THE DEMONIACS OF LOUDUN--URBAN GRANDIER: 1632-1634.
In the _State Memoirs_, written by the famous Father Joseph, and known
to us by extracts only--the work itself having, no doubt, been wisely
suppressed as too instructive--the good Father explained how, in 1633,
he had the luck to discover a heresy, a huge heresy, in which ever so
many confessors and directors were concerned. That excellent army of
Church-constables, those dogs of the Holy Troop, the Capuchins, had,
not only in the wildernesses, but even in the populous parts of
France--at Chartres, in Picardy, everywhere--got scent of some
dreadful game; the _Alumbrados_ namely, or Illuminate, of Spain, who
being sorely persecuted there, had fled for shelter into France,
where, in the world of women, especially among the convents, they
dropped the gentle poison which was afterwards called by the name of
Molinos.[90]
[90] Molinos, born at Saragossa in 1627, died a prisoner to
the Inquisition in 1696. His followers were called
Quietists.--TRANS.
The wonder was, that the matter had not been sooner known. Having
spread so far, it could not have been wholly hidden. The Capuchins
swore that in Picardy alone, where the girls are weak and
warmer-blooded than in the South, this amorously mystic folly owned
some sixty thousand professors. Did all the clergy share in it--all
the confessors and directors? We must remember, that attached to the
official directors were a good many laymen, who glowed with the same
zeal for the souls of women. One of them, who afterwards made some
noise by his talent and boldness, is the author of _Spiritual
Delights_, Desmarets of Saint Sorlin.
* * * * *
Without remembering the new state of things, we should fail to
understand the all-powerful attitude of the director towards the nuns,
of whom he was now a hundred-fold more the master than he had been in
days of yore.
The reforming movement of the Council of Trent, for the better
enclosing of monasteries, was not much followed up in the reign of
Henry IV., when the nuns received company, gave balls, danced, and so
forth. In the reign, however, of Louis XIII., it began afresh with
greater earnestness. The Cardinal Rochefoucauld, or rather the Jesuits
who drew him on, insisted on a great deal of outward decency. Shall we
say, then, that all entrance into the convents was forbidden? One man
only went in every day, not only into the house, but also, if he
chose, into each of the cells; a fact made evident from several known
cases, especially that of David at Louviers. By this reform, this
closing system, the door was shut upon the world at large, on all
inconvenient rivals, while the director enjoyed the sole command of
his nuns, the special right of private interviews with them.
What would come of this? The speculative might treat it as a problem;
not so practical men or physicians. The physician Wyer tells some
plain stories to show what did come of it from the sixteenth century
onwards. In his Fourth Book he quotes a number of nuns who went mad
for love. And in Book III. he talks of an estimable Spanish priest
who, going by chance into a nunnery, came out mad, declaring that the
brides of Jesus were his also, brides of the priest, who was a vicar
of Jesus. He had masses said in return for the favour which God had
granted him in this speedy marriage with a whole convent.
If this was the result of one passing visit, we may understand the
plight of a director of nuns when he was left alone with them, and
could take advantage of the new restrictions to spend the day among
them, listening hour by hour to the perilous secret of their
languishings and their weaknesses.
In the plight of these girls the mere senses are not all in all.
Allowance must be made for their listlessness of mind; for the
absolute need of some change in their way of life; of some dream or
diversion to relieve their lifelong monotony. Strange things are
happening constantly at this period. Travels, events in the Indies,
the discovery of a world, the invention of printing: what romance
there is everywhere! While all this goes on without, putting men's
minds into a flutter, how, think you, can those within bear up against
the oppressive sameness of monastic life--the irksomeness of its
lengthy services, seasoned by nothing better than a sermon preached
through the nose?
* * * * *
The laity themselves, living amidst so many distractions, desire, nay
insist, that their confessors shall absolve them for their acts of
inconstancy. The priests, on their side, are drawn or forced on, step
by step. There grows up a vast literature, at once various and
learned, of casuistry, of the art of allowing all things; a
progressive literature, in which the indulgence of to-night seems to
become the severity of the morrow.
This casuistry was meant for the world; that mysticism for the
convent. The annihilation of the person and the death of the will form
the great mystic principle. The true moral bearings of that principle
are well shown by Desmarets. "The devout," he says, "having offered up
and annihilated their own selves, exist no longer but in God.
