

picks up every windfall. For instance, when the Church throws out

nature as impure and doubtworthy, Satan fastens on her for his own

adornment. Nay, more; he employs her, and makes her useful to him as

the fountain-head of the arts; thus accepting the awful name with

which others would brand him; to wit, the _Prince of the World_.

Some one rashly said, "Woe to those who laugh." Thus from the first

was Satan intrusted with too pretty a part; he had the sole right of

laughing, and of declaring it an _amusement_--rather let us say _a

necessity_; for laughing is essentially a natural function. Life

would be unbearable if we could not laugh, at least in our

afflictions.

Looking on life as nothing but a trial, the Church is careful not to

prolong it. Her medicine is resignation, the looking for and the hope

of death. A broad field this for Satan! He becomes the physician, the

healer of the living. Better still, he acts as comforter: he is good

enough to shew us our dead, to call up the shades of our beloved.

One more trifle the Church rejected, namely, logic or free reason.

Here was a special dainty, to which _the other_ greedily helped

himself. The Church had carefully builded up a small _In pace_,

narrow, low-roofed, lighted by one dim opening, a mere cranny. That

was called _The School_. Into it were turned loose a few shavelings,

with this commandment, "Be free." They all fell lame. In three or four

centuries the paralysis was confirmed, and Ockham's standpoint is the

very same as Abélard's.[4]

[4] Abélard flourished in the twelfth, William of Ockham

(pupil of Duns Scotus) in the fourteenth century.--TRANS.

It is pleasant to track the Renaissance up to such a point. The

Renaissance took place indeed, but how? Through the Satanic daring of

those who pierced the vault, through the efforts of the damned who

were bent on seeing the sky. And it took place yet more largely away

from the schools and the men of letters, in the _School of the Bush_,

where Satan had set up a class for the Witch and the shepherd.

Perilous teaching it was, if so it happened; but the very dangers of

it heightened the eager passion, the uncontrollable yearning to see

and to know. Thus began those wicked sciences, physic debarred from

poisoning, and that odious anatomy. There, along with his survey of

the heavens, the shepherd who kept watch upon the stars applied also

his shameful nostrums, made his essays upon the bodies of animals. The

Witch would bring out a corpse stolen from the neighbouring cemetery;

and, for the first time, at risk of being burned, you might gaze upon

that heavenly wonder, "which men"--as M. Serres has well said--"are

foolish enough to bury, instead of trying to understand."

Paracelsus, the only doctor whom Satan admitted there, saw yet a third

worker, who, stealing at times into that dark assembly, displayed

there his surgical art. This was the surgeon of those happy days, the

headsman stout of hand, who could play patly enough with the fire,

could break bones and set them again; who if he killed, would

sometimes save, by hanging one only for a certain time.

By the more sacrilegious of its essays this convict university of

witches, shepherds, and headsmen, emboldened the other, obliged its

rival to study. For everyone wanted to live. The Witch would have got

hold of everything: people would for ever have turned their backs on

the doctor. And so the Church was fain to suffer, to countenance these

crimes. She avowed her belief in _good poisons_ (Grillandus). She

found herself driven and constrained to allow of public dissections.

In 1306 one woman, in 1315 another, was opened and dissected by the

Italian Mondino. Here was a holy revelation, the discovery of a

greater world than that of Christopher Columbus! Fools shuddered or

howled; but wise men fell upon their knees.

* * * * *

With such conquests the Devil was like enough to live on. Never could

the Church alone have put an end to him. The stake itself was useless,

save for some political objects.

Men had presently the wit to cleave Satan's realm in twain. Against

the Witch, his daughter, his bride, they armed his son, the doctor.

Heartily, utterly as the Church loathed the latter, yet to extinguish

the Witch, she established his monopoly nevertheless. In the

fourteenth century she proclaimed, that any woman who dared to heal

others _without having duly studied_, was a witch and should therefore

die.

But how was she to study in public? Fancy what a scene of mingled fun

and horror would have occurred, if the poor savage had risked an

entrance into the schools! What games and merry-makings there would

have been! On Midsummer Day they used to chain cats together and burn

them in the fire. But to tie up a Witch in that hell of caterwaulers,

a Witch yelling and roasting, what fun it would have been for that

precious crew of monklings and cowlbearers!

In due time we shall see the decline of Satan. Sad to tell, we shall

find him pacified, turned into _a good old fellow_. He will be robbed

and plundered, until of the two masks he wore at the Sabbath, the

dirtiest is taken by Tartuffe. His spirit is still everywhere, but of

his bodily self, in losing the Witch he lost all. The wizards were

only wearisome.

Now that we have hurled him so far downwards, are we fully aware of

what has happened? Was he not an important actor, an essential item in

the great religious machine just now slightly out of gear? All

organisms that work properly are twofold, twosided. Life can otherwise

not go on at all. It is a kind of balance between two forces,

opposite, symmetrical, but unequal; the lower answering to the other

as its counterpoise. The higher chafes at it, seeks to put it down. So

doing, it is all wrong.

When Colbert, in 1672, got rid of Satan, with very little ceremony, by

forbidding the judges to entertain pleas of witchcraft, the sturdy

Parliament of Normandy with its sound Norman logic pointed out the

dangerous drift of such a decision. The Devil is nothing less than a

dogma holding on to all the rest. If you meddle with the Eternally

Conquered, are you not meddling with the Conqueror likewise? To doubt

the acts of the former, leads to doubting the acts of the second, the

miracles he wrought for the very purpose of withstanding the Devil.

The pillars of heaven are grounded in the Abyss. He who thoughtlessly

removes that base infernal, may chance to split up Paradise itself.

Colbert could not listen, having other business to mind. But the Devil

perhaps gave heed and was comforted. Amidst such minor means of

earning a livelihood as spirit-rapping or table-turning, he grows

resigned, and believes at least that he will not die alone.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

THE DEATH OF THE GODS.

Certain authors have declared that, shortly before the triumph of

Christianity, a voice mysterious ran along the shores of the Ægean

Sea, crying, "Great Pan is dead!" The old universal god of nature was

no more; and great was the joy thereat. Men fancied that with the

death of nature temptation itself was dead. After the troublings of so

long a storm, the soul of man was at length to find rest.

Was it merely a question touching the end of that old worship, its

overthrow, and the eclipse of old religious rites? By no means.

Consult the earliest Christian records, and in every line you may read

the hope, that nature is about to vanish, life to be extinguished;

that the end of the world, in short, is very near. It is all over with

the gods of life, who have spun out its mockeries to such a length.

Everything is falling, breaking up, rushing down headlong. The whole

is becoming as nought: "Great Pan is dead!"

It was nothing new that the gods must perish. Many an ancient worship

was grounded in that very idea. Osiris, Adonis die indeed in order to

rise again. On the stage itself, in plays which were only acted for

the feast days of the gods, Æschylus expressly averred by the mouth of

Prometheus, that some day they should suffer death: but how? As

conquered and laid low by the Titans, the ancient powers of nature.

Here, however, things are quite otherwise. Alike in generals and

particulars, in the past and the future, would the early Christians

have cursed Nature herself. So utterly did they condemn her, as to

find the Devil incarnate in a flower. Swiftly may the angels come

again, who erst overwhelmed the cities of the Dead Sea! Oh, that they

may sweep off, may crumple up as a veil the hollow frame of this

world; may at length deliver the saints from their long trial!

The Evangelist said, "The day is coming:" the Fathers, "It is coming

immediately." From the breaking-up of the Empire and the invasion of

the Barbarians, St. Augustin draws the hope that very soon no city

would remain but the city of God.

And yet, how hard of dying is the world; how stubbornly bent on

living! Like Hezekiah, it begs a respite, one turn more of the dial.

Well, then, be it so until the year one thousand. But thereafter, not

one day.

* * * * *

Are we quite sure of what has been so often repeated, that the gods of

old had come to an end, themselves wearied and sickened of living;

that they were so disheartened as almost to send in their resignation;

that Christianity had only to blow upon these empty shades?

They point to the gods in Rome; they point out those in the Capitol,

admitted there only by a kind of preliminary death, on the surrender,

I might say, of all their local pith; as having disowned their

country, as having ceased to be the representative spirits of the

nations. In order to receive them, indeed, Rome had performed on them

a cruel operation: they were enervated, bleached. Those great

centralized deities became in their official life the mournful

functionaries of the Roman Empire. But the decline of that Olympian

aristocracy had in no wise drawn down the host of home-born gods, the

mob of deities still keeping hold of the boundless country-sides, of

the woods, the hills, the fountains; still intimately blended with the

life of the country. These gods abiding in the heart of oaks, in

waters deep and rushing, could not be driven therefrom.

Who says so? The Church. She rudely gainsays her own words. Having

proclaimed their death, she is indignant because they live. Time after

time, by the threatening voice of her councils[5] she gives them

notice of their death--and lo! they are living still.

[5] See Mansi, Baluze; Council of Arles, 442; of Tours, 567;

of Leptines, 743; the Capitularies, &c., and even Gerson,

about 1400.

"They are devils."--Then they must be alive. Failing to make an end of

them, men suffer the simple folk to clothe, to disguise them. By the

help of legends they come to be baptized, even to be foisted upon the

Church. But at least they are converted? Not yet. We catch them

stealthily subsisting in their own heathen character.

Where are they? In the desert, on the moor, in the forest? Ay; but,

above all, in the house. They are kept up by the most intimate

household usages. The wife guards and hides them in her household

things, even in her bed. With her they have the best place in the

world, better than the temple,--the fireside.

* * * * *

Never was revolution so violent as that of Theodosius. Antiquity shows

no trace of such proscription of any worship. The Persian

fire-worshipper might, in the purity of his heroism, have insulted the

visible deities, but he let them stand nevertheless. He greatly

favoured the Jews, protecting and employing them. Greece, daughter of

the light, made merry with the gods of darkness, the tunbellied

Cabiri; but yet she bore with them, adopted them as workmen, even to

shaping out of them her own Vulcan. Rome in her majesty welcomed not

only Etruria, but even the rural gods of the old Italian labourer. She

persecuted the Druids, but only as the centre of a dangerous national

resistance.

Christianity conquering sought and thought to slay the foe. It

demolished the schools, by proscribing logic and uprooting the

philosophers, whom Valens slaughtered. It razed or emptied the

temples, shivered to pieces the symbols. The new legend would have

been propitious to the family, had the father not been cancelled in

Saint Joseph; had the mother been set up as an educatress, as having

morally brought forth Jesus. A fruitful road there was, but abandoned

at the very outset through the effort to attain a high but barren

purity.

So Christianity turned into that lonely path where the world was going

of itself; the path of a celibacy in vain opposed by the laws of the

emperors. Down this slope it was hurled headlong by the establishment

of monkery.

But in the desert was man alone? The Devil kept him company with all

manner of temptations. He could not help himself, he was driven to

create anew societies, nay whole cities of anchorites. We all know

those dismal towns of monks which grew up in the Thebaid; how wild,

unruly a spirit dwelt among them; how deadly were their descents on

Alexandria. They talked of being troubled, beset by the Devil; and

they told no lie.

A huge gap was made in the world; and who was to fill it? The

Christians said, The Devil, everywhere the Devil: _ubique dæmon_.[6]

[6] See the Lives of the Desert Fathers, and the authors

quoted by A. Maurie, _Magie_, 317. In the fourth century, the

Messalians, thinking themselves full of devils, spat and blew

their noses without ceasing; made incredible efforts to spit

them forth.

Greece, like all other nations, had her _energumens_, who were sore

tried, possessed by spirits. The relation there is quite external; the

seeming likeness is really none at all. Here we have no spirits of any

kind: they are but black children of the Abyss, the ideal of

waywardness. Thenceforth we see them everywhere, those poor

melancholics, loathing, shuddering at their own selves. Think what it

must be to fancy yourself double, to believe in that _other_, that

cruel host who goes and comes and wanders within you, making you roam

at his pleasure among deserts, over precipices! You waste and weaken

more and more; and the weaker grows your wretched body, the more is it

worried by the devil. In woman especially these tyrants dwell, making

her blown and swollen. They fill her with an infernal _wind_, they

brew in her storms and tempests, play with her as the whim seizes

them, drive her to wickedness, to despair.

And not ourselves only, but all nature, alas! becomes demoniac. If

there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest!

The light we think so pure teems with children of the night. The

heavens themselves--O blasphemy!--are full of hell. That divine

morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an

Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend

Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into

temptation by her light so soft and mild.

That such a society should wax wroth and terrible is not surprising.

Indignant at feeling itself so weak against devils, it persecutes them

everywhere, in the temples, at the altars once of the ancient worship,

then of the heathen martyrs. Let there be more feasts?--they will

likely be so many gatherings of idolaters. The Family itself becomes

suspected: for custom might bring it together round the ancient Lares.

And why should there be a family?--the empire is an empire of monks.

But the individual man himself, thus dumb and isolated though he be,

still watches the sky, still honours his ancient gods whom he finds

anew in the stars. "This is he," said the Emperor Theodosius, "who

causes famines and all the plagues of the empire." Those terrible

words turned the blind rage of the people loose upon the harmless

Pagan. Blindly the law unchained all its furies against the law.

Ye gods of Eld, depart into your tombs! Get ye extinguished, gods of

Love, of Life, of Light! Put on the monk's cowl. Maidens, become nuns.

Wives, forsake your husbands; or, if ye will look after the house, be

unto them but cold sisters.

But is all this possible? What man's breath shall be strong enough to

put out at one effort the burning lamp of God? These rash endeavours

of an impious piety may evoke miracles strange and monstrous. Tremble,

guilty that ye are!

Often in the Middle Ages will recur the mournful tale of the Bride of

Corinth. Told at a happy moment by Phlegon, Adrian's freedman, it

meets us again in the twelfth, and yet again in the sixteenth century,

as the deep reproof, the invincible protest of nature herself.

* * * * *

"A young man of Athens went to Corinth, to the house of one who had

promised him his daughter. Himself being still a heathen, he knew not

that the family which he thought to enter had just turned Christian.

It is very late when he arrives. They are all gone to rest, except the

mother, who serves up for him the hospitable repast and then leaves

him to sleep. Dead tired, he drops down. Scarce was he fallen asleep,

when a figure entered the room: 'tis a girl all clothed and veiled in

white; on her forehead a fillet of black and gold. She sees him. In

amazement she lifts her white hand: 'Am I, then, such a stranger in

the house already? Alas, poor recluse!... But I am ashamed, and

withdraw. Sleep on.'

"'Stay, fair maiden! Here are Bacchus, Ceres, and with thee comes

Love. Fear not, look not so pale!'

"'Ah! Away from me, young man! I have nothing more to do with

happiness. By a vow my mother made in her sickness my youth and my

life are bound for ever. The gods have fled, and human victims now are

our only sacrifices.'

"'Ha! can it be thou, thou, my darling betrothed, who wast given me

from my childhood? The oath of our fathers bound us for evermore under

the blessing of heaven. Maiden, be mine!'

"'No, my friend, not I. Thou shalt have my younger sister. If I moan

in my chilly dungeon, do thou in her arms think of me, of me wasting

away and thinking only of thee; of me whom the earth is about to cover

again.'

"'Nay, I swear by this flame, the torch of Hymen, thou shalt come home

with me to my father. Rest thee, my own beloved.'

"As a wedding-gift he offers her a cup of gold. She gives him her

chain, but instead of the cup desires a curl of his hair.

"It is the hour of spirits; her pale lip drinks up the dark blood-red

wine. He too drinks greedily after her. He calls on the god of Love.

She still resisted, though her poor heart was dying thereat. But he

grows desperate, and falls weeping on the couch. Anon she throws

herself by his side.

"'Oh! how ill thy sorrow makes me! Yet, if thou wast to touch me----

Oh, horror!--white as the snow, and cold as ice, such, ah me! is thy

bride.'

"'I will warm thee again: come to me, wert thou come from the very

grave.'

"Sighs and kisses many do they exchange.

"'Dost thou feel how warm I am?'

"Love twines and holds them fast. Tears mingle with their joy. She

changes with the fire she drinks from his mouth: her icy blood is

aglow with passion; but the heart in her bosom will not beat.

"But the mother was there listening. Soft vows, cries of wailing and

of pleasure.

"'Hush, the cock is crowing: to-morrow night!' Then with kiss on kiss

they say farewell.

"In wrath the mother enters; sees what? Her daughter. He would have

hidden her, covered her up. But freeing herself from him, she grew

from the couch up to the roof.

"'O mother, mother, you grudge me a pleasant night; you would drive me

from this cosy spot! Was it not enough to have wrapped me in my

winding-sheet and borne me to the grave? A greater power has lifted up

the stone. In vain did your priests drone over the trench they dug for

me. Of what use are salt and water, where burns the fire of youth? The

earth cannot freeze up love. You made a promise; I have just reclaimed

my own.

"'Alas, dear friend, thou must die: thou wouldst but pine and dry up

here. I have thy hair; it will be white to-morrow.... Mother, one last

prayer! Open my dark dungeon, set up a stake, and let the loving one

find rest in the flames. Let the sparks fly upward and the ashes

redden. We will go to our olden gods.'"[7]

[7] Here I have suppressed a shocking phrase. Goethe, so

noble in the form, is not so in the spirit of his poem. He

spoils the marvel of the legend by sullying the Greek

conception with a horrible Slavish idea. As they are weeping,

he turns the maiden into a vampire. She comes because she

thirsts for blood, that she may suck the blood from his

heart. And he makes her coldly say this impious and unclean

thing: "When I have done with him, I will pass on to others:

the young blood shall fall a prey to my fury."

In the Middle Ages this story put on a grotesque garb, by way

of frightening us with the _Devil Venus_. On the finger of

her statue a young man imprudently places a ring, which she

clasps tight, guarding it like a bride, and going in the

night to his couch, to assert her rights. He cannot rid

himself of his infernal spouse without an exorcism. The same

tale, foolishly applied to the Virgin, is found in the

_Fabliaux_. If my memory does not mislead me, Luther also, in

his "Table Talk," takes up the old story in a very coarse

way, till you quite smell the body. The Spanish Del Rio

shifts the scene of it to Brabant. The bride dies shortly

before her marriage; the death-bells are rung. The bridegroom

rushed wildly over the country. He hears a wail. It is she

herself wandering about the heath. "Seest thou not"--she

says--"who leads me?" But he catches her up and bears her

home. At this point the story threatened to become too

moving; but the hard inquisitor, Del Rio, cuts the thread.

"On lifting her veil," says he, "they found only a log of

wood covered with the skin of a corpse." The Judge le Loyer,

silly though he be, has restored the older version.

Thenceforth these gloomy taletellers come to an end. The

story is useless when our own age begins; for then the bride

has triumphed. Nature comes back from the grave, not by

stealth, but as mistress of the house.

CHAPTER II.

WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR.

"Be ye as newborn babes (_quasi modo geniti infantes_); be thoroughly

childlike in the innocence of your hearts; peaceful, forgetting all

disputes, calmly resting under the hand of Christ." Such is the kindly

counsel tendered by the Church to this stormy world on the morning

after the great fall. In other words: "Volcanoes, ruins, ashes, and

lava, become green. Ye parched plains, get covered with flowers."

One thing indeed gave promise of the peace that reneweth: the schools

were all shut up, the way of logic forsaken. A method infinitely

simple for the doing away with argument, offered all men a gentle

slope, down which they had nothing to do but go. If the creed was

doubtful, the life was all traced out in the pathway of the legend.

From first to last but the one word _Imitation_.

"Imitate, and all will go well. Rehearse and copy." But is this the

way to that true childhood which quickens the heart of man, which

leads back to its fresh and fruitful springs? In this world that is to

make us young and childlike, I see at first nothing but the tokens of

age; only cunning, slavishness, want of power. What kind of

literature is this, confronted with the glorious monuments of Greeks

and Jews? We have just the same literary fall as happened in India

from Brahminism to Buddhism; a twaddling flow of words after a noble

inspiration. Books copy from books, churches from churches, until they

cannot so much as copy. They pillage from each other: Aix-la-Chapelle

is adorned with the marbles torn from Ravenna. It is the same with all

the social life of those days. The bishop-king of a city, the savage

king of a tribe, alike copy the Roman magistrates. Original as one

might deem them, our monks in their monasteries simply restored their

ancient _Villa_, as Chateaubriand well said. They had no notion either

of forming a new society or of fertilizing the old. Copying from the

monks of the East, they wanted their servants at first to be

themselves a barren race of monkling workmen. It was in spite of them

that the family in renewing itself renewed the world.

Seeing how fast these oldsters keep on oldening; how in one age we

fall from the wise monk St. Benedict down to the pedantic Benedict of

Aniane;[8] we feel that such gentry were wholly guiltless of that

great popular creation which bloomed amidst ruins; namely, the Lives

of the Saints. If the monks wrote, it was the people made them. This

young growth might throw out some leaves and flowers from the crannies

of an old Roman ruin turned into a convent: but most assuredly not

thence did it first arise. Its roots go deep into the ground: sown by

the people and cultivated by the family, it takes help from every

hand, from men, from women, from children. The precarious, troubled

life of those days of violence, made these poor folk imaginative,

prone to believe in their own dreams, as being to them full of

comfort: strange dreams withal, rich in marvels, in fooleries; absurd,

but charming.

[8] Benedict founded a convent at Aniane in Languedoc, in the

reign of Charlemagne.

These families, isolated in forests and mountains, as we still see

them in the Tyrol or the Higher Alps, and coming down thence but once

a week, never wanted for illusions in the desert. One child had seen

this, some woman had dreamed that. A new saint began to rise. The

story went abroad in the shape of a ballad with doggrel rhymes. They

sang and danced to it of an evening at the oak by the fountain. The

priest, when he came on Sunday to perform service in the woodland

chapel, found the legendary chant already in every mouth. He said to

himself, "After all, history is good, is edifying.... It does honour

to the Church. _Vox populi, vox Dei!_--But how did they light upon

it?" He could be shown the true, the irrefragable proofs of it in some

tree or stone which had witnessed the apparition, had marked the

miracle. What can he say to that?

Brought back to the abbey, the tale will find a monk good for nothing,

who can only write; who is curious, believes everything, no matter

how marvellous. It is written out, broidered with his dull rhetoric,

and spoilt a little. But now it has come forth, confirmed and

consecrated, to be read in the refectory, ere long in the church.

Copied, loaded and overloaded with ornaments chiefly grotesque, it

will go on from age to age, until at last it comes to take high rank

in the Golden Legend.

* * * * *

When those fair stories are read again to us in these days, even as we

listen to the simple, grave, artless airs into which those rural

peoples threw all their young heart, we cannot help marking a great

inspiration; and we are moved to pity as we reflect upon their fate.

They had taken literally the touching advice of the Church: "Be ye as

newborn babes." But they gave to it a meaning, the very last that one

would dream of finding in the original thought. As much as

Christianity feared and hated Nature, even so much did these others

cherish her, deeming her all guileless, hallowing her even in the

legends wherewith they mingled her up.

Those _hairy_ animals, as the Bible sharply calls them, animals

mistrusted by the monks who fear to find devils among them, enter in

the most touching way into these beautiful stories; as the hind, for

instance, who refreshes and comforts Geneviève of Brabant.

Even outside the life of legends, in the common everyday world, the

humble friends of his hearth, the bold helpmates of his work, rise

again in man's esteem. They have their own laws,[9] their own

festivals. If in God's unbounded goodness there is room for the

smallest creatures, if He seems to show them a pitying preference,

"Wherefore," says the countryman, "should my ass not have entered the

church? Doubtless, he has his faults, wherein he only resembles me the

more. He is a rough worker, but has a hard head; is intractable,

stubborn, headstrong; in short, just like myself."

