Thorel v. Tinel. Action for libel in 1851. Mr. Dale Owen's
incomplete version of this affair. The suit really a trial for
witchcraft. Spectral obsession. Movements of objects. Rappings.
Incidental folklore. Old G. Thorel and the cure. The wizard's
revenge. The haunted parlour boarder. Examples of magical tripping
up, and provoked hallucinations. Case of Dr. Gibotteau and Berthe
the hospital nurse. Similar case in the Salem affair, 1692.
Evidence of witnesses to abnormal phenomena. Mr. Robert de Saint
Victor. M. de Mirville. Thorel non-suited. Other modern French
examples of witchcraft.
Perhaps the last trial for witchcraft was the case of Thorel v.
Tinel, heard before the juge de paix of Yerville, on January 28, and
February 3 and 4, 1851. The trial was, in form, the converse of
those with which old jurisprudence was familiar. Tinel, the Cure of
Cideville, did not accuse the shepherd Thorel of sorcery, but Thorel
accused Tinel of defaming his character by the charge of being a
warlock. Just as when a man prosecutes another for saying that he
cheated at cards, or when a woman prosecutes another for saying that
the plaintiff stole diamonds, it is really the guilt or innocence of
the plaintiff that is in question, so the issue before the court at
Yerville was: 'Is Thorel a warlock or not?' The court decided that
he himself had been the chief agent in spreading the slander against
himself, he was non-suited, and had to pay costs, but as to the real
cause of the events which were attributed to the magic of Thorel,
the court was unable to pronounce an opinion.
This curious case has often been cited, as by Mr. Robert Dale Owen,
in his Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, {275} but Mr.
Owen, by accident or design, omitted almost all the essential
particulars, everything which connects the affair with such
transactions as the witch epidemic at Salem, and the trials for
sorcery before and during the Restoration. Yet, in the events at
Cideville, and the depositions of witnesses, we have all the
characteristics of witchcraft. First we have men by habit and
repute sorcerers. Then we have cause of offence given to these.
Then we have their threats, malum minatum, then we have evil
following the threats, damnum secutum. Just as of old, that damnum,
that damage, declares itself in the 'possession' of young people,
who become, more or less, subject to trances and convulsions. One
of them is haunted, as in the old witchcraft cases, by the phantasm
of the sorcerer. The phantasm (as in Cotton Mather's examples) is
wounded, a parallel wound is found on the suspected warlock.
Finally, the house where the obsessed victims live is disturbed by
knocks, raps, flight of objects, and inexplicable movements of heavy
furniture. Thus all the notes of a bad affair of witchcraft are
attested in a modern trial, under the third Empire. Finally, some
curious folklore is laid bare, light is cast on rural life and
superstition, and a singular corroboration of a singular statement,
much more recent than the occurrences at Cideville, is obtained. A
more astonishing example of survival cannot be imagined, of
survival, or of disconnected and spontaneous revival and
recrudescence. {276}
There was at Auzebosc, near famous Yvetot, an old shepherd named G---:
he was the recognised 'wise man,' or white witch of the
district, and some less noted rural adepts gave themselves out as
his pupils. In March, 1849, M. Tinel, Cure of Cideville, visited a
sick peasant, and advised him to discard old G., the shepherd
magical, and send for a physician. G. was present, though
concealed, heard the cure's criticisms, and said: 'Why does he
meddle in my business, I shall meddle in his; he has pupils in his
house, we'll see how long he keeps them.' In a few days, G. was
arrested, as practising medicine unauthorised, was imprisoned for
some months, and fancied that the cure had a share in this
persecution. All this, of course, we must take as 'the clash of the
country side,' intent, as there was certainly damnum secutum, on
establishing malum minatum.
On a farm near the cure's house in Cideville was another shepherd,
named Thorel, a man of forty, described as dull, illiterate, and
given to boasting about his powers as a disciple of the venerable G.
