"Hereupon, with moans and lamentations, the man instantly fell upon the earth before me, and prayed for compassion. My servants came up—we seized the wretch, and led him home, where I shut him up in the prison of the tower, at the corner of the court, and next morning I intended to give notice of what had happened to the magistrates.
"As soon as he came into the tower, he had fallen into a state of almost utter insensibility.—When I went to him next morning, he was sitting on a bed of straw, which we had prepared for him, and wept violently. He fell at my feet, and begged that I would take compassion on him.—He told me that he had already lived several weeks in the woods, eating nothing but roots and wild fruit. He was a poor Capuchin from a distant convent, and had escaped out of the prison, in which, on account of his madness, he had been shut up.
"The man was, to say the truth, in a most miserable condition—I had compassion upon him, and desired that food and wine should be administered for his restoration, after which he visibly recovered. He begged of me in the most earnest and abject manner, that I would bear with him for a few days in the house, and that I would, if possible, get him a new dress of his order. He would then alone, and of his own accord, walk back to his convent.
"I complied with his wishes, and his madness seemed visibly to leave him. The paroxysms were more rare, and far less vehement. In the exasperations of his madness he uttered horrible cries, and I observed, that when on this account I spoke to him harshly, and threatened him with death, he fell into a state of almost utter annihilation, threw himself on the earth, chastised himself with a knotted rope, and called on God and the Saints, to free him from the torments and terrors of hell which awaited him.
"At such intervals he seemed to look on himself as St Anthony, and at other times, in his violent paroxysms, affirmed that he was an herrgraf, and supreme Prince, adding, that he would have us all put to death as soon as his servants appeared to rescue him.
"In his lucid moments, he begged of me for God's sake not to turn him out of this house, as he felt that his cure depended on his residence with me. Only once I had another disagreeable adventure with him, and, as luck would have it, it befell just at the time when the Prince was hunting in our forest, and spent the night in my house.
"The monk, after he had beheld the Prince with his brilliant train of attendants, was completely changed. He remained gloomy and reserved. When we went as usual to prayers, he retired abruptly. If he heard even a word uttered in the spirit of devotion, there was a trembling through all his limbs, and at the same time, he looked on my daughter Anne with an aspect so strange and ambiguous, that I resolved to get him directly away from the house, in order to prevent all sorts of misdemeanours, which of necessity would ensue.
"In the course of the very night preceding the day on which I had intended to pack him off, I was alarmed about one o'clock by a piercing cry, which vibrated along the corridor. I sprung out of bed, got a light, and ran towards the room where my daughters slept. The monk had contrived to break from the dungeon in which I always kept him shut up, and giving the reins to his abominable impulses, had betaken himself directly to the door of my daughters' room, which he had burst in with his foot.
"By good luck, the lad Francis had been awoke by extreme thirst, and was going to get water in the court, when he heard the monk's heavy step in the corridor. He ran up to him accordingly, and seized him from behind, just at the moment when he was entering the room; but the lad was too weak to get the better of the madman. They wrestled together, and both fell out of the room again into the corridor, the girls, meanwhile, screaming loudly.
"Just at this time I came up. The monk had got Francis on the ground, and was grappling him by the throat in such a manner that he would very soon have made an end of his victim. Without losing a moment, therefore, I seized the maniac, and tore him away. Then suddenly, before I could understand how he could accomplish it, I saw a knife gleaming in his clenched hand, with which he directly struck at me; but Francis, who had now recovered, seized his arm, and, as I am a strong man, we succeeded in pinning the wretched man to the wall, in such manner, that his breath was almost squeezed out of his body.