[9] See J. Grimm, _Rechts Alterthümer_, and my _Origines du

Droit_.

Thence come those wonderful feasts, the fairest of the Middle Ages;

feasts of _Innocents_, of _Fools_, of the _Ass_. It is the people

itself, moreover, which, in the shape of an ass, draws about its own

image, presents itself before the altar, ugly, comical, abased.

Verily, a touching sight! Led by Balaam, he enters solemnly between

Virgil and the Sibyl;[10] enters that he may bear witness. If he

kicked of yore against Balaam, it was that before him he beheld the

sword of the ancient law. But here the law is ended, and the world of

grace seems opening its two-leaved gate to the mean and to the simple.

The people innocently believes it all. Thereon comes that lofty hymn,

in which it says to the ass what it might have said to itself:--

"Down on knee and say _Amen_!

Grass and hay enough hast eaten.

Leave the bad old ways, and go!

* * * * *

For the new expels the old:

Shadows fly before the noon:

Light hath hunted out the night."

[10] According to the ritual of Rouen. See Ducange on the

words _Festum_ and _Kalendæ_: also Martène, iii. 110. The

Sibyl was crowned and followed by Jews and Gentiles, by

Moses, the Prophets, Nebuchadnezzar, &c. From a very early

time, and continually from the seventh to the seventeenth

century, the Church strove to proscribe the great people's

feasts of the Ass, of Innocents, of Children, and of Fools.

It never succeeded until the advent of the modern spirit.

How bold and coarse ye are! Was it this we asked of you, children rash

and wayward, when we told you to be as children? We offered you milk;

you are drinking wine. We led you softly, bridle in hand, along the

narrow path. Mild and fearful, ye hesitated to go forward: and now,

all at once, the bridle is broken; the course is cleared at a single

bound. Ah! how foolish we were to let you make your own saints; to

dress out the altar; to deck, to burden, to cover it up with flowers!

Why, it is hardly distinguishable! And what we do see is the old

heresy condemned of the Church, _the innocence of nature_: what am I

saying?--a new heresy, not like to end to-morrow, _the independence of

man_.

Listen and obey!--You are forbidden to invent, to create. No more

legends, no more new saints: we have had enough of them. You are

forbidden to introduce new chants in your worship: inspiration is not

allowed. The martyrs you would bring to light should stay modestly

within their tombs, waiting to be recognised by the Church. The

clergy, the monks are forbidden to grant the tonsure of civil freedom

to husbandmen and serfs. Such is the narrow fearful spirit that fills

the Church of the Carlovingian days.[11] She unsays her words, she

gives herself the lie, she says to the children, "Be old!"

[11] See the Capitularies, _passim_.

* * * * *

A fall indeed! But is this earnest? They had bidden us all be

young.--Ah! but priest and people are no longer one. A divorce without

end begins, a gulf unpassable divides them for ever. The priest

himself, a lord and prince, will come out in his golden cope, and

chant in the royal speech of that great empire which is no more. For

ourselves, a mournful company, bereft of human speech, of the only

speech that God would care to hear, what else can we do but low and

bleat with the guileless friends who never scorn us, who, in

winter-time will keep us warm in their stable, or cover us with their

fleeces? We will live with dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves.

In sooth there is less need than before for our going to church. But

the church will not hold us free: she insists on our returning to hear

what we no longer understand. Thenceforth a mighty fog, a fog heavy

and dun as lead, enwraps the world. For how long? For a whole

millennium of horror. Throughout ten centuries, a languor unknown to

all former times seizes upon the Middle Ages, even in part on those

latter days that come midway betwixt sleep and waking, and holds them

under the sway of a visitation most irksome, most unbearable; that

convulsion, namely, of mental weariness, which men call a fit of

yawning.

When the tireless bell rings at the wonted hours, they yawn; while the

nasal chant is singing in the old Latin words, they yawn. It is all

foreseen, there is nothing to hope for in the world, everything will

come round just the same as before. The certainty of being bored

to-morrow sets one yawning from to-day; and the long vista of

wearisome days, of wearisome years to come, weighs men down, sickens

them from the first with living. From brain to stomach, from stomach

to mouth, the fatal fit spreads of its own accord, and keeps on

distending the jaws without end or remedy. An actual disease the pious

Bretons call it, ascribing it, however, to the malice of the Devil. He

keeps crouching in the woods, the peasants say: if anyone passes by

tending his cattle, he sings to him vespers and other rites, until he

is dead with yawning.[12]

[12] An illustrious Breton, the last man of the Middle Ages,

who had gone on a bootless errand to convert Rome, received

there some brilliant offers. "What do you want?" said the

Pope.--"Only one thing: to have done with the Breviary."

* * * * *

_To be old_ is to be weak. When the Saracens, when the Norsemen

threaten us, what will come to us if the people remain old?

Charlemagne weeps, and the Church weeps too. She owns that her relics

fail to guard her altars from these Barbarian devils.[13] Had she not

better call upon the arm of that wayward child whom she was going to

bind fast, the arm of that young giant whom she wanted to paralyse?

This movement in two opposite ways fills the whole ninth century. The

people are held back, anon they are hurled forward: we fear them and

we call on them for aid. With them and by means of them we throw up

hasty barriers, defences that may check the Barbarians, while

sheltering the priests and their saints escaped thither from their

churches.

[13] The famous avowal made by Hincmar.

In spite of the Bald Emperor's[14] command not to build, there grows

up a tower on the mountain. Thither comes the fugitive, crying, "In

God's name, take me in, at least my wife and children! Myself with my

cattle will encamp in your outer enclosure." The tower emboldens him

and he feels himself a man. It gives him shade, and he in his turn

defends, protects his protector.

[14] Charles the Bald.--TRANS.

Formerly in their hunger the small folk yielded themselves to the

great as serfs; but here how great the difference! He offers himself

as a _vassal_, one who would be called brave and valiant.[15] He gives

himself up, and keeps himself, and reserves to himself the right of

going elsewhere. "I will go further: the earth is large: I, too, like

the rest, can rear my tower yonder. If I have defended the outworks, I

can surely look after myself within."

[15] A difference too little felt by those who have spoken of

the _personal recommendation_, &c.

Thus nobly, thus grandly arose the feudal world. The master of the

tower received his vassals with some such words as these: "Thou shalt

go when thou willest, and if need be with my help; at least, if thou

shouldst sink in the mire, I myself will dismount to succour thee."

These are the very words of the old formula.[16]

[16] Grimm, _Rechts Alterthümer_, and my _Origines du Droit_.

* * * * *

But, one day, what do I see? Can my sight be grown dim? The lord of

the valley, as he rides about, sets up bounds that none may overleap;

ay, and limits that you cannot see. "What is that? I don't

understand." That means that the manor is shut in. "The lord keeps it

all fast under gate and hinge, between heaven and earth."

Most horrible! By virtue of what law is this _vassus_ (or _valiant_

one) held to his power? People will thereon have it, that _vassus_ may

also mean _slave_. In like manner the word _servus_, meaning a

_servant_, often indeed a proud one, even a Count or Prince of the

Empire, comes in the case of the weak to signify a _serf_, a wretch

whose life is hardly worth a halfpenny.

In this damnable net are they caught. But down yonder, on his ground,

is a man who avers that his land is free, a _freehold_, a _fief of the

sun_. Seated on his boundary-stone, with hat pressed firmly down, he

looks at Count or Emperor passing near. "Pass on, Emperor; go thy

ways! If thou art firm on thy horse, yet more am I on my pillar. Thou

mayest pass, but so will not I: for I am Freedom."

But I lack courage to say what becomes of this man. The air grows

thick around him: he breathes less and less freely. He seems to be

_under a spell_: he cannot move: he is as one paralysed. His very

beasts grow thin, as if a charm had been thrown over them. His

servants die of hunger. His land bears nothing now; spirits sweep it

clean by night.

Still he holds on: "The poor man is a king in his own house." But he

is not to be let alone. He gets summoned, must answer for himself in

the Imperial Court. So he goes, like an old-world spectre, whom no one

knows any more. "What is he?" ask the young. "Ah, he is neither a

lord, nor a serf! Yet even then is he nothing?"

"Who am I? I am he who built the first tower, he who succoured you, he

who, leaving the tower, went boldly forth to meet the Norse heathens

at the bridge. Yet more, I dammed the river, I tilled the meadow,

creating the land itself by drawing it God-like out of the waters.

From this land who shall drive me?"

"No, my friend," says a neighbour--"you shall not be driven away. You

shall till this land, but in a way you little think for. Remember, my

good fellow, how in your youth, some fifty years ago, you were rash

enough to wed my father's little serf, Jacqueline. Remember the

proverb, 'He who courts my hen is my cock.' You belong to my

fowl-yard. Ungird yourself; throw away your sword! From this day forth

you are my serf."

There is no invention here. The dreadful tale recurs incessantly

during the Middle Ages. Ah, it was a sharp sword that stabbed him. I

have abridged and suppressed much, for as often as one returns to

these times, the same steel, the same sharp point, pierces right

through the heart.

There was one among them who, under this gross insult, fell into so

deep a rage that he could not bring up a single word. It was like

Roland betrayed. His blood all rushed upwards into his throat. His

flaming eyes, his mouth so dumb, yet so fearfully eloquent, turned all

the assembly pale. They started back. He was dead: his veins had

burst. His arteries spurted the red blood over the faces of his

murderers.[17]

[17] This befell the Count of Avesnes when his freehold was

declared a mere fief, himself a mere vassal, a serf of the

Earl of Hainault. Read, too, the dreadful story of the Great

Chancellor of Flanders, the first magistrate of Bruges, who

also was claimed as a serf.--Gualterius, _Scriptores Rerum

Francicarum_, viii. 334.

* * * * *

The doubtful state of men's affairs, the frightfully slippery descent

by which the freeman becomes a vassal, the vassal a servant, and the

servant a serf,--in these things lie the great terror of the Middle

Ages, and the depth of their despair. There is no way of escape

therefrom; for he who takes one step is lost. He is an _alien_, a

_stray_, a _wild beast of the chase_. The ground grows slimy to catch

his feet, roots him, as he passes, to the spot. The contagion in the

air kills him; he becomes a thing _in mortmain_, a dead creature, a

mere nothing, a beast, a soul worth twopence-halfpenny, whose murder

can be atoned for by twopence-halfpenny.

These are outwardly the two great leading traits in the wretchedness

of the Middle Ages, through which they came to give themselves up to

the Devil. Meanwhile let us look within, and sound the innermost

depths of their moral life.

CHAPTER III.

THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE.

There is an air of dreaming about those earlier centuries of the

Middle Ages, in which the legends were self-conceived. Among

countryfolk so gently submissive, as these legends show them, to the

Church, you would readily suppose that very great innocence might be

found. This is surely the temple of God the Father. And yet the

_penitentiaries_, wherein reference is made to ordinary sins, speak of

strange defilements, of things afterwards rare enough under the rule

of Satan.

These sprang from two causes, from the utter ignorance of the times,

and from the close intermingling of near kindred under one roof. They

seem to have had but a slight acquaintance with our modern ethics.

Those of their day, all counterpleas notwithstanding, resemble the

ethics of the patriarchs, of that far antiquity which regarded

marriage with a stranger as immoral, and allowed only of marriage

amongst kinsfolk. The families thus joined together became as one. Not

daring to scatter over the surrounding deserts, tilling only the

outskirts of a Merovingian palace or a monastery, they took shelter

every evening under the roof of a large homestead (_villa_). Thence

arose unpleasant points of analogy with the ancient _ergastulum_,

where the slaves of an estate were all crammed together. Many of these

communities lasted through and even beyond the Middle Ages. About the

results of such a system the lord would feel very little concern. To

his eyes but one family was visible in all this tribe, this multitude

of people "who rose and lay down together, ... who ate together of the

same bread, and drank out of the same mug."

Amidst such confusion the woman was not much regarded. Her place was

by no means lofty. If the virgin, the ideal woman, rose higher from

age to age, the real woman was held of little worth among these

boorish masses, in this medley of men and herds. Wretched was the doom

of a condition which could only change with the growth of separate

dwellings, when men at length took courage to live apart in hamlets,

or to build them huts in far-off forest-clearings, amidst the fruitful

fields they had gone out to cultivate. From the lonely hearth comes

the true family. It is the nest that forms the bird. Thenceforth they

were no more things, but men; for then also was the woman born.

* * * * *

It was a very touching moment, the day she entered _her own home_.

Then at last the poor wretch might become pure and holy. There, as she

sits spinning alone, while her goodman is in the forest, she may brood

on some thought and dream away. Her damp, ill-fastened cabin, through

which keeps whistling the winter wind, is still, by way of a

recompense, calm and silent. In it are sundry dim corners where the

housewife lodges her dreams.

And by this time she has some property, something of her own. The

_distaff_, the _bed_, and the _trunk_, are all she has, according to

the old song.[18] We may add a table, a seat, perhaps two stools. A

poor dwelling and very bare; but then it is furnished with a living

soul! The fire cheers her, the blessed box-twigs guard her bed,

accompanied now and again by a pretty bunch of vervein. Seated by her

door, the lady of this palace spins and watches some sheep. We are not

yet rich enough to keep a cow; but to that we may come in time, if

Heaven will bless our house. The wood, a bit of pasture, and some bees

about our ground--such is our way of life! But little corn is

cultivated as yet, there being no assurance of a harvest so long of

coming. Such a life, however needy, is anyhow less hard for the woman:

she is not broken down and withered, as she will be in the days of

large farming. And she has more leisure withal. You must never judge

of her by the coarse literature of the Fabliaux and the Christmas

Carols, by the foolish laughter and license of the filthy tales we

have to put up with by and by. She is alone; without a neighbour. The

bad, unwholesome life of the dark, little, walled towns, the mutual

spyings, the wretched dangerous gossipings, have not yet begun. No old

woman comes of an evening, when the narrow street is growing dark, to

tempt the young maiden by saying how for the love of her somebody is

dying. She has no friend but her own reflections; she converses only

with her beasts or the tree in the forest.

[18]

"Trois pas du côté du banc,

Et trois pas du côté du lit;

Trois pas du côté du coffre,

Et trois pas---- Revenez ici."

(_Old Song of the Dancing Master._)

Such things speak to her, we know of what. They recall to her mind the

saws once uttered by her mother and grandmother; ancient saws handed

down for ages from woman to woman. They form a harmless reminder of

the old country spirits, a touching family religion which doubtless

had little power in the blustering hurly-burly of a great common

dwellinghouse, but now comes back again to haunt the lonely cabin.

It is a singular, a delicate world of fays and hobgoblins, made for a

woman's soul. When the great creation of the saintly Legend gets

stopped and dried up, that other older, more poetic legend comes in

for its share of welcome; reigns privily with gentle sway. It is the

woman's treasure; she worships and caresses it. The fay, too, is a

woman, a fantastic mirror wherein she sees herself in a fairer guise.

Who were these fays? Tradition says, that of yore some Gaulish queens,

being proud and fanciful, did on the coming of Christ and His Apostles

behave so insolently as to turn their backs upon them. In Brittany

they were dancing at the moment, and never stopped dancing. Hence

their hard doom; they are condemned to live until the Day of

Judgment.[19] Many of them were turned into mice or rabbits; as the

Kow-riggwans for instance, or Elves, who meeting at night round the

old Druidic stones entangle you in their dances. The same fate befell

the pretty Queen Mab, who made herself a royal chariot out of a

walnut-shell. They are all rather whimsical, and sometimes

ill-humoured. But can we be surprised at them, remembering their

woeful lot? Tiny and odd as they are, they have a heart, a longing to

be loved. They are good and they are bad and full of fancies. On the

birth of a baby they come down the chimney, to endow it and order its

future. They are fond of good spinning-women--they even spin divinely

themselves. Do we not talk of _spinning like a fairy_?

[19] All passages bearing on this point have been gathered

together in two learned works by M. Maury (_Les Fées_, 1843;

and _La Magie_, 1860). See also Grimm.

The fairy-tales, stripped of the absurd embellishments in which the

latest compilers muffled them up, express the heart of the people

itself. They mark a poetic interval between the gross communism of the

primitive _villa_, and the looseness of the time when a growing

burgess-class made our cynical Fabliaux.[20]

[20] A body of tales by the Trouvères of the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries.--TRANS.

These tales have an historical side, reminding us, in the ogres, &c.,

of the great famines. But commonly they soar higher than any history,

on the _Blue Bird's_ wing, in a realm of eternal poesy; telling us our

wishes which never vary, the unchangeable history of the heart.

The poor serf's longing to breathe, to rest, to find a treasure that

may end his sufferings, continually returns. More often, through a

lofty aspiration, this treasure becomes a soul as well, a treasure of

love asleep, as in _The Sleeping Beauty_: but not seldom the charming

person finds herself by some fatal enchantment hidden under a mask.

Hence that touching trilogy, that admirable _crescendo_ of _Riquet

with the Tuft_, _Ass's Skin_, and _Beauty and the Beast_. Love will

not be discouraged. Through all that ugliness it follows after and

gains the hidden beauty. In the last of these tales that feeling

touches the sublime, and I think that no one has ever read it without

weeping.

A passion most real, most sincere, lurks beneath it--that unhappy,

hopeless love, which unkind nature often sets between poor souls of

very different ranks in life. On the one hand is the grief of the

peasant maid at not being able to make herself fair enough to win the

cavalier's fancy; on the other the smothered sighs of the serf, when

along his furrow he sees passing, on a white horse, too exquisite a

glory, the beautiful, the majestic Lady of the Castle. So in the East

arises the mournful idyll of the impossible loves of the Rose and the

Nightingale. Nevertheless, there is one great difference: the bird and

the flower are both beautiful; nay, are alike in their beauty. But

here the humbler being, doomed to a place so far below, avows to

himself that he is ugly and monstrous. But amidst his wailing he feels

in himself a power greater than the East can know. With the will of a

hero, through the very greatness of his desire, he breaks out of his

idle coverings. He loves so much, this monster, that he is loved, and,

in return, through that love grows beautiful.

An infinite tenderness pervades it all. This soul enchanted thinks not

of itself alone. It busies itself in saving all nature and all society

as well. Victims of every kind, the child beaten by its step-mother,

the youngest sister slighted, ill-used by her elders, are the surest

objects of its liking. Even to the Lady of the Castle does its

compassion extend; it mourns her fallen into the hands of so fierce a

lord as Blue-Beard. It yearns with pity towards the beasts; it seeks

to console them for being still in the shape of animals. Let them be

patient, and their day will come. Some day their prisoned souls shall

put on wings, shall be free, lovely, and beloved. This is the other

side of _Ass's Skin_ and such like stories. There especially we are

sure of finding a woman's heart. The rude labourer in the fields may

be hard enough to his beasts, but to the woman they are no beasts. She

regards them with the feeling of a child. To her fancy all is human,

all is soul: the whole world becomes ennobled. It is a beautiful

enchantment. Humble as she is, and ugly as she thinks herself, she

has given all her beauty, all her grace to the surrounding universe.

* * * * *

Is she, then, so ugly, this little peasant-wife, whose dreaming fancy

feeds on things like these? I tell you she keeps house, she spins and

minds the flock, she visits the forest to gather a little wood. As yet

she has neither the hard work nor the ugly looks of the countrywoman

as afterwards fashioned by the prevalent culture of grain crops. Nor

is she like the fat townswife, heavy and slothful, about whom our

fathers made such a number of fat stories. She has no sense of safety;

she is meek and timid, and feels herself, as it were, in God's hand.

On yonder hill she can see the dark frowning castle, whence a thousand

harms may come upon her. Her husband she holds in equal fear and

honour. A serf elsewhere, by her side he is a king. For him she saves

of her best, living herself on nothing. She is small and slender like

the women-saints of the Church. The poor feeding of those days must

needs make women fine-bred, but lacking also in vital strength. The

children die off in vast numbers: those pale roses are all nerves.

Hence, will presently burst forth the epileptic dances of the

fourteenth century. Meanwhile, towards the twelfth century, there come

to be two weaknesses attached to this state of half-grown youth: by

night somnambulism; in the daytime seeing of visions, trance, and the

gift of tears.

* * * * *

This woman, for all her innocence, still has a secret which the Church

may never be told. Locked up in her heart she bears the pitying

remembrance of those poor old gods who have fallen into the state of

spirits;[21] and spirits, you must know, are not exempt from

suffering. Dwelling in rocks, and in hearts of oak, they are very

unhappy in winter; being particularly fond of warmth. They ramble

about houses; they are sometimes seen in stables warming themselves

beside the beasts. Bereft of incense and burnt-offerings, they

sometimes take of the milk. The housewife being thrifty, will not

stint her husband, but lessens her own share, and in the evening

leaves a little cream.

[21] This loyalty of hers is very touching indeed. In the

fifth century the peasants braved persecution by parading the

gods of the old religion in the shape of small dolls made of

linen or flour. Still the same in the eighth century. The

_Capitularies_ threaten death in vain. In the twelfth

century, Burchard, of Worms, attests their inutility. In

1389, the Sorbonne inveighs against certain traces of

heathenism, while in 1400, Gerson talks of it as still a

lively superstition.

Those spirits who only appear at night, regret their banishment from

the day and are greedy of lamplight. By night the housewife starts on

her perilous trip, bearing a small lantern, to the great oak where

they dwell, or to the secret fountain whose mirror, as it multiplies

the flame, may cheer up those sorrowful outlaws.

But if anyone should know of it, good heavens! Her husband is canny

and fears the Church: he would certainly give her a beating. The

priest wages fierce war with the sprites, and hunts them out of every

place. Yet he might leave them their dwelling in the oaks! What harm

can they do in the forest? Alas! no: from council to council they are

hunted down. On set days the priest will go even to the oak, and with

prayers and holy water drive away the spirits.

How would it be if no kind soul took pity on them? This woman,

however, will take them under her care. She is an excellent Christian,

but will keep for them one corner of her heart. To them alone can she

entrust those little natural affairs, which, harmless as they are in a

chaste wife's dwelling, the Church at any rate would count as

blameworthy. They are the confidants, the confessors of these touching

womanly secrets. Of them she thinks, when she puts the holy log on the

fire. It is Christmastide; but also is it the ancient festival of the

Northern spirits, the _Feast of the Longest Night_. So, too, the Eve

of May-day is the _Pervigilium of Maia_, when the tree is planted. So,

too, with the Eve of St. John, the true feast-day of life, of flowers,

and newly-awakened love. She who has no children makes it her especial

duty to cherish these festivals, and to offer them a deep devotion. A

vow to the Virgin would perhaps be of little avail, it being no

concern of Mary's. In a low whisper, she prefers addressing some

ancient _genius_, worshipped in other days as a rustic deity, and

afterwards by the kindness of some local church transformed into a

saint.[22] And thus it happens that the bed, the cradle, all the

sweetest mysteries on which the chaste and loving soul can brood,

belong to the olden gods.

[22] A. Maury, _Magie_, 159.

* * * * *

Nor are the sprites ungrateful. One day she awakes, and without having

stirred a finger, finds all her housekeeping done. In her amazement

she makes the sign of the cross and says nothing. When the good man

goes she questions herself, but in vain. It must have been a spirit.

"What can it be? How came it here? How I should like to see it! But I

am afraid: they say it is death to see a spirit."--Yet the cradle

moves and swings of itself. She is clasped by some one, and a voice so

soft, so low that she took it for her own, is heard saying, "Dearest

mistress, I love to rock your babe, because I am myself a babe." Her

heart beats, and yet she takes courage a little. The innocence of the

cradle gives this spirit also an innocent air, causing her to believe

it good, gentle, suffered at least by God.