Popular opinion decided that G. employed Thorel to procure his
vengeance; it was necessary that a sorcerer should _touch_ his
intended victim, and G. had not the same conveniency for doing so as
Thorel. In old witch trials we sometimes find the witch kissing her
destined prey. {277} Thorel, so it was said, succeeded in touching,
on Nov. 25, 1850, M. Tinel's two pupils, in a crowd at a sale of
wood. The lads, of fifteen and twelve, were named Lemonier and
Bunel. For what had gone before, we have, so far, only public
chatter, for what followed we have the sworn evidence in court of
the cure's pupils, in January and February, 1851. According to
Lemonier, on Nov. 26, while studying, he heard light blows of a
hammer, these recurred daily, about 5. p.m. When M. Tinel, his
tutor, said plus fort, the noises were louder. To condense evidence
which becomes tedious by its eternal uniformity, popular airs were
beaten on demand; the noise grew unbearable, tables moved untouched,
a breviary, a knife, a spit, a shoe flew wildly about. Lemonier was
buffeted by a black hand, attached to nobody. 'A kind of human
phantasm, clad in a blouse, haunted me for fifteen days wherever I
went; none but myself could see it.' He was dragged by the leg by a
mysterious force. On a certain day, when Thorel found a pretext for
visiting the house, M. Tinel made him beg Lemonier's pardon, clearly
on the ground that the swain had bewitched the boy. 'As soon as I
saw him I recognised the phantasm which had haunted me for a
fortnight, and I said to M. Tinel: "There is the man who follows
me".' Thorel knelt to the boy, asked his pardon, and pulled
violently at his clothes. As defendant, perhaps, the cure could not
be asked to corroborate these statements. The evidence of the other
boy, Bunel, was that, on Nov. 26, he heard first a rush of wind,
then tappings on the wall. He corroborated Lemonier's testimony to
the musical airs knocked out, the volatile furniture, and the
recognition in Thorel of the phantom. 'In the evening,' said Bunel,
'Lemonier en eut une crise de nerfs dans laquelle il avait perdu
connaissance.'
Leaving the boys' sworn evidence, and returning to the narrative
with its gossip, we learn that Thorel boasted of his success, and
said that, if he could but touch one of the lads again, the
furniture would dance, and the windows would be broken. Meanwhile,
we are told, nails were driven into points in the floor where
Lemonier saw the spectral figure standing. One nail became red hot,
and the wood round it smoked: Lemonier said that this nail had hit
'the man in the blouse' on the cheek. Now, when Thorel was made to
ask the boy's pardon, and was recognised by him as the phantom,
after the experiment with the nail, Thorel bore on his cheek the
mark of the wound!
This is in accordance with good precedents in witchcraft. A witch-
hare is wounded, the witch, in her natural form, has the same wound.
At the trial of Bridget Bishop, in the court of Oyer and Terminer,
held at Salem, June 2, 1692, there was testimony brought in that a
man striking once at the place where a bewitched person said the
_shape_ of Mrs. Bishop stood, the bewitched cried out, _that he had
tore her coat_, in the place then particularly specified, and
Bishop's coat was found to be torn in that very place. {279a} Next
day, after Thorel touched the boy, the windows broke, as he had
prophesied. Then followed a curious scene in which Thorel tried, in
presence of the maire, to touch the cure, who retreated to the end
of the room, and struck the shepherd with his cane. Thereupon
Thorel brought his action for libel and assault against the cure.
Forty-two witnesses were heard, it was proved that Thorel had, in
fact, frequently accused himself, and he was non-suited: his
counsel spoke of appealing, but, unluckily, the case was not carried
to a higher court. In a few weeks the boys were sent to their
homes, when (according to the narrative) there were disturbances at
the home of the younger lad. Thus the cure lost his pupils.
A curious piece of traditional folklore came out, but only as
hearsay, in court. M. Cheval, Maire of Cideville, deposed that a M.
Savoye told him that Thorel had once been shepherd to a M. Tricot.
At that time Thorel said to one of two persons in his company:
'Every time I strike my cabin (a shelter on wheels used by
shepherds) you will fall,' and, at each stroke, the victim felt
something seize his throat, and fell! {279b} This anecdote is
curious, because in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research is a long paper by Dr. Gibotteau, on his experiments with a
hospital nurse called Berthe. This woman, according to the doctor,
had the power of making him see hallucinations, of a nature more or
less horrible, from a distance. She had been taught some
traditional feats of rural sorcery, among others that of making a
man stumble, or fall, as he walked. The doctor does not make any
allusion to the Cideville affair, and it seems probable that this
trick is part of the peasant's magical repertoire, or, rather, that
the peasant warlocks boast of being able to perform the trick. But,
if we can accept the physician's evidence, as 'true for him,' at
least, then a person like Berthe really might affect, from a
distance, a boy like Lemonier with a haunting hallucination. To do
this is witchcraft, and for crimes of this kind, or on false charges
of this kind, poor Mrs. Bishop was burned at Salem in 1692.
