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NEW THOUGHT LIBRARY •ASSOCIATION
No,
LA SORCIERE
J, MICHELET.
LONDON:
PRIKTBD BY •WOODFALL AND HINDUS, AHGBL COUBT, SKINNER 8TKIET.
FD, W. P'- R'
E Little Rock, Ark.
LA SORCIERE:
THE WITCH OF THE MIDDLE AGES,
FEOM THE FRENCH OF J. MICHELET.
BY L. J. TROTTER.
only Authorized English Translation.)
-33 <t LONDON:
SIMPKIN, MAKSHALL, AND CO,
STATIONERS' HALL COURT.
NEW THOUGHT LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
PIIEFACE.
IN this translation of a work rich in the raciest beauties arid defects of an author long since made known to the British public, the present writer has striven to recast the trenchant humour, the scornful eloquence, the epigrammatic dash of Mr. Michelet, in language not all unworthy of such a word-master. How far he has succeeded others may be left to judge. In one point only is he aware of having been less true to his original than in theory he was bound to be. He has slurred or slightly altered a few of those passages which French readers take as a thing of course, but English ones, because of their different training, are supposed to eschew. A Frenchmap, in short, writes for men, an Englishman rather for drawing-room ladies, who tolerate grossness only in the theatres and the columns of the newspapers. Mr. Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details, moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with themes of general talk. The coarsest of these have been pruned away, but enough perhaps remain to startle readers of especial prudery. The translator,
VI PREFACE.
however, felt that he had no choice between shocking these and sinning against his original. Readers of a larger culture will make allowance for such a strait, will not be so very frightened at an amount of plain- speaking, neither in itself immoral, nor, on the whole, impertinent.. Had he docked his work of everything condemned by prudish theories, he might have made it more conventionally decent; but Michelet would have been puzzled to recognize himself in the poor maimed cripple that would then have borne his name. Nor will a reader of average shrewdness mistake the religious drift of a book suppressed by the Imperial underlings in the interests neither of religion nor of morals, but merely of Popery in its most outrageous form. If its attacks on Rome seem, now and then, to involve Christianity itself, we must allow something for excess of warmth, and something for the nature of inquiries which laid bare the rotten outgrowths of a religion in itself the purest known among men. In studying the so-called Ages of Faith, the author has only found them worthy of their truer and older title, the Ages of Darkness. It is against the tyranny, feudal and priestly, of those days, that he raises an outcry, warranted almost always by facts which a more mawkish philosophy refuses to see. If he is sometimes hasty and onesided; if the Church and the Feudal System of those days had their uses for the time being ; it is still a gain to have the other side of the subject
'PREFACE. VH
kept before us by way of counterpoise^to the doctrines now in vogue. We need not be intolerant ; but Home is yet alive.
Taken as a whole, Mr. Michelet's book cannot be called unchristian. Like most thoughtful minds of the day, he yearns for some nobler and larger creed than that of the theologians ; for a creed which, under- standing Nature, shall reconcile it with Nature's God. Nor may he fairly be called irreverent for talking, Frenchman like, of things spiritual with the same freedom as he would of things temporal. Perhaps in his heart of hearts he has nearly as much religious earnestness as they who call Dr. Colenso an infidel, and shake their heads at the doubtful theology of Frederic Robertson. At any rate, no translator who should cut or file away so special a feature of French feeling would be doing justice to so marked an original.
For English readers who already know the concise and sober volumes of their countryman, Mr. Wright, the present work will offer mainly an interesting study of the author himself. It is a curious compound of rhapsody and souud reason, of history and romance, of coarse realism and touching poetry, such as, even in France, few save Mr. Michelet could have produced. Founded on truth and close inquiry, it still reads more like a poem than a sober history. As a beautiful speculation, which has nearly, but not quite, grasped
Vlll PREFACE.
the physical causes underlying the whole history of magic and illusion in all ages, it may be read with profit as well as pleasure in this age of vulgar spirit- rapping. But the true history of Witchcraft has yet to be written by some cooler hand.
L. T. May llt/i, 1863.
-
CONTENTS,
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
To One Wizard Ten Thousand Witches .... 1
The Witch was the sole Physician of the People . . 4
Terrorism of the Middle Ages 5
The Witch wag the Offspring of Despair ... 9
She in her Turn created Satan 12
Satan, Prince ef the World, Physician, Innovator . . 13
His School — of Witches, Shepherds, and Headsmen . 15
His Decline ... 16
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I. — THE DEATH OF THE GODS . . . . 19
Christianity thought the World was Dying ... 20
The World of Demons ' 24
The Bride of Corinth 26
CHAPTER ' II. — WHY THK MIDDLE Aass FELL INTO DESPAIR SO
The People make their own Legends .... 31
But are forbidden to do so any more .... 35
The People guard their Territory .... 38
But are made Serfs . 40
X CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER III. — THE LITTLE DEVIL OP THE FIRESIDE . . 43
Ancient Communism of the Villa .... 43
The Hearth made independent 44
The Wife of the Serf 45
Her Loyalty to the Olden Gods 46
The Goblin .53
CIIAPTEK IV. — TEMPTATIONS . . ... 57
The Serf invokes the Spirit of Hidden Treasures . . 58
Feudal Raids . . . ' 59
The Wife turns her Goblin into a Devil ... 66
CHAPTER V. — POSSESSION . . . . . . ,69
The Advent of Gold in 1300 69
The Woman makes Terms with the Demon of Gold . 71
Impure Horrors of the Middle Ages .... 75
The Village Lady 78
Hatred of the Lady of the Castle . . . . 84
CHAPTER VI. — THE COVENANT 88
The Woman-serf gives Herself up to the Devil .. . 90
The Moor and the Witch 93
CHAPTER VII. — THE KINO OF THE DEAD .... 96
The dear Dead are brought back to Earth ... 97
The Idea of Satan is softened 103
CHAPTER VIII.— THE PRINCE OF NATURE ..... 106
The Thaw in the Middle Ages 108
The Witch calls forth the East 109
She conceives Nature 112
CHAPTER IX.— THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN ..... 116
Diseases of the Middle Ages . . . . . 116
The Comforters, or Solanese -121
The Middle Ages anti-natural . 128
CONTENTS. XI
PAOI
CHAPTER X.— CHARMS AND PHILTRES • . . . 131
Blue-Beard and Griselda 133
The Witch consulted by the Castle . . . .137 Her Malice 141
CHAPTER XI. — THE REBELS' COMMUMCN — SABBATHS — THE
BLACK MASS 143
The old Half -heathen Sabasies 144
The Four Acts of the Black Mass . . . .150 Act I. The Introit, the Kiss, the Banquet . . . 151 Act II. The Offering : the Woman as Altar and Host 153
CHAPTER XII. — THE SEQUEL — LOVE AKD DEATH — SATAH
DISAPPEARS 157
Act III. Love of near Kindred ..... 158
Act IV. Death of Satan and the Witch . 165
BOOK II.
CHAPTER I. — THE WITCH IN HER DECLINE — SATAK MULTI- PLIED AND MADE COMMON 168
Witches and Wizards employed by the Cfreat . . 172 The Wolf -lady . . . '. .' . . .174
The last Philtre .179
CHAPTER II. — PERSECUTIONS 180
The Hammer for Witches . . . " . . 181
Satan Master of the World 193
CHAPTER III. — CENTURY OF TOLERATION IN FRANCE : RE- ACTION 198
Spain begins when France stops short .... 199
Reaction : French Lawyers burn as many as the Priests 203
CHAPTER IV. — THE WITCHES OF THE BABQUK COUNTRY . 207
They give Instructions to their own Judges . . . 212
XU CONTENTS.
PAG a
CHAPTER V. — SATAN TURNS PRIEST 218
Jokes of the Modern Sabbath . . . . . 221
CHAPTER VI.— GAUJ?FRIDI : 1610 228
Wizard Priests prosecuted by Monks . . . 232
Jealousies of the Nuns ...... 234
CHAPTER VII. — THE DEMONIACS OP LOUDEN : URBAN GRAN-
DIER 255
The Vicar a fine Speaker, and a Wizard . . . 263
Sickly Rages of the Nuns 264
CHAPTER VIII. — THE DEMONIACS OP LOUVIERS— MADELINE
BAVENT 277
Illuminism : the Devil a Quietist - . - . . . 277
Fight between the Devil and the Doctor . . . 285
CHAPTER IX. — THE DEVIL TRIUMPHS IN THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY 294
CHAPTER X. — FATHER GIRARD AND LA CADI^RE . . 303
CHAPTER XI. — CADI^RE IN THE CONVKNT .... 339
CHAPTER XII — TRIAL OF CAPI^RE . . . . . 367
EPH.OOOI 395
Can Satan and Jesus be reconciled ? 396
The Witch is dead, but the Fairy will live again . . 399
,f Oncoming of the Religious Revival .... 399
INTKODUCTION,
IT was said by Sprenger, before the year 1500, " Heresy of witches, not of wizards, must we call it, for these latter are of very small account." And by another, in the time of Louis XIII. : " To one wizard, ten thousand witches."
" Witches they are by nature." It is a gift pe- culiar to woman and her temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her subtlety, by a roguishness often whimsical and beneficent, she becomes a Witch ; she works her spells; does at any rate lull our pains to rest and beguile them.
All primitive races have the same beginning, as so many books of travel have shown. While the man is hunting and fighting, the woman works with her wits, with her imagination : she brings forth dreams and gods. On certain days she becomes a seeress, borne on boundless wings of reverie and desire. The better to reckon up the seasons, she watches the sky; but her heart belongs to earth none the less. Young and
/8
2 INTRODUCTION.
flower-like herself, she looks down toward the ena moured flowers, and forms with them a personal ac- quaintance. As a woman, she beseeches them to heal the objects of her love.
In a way so simple and touching do all religion and all science begin. Ere long everything will get par- celled outj we shall mark the beginning of the pro- fessional man as juggler, astrologer, or prophet, necro- mancer, priest, physician. But at first the woman is everything.
A religion so strong and hearty as that of Pagan Greece begins with the Sibyl to end in the Witch. The former, a lovely maiden in the broad daylight, rocked its cradle, endowed it with a charm and glory of its own. Presently it fell sick, lost itself in the darkness of the Middle Ages, and was hidden away by the Witch in woods and wilds : there, sustained by her compas- sionate daring, it was made to live anew. Thus, of every religion woman is the mother, the gentle guar- dian, the faithful nurse. With her the gods fare like men : they are born and die upon her bosom.
Alas ! her loyalty costs her dear. Ye magian queens of Persia; bewitching Circe ; sublime Sibyl ! Into what have ye grown, and how cruel the change that has come upon you ! She who from her throne in the East taught men the virtues of plants and the courses of the stars ; who, on her Delphic tripod beamed over with the god of light, as she gave forth her oracles to a
INTRODUCTION. 3
world upon its knees ; — she also it is whom, a thousand years later, people hunt down like a wild beast ; fol- lowing her into the public places, where she is dis- honoured, worried, stoned, or set upon the burning coals !
For this poor wretch the priesthood can never have done with their faggots, nor the people with their insults, nor the children with their stones. The poet, childlike, flings her one more stone, for a woman the cruellest of all. On no grounds whatever, he imagines her to have been always old and ugly. The word " witch" brings before us the frightful old women of Macbeth. But their cruel processes teach us the reverse of that. Numbers perished precisely for being young and beautiful.
The Sibyl foretold a fortune, the Witch accomplishes one. Here is the great, the true difference between them. The latter calls forth a destiny, conjures it, works it out. Unlike the Cassandra of old, who awaited mournfully the future she foresaw so well, this woman herself creates the future. Even more than Circe, than Medea, does she bear in her hand the rod of natural miracle, with Nature herself aa sister and helpmate. Already she wears the features of a mo- dern Prometheus. With her industry begins, espe- cially that queen-like industry which heals and restores mankind. As the Sibyl seemed to gaze upon the morning, so she, contrariwise, looks towards the west ; but it is just that gloomy west, which long before
B 2
4 INTRODUCTION.
dawn — as happens among the tops of the Alps — gives forth a flush anticipant of day.
Well does the priest discern the danger, the bane, the alarming rivalry, involved in this priestess of na- ture whom he makes a show of despising. From the gods of yore she has conceived other gods. Close to the Satan of the Past we see dawning within her a Satan of the Future.
The only physician of the people for a thousand years was the Witch. The emperors, kings, popes, and richer barons had indeed their doctors of Salerno, their Moors and Jews ; but the bulk of people in every state, the world as it might well be called, consulted none but the Saga, or wise-woman. When she could not cure them, she was insulted, was called a Witch But generally, from a respect not unmixed with fear, she was called good lady or fair lady (belle dame — be lla donna *), the very name we give to the fairies.
Soon there came upon her the lot which still befalls her favourite plant, belladonna, and some other whole- some poisons which she employed as antidotes to the great plagues of the Middle Ages. Children and ignorant passers-by would curse those dismal flowers before they knew them. Affrighted by their ques- tionable hues, they shrink back, keep far aloof from them. And yet among them are the comforters
* Whence our old word Beldam, the more courteous meaning of which is all but lost in its ironical one. — TRANS.
INTRODUCTION. 5
(Solanese) which, when discreetly employed, have cured so many, have lulled so many sufferings to sleep.
