showed so clearly what his aim was that the
magistrates made no reply. The civil lieutenant remarked that he had
been surprised that Mignon had not made any attempt to find out the
cause of the enmity of which the superior had spoken, and which it was
so important to find out; but Mignon excused himself by saying that he
had no right to put questions merely to gratify curiosity. The civil
lieutenant was about to insist on the matter being investigated, when
the lay sister in her turn went into a fit, thus extricating Mignon from
his embarrassment. The magistrates approached the lay sister's bed at
once, and directed Mignon to put the same questions to her as to the
superior: he did so, but all in vain; all she would reply was, "To the
other! To the other!"

Mignon explained this refusal to answer by saying that the evil spirit
which was in her was of an inferior order, and referred all questioners
to Ashtaroth, who was his superior. As this was the only explanation,
good or bad, offered them by Mignon, the magistrates went away, and
drew up a report of all they had seen and heard without comment, merely
appending their signatures.

But in the town very few people showed the same discretion and reticence
as the magistrates. The bigoted believed, the hypocrites pretended
to believe; and the worldly-minded, who were numerous, discussed the
doctrine of possession in all its phases, and made no secret of their
own entire incredulity. They wondered, and not without reason it must be
confessed, what had induced the devils to go out of the nuns' bodies
for two days only, and then come back and resume possession, to the
confusion of the exorcists; further, they wanted to know why the mother
superior's devil spoke Latin, while the lay sister's was ignorant of
that tongue; for a mere difference of rank in the hierarchy of hell did
not seem a sufficient explanation of such a difference in education;
Mignon's refusal to go on with his interrogations as to the cause of the
enmity made them, they said, suspect that, knowing he had reached the
end of Ashtaroth's classical knowledge, he felt it useless to try to
continue the dialogue in the Ciceronian idiom. Moreover, it was well
known that only a few days before all Urbain's worst enemies had met in
conclave in the village of Puidardane; and besides, how stupidly Mignon
had shown his hand by mentioning Gaufredi, the priest who had been
executed at Aix: lastly, why had not a desire fo