From that day forth she is no longer alone. She readily feels its

presence, and it is never far from her. It rubs her gown, and she

hears the grazing. It rambles momently about her, and plainly cannot

leave her side. If she goes to the stable, it is there; and she

believes that the other day it was in the churn.[23]

[23] This is a favourite haunt of the little rogue's. To this

day the Swiss, knowing his tastes, make him a present of some

milk. His name among them is _troll_ (_drôle_); among the

Germans _kobold_, _nix_. In France he is called _follet_,

_goblin_, _lutin_; in England, _Puck_, _Robin Goodfellow_.

Shakespeare says, he does sleepy servants the kindness to

pinch them black and blue, in order to rouse them.

Pity she cannot take it up and look at it! Once, when she suddenly

touched the brands, she fancied she saw the tricksy little thing

tumbling about in the sparks; another time she missed catching it in a

rose. Small as it is, it works, sweeps, arranges, saves her a thousand

cares.

It has its faults, however; is giddy, bold, and if she did not hold it

fast, might perhaps shake itself free. It observes and listens too

much. It repeats sometimes of a morning some little word she had

whispered very, very softly on going to bed, when the light was put

out. She knows it to be very indiscreet, exceedingly curious. She is

irked with feeling herself always followed about, complains of it, and

likes complaining. Sometimes, having threatened him and turned him

off, she feels herself quite at ease. But just then she finds herself

caressed by a light breathing, as it were a bird's wing. He was under

a leaf. He laughs: his gentle voice, free from mocking, declares the

joy he felt in taking his chaste young mistress by surprise. On her

making a show of great wrath, "No, my darling, my little pet," says

the monkey, "you are not a bit sorry to have me here."

She feels ashamed and dares say nothing more. But she guesses now that

she loves him overmuch. She has scruples about it, and loves him yet

more. All night she seems to feel him creeping up to her bed. In her

fear she prays to God, and keeps close to her husband. What shall she

do? She has not the strength to tell the Church. She tells her

husband, who laughs at first incredulously. Then she owns to a little

more,--what a madcap the goblin is, sometimes even overbold. "What

matters? He is so small." Thus he himself sets her mind at ease.

Should we too feel reassured, we who can see more clearly? She is

quite innocent still. She would shrink from copying the great lady up

there who, in the face of her husband, has her court of lovers and her

page. Let us own, however, that to that point the goblin has already

smoothed the way. One could not have a more perilous page than he who

hides himself under a rose; and, moreover, he smacks of the lover.

More intrusive than anyone else, he is so tiny that he can creep

anywhere.

He glides even into the husband's heart, paying him court and winning

his good graces. He looks after his tools, works in his garden, and of

an evening, by way of reward, curls himself up in the chimney, behind

the babe and the cat. They hear his small voice, just like a

cricket's; but they never see much of him, save when a faint glimmer

lights a certain cranny in which he loves to stay. Then they see, or

think they see, a thin little face; and cry out, "Ah! little one, we

have seen you at last!"

In church they are told to mistrust the spirits, for even one that

seems innocent, and glides about like a light breeze, may after all be

a devil. They take good care not to believe it. His size begets a

belief in his innocence. Whilst he is there, they thrive. The husband

holds to him as much as the wife, and perhaps more. He sees that the

tricksy little elf makes the fortune of the house.

CHAPTER IV.

TEMPTATIONS.

I have kept this picture clear of those dreadful shadows of the hour

by which it would have been sadly overdarkened. I refer especially to

the uncertainty attending the lot of these rural households, to their

constant fear and foreboding of some casual outrage which might at any

moment descend on them from the castle.

There were just two things which made the feudal rule a hell: on one

hand, its _exceeding steadfastness_, man being nailed, as it were, to

the ground, and emigration made impossible; on the other, a very great

degree of _uncertainty_ about his lot.

The optimist historians who say so much about fixed rents, charters,

buying of immunities, forget how slightly all this was guaranteed. So

much you were bound to pay the lord, but all the rest he could take if

he chose; and this was very fitly called the _right of seizure_. You

may work and work away, my good fellow! But while you are in the

fields, yon dreaded band from the castle will fall upon your house and

carry off whatever they please "for their lord's service."

Look again at that man standing with his head bowed gloomily over the

furrow! And thus he is always found, his face clouded, his heart

oppressed, as if he were expecting some evil news. Is he meditating

some wrongful deed? No; but there are two ideas haunting him, two

daggers piercing him in turn. The one is, "In what state shall I find

my house this evening?" The other, "Would that the turning up of this

sod might bring some treasure to light! O that the good spirit would

help to buy us free!"

We are assured that, after the fashion of the Etruscan spirit which

one day started up from under the ploughshare in the form of a child,

a dwarf or gnome of the tiniest stature would sometimes on such an

appeal come forth from the ground, and, setting itself on the furrow,

would say, "What wantest thou?" But in his amazement the poor man

would ask for nothing; he would turn pale, cross himself, and

presently go quite away.

Did he never feel sorry afterwards? Said he never to himself, "Fool

that you are, you will always be unlucky?" I readily believe he did;

but I also think that a barrier of dread invincible stopped him short.

I cannot believe with the monks who have told us all things concerning

witchcraft, that the treaty with Satan was the light invention of a

miser or a man in love. On the contrary, nature and good sense alike

inform us that it was only the last resource of an overwhelming

despair, under the weight of dreadful outrages and dreadful

sufferings.

* * * * *

But those great sufferings, we are told, must have been greatly

lightened about the time of St. Louis, who forbade private wars among

the nobles. My own opinion is quite the reverse. During the fourscore

or hundred years that elapsed between his prohibition and the wars

with England (1240-1340), the great lords being debarred from the

accustomed sport of burning and plundering their neighbours' lands,

became a terror to their own vassals. For the latter such a peace was

simply war.

The spiritual, the monkish lords, and others, as shown in the _Journal

of Eudes Rigault_, lately published, make one shudder. It is a

repulsive picture of profligacy at once savage and uncontrolled. The

monkish lords especially assail the nunneries. The austere Rigault,

Archbishop of Rouen, confessor of the holy king, conducts a personal

inquiry into the state of Normandy. Every evening he comes to a

monastery. In all of them he finds the monks leading the life of great

feudal lords, wearing arms, getting drunk, fighting duels, keen

huntsmen over all the cultivated land; the nuns living among them in

wild confusion, and betraying everywhere the fruits of their shameless

deeds.

If things are so in the Church, what must the lay lords have been?

What like was the inside of those dark towers which the folk below

regarded with so much horror? Two tales, undoubtedly historical,

namely, _Blue-Beard_ and _Griselda_, tell us something thereanent. To

his vassals, his serfs, what indeed must have been this devotee of

torture who treated his own family in such a way? He is known to us

through the only man who was brought to trial for such deeds; and that

not earlier than the fifteenth century,--Gilles de Retz, who kidnapped

children.

Sir Walter Scott's Front de Boeuf, and the other lords of melodramas

and romances, are but poor creatures in the face of these dreadful

realities. The Templar also in _Ivanhoe_, is a weak artificial

conception. The author durst not assay the foul reality of celibate

life in the Temple, or within the castle walls. Few women were taken

in there, being accounted not worth their keep. The romances of

chivalry altogether belie the truth. It is remarkable, indeed, how

often the literature of an age expresses the very opposite of its

manners, as, for instance, the washy theatre of eclogues after

Florian,[24] during the years of the Great Terror.

[24] A writer of eclogues, fables and dramas; in youth a

friend of Voltaire, afterwards imprisoned during the

Terror.--TRANS.

The rooms in these castles, in such at least as may be seen to-day,

speak more plainly than any books. Men-at-arms, pages, footmen,

crammed together of nights under low-vaulted roofs, in the daytime

kept on the battlements, on narrow terraces, in a state of most

sickening weariness, lived only in their pranks down below; in feats

no longer of arms on the neighbouring domains, but of hunting, ay, and

hunting of men; insults, I may say, without number, outrages untold on

families of serfs. The lord himself well knew that such an army of

men, without women, could only be kept in order by letting them loose

from time to time.

The awful idea of a hell wherein God employs the very guiltiest of the

wicked spirits to torture the less guilty delivered over to them for

their sport,--this lovely dogma of the Middle Ages was exemplified to

the last letter. Men felt that God was not among them. Each new raid

betokened more and more clearly the kingdom of Satan, until men came

to believe that thenceforth their prayers should be offered to him

alone.

Up in the castle there was laughing and joking. "The women-serfs were

too ugly." There is no question raised as to their beauty. The great

pleasure lay in deeds of outrage, in striking and making them weep.

Even in the seventeenth century the great ladies died with laughing,

when the Duke of Lorraine told them how, in peaceful villages, his

people went about harrying and torturing all the women, even to the

old.

These outrages fell most frequently, as we might suppose, on families

well to do and comparatively distinguished among the serfs; the

families, namely, of those serf-born mayors, who already in the

twelfth century appear at the head of the village. By the nobles they

were hated, jeered, cruelly plagued. Their newborn moral dignity was

not to be forgiven. Their wives and daughters were not allowed to be

good and wise: they had no right to be held in any respect. Their

honour was not their own. _Serfs of the body_, such was the cruel

phrase cast for ever in their teeth.

* * * * *

In days to come people will be slow to believe, that the law among

Christian nations went beyond anything decreed concerning the olden

slavery; that it wrote down as an actual right the most grievous

outrage that could ever wound man's heart. The lord spiritual had this

foul privilege no less than the lord temporal. In a parish outside

Bourges, the parson, as being a lord, expressly claimed the

firstfruits of the bride, but was willing to sell his rights to the

husband.[25]

[25] Lauriere, ii. 100 (on the word _Marquette_). Michelet,

_Origines du Droit_, 264.

It has been too readily believed that this wrong was formal, not real.

But the price laid down in certain countries for getting a

dispensation, exceeded the means of almost every peasant. In Scotland,

for instance, the demand was for "several cows:" a price immense,

impossible. So the poor young wife was at their mercy. Besides, the

Courts of Béarn openly maintain that this right grew up naturally:

"The eldest-born of the peasant is accounted the son of his lord, for

he perchance it was who begat him."[26]

[26] When I published my _Origines_ in 1837, I could not have

known this work, published in 1842.

All feudal customs, even if we pass over this, compel the bride to go

up to the castle, bearing thither the "wedding-dish." Surely it was a

cruel thing to make her trust herself amongst such a pack of celibate

dogs, so shameless and so ungovernable.

A shameful scene we may well imagine it to have been. As the young

husband is leading his bride to the castle, fancy the laughter of

cavaliers and footmen, the frolics of the pages around the wretched

poor! But the presence of the great lady herself will check them? Not

at all. The lady in whose delicate breeding the romances tell us to

believe,[27] but who, in her husband's absence, ruled his men,

judging, chastising, ordaining penalties, to whom her husband himself

was bound by the fiefs she brought him,--such a lady would be in no

wise merciful, especially towards a girl-serf who happened also to be

good-looking. Since, according to the custom of those days, she openly

kept her gentleman and her page, she would not be sorry to sanction

her own libertinism by that of her husband.

[27] This delicacy appears in the treatment these ladies

inflicted on their poet Jean de Meung, author of the _Roman

de la Rose_.

Nothing will she do to hinder the fun, the sport they are making out

of yon poor trembler who has come to redeem his bride. They begin by

bargaining with him; they laugh at the pangs endured by "the miserly

peasant;" they suck the very blood and marrow of him. Why all this

fury? Because he is neatly clad; is honest, settled; is a man of mark

in the village. Why, indeed? Because she is pious, chaste, and pure;

because she loves him; because she is frightened and falls a-weeping.

Her sweet eyes plead for pity.

In vain does the poor wretch offer all he has, even to her dowry: it

is all too little. Angered at such cruel injustice, he will say

perhaps that "his neighbour paid nothing." The insolent fellow! he

would argue with us! Thereon they gather round him, a yelling mob:

sticks and brooms pelt upon him like hail. They jostle him, they throw

him down. "You jealous villain, you Lent-faced villain!" they cry; "no

one takes your wife from you; you shall have her back to-night, and to

enhance the honour done you ... your eldest child will be a baron!"

Everyone looks out of window at the absurd figure of this dead man in

wedding garments. He is followed by bursts of laughter, and the noisy

rabble, down to the lowest scullion, give chase to the "cuckold."[28]

[28] The old tales are very sportive, but rather monotonous.

They turn on three jokes only: the despair of the _cuckold_,

the cries of the _beaten_, the wry faces of the _hanged_. The

first is amusing, the second laughable, the third, as crown

of all, makes people split their sides. And the three have

one point in common: it is the weak and helpless who is

ill-used.

* * * * *

The poor fellow would have burst, had he nothing to hope for from the

Devil. By himself he returns: is the house empty as well as desolate?

No, there is company waiting for him there: by the fireside sits

Satan.

But soon his bride comes back, poor wretch, all pale and undone. Alas!

alas! for her condition. At his feet she throws herself and craves

forgiveness. Then, with a bursting heart, he flings his arms round her

neck. He weeps, he sobs, he roars, till the house shakes again.

But with her comes back God. For all her suffering, she is pure,

innocent, holy still. Satan for that nonce will get no profit: the

treaty is not yet ripe.

Our silly Fabliaux, our absurd tales, assume with regard to this

deadly outrage and all its further issues, that the woman sides with

her oppressors against her husband; they would have us believe that

her brutal treatment by the former makes her happy and transports her

with delight. A likely thing indeed! Doubtless she might be seduced by

rank, politeness, elegant manners. But no pains are ever taken to that

end. Great would be the scoffing at anyone who made true-love's wooing

towards a serf. The whole gang of men, to the chaplain, the butler,

even the footmen, would think they honoured her by deeds of outrage.

The smallest page thought himself a great lord, if he only seasoned

his love with insolence and blows.

* * * * *

One day, the poor woman, having just been ill-treated during her

husband's absence, begins weeping, and saying quite aloud, the while

she is tying up her long hair, "Ah, those unhappy saints of the woods,

what boots it to offer them my vows? Are they deaf, or have they grown

too old? Why have I not some protecting spirit, strong and

mighty--wicked even, if it need be? Some such I see in stone at the

church-door; but what do they there? Why do they not go to their

proper dwelling, the castle, to carry off and roast those sinners? Oh,

who is there will give me power and might? I would gladly give myself

in exchange. Ah, me, what is it I would give? What have I to give on

my side? Nothing is left me. Out on this body, out on this soul, a

mere cinder now! Why, instead of this useless goblin, have I not some

spirit, great, strong, and mighty, to help me?"

"My darling mistress! If I am small, it is your fault; and bigger I

cannot grow. And besides, if I were very big, neither you nor your

husband would have borne with me. You would have driven me away with

your priests and your holy water. I can be strong, however, if you

please. For, mistress mine, the spirits in themselves are neither

great nor small, neither weak nor strong. For him who wishes it, the

smallest can become a giant."

"In what way?"

"Why, nothing can be simpler. To make him a giant, you must grant him

only one gift."

"What is that?"

"A lovely woman-soul."

"Ah, wicked one! What then art thou, and what wouldst thou have?"

"Only what you give me every day.... Would you be better than the lady

up yonder? She has pledged her soul to her husband and to her lover,

and yet she yields it whole to her page. I am more than a page to you,

more than a servant. In how many matters have I not been your little

handmaid! Do not blush, nor be angry. Let me only say, that I am all

about you, and already perhaps in you. Else, how could I know your

thoughts, even those which you hide from yourself? Who am I, then?

Your little soul, which speaks thus openly to the great one. We are

inseparable. Do you know how long I have been with you? Some thousand

years, for I belonged to your mother, to hers, to your ancestors. I am

the Spirit of the Fireside."

"Tempter! What wilt thou do?"

"Why, thy husband shall be rich, thyself mighty, and men shall fear

thee."

"Where am I? Surely thou art the demon of hidden treasures!"

"Why call me demon, if I do deeds of justice, of goodness, of piety?

God cannot be everywhere--He cannot be always working. Sometimes He

likes to rest, leaving us other spirits here to carry on the smaller

husbandry, to remedy the ills which his providence passed over, which

his justice forgot to handle.

"Of this your husband is an example. Poor, deserving workman, he is

killing himself and gaining nought in return. Heaven has had no time

to look after him. But I, though rather jealous of him, still love my

kind host. I pity him: his strength is going, he can bear up no

longer. He will die, like your children, already dead of misery. This

winter he was ill; what will become of him the next?"

Thereon, her face in her hands, she wept two, three hours, and even

more. And when she had poured out all her tears--her bosom still

throbbing hard--the other said, "I ask nothing: only, I pray, save

him."

She had promised nothing, but from that hour she became his.

CHAPTER V.

POSSESSION.

A dreadful age was the age of gold; for thus do I call that hard time

when gold first came into use. This was in the year 1300, during the

reign of that Fair King[29] who never spake a word; the great king who

seemed to have a dumb devil, but a devil with mighty arm, strong

enough to burn the Temple, long enough to reach Rome, and with glove

of iron to deal the first good blow at the Pope.

[29] Philip the Fair of France, who put down the Templar in

Paris, and first secured the liberties of the Gallican

Church.--TRANS.

Gold thereupon becomes a great pope, a mighty god, and not without

cause. The movement began in Europe with the Crusades: the only wealth

men cared for was that which having wings could lend itself to their

enterprise; the wealth, namely, of swift exchanges. To strike blows

afar off the king wants nothing but gold. An army of gold, a fiscal

army, spreads over all the land. The lord, who has brought back with

him his dreams of the East, is always longing for its wonders, for

damascened armour, carpets, spices, valuable steeds. For all such

things he needs gold. He pushes away with his foot the serf who

brings him corn. "That is not all; I want gold!"

On that day the world was changed. Theretofore in the midst of much

evil there had always been a harmless certainty about the tax.

According as the year was good or bad, the rent followed the course of

nature and the measure of the harvest. If the lord said, "This is

little," he was answered, "My lord, Heaven has granted us no more."

But the gold, alas! where shall we find it? We have no army to seize

it in the towns of Flanders. Where shall we dig the ground to win him

his treasure? Oh, that the spirit of hidden treasures would be our

guide![30]

[30] The devils trouble the world all through the Middle

Ages; but not before the thirteenth century does Satan put on

a settled shape. "_Compacts_," says M. Maury, "are very rare

before that epoch;" and I believe him. How could they treat

with one who as yet had no real existence? Neither of the

treating parties was yet ripe for the contract. Before the

will could be reduced to the dreadful pass of selling itself

for ever, it must be made thoroughly desperate. It is not the

unhappy who falls into despair, but the truly wretched, who

being quite conscious of his misery, and having yet more to

suffer, can find no escape therefrom. The wretched in this

way are the men of the fourteenth century, from whom they ask

a thing so impossible as payments in gold. In this and the

following chapter I have touched on the circumstances, the

feelings, the growing despair, which brought about the

enormity of _compacts_, and, worse still than these, the

dreadful character of the _Witch_. If the name was freely

used, the thing itself was then rare, being no less than a

marriage and a kind of priesthood. For ease of illustration,

I have joined together the details of so delicate a scrutiny

by a thread of fiction. The outward body of it matters

little. The essential point is to remember that such things

were not caused, as they try to persuade us, by _human

fickleness, by the inconstancy of our fallen nature, by the

chance persuasions of desire_. There was needed the deadly

pressure of an age of iron, of cruel needs: it was needful

that Hell itself should seem a shelter, an asylum, by

contrast with the hell below.

While all are desperate, the woman with the goblin is already seated

on her sacks of corn in the little neighbouring village. She is alone,

the rest being still at their debate in the village.

She sells at her own price. But even when the rest come up, everything

favours her, some strange magical allurement working on her side. No

one bargains with her. Her husband, before his time, brings his rent

in good sounding coin to the feudal elm. "Amazing!" they all say, "but

the Devil is in her!"

They laugh, but she does not. She is sorrowful and afraid. In vain she

tries to pray that night. Strange prickings disturb her slumber.

Fantastic forms appear before her. The small gentle sprite seems to

have grown imperious. He waxes bold. She is uneasy, indignant, eager

to rise. In her sleep she groans, and feels herself dependent, saying,

"No more do I belong to myself!"

* * * * *

"Here is a sensible countryman," says the lord; "he pays beforehand!

You charm me: do you know accounts?"--"A little."--"Well then, you

shall reckon with these folk. Every Saturday you shall sit under the

elm and receive their money. On Sunday, before mass, you shall bring

it up to the castle."

What a change in their condition! How the wife's heart beats when of a

Saturday she sees her poor workman, serf though he be, seated like a

lordling under the baronial shades. At first he feels giddy, but in

time accustoms himself to put on a grave air. It is no joking matter,

indeed; for the lord commands them to show him due respect. When he

has gone up to the castle, and the jealous ones look like laughing and

designing to pay him off, "You see that battlement," says the lord,

"the rope you don't see, but it is also ready. The first man who

touches him shall be set up there high and quick."

* * * * *

This speech is repeated from one to another; until it has spread

around these two as it were an atmosphere of terror. Everybody doffs

his hat to them, bowing very low indeed. But when they pass by, folk

stand aloof, and get out of the way. In order to shirk them they turn

up cross roads, with backs bended, with eyes turned carefully down.

Such a change makes them first savage, but afterwards sorrowful. They

walk alone through all the district. The wife's shrewdness marks the

hostile scorn of the castle, the trembling hate of those below. She

feels herself fearfully isolated between two perils. No one to defend

her but her lord, or rather the money they pay him: but then to find

that money, to spur on the peasant's slowness, and overcome his

sluggish antagonism, to snatch somewhat even from him who has nothing,

what hard pressure, what threats, what cruelty, must be employed! This

was never in the goodman's line of business. The wife brings him to

the mark by dint of much pushing: she says to him, "Be rough; at need

be cruel. Strike hard. Otherwise you will fall short of your

engagements; and then we are undone."

This suffering by day, however, is a trifle in comparison with the

tortures of the night. She seems to have lost the power of sleeping.

She gets up, walks to and fro, and roams about the house. All is

still; and yet how the house is altered; its old innocence, its sweet

security all for ever gone! "Of what is that cat by the hearth

a-thinking, as she pretends to sleep, and 'tweenwhiles opens her green

eyes upon me? The she-goat with her long beard, looking so discreet

and ominous, knows more about it than she can tell. And yon cow which

the moon reveals by glimpses in her stall, why does she give me such a

sidelong look? All this is surely unnatural!"

Shivering, she returns to her husband's side. "Happy man, how deep his

slumber! Mine is over; I cannot sleep, I never shall sleep again." In

time, however, she falls off. But oh, what suffering visits her then!

The importunate guest is beside her, demanding and giving his orders.

If one while she gets rid of him by praying or making the sign of the

cross, anon he returns under another form. "Get back, devil! What

durst thou? I am a Christian soul. No, thou shalt not touch me!"

In revenge he puts on a hundred hideous forms; twining as an adder

about her bosom, dancing as a frog upon her stomach, anon like a bat,

sharp-snouted, covering her scared mouth with dreadful kisses. What is

it he wants? To drive her into a corner, so that conquered and crushed

at last, she may yield and utter the word "Yes." Still she is resolute

to say "No." Still she is bent on braving the cruel struggles of every

night, the endless martyrdom of that wasting strife.

* * * * *

"How far can a spirit make himself withal a body? What reality can

there be in his efforts and approaches? Would she be sinning in the

flesh, if she allowed the intrusions of one who was always roaming

about her? Would that be sheer adultery?" Such was the sly roundabout

way in which sometimes he stayed and weakened her resistance. "If I am

only a breath, a smoke, a thin air, as so many doctors call me, why

are you afraid, poor fearful soul, and how does it concern your

husband?"