You find them in ill-looking spots, growing all lonely and ill-famed amidst ruins and rubbish-heaps. Therein lies one other point of resemblance between these flowers and her who makes use of them. For where else than in waste wildernesses could live the poor wretch whom all men thus evilly entreated ; the woman accursed and proscribed as a poisoner, even while she used Lto heal and save ; as the betrothed of the Devil and of evil incarnate, for all the good which, according to the great physician of the Renaissance, she herself had done ? When Paracelsus, at Basle, in 1527, threw ail medicine into the fire,* he avowed that he knew nothing but what he had learnt from witches.
This was worth a requital, and they got it. They were repaid with tortures, with the stake. For them new punishments, new pangs, were expressly devised. They were tried in a lump ; they were condemned by a single word. Never had there been such wasteful- ness of human life. Not to speak of Spain, that classic land of the faggot, where Moor and Jew are always accompanied by the Witch, there were burnt at Treves seven thousand, and I know not how many at Tou- louse; five hundred at Geneva in three months of 1513; at Wurtzburg eight hundred, almost in one batch, and fifteen hundred at Bamberg; these two
* Alluding to the bonfire which Paracelsus, as professor of medicine, made of the works of Galen and Avicenna. — TRANS.
6 INTRODUCTION.
latter being very small bishoprics ! Even Ferdinand II., the savage Emperor of the Thirty Years' War, was driven, bigot as he was, to keep a watch on these worthy bishops, else they would have burned all their subjects. In the Wurtzburg list I find one Wizard a schoolboy, eleven years old ; a Witch of fifteen : and at Bayonne two, infernally beautiful, of seventeen years.
Mark how, at certain seasons, hatred wields this one word Witch, as a means of murdering whom she will. Woman's jealousy, man's greed, take ready hold of so handy a weapon. Is such a one wealthy ? She is a Witch. Is that girl pretty ? She is a Witch. You will even see the little beggar-woman, La Murgui, leave a death-mark with that fearful stone on the forehead of a great lady, the too beautiful dame of Lancinena.
The accused, when they can, avert the torture by killing themselves. Remy, that excellent judge of Lorraine, who burned some eight hundred of them, crows over this very fear. " So well," said he, " does my way of justice answer, that of those who were ar- rested the other day, sixteen, without further waiting, strangled themselves forthwith."
Over the long track of my History, during the thirty years which I have devoted to it, this frightful literature of witchcraft passed to and fro repeatedly through my hands. First I exhausted the manuals of the Inquisition, the asinine foolings of the Dominicans.
INTRODUCTION'. 7
(Scourges, Hammers, Ant-hills, Floggings, Lanterns, &c., are the titles of their books.) Next, I read the Parliamentarists, the lay judges who despised the monks they succeeded, but were every whit as foolish themselves. One word further would I say of them here: namely, this single remark, that, from 1300 to 1600, and yet later, but one kind of justice may be seen. Barring a small interlude in the Parliament of Paris, the same stupid savagery prevails everywhere, at all hours. Even great parts are of no use here. As soon as witchcraft comes into question, the fine- natured De Lancre, a Bordeaux magistrate and forward politician under Henry IV., sinks back to the level of a Nider, a Sprenger ; of the monkish ninnies of the fifteenth century.
It fills one with amazement to see these different ages, these men of diverse culture, fail in taking the least step forward. Soon, however, you begin clearly to understand how all were checked alike, or let us rather say blinded, made hopelessly drunk and savage, by the poison of their guiding principle. That prin- ciple lies in the statement of a radical injustice : " On account of one man all are lost ; are not only punished but worthy of punishment; depraved and perverted beforehand, dead to God even before their birth. The very babe at the breast is damned."
Who says so ? Everyone, even Bossuet himself. A leading doctor in Rome, Spina, a Master of the Holy Palace, formulates the question neatly : " Why does God
8 INTRODUCTION.
suffer the innocent to die ? — For very good reasons : . even if they do not die on account of their own sins, they are always liable to death as guilty of the original sin." (De Strigibus, ch. 9.)
From this atrocity spring two results, the one per- taining to justice, the other to logic. The judge is never at fault in his work : the person brought before him is certainly guilty, the more so if he makes a defence. Justice need never beat her head, or work herself into a heat, in order to distinguish the truth from the falsehood. Everyhow she starts from a fore- gone conclusion. Again, the logician, the schoolman, has only to analyse the soul, to take count of the shades it passes through, of its manifold nature, its inward strifes and battles. He had no need, as \\c have, to explain how that soul may grow wicked step by step. At all such niceties and groping efforts, how, if even he could understand them, would he laugh and wag his head ! And, oh ! how gracefully then would quiver those splendid ears which deck his empty skull !
Especially in treating of the compact with the Devil, that awful covenant whereby, for the poor profit of one day, the spirit sells itself to everlasting torture, we of another school would seek to trace anew that road accursed, that frightful staircase of mishaps and crimes, which had brought it to a depth so low. Much, how- ever, cares our fine fellow for all that ! To him soul and Devil seem born for each other, insomuch that ou the first temptation, for a whim, a desire, a passing
INTRODUCTION. 9
fancy, the soul will throw itself at one stroke into so horrible an extremity.
Neither do I find that the moderns have made much inquiry into the moral chronology of witchcraft. They cling too much to the connection between antiquity and the Middle Ages; connection real indeed, but slight, of small importance. Neither from the magician of old, nor the seeress of Celts and Germans, comes forth the true Witch. The harmless " Sabasies " (from Bacchus Sabasius), and the petty rural " Sabbath" of the Middle Ages, have nothing to do with the Black Mass of the fourteenth century, with the grand defiance then solemnly given to Jesus. This fearful conception never grew out of a long chain of tradition. It leapt forth from the horrors of the day.
At what date, then, did the Witch first appear ? I say unfalteringly, "In the age of despair:" of that deep despair which the gentry of the Church engen- dered. Unfalteringly do I say, " The Witch is a crime of their own achieving."
I am not to be taken up short by the excuses which their sugary explanations seem to furnish. ''Weak was that creature, and giddy, and pliable under temp- tation. She was drawn towards evil by her lust." Alas ! in the wretchedness, the hunger of those days, nothing of that kind could have ruined her even into a hellish rage. An amorous woman, jealous and for- saken, a child hunted out by her stepmother, a mother
]0 INTRODUCTION.
beaten by her son (old subjects these of story), if such as they were ever tempted to call upon the Evil Spirit, yet all this would make no Witch. These poor creatures may have called on Satan, but it does not follow that he accepted them. They are still far, ay, very far from being ripe for him. They have not yet learned to hate God.
For the better understanding of this point, you should read those hateful registers which remain to us of the Inquisition, not only in the extracts given by Llorente, by Lamothe-Langon, &c., but in what re- mains of the original registers of Toulouse. Head them in all their flatness, in all their dryness, so dis- mal, so terribly savage. At the end of a few pages you feel yourself stricken with a chill ; a cruel shiver fastens upon you ; death, death, death, is traceable in every line. Already you are in a bier, or else in a stone cell with mouldy walls. Happiest of all are the killed. The horror of horrors is the In pace. This phrase it is which comes back unceasingly, like an ill-omened bell sounding again and again the heart's ruin of the living dead : always we have the same word, *f Im- mured."
Frightful machinery for crushing and flattening; most cruel press for shattering the soul ! One turn of the screw follows another, until, all breathless, and with a loud crack, it has burst forth from the machine and fallen into the unknown world.
INTRODUCTION. ] ]
On her first appearance the Witch has neither father nor mother, nor son, nor husband, nor family. She is a marvel, an aerolith, alighted no one knows whence. Who, in Heaven's name, would dare to draw near her ?
Her place of abode ? It is in spots impracticable, in a forest of brambles, on a wild moor where thorn and thistle intertwining forbid approach. The night she passes under an old cromlech. If anyone finds her there, she is isolated by the common dread ; she is surrounded, as it were, by a ring of fire.
And yet — would you believe it ? — she is a woman still. This very life of hers, dreadful though it be, tightens and braces her woman's energy, her womanly electricity. Hence, you may see her endowed with two gifts. One is the inspiration of lucid frenzy, which in its several degrees, becomes poesy, second-sight, depth of insight, cunning simplicity of speech, the power especially of believing in yourself through all your delusions. Of such a gift the man, the wizard, knows nothing. On his side no beginning would have been made.
From this gift flows that other, the sublime power of unaided conception, that parthenogenesis which our physiologists have come to recognise, as touching fruit- fulness of the body in the females of several species ; and which is not less a truth with regard to the con- ceptions of the spirit. .
By herself did she conceive and bring forth — what ?
12 INTRODUCTION.
A second self, who resembles her in his self-delusions. The son of her hatred, conceived upon her love ; for without love can nothing be created. For all the alarm this child gave her, she has become so well again, is so happily engrossed with this new idol, that she places it straightway upon her altar, to worship it, yield her life up to it, and offer herself up as a living and perfect sacrifice. Very often she will even say to her judge, " There is but one thing I fear ; that I shall not suffer enough for him." — (Lancre.)
Shall I tell you what the child's first effort was ? It was a fearful burst of laughter. Has he not cause for mirth on his broad prairie, far away from the Spanish dungeons and the "immured" of Toulouse? The whole world is his In pace. He comes, and goes, and walks to and fro. His is the boundless forest, his the desert with its far horizons, his the whole earth, in the fulness of its teeming girdle. The Witch in her ten- derness calls him "Robin mine,3' the name of that bold outlaw, the joyous Robin Hood, who lived under the green bowers. She delights too in calling him fondly by such names as Little Green, Pretty-Wood, Greenwood ; after the little madcap's favourite haunts. He had hardly seen a thicket when he took to playing the truant. *
What astounds one most is, that at one stroke the
* Here, as in some other passages, the play of words in the original is necessarily lost. — TRANS.
INTRODUCTION. 13
Witch should have achieved an actual Being. He bears about him every token of reality. We have heard and seen him ; anyone could draw his likeness.
The Saints, those darling sons of the house, with their dreams and meditations make but little stir; they look forward waitingly, as men assured of their part in Elysium. What little energy they have is all centred in the narrow round of Imitation-, a word which condenses the whole of the Middle Ages. He on the other hand — this accursed bastard whose only lot is the scourge — has no idea of waiting. He is always seeking and will never rest. He busies himself with all things between earth and heaven. He is exceed- ingly curious ; will dig, dive, ferret, and poke his nose everywhere. At the consummation est he only laughs, the little scoffer ! He is always saying " Further," or "Forward." Moreover, he is not hard to please. He takes every rebuff; picks up every windfall. For in- stance, when the Church throws out nature as impure and doubtworthy, Satan fastens on her for his own adornment. Nay, more ; he employs her, and makes her useful to him as the fountain-head of the arts ; thus accepting the awful name with which others would brand him ; to wit, the Prince of the World.
Some one rashly said, " Woe to those who laugh." Thus from the first was Satan intrusted with too pretty a part ; he had the sole right of laughing, and of de- claring it an amusement — rather let us say a necessity ; for laughing is essentially a natural function. Life
14 INTRODUCTION.
would be unbearable if we could not laugh, at least in our afflictions.
Looking on life as nothing but a trial, the Church is careful not to prolong it. Her medicine is resignation, the looking for and the hope of death. A broad field this for Satan ! He becomes the physician, the healer of the living. Better still, he acts as comforter : he is good enough to shew us our dead, to call up the shades of our beloved.
One more trifle the Church rejected, namely, logic or free reason. Here was a special dainty, to which the. other greedily helped himself. The Church had carefully builded up a small In pace, narrow, low- roofed, lighted by one dim opening, a mere cranny. That was called The School. Into it were turned loose a few shavelings, with this commandment, " Be free." They all fell lame. In three or four centuries the paralysis was confirmed, and Ockham's standpoint is the very same as Abelard's.*
It is pleasant to track the Renaissance up to such a point. The Renaissance took place indeed, but how ? Through the Satanic daring of those who pierced the vault, through, the efforts of the damned who were bent on seeing the sky. And it took place yet more largely away from the schools and the men of letters, in the School of the Bush, where Satan had set up a class for the Witch and the shepherd.
* Abelard flourished in the twelfth, William of Ockham (pupil of Duns Scotus) in the fourteenth century. — TRANS.
INTRODUCTION. 15
Perilous teaching it was, if so it happened ; but the very dangers of it heightened the eager passion, the uncontrollable yearning to see and to know. Thus began those wicked sciences, physic debarred from poisoning, and that odious anatomy. There, along with his survey of the heavens, the shepherd who kept watch upon the stars applied also his shameful nos- trums, made his essays upon the bodies of animals. The Witch would bring out a corpse stolen from the neighbouring cemetery; and, for the first time, at risk of being burned, you might gaze upon that heavenly wonder, " which men" — as M. Serres has well said — "are foolish enough to bury, instead of trying to understand."
Paracelsus, the only doctor whom Satan admitted there, saw yet a third worker, who, stealing at times into that dark assembly, displayed there his surgical art. This was the surgeon of those happy days, the headsman' stout of hand, who could play patly enough with the fire, could break bones and set them again ; who if he killed, would sometimes save, by hanging one only for a certain time.
