The very friends of Girard, seeing their numbers fall off, their phalanx grow thin, were eager for the sentence. It was pronounced on the 11th October, 1731.
In sight of the popular feeling, no one dared to follow up the savage sentence of the bench, by getting Cadière hanged. Twelve councillors sacrificed their honour, by declaring Girard innocent. Of the twelve others, some Jansenists condemned him to the flames as a wizard; and three or four, with better reason, condemned him to death as a scoundrel. Twelve being against twelve, the President Lebret had to give the casting vote. He found for Girard. Acquitted of the capital crime of witchcraft, the latter was then made over, as priest and confessor, to the Toulon magistrate, his intimate friend Larmedieu, for trial in the bishop’s court.
The great folk and the indifferent ones were satisfied. And so little heed was given to this award, that even in these days it has been said that “both were acquitted.” The statement is not correct. Cadière was treated as a slanderer, was condemned to see her memorials and other papers burnt by the hand of the executioner.
There was still a dreadful something in the background. Cadière being so marked, so branded for the use of calumny, the Jesuits were sure to keep pushing underhand their success with Cardinal Fleury, and to urge her being punished in some secret, arbitrary way. Such was the notion imbibed by the town of Aix. It felt that, instead of sending her home, Parliament would rather yield her up. This caused so fearful a rage, such angry menaces, against President Lebret, that he asked to have the regiment of Flanders sent thither.
Girard was fleeing away in a close carriage, when they found him out and would have killed him, had he not escaped into the Jesuits’ Church. There the rascal betook himself to saying mass. After his escape thence he returned to Dôle, to reap honour and glory from the Society. Here, in 1733, he died, in the perfume of holiness. The courtier Lebret died in 1735.
Cardinal Fleury did whatever the Jesuits pleased. At Aix, Toulon, Marseilles, many were banished, or cast into prison. Toulon was specially guilty, as having borne Girard’s effigy to the doors of his Girardites, and carried about the thrice holy standard of the Jesuits.
According to the terms of the award, Cadière should have been free to return home, to live again with her mother. But I venture to say that she was never allowed to re-enter her native town, that flaming theatre wherein so many voices had been raised in her behalf.
If only to feel an interest in her was a crime deserving imprisonment, we cannot doubt but that she herself was presently thrown into prison; that the Jesuits easily obtained a special warrant from Versailles to lock up the poor girl, to hush up, to bury with her an affair so dismal for themselves. They would wait, of course, until the public attention was drawn off to something else. Thereon the fatal clutch would have caught her anew; she would have been buried out of sight in some unknown convent, snuffed out in some dark In pace.
She was but one-and-twenty at the time of the award, and she had always hoped to die soon. May God have granted her that mercy![119]