THE DEVIL TRIUMPHS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
The Fronde was a kind of Voltaire. The spirit of Voltaire, old as
France herself, but long restrained, burst forth in the political, and
anon in the religious, world. In vain did the Great King seek to
establish a solemn gravity. Beneath it laughter went on.
Was there nought else, then, but laughter and jesting? Nay, it was the
Advent of Reason. By means of Kepler, of Galileo, Descartes, Newton,
there was now triumphantly enthroned the reasonable dogma of faith in
the unchangeable laws of nature. Miracle dared no longer show itself,
or, when it did dare, was hissed down. In other and better words, the
fantastic miracles of mere whim had vanished, and in their stead was
seen the mighty miracle of the universe--more regular, and therefore
more divine.
The great rebellion decidedly won the day. You may see it working in
the bold forms of those earlier outbursts; in the irony of Galileo; in
the absolute doubt wherewith Descartes leads off his system. The
Middle Ages would have said, "'Tis the spirit of the Evil One."
The victory, however, is not a negative one, but very affirmative and
surely based. The spirit of nature and the natural sciences, those
outlaws of an elder day, return in might irresistible. All idle
shadows are hunted out by the real, the substantial.
They had said in their folly, "Great Pan is dead." Anon, observing
that he was yet alive, they had made him a god of evil: amid such a
chaos they might well be deceived. But, lo! he lives, and lives
harmonious, in the grand stability of laws that govern alike the star
and the deep-hidden mystery of life.
* * * * *
Of this period two things, by no means contradictory, may be averred:
the spirit of Satan conquers, while the reign of witchcraft is at an
end.
All marvel-mongering, hellish or holy, is fallen very sick at last.
Wizards and theologians are powerless alike. They are become, as it
were, empirics, who pray in vain for some supernatural change, some
whim of Providence, to work the wonders which science asks of nature
and reason only.
For all their zeal, the Jansenists of this century succeed only in
bringing forth a miracle very small and very ridiculous. Still less
lucky are the rich and powerful Jesuits, who cannot get a miracle done
at any price; who have to be satisfied with the visions of a hysteric
girl, Sister Mary Alacoque, of an exceedingly sanguine habit, with
eyes for nothing but blood. In view of so much impotence, magic and
witchcraft may find some solace for themselves.
While the old faith in the supernatural was thus declining, priests
and witches shared a common fate. In the fears, the fancies of the
Middle Ages, these two were bound up together. Together they were
still to face the general laughter and disdain. When Molière made fun
of the Devil and his "seething cauldrons," the clergy were deeply
stirred, deeming that the belief in Paradise had fallen equally low.
A government of laymen only, that of the great Colbert, who was long
the virtual King of France, could not conceal its scorn for such old
questions. It emptied the prisons of the wizards whom the Rouen
Parliament still crowded into them, and, in 1672, forbade the law
courts from entertaining any prosecutions for witchcraft. The
Parliament protested, and gave people to understand that by this
denial of sorcery many other things were put in peril. Any doubting of
these lower mysteries would cause many minds to waver from their
belief in mysteries of a higher sort.
* * * * *
The Sabbath disappears, but why? Because it exists everywhere. It
enters into the people's habits, becomes the practice of their daily
life. The Devil, the Witches, had long been reproached with loving
death more than life, with hating and hindering the generative powers
of nature. And now in the pious seventeenth century, when the Witch is
fast dying out, a love of barrenness, and a fear of being fruitful,
are found to be, in very truth, the one prevalent disease.
If Satan ever read, he would have good cause for laughter as he read
the casuists who took him up where he left off. For there was one
difference at least between them. In times of terror Satan made
provision for the famished, took pity on the poor. But these fellows
have compassion only for the rich. With his vices, his luxury, his
court life, the rich man is still a needy miserable beggar. He comes
to confession with a humbly threatening air, in order to wrest from
his doctor permission to sin with a good conscience. Some day will be
told, by him who may have the courage to tell it, an astounding tale
of the cowardly things done, and the shameful tricks so basely
ventured by the casuist who wished to keep his penitent. From Navarro
to Escobar the strangest bargains were continually made at the wife's
expense, and some little wrangling went on after that. But all this
would not do. The casuist was conquered, was altogether a coward. From
Zoccoli to Liguori--1670 to 1770--he gave up banning Nature.
The Devil, so it was said, showed two countenances at the Sabbath: the
one in front seemed threatening, the other behind was farcical. Now
that he has nothing to do with it, he has generously given the latter
to the casuist.
It must have amused him to see his trusty friends settled among honest
folk, in the serious households swayed by the Church. The worldling
who bettered himself by that great resource of the day, lucrative
adultery, laughed at prudence, and boldly followed his natural bent.
Pious families, on the other hand, followed nothing but their Jesuits.
In order to preserve, to concentrate their property, to leave each one
wealthy heir, they entered on the crooked ways of the new
spiritualism. Buried in a mysterious gloom, losing at the faldstool
all heed and knowledge of themselves, the proudest of them followed
the lesson taught by Molinos: "In this world we live to suffer. But in
time that suffering is soothed and lulled to sleep by a habit of pious
indifference. We thus attain to a negation. Death do you say? Not
altogether. Without mingling in the world, or heeding its voices, we
get thereof an echo dim and soft. It is like a windfall of Divine
Grace, so mild and searching; never more so than in moments of
self-abasement, when the will is wholly obscured."