By the more sacrilegious of its essays this convict university of witches, shepherds, and headsmen, em- boldened the other^ obliged its rival to study. For everyone wanted to live. The Witch would have got hold of everything : people would for ever have turned their backs on the doctor. And so the Church was fain to suffer, to countenance these crimes. She avowed he
16 INTRODUCTION.
belief in good poisons (Grillandus). She found herself driven and constrained to allow of public dissections. In 1306 one woman, in 1315 another, was opened and dissected by the Italian Mondino. Here was a holy revelation, the discovery of a greater world than that of Christopher Columbus ! Fools shuddered or howled ; but wise men fell upon their knees.
With such conquests the Devil was like enough to live on. Never could the Church alone have put an end to him. The stake itself was useless, save for some political objects.
Men had presently the wit to cleave Satan's realm in twain. Against the Witch, his daughter, his bride, they armed his son, the doctor. Heartily, utterly as the Church loathed the latter, yet to extinguish the Witch, she established his monopoly nevertheless. In the fourteenth century she proclaimed, that any woman who dared to heal others without having duly studied, was a witch and should therefore die.
But how was she to study in public ? Fancy what a scene of mingled fun and horror would have oc- curred, if the poor savage had risked an entrance into the schools ! What games and merry-makings there would have been ! On Midsummer Day they used to chain cats together and burn them in the fire. But to tie up a Witch in that hell of caterwaulers, a Witch yelling and roasting, what fun it would have been for that precious crew of monklings and cowlbearers !
INTRODUCTION. 17
In due time we shall see the decline of Satan. Sad to tell, we shall find him pacified, turned into a good old fellow. He will be robbed and plundered, until of the two masks he wore at the Sabbath, the dirtiest is taken by Tartuffe. His spirit is still everywhere, but of his bodily self, in losing the Witch he lost all. The wizards were only wearisome.
Now that we have hurled him so far downwards, are we fully aware of what has happened ? Was he not an important actor, an essential item in the great religious machine just now slightly out of gear? All organisms that work properly are twofold, twosided. Life can otherwise not go on at all. It is a kind of balance between two forces, opposite, symmetrical, but unequal ; the lower answering to the other as its counterpoise. The higher chafes at it, seeks to put it down. So doing, it is all wrong.
When Colbert, in 1672, got rid of Satan, with very little ceremony, by forbidding the judges to entertain pleas of witchcraft, the sturdy Parliament of Normandy with its sound Norman logic pointed out the dangerous drift of such a decision. The Devil is nothing less than a dogma holding on to all the rest. If you meddle with the Eternally Conquered, are you not meddling with the Conqueror likewise ? To doubt the acts of the former, leads to doubting the acts of the second, the miracles he wrought for the very purpose of withstanding the Devil. The pillars of heaven are grounded in the Abyss. He who thoughtlessly removes
c
18 INTRODUCTION.
that base infernal, may chance to split up Paradise itself.
Colbert could not listen, having other business to mind. But the Devil perhaps gave heed and was comforted. Amidst such minor means of earning -a livelihood as spirit-rapping or table-turning, he grows resigned, and believes at least that he will not die alone.
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
THE DEATH OF THE GODS.
CERTAIN authors have declared that, shortly before the triumph of Christianity, a voice mysterious ran along the shores of the ^Egean Sea, crying, "Great Pan is dead ! " The old universal god of nature was no more ; and great was the joy thereat. Men fancied that with the death of nature temptation itself was dead. After the troublings of so long a storm, the soul of man was at length to find rest.
Was it merely a question touching the end of that old worship, its overthrow, and the eclipse of old religious rites ? By no means. Consult the earliest Christian records, and in every line you may read the hope, that nature is about to vanish, life to be extin- guished ; that the end of the world, in short, is very near. It is all over with the gods of life, who have spun out its mockeries to such a length. Every-
c 2
20 THE WITCH.
thing is falling, breaking up, rushing down headlong. The whole is becoming as nought : " Great Pan is dead!"
Tt was nothing new that the gods must perish. Many an ancient worship was grounded in that very idea. Osiris, Adonis die indeed in order to rise again. On the stage itself, in plays which were only acted for the feast days of the gods, ^Eschylus expressly averred by the mouth of Prometheus, that some day they should suffer death : but how ? As conquered and laid low by the Titans, the ancient powers of nature.
Here, however, things are quite otherwise. Alike in generals and particulars, in the past and the future, would the early Christians have cursed Nature herself. So utterly did they condemn her, as to find the Devil incarnate in a flower. Swiftly may the angels come again, who erst overwhelmed the cities of the Dead Sea ! Oh, that they may sweep off, may crumple up as a veil the hollow frame of this world ; may at length deliver the saints from their long trial !
The Evangelist said, " The day is coming : " the Fathers, "It is coming immediately." From the breaking-up of the Empire and the invasion of the Barbarians, St. Augustin draws the hope that very soon no city would remain but the city of God.
And yet, how hard of dying is the world ; how stubbornly bent on living ! Like Hezekiah, it begs a respite, one turn more of the dial. Well, then, be
THE DEATH OF THE GODS. 21
it so until the year one thousand. But thereafter, not one day.
Are we quite sure of what has been so often repeated, that the gods of old had come to an end, themselves wearied and sickened of living ; that they were so disheartened as almost to send in their resig- nation ; that Christianity had only to blow upon these empty shades ?
They point to the gods in Rome; they point out those in the Capitol, admitted there only by a kind of preliminary death, on the surrender, I might say, of all their local pith ; as having disowned their country, as having ceased to be the representative spirits of the nations. In order to receive them, indeed, Rome had performed on them a cruel operation : they were enervated, bleached. Those great centralized deities became in their official life the mournful functionaries of the Roman Empire. But the decline of that Olympian aristocracy had in no wise drawn down the host of home-born gods, the mob of deities still keeping hold of the boundless country-sides, of the woods, the hills, the fountains ; still intimately blended with the life of the country. These gods abiding in the heart of oaks, in waters deep and rushing, could not be driven therefrom.
Who says so ? The Church. She rudely gainsays her own words. Having proclaimed their death, she is indignant because they live. Time after time, by
22 THE WITCH.
the threatening voice of her councils * she gives them notice of their death — and lo ! they are living still.
" They are devils." — Then they must be alive. Failing to make an end of them, men suffer the simple folk to clothe, to disguise them. By the help of legends they come to be baptized, even to be foisted upon the Church. But at least they are converted ? Not yet. We catch them stealthily subsisting in their own heathen character.
Where are they ? In the desert, on the moor, ia the forest ? Ay ; but, above all, in the house. They are kept up by the most intimate household usages. The wife guards and hides them in her household things, even in her bed. With her they have the best place in the world, better than the temple, — the fireside.
Never was revolution so violent as that of Theodo- sius. Antiquity shows no trace of such proscription of any worship. The Persian fire-worshipper might, in the purity of his heroism, have insulted the visible deities, but he let them stand nevertheless. He greatly favoured the Jews, protecting and employing them. Greece, daughter of the light, made merry with the gods of darkness, the tunbellied Cabiri ; but yet she bore with them, adopted them as workmen, even to shaping out of them her own Vulcan. Rome
* See Mansi, Baluze ; Council of Aries, 442 ; of Tours, 567 ; of Leptines, 743 ; the Capitularies, &c., and even Gerson, about 1400.
THE DEATH OF THE GODS. 23
in her majesty welcomed not only Etruria, but even the rural gods of the old Italian labourer. She per- secuted the Druids, but only as the centre of a dan- gerous national resistance.
Christianity conquering sought and thought to slay the foe. It demolished the schools, by proscribing logic and uprooting the philosophers, whom Valens slaughtered. It razed or emptied the temples, shivered to pieces the symbols. The new legend would have been propitious to the family, had the father not been cancelled in Saint Joseph ; had the mother been set up as an educatress, as having morally brought forth Jesus. A fruitful road there was, but abandoned at the very outset through the effort to attain a high but barren purity.
So Christianity turned into that lonely path where the world was going of itself; the path of a celibacy in vain opposed by the laws of the emperors. Down this slope it was hurled headlong by the establishment of monkery.
But in the desert was man alone ? The Devil kept him company with all manner of temptations. He could not help himself, he was driven to create anew societies, nay whole cities of anchorites. We all know those dismal towns of monks which grew up in the Thebaid ; how wild, unruly a spirit dwelt among them ; how deadly were their descents on Alexandria. They talked of being troubled, beset by the Devil ; and they told no lie.
24 THE WITCH.
A huge gap was made in the world ; and who was to fill it ? The Christians said, The Devil, everywhere the Devil : ubique daemon.*
Greece, like all other nations, had her energumens, who were sore tried, possessed by spirits. The rela- tion there is quite external; the seeming likeness is really none at all. Here we have no spirits of any kind : they are but black children of the Abyss, the ideal of waywardness. Thenceforth we see them everywhere, those poor melancholies, loathing, shud- dering at their own selves. Think what it must be to fancy yourself double, to believe in that other, that cruel host who goes and comes and wanders within you, making you roam at his pleasure among deserts, over precipices ! You waste and weaken more and more ; and the weaker grows your wretched body, the more is it worried by the devil. In woman especially these tyrants dwell, making her blown and swollen. They fill her with an infernal wind, they brew in her storms and tempests, play with her as the whim seizes them, drive her to wickedness, to despair.
And not ourselves only, but all nature, alas ! be- comes demoniac. If there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest ! The light we think
* See the Lives of the Desert Fathers, and 'the authors quoted by A. Maurie, Magie, 317. In the fourth century, the Messalians, thinking themselves full of devils, spat and blew their noses without ceasing ; made incredible efforts to spit them forth.
THE DEATH OF THE GODS. 25
so pure teems with children of the night. The heavens themselves — 0 blasphemy ! — are full of hell. That divine morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into temptation by her light so soft and mild.
That such a society should wax wroth and terrible is not surprising. Indignant at feeling itself so weak against devils, it persecutes them everywhere, in the temples, at the altars once of the ancient worship, then of the heathen martyrs. Let there be more feasts ? — they will likely be so many gatherings of idol- aters. The Family itself becomes suspected : for custom might bring it together round the ancient Lares. And why should there be a family ? — the empire is an empire of monks.
But the individual man himself, thus dumb and isolated though he be, still watches the sky, still honours his ancient gods whom he finds anew in the stars. "This is he," said the Emperor Theodosius, "who causes famines and all the plagues of the empire." Those terrible words turned the blind rage of the people loose upon the harmless Pagan. Blindly the law unchained all its furies against the law.
Ye gods of Eld, depart into your tombs ! Get ye extinguished, gods of Love, of Life, of Light ! Put on the monk's cowl. Maidens, become nuns. Wives,
26 THE WITCH.
forsake your husbands ; or, if ye will look after the house, be unto them but cold sisters.
But is all this possible ? What man's breath shall be strong enough to put out at one effort the burning lamp of God ? These rash endeavours of an impious piety may evoke miracles strange and monstrous. Tremble, guilty that ye are !
Often in the Middle Ages 'will recur the mournful tale of the Bride of Corinth. Told at a happy moment by Phlegon, Adrian's freedman, it meets us again in the twelfth, and yet again in the sixteenth century, as the deep reproof, the invincible protest of nature herself.
"A young man of Athens went to Corinth, to the house of one who had promised him his daughter. Himself being still a heathen, he -knew not that the family which he thought to enter had just turned Christian. It is very late when he arrives. They are all gone to rest, except the mother, who serves up for him the hospitable repast and then leaves him to sleep. Dead fired, he drops down. Scarce was he fallen asleep, when a figure entered the room : 'tis a girl all clothed and veiled in white ; on her forehead a fillet of black and gold. She sees him. In amazement she lifts her white hand : e Am I, then, such a stranger in the house already ? Alas, poor recluse ! . . . But I am ashamed, and withdraw. Sleep on.'
" ' Stay, fair maiden ! Here are Bacchus, Ceres, and with thee comes Love. Fear not, look not so pale !'
THE DEATH OF THE GODS. 27
" ' Ah ! Away from me, young man ! I have no- thing more to do with happiness. By a vow my mother made in her sickness my youth and my life are bound for ever. The gods have fled, and human victims now are our only sacrifices/
" ' Ha ! can it be thou, thou, my darling betrothed, who wast given me from my childhood ? The oath of our fathers bound us for evermore under the blessing of heaven. Maiden, be mine ! '
" ' No, my friend, not I. Thou shalt have my younger sister. If I moan in my chilly dungeon, do thou in her arms think of me, of me wasting away and thinking only of thee; of me whom the earth is about to cover again.'
" e Nay, I swear by this flame, the torch of Hymen, thou shalt come home with me to my father. Ilest thee, my own beloved/
" As a wedding-gift he offers her a cup of gold. She gives him her chain, but instead of the cup desires a curl of his hair.
" It is the hour of spirits ; .her pale lip drinks up the dark blood-red wine. He too drinks greedily after her. He calls on the god of Love. She still resisted, though her poor heart was dying thereat. But he grows desperate, and falls weeping on the couch. Anon she throws herself by his side.
" ' Oh ! how ill thy sorrow makes me ! Yet, if thou
wast to touch me Oh, horror ! — white as the snow,
and cold as ice, such, ah me ! is thy bride/
28 THE WITCH.
" ' I will warm tliee again : come to me, wert thou come from the very grave/
" Sighs and kisses many do they exchange.
" ' Dost thou feel how warm I am ? '
"Love twines and holds them fast. Tears mingle with their joy. She changes with the fire she drinks from his mouth : her icy blood is aglow with passion ; but the heart in her bosom will not beat.
" But the mother was there listening. Soft vows, cries of wailing and of pleasure.