At the lowest, we have all the notes of sorcery as our rude
ancestors knew it, in this modern affair. Two hundred years
earlier, Thorel would have been burned, and G., too, probably, for
the Maire of Cideville swore that before the disturbances, and three
weeks after G. was let out of prison, Thorel had warned him of the
trouble which G. would bring on the cure. Meanwhile the evidence
shows no conscious malignity on the part of the two boys. They at
first took very little notice of the raps, attributing the noises to
mice. Not till the sounds increased, and showed intelligence, as by
drumming tunes, did the lads concern themselves, much about the
matter. At no time (it seems) did they ask to be sent home, and, of
course, to be relieved from their lessons and sent home would be
their motive, if they practised a fraud. We may admit that, from
rural tradition, the boys might have learned what the customary
phenomena are, knocks, raps, moving tables, heavy objects sailing
tranquilly about a room. It would be less easy for them to produce
these phenomena, nor did the people of all classes who flocked to
Cideville detect any imposture.
A land surveyor swore that the raps went on when he had placed the
boy in an attitude which made fraud (in his opinion) impossible. A
gentleman M. de B. 'took all possible precautions' but,
nevertheless, was entertained by 'a noise which performed the tunes
demanded'. He could discover no cause of the noise. M. Huet,
touching a table with his finger, received responsive raps, which
answered questions, 'at the very place where I struck, and beneath
my finger. I cannot explain the fact, which, I am convinced, was
not caused by the child, nor by any one in the house.' M. Cheval
saw things fly about, he slept in the boy's room, and his pillow
flew from under his head. He lay down between the children, holding
their hands, and placing his feet on theirs, when the coverlet of
the bed arose, and floated away. The Marquis de Mirville had a
number of answers by raps, which staggered him very much, but the
force was quite feeble when he asked for portions of Italian music.
Madame de St. Victor felt herself pushed, and her clothes pulled in
the cure's house, when no one was near her. She also saw furniture
behave in a fantastic manner, and M. Raoul Robert de St. Victor had
many such experiences. M. Paul de St. Victor was not present. A
desk sailed along: paused in air, and fell: 'I had never seen a
movement of this kind, and I admit that I was alarmed'. Le
Seigneur, a farmer, saw 'a variety of objects arise and sail about':
he was certain that the boys did not throw them, and when in their
company, in the open air, between Cideville and Anzooville, 'I saw
stones come to us, without striking us, hurled by some invisible
force'. There was other confirmatory evidence, from men of physic,
and of the law.
The juge de paix, as we have seen, pronounced that the clearest
point in the case was 'the absence of known cause for the effects,'
and he non-suited Thorel, the plaintiff.
The cause of the phenomena is, of course, as obscure for us as for
the worthy magistrate. We can only say that, when precisely similar
evidence was brought before judges and juries in England and New
England, at a period when medicine, law, and religion all recognised
the existence of witchcraft, magic, and diabolical possession, they
had scarcely any choice but to condemn the accused. Causa patet,
they said: 'The devil is at the bottom of it all, and the witch is
his minister'.
The affair of Cideville by no means stands alone in modern France.
In 1853, two doctors and other witnesses signed a deposition as to
precisely similar phenomena attending Adelaide Francoise Millet, a
girl of twelve, at Songhien, in Champagne. The trouble, as at Cock
Lane, began by a sound of scratching on the wood of her bed. The
clerk of the juge de la paix, the master of the Douane, two doctors,
and others visited her, and tied her hands and feet. The noise
continued. Mysterious missiles pursued a girl in Martinique, in
1854. The house, which was stormed by showers of stone, in Paris
(1846), entirely baffled the police. {283a} There is a more
singular parallel to the Cideville affair, the account was printed
from the letter of a correspondent in the Abeille of Chartres, March
11, 1849. {283b} At Gaubert, near Guillonville, a man was
imprisoned for thefts of hay, the property of a M. Dolleans. Two
days after his arrest, namely, on December 31, 1848, the servant of
M. Dolleans had things of all sorts thrown at her from all
directions. She fell ill, and went into hospital for five days,
_where she was untroubled_. On her return, in the middle of a
conversation, ribbons and bits of string would fly at her, and twist
themselves round her neck, as in the case of Francis Fey, of
Spraiton, given by Aubrey and Bovet. Mademoiselle Dolleans
carefully watched the girl for a fortnight, and never let her out of
her sight, but could not discover any fraud. After about a month
the maid was sent home, where she was not molested. Naturally we
see in her the half-insane cunning of hysteria, but that explanation
does not apply to little Master Dolleans, a baby of three months
old. The curse fell on _him_: however closely his parents watched
him, pots and pans showered into his cradle, the narrator himself
saw a miscellaneous collection of household furniture mysteriously
amassed there.
The Abeille of Chartres held this letter over, till two of its
reporters had visited the scene of action, and interviewed doctors,
priests, and farmers, who all attested the facts. Happily, in this
case, an exorcism by a priest proved efficacious. At Cideville,
holy water and consecrated medals were laughed at by the sprite,
who, by the way, answered to the name of Robert.