nance.--TRANS.

The mother, in her own despite, became an abettor in all this
juggling. In truth, she was afraid of Girard; she began to find him
capable of anything, and somebody, perhaps the Guiol, had told her, in
the deepest confidence, that, if she said a word against him, her
daughter would not be alive twenty-four hours.

Cadiere, for her part, never lied about the matter. In the narrative
taken down from her own lips of what happened this Lent, she expressly
tells of a crown, with sharp points, which stuck in her head, and made
it bleed. Nor did she then make any secret of the source whence came
the little crosses she gave her visitors. From a model supplied by
Girard, they were made to her order by one of her kinsfolk, a
carpenter in the Arsenal.

On Good Friday, she remained twenty-four hours in a swoon, which they
called a trance; remained in special charge of Girard, whose
attentions weakened her, and did her deadly harm. She was now three
months gone with child. The saintly martyr, the transfigured marvel,
was already beginning to fill out. Desiring, yet dreading the more
violent issues of a miscarriage, he plied her daily with reddish
powders and dangerous drinks.

Much rather would he have had her die, and so have rid himself of the
whole business. At any rate, he would have liked to get her away from
her mother, to bury her safe in a convent. Well acquainted with houses
of that sort, he knew, as Picard had done in the Louviers affair, how
cleverly and discreetly such cases as Cadiere's could be hidden away.
He talked of it this very Good Friday. But she seemed too weak to be
taken safely from her bed. At last, however, four days after Easter, a
miscarriage took place.

The girl Laugier had also been having strange convulsive fits, and
absurd beginnings of _stigmata_: one of them being an old wound,
caused by her scissors when she was working as a seamstress, the other
an eruptive sore in her side. Her transports suddenly turned to
impious despair. She spat upon the crucifix: she cried out against
Girard, "that devil of a priest, who had brought a poor girl of
two-and-twenty into such a plight, only to forsake her afterwards!"
Girard dared not go and face her passionate outbreaks. But the women
about her, being all in his interest, found some way of bringing this
matter to a quiet issue.

Was Girard a wizard, as people afterwards maintained? They might well
think so, who saw how easily, being neit