" ' Hush, the cock is crowing : to-morrow night ! ' Then with kiss on kiss they say farewell.
" In wrath the mother enters ; sees what ? Her daughter. He would have hidden her, covered her up. But freeing herself from him, she grew from the couch up to the roof.
" ' 0 mother, mother, you grudge me a pleasant night ; you would drive me from this cosy spot ! Was it not enough to have wrapped me in my winding- sheet and borne me to the grave ? A greater power has lifted up the stone. In vain did your priests drone over the trench they dug for me. Of what use are salt and water, where burns the fire of youth ? The earth cannot freeze up love. You made a pro- mise ; I have just reclaimed my own.
"'Alas, dear friend, thou must die: thou woulust but pine and dry up here. I have thy hair ; it will be white to-morrow. . . . Mother, one last prayer ! Open my dark dungeon, set up a stake, and let the
THE DEATH OF THE GODS. 29
loving one find rest in the flames. Let the sparks fly upward and the ashes redden. We will go to our olden gods/ " *
* Here I have suppressed a shocking phrase. Goethe, so noble in the form, is not so in the spirit of his poem. He spoils the marvel of the legend by sullying the Greek conception with a horrible Slavish idea. As they are weeping, he turns the maiden into a vampire. She comes because she thirsts for blood, that she may suck the blood from his heart. And he makes her coldly say this impious and unclean thing : " When I have done with him, I will pass on to others : the young blood shall fall .a prey to my fury."
In the Middle Ages this story put on a grotesque garb, by way of frightening us with the Devil Venus. On the finger of her statue a young man imprudently places a ring, which she clasps tight, guarding it like a bride, and going in the night to his couch, to assert her rights. He cannot rid himself of his infernal spouse without an exorcism. The same tale, foolishly applied to the Virgin, is found in the Fabliaux. If my memory does not mislead me, Luther also, in his " Table Talk," takes up the old story in a very coarse way, till you quite smell the body. The Spanish. Del Rio shifts the scene of it to Brabant. The bride dies shortly before her marriage ; the death-bells are rung. The bridegroom rushed wildly over the country. He hears a wail. It is she herself wandering about the heath. " Seest thou not " — she says — " who leads me ? " But he catches her up and bears her home. At this point the story threatened to become too moving ; but the hard inquisitor, Del Rio, cuts the thread. " On lifting her veil," says he, " they found only a log of wood covered with the skin of a corpse." The Judge le Loyer, silly though he be, has restored the older version.
Thenceforth these gloomy taletellers come to an end. The story is useless when our own age begins ; for then the bride has triumphed. Nature conies back from the grave, not by 'stealth, but as mistress of the house.
CHAPTER II.
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR.
" BE ye as newborn babes (quasi modo geniti infantes] ; be thoroughly childlike in the innocence of your hearts ; peaceful, forgetting all disputes, calmly resting under the hand of Christ." Such is the kindly counsel tendered by the Church to this stormy world on the morning after the great fall. In other words : " Vol- canoes, ruins, ashes, and lava, become green. Ye parched plains, get covered with flowers."
One thing indeed gave promise of the peace that reneweth : the schools were all shut up, the way of logic forsaken. A method infinitely simple for the doing away with argument, offered all men a gentle slope, down which they had nothing to do but go. If the creed was doubtful, the life was all traced out in the pathway of the legend. From first to last but the one word Imitation.
"Imitate, and all will go well. Rehearse and copy." But is this the way to that true childhood which quickens the heart of man, which leads back to its fresh and fruitful springs? In this world that is to make us young and childlike, I see at first nothing but the tokens of age ; only cunning, slavishness, want of power.
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR. 31
What kind of literature is this, confronted with the glorious monuments of Greeks and Jews ? We have just the same literary fall as happened in India from Brahminism to Buddhism ; a twaddling flow of words after a noble inspiration. Books copy from books, churches from churches, until they cannot so much as copy. They pillage from each other : Aix-la-Chapelle is adorned with the marbles torn from Ravenna. It is the same with all the social life of those days. The bishop-king of a city, the savage king of a tribe, alike copy the Roman magistrates. Original as one might deem them, our monks in their monasteries simply restored their ancient Villa, as Chateaubriand well said. They had no notion either of forming a new society or of fertilizing the old. Copying from the monks of the East, they wanted their servants at first to be them- selves a barren race of rnonkling workmen. It was in spite of them that the family in renewing itself renewed the world.
Seeing how fast these oldsters keep on oldening ; how in one age we fall from the wise monk St. Bene- dict down to the pedantic Benedict of Aniane ; * we feel that such gentry were wholly guiltless of that great popular creation which bloomed amidst ruins ; namely, the Lives of the Saints. If the monks wrote, it was the people made them. This young growth might throw out some leaves and flowers from the crannies of
* Benedict founded a convent at Aniane in Languedoc, in the reign of Charlemagne.
3# THE WITCH.
an old Roman ruin turned into a convent : but most assuredly not thence did it first arise. Its roots go deep into the ground : sown by the people and culti- vated by the family, it takes help from every hand, from men, from women, from children. The precarious, troubled life of those days of violence, made these poor folk imaginative, prone to believe in their own dreams, as being to them full of comfort : strange dreams withal, rich in marvels, in fooleries ; absurd, but charm- ing.
These families, isolated in forests and mountains, as we still see them in the Tyrol or the Higher Alps, and coming down thence but once a week, never wanted for illusions in the desert. One child had seen this, some woman had dreamed that. A new saint began to rise. The story went abroad in the shape of a ballad with doggrel rhymes. They sang and danced to it of an evening at the oak by the fountain. The priest, when he came on Sunday to perform service in the woodland chapel, found the legendary chant already in every mouth. He said to himself, "After all, history is good, is edifying. ... It does honour to the Church. Vox populi, vox Dei ! — But how did they light upon it ? " He could be shown the true, the irrefragable proofs of it in some tree or stone which had witnessed the apparition, had marked the miracle. What can he say to that ?
Brought back to the abbey, the tale will find a monk good for nothing, who can only write ; who is curious,
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR. S3
believes everything, no matter how marvellous. It is written out, broidered with his dull rhetoric, and spoilt a little. But now it has come forth, confirmed and consecrated, to be read in the refectory, ere long in the church. Copied, loaded and overloaded with orna- ments chiefly grotesque, it will go on from age to age, until at last it comes to take high rank in the Golden. Legend.
AVhen those fair stories are read again to us in these days, even as we listen to the simple, grave, artless airs into which those rural peoples threw all their young heart, we cannot help marking a great inspiration ; and we are moved to pity as we reflect upon their fate.
They had taken literally the touching advice of the Church : " Be ye as new-born babes/' But they gave to it a meaning, the very last that one would dream of finding in the original thought. As much, as Chris- tianity feared and hated Mature, even so mucli did these others cherish her, deeming her all guileless, hallow- ing her even in the legends wherewith they mingled her up.
Those hairy animals, as the Bible sharply calls them, animals mistrusted by the monks who fear to lind devils among them, enter in the most touching way into these beautiful stories ; as the hind, for instance, who refreshes and comforts Genevieve of Brabant.
Even outside the life of legends, in the common everyday world," the humble friends of his hearth, the
D
34 THE WITCH.
bold helpmates of his work, rise again in man's esteem. They have their own laws,* their own festivals. If in God's unbounded goodness there is room for the smallest creatures, if He seems to show them a pitying prefer- ence, " Wherefore/' says the countryman, "should my ass not have entered the church ? Doubtless, he has his faults, wherein he only resembles me the more. He is a rough worker, but has a hard head ; is intract- able, stubborn, headstrong; ill short, just like myself." Thence come those wonderful feasts, the fairest of the Middle Ages ; feasts of Innocents, of Fools, of the Ass. It is the people itself, moreover, which, in the shape of an ass, draws about its own image, presents itself before the altar, ugly, comical, abased. Verily, a touching sight ! Led by Balaam, he enters solemnly between Virgil and the Sibyl ;f enters that he may bear witness. If he kicked of yore against Balaam, it was that before him he beheld the sword of the an- cient law. But here the law is ended, and the world of grace seems opening its two-leaved gate to the mean and to the simple. The people innocently believes it
* See J. Grimm, Rechts Alterthiimer, and my Origuies du Droit.
t According to the ritual of Rouen. See Ducange on the words Festum and Kalendce : also Martene, iii. 110. The Sibyl was crowned and followed by Jews and Gentiles, by Moses, the Prophets, Nebuchadnezzar, <fec. From a very early time, and continually from the seventh to the seventeenth century, the Church strove to proscribe the great people's feasts of the Ass, of Innocents, of Children, and of Fools. It never succeeded until the advent of the modern spirit.
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR. 35
all. Thereon comes that lofty hymn, in which it says to the ass what it might have said to itself : —
"Down on knee and say Amen ! Grass and hay enough hast eaten. Leave the bad old ways, and go!
For the new expels the old : Shadows fly before the noon : Light hath hunted out the night."
How bold and coarse ye are ! Was it this we asked of you, children rash and wayward, when we told yo1 1 to be as children ? We offered you milk ; you arc- drinking wine. We led you softly, bridle in hand, along the narrow path. Mild and fearful, ye hesitated to go forward : and now, all at once, the bridle is broken ; the course is cleared at a single bound. Ah ! how foolish we were to let you make your own saints ; to dress out the altar ; to deck, to burden, to cover it up with flowers ! Why, it is hardly distinguishable ! And what we do see is the old heresy condemned of the Church, the innocence of nature : what am I saying? — a new heresy, not like to end to-morrow, the independ- ence of man.
Listen and obey ! — You are forbidden to invent, to create. No more legends, no more new saints : we have had enough of them. You are forbidden to in- troduce new chants in your worship : inspiration is not allowed. The martyrs you would bring to light should stay modestly within their tombs, waiting to be recog- nised by the Church. The clergy, the monks are
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36 THE WITCH.
forbidden to grant the tonsure of civil freedom to husbandmen and serfs. Such is the narrow fearful spirit that fills the Church of the Carlovingian days.* She unsays her words, she gives herself the lie, she says to the children, " Be old ! "
A fall indeed ! But is this earnest ? They had bidden us all be young. — Ah ! but priest and people are no longer one. A divorce without end begins, a gulf unpassable divides them for ever. The priest himself, a lord and prince, will come out in his golden cope, and chant in the royal speech of that great empire which is no more. ^ For ourselves, a mournful company, bereft of human speech, of the only speech that God would care to hear, what else can we do but low and bleat with the guileless friends who never scorn us, who, in winter-time will keep us warm in their stable, or cover us with their fleeces ? We will live with dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves.
In sooth there is less need than before for our going to church. But the church will not hold us free : she insists on our returning to hear what we no longer understand. Thenceforth a mighty fog, a fog heavy and dun as lead, enwraps the world. For how long ? For a whole millennium of horror. Throughout ten centuries, a languor unknown to all former times seizes upon the Middle Ages, even in part on those latter clays that come midway betwixt sleep and waking, and * See the Capitularies, passim.
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR. 37
holds them under the sway of a visitation most irk- some, most unbearable ; that convulsion, namely, of mental weariness, which men call a fit of yawning.
When the tireless bell rings at the wonted hours, they yawn ; while the nasal chant is singing in the old Latin words, they yawn. It is all foreseen, there is nothing to hope for in the world, everything will come round just the same as b«fore. The certainty of being bored to-morrow sets one yawning from to-day; and the long vista of wearisome days, of wearisome years to come, weighs men down, sickens them from the first with living. From brain to stomach, from stomach to mouth, the fatal fit spreads of its own accord, and keeps on distending the jaws without end or remedy. An actual disease the pious Bretons call it, ascribing it, however, to the malice of the Devil. He keeps crouch- ing in the woods, the peasants say : if anyone passes by tending his cattle, he sings to him vespers and other rites, until he is dead with yawning.*
To be old is to be weak. When the Saracens, when the Norsemen threaten us, what will come to us if the people remain old ? Charlemagne weeps, and the Church weeps too. She owns that her relics fail to
* An illustrious Breton, the last man of the Middle Ages, who had gone on a bootless errand to convert Rome, received there some brilliant offers. " What do you want ? " said the Pope. — " Only one thing : to have done with the Breviary."
38 THE WITCH.
guard her altars from these Barbarian devils.* Had she not better call upon the arm of that wayward child whom she was going to bind fast, the arm of that young giant whom she wanted to paralyse ? This movement in two opposite ways fills the whole ninth century. The people are held back, anon they are hurled forward : we fear them and we call on them for aid. With them and by means of them we throw up hasty barriers, defences that may check the Barbarians, while sheltering the priests and their saints escaped thither from their churches.
In spite of the Bald Emperor's f command not to build, there grows up a tower on the mountain. Thither comes the fugitive, crying, " In God's name, take me in, at least my wife and children ! Myself with my cattle will encamp in your outer enclosure." The tower emboldens him and he feels himself a man. It gives him shade, and he in his turn defends, protects his protector.
Formerly in their hunger the small folk yielded themselves to the great as serfs; but here how great the difference ! He offers himself as a vassal, one who would be called brave and valiant.J He gives himself up, and keeps himself, and reserves to himself the right of going elsewhere. " I will go further : the
* The famous avowal made by Hincmar. t Charles the Bald.— TRANS.
1 A difference too little felt by those who have spoken of the personal recommendation, &c.
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR. 39
earth is large : I, too, like the rest, can rear my tower yonder. If I have defended the outworks, I can surely look after myself within."
