On the following day the sisters were taken to Sainte-Croix. Many of the tourists were still in town, and the church was crowded to the doors. The Prioress was exorcised and, after the usual preliminaries, identified herself as Isacaaron, the only devil presently at home; for all the other tenants of her body had gone back to hell for the wild party which had been organized for the reception of Grandier’s soul.
Judiciously questioned, Sœur Jeanne confirmed what the exorcists had been saying all along—namely, that when Grandier had said “God” he always meant “Satan,” and that when he had renounced the devil, he had actually been renouncing Christ.
Lactance then wanted to know what kind of torments the parson was suffering down there, and was evidently rather disappointed when the Prioress told him that the worst of them was the privation of God.
No doubt, no doubt. But what were the physical tortures?
After a good deal of pressing Sœur Jeanne replied that Grandier “had a special torture for each of the sins he had committed, especially those of the flesh.”
And what about the execution? Had the devil been able to prevent the wretch from suffering?
Alas, replied Isacaaron, Satan had been frustrated by the exorcisms. If the fire had not been blessed, the parson would have felt nothing. But thanks to the labors of Lactance, Tranquille and Archangel he had suffered excruciatingly.
But not so excruciatingly, cried the exorcist, as he was suffering now! And with a kind of gloating horror, Father Lactance brought the conversation back to hell. In which of hell’s many mansions was the magician lodged? How had Lucifer received him? What precisely was being done to him at this moment? Sister Jane’s Isacaaron did his best to answer. Then, when his imagination began to flag, Sister Agnes was thrown into fits, and Beherit was invited to say his piece.
That evening, at the convent, the friars noticed that Father Lactance looked pale and seemed strangely preoccupied. Was he feeling ill?
Father Lactance shook his head. No, he was not ill. But the prisoner had asked to see Father Grillau, and they had denied him. Could it be that they had committed a sin by making it impossible for him to confess?
His colleagues did their best to reassure him, but without success. Next morning, after a sleepless night, Lactance was in a fever.
“God is punishing me,” he kept repeating, “God is punishing me.”
He was bled by Mannoury, was purged by M. Adam. The fever subsided for a little, then returned. And now he began to see things, to hear things. Grandier under torture, screaming. Grandier at the stake, asking God to forgive his enemies. And then devils, swarms of devils. They entered his body, they set him raving, they made him kick his legs and bite the pillows, they filled his mouth with the most horrible blasphemies.
On September 18th, exactly one month after Grandier’s execution, Father Lactance knocked the crucifix out of the hand of the priest who had administered Extreme Unction, and died. Laubardemont paid for a handsome funeral, and Father Tranquille preached a sermon, in which he extolled the Recollet as a model of holiness and proclaimed that he had been murdered by Satan, who had thus revenged himself for all the affronts and humiliations inflicted on him by this most heroic of God’s servants.
The next to go was Mannoury, the surgeon. One night, shortly after the death of Father Lactance, he was sent for to bleed a sick man, who lived near the Porte du Martrai. On the way home, his servant with a lantern walking ahead of him, he saw Urbain Grandier. Naked, as when he had been pricked for the devil’s marks, the parson was standing in the Rue du Grand-Pavé, between the counterscarps of the castle and the Cordeliers’ garden. Mannoury halted, and his servant saw him staring into the vacant blackness, heard him asking someone, who wasn’t there, what he wanted. There was no answer. Then the surgeon began to tremble all over. A moment later, he fell to the ground, screaming for pardon. Within the week he, too, was dead.
After that it was the turn of Louis Chauvet, one of the upright judges who had refused to take part in the hellish tomfoolery of the trial. The Prioress and most of her nuns had accused him of being a magician, and M. Barré was able to confirm their testimony through the mouths of several demoniacs in his own parish, at Chinon. Fear of what might happen to him, if the Cardinal should choose to take these ravings seriously, preyed on Chauvet’s mind. He sank into a melancholy, then into madness, then into a decline, which killed him before the winter was out.
Tranquille was of tougher fiber than the others. It was not until 1638 that he finally succumbed to the consequences of a too exclusive preoccupation with evil. By his hatred of Grandier he had helped to raise the devils; by his scandalous insistence on public exorcisms, he had done his best to keep them alive. Now the devils turned against him. God is not mocked; he was reaping what he had deliberately sown.
At first the obsessions were rare and of no great force. But little by little Dog’s Tail and Leviathan gained the upper hand. During the last year of his life, Father Tranquille was behaving like the nuns whose hysteria he had so carefully fostered—rolling on the floor, cursing, yelling, sticking out his tongue, hissing, barking, neighing. Nor was this all. The “stinking Owl of Hell,” as his Capuchin biographer picturesquely nicknames the devil, plagued him with hardly resistible temptations against chastity, against humility, against patience, faith and devotion. He called on the Virgin, on St. Joseph, on St. Francis and St. Bonaventure. In vain. The possession went from bad to worse.
On Whitsunday, 1638, Tranquille preached his last sermon; for two or three days more he managed to say Mass; then he took to his bed with a sickness nonetheless mortal for being obviously psychosomatic. “He threw up ordures, which were judged to be diabolic Pacts. . . . Every time he took a little nourishment, the devils made him retch with a violence that would have killed the healthiest person.” And meanwhile he suffered from headaches and pains in the heart, “of a kind of which there is no mention in Galen or Hippocrates.” By the end of the week “he was vomiting filths and stinks so insupportable, that his attendants had to throw them out without delay, so fearfully was the room infected by them.” On the Monday after Whitsun, Extreme Unction was administered. The devils left the dying man and forthwith entered the body of another friar, who was kneeling by the bed. The new demoniac became so frantic, that he had to be held by half a dozen of his colleagues, who had the greatest difficulty in preventing him from kicking the hardly lifeless corpse.
On the day of the funeral, Father Tranquille lay in state. “No sooner was the service over than the people flung themselves upon him. Some applied their rosaries to his body, others cut from his habit little pieces which they preserved as relics. So great was the press that the coffin was smashed, and the body disturbed in countless ways, each man tugging it toward himself so as to get his snippet. And assuredly the good Father would have been left stark naked, had it not been for several persons of honor, who formed a guard to protect him from the indiscreet devotion of the people, who, after cutting up the habit, would probably have mangled the corpse itself.”
The shreds of Father Tranquille’s habit, the ashes of the man he had tortured and burned alive. . . . Everything was equivocal. The magician had died a martyr; his fiendish executioner was now a saint—but a saint who was possessed by Beelzebub. Only one thing was certain: a fetish is a fetish. So lend me your knife; after you with the shears!
[1]
Behold the cross of the Lord, let its enemies take flight; the lion of the tribe of Juda has conquered, the root of David. I exorcise thee, creature of wood, in the name of God the Father Almighty, and in the name of Jesus Christ his Son our Lord, and in the power of the Holy Ghost. . . .”
CHAPTER NINE
Grandier was gone, but Eazaz remained, Coal of Impurity remained, Zabulon went marching along. To many, the fact seemed unaccountable. But where the cause persists, the effects will always follow. It was Canon Mignon and the exorcists who had originally crystallized the nuns’ hysteria into the forms of devils, and it was Canon Mignon and the exorcists who now kept the possession alive. Twice every day, Sundays excepted, the demoniacs were put through their tricks. As might have been expected, they were no better—they were even a little worse—than they had been while the magician was alive.
Toward the end of September Laubardemont informed the Cardinal that he had appealed to the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits had a reputation for learning and ability. From these masters of all the sciences the public would surely “accept, with less contradiction, the evidence for the truth of this possession.”
Many Jesuits, including Vitelleschi, the General of the Order, were for politely refusing
