ute peasants who seemed in
attendance upon them. Then, advancing somewhat before the Canons and
Capuchins who were with him, he pronounced, in a shrill voice, this
singular decree:

"We, Sieur de Laubardemont, referendary, being delegated and
invested with discretionary power in the matter of the trial of the
magician Urbain Grandier, upon the various articles of accusation
brought against him, assisted by the reverend Fathers Mignon, canon,
Barre, cure of St. Jacques at Chinon, Father Lactantius, and all the
other judges appointed to try the said magician, have decreed as
follows:

"Primo: the factitious assembly of proprietors, noble citizens of
this town and its environs, is dissolved, as tending to popular
sedition; its proceedings are declared null, and its letter to the
King, against us, the judges, which has been intercepted, shall be
publicly burned in the marketplace as calumniating the good
Ursulines and the reverend fathers and judges.

"Secundo: it is forbidden to say, publicly or in private, that the
said nuns are not possessed by the Evil Spirit, or to doubt of the
power of the exorcists, under pain of a fine of twenty thousand
livres, and corporal punishment.

"Let the bailiffs and sheriffs obey this. Given the eighteenth of
June, in the year of grace 1639."

Before he had well finished reading the decree, the discordant blare of
trumpets, bursting forth at a prearranged signal, drowned, to a certain
extent, the murmurs that followed its proclamation, amid which
Laubardemont urged forward the procession, which entered the great
building already referred to--an ancient convent, whose interior had
crumbled away, its walls now forming one vast hall, well adapted for the
purpose to which it was about to be applied. Laubardemont did not deem
himself safe until he was within the building and had heard the heavy,
double doors creak on their hinges as, closing, they excluded the furious
crowd without.

CHAPTER III

THE GOOD PRIEST

L'homme de paix me parla ainsi.--VICAIRE SAVOYARD.

Now that the diabolical procession is in the arena destined for its
spectacle, and is arranging its sanguinary representation, let us see
what Cinq-Mars had been doing amid the agitated throng. He was naturally
endowed with great tact, and he felt that it would be no easy matter for
him to attain his object of seeing the Abbe Quillet, at a time when
publi