Thus nobly, thus grandly arose the feudal world. The master of the tower received his vassals with some such words as these : " Thou shalt go when thou wiliest, and if need be with my help ; at least, if thou shouldst sink in the mire, I myself will dismount to succour thee." These are the very words of the old formula.*
But, one day, what do I see ? Can my sight be grown dim ? The lord of the valley, as he rides a.bout, sets up bounds that none may overleap; ay, and limits that you cannot see. " What is that ? I don't understand." That means that the manor is shut in. "The lord keeps it all fast under gate and hinge, between heaven and earth."
Most horrible ! By virtue of what law is this vassus (or valiant one) held to his power ? People will there- on have it, that vassus may also mean slave. In like manner the word servus, meaning a servant, often indeed a proud one, even a Count or Prince of the Empire, comes in the case of the weak to signify a serf, a wretch whose life is hardly worth a halfpenny.
In this damnable net are they caught. But down yonder, on his ground, is a man who avers that his land is free, a freehold, a fief of the sun. Seated on his
* Grimm, Rechts Alterthumer, and my Origines du Droit.
40 THE WITCH.
boundary-stone, with hat pressed firmly down, he looks at Count or Emperor passing near. "Pass on, Em- peror ; go thy ways ! If thou art firm on thy horse, yet more am I on my pillar. Thou mayest pass, but so will not I : for I am Freedom."
But I lack courage to say what becomes of this man. The air grows thick around him : he breathes less and less freely." He seems to be under a spell : he cannot move : he is as one paralysed. .His very beasts grow thin, as if a charm had been thrown over them. His servants die of hunger. His land bears nothing now ; spirits sweep it clean by night.
Still he holds on : " The poor man is a king in his own house." But he is not to be let alone. He gets summoned, must answer for himself in the Imperial Court. So he goes, like an old-world spectre, whom no one knows any more. " What is he ?" ask the young. " Ah, he is neither a lord, nor a serf ! Yet even then is he nothing ? "
" Who am I ? I am he who built the first tower, he who succoured you, he who, leaving the tower, went boldly forth to meet the Norse heathens at the bridge. Yet more, I dammed the river, I tilled the meadow, creating the land itself by drawing it God-like out of the waters. From this land who shall drive me ? "
" No, my friend," says a neighbour — " you shall not be driven away. You shall till this land, but in a way you little think for. Remember, my good fellow, how in your youth, some fifty years ago, you were rash
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR. 4J
enough to wed my father's little serf/ Jacqueline. Remember the proverb, ' He who courts my hen is my cock/ You belong to my fowl-yard. Ungird your- self; throw away your sword! From this day forth you are my serf."
There is no invention here. The dreadful tale recurs incessantly during the Middle Ages. Ah, it was a sharp sword that stabbed him. I have abridged and suppressed much, for as often as one returns to these times, the same steel, the same sharp point, pierces right through the heart.
There was one among them who, under this gross insult, fell into so deep a rage that he could not bring up a single word. It was like Roland betrayed. -His blood all rushed upwards into his throat. His flaming eyes, his mouth so dumb, yet so fearfully eloquent, turned all the assembly pale. They started back. He was dead : his veins had burst. His arteries spurted the red blood over the faces of his murderers.*
The doubtful state of men's affairs, the frightfully slippery descent by which the freeman becomes a vassal, the vassal a servant, and the servant a serf, — • in these things lie the great terror of the Middle Ages,
* This befell the Count of Avesnes when his freehold was declared a mere fief, himself a mere vassal, a serf of the Earl of Hainault. Read, too, the dreadful story of the Great Chan- cellor of Flanders, the first magistrate of Bruges, who also was claimed as a serf. — Gualterius, Scriptores fierum Francicarum, viii. 334.
42 THE WITCH.
and the depth of their despair. There is no way of escape therefrom ; for he who takes one step is lost. He is an alien, a stray, a wild beast of the chase. The ground grows slimy to catch his feet, roots him, as he passes, to the spot. The contagion in the air kills him; he becomes a thing in mortmain, a dead crea- ture, a mere nothing, a beast, a soul worth twopence- halfpenny, whose murder can be atoned for by two- pence-halfpenny.
These are outwardly the two great leading traits in the wretchedness of the Middle Ages, through which they came to give themselves up to the Devil. Mean- while let us look within, and sound the innermost depths of their moral life.
CHAPTER III.
THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE.
THERE is an air of dreaming about those earlier cen- turies of the Middle Ages, in which the legends were self-conceived. Among countryfolk so gently sub- missive, as these legends show them, to the Church, you would readily suppose that very great innocence might be found. This is surely the temple of God the Father. And yet the penitentiaries, wherein re- ference is made to ordinary sins, speak of strange defilements, of things afterwards rare enough under the rule of Satan.
These sprang from two causes, from the utter igno- rance of the times, and from the close intermingling of near kindred under one roof. They seem to have had but a slight acquaintance with our modern ethics. Those of their day, all counterpleas notwithstanding, resemble the ethics of the patriarchs, of that far anti- quity which regarded marriage with a stranger as immoral, and allowed only of marriage amongst kins- folk. The families thus joined together became as one. Not daring to scatter over the surrounding deserts, tilling only the outskirts of a Merovingian palace or a monastery, they took shelter every evening under the roof of a large homestead (villa). Thence
44 THE WITCH.
arose unpleasant points of analogy with the ancient ergastulum, where the slaves of an estate were all crammed together. Many of these communities lasted through and even beyond the Middle Ages. About the results of such a system the lord would feel very little concern. To his eyes but one family was visible in all this tribe, this multitude of people " who rose and lay down together, . . . who ate together of the same bread, and drank out of the same mug/'
Amidst such confusion the woman was not much regarded. Her place was by no means lofty. If the virgin, the ideal woman, rose higher from age to age, the real woman was held of little worth among these boorish masses, in this medley of men and herds. Wretched was the doom of a condition which could only change with the growth of separate dwellings, when men at length took courage to live apart in hamlets, or to build them huts in far-off forest-clearings, amidst the fruitful fields they had gone out to cultivate. From the lonely hearth comes the true family. It is the nest that forms the bird. Thenceforth they were no more things, but men ; for then also was the woman born.
It was a very touching moment, the day she entered her own home. Then at last the poor wretch might become pure and holy. There, as she sits spinning alone, while her goodman is in the forest, she may brood on some thought and dream away. Her damp, ill-fastened cabin, through which keeps whistling the
THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE. 45
winter wind, is still, by way of a recompense, calm and silent. In it are sundry dim corners where the housewife lodges her dreams.
And by this time she has some property, something of her own. The distaff, the bed, and the trunk., are all she has, according to the old song.* We may add a table, a seat, perhaps two stools. A poor dwelling and very bare ; but then it is furnished with a living soul ! The fire cheers her, the blessed box-twigs guard her bed, accompanied now and again by a pretty bunch of vervein. Seated by her door, the lady of this palace spins and watches some sheep. We are not yet rich enough to keep a cow; but to that we may come in time, if Heaven will bless our house. The wood, a bit of pasture, and some bees about our ground — such is our way of life ! But little corn is cultivated as yet, there being no assurance of a harvest so long of coming. Such a life, however needy, is anyhow less hard for the woman : she is not broken down and withered, as she will be in the days of large farming. And she has more leisure withal. You must never judge of her by the coarse literature of the Fabliaux and the Christmas Carols, by the foolish laughter and license of the filthy tales we have to put
* " Trois pas du c6te du bane, Et trois pas du cote du lit ; Trois pas du c6te du cofire,
Et trois pas Revenez ici."
(Old Sony of the Dancing Master.)
46 THE WITCH.
up with by and by. She is alone; without a neigh- bour. The bad, unwholesome life of the dark, little, walled towns, the mutual spyings, the wretched dan- gerous gossipings, have not yet begun. No old woman comes of an evening, when the narrow street is growing dark, to tempt the young maiden by saying how for the love of her somebody is dying. She has no friend but her own reflections ; she converses only with her beasts or the tree in the forest.
Such things speak to her, we know of what. They recall to her mind the saws once uttered by her mother and grandmother ; ancient saws handed down for ages from woman to woman. They form a harmless re- minder of the old country spirits, a touching family religion which doubtless had little power in the blus- tering hurly-burly of a great common dwellinghousej but now comes baek again to haunt the lonely cabin.
It is a singular, a delicate world of fays and hob- goblins, made for a woman's soul. When the great creation of the saintly Legend gets stopped arid dried up, that other older, more poetic legend comes in for its share of welcome; reigns privily with gentle sway. It is the woman's treasure; she worships and caresses it. The fay, too, is a woman, a fantastic mirror wherein she sees herself in a fairer guise.
Who were these fays ? Tradition says, that of yore some Gaulish queens, being proud and fanciful, did on the coming of Christ and His Apostles behave so inso- lently as to turn their backs upon them. In Brittany
THE LITTLE DEVIL OP THE FIRESIDE. 47
they Avere dancing at the moment, and never stopped dancing. Hence their hard doom; they are con- demned to live until the Day of Judgment.* Many of them were turned into mice or rabbits ; as the Kow- riggwans for instance, or Elves, who meeting at night round the old Druidic stones entangle you in their dances. The same fate befell the pretty Queen Mab, who made herself a royal chariot out of a walnut-shell. They are all rather whimsical, and sometimes ill- humoured. But can we be surprised at them, remem- bering their woeful lot ? Tiny and odd as they are, they have a heart, a longing to be loved. They are good and they are bad and full of fancies. On the birth of a baby they come down the chimney, to endow it and order its future. They are fond of good spin- ning-women— they even spin divinely themselves. Do we not talk of spinning like a fairy ?
The fairy-tales, stripped of the absurd embellishments in which the latest compilers muffled them up, express the heart of the people itself. They mark a poetic interval between the gross communism of the primitive villa, and the looseness of the time when a growing burgess-class made our cynical Fabliaux.f
These tales have an historical side, reminding us, in
the ogres, &c., of the great famines. But commonly
* All passages bearing on this point have been gathered
together in two learned works by M. Maury (Les Fees, 1843 ;
and La Macjie, I860). See also Grimm.
t A body of tales by the Trouveres of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. — TBANS.
48 THE WITCH.
they soar higher than any history, on the Blue Bird's wing, in a realm of eternal poesy; telling us our wishes which never vary, the unchangeable history of the heart.
The poor serf's longing to breathe, to rest, to find a treasure that may end his sufferings, continually re- turns. More often, through a lofty aspiration, this treasure becomes a soul as well, a treasure of love asleep, as in The Sleeping Beauty : but not seldom the charming person finds herself by some -fatal enchant- ment hidden under a mask. Hence that touching tri- logy, that admirable crescendo of Riquel with the Tuft, Ass's Skin, and Beauty and the Beast. Love will not be discouraged. Through all that ugliness it follows after and gains the hidden beauty. In the last of these tales that feeling touches the sublime, and I think that no one has ever read it without weeping.
A passion most real, most sincere, lurks beneath it — that unhappy, hopeless love, which unkind nature often sets between poor souls of very different ranks in life. On the one hand is the grief of the peasant maid at not being able to make herself fair enough to win the cavalier's fancy ; on the other the smothered sighs of the serf, when along his furrow he sees passing, on a white horse, too exquisite a glory, the beautiful, the majestic Lady of the Castle. So in the East arises the mournful idyll of the impossible loves of the Rose and the Nightingale. Nevertheless, there is one great difference : the bird and the flower are both
THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE. 49
beautiful ; nay, are alike in their beauty. But here the humbler being, doomed to a place so far below, avows to himself that he is ugly and monstrous. But amidst his wailing he feels in himself a power greater than the East can know. With the will of a hero, through the very greatness of his desire, he breaks out of his idle coverings. He loves so much, this mon- ster, that he is loved, and, in return, through that love grows beautiful.
An infinite tenderness pervades it all. This soul enchanted thinks not of itself alone. It busies itself in saving all nature and all society as well. Victims of every kind, the child beaten by its step-mother, the youngest sister slighted, ill-used by her elders, are the surest objects of its liking. Even to the Lady of the Castle does its compassion extend j it mourns her fallen into the hands of so fierce a lord as Blue-Beard. It yearns with pity towal'ds the beasts ; it seeks to console them for being still in the shape of animals. Let them be patientj and their day will come. Some day their prisoned souls shall put on wings, shall be free, lovely, and beloved. This is the other side of Ass's Skin and such like stories. There especially we are sure of finding a woman's heart. The rude labourer in the fields may be hard enough to his beasts, but to the woman they are no beasts. She regards them with the feeling of a child. To her fancy all is human, all is soul : the whole world becomes ennobled. It is a beau- tiful enchantment. Humble as she is, and ugly as she
E
50 THE WITCH.
thinks herself, she has given all her beauty, all her grace to the surrounding universe.
