The Devils of Loudun, Page 27

  “Dicas!” he shouted.

  The word caught the fancy of the onlookers and for the brief and horrible remainder of his life the Recollet was always known in Loudun as Father Dicas.

  “Dicas! Dicas!”

  For the thousandth time Grandier answered that he had nothing to confess.

  “And now,” he added, “give me the kiss of peace and let me die.”

  At first Lactance refused; but when the crowd protested against such an un-Christian malignity, he climbed on to the pile of faggots and kissed the parson’s cheek.

  “Judas!” cried a voice, and a score of others took up the refrain.

  “Judas, Judas. . . .”

  Lactance heard them and, in a passion of uncontrollable rage, jumped down from the pyre, seized a twist of straw and, lighting it in the brazier, waved the flame in the victim’s face. Let him confess who he was—the devil’s servant! Let him confess, let him renounce his master!

  “Father,” said Grandier with a calm and gentle dignity that contrasted strangely with the almost hysterical malice of his accusers, “I am about to meet the God who is my witness that I have spoken the truth.”

  “Confess,” the friar fairly screamed. “Confess! . . . You have only a moment to live.”

  “Only a moment,” the parson repeated slowly. “Only a moment—and then I go to that just and fearful judgment to which, Reverend Father, you too must soon be called.”

  Without waiting to hear anything more, Father Lactance threw his torch on to the straw of the pyre. Hardly visible in the bright afternoon sunshine, a little flame appeared and began to creep, growing larger as it advanced, towards the bundles of dry kindling. Following the Recollet’s example, Father Archangel set fire to the straw on the opposite side of the pyre. A thin blue haze of smoke rose into the windless air. Then, with a cheerful crackling, like the noise that accompanies the drinking of mulled wine on a winter evening by the hearth, one of the faggots caught fire.

  The prisoner heard the sound and, turning his head, saw the gay dancing of flames.

  “Is this what you promised me?” he called to La Grange in a tone of agonized protest.

  And suddenly the divine presence was eclipsed. There was no God, no Christ, nothing but fear.

  La Grange shouted indignantly at the friars and tried to extinguish the nearest flames. But there were too many of them to be stamped out; and here was Father Tranquille setting fire to the straw behind the parson’s back, here was Father Lactance lighting another torch at the brazier.

  “Strangle him,” he ordered. And the crowd took up the cry. “Strangle, strangle!”

  The executioner ran for his noose, only to discover that one of the Capuchins had surreptitiously knotted the rope so that it could not be used. By the time the knots were undone, it was too late. Between the executioner and the victim he had intended to save from this last agony there was a wall of flame, a billowing curtain of smoke. Meanwhile, with whisk and holy water pot, the friars were ridding the bonfire of its remaining devils.

  “Exorciso te, creatura ignis. . . .”

  The water hissed among the burning logs and was turned in an instant to steam. From the further side of the wall of flames came a sound of screaming. The exorcism, it was evident, had begun to take effect. The friars paused for a moment to give thanks; then, with faith renewed and energy redoubled, they set to work again.

  “Draco nequissime, serpens antique, immundissime spiritus . . .”

  At this moment a large black fly appeared from nowhere, bumped into Father Lactance’s face and dropped on the opened pages of his book of exorcism. A fly—and as large as a walnut! And Beelzebub was the Lord of Flies!

  “Imperat tibi Martyrum sanguis,” he shouted above the roaring of the fire, “Imperat tibi continentia Confessorum . . .”

  With a preternaturally loud buzz the insect took wing and disappeared into the smoke.

  “In nomine Agni, qui ambulavit super aspidem et basiliscum. . . .”

  All at once the screams were strangled by a paroxysm of coughing. The wretch was trying to cheat them by dying of suffocation! To frustrate this latest of Satan’s wiles, Lactance hurled a whiskful of holy water into the smoke.

  “Exorciso te, creatura fumi. Effugiat atque discedat a te nequitia omnis ac versutia diabolicae fraudis. . . .”

  It worked! The coughing stopped. There was another cry, then silence. And suddenly, to the consternation of the Recollet and his Capuchin colleagues, the blackened thing at the centre of the bonfire began to speak.

  “Deus meus,” it said, “miserere mei Deus.” And then, in French, “Forgive them, forgive my enemies.”

  The coughing began again. A moment later the cords which bound him to the post gave way and the victim tumbled sideways among the blazing logs.

  The fire burned on, the good fathers continued to sprinkle and intone. Suddenly a flock of pigeons came swooping down from the church and started to wheel around the roaring column of flame and smoke. The crowd shouted, the archers waved their halberds at the birds, Lactance and Tranquille splashed them on the wing with holy water. In vain. The pigeons were not to be driven away. Round and round they flew, diving through the smoke, singeing their feathers in the flames. Both parties claimed a miracle. For the parson’s enemies the birds, quite obviously, were a troop of devils, come to fetch away his soul. For his friends, they were emblems of the Holy Ghost and living proof of his innocence. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that they were just pigeons, obeying the laws of their own, their blessedly other-than-human nature.

