,
Recollects, Carmelites, Dominicans, &c., who among the clergy would
have been safe? What director, what priest, however upright, but had
used, and used amiss, the gentle language of the Quietists towards
their penitents?

Richelieu took care not to trouble the clergy, while he was already
bringing about the General Assembly from which he was soon to ask a
contribution towards the war. One trial alone was granted the monks,
the trial of a vicar, but a vicar who dealt in magic; a trial wherein
matters were allowed, as in the case of Gauffridi, to get so
entangled, that no confessor, no director, saw his own likeness there,
but everyone in full security could say, "This is not I."

* * * * *

Thanks to these strict precautions the Grandier affair is involved in
some obscurity.[92] Its historian, the Capuchin Tranquille, proves
convincingly that Grandier was a wizard, and, still more, a devil; and
on the trial he is called, as Ashtaroth might have been called,
_Grandier of the Dominations_. On the other hand, Menage is ready to
rank him with great men accused of magic, with the martyrs of free
thought.

[92] The _History of the Loudun Devils_, by the Protestant
Aubin, is an earnest, solid book, confirmed by the _Reports_
of Laubardemont himself. That of the Capuchin Tranquille is a
piece of grotesquerie. The _Proceedings_ are in the Great
Library of Paris. M. Figuier has given a long and excellent
account of the whole affair, in his _History of the
Marvellous_.

In order to see a little more clearly, we must not set Grandier by
himself; we must keep his place in the devilish trilogy of those
times, in which he figured only as a second act; we must explain him
by the first act, already shown to us in the dreadful business of
Sainte-Baume, and the death of Gauffridi; we must explain him by the
third act, by the affair at Louviers, which copied Loudun, as Loudun
had copied Sainte-Baume, and which in its turn owned a Gauffridi and
an Urban Grandier.

The three cases are one and selfsame. In each case there is a
libertine priest, in each a jealous monk, and a frantic nun by whose
mouth the Devil is made to speak; and in all three the priest gets
burnt at last.

And here you may notice one source of light which makes these matters
clearer to our eyes than if we saw them through the miry shades of a
monastery in Spain or Italy. In those lands of Southern lazin