Is she, then, so ugly, this little peasant-wife, whose dreaming fancy feeds on things like these ? I tell you she keeps house, she spins and minds the flock, she visits the forest to gather a little wood. As yet she has neither the hard work nor the ugly looks of the countrywoman as afterwards fashioned by the prevalent culture of grain crops. Nor is she like the fat towns- wife, heavy and slothful, about whom our fathers made such a number of fat stories. She has no sense of safety ; she is meek and timid, and feels herself, as it were, in God's hand. On yonder hill she can see the dark frowning castle, whence a thousand harms may come upon her. Her husband she holds in equal fear and honour. A serf elsewhere, by her side he is a king. For him she saves of her best, living herself on nothing. She is small and slender like the women- saints of the Church. The poor feeding of those days must needs make women fine-bred, but lacking also in vital strength. The children die off in vast numbers : those pale roses are all nerves. Hence, will presently burst forth the epileptic dances of the four- teenth century. Meanwhile, towards the twelfth cen- tury, there come to be two weaknesses attached to this state of half-grown youth : by night somnambulism ; in the daytime seeing of visions, trance, and the gift of tears.
THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE. 51
This woman, for all her innocence, still has a secret which the Church may never be told. Locked up in her heart she bears the pitying remembrance of those poor old gods who have fallen into the state of spirits ; * and spirits, you must, know, are not exempt from suffering. Dwelling in rocks, and in hearts of oak, they are very unhappy in winter ; being particu- larly fond of warmth. They ramble about houses; they are sometimes seen in stables warming themselves beside the beasts. Bereft of incense and burnt-offer- ings, they sometimes take of the milk. The house- wife being thrifty, will not stint her husband, but. lessens her own share, and in the evening leaves a little cream.
Those spirits who only appear at night, regret their banishment from the day and are greedy of lamplight. By night the housewife starts on her perilous trip, bearing a small lantern, to the great oak where they dwell, or to the secret fountain whose mirror, as it multiplies the flame, may cheer up those sorrowful outlaws.
But if anyone should know of it, good heavens !
* This loyalty of hers is very touching indeed. In the fifth century the peasants braved persecution by parading the gods of the old religion in the shape of small dolls made of linen or flour. Still the same in the eighth century. The Capitularies threaten death in vain. In the twelfth century, Burchard, of Worms, attests their inutility. In 1389, the Sorbonne inveighs against certain traces of heathenism, while in 1400, Gerson talks of it as still a lively superstition.
E 2
52 THE WITCH.
Her husband is canny and fears the Church : he would certainly give her a beating. The priest wages fierce war with the sprites, and hunts them out of every place. Yet he might leave them their dwelling in the oaks ! What harm can they do in the forest ? Alas ! no-: from council to council they are hunted down. On set days the priest will go even to the oak, and with prayers and holy water drive away the spirits.
How would it be if no kind soul took pity on them ? This woman, however, will take them under her care. She is an excellent Christian, but will keep for them one corner of her heart. To them alone can she entrust those little natural affairs, which, harmless as they are in a chaste wife/s dwelling, the Church at any rate would count as blameworthy. They are the confidants, the confessors of these touching wo- manly secrets. Of them she thinks, when she puts the holy log on the fire. It is Christmastide ; but also is it the ancient festival of the Northern spirits, the Feast of the Longest Night. So, too, the Eve of May-day is the Pervigilium of Maia, when the tree is planted. So, too, with the Eve of St. John, the true feast-day of life, of flowers, and newly-awakened love. She who has no children makes it her especial duty to cherish these festivals, and to offer them a deep devotion. A vow to the Virgin would perhaps be of little avail, it being no concern of Mary's. In a low whisper, she prefers addressing some ancient genius, worshipped in other days as a rustic deity, ar,d
THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE. 53
afterwards by the kindness of some local church trans- formed into a saint.* And thus it happens that the bed, the cradle, all the sweetest mysteries on which the chaste and loving soul can brood, belong to the olden gods.
Nor are the sprites ungrateful. One day she awakes, and without having stirred a finger, finds all her house- keeping done. In her amazement she makes the sign of the cross and says nothing. When the good man goes she questions herself, but in vain. It must have been a spirit. " What can it be ? How came it here ? How I should like to see it! But I am afraid: they say it is death to see a spirit." — Yet the cradle moves and swings of itself. She is clasped by some one, and a voice so soft, so low that she took it for her own, is heard saying, "Dearest mistress, I love to rock your babe, because I am myself a babe." Her heart beats, and yet she takes courage a little. The innocence of the cradle gives this spirit also an innocent air, causing her to believe it good, gentle, suffered at least by God.
From that day forth she is no longer alone. She readily feels its presence, and it is never far from her. It rubs her gown, and she hears the grazing. It ram- bles momently about her, and plainly cannot leave her
* A. Maury, Magie, 159.
54 THE WITCH.
side. If she goes to the stable, it is there; and she believes that the other day it was in the churn.*
Pity she cannot take it up and look at it ! Once, when she suddenly touched the brands, she fancied she saw the tricksy little thing tumbling about in the sparks ; another time she missed catching it in a rose. Small as it is, it works, sweeps, arranges, saves her a thousand cares.
It has its faults, however; is giddy, bold, and if she did not hold it fast, might perhaps shake itself free. It observes and listens too much. It repeats sometimes of a morning some little word she had whispered very, very softly on going to bed, when the light was put out. She knows it to be very indiscreet, exceedingly curious. She is irked with feeling herself always followed about, complains of it, and likes complaining. Sometimes, having threatened him and turned him off, she feels herself quite at ease. But just then she finds herself caressed by a light breathing, as it were a bird's wing. He was under a leaf. He laughs : his gentle voice, free from mocking, declares the joy he felt in taking his chaste young mistress by surprise. On her making a
* This is a favourite haunt of the little rogue's. To this day the Swiss, knowing his tastes, make him a present of some milk. His name among them is troll (dr6le) ; among the Ger- mans Jcobold, nix. In France he is called follet, goblin, hitin ; in England, Puck, Robin Ooodfellow. Shakespeare says, he does sleepy servants the kindness to pinch them black and blue, in order to rouse them.
THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE. 55
show of great wrath, " No, my darling, my little pet," says the monkey, " you are not a bit sorry to have me here."
She feels ashamed and dares say nothing more. But she guesses now that she loves him overmuch. She has scruples about it, and loves him yet more. All night she seems to feel him creeping up to her bed. In her fear she prays to God, and keeps close to her husband. What shall she do ? She has not the strength to tell the Church. She tells her husband, who laughs at first incredulously. Then she owns to a little more, — what a madcap the goblin is, sometimes even overbold. "What matters? He is so small." Thus he himself sets her mind at ease.
Should we too feel reassured, we who can see more clearly ? She is quite innocent still. She would shrink from copying the great lady up there who, in the face of her husband, has her court of lovers and her page. Let us own, however, that to that point the goblin has already smoothed the way. One could not have a more perilous page than he who hides himself under a rose ; and, moreover, he smacks of the lover. More intru- sive than anyone else, he is so tiny that he can creep anywhere.
He glides even into the husband's heart, paying him court and winning his good graces. He looks after his tools, works in his garden, and of an evening, by way of reward, curls himself up in the chimney, behind the babe and the cat. They hear his small voice, just
56 THE WITCH.
like a cricket's ; but they never see much of him, save when a faint glimmer lights a certain cranny in which he loves to stay. Then they see, or think they see, a thin little face ; and cry out, " Ah ! little one, we have seen you at last ! "
In church they are told to mistrust the spirits, for even one that seems innocent, and glides about like a light breeze, may after all be a devil. They take good care not to believe it. His size begets a belief in his innocence. Whilst he is there, they thrive. The hus- band holds to him as much as the wife, and perhaps more. He sees that the tricksy little elf makes the fortune of the house.
CHAPTER IV.
TEMPTATIONS.
I HAVE kept 'this picture clear of those dreadful shadows of the hour by which it would have been sadly overdarkened. I refer especially to the uncer- tainty attending the lot of these rural households, to their constant fear and foreboding of some casual outrage which might at any moment descend on them from the castle.
There were just two things which made the feudal rule a hell : on one hand, its exceeding steadfastness, man being nailed, as it were, to the ground, and emigration made impossible; on the other, a very great degree of uncertainty about his lot.
The optimist historians who say so much about fixed rents, charters, buying of immunities, forget how slightly all this was guaranteed. So much you were bound to pay the lord, but all the rest he could take if he chose ; and this was very fitly called the right of seizure. You may work and work away, my good fellow ! But while you are in the fields, yon dreaded band from the castle will fall upon your house and carry off whatever they please "for their lord's ser- vice."
58 THE WITCH.
Look again at that man standing with his head bowed gloomily over the furrow ! And thus he is always found, his face clouded, his heart oppressed, as if he were expecting some evil news. Is he meditating some wrongful deed ? No ; but there are two ideas haunting him, two daggers piercing him in turn. The one is, " In what state shall I find my house this evening ? " The other, " Would that the turn- ing up of this sod might bring some treasure to light ! 0 that the good spirit would help to buy us free ! "
We are assured that, after the fashion of the Etruscan spirit which one day started up from under the ploughshare in the form of a child, a dwarf or gnome of the tiniest stature would sometimes on such an appeal come forth from the ground, and, setting itself on the furrow, would say, "What wantest thou ? " But in his amazement the poor man would ask for nothing; he would turn pale, cross himself, and pre- sently go quite away.
Did he never feel sorry afterwards ? Said he never to himself, " Fool that you are, you will always be un- lucky ? " I readily believe he did ; but I also think that a barrier of dread invincible stopped him short. I cannot believe with the monks who have told us all things concerning witchcraft, that the treaty with Satan was the light invention of a miser or a man in love. On the contrary, nature and good sense alike inform us that it was only the last resource of an over-
TEMPTATIONS. 59
whelming despair, under the weight of dreadful out- rages and dreadful sufferings.
But those great sufferings, we aretold,must have been greatly lightened about the time of St. Louis, who for- bade private wars among the nobles. My own opinion is quite the reverse. During the fourscore or hundred years that elapsed between his prohibition and the wars with England (1240-1340), the great lords being debarred from the accustomed sport of burning and plundering their neighbours' lands, became a terror to their own vassals. For the latter such a peace was simply war.
The spiritual, the monkish lords, and others, as shown in the Journal of Eudes Rigault, lately pub- lished, make one shudder. It is a repulsive picture of profligacy at once savage and uncontrolled. The monkish lords especially assail the nunneries. The austere Rigault, Archbishop of Rouen, confessor of the holy king, conducts a personal inquiry into the state of .Normandy. Every evening he comes to e monastery. In all of them he finds the monks leading the life of great feudal lords, wearing arms, getting drunk, fight- ing duels, keen huntsmen over all the cultivated land ; the nuns living among them in wild confusion, and betraying everywhere the fruits of their shameless deeds.
. If things are so in the Church, what must the lay lords have been ? What like was the inside of those
CO THE \VITCII.
dark towers which the folk below regarded with so much horror ? Two tales, undoubtedly historical, namely, Blue-Beard and Griselda, tell us something thereanent. To his vassals, his serfs, what indeed must have been this devotee of torture who treated his own family in such a way ? He is known to us through the only man who was brought to trial for such deeds ; and that not earlier than the fifteenth century, — Gilles de Retz, who kidnapped children.
Sir Walter Scott's Front de Bceuf, and the other lords of melodramas and romances, are but poor crea- tures in the face of these dreadful realities. The Templar also in Ivanhoe, is a weak artificial conception. The author durst not assay the foul reality of celibate life in the Temple, or within the castle walls. Few women were taken in there, being accounted not worth their keep. The romances of chivalry altogether belie the truth. It is remarkable, indeed, how often the literature of an age expresses the very opposite of its manners, as, for instance, the washy theatre of eclogues after Florian,* during the years of the Great Terror.
The rooms in these castles, in such at least as may be seen to-day, speak more plainly than any books. Men-at-arms, pages, footmen, crammed together of nights under low-vaulted roofs, in the daytime kept on the battlements, on narrow terraces, in a state of most
* A writer of eclogues, fables and dramas ; in youth a friend of Voltaire, afterwards imprisoned during the Terror. — TRANS.
TEMPTATIONS. 61
sickening weariness, lived only in their pranks down below ; in feats no longer of arms on the neighbouring domains, but of hunting, ay, and hunting of men; insults, I may say, without number, outrages untold on families of serfs. The lord himself well knew that such an army of men, without women, could only be kept in order by letting them loose from time to time.
The awful idea of a hell wherein God employs the very guiltiest of the wicked spirits to torture the less guilty delivered over to them for their sport, — this lovely dogma of the Middle Ages was exemplified to the last letter. Men felt that God was not among them. Each new raid betokened more and more clearly the kingdom of Satan, until men came to be- lieve that thenceforth their prayers should be offered to him alone.
Up in the castle there was laughing and joking. " The women-serfs were too ugly." There is no ques- tion raised as to their beauty. The great pleasure lay in deeds of outrage, in striking and making them weep. Even in the seventeenth century the great ladies died with laughing, when the Duke of Lorraine told them how, in peaceful villages, his people went about harrying and torturing all the women, even to the old.
These outrages fell most frequently, as we might suppose, on families well to do and comparatively dis- tinguished among the serfs; the families, namely, of those serf-born mayors, who already in the twelfth century appear at the head of the village. By the
62 THE WITCH.
nobles they were hated, jeered, cruelly plagued. Their new-born moral dignity was not to be forgiven. Their wives and daughters were not allowed to be good and wise : they had no right to be held in any respect. Their honour was not their own. Serfs of the body, such was the cruel phrase cast for ever in their teeth.