It is the painful doom of the soul in these Middle Ages, that a number

of questions which to us would seem idle, questions of pure

scholastics, disturb, frighten, and torment it, taking the guise of

visions, sometimes of devilish debatings, of cruel dialogues carried

on within. The Devil, fierce as he shows himself in the demoniacs,

remains always a spirit throughout the days of the Roman Empire, even

in the time of St. Martin or the fifth century. With the Barbarian

inroads he waxes barbarous, and takes to himself a body. So great a

body does he become, that he amuses himself in breaking with stones

the bell of the convent of St. Benedict. More and more fleshly is he

made to appear, by way of frightening the plunderers of ecclesiastical

goods. People are taught to believe that sinners will be tormented not

in the spirit only, but even bodily in the flesh; that they will

suffer material tortures, not those of ideal flames, but in very deed

such exquisite pangs as burning coals, gridirons, and red-hot spits

can awaken.

This conception of the torturing devils inflicting material agonies on

the souls of the dead, was a mine of gold to the Church. The living,

pierced with grief and pity, asked themselves "if it were possible to

redeem these poor souls from one world to another; if to these, too,

might be applied such forms of expiation, by atonement and compromise,

as were practised upon earth?" This bridge between two worlds was

found in Cluny, which from its very birth, about 900, became at once

among the wealthiest of the monastic orders.

So long as God Himself dealt out his punishments, _making heavy his

hand_, or striking _with the sword of the Angel_, according to the

grand old phrase, there was much less of horror; if his hand was heavy

as that of a judge, it was still the hand of a Father. The Angel who

struck remained pure and clean as his own sword. Far otherwise is it

when the execution is done by filthy demons, who resemble not the

angel that burned up Sodom, but the angel that first went forth

therefrom. In that place they stay, and their hell is a kind of Sodom,

wherein these spirits, fouler than the sinners yielded into their

charge, extract a horrible joy from the tortures they are inflicting.

Such was the teaching to be found in the simple carvings hung out at

the doors of churches. By these men learned the horrible lesson of the

pleasures of pain. On pretence of punishing, the devils wreaked upon

their victims the most outrageous whims. Truly an immoral and most

shameful idea was this, of a sham justice that befriended the worse

side, deepening its wickedness by the present of a plaything, and

corrupting the Demon himself!

* * * * *

Cruel times indeed! Think how dark and low a heaven it was, how

heavily it weighed on the head of man! Fancy the poor little children

from their earliest years imbued with such awful ideas, and trembling

within their cradles! Look at the pure innocent virgin believing

herself damned for the pleasure infused in her by the spirit! And the

wife in her marriage-bed tortured by his attacks, withstanding him,

and yet again feeling him within her!--a fearful feeling known to

those who have suffered from tænia. You feel in yourself a double

life; you trace the monster's movements, now boisterous, anon soft and

waving, and therein the more troublesome, as making you fancy yourself

on the sea. Then you rush off in wild dismay, terrified at yourself,

longing to escape, to die.

Even at such times as the demon was not raging against her, the woman

into whom he had once forced his way would wander about as one

burdened with gloom. For thenceforth she had no remedy. He had taken

fast hold of her, like an impure steam. He is the Prince of the Air,

of storms, and not least of the storms within. All this may be seen

rudely but forcefully presented under the great doorway of Strasburg

Cathedral. Heading the band of _Foolish Virgins_, the wicked woman who

lures them on to destruction is filled, blown out by the Devil, who

overflows ignobly and passes out from under her skirts in a dark

stream of thick smoke.

This blowing-out is a painful feature in the _possession_; at once her

punishment and her pride. This proud woman of Strasburg bears her

belly well before her, while her head is thrown far back. She triumphs

in her size, delights in being a monster.

To this, however, the woman we are following has not yet come. But

already she is puffed up with him, and with her new and lofty lot.

The earth has ceased to bear her. Plump and comely in these better

days, she goes down the street with head upright, and merciless in her

scorn. She is feared, hated, admired.

In look and bearing our village lady says, "I ought to be the great

lady herself. And what does she up yonder, the shameless sluggard,

amidst all those men, in the absence of her lord?" And now the rivalry

is set on foot. The village, while it loathes her, is proud thereat.

"If the lady of the castle is a baroness, our woman is a queen; and

more than a queen,--we dare not say what." Her beauty is a dreadful, a

fantastic beauty, killing in its pride and pain. The Demon himself is

in her eyes.

* * * * *

He has her and yet has her not. She is still _herself_, and preserves

_herself_. She belongs neither to the Demon nor to God. The Demon may

certainly invade her, may encompass her like a fine atmosphere. And

yet he has gained nothing at all; for he has no will thereto. She is

_possessed_, _bedevilled_, and she does not belong to the Devil.

Sometimes he uses her with dreadful cruelty, and yet gains nothing

thereby. He places a coal of fire on her breast, or within her bowels.

She jumps and writhes, but still says, "No, butcher, I will stay as I

am."

"Take care! I will lash you with so cruel a scourge of vipers, I will

smite you with such a blow, that you will afterwards go weeping and

rending the air with your cries."

The next night he will not come. In the morning--it was Sunday--her

husband went up to the castle. He came back all undone. The lord had

said: "A brook that flows drop by drop cannot turn the mill. You bring

me a halfpenny at a time, which is good for nought. I must set off in

a fortnight. The king marches towards Flanders, and I have not even a

war-horse, my own being lame ever since the tourney. Get ready for

business: I am in want of a hundred pounds."

"But, my lord, where shall I find them?"

"You may sack the whole village, if you will; I am about to give you

men enough. Tell your churls, if the money is not forthcoming they are

lost men; yourself especially--you shall die. I have had enough of

you: you have the heart of a woman; you are slack and sluggish. You

shall die--you shall pay for your cowardice, your effeminacy. Stay; it

makes but very small difference whether you go down now, or whether I

keep you here. This is Sunday: right loudly would the folk yonder

laugh to see you dangling your legs from my battlements."

All this the unhappy man tells again to his wife; and preparing

hopelessly for death, commends his soul to God. She being just as

frightened, can neither lie down nor sleep. What is to be done? How

sorry she is now to have sent the spirit away! If he would but come

back! In the morning, when her husband rises, she sinks crushed upon

the bed. She has hardly done so, when she feels on her chest a heavy

weight. Gasping for breath, she is like to choke. The weight falls

lower till it presses on her stomach, and therewithal on her arms she

feels the grasp as of two steel hands.

"You wanted me, and here I am. So, at last, stubborn one, I have your

soul--at last!"

"But oh, sir, is it mine to give away? My poor husband! you used to

love him--you said so: you promised----"

"Your husband! You forget. Are you sure your thoughts were always kept

upon him? Your soul! I ask for it as a favour; but it is already

mine."

"No, sir," she says--her pride once more returning to her, even in so

dire a strait--"no, sir; that soul belongs to me, to my husband, to

our marriage rites."

"Ah, incorrigible little fool! you would struggle still, even now that

you are under the goad! I have seen your soul at all hours; I know it

better than you yourself. Day by day did I mark your first

reluctances, your pains, and your fits of despair. I saw how

disheartened you were when, in a low tone, you said that no one could

be held to an impossibility. And then I saw you growing more resigned.

You were beaten a little, and you cried out not very loud. As for me,

I ask for your soul simply because you have already lost it.

Meanwhile, your husband is dying. What is to be done? I am sorry for

you: I have you in my power; but I want something more. You must

grant it frankly and of free will, or else he is a dead man."

She answered very low, in her sleep, "Ah me! my body and my miserable

flesh, you may take them to save my husband; but my heart, never. No

one has ever had it, and I cannot give it away."

So, all resignedly she waited there. And he flung at her two words:

"Keep them, and they will save you." Therewith she shuddered, felt

within her a horrible thrill of fire, and, uttering a loud cry, awoke

in the arms of her astonished husband, to drown him in a flood of

tears.

* * * * *

She tore herself away by force, and got up, fearing lest she should

forget those two important words. Her husband was alarmed; for,

without looking even at him, she darted on the wall a glance as

piercing as that of Medea. Never was she more handsome. In her dark

eye and the yellowish white around it played such a glimmer as one

durst not face--a glimmer like the sulphurous jet of a volcano.

She walked straight to the town. The first word was "_Green_." Hanging

at a tradesman's door she beheld a green gown--the colour of the

Prince of the World--an old gown, which as she put it on became new

and glossy. Then she walked, without asking anyone, straight to the

door of a Jew, at which she knocked loudly. It was opened with great

caution. The poor Jew was sitting on the ground, covered over with

ashes. "My dear, I must have a hundred pounds."

"Oh, madam, how am I to get them? The Prince-bishop of the town has

just had my teeth drawn to make me say where my gold lies.[31] Look at

my bleeding mouth."

[31] This was a common way of extracting help from the Jews.

King John Lackland often tried it.

"I know, I know; but I come to obtain from you the very means of

destroying your Bishop. When the Pope gets a cuffing, the Bishop will

not hold out long."

"Who says so?"

"_Toledo._"[32]

[32] Toledo seems to have been the holy city of Wizards, who

in Spain were numberless. These relations with the civilized

Moors, with the Jews so learned and paramount in Spain, as

managers of the royal revenues, had given them a very high

degree of culture, and in Toledo they formed a kind of

University. In the sixteenth century, it was christianised,

remodelled, reduced to mere _white magic_. See the

_Deposition of the Wizard Achard, Lord of Beaumont, a

Physician of Poitou_. Lancre, _Incredulité_, p. 781.

He hung his head. She spoke and blew: within her was her own soul and

the Devil to boot. A wondrous warmth filled the room: he himself was

aware of a kind of fiery fountain. "Madam," said he, looking at her

from under his eyes, "poor and ruined as I am, I had some pence still

in store to sustain my poor children."

"You will not repent of it, Jew. I will swear to you the _great oath_

that kills whoso breaks it. What you are about to give me, you shall

receive back in a week, at an early hour in the morning. This I swear

by your _great oath_ and by mine, which is yet greater: '_Toledo_.'"

* * * * *

A year went by. She had grown round and plump; had made herself one

mass of gold. Men were amazed at her power of charming. Every one

admired and obeyed her. By some devilish miracle the Jew had grown so

generous as to lend at the slightest signal. By herself she maintained

the castle, both through her own credit in the town, and through the

fear inspired in the village by her rough extortion. The all-powerful

green gown floated to and fro, ever newer and more beautiful. Her own

beauty grew, as it were, colossal with success and pride. Frightened

at a result so natural, everyone said, "At her time of life how tall

she grows!"

Meanwhile we have some news: the lord is coming home. The lady, who

for a long time had not dared to come forth, lest she might meet the

face of this other woman down below, now mounted her white horse.

Surrounded by all her people, she goes to meet her husband; she stops

and salutes him.

And, first of all, she says, "How long I have been looking for you!

Why did you leave your faithful wife so long a languishing widow? And

yet I will not take you in to-night, unless you grant me a boon."

"Ask it, ask it, fair lady," says the gentleman laughing; "but make

haste, for I am eager to embrace you. How beautiful you have grown!"

She whispered in his ear, so that no one knew what she said. Before

going up to the castle the worthy lord dismounts by the village

church, and goes in. Under the porch, at the head of the chief people,

he beholds a lady, to whom without knowing her he offers a low salute.

With matchless pride she bears high over the men's heads the towering

horned bonnet (_hennin_[33]) of the period; the triumphal cap of the

Devil, as it was often called, because of the two horns wherewith it

was embellished. The real lady, blushing at her eclipse, went out

looking very small. Anon she muttered, angrily, "There goes your serf.

It is all over: everything has changed places: the ass insults the

horse."

[33] The absurd head-dress of the women, with its one and

often two horns sloping back from the head, in the fourteenth

century.--TRANS.

As they are going off, a bold page, a pet of the lady's, draws from

his girdle a well-sharpened dagger, and with a single turn cleverly

cuts the fine robe along her loins.[34] The crowd was astonished, but

began to make it out when it saw the whole of the Baron's household

going off in pursuit of her. Swift and merciless about her whistled

and fell the strokes of the whip. She flies, but slowly, being already

grown somewhat heavy. She has hardly gone twenty paces when she

stumbles; her best friend having put a stone in her way to trip her

up. Amidst roars of laughter she sprawls yelling on the ground. But

the ruthless pages flog her up again. The noble handsome greyhounds

help in the chase and bite her in the tenderest places. At last, in

sad disorder, amidst the terrible crowd, she reaches the door of her

house. It is shut. There with hands and feet she beats away, crying,

"Quick, quick, my love, open the door for me!" There hung she, like

the hapless screech-owl whom they nail up on a farm-house door; and

still as hard as ever rained the blows. Within the house all is deaf.

Is the husband there? Or rather, being rich and frightened, does he

dread the crowd, lest they should sack his house?

[34] Such cruel outrages were common in those days. By the

French and Anglo-Saxon laws, lewdness was thus punished.

Grimm, 679, 711. Sternhook, 19, 326. Ducange, iii. 52.

Michelet, _Origines_, 386, 389. By and by, the same rough

usage is dealt out to honest women, to citizen's wives, whose

pride the nobles seek to abase. We know the kind of ambush

into which the tyrant Hagenbach drew the honourable ladies of

the chief burghers in Alsace, probably in scorn of their rich

and royal costume, all silks and gold. In my _Origines_ I

have also related the strange claim made by the Lord of Pacé,

in Anjou, on the pretty (and honest) women of the

neighbourhood. They were to bring to the castle fourpence and

a chaplet of flowers, and to dance with his officers: a

dangerous trip, in which they might well fear some such

affronts as those offered by Hagenbach. They were forced to

obey by the threat of being stripped and pricked with a goad

bearing the impress of the lord's arms.

And now she has borne such misery, such strokes, such sounding

buffets, that she sinks down in a swoon. On the cold stone threshold

she finds herself seated, naked, half-dead, her bleeding flesh covered

with little else than the waves of her long hair. Some one from the

castle says, "No more now! We do not want her to die."

They leave her alone, to hide herself. But in spirit she can see the

merriment going on at the castle. The lord however, somewhat dazed,

said that he was sorry for it. But the chaplain says, in his meek way,

"If this woman is _bedevilled_, as they say, my lord, you owe it to

your good vassals, you owe it to the whole country, to hand her over

to Holy Church. Since all that business with the Templars and the

Pope, what way the Demon is making! Nothing but fire will do for him."

Upon which a Dominican says, "Your reverence has spoken right well.

This devilry is a heresy in the highest degree. The bedevilled, like

the heretic, should be burnt. Some of our good fathers, however, do

not trust themselves now even to the fire. Wisely they desire that,

before all things, the soul may be slowly purged, tried, subdued by

fastings; that it may not be burnt in its pride, that it shall not

triumph at the stake. If you, madam, in the greatness of your piety,

of your charity, would take the trouble to work upon this woman,

putting her for some years _in pace_ in a safe cell, of which you

only should have the key,--by thus keeping up the chastening process

you might be doing good to her soul, shaming the Devil, and giving

herself up meek and humble into the hands of the Church."

CHAPTER VI.

THE COVENANT.

Nothing was wanting but the victim. They knew that to bring this woman

before her was the most charming present she could receive. Tenderly

would she have acknowledged the devotion of anyone who would have

given her so great a token of his love, by delivering that poor

bleeding body into her hands.

But the prey was aware of the hunters. A few minutes later and she

would have been carried off, to be for ever sealed up beneath the

stone. Wrapping herself in some rags found by chance in the stable,

she took to herself wings of some kind, and before midnight gained

some out-of-the-way spot on a lonely moor all covered with briars and

thistles. It was on the skirts of a wood, where by the uncertain light

she might gather a few acorns, to swallow them like a beast. Ages had

elapsed since evening; she was utterly changed. Beauty and queen of

the village no more, she seemed with the change in her spirit to have

changed her postures also. Among her acorns she squatted like a boar

or a monkey. Thoughts far from human circled within her as she heard,

or seemed to hear the hooting of an owl, followed by a burst of

shrill laughter. She felt afraid, but perhaps it was the merry

mockbird mimicking all those sounds, according to its wonted fashion.

But the laughter begins again: whence comes it? She can see nothing.

Apparently it comes from an old oak. Distinctly, however, she hears

these words: "So, here you are at last! You have come with an ill

grace; nor would you have come now, if you had not tried the full

depth of your last need. You were fain first to run the gauntlet of

whips; to cry out and plead for mercy, haughty as you were; to be

mocked, undone, forsaken, unsheltered even by your husband. Where

would you have been this night, if I had not been charitable enough to

show you the _in pace_ getting ready for you in the tower? Late, very

late, you are in coming to me, and only after they have called you the

_old woman_. In your youth you did not treat me well, when I was your

wee goblin, so eager to serve you. Now take your turn, if so I wish

it, to serve me and kiss my feet.

"You were mine from birth through your inborn wickedness, through

those devilish charms of yours. I was your lover, your husband. Your

own has shut his door against you: I will not shut mine. I welcome you

to my domains, my free prairies, my woods. How am I the gainer, you

may say? Could I not long since have had you at any hour? Were you

not invaded, possessed, filled with my flame? I changed your blood

and renewed it: not a vein in your body where I do not flow. You know

not yourself how utterly you are mine. But our wedding has yet to be

celebrated with all the forms. I have some manners, and feel rather

scrupulous. Let us be one for everlasting."

"Oh! sir, in my present state, what should I say? For a long, long

while back have I felt, too truly felt, that you were all my fate.

With evil intent you caressed me, loaded me with favours, and made me

rich, in order at length to cast me down. Yesterday, when the black

greyhound bit my poor naked flesh, its teeth scorched me, and I said,

''Tis he!' At night when that daughter of Herodias with her foul

language scared the company, somebody put them up to the promising her

my blood; and that was you!"

"True; but 'twas I who saved you and brought you hither. I did

everything, as you have guessed. I ruined you, and why? That I might

have you all to myself. To speak frankly, I was tired of your husband.

You took to haggling and pettifogging: far otherwise do I go to work;

I want all or none. This is why I have moulded and drilled you,

polished and ripened you, for my own behoof. Such, you see, is my

delicacy of taste. I don't take, as people imagine, those foolish

souls who would give themselves up at once. I prefer the choicer

spirits, who have reached a certain dainty stage of fury and despair.

Stop: I must let you know how pleasant you look at this moment. You

are a great beauty, a most desirable soul. I have loved you ever so

long, but now I am hungering for you.

"I will do things on a large scale, not being one of those husbands

who reckon with their betrothed. If you wanted only riches, you should

have them in a trice. If you wanted to be queen in the stead of Joan

of Navarre, that too, though difficult, should be done, and the King

would not lose much thereby in the matter of pride and haughtiness. My

wife is greater than a queen. But, come, tell me what you wish."

"Sir, I ask only for the power of doing evil."

"A delightful answer, very delightful! Have I not cause to love you?

In reality those words contain all the law and all the prophets. Since

you have made so good a choice, all the rest shall be thrown in, over

and above. You shall learn all my secrets. You shall see into the

depths of the earth. The whole world shall come and pour out gold at

thy feet. See here, my bride, I give you the true diamond,

_Vengeance_. I know you, rogue; I know your most hidden desires. Ay,

our hearts on that point understand each other well! Therein at least

shall I have full possession of you. You shall behold your enemy on

her knees at your feet, begging and praying for mercy, and only too

happy to earn her release by doing whatever she has made you do. She

will burst into tears; and you will graciously say, _No_: whereon she

will cry, 'Death and damnation!' ... Come, I will make this my special

business."

"Sir, I am at your service. I was thankless indeed, for you have

always heaped favours on me. I am yours, my master, my god! None other

do I desire. Sweet are your endearments, and very mild your service."

And so she worships him, tumbling on all-fours. At first she pays him,

after the forms of the Temple, such homage as betokens the utter

abandonment of the will. Her master, the Prince of this World, the

Prince of the Winds, breathes upon her in his turn, like an eager

spirit. She receives at once the three sacraments, in reverse

order--baptism, priesthood, and marriage. In this new Church, the

exact opposite of the other, everything must be done the wrong way.

Meekly, patiently, she endures the cruel initiation,[35] borne up by

that one word, "Vengeance!"

[35] This will be explained further on. We must guard against

the pedantic additions of the sixteenth century writers.

* * * * *

Far from being crushed or weakened by the infernal thunderbolt, she

arose with an awful vigour and flashing eyes. The moon, which for a

moment had chastely covered herself, took flight on seeing her again.

Blown out to an amazing degree by the hellish vapour, filled with

fire, with fury, and with some new ineffable desire, she grew for a

while enormous with excess of fulness, and displayed a terrible

beauty. She looked around her, and all nature was changed. The trees

had gotten a tongue, and told of things gone by. The herbs became

simples. The plants which yesterday she trod upon as so much hay, were

now as people discoursing on the art of medicine.

She awoke on the morrow far, very far, from her enemies, in a state of

thorough security. She had been sought after, but they had only found

some scattered shreds of her unlucky green gown. Had she in her

despair flung herself headlong into the torrent? Or had she been

carried off alive by the Devil? No one could tell. Either way she was

certainly damned, which greatly consoled the lady for having failed to

find her.

Had they seen her they would hardly have known her again, she was so

changed. Only the eyes remained, not brilliant, but armed with a very

strange and a rather deterring glimmer. She herself was afraid of

frightening: she never lowered them, but looked sideways, so that the

full force of their beams might be lost by slanting them. From the

sudden browning of her hue people would have said that she had passed

through the flame. But the more watchful felt that the flame was

rather in herself, that she bore about her an impure and scorching

heat. The fiery dart with which Satan had pierced her was still

there, and, as through a baleful lamp, shot forth a wild, but

fearfully witching sheen. Shrinking from her, you would yet stand

still, with a strange trouble filling your every sense.

She saw herself at the mouth of one of those troglodyte caves, such as

you find without number in the hills of the Centre and the West of

France. It was in the borderland, then wild, between the country of

Merlin and the country of Melusina. Some moors stretching out of sight

still bear witness to the ancient wars, the unceasing havoc, the many

horrors, which prevented the country being peopled again. There the

Devil was in his home. Of the few inhabitants most were his zealous

worshippers. Whatever attractions he might have found in the rough

brakes of Lorraine, the black pine-forests of the Jura, or the briny

deserts of Burgos, his preferences lay, perhaps, in our western

marches. There might be found not only the visionary shepherd, that

Satanic union of the goat and the goatherd, but also a closer

conspiracy with nature, a deeper insight into remedies and poisons, a

mysterious connection, whose links we know not, with Toledo the

learned, the University of the Devil.

The winter was setting in: its breath having first stripped the trees,

had heaped together the leaves and small boughs of dead wood. All this

she found prepared for her at the mouth of her gloomy den. By a wood

and moor, half a mile across, you came down within reach of some

villages, which had grown up beside a watercourse. "Behold your

kingdom!" said the voice within her. "To-day a beggar, to-morrow you

shall be queen of the whole land."

CHAPTER VII.

THE KING OF THE DEAD.

At first she was not much affected by promises like these. A lonely

hermitage without God, amidst the great monotonous breezes of the

West, amidst memories all the more ruthless for that mighty solitude,

of such heavy losses, such sharp affronts; a widowhood so hard and

sudden, away from the husband who had left her to her shame--all this

was enough to bow her down. Plaything of fate, she seemed like the

wretched weed upon the moor, having no root, but tossed to and fro,

lashed and cruelly cut by the north-east winds; or rather, perhaps,

like the grey, many-cornered coral, which only sticks fast to get more

easily broken. The children trampled on her; the people said, with a

laugh, "She is the bride of the winds."

Wildly she laughed at herself when she thought on the comparison. But,

from the depth of her dark cave, she heard,--

"Ignorant and witless, you know not what you say. The plant thus

tossing to and fro may well look down upon the rank and vulgar herbs.

If it tosses, it is, at least, all self-contained--itself both flower

and seed. Do thou be like it; be thine own root, and even in the

whirlwind thou wilt still bear thy blossom: our own flowers for

ourselves, as they come forth from the dust of tombs and the ashes of

volcanoes.