_Thenceforth they can do no wrong._ The better part of them is so
divine that it no longer knows what the other is doing."[91]
[91] An old doctrine which often turns up again in the Middle
Ages. In the seventeenth century it prevails among the
convents of France and Spain. A Norman angel, in the Louviers
business, teaches a nun to despise the body and disregard the
flesh, after the example of Jesus, who bared himself for a
scourging before all the people. He enforces an utter
surrendering of the soul and the will by the example of the
Virgin, "who obeyed the angel Gabriel and conceived, without
risk of evil, for impurity could not come of a spirit." At
Louviers, David, an old director of some authority, taught
"that sin could be killed by sin, as the better way of
becoming innocent again."
It might have been thought that the zealous Joseph who had raised so
loud a cry of alarm against these corrupt teachers, would have gone
yet further; that a grand searching inquiry would have taken place;
that the countless host whose number, in one province only, were
reckoned at sixty thousand, would be found out and closely examined.
But not so: they disappear, and nothing more is known about them. A
few, it is said, were imprisoned; but trial there was none: only a
deep silence. To all appearance Richelieu cared but little about
fathoming the business. In his tenderness for the Capuchins he was not
so blind as to follow their lead in a matter which would have thrown
the supervision of all confessors into their hands.
As a rule, the monks had a jealous dislike of the secular clergy.
Entire masters of the Spanish women, they were too dirty to be
relished by those of France; who preferred going to their own priests
or to some Jesuit confessor, an amphious creature, half monk, half
worldling. If Richelieu had once let loose the pack of Capuchins,
Recollects, Carmelites, Dominicans, &c., who among the clergy would
have been safe? What director, what priest, however upright, but had
used, and used amiss, the gentle language of the Quietists towards
their penitents?
Richelieu took care not to trouble the clergy, while he was already
bringing about the General Assembly from which he was soon to ask a
contribution towards the war. One trial alone was granted the monks,
the trial of a vicar, but a vicar who dealt in magic; a trial wherein
matters were allowed, as in the case of Gauffridi, to get so
entangled, that no confessor, no director, saw his own likeness there,
but everyone in full security could say, "This is not I."
* * * * *
Thanks to these strict precautions the Grandier affair is involved in
some obscurity.[92] Its historian, the Capuchin Tranquille, proves
convincingly that Grandier was a wizard, and, still more, a devil; and
on the trial he is called, as Ashtaroth might have been called,
_Grandier of the Dominations_. On the other hand, Ménage is ready to
rank him with great men accused of magic, with the martyrs of free
thought.
[92] The _History of the Loudun Devils_, by the Protestant
Aubin, is an earnest, solid book, confirmed by the _Reports_
of Laubardemont himself. That of the Capuchin Tranquille is a
piece of grotesquerie. The _Proceedings_ are in the Great
Library of Paris. M. Figuier has given a long and excellent
account of the whole affair, in his _History of the
Marvellous_.
In order to see a little more clearly, we must not set Grandier by
himself; we must keep his place in the devilish trilogy of those
times, in which he figured only as a second act; we must explain him
by the first act, already shown to us in the dreadful business of
Sainte-Baume, and the death of Gauffridi; we must explain him by the
third act, by the affair at Louviers, which copied Loudun, as Loudun
had copied Sainte-Baume, and which in its turn owned a Gauffridi and
an Urban Grandier.
The three cases are one and selfsame. In each case there is a
libertine priest, in each a jealous monk, and a frantic nun by whose
mouth the Devil is made to speak; and in all three the priest gets
burnt at last.
And here you may notice one source of light which makes these matters
clearer to our eyes than if we saw them through the miry shades of a
monastery in Spain or Italy. In those lands of Southern laziness, the
nuns were astoundingly passive, enduring the life of the seraglio and
even worse.[93] Our French women, on the contrary, gifted with a
personality at once strong, lively, and hard to please, were equally
dreadful in their jealousy and in their hate; and being devils indeed
without metaphor, were accordingly rash, blusterous, and prompt to
accuse. Their revelations were very plain, so plain indeed at the
last, that everyone felt ashamed; and after thirty years and three
special cases, the whole thing, begun as it was through terror, got
fairly extinguished in its own dulness beneath hisses of general
disgust.
[93] See Del Rio, Llorente Ricci, &c.
It was not in Loudun, amidst crowds of Poitevins, in the presence of
so many scoffing Huguenots, in the very town where they held their
great national synods, that one would have looked for an event so
discreditable to the Catholics. But these latter, living, as it were,
in a conquered country,[94] in the old Protestant towns, with the
greatest freedom, and thinking, not without cause, of the people they
had often massacred and but lately overcome, were not the persons to
say a word about it. Catholic Loudun, composed of magistrates,
priests, monks, a few nobles, and some workmen, dwelled aloof from the
rest, like a true conquering settlement. This settlement, as one might
easily guess, was rent in twain by the rivalry of the priests and the
monks.