In days to come people will be slow to believe, that the law among Christian nations went beyond any- thing decreed concerning the olden slavery; that it wrote down as an actual right the most grievous out- rage that could ever wound man's heart. The lord spiritual had this foul privilege no less than the lord temporal. In a parish outside Bourges, the parson, as being a lord, expressly claimed the firstfruits of the bride, but was willing to sell his rights to the husband.*
It has been too readily believed that this wrong was formal, not real. But the price laid down in certain countries for getting a dispensation, exceeded the means of almost every peasant. In Scotland, for instance, the demand was for " several cows : " a price immense, impossible. So the poor young wife was at their mercy. Besides, the Courts of Beam openly maintain that this right grew up naturally : " The eldest -born of the peasant is accounted the son of his lord, for he perchance it was who begat him."f
* Lauriere, ii. 100 (on the word Narquette). Michelet, Origines du Droit, 264.
t When I published my Origiiws ia 1837, I could not have known this work, published ia 1842.
TEMPTATIONS. 63
All feudal customs, even if we pass over this,, compel the bride to go up to the castle, bearing thither the "wedding-dish." Surely it was a cruel thing to make her trust herself amongst such a pack of celibate dogs, so shameless and so ungovernable.
A shameful scene we may well imagine it to have been. As the young husband is leading his bride to the castle, fancy the laughter of cavaliers and footmen, the frolics of the pages around the wretched poor ! But the presence of the great lady herself will check them ? Not at all. The lady in whose delicate breeding the romances tell us to believe,* but who, in her hus- band's absence, ruled his men, judging, chastising, ordaining penalties, to whom her husband himself was bound by the fiefs she brought him, — such a lady would be in no wise merciful, especially towards a girl- serf who' happened also to be good-looking. Since, according to the custom of those days, she openly kept her gentleman and her page, she would not be sorry to sanction her own libertinism by that of her husband.
Nothing will she do to hinder the fun, the sport they are making out of you poor trembler who has come to redeem his bride. They begin by bargaining with him ; they laugh at the pangs endured by " the miserly peasant ; " they suck the very blood and marrow of him. Why all this fury ? Because he is neatly clad ;
* This delicacy appears in the treatment these ladies in- flicted on their poet Jean de Meting, author of the Roman de la Rose.
G4 THE WITCH.
is honest, settled; is a man of mark in the village. Why, indeed? Because she is pious, chaste, and pure; because she loves him ; because she is frightened and falls a-weeping. Her sweet eyes plead for pity.
In vain does the poor wretch offer all he has, even to her dowry : it is all too little. Angered at such cruel injustice, he will say perhaps that " his neighbour paid nothing." The insolent fellow ! he would argue with us ! Thereon they gather round him, a yelling mob : sticks and brooms pelt upon him like hail. They jostle him, they throw him down. " You jealous villain, you Lent-faced villain!" they cry; "no one takes your wife from you ; you shall have her back to- night, and to enhance the honour done you . . . your eldest child will be a baron ! " Everyone looks out of window at the absurd figure of this dead man in wedding garments. He is followed by "bursts of laughter, and the noisy rabble, down to the lowest scullion, give chase to the " cuckold."*
The poor fellow would have burst, had he nothing to hope for from the Devil. By himself he returns : is the house empty as well as desolate ? No, there is
* The old tales are very sportive, but rather monotonous. They turn on three jokes only: the despair of the cuckold, the cries of the beaten, the wry faces of the hanged. The first is amusing, the second laughable, the third, as crown of all, makes people split their sides. And the three have one point in common : it is the weak and helpless who is ill-used.
TEMPTATIONS. C5
company waiting for him there : by the fireside sits Satan.
But soon his bride comes back, poor wretch, all pale and undone. Alas ! alas ! for her condition. At his feet she throws herself and craves forgiveness. Then, with a bursting heart, he flings his arms round her neck. He weeps, he sobs, he roars, till the house shakes again.
But with her comes back God. For all her suffer- ing, she is pure, innocent, holy still. Satan for that nonce will get no profit : the treaty is not yet ripe.
Our silly Fabliaux, our absurd tales, assume with regard to this deadly outrage and all its further issues, that the woman sides with her oppressors against her husband ; they would have us believe that her brutal treatment by the former makes her happy and trans- ports her with delight. A likely thing indeed ! Doubtless she might be seduced by rank, politeness, elegant manners. But no pains are ever taken to that end. Great would be the scoffing at anyone who made true-love's wooing towards a serf. The whole gang of men, to the chaplain, the butler, even the footmen, would think they honoured her by deeds of outrage. The smallest page thought himself a great lord, if he only seasoned his love with insolence and blows.
One day, the poor woman, having just been ill- treated during her husband's absence, begins weeping,
66 THE WITCH.
and saying quite aloud, the while she is tying up her long hair, " Ah, those unhappy saints of the woods, what boots it to offer them my vows ? Are they deaf, or have they grown .too old ? Why have I not some protecting spirit, strong and mighty — wicked even, if it need be ? Some such I see in stone at the church- door ; but what do they there ? Why do they not go to their proper dwelling, the castle, to carry off and roast those sinners ? Oh, who is there will give me power and might ? I would gladly give myself in exchange. -Ah, me, what is it I would give ? What have I to give on my side ? Nothing is left me. Out on this body, out on this soul, a mere cinder now ! Why, instead of this useless goblin, have I not some spirit, great, strong, and mighty, to help me ? "
" My darling mistress ! If I am small, it is your fault ; and bigger I cannot grow. And besides, if I were very big, neither you nor your husband would have borne with me. You would have driven me away with your priests and your holy water. I can be strong, however, if you please. For, mistress mine, the spirits in themselves are neither great nor small, neither weak nor strong. For him who wishes it, the smallest can become a giant."
" In what way ? "
" Why, nothing can be simpler. • To make him a giant, you must grant him only one gift."
" What is that ? "
" A lovely woman-soul."
TEMPTATIONS. 67
" Ah, wicked one ! What then art thou, and what \vouldst thou have ? "
" Only what you give me every day. . . . Would you be better than the lady up yonder? She has pledged her soul to her husband and to her lover, and yet she yields it whole to her page. I am more than a page to you, more than a servant. In how many matters have I not been your little handmaid ! Do not blush, nor be angry. Let me only say, that I am all about you, and already perhaps in you. Else, how could I know your thoughts, even those which you hide from yourself ? "Who am I, then ? Your little soul, which speaks thus openly to the great one. We are inseparable. Do you know how long I have been with you ? Some thousand years, for I belonged to your mother, to hers, to your ancestors. I am the Spirit of the Fireside."
" Tempter ! What wilt thou do ? "
" Why, thy husband shall be rich, thyself mighty, and men shall fear thee."
"Where am I? Surely thou art the demon of hidden treasures !"
" Why call me demon, if I do deeds of justice, of goodness, of piety ? God cannot be everywhere — He cannot be always working. Sometimes He likes to rest, leaving us other spirits here to carry on the smaller husbandry, to remedy the ills which his pro- vidence passed over, which his justice forgot to handle.
F 2
68 THE WITCH.
" Of this your husband is an example. Poor, de- serving workman, he is killing himself and gaining nought in return. Heaven has had no time to look after him. But I, though rather jealous of him, still love my kind host. I pity him : his strength is going, he can bear up no longer. He will die, like your chil- dren, already dead of misery. This winter he was ill ; what will become of him the next ? "
Thereon, her face in her hands, she wept two, three hours, and even more. And when she had poured out all her tears — her bosom still throbbing hard — the other said, " I ask nothing : only, I pray, save him."
She had promised nothing, but from that hour she became his.
CHAPTER V.
POSSESSION.
A DREADFUL age was the age of gold; for thus do I call that hard time when gold first came into use. This was in the year 1300, during the reign of that Pair King * who never spake a word ; the great king who seemed to have a dumb devil, but a devil with mighty arm, strong enough, to burn the Temple, long enough to reach Rome, and with glove of iron to deal the first good blow at the Pope.
Gold thereupon becomes a great pope, a mighty god, and not without cause. The movement began in Europe with the Crusades : the only wealth men cared for was that which having wings could lend itself to their enterprise ; the wealth, namely, of swift exchanges. To strike blows afar off the king wants nothing but gold. An army of gold, a fiscal army, spreads over all the land. The lord, who has brought back with him his dreams of the East, is always longing for its wonders, for damascened armour, carpets, spices, valuable steeds. For all such things
* Philip the Fair of France, who put down the Templar in Paris, and first secured the liberties of the Gallican Church. — TRANS.
70 THE WITCH.
he needs gold. He pushes away with his foot the serf who brings him corn. " That is not all ; I want
gold ! "
On that day the world was changed. Theretofore
in the midst of much evil there had always been a harmless certainty about the tax. According as the year was good or bad, the rent followed the course of nature and the measure of the harvest. If the lord said, " This is little," he was answered, " My lord, Heaven has granted us no more."
But the gold, alas ! where shall we find it ? We have no army to seize it in the towns of Flanders. Where shall we dig the ground to win him his trea- sure ? Oh, that the spirit of hidden treasures would be our guide ! *
* The devils trouble the world all through the Middle Ages ; but not before the thirteenth century does Satan put on a settled shape. " Compacts" says M. Maury, " are very rare before that epoch ;" and I believe him. How could they treat with one who as yet had no real existence 1 Neither of the treating parties was yet ripe for the contract. Before the will could be reduced to the dreadful pass of selling itself for ever, it must be made thoroughly desperate. It is not the unhappy who falls into despair, but the truly wretched, who being quite conscious of his misery, and having yet more to suffer, can find no escape therefrom. The wretched in this way are the men of the fourteenth century, from whom they ask a thing so impossible as payments in gold. In this and the following chapter I have touched on the circumstances, the feelings, the growing despair, which brought about the enormity of compacts, and, worse still than these, the dreadful character of the Witch. If the name was freely used, the thing itself was then rare,
POSSESSION. 71
While all are desperate, the woman with the goblin is already seated on her sacks of corn in the little neighbouring village. She is alone, the rest being still at their debate in the village.
She sells at her own price. But even when the rest come up, everything favours her, some strange magical allurement working on her side. No one bargains with her. Her husband, before his time, brings his rent in good sounding coin to the feudal elm. " Amazing ! " they all say, " but the Devil is in her ! "
They laugh, but she does not. She is sorrowful and afraid. In vain she tries to pray that night. Strange prickings .disturb her slumber. Fantastic forms appear before her. The small gentle sprite seems to have grown imperious. He waxes bold. She is uneasy, indignant, eager to rise. In her sleep she groans, and feels herself dependent, saying, " No more do I belong to myself ! "
" Here is a sensible countryman," says the lord ;
being no less than a marriage and a kind of priesthood. For ease of illustration, I have joined together the details of so delicate a scrutiny by a thread of fiction. The outward body of it matters little. The essential point is to remember that such things were not caused, as they try to persuade us, by human fickleness, by the inconstancy of our fallen nature, by the chance persuasions of desire. There was needed the deadly pressure of an age of iron, of cruel needs : it was needful that Hell itself should seem a shelter, an asylum, by contrast with the hell belovr.
72 THE WITCH.
"he pays beforehand ! You charm me : do you know accounts ? "— " A little."— " Well then, you shall reckon with these folk. Every Saturday you shall sit under the elm and receive their money. On Sunday, before mass, you shall bring it up to the castle."
What a change in their condition ! How the wife's heart beats when of a Saturday she sees her poor workman, serf though he be, seated like a lordling under the baronial shades. At first he feels giddy, but in time acccustoms himself to put on a grave air. It is no joking matter, indeed ; for the lord com- mands them to show him due respect. When he has gone up to the castle, and the jealous ones look like laughing and designing to pay him off, " You see that battlement," says the lord, " the rope you don't see, but it is also ready. The first man who touches him shall be set up there high and quick."
This speech is repeated from one to another; until it has spread around these two as it were an atmo- sphere of terror. Everybody doffs his hat to them, bowing very low indeed. But when they pass by, folk stand aloof, and get out of the way. In order to shirk them they turn up cross roads, with backs bended, with eyes turned carefully down. Such a change makes them first savage, but afterwards sor- rowful. They walk alone through all the district. The wife's shrewdness marks- the hostile scorn of the
POSSESSION. 73
castle, the trembling hate of those below. She feels herself fearfully isolated between two perils. No one to defend her but her lord, or rather the money they pay him : but then to find that money, to spur on the peasant's slowness, and overcome his sluggish anta- gonism, to snatch somewhat even from him who has nothing, what hard pressure, what threats, what cruelty, must be employed ! This was never in the goodman's line of business. The wife brings him to the mark by dint of much pushing : she says to him, "Be rough; at need be cruel. Strike hard. Other- wise you will fall short of your engagements ; and then we are undone."
This suffering by day, however, is a trifle in com- parison with the tortures of the- night. She seems to have lost the power of sleeping. She gets up, walks to and fro, and roams about the house. All is still ; and yet how the house is altered ; its old innocence, its sweet security all for ever gone ! " Of what is that cat by the hearth a-thinking, as she pretends to sleep, and 'tweenwhiles opens her green eyes upon me ? The she-goat with her long beard, looking so discreet and ominous, knows more about it than she can tell. And yon cow which the moon reveals by glimpses in her stall, why does she give me such a sidelong look ? All this is surely unnatural ! "
Shivering, she returns to her husband's side. " Happy man, how deep his slumber ! Mine is over ; I cannot sleep, I never shall sleep again." In time,
74 THE WITCH.
however, she falls off. But oh, what suffering visits her then ! The importunate guest is beside her, de- manding and giving his orders. If one while she gets rid of him by praying or making the sign of the cross, anon he returns under another form. "Get back, devil ! What durst thou ? I am a Christian soul. No, thou shalt not touch me ! "
In revenge he puts on a hundred hideous forms ; twining as an adder about her bosom, dancing as a frog upon her stomach, anon like a bat, sharp-snouted, cover- ing her scared mouth with dreadful kisses. What is it he wants ? To drive her into a corner, so that conquered and crushed at last, she may yield and utter the word " Yes." Still she is resolute to say " No." Still she is bent on braving the cruel struggles of every night, the endless martyrdom of that wasting strife.
