Early in the eighteenth century the attention of Europe was directed to a
very remarkable instance of fanaticism, which has been claimed by the
animal magnetists as a proof of their science. The _Convulsionaries of St.
Medard_, as they were called, assembled in great numbers round the tomb of
their favourite saint, the Jansenist priest Paris, and taught one another
how to fall into convulsions. They believed that St. Paris would cure all
their infirmities; and the number of hysterical women and weak-minded
persons of all descriptions that flocked to the tomb from far and near was
so great as daily to block up all the avenues leading to it. Working
themselves up to a pitch of excitement, they went off one after the other
into fits, while some of them, still in apparent possession of all their
faculties, voluntarily exposed themselves to sufferings which on
ordinary occasions would have been sufficient to deprive them of life. The
scenes that occurred were a scandal to civilisation and to religion--a
strange mixture of obscenity, absurdity, and superstition. While some were
praying on bended knees at the shrine of St. Paris, others were shrieking
and making the most hideous noises. The women especially exerted
themselves. On one side of the chapel there might be seen a score of them,
all in convulsions; while at another as many more, excited to a sort of
frenzy, yielded themselves up to gross indecencies. Some of them took an
insane delight in being beaten and trampled upon. One in particular,
according to Montegre, whose account we quote,[70] was so enraptured with
this ill-usage, that nothing but the hardest blows would satisfy her.
While a fellow of Herculean strength was beating her with all his might
with a heavy bar of iron, she kept continually urging him to renewed
exertion. The harder he struck the better she liked it, exclaiming all the
while, "Well done, brother, well done! Oh, how pleasant it is! what good
you are doing me! Courage, my brother, courage; strike harder, strike
harder still!" Another of these fanatics had, if possible, a still greater
love for a beating. Carre de Montgeron, who relates the circumstance, was
unable to satisfy her with sixty blows of a large sledge-hammer. He
afterwards used the same weapon with the same degree of strength, for the
sake of experiment, and succeeded in battering a hole in a stone wall at
the twenty-fifth stroke. Another woman, named Sonnet, laid herself down on
a re