[94] The capture of Rochelle, the last of the Huguenot
strongholds took place in 1628.--TRANS.
* * * * *
The monks, being numerous and proud, as men specially sent forth to
make converts, kept the pick of the pavement against the Protestants,
and were confessing the Catholic ladies, when there arrived from
Bordeaux a young vicar, brought up by the Jesuits, a man of letters,
of pleasing manners, who wrote well and spoke better. He made a noise
in the pulpit, and ere long in the world. By birth a townsman of
Mantes, of a wrangling turn, he was Southern by education, with all
the readiness of a Bordelais, boastful and frivolous as a Gascon. He
soon managed to set the whole town by the ears, drawing the women to
his side, while the men were mostly against him. He became lofty,
insolent, unbearable, devoid of respect for everything. The Carmelites
he overwhelmed with jibes; he would rail away from his pulpit against
monks in general. They choked with rage at his sermons. Proud and
stately, he went along the streets of Loudun like a Father of the
Church; but by night he would steal, with less of bluster, down the
byeways and through back-doors.
They all surrendered themselves to his pleasure. The wife of the Crown
Counsel was aware of his charms; still more so the daughter of the
Public Prosecutor, who had a child by him. This did not satisfy him.
Master of the ladies, this conqueror pushed his advantage until he had
gained the nuns.
By that time the Ursulines abounded everywhere, sisters devoted to
education, feminine missionaries in a Protestant land, who courted and
pleased the mothers, while they won over the little girls. The nuns of
Loudun formed a small convent of young ladies, poor and well-born. The
convent in itself was poor, the nuns for whom it was founded, having
been granted nothing but their house, an old Huguenot college. The
prioress, a lady of good birth and high connections, burned to exalt
her nunnery, to enlarge it, make it wealthier and wider known. Perhaps
she would have chosen Grandier, as being then the fashion, had she not
already gotten for her director a priest with very different rootage
in the country, a near kinsman of the two chief magistrates. The
Canon Mignon, as he was called, held the prioress fast. These two were
enraged at learning through the confessional--the "Ladies Superior"
might confess their nuns--that the young nuns dreamed of nothing but
this Grandier, of whom there was so much talk.
Thereupon three parties, the threatened director, the cheated husband,
the outraged father, joined together by a common jealousy, swore
together the destruction of Grandier. To ensure success, they only
needed to let him go on. He was ruining himself quite fast enough. An
incident that came to light made noise enough almost to bring down the
town.
* * * * *
The nuns placed in that old Huguenot mansion, were far from easy in
their minds. Their boarders, children of the town, and perhaps also
some of the younger nuns, had amused themselves with frightening the
rest by playing at ghosts and apparitions. Little enough of order was
there among this throng of rich spoilt girls. They would run about the
passages at night, until they frightened themselves. Some of them were
sick, or else sick at heart. But these fears and fancies mingled with
the gossip of the town, of which they heard but too much during the
day, until the ghost by night took the form of Grandier himself.
Several said they saw him, felt him near them in the night, and
yielded unawares to his bold advances. Was all this fancy, or the fun
of novices? Had Grandier bribed the porteress or ventured to climb
the walls? This part of the business was never cleared up.
From that time the three felt sure of catching him. And first, among
the small folk under their protection, they stirred up two good souls
to declare that they could no longer keep as vicar a profligate, a
wizard, a devil, a freethinker, who bent one knee in church instead of
two, who scoffed at rules and granted dispensations contrary to the
rights of the Bishop. A shrewd accusation, which turned against him
his natural defender, the Bishop of Poitiers, and delivered him over
to the fury of the monks.
To say truth, all this was planned with much skill. Besides raising up
two poor people as accusers, they thought it advisable to have him
cudgelled by a noble. In those days of duelling a man who let himself
be cudgelled with impunity lost ground with the public, and sank in
the esteem of the women. Grandier deeply felt the blow. Fond of making
a noise in all cases, he went to the King, threw himself on his knees,
and besought vengeance for the insult to his gown. From so devout a
king he might have gained it; but here there chanced to be some
persons who told the King that it was all an affair of love, the fury
of a betrayed husband wreaking itself on his foe.
