ts of many people, and she had
answered yes. Therefore they might charge her with the practice named
in the list of forms employed in trials for witchcraft, as _Divination
and imposture_. This alone in ecclesiastic law deserved the stake.
They might, indeed, without much effort, call her a _Witch_, after
the confession made by the Ollioules ladies, that at one same hour of
the night she used to be in several cells together. Their infatuation,
the surprising tenderness that suddenly came over them, had all the
air of an enchantment.

What was there to prevent her being burnt? They were still burning
everywhere in the eighteenth century. In one reign only, that of
Philip V., sixteen hundred people were burnt in Spain: one Witch was
burnt as late as 1782. In Germany one was burnt in 1751; in
Switzerland one also in 1781. Rome was always burning her victims, on
the sly indeed, in the dark holes and cells of the Inquisition.[116]

[116] This fact comes to us from an adviser to the Holy
Office, still living.

"But France, at least, is surely more humane?" She is very
inconsistent. In 1718, a Wizard is burnt at Bordeaux.[117] In 1724 and
1726, the faggots were lighted in Greve for offences which passed as
schoolboy jokes at Versailles. The guardians of the Royal child, the
Duke and Fleury, who are so indulgent to the Court, are terrible to
the town. A donkey-driver and a noble, one M. des Chauffours, are
burnt alive. The advent of the Cardinal Minister could not be
celebrated more worthily than by a moral reformation, by making a
severe example of those who corrupted the people. Nothing more timely
than to pass some terrible and solemn sentence on this infernal girl,
who made so heinous an assault on the innocent Girard!

[117] I am not speaking of executions done by the people of
their own accord. A hundred years ago, in a village of
Provence, an old woman on being refused alms by a landowner,
said in her fury, "You will be dead to-morrow." He was
smitten and died. The whole village, high and low, seized the
old woman, and set her on a bundle of vine-twigs. She was
burnt alive. The Parliament made a feint of inquiring, but
punished nobody.--[In 1751 an old couple of Tring, in
Hertfordshire, according to Wright, were tortured, kicked,
and beaten to death, on the plea of witchcraft, by a maddened
country mob.--TRANS.]

Observe what was needed to wash that father clean.