st, Satan endeavoured to supply his vassals who were brought
before the judges with strength to support the examinations, so that if,
by intermission of the torture, the wretches should fall into a doze,
they declared, when they were recalled from it to the question, that the
profound stupor "had something of Paradise in it, being gilded," said
the judge, "with the immediate presence of the devil;" though, in all
probability, it rather derived its charms from the natural comparison
between the insensibility of exhaustion and the previous agony of acute
torture. The judges took care that the fiend seldom obtained any
advantage in the matter by refusing their victims, in most cases, any
interval of rest or sleep. Satan then proceeded, in the way of direct
defiance, to stop the mouth of the accused openly, and by mere force,
with something like a visible obstruction in their throat.
Notwithstanding this, to put the devil to shame, some of the accused
found means, in spite of him, to confess and be hanged, or rather burnt.
The fiend lost much credit by his failure on this occasion. Before the
formidable Commissioners arrived, he had held his _cour pleniere_ before
the gates of Bourdeaux, and in the square of the palace of Galienne,
whereas he was now insulted publicly by his own vassals, and in the
midst of his festival of the Sabbath the children and relations of the
witches who had suffered not sticking to say to him, "Out upon you! Your
promise was that our mothers who were prisoners should not die; and look
how you have kept your word with us! They have been burnt, and are a
heap of ashes." To appease this mutiny Satan had two evasions. He
produced illusory fires, and encouraged the mutinous to walk through
them, assuring them that the judicial pile was as frigid and inoffensive
as those which he exhibited to them. Again, taking his refuge in lies,
of which he is well known to be the father, he stoutly affirmed that
their parents, who seemed to have suffered, were safe in a foreign
country, and that if their children would call on them they would
receive an answer. They made the invocation accordingly, and Satan
answered each of them in a tone which resembled the voice of the
lamented parent almost as successfully as Monsieur Alexandra could have
done.

Proceeding to a yet more close attack, the Commissioners, on the eve of
one of the Fiend's Sabbaths, placed the gibbet on which they executed
their victims just on the s