They ruined themselves, but could not stay the issue. A general protest by the town to the King failed to stay it also. On the 18th August, 1634, Grandier was condemned to the stake. So violent were his enemies that, for the second time before burning him, they insisted on having him stuck with needles in order to find out the Devil’s marks. One of his judges would have had even his nails torn out of him, had not the surgeon withheld his leave.
They were afraid of the last words their victim might say on the scaffold. Among his papers there had been found a manuscript condemning the celibacy of priests, and those who called him a wizard themselves believed him to be a freethinker. They remembered the brave words which the martyrs of free thought had thrown out against their judges; they called to mind the last speech of Giordano Bruno, the bold defiance of Vanini.[101] So they agreed with Grandier, that if he were prudent, he should be saved from burning, perhaps be strangled. The weak priest, being a man of flesh, yielded to this demand of the flesh, and promised to say nothing. He spoke not a word on the road, nor yet upon the scaffold. When he was fairly fastened to the post, with everything ready, and the fire so arranged as to enfold him swiftly in smoke and flames, his own confessor, a monk, set the faggots ablaze without waiting for the executioner. The victim, pledged to silence, had only time to say, “So, you have deceived me!” when the flames whirled fiercely upwards, and the furnace of pain began, and nothing was audible save the wretch’s screams.
Richelieu in his Memoirs says little, and that with evident shame, concerning this affair. He gives one to believe that he only followed the reports that reached him, the voice of general opinion. Nevertheless, by rewarding the exorcisers, by throwing the reins to the Capuchins, and letting them triumph over France, he gave no slight encouragement to that piece of knavery. Gauffridi, thus renewed in Grandier, is about to reappear in yet fouler plight in the Louviers affair.
In this very year, 1634, the demons hunted from Poitou pass over into Normandy, copying again and again the fooleries of Sainte-Baume, without any trace of invention, of talent, or of imagination. The frantic Leviathan of Provence, when counterfeited at Loudun, loses his Southern sting, and only gets out of a scrape by talking fluently to virgins in the language of Sodom. Presently, alas! at Louviers he loses even his old daring, imbibes the sluggish temper of the North, and sinks into a sorry sprite.[102]
FOOTNOTES:
[90] Molinos, born at Saragossa in 1627, died a prisoner to the Inquisition in 1696. His followers were called Quietists.—Trans.
[91] An old doctrine which often turns up again in the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century it prevails among the convents of France and Spain. A Norman angel, in the Louviers business, teaches a nun to despise the body and disregard the flesh, after the example of Jesus, who bared himself for a scourging before all the people. He enforces an utter surrendering of the soul and the will by the example of the Virgin, “who obeyed the angel Gabriel and conceived, without risk of evil, for impurity could not come of a spirit.” At Louviers, David, an old director of some authority, taught “that sin could be killed by sin, as the better way of becoming innocent again.”
[92] The History of the Loudun Devils, by the Protestant Aubin, is an earnest, solid book, confirmed by the Reports of Laubardemont himself. That of the Capuchin Tranquille is a piece of grotesquerie. The Proceedings are in the Great Library of Paris. M. Figuier has given a long and excellent account of the whole affair, in his History of the Marvellous.
[93] See Del Rio, Llorente Ricci, &c.
[94] The capture of Rochelle, the last of the Huguenot strongholds took place in 1628.—Trans.