"To thee, first flower of Satan, do I this day grant the knowledge of

my former name, my olden power. I was, I am, the _King of the Dead_.

Ay, have I not been sadly slandered? 'Tis I who alone can make them

reappear; a boon untold, for which I surely deserved an altar."

* * * * *

To pierce the future and to call up the past, to forestal and to live

again the swift-flying moments, to enlarge the present with that which

has been and that which will be--these are the two things forbidden to

the Middle Ages; but forbidden in vain. Nature is invincible; nothing

can be gained in such a quarter. He who thus errs is _a man_. It is

not for him to be rooted to his furrow, with eyes cast down, looking

nowhere beyond the steps he takes behind his oxen. No: we will go

forward with head upraised, looking further and looking deeper! This

earth that we measure out with so much care, we kick our feet upon

withal, and keep ever saying to it, "What dost thou hold in thy

bowels? What secrets lie therein? Thou givest us back the grain we

entrust to thee; but not that human seed, those beloved dead, we have

lent into thy charge. Our friends, our loves, that lie there, will

they never bud again? Oh, that we might see them, if only for one

hour, if only for one moment!

"Some day we ourselves shall reach the unknown land, whither they have

already gone. But shall we see them again there? Shall we dwell with

them? Where are they, and what are they doing? They must be kept very

close prisoners, these dear dead of mine, to give me not one token!

And how can I make them hear me? My father, too, whose only hope I

was, who loved me with so mighty a love, why comes he never to me? Ah,

me! on either side is bondage, imprisonment, mutual ignorance; a

dismal night, where we look in vain for one glimmer!"[36]

[36] The glimmer shines forth in Dumesnil's _Immortalité_,

and _La Foi Nouvelle_, in the _Ciel et Terre_ of Reynaud,

Henry Martin, &c.

These everlasting thoughts of Nature, from having in olden times been

simply mournful, became in the Middle Ages painful, bitter, weakening,

and the heart thereby grew smaller. It seems as if they had reckoned

on flattening the soul, on pressing and squeezing it down to the

compass of a bier. The burial of the serf between four deal boards was

well suited to such an end: it haunted one with the notion of being

smothered. A person thus enclosed, if ever he returned in one's

dreams, would no longer appear as a thin luminous shadow encircled by

a halo of Elysium, but only as the wretched sport of some hellish

griffin-cat. What a hateful and impious idea, that my good, kind

father, my mother so revered by all, should become the plaything of

such a beast! You may laugh now, but for a thousand years it was no

laughing matter: they wept bitterly. And even now the heart swells

with wrath, the very pen grates angrily upon the paper, as one writes

down these blasphemous doings.

* * * * *

Moreover, it was surely a cruel device to transfer the Festival of the

Dead from the Spring, where antiquity had placed it, to November. In

May, where it fell at first, they were buried among the flowers. In

March, wherein it was afterwards placed, it became the signal for

labour and the lark. The dead and the seed of corn entered the earth

together with the same hope. But in November, when all the work is

done, the weather close and gloomy for many days to come; when the

folk return to their homes; when a man, re-seating himself by the

hearth, looks across on that place for evermore empty--ah, me! at such

a time how great the sorrow grows! Clearly, in choosing a moment

already in itself so funereal, for the obsequies of Nature, they

feared that a man would not find cause enough of sorrow in himself!

The coolest, the busiest of men, however taken up they be with life's

distracting cares, have, at least, their sadder moments. In the dark

wintry morning, in the night that comes on so swift to swallow us up

in its shadow, ten years, nay, twenty years hence, strange feeble

voices will rise up in your heart: "Good morning, dear friend, 'tis

we! You are alive, are working as hard as ever. So much the better!

You do not feel our loss so heavily, and you have learned to do

without us; but we cannot, we never can, do without you. The ranks are

closed, the gap is all but filled. The house that was ours is full,

and we have blessed it. All is well, is better than when your father

carried you about; better than when your little girl said, in her

turn, to you, 'Papa, carry me.' But, lo! you are in tears. Enough,

till we meet again!"

Alas, and are they gone? That wail was sweet and piercing: but was it

just? No. Let me forget myself a thousand times rather than I should

forget them! And yet, cost what it will to say so, say it we must,

that certain traces are fading off, are already less clear to see;

that certain features are not indeed effaced, but grown paler and more

dim. A hard, a bitter, a humbling thought it is, to find oneself so

weak and fleeting, wavering as unremembered water; to feel that in

time one loses that treasure of grief which one had hoped to preserve

for ever. Give it me back, I pray: I am too much bounden to so rich a

fountain of tears. Trace me again, I implore you, those features I

love so well. Could you not help me at least to dream of them by

night?

* * * * *

More than one such prayer is spoken in the month of November. And

amidst the striking of the bells and the dropping of the leaves, they

clear out of church, saying one to another in low tones: "I say,

neighbour; up there lives a woman of whom folk speak well and ill.

For myself, I dare say nothing; but she has power over the world

below. She calls up the dead, and they come. Oh, if she might--without

sin, you know, without angering God--make my friends come to me! I am

alone, as you must know, and have lost everything in this world. But

who knows what this woman is, whether of hell or heaven? I won't go

(he is dying of curiosity all the while); I won't. I have no wish to

endanger my soul: besides, the wood yonder is haunted. Many's the time

that things unfit to see have been found on the moor. Haven't you

heard about Jacqueline, who was there one evening looking for one of

her sheep? Well, when she returned, she was crazy. I won't go."

Thus unknown to each other, many of the men at least went thither. For

as yet the women hardly dared so great a risk. They remark the dangers

of the road, ask many questions of those who return therefrom. The new

Pythoness is not like her of Endor, who raised up Samuel at the prayer

of Saul. Instead of showing you the ghosts, she gives you cabalistic

words and powerful potions to bring them back in your dreams. Ah, how

many a sorrow has recourse to these! The grandmother herself,

tottering with her eighty years, would behold her grandson again. By

an unwonted effort, yet not without a pang of shame at sinning on the

edge of the grave, she drags herself to the spot. She is troubled by

the savage look of a place all rough with yews and thorns, by the

rude, dark beauty of that relentless Proserpine. Prostrate,

trembling, grovelling on the ground, the poor old woman weeps and

prays. Answer there is none. But when she dares to lift herself up a

little, she sees that Hell itself has been a-weeping.

* * * * *

It is simply Nature recovering herself. Proserpine blushes

self-indignantly thereat. "Degenerate soul!" she calls herself, "why

this weakness? You came hither with the firm desire of doing nought

but evil. Is this your master's lesson? How he will laugh at you for

this!"

"Nay! Am I not the great shepherd of the shades, making them come and

go, opening unto them the gate of dreams? Your Dante, when he drew my

likeness, forgot my attributes. When he gave me that useless tail, he

did not see that I held the shepherd's staff of Osiris; that from

Mercury I had inherited his caduceus. In vain have they thought to

build up an insurmountable wall between the two worlds; I have wings

to my heels, I have flown over. By a kindly rebellion of that

slandered Spirit, of that ruthless monster, succour has been given to

those who mourned; mothers, lovers, have found comfort. He has taken

pity on them in defiance of their new god."

The scribes of the Middle Ages, being all of the priestly class, never

cared to acknowledge the deep but silent changes of the popular mind.

It is clear that from thenceforth compassion goes over to Satan's

side. The Virgin herself, ideal as she is of grace, makes no answer

to such a want of the heart. Neither does the Church, who expressly

forbids the calling up of the dead. While all books delight in keeping

up either the swinish demon of earlier times, or the griffin butcher

of the second period, Satan has changed his shape for those who cannot

write. He retains somewhat of the ancient Pluto; but his pale nor

wholly ruthless majesty, that permitted the dead to come back, the

living once more to see the dead, passes ever more and more into the

nature of his father, or his grandfather, Osiris, the shepherd of

souls.

Through this one change come many others. Men with their mouths

acknowledge the hell official and the boiling caldrons; but in their

hearts do they truly believe therein? Would it be so easy to win these

infernal favours for hearts beset with hateful traditions of a hell of

torments? The one idea neutralizes without wholly effacing the other,

and between them grows up a vague mixed image, resembling more and

more nearly the hell of Virgil. A mighty solace was here offered to

the human heart. Blessed above all was the relief thus given to the

poor women, whom that dreadful dogma about the punishment of their

loved dead had kept drowned in tears and inconsolable. The whole of

their lifetime had been but one long sigh.

* * * * *

The Sibyl was musing over her master's words, when a very light step

became audible. The day has scarcely dawned: it is after Christmas,

about the first day of the new year. Over the crisp and rimy grass

approaches a small, fair woman, all a-trembling, who has no sooner

reached the spot, than she swoons and loses her breath. Her black gown

tells plainly of her widowhood. To the piercing gaze of Medea, without

moving or speaking, she reveals all: there is no mystery about her

shrinking figure. The other says to her with a loud voice: "You need

not tell me, little dumb creature, for you would never get to the end

of it. I will speak for you. Well, you are dying of love!" Recovering

a little, she clasps her hands together, and sinking almost on her

knees, tells everything, making a full confession. She had suffered,

wept, prayed, and would have silently suffered on. But these winter

feasts, these family re-unions, the ill-concealed happiness of other

women who, without pity for her, showed off their lawful loves, had

driven the burning arrow again into her heart. Alas, what could she

do? If he might but return and comfort her for one moment! "Be it even

at the cost of my life; let me die, but only let me see him once

more!"

"Go back to your house: shut the door carefully: put up the shutter

even against any curious neighbour. Throw off your mourning, and put

on your wedding-clothes; place a cover for him on the table; but yet

he will not come. You will sing the song he made for you, and sang to

you so often, but yet he will not come. Then you shall draw out of

your box the last dress he wore, and, kissing it, say, 'So much the

worse for thee if thou wilt not come!' And presently when you have

drunk this wine, bitter, but very sleepful, you will lie down as a

wedded bride. Then assuredly he will come to you."

The little creature would have been no woman, if next morning she had

not shown her joy and tenderness by owning the miracle in whispers to

her best friend. "Say nought of it, I beg. But he himself told me,

that if I wore this gown and slept a deep sleep every Sunday, he would

return."

A happiness not without some danger. Where would the rash woman be, if

the Church learned that she was no longer a widow; that re-awakened by

her love, the spirit came to console her?

But strange to tell, the secret is kept. There is an understanding

among them all, to hide so sweet a mystery. For who has no concern

therein? Who has not lost and mourned? Who would not gladly see this

bridge created between two worlds? "O thou beneficent Witch! Blessed

be thou, spirit of the nether world!"

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PRINCE OF NATURE.

Hard is the long sad winter of the North-west. Even after its

departure it renews its visits, like a drowsy sorrow which ever and

again comes back and rages afresh. One morning everything wakes up

decked with bright needles. In this cruel mocking splendour that makes

one shiver through and through, the whole vegetable world seems turned

mineral, loses its sweet diversity, and freezes into a mass of rough

crystals.

The poor Sibyl, as she sits benumbed by her hearth of leaves, scourged

by the flaying north-east winds, feels at her heart a cruel pang, for

she feels herself all alone. But that very thought again brings her

relief. With returning pride returns a vigour that warms her heart and

lights up her soul. Intent, quick, and sharp, her sight becomes as

piercing as those needles; and the world, the cruel world that caused

her suffering, is to her transparent as glass. Anon she rejoices over

it, as over a conquest of her making.

For is she not a queen, a queen with courtiers of her own? The crows

have clearly some connection with her. In grave, dignified body they

come like ancient augurs, to talk to her of passing things. The

wolves passing by salute her timidly with sidelong glances. The bear,

then oftener seen than now, would sometimes, in his heavily

good-natured way, seat himself awkwardly at the threshold of her den,

like a hermit calling on a fellow-hermit, just as we often see him in

the Lives of the Desert Fathers.

All those birds and beasts with whom men only made acquaintance in

hunting or slaying them, were outlawed as much as she. With all these

she comes to an understanding; for Satan as the chief outlaw, imparts

to his own the pleasures of natural freedom, the wild delight of

living in a world sufficient unto itself.

* * * * *

Rough freedom of loneliness, all hail! The whole earth seems still

clothed in a white shroud, held in bondage by a load of ice, of

pitiless crystals, so uniform, sharp, and agonizing. After the year

1200 especially, the world is shut in like a transparent tomb, wherein

all things look terribly motionless, hard, and stiff.

The Gothic Church has been called a "crystallization;" and so it truly

is. About 1300, architecture gave up all its old variety of form and

living fancies, to repeat itself for evermore, to vie with the

monotonous prisms of Spitzbergen, to become the true and awful

likeness of that hard crystal city, in which a dreadful dogma thought

to bury all life away.

But for all the props, buttresses, flying-buttresses, that keep the

monument up, one thing there is that makes it totter. There is no loud

battering from without, but a certain softness in the very

foundations, which attacks the crystal with an imperceptible thaw.

What thing do I mean? The humble stream of warm tears shed by a whole

world, until they have become a very sea of wailings. What do I call

it? A breath of the future, a stirring of the natural life, which

shall presently rise again in irresistible might. The fantastic

building of which more than one side is already sinking, says, not

without terror, to itself, "It is the breath of Satan."

Beneath this Hecla-glacier lies a volcano which has no need of

bursting out; a mild, slow, gentle heat, which caresses it from below,

and, calling it nearer, says in a whisper, "Come down."

* * * * *

The Witch has something to laugh at, if from the gloom she can see how

utterly Dante and St. Thomas,[37] in the bright light yonder, ignore

the true position of things. They fancy that the Devil wins his way by

cunning or by terror. They make him grotesque and coarse, as in his

childhood, when Jesus could still send him into the herd of swine. Or

else they make him subtle as a logician of the schools, or a

fault-finding lawyer. If he had been no better than this compound of

beast and disputant,--if he had only lived in the mire or on

fine-drawn quibbles about nothing, he would very soon have died of

hunger.

[37] St. Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor," who died in

1274.--TRANS.

People were too ready to crow over him, when he was shewn by

Bartolus[38] pleading against the woman--that is, the Virgin--who gets

him nonsuited and condemned with costs. At that time, indeed, the very

contrary was happening on earth. By a master-stroke of his he had won

over the plaintiff herself, his fair antagonist, the Woman; had

seduced her, not indeed by verbal pleadings, but by arguments not less

real than they were charming and irresistible. He put into her hands

the fruits of science and of nature.

[38] Bartolus or Bartoli, a lawyer and law-writer of the

fourteenth century.--TRANS.

No need for controversies, for pleas of any kind: he simply shows

himself. In the East, the new-found Paradise, he begins to work. From

that Asian world, which men had thought to destroy, there springs

forth a peerless day-dawn, whose beams travel afar until they pierce

the deep winter of the West. There dawns on us a world of nature and

of art, accursed of the ignorant indeed, but now at length come

forward to vanquish its late victors in a pleasant war of love and

motherly endearments. All are conquered, all rave about it; they will

have nothing but Asia herself. With her hands full she comes to meet

us. Her tissues, shawls, her carpets so agreeably soft, so wondrously

harmonized, her bright and well-wrought blades, her richly damascened

arms, make us aware of our own barbarism. Moreover, little as that may

seem, these accursed lands of the "miscreant," ruled by Satan, are

visibly blessed with the fairest fruits of nature, that elixir of the

powers of God; with _the first of vegetables_, coffee; with _the first

of beasts_, the Arab horse. What am I saying?--with a whole world of

treasures, silk, sugar, and a host of herbs all-powerful to relieve

the heart, to soothe and lighten our sufferings.

All this breaks upon our view about the year 1300. Spain herself,

whose brain is wholly fashioned out of Moors and Jews, for all that

she is again subdued by the barbarous children of the Goth, bears

witness in behalf of those _miscreants_. Wherever the Mussulman

children of the Devil are at work, all is prosperous, the springs well

forth, the ground is covered with flowers. A right worthy and harmless

travail decks it with those wondrous vineyards, through which men

recruit themselves, drowning all care, and seeming to drink in

draughts of very goodness and heavenly compassion.

* * * * *

To whom does Satan bring the foaming cup of life? In this fasting

world, which has so long been fasting from reason, what man was there

strong enough to take all this in without growing giddy, without

getting drunken and risking the loss of his wits?

Is there yet a brain so far from being petrified or crystallized by

the teaching of St. Thomas, as to remain open to the living world, to

its vegetative forces? Three magicians, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon,

Arnaud of Villeneuve,[39] by strong efforts make their way to Nature's

secrets; but those lusty intellects lack flexibility and popular

power. Satan falls back on his own Eve. The woman is still the most

natural thing in the world; still keeps her hold on those traits of

roguish innocence one sees in a kitten or a child of very high spirit.

Besides, she figures much better in that world-comedy, that mighty

game wherewith the universal Proteus disports himself.

[39] Three eminent schoolmen of the thirteenth century, whose

scientific researches pointed the way to future

discoveries.--TRANS.

But being light and changeful, she is all the less liable to be carked

and hardened by pain! This woman, whom we have seen outlawed from the

world, and rooted on her wild moor, affords a case in point. Have we

yet to learn whether, bruised and soured as she is, with her heart

full of hate, she will re-enter the natural world and the pleasant

paths of life? Assuredly her return thither will not find her in good

tune, will happen mainly through a round of ill. In the coming and

going of the storm she is all the more scared and violent for being so

very weak.

When in the mild warmth of spring, from the air, the depths of the

earth, from the flowers and their languages, a new revelation rises

round her on every side, she is taken dizzy at the first. Her

swelling bosom overflows. The Sibyl of science has her tortures, like

her of Cumæ or of Delphi. The schoolmen find their fun in saying, "It

is the wind and nought else that blows her out. Her lover, the Prince

of the Air, fills her with dreams and delusions, with wind, with

smoke, with emptiness." Foolish irony! So far from this being the true

cause of her drunkenness, it is nothing empty, it is a real, a

substantial thing, which has loaded her bosom all too quickly.

* * * * *

Have you ever seen the agave, that hard wild African shrub, so sharp,

bitter, and tearing, with huge bristles instead of leaves? Ten years

through it loves and dies. At length one day the amorous shoot, which

has so long been gathering in the rough thing, goes off with a noise

like gunfire, and darts skyward. And this shoot becomes a whole tree,

not less than thirty feet high, and bristling with sad flowers.

Some such analogy does the gloomy Sibyl feel, when one morning of a

spring-time, late in coming, and therefore impetuous at the last,

there takes place all around her a vast explosion of life.

And all things look at her, and all things bloom for her. For every

thing that has life says softly, "Whoso understands me, I am his."

What a contrast! Here is the wife of the desert and of despair, bred

up in hate and vengeance, and lo! all these innocent things agree to

smile upon her! The trees, soothed by the south wind, pay her gentle

homage. Each herb of the field, with its own special virtue of scent,

or remedy, or poison--very often the three things are one--offers

itself to her, saying, "Gather me."

All things are clearly in love. "Are they not mocking me? I had been

readier for hell than for this strange festival. O spirit, art thou

indeed that spirit of dread whom once I knew, the traces of whose

cruelty I bear about me--what am I saying, and where are my

senses?--the wound of whose dealing scorches me still?

"Ah, no! 'Tis not the spirit whom I hoped for in my rage; '_he who

always says, No!_' This other one utters a yes of love, of drunken

dizziness. What ails him? Is he the mad, the dazed soul of life?

"They spoke of the great Pan as dead. But here he is in the guise of

Bacchus, of Priapus, eager with long-delayed desire, threatening,

scorching, teeming. No, no! Be this cup far from me! Trouble only

should I drink from it,--who knows? A despair yet sharper than my past

despairs."

Meanwhile wherever the woman appears, she becomes the one great object

of love. She is followed by all, and for her sake all despise their

own proper kind. What they say about the black he-goat, her pretended

favourite, may be applied to all. The horse neighs for her, breaking

everything and putting her in danger. The awful king of the prairie,

the black bull, bellows with grief, should she pass him by at a

distance. And, behold, yon bird despondingly turns away from his hen,

and with whirring wings hastes to convince the woman of his love!

Such is the new tyranny of her master, who, by the funniest hap of

all, foregoes the part accredited to him as king of the dead, to burst

forth a very king of life.

"No!" she says; "leave me to my hatred: I ask for nothing more. Let me

be feared and fearful! The beauty I would have, is only that which

dwells in these black serpents of my hair, in this countenance

furrowed with grief, and the scars of thy thunderbolt." But the Lord

of Evil replies with cunning softness: "Oh, but you are only the more

beautiful, the more impressible, for this fiery rage of yours! Ay,

call out and curse on, beneath one and the same goad! 'Tis but one

storm calling another. Swift and smooth is the passage from wrath to

pleasure."

Neither her fury nor her pride would have saved her from such

allurements. But she is saved by the boundlessness of her desire.

There is nought will satisfy her. Each kind of life for her is all too

bounded, wanting in power. Away from her, steed and bull and loving

bird! Away, ye creatures all! for one who desires the Infinite, how

weak ye are!

She has a woman's longing; but for what? Even for the whole, the great

all-containing whole. Satan did not foresee that no one creature would

content her.

That which he could not do, is done for her in some ineffable way.

Overcome by a desire so wide and deep, a longing boundless as the sea,

she falls asleep. At such a moment, all else forgot, no touch of hate,

no thought of vengeance left in her, she slumbers on the plain,

innocent in her own despite, stretched out in easy luxuriance like a

sheep or a dove.

She sleeps, she dreams; a delightful dream! It seemed as if the

wondrous might of universal life had been swallowed up within her; as

if life and death and all things thenceforth lay fast in her bowels;

as if in return for all her suffering, she was teeming at last with

Nature herself.

CHAPTER IX.

THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN.

That still and dismal scene of the Bride of Corinth, is repeated

literally from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. While it was

yet night, just before the daybreak, the two lovers, Man and Nature,

meet again, embrace with rapture, and, at that same moment--horrible

to tell!--behold themselves attacked by fearful plagues. We seem still

to hear the loved one saying to her lover, "It is all over: thy hair

will be white to-morrow. I am dead, and thou too wilt die."

Three dreadful blows happen in these three centuries. In the first we

have a loathsome changing of the outer man, diseases of the skin,

above all, leprosy. In the second, the evil turns inwards, becomes a

grotesque excitement of the nerves, a fit of epileptic dancing. Then

all grows calm, but the blood is changed, and ulcers prepare the way

for syphilis, the scourge of the fifteenth century.

* * * * *

Among the chief diseases of the Middle Ages, so far as one can look

therein, to speak generally, had been hunger, weakness, poverty of

blood, that kind of consumption which is visible in the sculptures of

that time. The blood was like clear water, and scrofulous ailments

were rife everywhere. Barring the well-paid doctors, Jew or Arab, of

the kings, the art of medicine was practised only with, holy water at

the church door. Thither on Sundays, after the service, would come a

crowd of sick, to whom words like these were spoken: "You have sinned

and God has afflicted you. Be thankful: so much the less will you

suffer in the next world. Resign yourselves to suffer and to die. The

Church has prayers for the dead." Weak, languishing, hopeless, with no

desire to live, they followed this counsel faithfully, and let life go

its way.

A fatal discouragement, a wretched state of things, that would have

prolonged without end these ages of lead, and debarred them from all

progress! Worst of all things is it to resign oneself so readily, to

welcome death with so much docility, to have strength for nothing, to

desire nothing. Of more worth was that new era, that close of the

Middle Ages, which at the cost of cruel sufferings first enabled us to

regain our former energy; namely, _the resurrection of desire_.

