“I will prove it at the proper time and place,” said Joos Damman, “but it pleaseth me not to do so as now.”
The bailiff then questioned Katheline; she never listened to him, and gazing at Hans:
“Thou art my green lord, lovely as the sun. Take away the fire, my darling!”
Nele, then speaking for Katheline, said:
“She can confess naught but what ye know already, Monseigneur and Messieurs; she is no witch, and only bereft of her wits.”
The bailiff then spoke and said:
“A sorcerer is one that, by diabolical means wittingly employed, endeavours to attain somewhat. Now, these twain, man and woman, are sorcerers by intent and deed: he, in having given the ointment for the sabbath, and in having made his face bright like Lucifer in order to obtain money and the satisfying of lewdness; she, in having submitted herself to him, taking him for a devil, and for having given herself up to his desires: the one being the worker of witchcraft, the other his manifest accomplice. There can therefore be no pity, and I must say this, for I perceive the aldermen and the populace over-indulgent in the case of the woman. She has not, it is true, killed or robbed, nor bewitched either beasts or mankind, nor healed any sick by remedies extraordinary, but only by known simples, as an honest and Christian physician; but she would have given up her daughter to the devil, and if this maid had not in her youth resisted with frank and valiant courage she would have yielded to Hilbert and would have become a sorceress like the other. Accordingly, I put it to the members of this tribunal if they are not of the opinion to put both these two to the torture?”
The aldermen made no answer, showing sufficiently that this was not their desire with regard to Katheline.
The bailiff then said, continuing his discourse:
“I am, like yourselves, touched with pity and compassion for her, but this sorceress, bereft of her wits, so obedient to the devil, might she not, had her lewd co-defendant so bidden her, have been capable of cutting off her daughter’s head with a sickle, even as Catherine Daru, in the country of France, did to her two daughters at the invitation of the devil? Might she not, if her black husband had so bidden her, have put animals to death; turned the butter in the churn by throwing sugar in it; been present in the body at all the worship and homage to the devil, dance, abominations, and copulations of sorcerers? Might she not have eaten human flesh, killed children to make pasties of them and sell them, as did a pastry cook in Paris; cut off the thighs of hanged men and carry them away to bite into them raw and thus commit infamous robbery and sacrilege? And I ask of the tribunal that in order to discover whether Katheline and Joos Damman have not committed other crimes than those already known and called into account, they be both put to the torture. Joos Damman refusing to confess anything further than the murder, and Katheline not having told everything, the laws of the empire enjoin upon us to proceed as I indicate.”