to beat her away with their butt-ends. She stayed in the room,
kept watch--neither of them, indeed, lying down--and shielded her
child from all harm.

[115] Alluding to the cruelties dealt on the Huguenots by the
French dragoons, at the close of Louis the Fourteenth's
reign.--TRANS.

Cadiere was forwarded to the Ursulines of Aix, who had the King's
command to take her in charge. But the prioress pretended that the
order had not yet come. We may see here how savage a woman who was
once impassioned will grow, until she has lost all her woman's nature.
She kept the other four hours at her street-door, as if she were a
public show. There was time to fetch a mob of Jesuits' followers, of
honest Church artizans, to hoot and hiss, while children might help by
throwing stones. For these four hours she was in the pillory. Some,
however, of the more dispassionate passers-by asked if the Ursulines
had gotten orders to let them kill the girl. We may guess what tender
jailers their sick prisoner would find in these good sisters!

The ground was prepared with admirable effect. By a spirited concert
between Jesuit magistrates and plotting ladies, a system of deterring
had been set on foot. No pleader would ruin himself by defending a
girl thus heavily aspersed. No one would digest the poisonous things
stored up by her jailers, for him who should daily show his face in
their parlour to await an interview with Cadiere. The defence in that
case would devolve on M. Chaudon, syndic of the Aix bar. He did not
decline so hard a duty. And yet he was so uneasy as to desire a
settlement, which the Jesuits refused. Thereupon he showed what he
really was, a man of unswerving honesty, of amazing courage. He
exposed, with the learning of a lawyer, the monstrous character of the
whole proceeding. So doing, he would for ever embroil himself with
the Parliament no less than the Jesuits. He brought into sharp outline
the spiritual incest of the confessor, though he modestly refrained
from specifying how far he had carried his profligacy. He also
withheld himself from speaking of Girard's girls, the loose-lived
devotees, as a matter well-known, but to which no one would have liked
to bear witness. In short, he gave Girard the best case he could by
assailing him _as a wizard_. People laughed, made fun of the advocate.
He undertook to prove the existence of demons by a series of sacred
texts, beginning with the Gospels. This made them laug