FOOTNOTES:
[64] Even in a very mystic theme, in a work of such genius as the Lamb of Van Eyck (says John of Bruges), all the Virgins seem big. It was only the quaint fashion of the fifteenth century.
[65] This wasting away of a used-up, enervated race, mars the effect of all those splendid miniatures of the Court of Burgundy, the Duke of Berry, &c. No amount of clever handling could make good works of art out of subjects so very pitiable.
[66] Among the great ladies imprisoned in their castles, this dreadful fancy was not rare. They hungered and thirsted for freedom, for savage freedom. Boguet mentions how, among the hills of Auvergne, a hunter one night drew his sword upon a she-wolf, but missing her, cut off her paw. She fled away limping. He came to a neighbouring castle to seek the hospitality of him who dwelt there. The gentleman, on seeing him, asked if he had had good sport. By way of answer he thought to draw out of his pouch the she-wolf’s paw; but what was his amazement to find instead of the paw a hand, and on one of the fingers a ring, which the gentleman recognized as belonging to his wife! Going at once in search of her, he found her hurt and hiding her fore-arm. To the arm which had lost its hand he fitted that which the hunter had brought him, and the lady was fain to own that she it was, who in the likeness of a wolf had attacked the hunter, and afterwards saved herself by leaving a paw on the battle-field. The husband had the cruelty to give her up to justice, and she was burnt.
[67] See my History of France, and still more the learned and careful account by the lamented Armand Guéraud: Notice sur Gilles de Rais, Nantes, 1855. We there find that the purveyors of that horrible child’s charnel-house were mostly men.
[68] Pouchet, on the Solaneæ and General Botany. Nysten, Dictionary of Medicine, article Datura. The robbers employed these potions but too often. A butcher of Aix and his wife, whom they wanted to rob of their money, were made to drink of some such, and became so maddened thereby, that they danced all one night naked in a cemetery.
[69] The Witch delighted in causing the noble and the great to undergo the most outrageous trials of their love. We know that queens and ladies of rank (in Italy even to the last century) held their court at times the most forbidding, and exacted the most unpleasant services from their favourites. There was nothing too mean, too repulsive, for the domestic brute—the cicisbeo, the priest, the half-witted page—to undergo, in the stupid belief that the power of a philtre increased with its nastiness. This was sad enough when the ladies were neither young, nor beautiful, nor witty. But what of that other astounding fact, that a Witch, who was neither a great lady, nor young, nor fair, but poor, and perhaps a serf, clad only in dirty rags, could still by her malice, by the strange power of her raging lewdness, by some bewitchingly treacherous spell, stupefy the gravest personages, and abase them to so low a depth? Some monks of a monastery on the Rhine, wherein, as in many other German convents, none but a noble of four hundred years’ standing could gain admission, sorrowfully owned to Sprenger that they had seen three of their brethren bewitched in turn, and a fourth killed by a woman, who boldly said, “I did it, and will do so again: they cannot escape me, for they have eaten,” &c. (Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, quæstio, vii. p. 84.) “The worst of it is,” says Sprenger, “that we have no means of punishing or examining her: so she lives still.”
CHAPTER II.
THE HAMMER FOR WITCHES.
The witches took small care to hide their game. Rather they boasted of it; and it was, indeed, from their own lips that Sprenger picked up the bulk of the tales that grace his handbook. It is a pedantic work, marked out into the absurd divisions and subdivisions employed by the followers of St. Thomas Aquinas; but a work sincere withal, and frank-spoken, written by a man so thoroughly frightened by this dreadful duel between God and the Devil, wherein God generally allows the Devil to win, that the only remedy he can discern is to pursue the latter fire in hand, and burn with all speed those bodies which he had chosen for his dwelling-place.