* * * * *

Some Arab writers have asserted that the widespread eruption of

skin-diseases which marks the thirteenth century, was caused by the

taking of certain stimulants to re-awaken and renew the defaults of

passion. Undoubtedly the burning spices brought over from the East,

tended somewhat to such an issue. The invention of distilling and of

divers fermented drinks may also have worked in the same direction.

But a greater and far more general fermentation was going on. During

the sharp inward struggle between two worlds and two spirits, a third

surviving silenced both. As the fading faith and the newborn reason

were disputing together, somebody stepping between them caught hold of

man. You ask who? A spirit unclean and raging, the spirit of sour

desires, bubbling painfully within.

Debarred from all outlet, whether of bodily enjoyment, or the free

flow of soul, the sap of life thus closely rammed together, was sure

to corrupt itself. Bereft of light, of sound, of speech, it spoke

through pains and ominous excrescences. Then happened a new and

dreadful thing. The desire put off without being diminished, finds

itself stopped short by a cruel enchantment, a shocking

metamorphosis.[40] Love was advancing blindly with open arms. It

recoils groaning; but in vain would it flee: the fire of the blood

keeps raging; the flesh eats itself away in sharp titillations, and

sharper within rages the coal of fire, made fiercer by despair.

[40] Leprosy has been traced to Asia and the Crusades; but

Europe had it in herself. The war declared by the Middle Ages

against the flesh and all cleanliness bore its fruits. More

than one saint boasted of having never washed even his hands.

And how much did the rest wash? To have stripped for a moment

would have been sinful. The worldlings carefully follow the

teaching of the monks. This subtle and refined society, which

sacrificed marriage and seemed inspired only with the poetry

of adultery, preserved a strange scruple on a point so

harmless. It dreaded all cleansing, as so much defilement.

There was no bathing for a thousand years!

What remedy does Christian Europe find for this twofold ill? Death and

captivity; nothing more. When the bitter celibacy, the hopeless love,

the passion irritable and ever-goading, bring you into a morbid state;

when your blood is decomposing, then you shall go down into an _In

pace_, or build your hut in the desert. You must live with the

handbell in your hand, that all may flee before you. "No human being

must see you: no consolation may be yours. If you come near, 'tis

death."

* * * * *

Leprosy is the last stage, the _apogee_ of this scourge; but a

thousand other ills, less hideous but still cruel, raged everywhere.

The purest and the most fair were stricken with sad eruptions, which

men regarded as sin made visible, or the chastisement of God. Then

people did what the love of life had never made them do: they forsook

the old sacred medicine, the bootless holy water, and went off to the

Witch. From habit and fear as well, they still repaired to church; but

thenceforth their true church was with her, on the moor, in the

forest, in the desert. To her they carried their vows.

Prayers for healing, prayers for pleasure. On the first effervescing

of their heated blood, folk went to the Sibyl, in great secrecy, at

uncertain hours. "What shall I do? and what is this I feel within me?

I burn: give me some lenitive. I burn: grant me that which causes my

intolerable desire."

A bold, a blamable journey, for which they reproach themselves at

night. Let this new fatality be never so urgent, this fire be never so

torturing, the Saints themselves never so powerless; still, have not

the indictment of the Templars and the proceedings of Pope Boniface

unveiled the Sodom lying hid beneath the altar? But a wizard Pope, a

friend of the Devil, who also carried him away, effects a change in

all their ideas. Was it not with the Demon's help that John XXII., the

son of a shoemaker, a Pope no more of Rome, succeeded in amassing in

his town of Avignon more gold than the Emperor and all the kings? As

the Pope is, so is the bishop. Did not Guichard, Bishop of Troyes,

procure from the Devil the death of the King's daughters? No death we

ask for--we; but pleasant things--for life, for health, for beauty,

and for pleasure: the things of God which God refuses. What shall we

do? Might we but win them through the grace of the _Prince of this

World_!

* * * * *

When the great and mighty doctor of the Renaissance, Paracelsus, cast

all the wise books of ancient medicine into the fire, Latin, and

Jewish, and Arabic, all at once, he declared that he had learned none

but the popular medicine, that of the _good women_,[41] the

_shepherds_, and the _headsmen_, the latter of whom made often good

horse-doctors and clever surgeons, resetting bones broken or put out

of joint.

[41] The name given in fear and politeness to the witches.

I make no doubt but that his admirable and masterly work on _The

Diseases of Women_--the first then written on a theme so large, so

deep, so tender--came forth from his special experience of those women

to whom others went for aid; of the witches, namely, who always acted

as the midwives: for never in those days was a male physician admitted

to the woman's side, to win her trust in him, to listen to her

secrets. The witches alone attended her, and became, especially for

women, the chief and only physician.

* * * * *

What we know for surest with regard to their medicinal practice is,

that for ends the most different, alike to stimulate and to soothe,

they made use of one large family of doubtful and very dangerous

plants, called, by reason of the services they rendered, _The

Comforters_, or Solaneæ.[42]

[42] Man's ingratitude is painful to see. A thousand other

plants have come into use: a hundred exotic vegetables have

become the fashion. But the good once done by these poor

_Comforters_ is clean forgotten!--Nay, who now remembers or

even acknowledges the old debt of humanity to harmless

nature? The _Asclepias acida_, _Sarcostemma_, or flesh-plant,

which for five thousand years was the _Holy Wafer_ of the

East, its very palpable God, eaten gladly by five hundred

millions of men,--this plant, in the Middle Ages called the

Poison-queller (_vince-venenum_), meets with not one word of

historical comment in our books of Botany. Perhaps two

thousand years hence they will forget the wheat. See Langlois

on the _Soma_ of India and the _Hom_ of Persia. _Mem. de

l'Académie des Inscriptions_, xix. 326.

A vast and popular family, many kinds of which abound to excess under

our feet, in the hedges, everywhere--a family so numerous that of one

kind alone we have eight hundred varieties.[43] There is nothing

easier, nothing more common, to find. But these plants are mostly

dangerous in the using. It needs some boldness to measure out a dose,

the boldness, perhaps, of genius.

[43] M. d'Orbigny's _Dictionary of Natural History_, article

_Morelles_.

Let us, step by step, mount the ladder of their powers.[44] The first

are simply pot-herbs, good for food, such as the mad-apples and the

tomatoes, miscalled "love-apples." Other, of the harmless kinds, are

sweetness and tranquillity itself, as the white mullens, or lady's

fox-gloves, so good for fomentations.

[44] I have found this ladder nowhere else. It is the more

important, because the witches who made these essays at the

risk of passing for poisoners, certainly began with the

weakest, and rose gradually to the strongest. Each step of

power thus gives its relative date, and helps us in this dark

subject to set up a kind of chronology. I shall complete it

in the following chapters, when I come to speak of the

Mandragora and the Datura. I have chiefly followed Pouchet's

_Solanées_ and _Botanique Générale_.

Going higher up, you come on a plant already suspicious, which many

think a poison, a plant which at first seems like honey and afterwards

tastes bitter, reminding one of Jonathan's saying, "I have eaten a

little honey, and therefore shall I die." But this death is

serviceable, a dying away of pain. The "bittersweet" should have been

the first experiment of that bold homoeopathy which rose, little by

little, up to the most dangerous poisons. The slight irritation and

the tingling which it causes might point it out as a remedy for the

prevalent diseases of that time, those, namely, of the skin.

The pretty maiden who found herself woefully adorned with uncouth red

patches, with pimples, or with ringworm, would come crying for such

relief. In the case of an elder woman the hurt would be yet more

painful. The bosom, most delicate thing in nature, with its innermost

vessels forming a matchless flower, becomes, through its injective and

congestive tendencies, the most perfect instrument for causing pain.

Sharp, ruthless, restless are the pains she suffers. Gladly would she

accept all kinds of poison. Instead of bargaining with the Witch, she

only puts her poor hard breast between her hands.

From the bittersweet, too weak for such, we rise to the dark

nightshades, which have rather more effect. For a few days the woman

is soothed. Anon she comes back weeping. "Very well, to-night you may

come again. I will fetch you something, as you wish me; but it will be

a strong poison."

It was a heavy risk for the Witch. At that time they never thought

that poisons could act as remedies, if applied outwardly or taken in

very weak doses. The plants they compounded together under the name of

_witches' herbs_, seemed to be but ministers of death. Such as were

found in her hands would have proved her, in their opinion, a poisoner

or a dealer in accursed charms. A blind crowd, all the more cruel for

its growing fears, might fell her with a shower of stones, or make her

undergo the trial by water--the _noyade_. Or even--most dreadful doom

of all!--they might drag her with a rope round her neck to the

churchyard, where a pious festival was held and the people edified by

seeing her thrown to the flames.

However, she runs the risk, and fetches home the dreadful plant. The

other woman comes back to her abode by night or morning, whenever she

is least afraid of being met. But a young shepherd, who saw her there,

told the village, "If you had seen her as I did, gliding among the

rubbish of the ruined hut, looking about her on all sides, muttering I

know not what! Oh, but she has frightened me very much! If she had

seen me, I was a lost man. She would have changed me into a lizard, a

toad, or a bat. She took a paltry herb--the paltriest I ever saw--of a

pale sickly yellow, with red and black marks, like the flames, as they

say, of hell. The horror of the thing is, that the whole stalk was

hairy like a man, with long, black, sticky hairs. She plucked it

roughly, with a grunt, and suddenly I saw her no more. She could not

have run away so quick; she must have flown. What a dreadful thing

that woman is! How dangerous to the whole country!"

Certainly the plant inspires dread. It is the henbane, a cruel and

dangerous poison, but a powerful emollient, a soft sedative poultice,

which melts, unbends, lulls to sleep the pain, often taking it quite

away.

Another of these poisons--the Belladonna, so called, undoubtedly, in

thankful acknowledgment, had great power in laying the convulsions

that sometimes supervened in childbirth, and added a new danger, a new

fear, to the danger and the fear of that most trying moment. A

motherly hand instilled the gentle poison, casting the mother herself

into a sleep, and smoothing the infant's passage, after the manner of

the modern chloroform, into the world.[45]

[45] Madame La Chapelle and M. Chaussier have renewed to good

purpose these practices of the older medicine. Pouchet,

_Solanées_.

Belladonna cures the dancing-fits while making you dance. A daring

homoeopathy this, which at first must frighten: it is _medicine

reversed_, contrary in most things to that which alone the Christians

studied, which alone they valued, after the example of the Jews and

Arabs.

How did men come to this result? Undoubtedly by the simple effect of

the great Satanic principle, that _everything must be done the wrong

way_, the very opposite way to that followed by the holy people. These

latter have a dread of poisons. Satan uses them and turns them into

remedies. The Church thinks by spiritual means, by sacraments and

prayers, to act even on the body. Satan, on the other hand, uses

material means to act even upon the soul, making you drink of

forgetfulness, love, reverie, and every passion. To the blessing of

the priest he opposes the magnetic passes made by the soft hands of

women, who cheat you of your pains.

* * * * *

By a change of system, and yet more of dress, as in the substitution

of linen for wool, the skin-diseases lost their intensity. Leprosy

abated, but seemed to go inwards and beget deeper ills. The fourteenth

century wavered between three scourges--the epileptic dancings, the

plague, and the sores which, according to Paracelsus, led the way to

syphilis.

The first danger was not the least. About 1350 it broke out in a

frightful manner with the dance of St. Guy, and was singular

especially in this, that it did not act upon each person separately.

As if carried on by one same galvanic current, the sick caught each

other by the hand, formed immense chains, and spun and spun round till

they died. The spectators, who laughed at first, presently catching

the contagion, let themselves go, fell into the mighty current,

increased the terrible choir.

What would have happened if the evil had held on as long as leprosy

did even in its decline?

It was the first step, as it were, towards epilepsy. If that

generation of sufferers had not been cured, it would have begotten

another decidedly epileptic. What a frightful prospect! Think of

Europe covered with fools, with idiots, with raging madmen! We are not

told how the evil was treated and checked. The remedy prescribed by

most, the falling upon these jumpers with kicks and cuffings, was

entirely fitted to increase the frenzy and turn it into downright

epilepsy.[46] Doubtless there was some other remedy, of which people

were loth to speak. At the time when witchcraft took its first great

flight, the widespread use of the _Solaneæ_, above all, of belladonna,

vulgarized the medicine which really checked those affections. At the

great popular gatherings of the Sabbath, of which we shall presently

speak, the _witches' herb_, mixed with mead, beer, cider,[47] or perry

(the strong drinks of the West), set the multitude dancing a dance

luxurious indeed, but far from epileptic.

[46] We should think that few physicians would quite agree

with M. Michelet.--TRANS.

[47] Cider was first made in the twelfth century.

* * * * *

But the greatest revolution caused by the witches, the greatest step

_the wrong way_ against the spirit of the Middle Ages, was what may be

called the reënfeoffment of the stomach and the digestive organs. They

had the boldness to say, "There is nothing foul or unclean."

Thenceforth the study of matter was free and boundless. Medicine

became a possibility.

That this principle was greatly abused, we do not deny; but the

principle is none the less clear. There is nothing foul but moral

evil. In the natural world all things are pure: nothing may be

withheld from our studious regard, nothing be forbidden by an idle

spiritualism, still less by a silly disgust.

It was here especially that the Middle Ages showed themselves in their

true light, as _anti-natural_, out of Nature's oneness drawing

distinctions of castes, of priestly orders. Not only do they count the

spirit _noble_, and the body _ignoble_; but even parts of the body are

called noble, while others are not, being evidently plebeian. In like

manner heaven is noble, and hell is not; but why?--"Because heaven is

high up." But in truth it is neither high nor low, being above and

beneath alike. And what is hell? Nothing at all. Equally foolish are

they about the world at large and the smaller world of men.

This world is all one piece: each thing in it is attached to all the

rest. If the stomach is servant of the brain and feeds it, the brain

also works none the less for the stomach, perpetually helping to

prepare for it the digestive _sugar_.[48]

[48] This great discovery was made by Claude Bernard.

* * * * *

There was no lack of injurious treatment. The witches were called

filthy, indecent, shameless, immoral. Nevertheless, their first steps

on that road may be accounted as a happy revolution in things most

moral, in charity and kindness. With a monstrous perversion of ideas

the Middle Ages viewed the flesh in its representative,

woman,--accursed since the days of Eve--as a thing impure. The Virgin,

exalted as _Virgin_ more than as _Our Lady_, far from lifting up the

real woman, had caused her abasement, by setting men on the track of a

mere scholastic puritanism, where they kept rising higher and higher

in subtlety and falsehood.

Woman herself ended by sharing in the hateful prejudice and deeming

herself unclean. She hid herself at the hour of childbed. She blushed

at loving and bestowing happiness on others. Sober as she mostly was

in comparison with man, living as she mostly did on herbs and fruits,

sharing through her diet of milk and vegetables the purity of the most

innocent breeds, she almost besought forgiveness for being born, for

living, for carrying out the conditions of her life.

* * * * *

The medical art of the Middle Ages busied itself peculiarly about the

man, a being noble and pure, who alone could become a priest, alone

could make God at the altar. It also paid some attention to the

beasts, beginning indeed with them; but of children it thought seldom:

of women not at all.

The romances, too, with their subtleties pourtray the converse of the

world. Outside the courts and highborn adulterers, which form the

chief topic of these romances, the woman is always a poor Griselda,

born to drain the cup of suffering, to be often beaten, and never

cared for.

In order to mind the woman, to trample these usages under foot, and to

care for her in spite of herself, nothing less would serve than the

Devil, woman's old ally, her trusty friend in Paradise, and the Witch,

that monster who deals with everything the wrong way, exactly

contrariwise to that of the holier people. The poor creature set such

little store by herself. She would shrink back, blushing, and loth to

say a word. The Witch being clever and evil-hearted, read her to the

inmost depths. Ere long she won her to speak out, drew from her her

little secret, overcame her refusals, her modest, humble hesitations.

Rather than undergo the remedy, she was willing almost to die. But the

cruel sorceress made her live.

CHAPTER X.

CHARMS AND PHILTRES.

Let no one hastily conclude from the foregoing chapter that I attempt

to whiten, to acquit entirely, the dismal bride of the Devil. If she

often did good, she could also do no small amount of ill. There is no

great power which is not abused. And this one had three centuries of

actual reigning, in the interlude between two worlds, the older dying

and the new struggling painfully to begin. The Church, which in the

quarrels of the sixteenth century will regain some of her strength, at

least for fighting, in the fourteenth is down in the mire. Look at the

truthful picture drawn by Clémangis. The nobles, so proudly arrayed in

their new armour, fall all the more heavily at Crécy, Poitiers,

Agincourt. All who survive end by being prisoners in England. What a

theme for ridicule! The citizens, the very peasants make merry and

shrug their shoulders. This general absence of the lords gave, I

fancy, no small encouragement to the Sabbath gatherings which had

always taken place, but at this time might first have grown into vast

popular festivals.

How mighty the power thus wielded by Satan's sweetheart, who cures,

foretels, divines, calls up the souls of the dead; who can throw a

spell upon you, turn you into a hare or wolf, enable you to find a

treasure, and, best of all, ensure your being beloved! It is an awful

power which combines all others. How could a stormy soul, a soul most

commonly gangrened, and sometimes grown utterly wayward, have helped

employing it to wreak her hate and revenge; sometimes even out of a

mere delight in malice and uncleanness?

All that once was told the confessor, is now imparted to her: not only

the sins already done, but those also which folk purpose doing. She

holds each by her shameful secret, by the avowal of her uncleanest

desires. To her they entrust both their bodily and mental ills; the

lustful heats of a blood inflamed and soured; the ceaseless prickings

of some sharp, urgent, furious desire.

To her they all come: with her there is no shame. In plain blunt words

they beseech her for life, for death, for remedies, for poisons.

Thither comes a young woman, to ask through her tears for the means of

saving her from the fruits of her sin. Thither comes the

step-mother--a common theme in the Middle Ages--to say that the child

of a former marriage eats well and lives long. Thither comes the

sorrowing wife whose children year by year are born only to die. And

now, on the other hand, comes a youth to buy at any cost the burning

draught that shall trouble the heart of some haughty dame, until,

forgetful of the distance between them, she has stooped to look upon

her little page.

* * * * *

In these days there are but two types, two forms of marriage, both of

them extreme and outrageous.

The scornful heiress of a fief, who brings her husband a crown or a

broad estate, an Eleanor of Guyenne for instance, will, under her

husband's very eyes, hold her court of lovers, keeping herself under

very slight control. Let us leave romances and poems, to look at the

reality in its dread march onward to the unbridled rage of the

daughters of Philip the Fair, of the cruel Isabella, who by the hands

of her lovers impaled Edward II. The insolence of the feudal women

breaks out diabolically in the triumphant two-horned bonnet and other

brazen-faced fashions.

But in this century, when classes are beginning to mingle slightly,

the woman of a lower rank, when she marries a lord, has to fear the

hardest trials. So says the truthful history of the humble, the meek,

the patient Griselda. In a more popular form it becomes the tale of

_Blue-Beard_, a tale which seems to me quite earnest and historical.

The wife so often killed and replaced by him could only have been his

vassal. He would have reckoned wholly otherwise with the daughter or

sister of a baron, who might avenge her. If I am not misled by a

specious conjecture, we must believe that this tale is of the

fourteenth century, and not of those preceding, in which the lord

would never have deigned to take a wife below himself.

Specially remarkable in the moving tale of _Griselda_ is the fact,

that throughout her heavy trials, she never seeks support in being

devout or in loving another. She is evidently faithful, chaste, and

pure. It never comes into her mind to love elsewhere.

Of the two feudal women, the Heiress and Griselda, it is peculiarly

the first who has her household of gentlemen, her courts of love, who

shows favour to the humblest lovers, encouraging them, delivering, as

Eleanor did, the famous sentence, soon to become quite classical:

"There can be no love between married folk."

Thereupon a secret hope, but hot and violent withal, arises in more

than one young heart. If he must give himself to the Devil, he will

rush full tilt on this adventurous intrigue. Let the castle be never

so surely closed, one fine opening is still left for Satan. In a game

so perilous, what chance of success reveals itself? Wisdom answers,

None. But what if Satan said, Yes?

We must remember how great a distance feudal pride set between the

nobles themselves. Words are misleading: one _cavalier_ might be far

below another.

The knight banneret, who brought a whole army of vassals to his king's

side, would look with utter scorn from one end of his long table on

the poor _lackland_ knights seated at the other. How much greater his

scorn for the simple varlets, grooms, pages, &c., fed upon his

leavings! Seated at the lowermost end of the tables close to the door,

they scraped the dishes sent down to them, often empty, from the

personages seated above beside the hearth. It never would cross the

great lord's mind, that those below would dare to lift eyes of fancy

towards their lovely mistress, the haughty heiress of a fief, sitting

near her mother, "crowned by a chaplet of white roses." Whilst he bore

with wondrous patience the love of some stranger knight, appointed by

his lady to bear her colours, he would have savagely punished the

boldness of any servant who looked so high. Of this kind was the

raging jealousy shown by the Lord of Fayel, who was stirred to deadly

wrath, not because his wife had a lover, but because that lover was

one of his household, the castellan or simple constable of his castle

of Coucy.

The deeper and less passable seemed the gulf between the great

heiress, lady of the manor, and the groom or page who, barring his

shirt, had nothing, not even his coat, but what belonged to his

master, the stronger became love's temptation to overleap that gulf.

The youth was buoyed up by the very impossibility. At length, one day

that he managed to get out of the tower, he ran off to the Witch and

asked her advice. Would a philtre serve as a spell to win her? Or,

failing that, must he make an express covenant? He never shrank at all

from the dreadful idea of yielding himself to Satan. "We will take

care for that, young man: but hie thee up again; you will find some

change already."

* * * * *

The change, however, is in himself. He is stirred by some ineffable

hope, that escapes in spite of him from a deep downcast eye, scored by

an ever-darting flame. Somebody, we may guess who, having eyes for him

alone, is moved to throw him, as she passes, a word of pity. Oh,

rapture! Kind Satan! Charming, adorable Witch!

He cannot eat nor drink until he has been to see the latter again.

Respectfully kissing her hand, he almost falls at her feet. Whatever

she may ask him, whatever she may bid him do, he will obey her. That

moment, if she wishes it, he will give her his golden chain, will give

her the ring upon his finger, though he had it from a dying mother.

But the Witch, in her native malice, in her hatred of the Baron, feels

an especial comfort in dealing him a secret blow.

Already a vague anxiety disturbs the castle. A dumb tempest, without

lightning or thunder, broods over it, like an electric vapour on a

marsh. All is silence, deep silence; but the lady is troubled. She

suspects that some supernatural power has been at work. For why indeed

be thus drawn to this youth, more than to some one else, handsomer,

nobler, renowned already for deeds of arms? There is something toward,

down yonder! Has that woman cast a spell upon her, or worked some

hidden charm? The more she asks herself these questions, the more her

heart is troubled.

* * * * *

The Witch has something to wreak her malice upon at last. In the

village she was a queen; but now the castle comes to her, yields

itself up to her on that side where its pride ran the greatest risk.

For us this passion has a peculiar interest, as the rush of one soul

towards its ideal against every social harrier, against the unjust

decree of fate. To the Witch, on her side, it holds out the deep, keen

delight of humbling the lady's pride, and revenging perhaps her own

wrongs; the delight of serving the lord as he served his vassals, of

levying upon him, through the boldness of a mere child, the

firstfruits of his outrageous wedding-rights. Undoubtedly, in these

intrigues where the Witch had to play her part, she often acted from a

depth of levelling hatred natural to a peasant.

