Did Gauffridi, thus master of all, keep to Madeline only? Did not the lover change into the libertine? We know not. The sentence points to a nun who never showed herself during the trial, but reappeared at the end, as having given herself up to the Devil and to him.
The Ursuline convent was open to all visitors. The nuns were under the charge of their Doctrinaries, men of fair character, and jealous withal. The founder himself was there, indignant, desperate. How woeful a mishap for the rising order, just as it was thriving amain and spreading all over France! After all its pretensions to wisdom, calmness, good sense, thus suddenly to go mad! Romillion would have hushed up the matter if he could. He caused one of his priests to exorcise the maidens. But the demons laughed the exorciser to scorn. He who dwelt in the fair damsel, even the noble demon Beelzebub, Spirit of Pride, never deigned to unclose his teeth.
Among the possessed was one sister from twenty to twenty-five years old, who had been specially adopted by Romillion; a girl of good culture, bred up in controversy; a Protestant by birth, but left an orphan, to fall into the hands of the Father, a convert like herself from Protestantism. Her name, Louisa Capeau, sounds plebeian. She showed herself but too clearly a girl of exceeding wit, and of a raging passion. Her strength, moreover, was fearful to see. For three months, in addition to the hellish storm within, she carried on a desperate struggle, which would have killed the strongest man in a week.
She said she had three devils: Verrine, a good Catholic devil, a volatile spirit of the air; Leviathan, a wicked devil, an arguer and a Protestant; lastly, another, acknowledged by her to be the spirit of uncleanness. One other she forgot to name, the demon of jealousy.
She bore a savage hate to the little fair-faced damsel, the favoured rival, the proud young woman of rank. This latter, in one of her fits, had said that she went to the Sabbath, where she was made queen, and received homage, and gave herself up, but only to the prince—“What prince?” To Louis Gauffridi, prince of magicians.
Pierced by this revelation as by a dagger, Louisa was too wild to doubt its truth. Mad herself, she believed the mad woman’s story in order to ruin her. Her own devil was backed by all the jealous demons. The women all exclaimed that Gauffridi was the very king of wizards. The report spread everywhere, that a great prize had been taken, a priest-king of magicians, even the prince of universal magic. Such was the dreadful diadem of steel and flame which these feminine demons drove into his brow.
Everyone lost his head, even to old Romillion himself. Whether from hatred of Gauffridi, or fear of the Inquisition, he took the matter out of the bishop’s hands, and brought his two bewitched ones, Louisa and Madeline, to the Convent of Sainte-Baume, whose prior was the Dominican Michaëlis, papal inquisitor in the Pope’s domain of Avignon, and, as he himself pretended, over all Provence. The great point was to get them exorcised. But as the two women were obliged to accuse Gauffridi, the business ended in making him fall into the hands of the Inquisition.
Michaëlis had to preach on Advent Sunday at Aix, before the Parliament. He felt how much so striking a drama would exalt him. He grasped at it with all the eagerness of a barrister in a Criminal Court, when a very dramatic murder, or a curious case of adultery comes before him.
The right thing in matters of this sort was, to spin out the play through Advent, Christmas, Lent, and burn no one before the Holy Week, the vigil, as it were, of the great day of Easter. Michaëlis kept himself for the last act, entrusting the bulk of the business to a Flemish Dominican in his service, Doctor Dompt, from Louvain, who had already exorcised, was well-skilled in fooleries of that nature.
The best thing the Fleming could do, was to do nothing. In Louisa, he found a terrible helpmate, with thrice as much zeal in her as the Inquisition itself, unquenchable in her rage, of a burning eloquence, whimsical, and sometimes very odd, but always raising a shudder; a very torch of Hell.