SATAN TURNS PRIEST.
Whatever semblance of Satanic fanaticism was still preserved by the
witches, it transpires from the narratives of Lancre and other writers
of the seventeenth century, that the Sabbath then was mainly an affair
of money. They raised contributions almost by force, charged something
for right of entrance, and extracted fines from those who stayed away.
At Brussels and in Picardy, they had a fixed scale of payment for
rewarding those who brought new members into the brotherhood.
In the Basque country no mystery was kept up. The gatherings there
would amount to twelve thousand persons, of all classes, rich or poor,
priests and gentlemen. Satan, himself a gentleman, wore a hat upon his
three horns, like a man of quality. Finding his old seat, the druidic
stone, too hard for him, he treats himself to an easy well-gilt
arm-chair. Shall we say he is growing old? More nimble now than when
he was young, he frolics about, cuts capers, and leaps from the bottom
of a large pitcher. He goes through the service head downwards, his
feet in the air.
He likes everything to go off quite respectably, and spares no cost
in his scenic arrangements. Besides the customary flames, red, yellow,
and blue, which entertain the eye, as they show forth or hide the
flickering shadows, he charms the ear with strange music, mainly of
little bells that tickle the nerves with something like the searching
vibrations of musical-glasses. To crown this splendour Satan bids them
bring out his silver plate. Even his toads give themselves airs,
become fashionable, and, like so many lordlings, go about in green
velvet.
The general effect is that of a large fair, of a great masked ball
with very transparent disguises. Satan, who understands his epoch,
opens the ball with the Bishop of the Sabbath; or the King and Queen:
offices devised in compliment to the great personages, wealthy or
well-born, who honour the meeting by their presence.
Here may be seen no longer the gloomy feast of rebels, the baleful
orgie of serfs and boors, sharing by night the sacrament of love, by
day the sacrament of death. The violent Sabbath-round is no more the
one only dance of the evening. Thereto are now added the Moorish
dances, lively or languishing, but always amorous and obscene, in
which girls dressed up for the purpose, like _La Murgui_ or _La
Lisalda_, feigned and showed off the most provoking characters. Among
the Basques these dances formed, we are told, the invincible charm
which sent the whole world of women, wives, daughters, widows--the
last in great numbers--headlong into the Sabbath.
Without such amusements and the accompanying banquet, one could hardly
understand this general rage for these Sabbaths. It is a kind of love
without love; a feast of barrenness undisguised. Boguet has settled
that point to a nicety. Differing in one passage, where he dismisses
the women as afraid of coming to harm, Lancre is generally at one with
Boguet, besides being more sincere. The cruel and foul researches he
pursues on the very bodies of witches, show clearly that he deemed
them barren, and that a barren passive love underlay the Sabbath
itself.
The feast ought therefore to have been a dismal one, if the men had
owned the smallest heart.
The silly girls who went to dance and eat were victims in every way.
But they were resigned to everything save the prospect of bearing
children. They bore indeed a far heavier load of wretchedness than the
men. Sprenger tells of the strange cry, which even in his day burst
forth in the hour of love, "May the Devil have the fruits!" In his
day, moreover, people could live for two _sous_ a day, while in the
reign of Henry IV., about 1600, they could barely live for twenty.
Through all that century the desire, the need for barrenness grew more
and more.
Under this growing dread of love's allurements the Sabbath would have
become quite dull and wearisome, had not the conductresses cleverly
made the most of its comic side, enlivening it with farcical
interludes. Thus, the opening scene in which Satan, like the Priapus
of olden times, bestowed his coarse endearments on the Witch, was
followed by another game, a kind of chilly purification, which the
sorceress underwent with much grimacing, and a great show of
unpleasant shuddering. Then came another swinish farce, described by
Lancre and Boguet, in which some young and pretty wife would take the
Witch's place as Queen of the Sabbath, and submit her body to the
vilest handling. A farce not less repulsive was the "Black Sacrament,"
performed with a black radish, which Satan would cut into little
pieces and gravely swallow.