Already it was something gained to have made the lady stoop to love a

menial. We should not be misled by such examples as John of Saintré

and Cherubin. The serving-boy filled the lowest offices in the

household. The footman proper did not then exist, while on the other

hand, few, if any maidservants lived in military strongholds. Young

hands did everything, and were not disgraced thereby. The service,

specially the body-service of the lord and lady, honoured and raised

them up. Nevertheless, it often placed the highborn page in situations

sorrowful enough, prosaic, not to say ridiculous. The lord never

distresses himself about that. And the lady must indeed be charmed by

the Devil, not to see what every day she saw, her well-beloved

employed in servile and unsuitable tasks.

* * * * *

In the Middle Ages the very high and the very low are continually

brought together. That which is hidden by the poems, we can catch a

glimpse of otherwhere. With those ethereal passions, many gross things

were clearly blended.

All we know of the charms and philtres used by the witches is very

fantastic, not seldom marked by malice, and recklessly mixed up with

things that seem to us the least likely to have awakened love. By

these methods they went a long way without the husband's perceiving in

his blindness the game they made of him.

These philtres were of various kinds. Some were for exciting and

troubling the senses, like the stimulants so much abused in the East.

Others were dangerous, and often treacherous draughts to whose

illusions the body would yield itself without the will. Others again

were employed as tests when the passion was defied, when one wished to

see how far the greediness of desire might derange the senses, making

them receive as the highest and holiest of favours, the most

disagreeable services done by the object of their love.

The rude way in which a castle was constructed, with nothing in it but

large halls, led to an utter sacrifice of the inner life. It was long

enough before they took to building in one of the turrets a closet or

recess for meditation and the saying of prayers. The lady was easily

watched. On certain days set or waited for, the bold youth would

attempt the stroke, recommended him by the Witch, of mingling a

philtre with her drink.

This, however, was a dangerous matter, not often tried. Less difficult

was it to purloin from the lady things which escaped her notice, which

she herself despised. He would treasure up the very smallest paring of

a nail; he would gather up respectfully one or two beautiful hairs

that might fall from her comb. These he would carry to the Witch, who

often asked, as our modern sleep-wakers do, for something very

personal and strongly redolent of the person, but obtained without her

leave; as, for instance, some threads torn out of a garment long worn

and soiled with the traces of perspiration. With much kissing, of

course, and worshipping, the lover was fain reluctantly to throw these

treasures into the fire, with a view to gathering up the ashes

afterwards. By and by, when she came to look at her garment, the fine

lady would remark the rent, but guessing at the cause, would only sigh

and hold her tongue. The charm had already begun to work.

* * * * *

Even if she hesitated from regard for her marriage-vow, certain it is

that life in a space so narrow, where they were always in each

other's sight, so near and yet so far, became a downright torment. And

even when she had once shown her weakness, still before her husband

and others equally jealous the moments of happiness would assuredly be

rare. Hence sprang many a foolish outbreak of unsatisfied desire. The

less they came together, the more deeply they longed to do so. A

disordered fancy sought to attain that end by means grotesque,

unnatural, utterly senseless. So by way of establishing a means of

secret correspondence between the two, the Witch had the letters of

the alphabet pricked on both their arms. If one of them wanted to send

a thought to the other, he brightened and brought out by sucking the

blood-red letters of the wished-for word. Immediately, so it is said,

the corresponding letters bled on the other's arm.

Sometimes in these mad fits they would drink each of the other's

blood, so as to mingle their souls, it was said, in close communion.

The devouring of Coucy's heart, which the lady "found so good that she

never ate again," is the most tragical instance of these monstrous

vows of loving cannibalism. But when the absent one did not die, but

only the love within him, then the lady would seek counsel of the

Witch, begging of her the means of holding him, of bringing him back.

The incantations used by the sorceress of Theocritus and Virgil,

though employed also in the Middle Ages, were seldom of much avail. An

attempt was made to win back the lover by a spell seemingly copied

from antiquity, by means of a cake, of a _confarreatio_[49] like that

which, both in Asia and Europe, had always been the holiest pledge of

love. But in this case it is not the soul only, it is the flesh also

they seek to bind; there must be so true an identity established

between the two, that, dead to all other women, he shall live only for

her. It was a cruel ceremony on the woman's side. "No haggling,

madam," says the Witch. Suddenly the proud dame grows obedient, even

to letting herself be stripped bare: for thus indeed it must be.

[49] One form of wedding among the Romans, in which the

bride-cake was broken between the pair, in token of their

union.--TRANS.

What a triumph for the Witch! And if this lady were the same as she

who had once made her "run the gauntlet," how meet the vengeance, how

dread the requital now! But it is not enough to have stripped her thus

naked. About her loins is fastened a little shelf, on which a small

oven is set for the cooking of the cake. "Oh, my dear, I cannot bear

it longer! Make haste, and relieve me."

"You must bear it, madam; you must feel the heat. When the cake is

done, he will be warmed by you, by your flame."

It is over; and now we have the cake of antiquity, of the Indian and

the Roman marriage, but spiced and warmed up by the lecherous spirit

of the Devil. She does not say with Virgil's wizard,[50]

"Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin!"

[50] "Hither, ye spells of mine, bring Daphnis home from the

city!"--_Virgil_, Eclogue viii.

But she takes him the cake, steeped, as it were, in the other's

suffering, and kept warm by her love. He has hardly bitten it when he

is overtaken by an odd emotion, by a feeling of dizziness. Then as the

blood rushes up to his heart he turns red and hot. Passion fastens

anew on him, and inextinguishable desire.[51]

[51] I am wrong in saying inextinguishable. Fresh philtres

were often needed; and the blame of this must lie with the

lady, from whom the Witch in her mocking, malignant rage

exacted the most humiliating observances.

CHAPTER XI.

THE REBELS' COMMUNION--SABBATHS--THE BLACK MASS.

We must now speak of the _Sabbaths_; a word which at different times

clearly meant quite different things. Unhappily, we have no detailed

accounts of these gatherings earlier than the reign of Henry IV.[52]

By that time they were nothing more than a great lewd farce carried on

under the cloak of witchcraft. But these very descriptions of a thing

so greatly corrupted are marked by certain antique touches that tell

of the successive periods and the different forms through which it had

passed.

[52] The least bad of these is by Lancre, a man of some wit,

whose evident connection with some young witches gave him

something to say. The accounts of the Jesuit Del Rio and the

Dominican Michaëlis are the absurd productions of two

credulous and silly pedants.

* * * * *

We may set out with this firm idea that, for many centuries, the serf

led the life of a wolf or a fox; that he was _an animal of the night_,

moving about, I may say, as little as possible in the daytime, and

truly living in the night alone.

Still, up to the year 1000, so long as the people made their own

saints and legends, their daily life was not to them uninteresting.

Their nightly Sabbaths were only a slight relic of paganism. They

held in fear and honour the Moon, so powerful over the good things of

earth. Her chief worshippers, the old women, burn small candles to

_Dianom_--the Diana of yore, whose other names were Luna and Hecate.

The Lupercal (or wolf-man) is always following the women and children,

disguised indeed under the dark face of ghost Hallequin (Harlequin).

The Vigil of Venus was kept as a holiday precisely on the first of

May. On Midsummer Day they kept the Sabaza by sacrificing the he-goat

of Bacchus Sabasius. In all this there was no mockery; nothing but a

harmless carnival of serfs.

But about the year 1000 the church is well-nigh shut against the

peasant through the difference between his language and hers. By 1100

her services became quite unintelligible. Of the mysteries played at

the church-doors, he has retained chiefly the comic side, the ox and

the ass, &c. On these he makes Christmas carols, which grow ever more

and more burlesque, forming a true Sabbatic literature.

* * * * *

Are we to suppose that the great and fearful risings of the twelfth

century had no influence on these mysteries, on this night-life of the

_wolf_, the _game bird_, the _wild quarry_. The great sacraments of

rebellion among the serfs, when they drank of each other's blood, or

ate of the ground by way of solemn pledge,[53] may have been

celebrated at the Sabbaths. The "Marseillaise" of that time, sung by

night rather than day, was perhaps a Sabbatic chant:--

"Nous sommes hommes commes ils sont!

Tout aussi grand coeur nous avons!

Tout autant souffrir nous pouvons!"[54]

[53] At the battle of Courtray. See also Grimm and my

_Origines_.

[54]

"We are fashioned of one clay:

Big as theirs our hearts are aye:

We can bear as much as they."--TRANS.

But the tombstone falls again in 1200. Seated thereon the Pope and the

King, with their enormous weight, have sealed up man. Has he now his

old life by night? More than ever. The old pagan dances must by this

time have waxed furious. Our negroes of the Antilles, after a dreadful

day of heat and hard work, would go and dance away some four leagues

off. So it was with the serf too. But with his dances there must have

mingled a merriment born of revenge, satiric farces, burlesques and

caricatures of the baron and the priest: a whole literature of the

night indeed, that knew not one word of the literature of the day,

that knew little even of the burgher Fabliaux.

* * * * *

Of such a nature were the Sabbaths before 1300. Before they could take

the startling form of open warfare against the God of those days, much

more was needed still, and especially these two things: not only a

descending into the very depths of despair, but also _an utter losing

of respect for anything_.

To this pass they do not come until the fourteenth century, under the

Avignon popes, and during the Great Schism; when the Church with two

heads seems no longer a church; when the king and all his nobles,

being in shameful captivity to the English, are extorting the means of

ransom from their oppressed and outraged people. Then do the Sabbaths

take the grand and horrible form of the _Black Mass_, of a ritual

upside down, in which Jesus is defied and bidden to thunder on the

people if He can. In the thirteenth century this devilish drama was

still impossible, through the horror it would have caused. And later

again, in the fifteenth, when everything, even suffering itself, had

become exhausted, so fierce an outburst could not have issued forth;

so monstrous an invention no one would have essayed. It could only

have belonged to the age of Dante.

* * * * *

It took place, I fancy, at one gush; an explosion as it were of genius

raving, bringing impiety up to the height of a great popular

passion-fit. To understand the nature of these bursts of rage, we must

remember that, far from imagining the fixedness of God's laws, a

people brought up by their own clergy to believe and depend on

miracles, had for ages past been hoping and waiting for nothing else

than a miracle which never came. In vain they demanded one in the

desperate hour of their last worst strait. Heaven thenceforth appeared

to them as the ally of their savage tormentors, nay, as itself a

tormentor too.

Thereon began the _Black Mass_ and the _Jacquerie_.[55]

[55] The Peasants' war which raged in France in 1364.

In the elastic shell of the Black Mass, a thousand variations of

detail may afterwards have been inserted; but the shell itself was

strongly made and, in my opinion, all of one piece.

This drama I succeeded in reproducing in my "History of France," in

the year 1857. There was small difficulty in casting it anew in its

four acts. Only at that time I left in it too many of the grotesque

adornments which clothed the Sabbath of a later period; nor did I

clearly enough define what belonged to the older shell, so dark and

dreadful.

* * * * *

Its date is strongly marked by certain savage tokens of an age

accursed, and yet more by the ruling place therein assigned to woman,

a fact most characteristic of the fourteenth century.

It is strange to mark how, at that period, the woman who enjoys so

little freedom still holds her royal sway in a hundred violent

fashions. At this time she inherits fiefs, brings her kingdoms to the

king. On the lower levels she has still her throne, and yet more in

the skies. Mary has supplanted Jesus. St. Francis and St. Dominic have

seen the three worlds in her bosom. By the immensity of her grace she

washes away sin; ay, and sometimes helps the sinner,--as in the story

of a nun whose place the Virgin took in the choir, while she herself

was gone to meet her lover.

Up high, and down very low, we see the woman. Beatrice reigns in

heaven among the stars, while John of Meung in the _Romaunt of the

Rose_ is preaching the community of women. Pure or sullied, the woman

is everywhere. We might say of her what Raymond Lulle said of God:

"What part has He in the world? The whole."

But alike in heaven and in poetry the true heroine is not the fruitful

mother decked out with children; but the Virgin, or some barren

Beatrice, who dies young.

A fair English damsel passed over into France, it is said, about the

year 1300, to preach the redemption of women. She looked on herself as

their Messiah.

* * * * *

In its earliest phase the Black Mass seemed to betoken this redemption

of Eve, so long accursed of Christianity. The woman fills every office

in the Sabbath. She is priestess, altar, pledge of holy communion, by

turns. Nay, at bottom, is she not herself as God?

* * * * *

Many popular traits may be found herein, and yet it comes not wholly

from the people. The peasant who honoured strength alone, made small

account of the woman; as we see but too clearly in our old laws and

customs. From him the woman would not have received the high place she

holds here. It is by her own self the place is won.

I would gladly believe that the Sabbath in its then shape was woman's

work, the work of such a desperate woman as the Witch was then. In the

fourteenth century she saw open before her a horrible career of

torments lighted up for three or four hundred years by the stake.

After 1300 her medical knowledge is condemned as baleful, her remedies

are proscribed as if they were poisons. The harmless drawing of lots,

by which lepers then thought to better their luck, brought on a

massacre of those poor wretches. Pope John XXII. ordered the burning

of a bishop suspected of Witchcraft. Under a system of such blind

repression there was just the same risk in daring little as in daring

much. Danger itself made people bolder; and the Witch was able to dare

anything.

* * * * *

Human brotherhood, defiance of the Christian heaven, a distorted

worship of nature herself as God--such was the purport of the Black

Mass.

They decked an altar to the arch-rebel of serfs, _to Him who had been

so wronged_, the old outlaw, unfairly hunted out of heaven, "the

Spirit by whom earth was made, the Master who ordained the budding of

the plants." Such were the names of honour given him by his

worshippers, the _Luciferians_, and also, according to a very likely

opinion, by the Knights of the Temple.

The greatest miracle of those unhappy times is, the greater abundance

found at the nightly communion of the brotherhood, than was to be

found elsewhere by day. By incurring some little danger the Witch

levied her contributions from those who were best off, and gathered

their offerings into a common fund. Charity in a Satanic garb grew

very powerful, as being a crime, a conspiracy, a form of rebellion.

People would rob themselves of their food by day for the sake of the

common meal at night.

* * * * *

Figure to yourself, on a broad moor, and often near an old Celtic

cromlech, at the edge of a wood, this twofold scene: on one side a

well-lit moor and a great feast of the people; on the other, towards

yon wood, the choir of that church whose dome is heaven. What I call

the choir is a hill commanding somewhat the surrounding country.

Between these are the yellow flames of torch-fires, and some red

brasiers emitting a fantastic smoke. At the back of all is the Witch,

dressing up her Satan, a great wooden devil, black and shaggy. By his

horns, and the goatskin near him, he might be Bacchus; but his manly

attributes make him a Pan or a Priapus. It is a darksome figure, seen

differently by different eyes; to some suggesting only terror, while

others are touched by the proud melancholy wherein the Eternally

Banished seems absorbed.[56]

[56] This is taken from Del Rio, but is not, I think,

peculiar to Spain. It is an ancient trait, and marked by the

primitive inspiration.

* * * * *

Act First. The magnificent _In troit_ taken by Christendom from

antiquity, that is, from those ceremonies where the people in long

train streamed under the colonnades on their way to the sanctuary, is

now taken back for himself by the elder god upon his return to power.

The _Lavabo_, likewise borrowed from the heathen lustrations,

reappears now. All this he claims back by right of age.

His priestess is always called, by way of honour, the Elder; but she

would sometimes have been young. Lancre tells of a witch of seventeen,

pretty, and horribly savage.

The Devil's bride was not to be a child: she must be at least thirty

years old, with the form of a Medea, with the beauty that comes of

pain; an eye deep, tragic, lit up by a feverish fire, with great

serpent tresses waving at their will: I refer to the torrent of her

black untamable hair. On her head, perhaps, you may see the crown of

vervein, the ivy of the tomb, the violets of death.

When she has had the children taken off to their meal, the service

begins: "I will come before thine altar; but save me, O Lord, from the

faithless and violent man (from the priest and the baron)."

Then come the denial of Jesus, the paying of homage to the new master,

the feudal kiss, like the greetings of the Temple, when all was

yielded without reserve, without shame, or dignity, or even purpose;

the denial of an olden god being grossly aggravated by a seeming

preference for Satan's back.

It is now his turn to consecrate his priestess. The wooden deity

receives her in the manner of an olden Pan or Priapus. Following the

old pagan form she sits a moment upon him in token of surrender, like

the Delphian seeress on Apollo's tripod. After receiving the breath of

his spirit, the sacrament of his love, she purifies herself with like

formal solemnity. Thenceforth she is a living altar.

* * * * *

The Introit over, the service is interrupted for the feast. Contrary

to the festive fashion of the nobles, who all sit with their swords

beside them, here, in this feast of brethren, are no arms, not even a

knife.

As a keeper of the peace, each has a woman with him. Without a woman

no one is admitted. Be she a kinswoman or none, a wife or none; be she

old or young, a woman he must bring with him.

What were the drinks passed round among them? Mead, or beer, or wine;

strong cider or perry? The last two date from the twelfth century.

The illusive drinks, with their dangerous admixture of belladonna, did

they already appear at that board? Certainly not. There were children

there. Besides, an excess of commotion would have prevented the

dancing.

This whirling dance, the famous _Sabbath-round_, was quite enough to

complete the first stage of drunkenness. They turned back to back,

their arms behind them, not seeing each other, but often touching each

other's back. Gradually no one knew himself, nor whom he had by his

side. The old wife then was old no more. Satan had wrought a miracle.

She was still a woman, desirable, after a confused fashion beloved.

* * * * *

Act Second. Just as the crowd, grown dizzy together, was led, both by

the attraction of the women and by a certain vague feeling of

brotherhood, to imagine itself one body, the service was resumed at

the _Gloria_. The altar, the host, became visible. These were

represented by the woman herself. Prostrate, in a posture of extreme

abasement, her long black silky tresses lost in the dust; she, this

haughty Proserpine, offered up herself. On her back a demon

officiated, saying the _Credo_, and making the offering.[57]

[57] This important fact of the woman being her own altar, is

known to us by the trial of La Voisin, which M. Ravaisson,

Sen., is about to publish with the other _Papers of the

Bastille_.

At a later period this scene came to be immodest. But at this time,

amidst the calamities of the fourteenth century, in the terrible days

of the Black Plague, and of so many a famine, in the days of the

Jacquerie and those hateful brigands, the Free Lances,--on a people

thus surrounded by danger, the effect was more than serious. The whole

assembly had much cause to fear a surprise. The risk run by the Witch

in this bold proceeding was very great, even tantamount to the

forfeiting of her life. Nay, more; she braved a hell of suffering, of

torments such as may hardly be described. Torn by pincers, and broken

alive; her breasts torn out; her skin slowly singed, as in the case

of the wizard bishop of Cahors; her body burned limb by limb on a

small fire of red-hot coal, she was like to endure an eternity of

agony.

Certainly all were moved when the prayer was spoken, the

harvest-offering made, upon this devoted creature who gave herself up

so humbly. Some wheat was offered to the _Spirit of the Earth_, who

made wheat to grow. A flight of birds, most likely from the woman's

bosom, bore to the _God of Freedom_ the sighs and prayers of the

serfs. What did they ask? Only that we, their distant descendants,

might become free.[58]

[58] This grateful offering of wheat and birds is peculiar to

France. In Lorraine, and no doubt in Germany, black beasts

were offered, as the black cat, the black goat, or the black

bull.

What was the sacrament she divided among them? Not the ridiculous

pledge we find later in the reign of Henry IV., but most likely that

_confarreatio_ which we saw in the case of the philtres, the hallowed

pledge of love, a cake baked on her own body, on the victim who,

perhaps, to-morrow would herself be passing through the fire. It was

her life, her death, they ate there. One sniffs already the scorching

flesh.

Last of all they set upon her two offerings, seemingly of flesh; two

images, one of _the latest dead_, the other of the newest-born in the

district. These shared in the special virtue assigned to her who acted

as altar and Host in one, and on these the assembly made a show of

receiving the communion. Their Host would thus be threefold, and

always human. Under a shadowy likeness of the Devil the people

worshipped none other than its own self.

The true sacrifice was now over and done. The woman's work was ended,

when she gave herself up to be eaten by the multitude. Rising from her

former posture, she would not withdraw from the spot until she had

proudly stated, and, as it were, confirmed the lawfulness of her

proceedings by an appeal to the thunderbolt, by an insolent defiance

of the discrowned God.

In mockery of the _Agnus Dei_, and the breaking of the Christian Host,

she brought a toad dressed up, and pulled it to pieces. Then rolling

her eyes about in a frightful way she raised them to heaven, and

beheading the toad, uttered these strange words: "Ah, _Philip_,[59] if

I had you here, you should be served in the same manner!"

[59] Lancre, 136. Why "Philip," I cannot say. By Satan Jesus

is always called John or _Janicot_ (Jack). Was she speaking

of Philip of Valois, who brought on the wasting hundred

years' war with England?

* * * * *

No answer being outwardly given to her challenge, no thunderbolt

hurled upon her head, they imagine that she has triumphed over the

Christ. The nimble band of demons seized their moment to astonish the

people with various small wonders which amazed and overawed the more

credulous. The toads, quite harmless in fact, but then accounted

poisonous, were bitten and torn between their dainty teeth. They

jumped over large fires and pans of live coal, to amuse the crowd and

make them laugh at the fires of Hell.

Did the people really laugh after a scene so tragical, so very bold? I

know not. Assuredly there was no laughing on the part of her who first

dared all this. To her these fires must have seemed like those of the

nearest stake. Her business rather lay in forecasting the future of

that devilish monarchy, in creating the Witch to be.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SEQUEL--LOVE AND DEATH--SATAN DISAPPEARS.

And now the multitude is made free, is of good cheer. For some hours

the serf reigns in short-lived freedom. His time indeed is scant

enough. Already the sky is changing, the stars are going down. Another

moment, and the cruel dawn remits him to his slavery, brings him back

again under hostile eyes, under the shadow of the castle, beneath the

shadow of the church; back again to his monotonous toiling, to the old

unending weariness of heart, governed as it were by two bells, whereof

one keeps saying "Always," the other "Never." Anon they will be seen

coming each out of his own house, heavily, humbly, with an air of calm

composure.

Let them at least enjoy the one short moment! Let each of these

disinherited, for once fulfil his fancy, for once indulge his musings.

What soul is there so all unhappy, so lost to all feeling, as never to

have one good dream, one fond desire; never to say, "If this would

only happen!"

The only detailed accounts we have, as I said before, are modern,

belonging to a time of peace and well-doing, when France was blooming

afresh, in the latter years of Henry VI., years of thriving luxury,

entirely different from that dark age when the Sabbath was first set

going.

No thanks to Mr. Lancre and others, if we refrain from pourtraying the

Third Act as like the Church-Fair of Rubens, a very miscellaneous

orgie, a great burlesque ball, which allowed of every kind of union,

especially between near kindred. According to those authors, who would

make us groan with horror, the main end of the Sabbath, the explicit

doctrine taught by Satan, was incest; and in those great gatherings,

sometimes of two thousand souls, the most startling deeds were done

before the whole world.

This is hard to believe; and the same writers tell of other things

which seem quite opposed to a view so cynical. They say that people

went to those meetings only in pairs, that they sat down to the feast

by twos, that even if one person came alone, she was assigned a young

demon, who took charge of her, and did the honours of the feast. They

say, too, that jealous lovers were not afraid to go thither in company

with the curious fair.

We also find that the most of them came by families, children and all.

The latter were sent off only during the first act, not during the

feast, nor the services, nor yet while this third act was going on; a

fact which proves that some decency was observed. Moreover, the scene

was twofold. The household groups stayed on the moor in a blaze of

light. It was only beyond the fantastic curtain of torch-smoke that

the darker spaces, where people could roam in all directions, began.

The judges, the inquisitors, for all their enmity, are fain to allow

the existence here of a general spirit of peace and mildness. Of the

three things that startle us in the feasts of nobles, there is not one

here; no swords, no duels, no tables reeking blood. No faithless

gallantries here bring dishonour on some intimate friend. Unknown,

unneeded here, for all they say, is the unclean brotherhood of the

Temple; in the Sabbath, woman is everything.

