ancient and modern histories.
The thesis of M. Vinslow, and the notes added thereto by M. Bruhier,
serve to prove that there are few certain signs of real death except
the putridity of a body being at least begun. We have an infinite
number of instances of persons supposed to be dead, who have come to
life again, even after they have been put in the ground. There are I
know not how many maladies in which the patient remains for a long
time speechless, motionless, and without sensible respiration. Some
drowned persons who have been thought dead, have been revived by care
and attention.

All this is well known and may serve to explain how some vampires have
been taken out of their graves, and have spoken, cried, howled,
vomited blood, and all that because they were not yet dead. They have
been killed by beheading them, piercing their heart, and burning them;
in all which people were very wrong, for the pretext on which they
acted, of their pretended reappearance to disturb the living, causing
their death, and maltreating them, is not a sufficient reason for
treating them thus. Besides, their pretended return has never been
proved or attested in such a way as to authorize any one to show such
inhumanity, nor to dishonor and put rigorously to death on vague,
frivolous, unproved accusations, persons who were certainly innocent
of the thing laid to their charge.

For nothing is more ill-founded than what is said of the apparitions,
vexations, and confusion caused by the pretended vampires and the
vroucolacas. I am not surprised that the Sorbonne should have
condemned the bloody and violent executions which are exercised on
these kinds of dead bodies. But it is astonishing that the secular
powers and the magistrates do not employ their authority and the
severity of the laws to repress them.

The magic devotions, the fascinations, the evocations of which we have
spoken, are works of darkness, operations of Satan, if they have any
reality, which I can with difficulty believe, especially in regard to
magical devotions, and the evocations of the manes or souls of dead
persons; for, as to fascinations of the sight, or illusions of the
senses, it is foolish not to admit some of these, as when we think we
see what is not, or do not behold what is present before our eyes; or
when we think we hear a sound which in reality does not strike our
ears, or the contrary. But to say that the demon can cause a person's
death, because they h