La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages

We can guess how this alarming blow was taken by the Cadière family. The sick girl's attacks became frequent and fearful. By a cruel chance they brought on a kind of epidemic am...

The Abbess of the Ollioules Convent was young for an abbess, being only thirty-eight years old. She was not wanting in mind. She was lively, swift alike in love and in hatred, h...

The order of Ursuline nuns seemed to be the calmest, the least irrational of them all. They were not wholly idle, but found some little employment in the bringing up of young gi...

The Jesuits were unlucky. Powerful at Versailles, where they ruled the Court, they had not the slightest credit with Heaven. Not one tiny miracle could they do. The Jansenists o...

In the _State Memoirs_, written by the famous Father Joseph, and known to us by extracts only--the work itself having, no doubt, been wisely suppressed as too instructive--the g...

A dreadful age was the age of gold; for thus do I call that hard time when gold first came into use. This was in the year 1300, during the reign of that Fair King[29] who never...

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 h...

It was said by Sprenger, before the year 1500, "_Heresy of witches_, not of wizards, must we call it, for these latter are of very small account." And by another, in the time of...

Had Richelieu allowed the inquiry demanded by Father Joseph into the doings of the Illuminate Confessors, some strange light would have been thrown into the depth of the cloiste...

She was very pure, but very sensitive. A slight touch, that no one else would have remarked, deprived her of her senses: this Girard found out for himself, and the knowledge of...

That still and dismal scene of the Bride of Corinth, is repeated literally from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. While it was yet night, just before the daybreak, the tw...

There is an air of dreaming about those earlier centuries of the Middle Ages, in which the legends were self-conceived. Among countryfolk so gently submissive, as these legends...

We must now speak of the _Sabbaths_; a word which at different times clearly meant quite different things. Unhappily, we have no detailed accounts of these gatherings earlier th...

"Be ye as newborn babes (_quasi modo geniti infantes_); be thoroughly childlike in the innocence of your hearts; peaceful, forgetting all disputes, calmly resting under the hand...

The Devil's delicate fondling, the lesser Witch, begotten of the Black Mass after the greater one's disappearance, came and bloomed in all her malignant cat-like grace. This wom...

Let no one hastily conclude from the foregoing chapter that I attempt to whiten, to acquit entirely, the dismal bride of the Devil. If she often did good, she could also do no s...

I have kept this picture clear of those dreadful shadows of the hour by which it would have been sadly overdarkened. I refer especially to the uncertainty attending the lot of t...

Certain authors have declared that, shortly before the triumph of Christianity, a voice mysterious ran along the shores of the Ægean Sea, crying, "Great Pan is dead!" The old un...

That strong-handed execution of the priests shows M. Lancre to have been a man of independent spirit. In politics he is the same. In his book on _The Prince_ (1617), he openly d...

And now the multitude is made free, is of good cheer. For some hours the serf reigns in short-lived freedom. His time indeed is scant enough. Already the sky is changing, the st...

Whatever semblance of Satanic fanaticism was still preserved by the witches, it transpires from the narratives of Lancre and other writers of the seventeenth century, that the S...

Hard is the long sad winter of the North-west. Even after its departure it renews its visits, like a drowsy sorrow which ever and again comes back and rages afresh. One morning...

The Fronde was a kind of Voltaire. The spirit of Voltaire, old as France herself, but long restrained, burst forth in the political, and anon in the religious, world. In vain di...

The Church forfeited the wizard's property to the judge and the prosecutor. Wherever the Canon Law was enforced the trials for witchcraft waxed numerous, and brought much wealth...

Nothing was wanting but the victim. They knew that to bring this woman before her was the most charming present she could receive. Tenderly would she have acknowledged the devot...

weak and fleeting, wavering as unremembered water; to feel that in time one loses that treasure of grief which one had hoped to preserve for ever. Give it me back, I pray: I am...

At first she was not much affected by promises like these. A lonely hermitage without God, amidst the great monotonous breezes of the West, amidst memories all the more ruthless...

The Advent of Gold in 1300 69 The Woman makes Terms with the Demon of Gold 71 Impure Horrors of the Middle Ages 75 The Village Lady 78 Hatred of the Lady of the Castle 84