1632, most of the nuns found themselves molested and disturbed by evil spirits.""

For the reparation of these crimes, Grandier was condemned to an amende honorable, and to be burnt alive, with the magical pacts and characters being in the rolls, together with the manuscript book, which he was accused of having written against the celibacy of priests, and his ashes to be scattered in the air. Having heard this terrible sentence without any commotion, he desired to have the guardian of the Franciscans of Loudun for his confessor: he was doctor of divinity of the faculty of Paris. They refused him, and offered him a recollect, whom he would not make use of; saying, that he was his enemy, and one of those who had most contributed to his ruin. They persisted in their resolution to give him no other confessor than this recollect, and he persisted in his refusal; and so he made only a mental confession to God; after which, he went to the place of execution, and died very constantly and christianly. As he was upon the pile, a great fly (a kind of drone) happened to buz about his head. A monk, present at the execution, who had read in the council of Quieres, that the devils are always at hand, when men are dying, to tempt them, and who had heard say, that Belzebub signifies in Hebrew the god of flies, cried out immediately, that it was the devil Belzebub that flew about Grandier, to carry his soul to hell; upon which a very pleasant song was made.

The devil's-craft of Loudun lasted a year after the death of Grandier. Theophrastus Renaudot, a famous physician, and inventor of the French gazette, made an encomium on Grandier, which was printed at Paris in loose sheets. This is taken from Menage, who vindicates him, and calls the possession of those nuns a chimera. He thinks it very probable that they were

* Mercure François, St. John, page 761-762.

only tormented with the suffocation of the matrix ; and he says, that Grandier deserves to be added to Gabriel Naudés catalogue of great men unjustly accused of magic. However, he confesses that he heard the superior of the Ursulines of Loudun say: "that, when she was delivered from the devils that tormented her, an angel engraved upon her hand Jesus, Maria, Joseph, F. de Salles, and that she shewed him her hand, on which those words were really engraved, but lightly, and like those crosses we see on the arms of the pilgrims, who have been in the Holy Land. He heard her say farther, that the angel engraved first, on the upper part of her hand, the name of Francis de Salles; that this word removed lower to give the precedence to those of Joseph and Maria, and that all three removed lower still to make room for that of Jesus." He has done well not to say in express words, that he took this for an imposture; the reader understands it well enough. But Monconis* leaves no room to doubt of the cheat; for which reason it will not be amiss to relate here what he says of it. He went to visit this superior of the Ursulines, the eighth of May 1645, and because she made him wait to speak with her above half an hour, he suspected some artifice. He desired her to shew him the characters, which the devil she was possessed with had imprinted upon her hand, when he was exorcised; † she did, and "The saw, in letters of a blood colour upon the back of her left hand, beginning from the wrist to the little finger, the word Jesus; below, drawing towards the shoulder, Maria; lower, Joseph; and lower still in the fourth line, F. de Salles. She told him all the villanies of the priest Grandier, who had been burnt for sending the devils into the convent; and how a magistrate of the town, whose wife he had debauched, had com* Voyages, part I, pag. 8 & 9.

+ According to Menage, it was an angel who imprinted those characters, when the possession was over.

plained of it to her, and that they agreed to impeach him, notwithstanding the strong inclinations this miscreant gave her by his conjurations, from which the mercy of God preserved her. At last M. de Monconis took leave of her, and desired to see her hand again; which she very civilly gave him through the grate he observed to her, that the letters were not so red as when she came, and that those letters seemed to peel off, and all the skin of her hand to rise, as if it had been a thin skin of starch-water dried up: with the end of his nail, by a gentle touch, he took off part of a leg of the M; at which she was very much surprised, though the place remained as fair as the other parts of the hand." He was satisfied with this. I do not in the least question it. The discovery of such a notable forgery, which had infatuated so many people, was an inestimable treasure to such a man as he. The new history of the devils of Loudun will inform you, "that, when the wrinkles of old age had made the hand dry and lean, the drugs, that were used to mark those names anew, being no longer able to imprint them, the good mother said then, that God had granted her prayers, and suffered those names to be effaced, which were the occasion of abundance of people coming to trouble and importune her, and withdraw her frequently from her acts of devotion." * You will there find also, that Cerisantes had the art of marking a name upon his hand, and that the queen's maids, in 1652, laughed at the engravings of the Ursulines.

It is probable that M. Menage designed to deny in general all that is said of magicians. In effect, he laughs at the first scene of this horrible tragedy, and draws from it some proofs for Grandier's justification. That first scene consisted in this, that one of the nuns, being by night in her little, but most chaste, bed, perceived a spectre resembling their deceased confessor, * Histoire des diables de Loudun, pag. 469.

and which owned, that it was he himself, and that he was returned to impart very extraordinary things. The spectre said, it would appear to her the same hour the night following; it failed not to appear, and received the same answer as at first, that she could not treat with it without the privity of her superior. Hereupon this spectre took Grandier's perfect shape. "He talked to this nun of love affairs, solicited her with addresses equally insolent and lascivious-she struggles, no body assists her; she torments herself, no body comforts her; she calls, nobody answers; she cries out, no body comes; she trembles, she perspires, she faints, she invokes the holy name of Jesus; and at last the spectre disappeared."

I own, with M. Menage, that this is proper enough to clear Urban Grandier as to magic; but not to justify him in other respects. Could not he, without being obliged to the devil Cedon for opening the door gain the door keeper, and get into this nun's chamber, pretending to be a ghost, and disguising himself with a mask resembling their late ghostly father? M. Menage says, that no man of sense will believe, that Grandier had the power of disposing of devils at his pleasure, to send them to torment innocent virgins consecrated to God. In fine, he praises the prudence and justice of Lewis XIV, "who has stopped the course of the proceedings against those, who are accused of magic and witchcraft, having commuted the penalty of death into banishment, with respect to many persons condemned by a decree of the parliament of Rouen, to be burnt, as guilty of this crime; and having afterwards, by a decree of his council of state, the twenty-sixth of April, 1672, ordained, that, through all the province of Normandy, the prisons should be opened to all persons, that were detained for the same crimes; and that, for the future, such as should be accused of it should be judged according to the declaration, which his majesty promises, by this

decree, to send into all the jurisdictions of France, to regulate the proceedings that are to be observed by the judges in the trials of magic and witchcraft."

It is certain, that the most incredulous and subtile philosophers must needs be puzzled with the phenomena relating to witchcraft; but, as to Grandier, I do not know but that we might apply to him what Olympias said upon the sight of a mistress of her husband, whom she found extremely handsome and witty: "let no body suspect her any longer of witchcraft, for all her enchantments are in her person." The curate of Loudun was a handsome genteel man, and a fine speaker; and this probably was the magic, with which he tempted the superior of the Ursulines, and subjected the nuns to violent and lascivious ardours. The vow of continence and devotion not being sufficient to remove this disorder, it was believed to be supernatural. This imagination spared self-love the shame of cherishing so long a criminal passion. They therefore believed themselves bewitched; all the machine was out of order and for the honor of that society, the first advances were not to be retracted. There is nothing more dangerous for people, that believe their good reputation to be necessary to the church, than to make a false step. This mother superior of the Ursulines might perhaps be sincere at first; but she was not so when she received Monconis's visit; and yet she must carry on the farce to salve what was past. Those, who perfectly knew the little town of Loudun, where those devil-crafts first began, might have explained them better than can be done at present.

Since the composition of this article, the History of the Devils of Loudun has been printed in Holland; and it appears manifestly by that book, that the pretended possession of the Ursulines was a horrid contrivance against the life of Grandier. This relation is extremely curious, and attended with all the pieces