ignorant passers-by would curse those dismal flowers before they knew
them. Affrighted by their questionable hues, they shrink back, keep
far aloof from them. And yet among them are the _comforters_
(Solaneae) which, when discreetly employed, have cured so many, have
lulled so many sufferings to sleep.

You find them in ill-looking spots, growing all lonely and ill-famed
amidst ruins and rubbish-heaps. Therein lies one other point of
resemblance between these flowers and her who makes use of them. For
where else than in waste wildernesses could live the poor wretch whom
all men thus evilly entreated; the woman accursed and proscribed as a
poisoner, even while she used to heal and save; as the betrothed of
the Devil and of evil incarnate, for all the good which, according to
the great physician of the Renaissance, she herself had done? When
Paracelsus, at Basle, in 1527, threw all medicine into the fire,[2] he
avowed that he knew nothing but what he had learnt from witches.

[2] Alluding to the bonfire which Paracelsus, as professor of
medicine, made of the works of Galen and Avicenna.--TRANS.

This was worth a requital, and they got it. They were repaid with
tortures, with the stake. For them new punishments, new pangs, were
expressly devised. They were tried in a lump; they were condemned by a
single word. Never had there been such wastefulness of human life. Not
to speak of Spain, that classic land of the faggot, where Moor and Jew
are always accompanied by the Witch, there were burnt at Treves seven
thousand, and I know not how many at Toulouse; five hundred at Geneva
in three months of 1513; at Wurtzburg eight hundred, almost in one
batch, and fifteen hundred at Bamberg; these two latter being very
small bishoprics! Even Ferdinand II., the savage Emperor of the Thirty
Years' War, was driven, bigot as he was, to keep a watch on these
worthy bishops, else they would have burned all their subjects. In the
Wurtzburg list I find one Wizard a schoolboy, eleven years old; a
Witch of fifteen: and at Bayonne two, infernally beautiful, of
seventeen years.

Mark how, at certain seasons, hatred wields this one word _Witch_, as
a means of murdering whom she will. Woman's jealousy, man's greed,
take ready hold of so handy a weapon. Is such a one wealthy? _She is a
Witch._ Is that girl pretty? _She is a Witch._ You will even see the
little beggar-woman, La Murgui, leave a death-mark with that fearful
stone on the fore