At the spiritual court of Poitiers, Grandier was condemned to do
penance, to be banished from Loudun, and disgraced as a priest. But
the civil court took up the matter and found him innocent. He had
still to await the orders of him by whom Poitiers was spiritually
overruled, Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux. That warlike prelate, an
admiral and brave sailor more than a priest, shrugged his shoulders on
hearing of such peccadilloes. He acquitted the vicar, but at the same
time wisely recommended him to go and live anywhere out of Loudun.
This the proud man did not care to do. He wanted to enjoy his triumph
on the very field of battle, to show off before the ladies. He came
back to Loudun in broad day, with mighty noise; the women all looking
out of window, as he went by with a laurel-branch in his hand.
* * * * *
Not satisfied with that piece of folly, he began to threaten, to
demand reparation. Thus pushed and imperilled in their turn, his
enemies called to remembrance the affair of Gauffridi, where the
Devil, the Father of Lies, was restored to his honours and accepted in
a court of justice as a right truthful witness, worthy of belief on
the side of the Church, worthy of belief on the side of His Majesty's
servants. In despair they invoked a devil and found one at their
command. He showed himself among the Ursulines.
A dangerous thing; but then, how many were nearly concerned in its
success! The prioress saw her poor humble convent suddenly attracting
the gaze of the Court, of the provinces, of all the world. The monks
saw themselves victorious over their rivals the priests. They pictured
anew those popular battles waged with the Devil in a former century,
and often, as at Soissons, before the church doors; the terror of the
people, and their joy at the triumph of the Good Spirit; the
confession drawn from the Devil touching God's presence in the
Sacrament; and the humiliation of the Huguenots at being refuted by
the Demon himself.
In these tragi-comedies the exorciser represented God, or at any rate
the Archangel, overthrowing the dragon. He came down from the platform
in utter exhaustion, streaming with sweat, but victorious, to be borne
away in the arms of the crowd, amidst the blessings of good women who
shed tears of joy the while.
Therefore it was that in these trials a dash of witchcraft was always
needful. The Devil alone roused the interest of the vulgar. They could
not always see him coming out of a body in the shape of a black toad,
as at Bordeaux in 1610. But it was easy to make it up to them by a
grand display of splendid stage scenery. The affair of Provence owed
much of its success to Madeline's desolate wildness and the terror of
Sainte-Baume. Loudun was regaled with the uproar and the bacchanal
frenzy of a host of exorcisers distributed among several churches.
Lastly, Louviers, as we shall presently see, put a little new life
into this fading fashion by inventing midnight scenes, in which the
demons who possessed the nuns began digging by the glimmer of torches,
until they drew forth certain charms from the holes wherein they had
been concealed.
* * * * *
The Loudun business began with the prioress and a lay sister of hers.
They had convulsive fits, and talked infernal gibberish. Other of the
nuns began copying them, one bold girl especially taking up Louisa's
part at Marseilles, with the same devil Leviathan, the leading demon
of trickery and evil speaking.
The little town was all in a tremble. Monks of every hue provided
themselves with nuns, shared them all round, and exorcised them by
threes and fours. The churches were parcelled out among them; the
Capuchins alone taking two for themselves. The crowd go after them,
swollen by all the women in the place, and in this frightened
audience, throbbing with anxiety, more than one cries out that she,
too, is feeling the devils.[95] Six girls of the town are possessed.
And the bare recital of these alarming events begets two new cases of
possession at Chinon.
[95] The same hysteric contagion marks the "Revivals" of a
later period, down to the last mad outbreak in Ireland. The
translator hopes some day to work out the physical question
here stated.--TRANS.
Everywhere the thing was talked of, at Paris, at the Court. Our
Spanish queen,[96] who is imaginative and devout, sends off her
almoner; nay more, sends her faithful follower, the old papist, Lord
Montague, who sees, who believes everything, and reports it all to the
Pope. It is a miracle proven. He had seen the wounds on a certain nun,
and the marks made by the Devil on the Lady Superior's hands.
[96] Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII.--TRANS.
What said the King of France to this? All his devotion was turned on
the Devil, on hell, on thoughts of fear. It is said that Richelieu was
glad to keep him thus. I doubt it; the demons were essentially
Spanish, taking the Spanish side: if ever they talked politics, they
must have spoken against Richelieu. Perhaps he was afraid of them. At
any rate, he did them homage, and sent his niece to prove the interest
he took in the matter.