The last act of all, according to Lancre, or at least according to the
two bold hussies who made him their fool, was an astounding event to
happen in such crowded meetings. Since witchcraft had become
hereditary in whole families, there was no further need of openly
divulging the old incestuous ways of producing witches, by the
intercourse of a mother with her son. Some sort of comedy perhaps was
made out of the old materials, in the shape of a grotesque Semiramis
or an imbecile Ninus. But the more serious game, which doubtless
really took place, attests the existence of great profligacy in the
upper walks of society: it took the form of a most hateful and
barbarous hoax.
Some rash husband would be tempted to the spot, so fuddled with a
baleful draught of datura or belladonna, that, like one entranced, he
came to lose all power of speech and motion, retaining only his
sight. His wife, on the other hand, being so bewitched with erotic
drinks as to lose all sense of what she was doing, would appear in a
woeful state of nature, letting herself be caressed under the
indignant eyes of one who could no longer help himself in the least.
His manifest despair, his bootless efforts to unshackle his tongue,
and set free his powerless limbs, his dumb rage and wildly rolling
eyes, inspired beholders with a cruel joy, like that produced by some
of Molière's comedies. The poor woman, stung with a real delight,
yielded herself up to the most shameful usage, of which on the morrow
neither herself nor her husband would have the least remembrance. But
those who had seen or shared in the cruel farce, would they, too, fail
to remember?
In such heinous outrages an aristocratic element seems traceable. In
no way do they remind us of the old brotherhood of serfs, of the
original Sabbath, which, though ungodly, and foul enough, was still a
free straightforward matter, in which all was done readily and without
constraint.
Clearly, Satan, depraved as he was from all time, goes on spoiling
more and more. A polite, a crafty Satan is he now become, sweetly
insipid, but all the more faithless and unclean. It is a new, a
strange thing to see at the Sabbaths, his fellowship with priests. Who
is yon parson coming along with his _Bénédicte_, his sextoness, he who
jobs the things of the Church, saying the White Mass of mornings, the
Black at night? "Satan," says Lancre, "persuades him to make love to
his daughters in the spirit, to debauch his fair penitents." Innocent
magistrate! He pretends to be unaware that for a century back the
Devil had been working away at the Church livings, like one who knew
his business! He had made himself father-confessor; or, if you would
rather have it so, the father-confessor had turned Devil.
The worthy M. de Lancre should have remembered the trials that began
in 1491, and helped perchance to bring the Parliament of Paris into a
tolerant frame of mind. It gave up burning Satan, for it saw nothing
of him but a mask.
A good many nuns were conquered by his new device of borrowing the
form of some favourite confessor. Among them was Jane Pothierre, a
holy woman of Quesnoy, of the ripe age of forty-five, but still, alas!
all too impressible. She owns her passion to her ghostly counsellor,
who loth to listen to her, flies to Falempin, some leagues off. The
Devil, who never sleeps, saw his advantage, and perceiving her, says
the annalist, "goaded by the thorns of Venus, he slily took the shape
of the aforesaid 'Father,' and returning every night to the convent,
was so successful in befooling her, that she owned to having received
him 434 times."[86] Great pity was felt for her on her repenting; and
she was speedily saved from all need of blushing, being put into a
fine walled-tomb built for her in the Castle of Selles, where a few
days after she died the death of a good Catholic. Is it not a deeply
moving tale? But this is nothing to that fine business of Gauffridi,
which happened at Marseilles while Lancre was drawing up deeds at
Bayonne.
[86] Massée, _Chronique du Monde_, 1540; and the Chroniclers
of Hainault, &c.