  When the fire had burned itself out, the executioner scattered four shovelfuls of ashes, one towards each of the cardinal points of the compass. Then the crowd surged forward. Burning their fingers, men and women rummaged in the hot flaky dust, hunting for teeth, for fragments of the skull and pelvis, for any cinder showing the black smear of burned flesh. A few, no doubt, were merely souvenir hunters; but most of them were in search of relics, for a charm to bring luck or compel reluctant love, for a talisman against headaches or constipation or the malice of enemies. And these charred

  THE BURNING OF GRANDIER, 1634

  An engraving from Urbain Grandier et les Possédées de Loudun by Dr. Gabriel Legué

  odds and ends would be no less effective if the parson were guilty of the crimes imputed to him, than if he were innocent. The power to work miracles lies, not in the source of a relic, but in its reputation, however acquired. Constant throughout history, a certain percentage of human beings can be restored to health or happiness by practically anything that has been well advertised—from Lourdes to witchcraft, from the Ganges to patent medicines and Mrs. Eddy, from the thaumaturgical arm of St. Francis Xavier to those “pigges bones” which Chaucer’s Pardoner carried in a glass for all to see and worship. If Grandier were what the Capuchins had said he was, that was excellent: even in ashes, a sorcerer is richly charged with power. And his relics would be charged with no less power if the parson were guiltless; for in that case he would be a martyr, equal to the best of them. In a little while most of the ashes had disappeared. Horribly tired and thirsty, but happy in the thought that their pockets were bulging with relics, tourists and townsfolk drifted away in search of a drink and the chance to take off their shoes.

  That evening, after only the briefest of rests and the lightest of refreshments, the good fathers re-assembled at the Ursuline convent. The Prioress was exorcized, duly went into convulsions, and in response to Lactance’s questioning announced that the black fly was none other than Baruch, the parson’s familiar. And why had Baruch hurled himself so rudely on the book of exorcisms? Sœur Jeanne bent herself backwards until her head touched her heels, then did the splits and finally answered that he had been trying to throw the book into the fire. It was all so edifying that the friars decided to break off for the night and begin again next morning, in public.

  On the following day the sisters were taken to Sainte-Croix. Many of the tourists were still in town, an
d the church was crowded to the doors. The Prioress was exorcized 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 labours 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 18th September, 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. Barre 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 fibre 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 none the less mortal for being obviously psycho-somatic. “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 towards 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 honour, 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!

  CHAPTER IX

  G

  RANDIER 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.

  Towards the end of September Laubardemont informed the Cardinal that he had appealed to the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits had a reputati
on 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 to have anything to do with the possession. But it was too late to raise objections. Laubardemont’s invitation was speedily followed by a royal command. Through the King, His Eminence had spoken.

  On the 15th of December 1634 four Jesuit fathers rode into Loudun. Among them was Jean-Joseph Surin. Father Bohyre, the Provincial of Aquitaine, had selected him for the task of exorcism, and had then, on the advice of his council, countermanded the order. Too late. Surin had already left Marennes. The original appointment was permitted to stand.

  Surin was now thirty-four, nel mezzo del cammin, his character formed, the pattern of his thinking already fixed. His fellow Jesuits thought highly of his abilities, recognized his zeal and respected the austerity of his life, the fervour of his pursuit of Christian perfection. But their admiration was tempered by certain misgivings. Father Surin had all the makings of a man of heroic virtue; but there was something about him which caused the more prudent of his colleagues and superiors to shake their heads. They detected in him a certain extravagance, a too-muchness in act and word. He liked to say that “the man who does not have excessive ideas in regard to God will never come near Him.” And of course it was true—provided always that the excessive ideas were of the right kind. Some of the young father’s excessive ideas, though orthodox enough, seemed to deviate from the high-road of discretion. For example, he maintained that we ought to be ready to die for the people with whom we live, “while at the same time preserving ourselves from them as though they were our enemies”—a proposition hardly calculated to improve the quality of communal living in the Society’s houses and colleges. As well as anti-social, his excessive ideas made him over-righteous to the point of scrupulosity. “We ought,” he said, “to bewail our vanities as sacrileges, to punish with the utmost severity our ignorances and inadvertences.” And to this inhuman rigorism in the name of perfection he added what seemed to many of his elders and contemporaries an indiscreet and even dangerous interest in those ‘extraordinary graces’ which are sometimes vouchsafed to the holy, but which are entirely unnecessary to salvation or to sanctification. “From his earliest childhood,” his friend, Father Anginot, was to write many years later, “he has felt powerfully drawn toward such things, and has esteemed them too highly. It has been necessary to humour him in this and to allow him to travel by a road which was not the common and ordinary way.”