* * * * *
The Court believed, but Loudun itself did not. Its devils, but sorry
imitators of the Marseilles demons, rehearsed in the morning what they
had learnt the night before from the well-known handbook of Father
Michaëlis. They would never have known what to say but for the secret
exorcisms, the careful rehearsal of the day's farce, by which night
after night they were trained to figure before the people.
One sturdy magistrate, bailiff of the town, made a stir: going himself
to detect the knaves, he threatened and denounced them. Such, too, was
the tacit opinion of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, to whom Grandier
appealed. He despatched a set of rules for the guidance at least of
the exorcisers, for putting a stop to their arbitrary doings; and,
better still, he sent his surgeon, who examined the girls, and found
them to be neither bewitched, nor mad, nor even sick. What were they
then? Knaves, to be sure.[97]
[97] Not of necessity knaves, Mr. Michelet; at least not
wilfully so; but silly hysteric patients, of the
spirit-rapping, revivalist order, victims of nervous
derangement, or undue nervous sensibility.--TRANS.
So through the century keeps on this noble duel between the Physician
and the Devil, this battle of light and knowledge with the dark shades
of falsehood. We saw its beginning in Agrippa and Wyer. Doctor Duncan
carried it bravely on at Loudun, and fearlessly impressed on others
the belief that this affair was nothing but a farce.
For all his alleged resistance, the Demon was frightened, held his
tongue, quite lost his voice. But people's passions had been too
fiercely roused for the matter to end there. The tide flowed again so
strongly in favour of Grandier, that the assailed became in their turn
assailants. An apothecary of kin to the accusers was sued by a rich
young lady of the town for speaking of her as the vicar's mistress. He
was condemned to apologise for his slander.
The prioress was a lost woman. It would have been easy to prove, what
one witness afterwards saw, that the marks upon her were made with
paint renewed daily. But she was kinswoman to one of the King's
judges, Laubardemont, and he saved her. He was simply charged to
overthrow the strong places of Loudun. He got himself commissioned to
try Grandier. The Cardinal was given to understand that the accused
was vicar and friend of the _Loudun shoemaker_,[98] was one of the
numerous agents of Mary of Medici, had made himself his parishioner's
secretary, and written a disgraceful pamphlet in her name.
[98] A woman named Hammon, of low birth, who entered the
service, and rose high in the good graces of Mary of Medici.
See Dumas' _Celebrated Crimes_.--TRANS.
Richelieu, for his part, would have liked to show a high-minded scorn
of the whole business, if he could have done so with safety to
himself. The Capuchins and Father Joseph had an eye to that also.
Richelieu would have given them a fine handle against him with the
King, had he displayed a want of zeal. One Quillet, after much grave
reflection, went to see the Minister and give him warning. But the
other, afraid to listen, regarded him with so stern a gaze that the
giver of advice deemed it prudent to seek shelter in Italy.
* * * * *
Laubardemont arrived at Loudun on the 6th December, 1633, bringing
along with him great fear, and unbounded powers; even those of the
King himself. The whole strength of the kingdom became, as it were, a
dreadful bludgeon to crush one little fly.
The magistrates were wroth; the civic lieutenant warned Grandier that
he would have to arrest him on the morrow. The latter paid no heed to
him, and was arrested accordingly. In a moment he was carried off,
without form of trial, to the dungeons of Angers. Presently he was
taken back and thrown, where think you? Into the house, the room of
one of his enemies, who had the windows walled up so as well-nigh to
choke him. The loathsome scrutiny of the wizard's body, in order to
find out the Devil's marks by sticking needles all over it, was
carried on by the hands of the accusers themselves, who took their
revenge upon him beforehand in the foretaste thus given him of his
future punishment.
They led him to the churches, confronted him with the girls, who had
got their cue from Laubardemont. These Bacchanals, for such they
became under the fuddling effect of some drugs administered by the
condemned apothecary above-named, flung out in such frantic rages,
that Grandier was nearly perishing one day beneath their nails.
Unable to imitate the eloquence of the Marseilles demoniac, they tried
obscenity in its stead. It was a hideous thing to see these girls give
full vent in public to their sensual fury, on the plea of scolding
their pretended devils. Thus indeed it was that they managed to swell
their audiences. People flocked to hear from the lips of these women
what no woman would else have dared to utter.
As the matter grew more hateful, so it also grew more laughable. They
were sure to repeat all awry what little Latin was ever whispered to
them. The public found that the devils had never gone through _their
lower classes_. The Capuchins, however, coolly said that if these
demons were weak in Latin, they were marvellous speakers of Iroquois
and Tupinambi.[99]
[99] Indians of the coast of Brazil.--TRANS.