The question of incest needs explaining. All alliances between

kinsfolk, even those most allowable in the present day, were then

regarded as a crime. The modern law, which is charity itself,

understands the heart of man and the well-being of families.[60] It

allows the widower to marry his wife's sister, the best mother his

children could have. Above all, it allows a man to wed his cousin,

whom he knows and may trust fully, whom he has loved perhaps from

childhood, his playfellow of old, regarded by his mother with special

favour as already the adopted of her own heart. In the Middle Ages all

this was incestuous.

[60] Of course the allusion here, as shown in the next

following sentence, is to French law in particular. As for

the marriage of cousins, there is much to say on both sides

of the question.--TRANS.

The peasant being fondest of his own family was driven to despair. It

was a monstrous thing for him to marry a cousin, even in the sixth

degree. It was impossible for him to get married in his own village

where the question of kinship stood so much in his way. He had to look

for a wife elsewhere, afar off. But in those days there was not much

intercourse or acquaintance between different places, and each hated

its own neighbours. On feast days one village would fight another

without knowing the reason why, as may sometimes still be seen in

countries never so thinly peopled. No one durst go seek a wife in the

very spot where men had been fighting together, where he himself would

have been in great danger.

There was another difficulty. The lord of the young serf forbade his

marrying in the next lordship. Becoming the serf of his wife's lord he

would have been wholly lost to his own. Thus he was debarred by the

priest from his cousin, by the lord from a stranger; and so it

happened that many did not marry at all.

The result was just what they pretended to avoid. In the Sabbath the

natural sympathies sprang forth again. There the youth found again her

whom he had known and loved at first, her whose "little husband" he

had been called at ten years old. Preferring her as he certainly did,

he paid but little heed to canonical hindrances.

When we come to know the Mediæval Family better, we give up believing

the declamatory assumptions of a general mingling together of the

people forming so great a crowd. On the contrary, we feel that each

small group is so closely joined together, as to be utterly barred to

the entrance of a stranger.

The serf was not jealous towards his own kin, but his poverty and

wretchedness made him exceedingly afraid of worsening his lot by

multiplying children whom he could not support. The priest and the

lord on their part wished to increase the number of their

serfs--wanted the woman to be always bearing; and the strangest

sermons were often delivered on this head,[61] varied sometimes with

threats and cruel reproaches. All the more resolute was the prudence

of the man. The woman, poor creature, unable to bear children fit to

live on such conditions, bearing them only to her sorrow, had a horror

of being made big. She never would have ventured to one of these night

festivals without being first assured, again and again, that no woman

ever came away pregnant.[62]

[61] The ingenious M. Génin has very recently collected the

most curious information on this point.

[62] Boguet, Lancre, and other authors, are agreed on this

question.

They were drawn thither by the banquet, the dancing, the lights, the

amusements; in nowise by carnal pleasure. The last thing they cared

for was to heighten their poverty, to bring one more wretch into the

world, to give another serf to their lord.

* * * * *

Cruel indeed was the social system of those days. Authority bade men

marry, but rendered marriage nearly impossible, at once by the

excessive misery of most, and the senseless cruelty of the canonical

prohibitions.

The result was quite opposed to the purity thus preached. Under a show

of Christianity existed the patriarchate of Asia alone.

Only the firstborn married. The younger brothers and sisters worked

under him and for him. In the lonely farms of the mountains of the

South, far from all neighbours and every woman, brothers and sisters

lived together, the latter serving and in all ways belonging to the

former; a way of life analogous to that in Genesis, to the marriages

of the Parsees, to the customs still obtaining in certain shepherd

tribes of the Himalayas.

The mother's fate was still more revolting. She could not marry her

son to a kinswoman, and thus secure to herself a kindly-affected

daughter-in-law. Her son married, if he could, a girl from a distant

village, an enemy often, whose entrance proved baneful either to the

children of a former marriage, or to the poor mother, who was often

driven away by the stranger wife. You may not think it, but the fact

is certainly so. At the very least she was ill-used; banished from the

fireside, from the very table.

There is a Swiss law forbidding the removal of the mother from her

place by the chimney-corner.

She was exceedingly afraid of her son's marrying. But her lot was

little happier if he did not marry. None the less servant was she of

the young master of the house, who succeeded to all his father's

rights, even to that of beating her. This impious custom I have seen

still followed in the South: a son of five-and-twenty chastising his

mother when she got drunk.

* * * * *

How much greater her suffering in those days of savagery! Then it was

rather he who came back from the feast half-drunken, hardly knowing

what he was about. But one room, but one bed, was all they had between

them. She was by no means free from fear. He had seen his friends

married, and felt soured thereat. Thenceforth her way is marked by

tears, by utter weakness, by a woful self-surrender. Threatened by her

only God, her son, heart-broken at finding herself in a plight so

unnatural, she falls desperate. She tries to drown all her memories in

sleep. At length comes an issue for which neither of them can fairly

account, an issue such as nowadays will often happen in the poorer

quarters of large towns, where some poor woman is forced, frightened,

perhaps beaten, into bearing every outrage. Thus conquered, and, spite

of her scruples, far too resigned, she endured thenceforth a pitiable

bondage; a life of shame and sorrow, and abundant anguish, growing

with the yearly widening difference between their several ages. The

woman of six-and-thirty might keep watch over a son of twenty years:

but at fifty, alas! or still later, where would he be? From the great

Sabbath where thronged the people of far villages, he would be

bringing home a strange woman for his youthful mistress, a woman hard,

heartless, devoid of ruth, who would rob her of her son, her seat by

the fire, her bed, of the very house which she herself had made.

To believe Lancre and others, Satan accounted the son for

praiseworthy, if he kept faithful to his mother, thus making a virtue

of a crime. If this be true, we must assume that the woman was

protected by a woman, that the Witch sided with the mother, to defend

her hearth against a daughter-in-law who, stick in hand, would have

sent her forth to beg.

Lancre further maintains that "never was good Witch, but she sprang

from the love of a mother for her son." In this way, indeed, was born

the Persian soothsayer, the natural fruit, they say, of so hateful a

mystery; and thus the secrets of the magical art were kept confined to

one family which constantly renewed itself.

An impious error led them to imitate the harmless mystery of the

husbandman, the unceasing vegetable round whereby the corn resown in

the furrow, brings forth its corn.

The less monstrous unions of brother with sister, so common in the

East, and in Greece, were cold and rarely fruitful. They were wisely

abandoned; nor would people ever have returned to them, but for that

rebellious spirit which, being aroused by absurd restrictions, flung

itself foolishly into the opposite extreme. Thus from unnatural laws,

hatred begot unnatural customs.

A cruel, an accursed time, a time big with despair!

* * * * *

We have been long discoursing; but the dawn is well-nigh come. In a

moment the hour will strike for the spirits to take themselves away.

The Witch feels her dismal flowers already withering on her brow.

Farewell, her royalty, perhaps her life! Where would they be, if the

day still found her there?

Of Satan, what shall she make? A flame, a cinder? He asks for nothing

better; knowing well, in his craftiness, that the only way to live and

to be born again, is first to die.

And will he die, he who as the mighty summoner of the dead, granted to

them that mourn their only joy on earth, the love they had lost, the

dream they had cherished? Ah, no! he is very sure to live.

Will he die, he that mighty spirit who, finding Creation accurst, and

Nature lying cold upon the ground, flung thither like a dirty

foster-child from off the Church's garment, gathered her up and placed

her on his bosom? In truth it cannot be.

Will he die, he the one great physician of the Middle Ages, of a

world that, falling sick, was saved by his poisons and bidden, poor

fool, to live?

As the gay rogue is sure of living, he dies wholly at his ease. He

shuffles out of himself, cleverly burns up his fine goatskin, and

disappears in a blaze of dawn.

But _she_ who made Satan, who made all things, good or ill, whose

countenance was given to so many forms of love, of devotion, and of

crime,--to what end will she come? Behold her all lonely on her waste

moorland.

She is not, as they say, the dread of all. Many will bless her. More

than one have found her beautiful, would sell their share in Paradise

to dare be near her. But all around her is a wide gulf. They who

admire, are none the less afraid of this all-powerful Medea, with her

fair deep eyes, and the thrilling adders of her dark overflowing hair.

To her thus lonely for ever, for evermore without love, what is there

left? Nothing but the Demon who had suddenly disappeared.

"'Tis well, good Devil, let us go. I am utterly loath to stay here any

more. Hell itself is far preferable. Farewell to the world!"

She must live but a very little longer, to play out the dreadful drama

she had herself begun. Near her, ready saddled by the obedient Satan,

stood a huge black horse, the fire darting from his eyes and nostrils.

She sprang upon him with one bound.

They follow her with their eyes. The good folk say with alarm, "What

is to become of her?" With a frightful burst of laughter, she goes

off, vanishing swift as an arrow. They would like much to know what

becomes of the poor woman, but that they never will.[63]

[63] See the end of the Witch of Berkeley, as told by William

of Malmesbury.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

THE WITCH IN HER DECLINE--SATAN MULTIPLIED AND MADE COMMON.

The Devil's delicate fondling, the lesser Witch, begotten of the Black

Mass after the greater one's disappearance, came and bloomed in all

her malignant cat-like grace. This woman is quite the reverse of the

other: refined and sidelong in manner, sly and purring demurely, quick

also at setting up her back. There is nothing of the Titan about her,

to be sure. Far from that, she is naturally base; lewd from her cradle

and full of evil daintinesses. Her whole life is the expression of

those unclean thoughts which sometimes in a dream by night may assail

him who would shrink with horror from any such by day.

She who is born with such a secret in her blood, with such instinctive

mastery of evil, she who has looked so far and so low down, will have

no religion, no respect for anything or person in the world; none even

for Satan, since he is a spirit still, while she has a particular

relish for all things material.

In her childhood she spoiled everything. Tall and pretty she startled

all by her slovenly habits. With her Witchcraft becomes a mysterious

cooking up of some mysterious chemistry. From an early date she

delights to handle repulsive things, to-day a drug, to-morrow an

intrigue. Among diseases and love-affairs she is in her element. She

will make a clever go-between, a bold and skilful empiric. War will be

made against her as a fancied murderer, as a woman who deals in

poisons. And yet she has small taste for such things, is far from

murderous in her desires. Devoid of goodness, she yet loves life,

loves to work cures, to prolong others' lives. She is dangerous in two

ways: on the one hand by selling receipts for barrenness, and even for

abortion; while on the other, her headlong libertine fancy leads her

to compass a woman's fall with her cursed potions, to triumph in the

wicked deeds of love.

Different, indeed, is this one from the other! She is a manufacturer:

the other was the ungodly one, the demon, the great rebellion, the

wife, we might almost say, the mother of Satan; for out of her and her

inward strength he grew up. But this one is the Devil's daughter

notwithstanding. Two things she derives from him, her uncleanness, her

love of handling life. These are her allotted walk, in these she is

quite an artist; an artist already trading in her lore, and we are

admitted into the business.

It was said that she would perpetuate herself by the incest from which

she sprang. But she has no need of that: numberless little ones will

she beget without help from another. In less than fifty years, at the

opening of the fifteenth century, under Charles VI., a mighty

contagion was spread abroad. Whoever thought he had any secrets or any

receipts, whoever fancied himself a seer, whoever dreamed and

travelled in his dreams, would call himself a pet of Satan. Every

moonstruck woman adopted the awful name of Witch!

A perilous, profitable name, cast at her in their hatred by people who

alternately insult and implore the unknown power. It is none the less

accepted, nay, is often claimed. To the children who follow her, to

the woman who, with threatening fists, hurl the name at her like a

stone, she turns round, saying proudly, "'Tis true, you have said

well!"

The business improves, and men are mingled in it. Hence another fall

for the art. Still the least of the witches retains somewhat of the

Sibyl. Those other frowsy charlatans, those clownish jugglers,

mole-catchers, ratkillers, who throw spells over beasts, who sell

secrets which they have not, defiled these times with the stench of a

dismal black smoke, of fear and foolery. Satan grows enormous, gets

multiplied without end. 'Tis a poor triumph, however, for him. He

grows dull and sick at heart. Still the people keep flowing towards

him, bent on having no other God than he. Himself only is to himself

untrue.

* * * * *

In spite of two or three great discoveries, the fifteenth century is,

to my thinking, none the less a century tired out, a century of few

ideas.

It opened right worthily with the Sabbath Royal of St. Denis, the wild

and woful ball given by Charles VI. in the abbey so named, to

commemorate the burial of Du Guesclin, which had taken place so many

years before. For three days and nights was Sodom wallowing among the

graves. The foolish king, not yet grown quite an idiot, compelled his

royal forefathers to share in the ball, by making their dry bones

dance in their biers. Death, becoming a go-between whether he would or

no, lent a sharp spur to the voluptuous revel. Then broke out those

unclean fashions of an age when ladies made themselves taller by

wearing the Devil's horned-bonnet, and gloried in dressing as if they

were all with child.[64] To this fashion they clung for the next forty

years. The younger folk on their side, not to be behind in

shamelessness, eclipsed them in the display of naked charms. The woman

wore Satan on her forehead in the shape of a horned head-dress: on the

feet of the bachelor and the page he was visible in the tapering

scorpion-like tips of their shoes. Under the mask of animals they

represented the lowest side of brute nature. The famous child stealer,

Retz, here took his first flight in villany. The great feudal ladies,

unbridled Jezebels, with less sense of shame in them than the men,

scorned all disguise whatever; displayed themselves with face

uncovered. In their sensual rages, in their mad parade of debauchery,

the king, the whole company might see the bottomless pit itself

yawning for the life, the feeling, the body, and the soul of each.

[64] Even in a very mystic theme, in a work of such genius as

the _Lamb_ of Van Eyck (says John of Bruges), all the Virgins

seem big. It was only the quaint fashion of the fifteenth

century.

Out of such doings come forth the conquered of Agincourt, a poor

generation of effete nobles, in whose miniatures you shiver to see the

falling away of their sorry limbs, as shown through the treacherous

tightness of their clothes.[65]

[65] This wasting away of a used-up, enervated race, mars the

effect of all those splendid miniatures of the Court of

Burgundy, the Duke of Berry, &c. No amount of clever handling

could make good works of art out of subjects so very

pitiable.

* * * * *

Much to be pitied is the Witch who, when the great lady came home from

that royal feast, became her bosom-counsellor and agent charged with

the doing of impossible things.

In her own castle, indeed, the lady is almost, if not all alone,

amidst a crowd of single men. To judge from romances you would think

she delighted in girding herself with an array of fair girls. Far

otherwise are we taught by history and common sense. Eleanor is not

so silly as to match herself against Rosamond. With all their own

rakishness, those queens and great ladies could be frightfully

jealous; witness she who is said by Henry Martin to have caused the

death of a girl admired by her husband, under the outrageous handling

of his soldiery. The power wielded by the lady's love depends, we

repeat, on her being alone. Whatever her age and figure, she becomes

the dream of all. The Witch takes mischievous delight in making her

abuse her goddesship, in tempting her to make game of the men she

humbles and befools. She goes to all lengths of boldness, even

treating them like very beasts. Look at them being transformed! Down

on all fours they tumble, like fawning monkeys, absurd bears, lewd

dogs, or swine eager to follow their contemptuous Circé.

Her pity rises thereat? Nay, but she grows sick of it all, and kicks

those crawling beasts with her foot. The thing is impure, but not

heinous enough. An absurd remedy is found for her complaint. These

others being so nought, she is to have something yet more

nought--namely, a little sweetheart. The advice is worthy of the

Witch. Love's spark shall be lighted before its time in some young

innocent, sleeping the pure sleep of childhood! Here you have the ugly

tale of little John of Saintré, pink of cherubim, and other paltry

puppets of the Age of Decay.

Through all those pedantic embellishments and sentimental

moralizings, one clearly marks the vile cruelty that lies below. The

fruit was killed in the flower. Here, in a manner, is the very "eating

of children," which was laid so often to the Witch's charge. Anyhow,

she drained their lives. The fair lady who caresses one in so tender

and motherly a way, what is she but a vampire, draining the blood of

the weak? The upshot of such atrocities we may gather from the tale

itself. Saintré becomes a perfect knight, but so utterly frail and

weak as to be dared and defied by the lout of a peasant priest, in

whom the lady, become better advised, has seen something that will

suit her best.

* * * * *

Such idle whimsies heighten the surfeit, the mad rage of an empty

mind. Circé among her beasts grows so weary and heartsick that she

would be a beast herself. She fancies herself wild, and locks herself

up. From her tower she casts an evil eye towards the gloomy forest.

She fancies herself a prisoner, and rages like a wolf chained fast.

"Let the old woman come this moment: I want her. Run!" Two minutes

later again: "What! is she not come yet?"

At last she is come. "Hark you: I have a sore longing--invincible, as

you know--to choke you, to drown you, or to give you up to the bishop,

who already claims you. You have but one way of escape, that is, to

satisfy another longing of mine by changing me into a wolf. I feel

wretchedly bored, weary of keeping still. I want, by night at least,

to run free about the forest. Away with stupid servants, with dogs

that stun me with their noise, with clumsy horses that kick out and

shy at a thicket."

"But if you were caught, my lady----"

"Insolent woman! You would rather die, then?"

"At least you have heard the story of the woman-wolf, whose paw was

cut off.[66] But, oh! how sorry I should be."

[66] Among the great ladies imprisoned in their castles, this

dreadful fancy was not rare. They hungered and thirsted for

freedom, for savage freedom. Boguet mentions how, among the

hills of Auvergne, a hunter one night drew his sword upon a

she-wolf, but missing her, cut off her paw. She fled away

limping. He came to a neighbouring castle to seek the

hospitality of him who dwelt there. The gentleman, on seeing

him, asked if he had had good sport. By way of answer he

thought to draw out of his pouch the she-wolf's paw; but what

was his amazement to find instead of the paw a hand, and on

one of the fingers a ring, which the gentleman recognized as

belonging to his wife! Going at once in search of her, he

found her hurt and hiding her fore-arm. To the arm which had

lost its hand he fitted that which the hunter had brought

him, and the lady was fain to own that she it was, who in the

likeness of a wolf had attacked the hunter, and afterwards

saved herself by leaving a paw on the battle-field. The

husband had the cruelty to give her up to justice, and she

was burnt.

"That is my concern. I will hear nothing more, I am in a hurry--have

been barking already. What happiness, to hunt all by myself in the

clear moonlight; by myself to fasten on the hind, or man likewise if

he comes near me; to attack the tender children, and, above all, to

set my teeth in the women; ay, the women, for I hate them all--not one

like yourself. Don't start, I won't bite you--you are not to my taste,

and besides, you have no blood in you! 'Tis blood I crave--blood!"

She can no longer refuse. "Nothing easier, my lady. To-night, at nine

o'clock, you will drink this. Lock yourself up, and then turning into

a wolf, while they think you are still here, you can scour the

forest."

It is done; and next morning the lady finds herself worn out and

depressed. In one night she must have travelled some thirty leagues.

She has been hunting and slaying until she is covered with blood. But

the blood, perhaps, comes from her having torn herself among the

brambles.

A great triumph and danger also for her who has wrought this miracle.

From the lady, however, whose command provoked it, she receives but a

gloomy welcome. "Witch, 'tis a fearful power you have; I should never

have guessed it. But now I fear and dread you. Good cause, indeed,

they have to hate you. A happy day will it be when you are burnt. I

can ruin you when I please. One word of mine about last night, and my

peasants would this evening whet their scythes upon you. Out, you

black-looking, hateful old hag!"

* * * * *

The great folk, her patrons, launch her into strange adventures. For

what can she refuse to her terrible protectors, when nothing but the

castle saves her from the priest, from the faggot? If the baron, on

his return from a crusade, being bent on copying the manners of the

Turks, sends for her, and orders her to steal him a few children, what

can she do? Raids such as those grand ones in which two thousand pages

were sometimes carried off from Greek ground to enter the seraglio,

were by no means unknown to the Christians; were known from the tenth

century to the barons of England, at a later date to the knights of

Rhodes and Malta. The famous Giles of Retz, the only one brought to

trial, was punished, not for having stolen his small serfs, a crime

not then uncommon, but for having sacrificed them to Satan. She who

actually stole them, and was ignorant, doubtless, of their future lot,

found herself between two perils: on the one hand the peasant's fork

and scythe; on the other, those torments which awaited her, when

recusant, within the tower. Retz's terrible Italian would have made

nothing of pounding her in a mortar.[67]

[67] See my _History of France_, and still more the learned

and careful account by the lamented Armand Guéraud: _Notice

sur Gilles de Rais_, Nantes, 1855. We there find that the

purveyors of that horrible child's charnel-house were mostly

men.

On all sides the perils and the profits went together. A position more

frightfully corrupting could not have been found. The Witches

themselves did not deny the absurd powers imputed to them by the

people. They averred that by means of a doll stuck over with needles

they could weave their spells around whomever they pleased, making him

waste away until he died. They averred that mandragora, torn from

beneath the gallows by the teeth of a dog, who invariably died

therefrom, enabled them to pervert the understanding; to turn men into

beasts, to give women over to idiotcy and madness. Still more dreadful

was the furious frenzy caused by the Thorn-apple, or Datura, which

made men dance themselves to death, and go through a thousand shameful

antics, without their own knowledge or remembrance.[68]

[68] Pouchet, on the _Solaneæ and General Botany_. Nysten,

_Dictionary of Medicine_, article _Datura_. The robbers

employed these potions but too often. A butcher of Aix and

his wife, whom they wanted to rob of their money, were made

to drink of some such, and became so maddened thereby, that

they danced all one night naked in a cemetery.

* * * * *

Hence there grew up against them a feeling of boundless hatred,

mingled with as extreme a fear. Sprenger, who wrote the _Hammer for

Witches_, relates with horror how, in a season of snow, when all the

roads were broken up, he saw a wretched multitude, wild with terror,

and spell-bound by evils all too real, fill up all the approaches to a

little German town. "Never," says he, "did you behold so mighty a

pilgrimage to our Lady of Grace, or her of the wilderness. All these

people, who hobbled, crawled, and stumbled among the quagmires, were

on their way to the Witch, to beseech the grace of the Devil upon

themselves. How proud and excited must the old woman have felt at

seeing so large a concourse prostrate before her feet!"[69]

[69] The Witch delighted in causing the noble and the great

to undergo the most outrageous trials of their love. We know

that queens and ladies of rank (in Italy even to the last

century) held their court at times the most forbidding, and

exacted the most unpleasant services from their favourites.

There was nothing too mean, too repulsive, for the domestic

brute--the _cicisbeo_, the priest, the half-witted page--to

undergo, in the stupid belief that the power of a philtre

increased with its nastiness. This was sad enough when the

ladies were neither young, nor beautiful, nor witty. But what

of that other astounding fact, that a Witch, who was neither

a great lady, nor young, nor fair, but poor, and perhaps a

serf, clad only in dirty rags, could still by her malice, by

the strange power of her raging lewdness, by some

bewitchingly treacherous spell, stupefy the gravest

personages, and abase them to so low a depth? Some monks of a

monastery on the Rhine, wherein, as in many other German

convents, none but a noble of four hundred years' standing

could gain admission, sorrowfully owned to Sprenger that they

had seen three of their brethren bewitched in turn, and a

fourth killed by a woman, who boldly said, "I did it, and

will do so again: they cannot escape me, for they have

eaten," &c. (Sprenger, _Malleus maleficarum_, _quæstio_, vii.

p. 84.) "The worst of it is," says Sprenger, "that we have no

means of punishing or examining her: _so she lives still_."