"Yes, yes—it is so!"
"I, who now speak to you, knew the son of a tailor who was once caught in the net of those ministers of the devil. I'll tell you what he saw—he told me all about it the next day. The Lutherans assembled at night—at midnight—in a large cave, men, young girls and women to celebrate their Luthery. A rich bourgeois woman, who lived on the same street with the tailor attended the incantation with her two daughters. When all the canting hypocrites were assembled, their priest donned a robe of goatskin with a headgear of spreading oxhorns; he then took a little child, spread the poor little fellow upon a table lighted by two tall wax candles, and, while the other heretics sang their psalms in French, interspersed with magical invocations, their priest cut the child's throat!"
"The assassins! The monsters! The demons!"
"The priest of Lucifer thereupon gathered the child's blood in a vase and sprinkled the assembly with the warm gore! He then tore out the child's heart and ate it up! That closed the celebration of the Luthery."
"Holy St. James, and shall we not bleed these sons of Satan to the last man?" cried the butcher, carrying his hand to his knife, while the proscribed man exchanged significant glances with Christian and remarked to those standing near him:
"Can such monstrosities be possible? Could such things have happened?"
"Whether they are possible! Why, Brother St. Lawrence-on-the-gridiron, a reverend Carmelite who is my confessor, told me, Marotte, there never was an assembly of those heretics held without at least one or two little children being sacrificed."
"Jesus, God! Everybody knows that," pursued the first narrator; "the tailor's son that I am talking about witnessed the heretical orgy; he saw everything with his own eyes; then, after the Lutherans had been sprinkled with the child's blood as a sort of baptism, their priest spoke up and said: 'Now, take off your clothes, and pray to God in our fashion. Long live hell and the Luthery!' As soon as he said this, he put out the two wax candles, whereupon all the he and she canting hypocrites, with as much clothing on as Adam and Eve, men, women and young girls, all thrown helter-skelter in the dark—well, you understand—it is an abomination!"[9]
"What a horror! Malediction upon them!"
"Mercy! May God protect us from such heretics!"