* * * * *
A farce so shameful, seen from a distance of sixty leagues, from St.
Germain or the Louvre, appeared miraculous, awful, terrifying. The
Court admired and trembled. Richelieu to please them did a cowardly
thing. He ordered money to be paid to the exorcisers, to the nuns.
The height of favour to which they had risen, drove the plotters
altogether mad. Senseless words were followed by shameful deeds.
Pleading that the nuns were tired, the exorcisers got them outside the
town, took them about by themselves. One of them, at least to all
appearance, returned pregnant. In the fifth or sixth month all outward
trace of it disappeared, and the devil within her acknowledged how
wickedly he had slandered the poor nun by making her look so large.
This tale concerning Loudun we learn from the historian of
Louviers.[100]
[100] Esprit de Bosroger, p. 135.
It is stated that Father Joseph, after a secret journey to the spot,
saw to what end the matter was coming, and noiselessly backed out of
it. The Jesuits also went, tried their exorcisms, did next to nothing,
got scent of the general feeling, and stole off in like manner.
But the monks, the Capuchins, were gone so far, that they could only
save themselves by frightening others. They laid some treacherous
snares for the daring bailiff and his wife, seeking to destroy them,
and thereby quench the coming reaction of justice. Lastly, they urged
on the commissioners to despatch Grandier. Things could be carried no
further: the nuns themselves were slipping out of their hands. After
that dreadful orgie of sensual rage and immodest shouting in order to
obtain the shedding of human blood, two or three of them swooned away,
were seized with disgust and horror; vomited up their very selves.
Despite the hideous doom that awaited them if they spoke the truth,
despite the certainty of ending their days in a dungeon, they owned in
church that they were damned, that they had been playing with the
Devil, and Grandier was innocent.
* * * * *
They ruined themselves, but could not stay the issue. A general
protest by the town to the King failed to stay it also. On the 18th
August, 1634, Grandier was condemned to the stake. So violent were his
enemies that, for the second time before burning him, they insisted on
having him stuck with needles in order to find out the Devil's marks.
One of his judges would have had even his nails torn out of him, had
not the surgeon withheld his leave.
They were afraid of the last words their victim might say on the
scaffold. Among his papers there had been found a manuscript
condemning the celibacy of priests, and those who called him a wizard
themselves believed him to be a freethinker. They remembered the brave
words which the martyrs of free thought had thrown out against their
judges; they called to mind the last speech of Giordano Bruno, the
bold defiance of Vanini.[101] So they agreed with Grandier, that if he
were prudent, he should be saved from burning, perhaps be strangled.
The weak priest, being a man of flesh, yielded to this demand of the
flesh, and promised to say nothing. He spoke not a word on the road,
nor yet upon the scaffold. When he was fairly fastened to the post,
with everything ready, and the fire so arranged as to enfold him
swiftly in smoke and flames, his own confessor, a monk, set the
faggots ablaze without waiting for the executioner. The victim,
pledged to silence, had only time to say, "So, you have deceived me!"
when the flames whirled fiercely upwards, and the furnace of pain
began, and nothing was audible save the wretch's screams.
[101] Both Neapolitans, burnt alive, the former at Venice in
1600, the latter at Toulouse in 1619.--TRANS.
Richelieu in his Memoirs says little, and that with evident shame,
concerning this affair. He gives one to believe that he only followed
the reports that reached him, the voice of general opinion.
Nevertheless, by rewarding the exorcisers, by throwing the reins to
the Capuchins, and letting them triumph over France, he gave no slight
encouragement to that piece of knavery. Gauffridi, thus renewed in
Grandier, is about to reappear in yet fouler plight in the Louviers
affair.
In this very year, 1634, the demons hunted from Poitou pass over into
Normandy, copying again and again the fooleries of Sainte-Baume,
without any trace of invention, of talent, or of imagination. The
frantic Leviathan of Provence, when counterfeited at Loudun, loses his
Southern sting, and only gets out of a scrape by talking fluently to
virgins in the language of Sodom. Presently, alas! at Louviers he
loses even his old daring, imbibes the sluggish temper of the North,
and sinks into a sorry sprite.[102]
[102] Wright and Dumas both differ from M. Michelet in their
view of Urban Grandier's character. The latter especially,
regards him as an innocent victim to his own fearlessness and
the hate of his foes, among whom not the least deadly was
Richelieu himself, who bore him a deep personal
grudge.--TRANS.