The Parliament of Provence had no need to envy the success attained by
that of Bordeaux. The lay authorities caught at the first occasion of
a trial for witchcraft to institute a reform in the morals of the
clergy. They sent forth a stern glance towards the close-shut
convent-world. A rare opportunity was offered by the strange
concurrence of many causes, by the fierce jealousies, the revengeful
longings which severed priest from priest. But for those mad passions
which ere long began to burst forth at every moment, we should have
gained no insight into the real lot of that great world of women who
died in those gloomy dwellings; not one word should we have heard of
the things that passed behind those parlour gratings, within those
mighty walls which only the confessor could overleap.
The example of the Basque priest, whom Lancre presents to us as
worldly, trifling, going with his sword upon him, and his deaconess by
his side, to dance all night at the Sabbath, was not one to inspire
fear. It was not such as he whom the Inquisition took such pains to
screen, or towards whom a body so stern for others, proved itself, for
once, indulgent. It is easy to see through all Lancre's reticences
the existence of _something else_. And the States-General of 1614,
affirming that priests should not be tried by priests, are also
thinking of _something else_. This very mystery it is which gets torn
in twain by the Parliament of Provence. The director of nuns gaining
the mastery over them and disposing of them, body and soul, by means
of witchcraft,--such is the fact which comes forth from the trial of
Gauffridi; at a later date from the dreadful occurrences at Loudun and
Louviers; and also in the scenes described by Llorente, Ricci, and
several more.
One common method was employed alike for reducing the scandal, for
misleading the public, for hiding away the inner fact while it was
busied with the outer aspects of it. On the trial of a priestly
wizard, all was done to juggle away the priest by bringing out the
wizard; to impute everything to the art of the magician, and put out
of sight the natural fascination wielded by the master of a troop of
women all abandoned to his charge.
But there was no way of hushing up the first affair. It had been
noised abroad in all Provence, in a land of light, where the sun
pierces without any disguise. The chief scene of it lay not only in
Aix and Marseilles, but also in Sainte-Baume, the famous centre of
pilgrimage for a crowd of curious people, who thronged from all parts
of France to be present at a deadly duel between two bewitched nuns
and their demons. The Dominicans, who attacked the affair as
inquisitors, committed themselves by the noise they made about it
through their partiality for one of these nuns. For all the care
Parliament presently took to hurry the conclusion, these monks were
exceedingly anxious to excuse her and justify themselves. Hence the
important work of the monk Michaëlis, a mixture of truth and fable;
wherein he raises Gauffridi, the priest he had sent to the flames,
into the Prince of Magicians, not only in France, but even in Spain,
Germany, England, Turkey, nay, in the whole inhabited earth.
Gauffridi seems to have been a talented, agreeable man. Born in the
mountains of Provence, he had travelled much in the Low Countries and
the East. He bore the highest character in Marseilles, where he served
as priest in the Church of Acoules. His bishop made much of him: the
most devout of the ladies preferred him for their confessor. He had a
wondrous gift, they say, of endearing himself to all. Nevertheless, he
might have preserved his fair reputation had not a noble lady of
Provence, whom he had already debauched, carried her blind, doting
fondness to the extent of entrusting him, perhaps for her religious
training, with the care of a charming child of twelve, Madeline de la
Palud, a girl of fair complexion and gentle nature. Thereon, Gauffridi
lost his wits, and respected neither the youth nor the holy ignorance,
the utter unreserve of his pupil.
As she grew older, however, the young highborn girl discovered her
misfortune, in loving thus beneath her, without hope of marriage. To
keep his hold on her, Gauffridi vowed he would wed her before the
Devil, if he might not wed her before God. He soothed her pride by
declaring that he was the Prince of Magicians, and would make her his
queen. He put on her finger a silver ring, engraved with magic
characters. Did he take her to the Sabbath, or only make her believe
she had been there, by confusing her with strange drinks and magnetic
witcheries? Certain it is, at least, that torn by two different
beliefs, full of uneasiness and fear, the girl thenceforth became mad
at certain times, and fell into fits of epilepsy. She was afraid of
being carried off alive by the Devil. She durst no longer stay in her
father's house, and took shelter in the Ursuline Convent at
Marseilles.