The knower, seer, feeler beside.
R. Browning (Fifine at the Fair).
De par le Roy dèfense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.
(By order of the King, God is forbidden
To work miracles in this place.)
Anon.
The teaching of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) led to an important evangelical movement in the Roman Catholic Church. When, however, the Jansenists became subjected to persecution, the usual result followed that numbers of them became fanatics. The more corrupt the French Court and Society became, the more frenzied became this fanaticism. In 1727 the Jansenist deacon, Pâris, a man of very holy life, was buried in the St. Médard churchyard, and shortly afterwards miracles were said to take place at his tomb. In consequence large crowds of convulsionnaires assembled there and very shocking scenes were enacted, men and women in hysterical and epileptic fits and ecstatic delirium, eating the earth of the grave and inflicting frightful tortures on themselves and each other. When in 1732 the Court interposed and closed the churchyard some wit wrote the above couplet on the gate.
Mr. King in his Classical and Foreign Quotations has “De faire des miracles,” but the above version seems correct (See Larousse.)