s evil by her lust."
Alas! in the wretchedness, the hunger of those days, nothing of that
kind could have ruffled her even into a hellish rage. An amorous
woman, jealous and forsaken, a child hunted out by her step-mother, a
mother beaten by her son (old subjects these of story), if such as
they were ever tempted to call upon the Evil Spirit, yet all this
would make no Witch. These poor creatures may have called on Satan,
but it does not follow that he accepted them. They are still far, ay,
very far from being ripe for him. They have not yet learned to hate
God.

* * * * *

For the better understanding of this point, you should read those
hateful registers which remain to us of the Inquisition, not only in
the extracts given by Llorente, by Lamothe-Langon, &c., but in what
remains of the original registers of Toulouse. Read them in all their
flatness, in all their dryness, so dismal, so terribly savage. At the
end of a few pages you feel yourself stricken with a chill; a cruel
shiver fastens upon you; death, death, death, is traceable in every
line. Already you are in a bier, or else in a stone cell with mouldy
walls. Happiest of all are the killed. The horror of horrors is the
_In pace_. This phrase it is which comes back unceasingly, like an
ill-omened bell sounding again and again the heart's ruin of the
living dead: always we have the same word, "Immured."

Frightful machinery for crushing and flattening; most cruel press for
shattering the soul! One turn of the screw follows another, until, all
breathless, and with a loud crack, it has burst forth from the machine
and fallen into the unknown world.

On her first appearance the Witch has neither father nor mother, nor
son, nor husband, nor family. She is a marvel, an aerolith, alighted
no one knows whence. Who, in Heaven's name, would dare to draw near
her?

Her place of abode? It is in spots impracticable, in a forest of
brambles, on a wild moor where thorn and thistle intertwining forbid
approach. The night she passes under an old cromlech. If anyone finds
her there, she is isolated by the common dread; she is surrounded, as
it were, by a ring of fire.

And yet--would you believe it?--she is a woman still. This very life
of hers, dreadful though it be, tightens and braces her woman's
energy, her womanly electricity. Hence, you may see her endowed with
two gifts. One is the _inspiration of lucid frenzy_, which in its
several