nough to have stripped her thus
naked. About her loins is fastened a little shelf, on which a small
oven is set for the cooking of the cake. "Oh, my dear, I cannot bear
it longer! Make haste, and relieve me."

"You must bear it, madam; you must feel the heat. When the cake is
done, he will be warmed by you, by your flame."

It is over; and now we have the cake of antiquity, of the Indian and
the Roman marriage, but spiced and warmed up by the lecherous spirit
of the Devil. She does not say with Virgil's wizard,[50]

"Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin!"

[50] "Hither, ye spells of mine, bring Daphnis home from the
city!"--_Virgil_, Eclogue viii.

But she takes him the cake, steeped, as it were, in the other's
suffering, and kept warm by her love. He has hardly bitten it when he
is overtaken by an odd emotion, by a feeling of dizziness. Then as the
blood rushes up to his heart he turns red and hot. Passion fastens
anew on him, and inextinguishable desire.[51]

[51] I am wrong in saying inextinguishable. Fresh philtres
were often needed; and the blame of this must lie with the
lady, from whom the Witch in her mocking, malignant rage
exacted the most humiliating observances.

CHAPTER XI.

THE REBELS' COMMUNION--SABBATHS--THE BLACK MASS.

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 than the reign of Henry IV.[52]
By that time they were nothing more than a great lewd farce carried on
under the cloak of witchcraft. But these very descriptions of a thing
so greatly corrupted are marked by certain antique touches that tell
of the successive periods and the different forms through which it had
passed.

[52] The least bad of these is by Lancre, a man of some wit,
whose evident connection with some young witches gave him
something to say. The accounts of the Jesuit Del Rio and the
Dominican Michaelis are the absurd productions of two
credulous and silly pedants.

* * * * *

We may set out with this firm idea that, for many centuries, the serf
led the life of a wolf or a fox; that he was _an animal of the night_,
moving about, I may say, as little as possible in the daytime, and
truly living in the night alone.

Still, up to the year 1000, so long as the people made their own
saints an