Exquisite depths of feeling! Alas, poor Satan! how art thou left
behind! Bend low, acknowledge, and admire thy children!
* * * * *
The physicians who, having sprung from the popular empiricism which
men called witchcraft, were far more truly his lawful children, were
too forgetful of him who had left them his highest patrimony, as being
his favoured heirs. They were ungrateful to the Witch, who laid the
way for themselves. Nay, they went further than that. On this fallen
king, their father and creator, they dealt some hard strokes with the
whip. "_Thou, too, my son?_" They gave the jesters cruel weapons
against him.
Even in the sixteenth century there were some to scoff at the spirit
who through all time, from the days of the Sibyl to those of the
Witch, had filled and troubled the woman. They maintained that he was
neither God nor Devil, but only "the Prince of the Air," as the Middle
Ages called him. Satan was nothing but a disease!
_Possession_ to them was only a result of the prison-like, sedentary,
dry, unyielding life of the cloister. As for the 6500 devils in
Gauffridi's little Madeline, and the hosts that fought in the bodies
of maddened nuns at Loudun and Louviers, these doctors called them
physical storms. "If Æolus can shake the earth," said Yvelin, "why not
also the body of a girl?" La Cadière's surgeon, of whom more anon, had
the coolness to say, "it was nothing more than a choking of the womb."
Wonderful descent! Routed by the simplest remedies, by exorcisms after
Molière, the terror of the Middle Ages would flee away and vanish
utterly!
This is too sweeping a reduction of the question. Satan was more than
that. The doctors saw neither the height nor the depth of him; neither
his grand revolt in the form of science, nor that strange mixture of
impurity and pious intrigue, that union of Tartuffe and Priapus, which
he brought to pass about the year 1700.
People fancy they know something about the eighteenth century, and
yet have never seen one of its most essential features. The greater
its outward civilization, the clearer and fuller the light that bathed
its uppermost layers, so much the more hermetically sealed lay all
those widespread lower realms, of priests and monks, and women
credulous, sickly, prone to believe whatever they heard or saw. In the
years before Cagliostro, Mesmer, and the magnetisers, who appeared
towards the close of the century, a good many priests still worked
away at the old dead witchcraft. They talked of nothing but
enchantments, spread the fear of them abroad, and undertook to hunt
out the devils with their shameful exorcisms. Many set up for wizards,
well knowing how little risk they ran, now that people were no longer
burnt. They knew they were sheltered by the milder spirit of their
age, by the tolerant teachings of their foes the philosophers, by the
levity of the great jesters, who thought that anything could be
extinguished with a laugh. Now it was just because people laughed,
that these gloomy plot-spinners went their way without much fear. The
new spirit, that of the Regent namely, was sceptical and easy-natured.
It shone forth in the _Persian Letters_, it shone forth everywhere in
the all-powerful journalist who filled that century, Voltaire. At any
shedding of human blood his whole heart rises indignant. All other
matters only make him laugh. Little by little, the maxim of the
worldly public seems to be, "Punish nothing, and laugh at all."
This tolerant spirit suffered Cardinal Tencin to appear in public as
his sister's husband. This, too, it was that ensured to the masters of
convents the peaceful possession of their nuns, who were even allowed
to make declarations of pregnancy, to register the births of their
children.[106] This tolerant temper made excuses for Father
Apollinaire, when he was caught in a shameful piece of exorcism. That
worthy Jesuit, Cauvrigny, idol of the provincial convents, paid for
his adventures only by a recall to Paris, in other words--by fresh
preferment.
[106] The noble Chapter of Canons of Pignan were sixteen in
number. In one year the provost received from the nuns
sixteen declarations of pregnancy. (See MS. History of Besse,
by M. Renoux.) One good fruit of this publicity was the
decrease of infanticide among the religious orders. At the
price of a little shame, the nuns let their children live,
and doubtless became good mothers. Those of Pignan put their
babes out to nurse with the neighbouring peasants, who
brought them up as their own.
Such also was the punishment awarded the famous Jesuit, Girard, who
was loaded with honours when he should have got the rope. He died in
the sweetest savour of holiness. His was the most curious affair of
that century. It enables us to probe the peculiar methods of that day,
to realize the coarse jumble of jarring machinery which was then at
work. As a thing of course, it was preluded by the dangerous suavities
of the Song of Songs. It was carried on by Mary Alacoque, with a
marriage of Bleeding Hearts spiced with the morbid blandishments of
Molinos. To these Girard added the whisperings of Satan and the
terrors of enchantment. He was at once the Devil and the Devil's
exorciser. At last, horrible to say, instead of getting justice done
to her, the unhappy girl whom he sacrificed with so much cruelty, was
persecuted to death. She disappeared, shut up perhaps by a _lettre de
cachet_, and buried alive in her tomb.