nd found his body decayed as if he had been dead seven years. They
observed the moment when the noise was heard, and it was found to be
precisely at that hour that his absolution had been signed by the
patriarch.

M. le Chevalier Ricaut, from whom we have this narrative, was neither
a Greek, nor a Roman Catholic, but a staunch Anglican; he remarks on
this occasion that the Greeks believe that an evil spirit enters the
bodies of the excommunicated, and preserves them from putrefaction, by
animating them, and causing them to act, nearly as the soul animates
and inspires the body.

They imagine, moreover, that these corpses eat during the night, walk
about, digest what they have eaten, and really nourish themselves--that
some have been found who were of a rosy hue, and had their veins still
fully replete with the quantity of blood; and although they had been
dead forty days, have ejected, when opened, a stream of blood as
bubbling and fresh as that of a young man of sanguine temperament would
be; and this belief so generally prevails that every one relates facts
circumstantially concerning it.

Father Theophilus Reynard, who has written a particular treatise on
this subject, maintains that this return of the dead is an indubitable
fact, and that there are very certain proofs and experience of the
same; but that to pretend that those ghosts who come to disturb the
living are always those of excommunicated persons, and that it is a
privilege of the schismatic Greek church to preserve from decay those
who incurred excommunication, and have died under censure of their
church, is an untenable assumption; since it is certain that the
bodies of the excommunicated decay like others, and there are some
which have died in communion with the church, whether the Greek or the
Latin, who remain uncorrupted. Such are found even among the Pagans,
and amongst animals, of which the dead bodies are sometimes found in
an uncorrupted state, both in the ground, and in the ruins of old
buildings.[516]

Footnotes:

[516] See, concerning the bodies of the excommunicated which are
affirmed to be exempt from decay, Father Goar, Ritual of the Greeks,
pp. 687, 688; Matthew Paris, History of England, tom. ii. p. 687; Adam
de Breme, c. lxxv.; Albert de Stade, on the year 1050, and Monsieur du
Cange, Glossar. Latinit. at the word _imblocatus_.

CHAPTER XXXII.

VROUCOLACA EXHUMED IN PRESENCE OF MONSIEUR DE TOURNEFORT.

Monsieur Pitton