g: paused in air, and fell: 'I had never seen a
movement of this kind, and I admit that I was alarmed'. Le
Seigneur, a farmer, saw 'a variety of objects arise and sail about':
he was certain that the boys did not throw them, and when in their
company, in the open air, between Cideville and Anzooville, 'I saw
stones come to us, without striking us, hurled by some invisible
force'. There was other confirmatory evidence, from men of physic,
and of the law.

The juge de paix, as we have seen, pronounced that the clearest
point in the case was 'the absence of known cause for the effects,'
and he non-suited Thorel, the plaintiff.

The cause of the phenomena is, of course, as obscure for us as for
the worthy magistrate. We can only say that, when precisely similar
evidence was brought before judges and juries in England and New
England, at a period when medicine, law, and religion all recognised
the existence of witchcraft, magic, and diabolical possession, they
had scarcely any choice but to condemn the accused. Causa patet,
they said: 'The devil is at the bottom of it all, and the witch is
his minister'.

The affair of Cideville by no means stands alone in modern France.
In 1853, two doctors and other witnesses signed a deposition as to
precisely similar phenomena attending Adelaide Francoise Millet, a
girl of twelve, at Songhien, in Champagne. The trouble, as at Cock
Lane, began by a sound of scratching on the wood of her bed. The
clerk of the juge de la paix, the master of the Douane, two doctors,
and others visited her, and tied her hands and feet. The noise
continued. Mysterious missiles pursued a girl in Martinique, in
1854. The house, which was stormed by showers of stone, in Paris
(1846), entirely baffled the police. {283a} There is a more
singular parallel to the Cideville affair, the account was printed
from the letter of a correspondent in the Abeille of Chartres, March
11, 1849. {283b} At Gaubert, near Guillonville, a man was
imprisoned for thefts of hay, the property of a M. Dolleans. Two
days after his arrest, namely, on December 31, 1848, the servant of
M. Dolleans had things of all sorts thrown at her from all
directions. She fell ill, and went into hospital for five days,
_where she was untroubled_. On her return, in the middle of a
conversation, ribbons and bits of string would fly at her, and twist
themselves round her neck, as in the case of Francis Fey, of
Spraiton, given by Aubrey a