Cadière, for her part, never lied about the matter. In the narrative taken down from her own lips of what happened this Lent, she expressly tells of a crown, with sharp points, which stuck in her head, and made it bleed. Nor did she then make any secret of the source whence came the little crosses she gave her visitors. From a model supplied by Girard, they were made to her order by one of her kinsfolk, a carpenter in the Arsenal.
On Good Friday, she remained twenty-four hours in a swoon, which they called a trance; remained in special charge of Girard, whose attentions weakened her, and did her deadly harm. She was now three months gone with child. The saintly martyr, the transfigured marvel, was already beginning to fill out. Desiring, yet dreading the more violent issues of a miscarriage, he plied her daily with reddish powders and dangerous drinks.
Much rather would he have had her die, and so have rid himself of the whole business. At any rate, he would have liked to get her away from her mother, to bury her safe in a convent. Well acquainted with houses of that sort, he knew, as Picard had done in the Louviers affair, how cleverly and discreetly such cases as Cadière’s could be hidden away. He talked of it this very Good Friday. But she seemed too weak to be taken safely from her bed. At last, however, four days after Easter, a miscarriage took place.
The girl Laugier had also been having strange convulsive fits, and absurd beginnings of stigmata: one of them being an old wound, caused by her scissors when she was working as a seamstress, the other an eruptive sore in her side. Her transports suddenly turned to impious despair. She spat upon the crucifix: she cried out against Girard, “that devil of a priest, who had brought a poor girl of two-and-twenty into such a plight, only to forsake her afterwards!” Girard dared not go and face her passionate outbreaks. But the women about her, being all in his interest, found some way of bringing this matter to a quiet issue.
Was Girard a wizard, as people afterwards maintained? They might well think so, who saw how easily, being neither young nor handsome, he had charmed so many women. Stranger still it was, that after getting thus compromised, he swayed opinion to such a degree. For a while, he seemed to have enchanted the whole town.
The truth was, that everyone knew the strength of the Jesuits. Nobody cared to quarrel with them. It was hardly reckoned safe to speak ill of them, even in a whisper. The bulk of the priesthood consisted of monklings of the Mendicant orders, who had no powerful friends or high connections. The Carmelites themselves, jealous and hurt as they were at losing Cadière, kept silence. Her brother, the young Jacobin, was lectured by his trembling mother into resuming his old circumspect ways. Becoming reconciled to Girard, he came at length to serve him as devotedly as did his younger brother, even lending himself to a curious trick by which people were led to believe that Girard had the gift of prophecy.
Such weak opposition as he might have to fear, would come only from the very person whom he seemed to have most thoroughly mastered. Submissive hitherto, Cadière now gave some slight tokens of a coming independence which could not help showing itself. On the 30th of April, at a country party got up by the polite Girard, and to which he sent his troop of young devotees in company with Guiol, Cadière fell into deep thought. The fair spring-time, in that climate so very charming, lifted her heart up to God. She exclaimed with a feeling of true piety, “Thee, Thee only, do I seek, O Lord! Thine angels are not enough for me.” Then one of the party, a blithesome girl, having, in the Provencial fashion, hung a tambourine round her neck, Cadière skipped and danced about like the rest; with a rug thrown across her shoulders, she danced the Bohemian measure, and made herself giddy with a hundred mad capers.
She was very unsettled. In May she got leave from her mother to make a trip to Sainte-Baume, to the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, the chief saint of girls on penance. Girard would only let her go under charge of two faithful overlookers, Guiol and Reboul. But though she had still some trances on the way, she showed herself weary of being a passive tool to the violent spirit, whether divine or devilish, that annoyed her. The end of her year’s possession was not far off. Had she not won her freedom? Once issued forth from the gloom and witcheries of Toulon, into the open air, in the midst of nature, beneath the full sunshine, the prisoner regained her soul, withstood the stranger spirit, dared to be herself, to use her own will. Girard’s two spies were far from edified thereat. On their return from this short journey, from the 17th to the 22nd May, they warned him of the change. He was convinced of it from his own experience. She fought against the trance, seeming no longer wishful to obey aught save reason.
He had thought to hold her both by his power of charming and through the holiness of his high office, and, lastly, by right of possession and carnal usage. But he had no hold upon her at all. The youthful soul, which, after all, had not been so much conquered as treacherously surprised, resumed its own nature. This hurt him. Besides his business of pedant, his tyranny over the children he chastised at will, over nuns not less at his disposal, there remained within a hard bottom of domineering jealousy. He determined to snatch Cadière back by punishing this first little revolt, if such a name could be given to the timid fluttering of a soul rising again from its long compression. On the 22nd May she confessed to him after her wont; but he refused to absolve her, declaring her to be so guilty that on the morrow he would have to lay upon her a very great penance indeed.