e peace, each has a woman with him. Without a woman
no one is admitted. Be she a kinswoman or none, a wife or none; be she
old or young, a woman he must bring with him.

What were the drinks passed round among them? Mead, or beer, or wine;
strong cider or perry? The last two date from the twelfth century.

The illusive drinks, with their dangerous admixture of belladonna, did
they already appear at that board? Certainly not. There were children
there. Besides, an excess of commotion would have prevented the
dancing.

This whirling dance, the famous _Sabbath-round_, was quite enough to
complete the first stage of drunkenness. They turned back to back,
their arms behind them, not seeing each other, but often touching each
other's back. Gradually no one knew himself, nor whom he had by his
side. The old wife then was old no more. Satan had wrought a miracle.
She was still a woman, desirable, after a confused fashion beloved.

* * * * *

Act Second. Just as the crowd, grown dizzy together, was led, both by
the attraction of the women and by a certain vague feeling of
brotherhood, to imagine itself one body, the service was resumed at
the _Gloria_. The altar, the host, became visible. These were
represented by the woman herself. Prostrate, in a posture of extreme
abasement, her long black silky tresses lost in the dust; she, this
haughty Proserpine, offered up herself. On her back a demon
officiated, saying the _Credo_, and making the offering.[57]

[57] This important fact of the woman being her own altar, is
known to us by the trial of La Voisin, which M. Ravaisson,
Sen., is about to publish with the other _Papers of the
Bastille_.

At a later period this scene came to be immodest. But at this time,
amidst the calamities of the fourteenth century, in the terrible days
of the Black Plague, and of so many a famine, in the days of the
Jacquerie and those hateful brigands, the Free Lances,--on a people
thus surrounded by danger, the effect was more than serious. The whole
assembly had much cause to fear a surprise. The risk run by the Witch
in this bold proceeding was very great, even tantamount to the
forfeiting of her life. Nay, more; she braved a hell of suffering, of
torments such as may hardly be described. Torn by pincers, and broken
alive; her breasts torn out; her skin slowly singed, as in the case
of the wizard bishop of Cahors; her body burned limb by limb on a