" How far can a spirit make himself withal a body ? What reality can there be in his efforts and approaches ? Would she be sinning in the flesh, if she allowed the intrusions of one who was always roaming about her ? Would that be sheer adultery?" Such was the sly roundabout way in which sometimes he stayed and weakened her resistance. " If I am only a breath, a smoke, a thin air, as so many doctors call me, why are you afraid, poor fearful soul, and how does it concern your husband ? "
It is the painful doom of the soul in. these Middle Ages, that a number of questions which to us would
POSSESSION. 75
seem idle, questions of pure scholastics, disturb, frighten, and torment it, taking the guise of visions, sometimes of devilish debatings, of cruel dialogues carried on within. The Devil, fierce as he shows him- self in the demoniacs, remains always a spirit through- out the days of the Roman Empire, even in the time of St. Martin or the fifth century. With the Barba- rian inroads he waxes barbarous, and takes to himself a body. So great a body does he become, that he amuses himself in breaking with stones the bell of the convent of St. Benedict. More and more fleshly is he made to appear, by way of frightening the plun- derers of ecclesiastical goods. People are taught to believe that sinners will be tormented not in the spirit only, but even bodily in the flesh ; that they will suffer material tortures, not those of ideal flames, but in very deed such exquisite pangs as burning coals, gridirons, and red-hot spits can awaken.
This conception of the torturing devils inflicting material agonies on the souls of the dead, was a mine of gold to the Church. The living, pierced with grief and pity, asked themselves "if it were possible to re- deem these poor souls from one world to another ; if to these, too, might be applied such forms of expiation, by atonement and compromise, as were practised upon earth ? " This bridge between two worlds was found in Cluny, which from its very birth, about 900, be- came at once among the wealthiest of the monastic orders.
7G THE WITCH.
So long as God Himself dealt out his punishments, making heavy his hand, or striking with the sword of the Angel, according to the grand old phrase, there was much less of horror ; if his hand was heavy as that of a judge, it was still the hand of a Father. The Angel who struck remained pure and clean as his own sword. Far otherwise is it when the execution is done by filthy demons, who resemble not the angel that burned up Sodom, but the angel that first went forth therefrom. In that place they stay, and their hell is a kind of Sodom, wherein these spirits, fouler than the sinners yielded into their charge, extract a horrible joy from the tortures they are inflicting. Such was the teaching to be found in the simple carvings hung out at the doors of churches. By these men learned the horrible lesson of the pleasures of pain. On pretence of punishing, the devils wreaked upon their victims the most outrageous whims. Truly an immoral and most shameful idea was this, of a sham justice that befriended the worse side, deepening its wickedness by the present of a plaything, and corrupting the Demon himself !
Cruel times indeed ! Think how dark and low a heaven it was, how heavily it weighed on the head of man ! Fancy the poor little children from their earliest years imbued with such awful ideas, and trembling within their cradles ! Look at the pure innocent virgin believing herself damned for the pleasure infused in
POSSESSION. 77
her by the spirit ! And the wife in her marriage-bed tortured by his attacks, withstanding him, and yet again feeling him within her ! — a fearful feeling known to those who have suffered from tasnia. You feel in yourself a double life ; you trace the monster's move- ments, now boisterous, anon soft and waving, and therein the more troublesome, as making you fancy yourself on the sea. Then you rush off in wild dismay, terrified at yourself, longing to escape, to die.
Even at such times as the demon was not raging against her, the woman into whom he had once forced his way would wander about as one burdened with gloom. For thenceforth she had no remedy. He had taken fast hold of her, like an impure steam. He is the Prince of the Air, of storms, and not least of the storms within. All this may be seen rudely but force- fully presented under the great doorway of Strasburg Cathedral. Heading the band of Foolish Virgins, the wicked woman who lures them on to destruction is filled, blown out by the Devil, who overflows ignobly and passes out from under her skirts in a dark stream of thick smoke.
This blowing-out is a painful feature in the possession; at once her punishment and her pride. This proud woman of Strasburg bears her belly well before her, while her head is thrown far back. She triumphs in her size, delights in being a monster.
To this, however, the woman we are following has not yet come. But already she is puffed up with him,
78 THE WITCH.
;md with her new and lofty lot. The earth has ceased to bear her. Plump and comely in these better days, she goes down the street with head upright, and mer- ciless in her scorn. She is feared, hated, admired.
In look and bearing our village lady says, " I ought to be the great lady herself. And what does she up yonder, the shameless sluggard, amidst all those men, in the absence of her lord ? " And now the rivalry is set on foot. The village, while it loathes her, is proud thereat. " If the lady of the castle is a baroness, our woman is a queen ; and more than a queen, — we dare not say what." Her beauty is a dreadful, a fantastic beauty, killing in its pride and pain. The Demon him- self is in her eyes.
He has her and yet has her not. She is still herself, and preserves herself. She belongs neither to theDe- mon nor to God. The Demon may certainly invade her, may encompass her like a fine atmosphere. And yet he has gained nothing at all ; for he has no will thereto. She is possessed, bedevilled, and she does not belong to the Devil. Sometimes he uses her with dreadful cruelty, and yet gains nothing thereby. He places a coal of fire on her breast, or within her bowels. She jumps and writhes, but still says, " No, butcher, I will stay as I am."
" Take care ! I will lash you with so cruel a scourge of vipers, I will smite you with such a blow,
POSSESSION. 79
that you will afterwards go. weeping and rending the air with your cries."
The next night he will not come. In the morning — it was Sunday — her husband went up to the castle. He came back all undone. The lord had said : " A brook that flows drop by drop cannot turn the mill. You bring me a halfpenny at a time, which is good for nought. I must set off in a fortnight. The king marches towards Flanders, and I have not even a war- horse, my own being lame ever since the tourney. Get ready for business : I am in want of a hundred pounds."
"But, my lord, where shall I find them?"
" You may sack the whole village, if you will ; I am about to give you men enough. Tell your churls, if the money is not forthcoming they are lost men; your- self especially — you shall die. I have had enough of you : you have the heart of a woman ; you are slack and sluggish. You shall die — you shall pay for youf cowardice, your effeminacy. Stay ; it makes but very small difference whether you go down now, or whether I keep you here. This is Sunday : right loudly would the folk yonder laugh to see you dangling your legs from my battlements."
All this the unhappy man tells again to his wife ; and preparing hopelessly for death, commends his soul to God. She being just as frightened, can neither lie down nor sleep. What is to be done ? How sorry she is now to have sent the spirit away ! If he would
80 THE WITCH.
but come back ! In the morning, when her husband rises, she sinks crushed upon the bed. She has hardly done so, when she feels on her chest a heavy weight. Gasping for breath, she is like to choke. The weight falls lower till it presses on her stomach, and therewithal on her arms she feels the grasp as of two steel hands.
" You wanted me, and here I am. So, at last, stub- born one, I have your soul — at last ! "
" But oh, sir, is it mine to give away ? My poor husband ! you used to love him — you said so : you promised "
" Your husband ! You forget. Are you sure your thoughts were always kept upon him ? Your soul ! I ask for it as a favour ; but it is already mine."
" No, sir," she says — her pride once more returning to her, even in so dire a strait — ' ' no, sir ; that soul belongs to me, to my husband, to our marriage rites."
" Ah, incorrigible little fool ! you would struggle Still, even now that you are under the goad ! I have seen your soul at all hours ; I know it better than you yourself. Day by day did I mark your first re- luctances, your pains, and your fits of despair. I saw how disheartened you were when, in a low tone, you said that no one could be held to an impossibility. And then I saw you growing more resigned. You were beaten a little, and you cried out not very loud. As for me, I ask for your soul simply because you have already lost it. Meanwhile, your husband is dying. What is to be done ? I am sorry for you : I have you
POSSESSION. 81
in my power; but I want something more. You must grant it frankly and of free will, or else he is a dead man."
She answered very low, in her sleep, " Ah me ! my body and my miserable flesh, you may take them to save my husband ; but my heart, never. No one has ever had it, and I cannot give it away."
So, all resignedly she waited there. And he flung at her two words : " Keep them, and they will save you." Therewith she shuddered, felt within her a horrible thrill of fire, and, uttering a loud cry, awoke in the arms of her astonished husband, to drown him in a flood of tears.
She tore herself away by force, and got up, fearing lest she should forget those two important words. Her husband was alarmed; for, without looking even at him, she darted on the wall a glance as piercing as that of Medea. Never was she more handsome. In her dark eye and the yellowish white around it played such a glimmer as one durst not face — a glimmer like the sulphurous jet of a volcano.
She walked straight to the town. The first word was " Green." Hanging at a tradesman's door she beheld a green gown — the colour of the Prince of the World — an old gown, which as she put it on became new and glossy. Then she walked, without asking any- one, straight to the door of a Jew, at which she knocked loudly. It was opened with great caution.
82 THE WITCH.
The poor Jew was sitting on the ground, covered over with ashes. " My dear, I must have a hundred pounds."
" Oh, madam, how am I to get them ? The Prince- bishop of the town has just had my teeth drawn to make me say where my gold lies.* Look at my bleed- ing mouth."
" I know, I know ; but I come to obtain from you the very means of destroying your Bishop. "When the Pope gets a cuffing, the Bishop will not hold out long."
" Who says so ? "
" Toledo.^
He hung his head. She spoke and blew : within her was her own soul and the Devil to boot. A wondrous warmth filled the room : he himself was aware of a kind of fiery fountain. " Madam," said he, looking at her from under his eyes, " poor and ruined as I am, I had some pence still in store to sustain my poor children."
" You will not repent of it, Jew. I will swear to you
* This was a common way of extracting help from the Jews. King John Lackland often tried it.
t Toledo seems to have been the holy city of Wizards, who in Spain were numberless. These relations with the civilized Moors, with the Jews so learned and paramount in Spain, as managers of the royal revenues, had given them a very high degree of culture, and in Toledo they formed a kind of Uni- versity. In the sixteenth century, it was christianised, re- modelled, reduced to mere white magic. See the Deposition of the Wizard Achard, Lord of Beaumont, a Physician of Poitou. Lancre, Incredulite, p. 781.
rossr.ssiox. 83
the great oath that kills whoso breaks it. "What you are about to give me, you shall receive back in a week, at an early hour in the morning. This I swear by your great oath and by mine, which is yet greater : ^Toledo.'"
A year went by. She had grown round and plump ; had made herself one mass of gold. Men were amazed at her power of charming. Every one admired and obeyed her. By some devilish miracle the Jew had grown so generous as to lend at the slightest signal. By herself she maintained the castle, both through her own credit in the town, and through the fear inspired in the village by her rough extortion. The all-powerful green gown floated to and fro, ever newer and more beautiful. Her own beauty grew, as it were, colossal with success and pride. Frightened at a result so natural, everyone said, " At her time of life how tall she grows ! "
Meanwhile we have some news : the lord is coming home. The lady, who for a long time had not dared to come forth, lest she might meet the face of this other woman down below, now mounted her white horse. Surrounded by all her people, she goes to meet her husband ; she stops and salutes him.
And, first of all, she says, " How long I have been looking for you ! Why did you leave your faithful wife so long a languishing widow ? And yet I will not take you in to-night, unless you grant me a boon/'
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84 1IIE WITCH.
" Ask it, ask it, fair lady/' says the gentlemen laughing; "but make haste, for I am eager to em- brace you. How beautiful you have grown ! "
She whispered in his ear, so that no one knew what she said. Before going up to the castle the worthy lord dismounts by the village church, and goes in. Under the porch, at the head of the chief people, he beholds a lady, to whom without knowing her he offers a low salute. With matchless pride she bears high over the men's heads the towering horned bonnet (hennin*} of the period; the triumphal cap of the Devil, as it was often called, because of the two horns wherewith it was embellished. The real lady, blushing at her eclipse, went out looking very small. Anon she muttered, angrily, " There goes your serf. It is all over : everything has changed places : the ass in- sults the horse."
As they are going off, a bold page, a pet of the lady's, draws from his girdle a well-sharpened dagger, and with a single turn cleverly cuts the fine robe along her loins.f The crowd was astonished, but began to
* The absurd head-dress of the -women, with its one and often two horns sloping back from the head, in the fourteenth century. — TRANS.
t Such cruel outrages were common in those days. By the French and Anglo-Saxon laws, lewdness was thus punished. Grimm, 679, 711. Sternhook, 19, 326. Ducange, iii. 52. Michelet, Origines, 386, 389. By and by, the same rough usage is dealt out to honest women, to citizen's wives, whose pride the nobles seek to abase. We know the kind of ambush into
POSSESSI3X. 85
make it out when it saw the whole of the Baron's household going off in pursuit of her. Swift and merciless about her whistled and fell the strokes of the whip. She flies, but slowly, being already grown somewhat heavy. She has hardly gone twenty paces when she stumbles ; her best friend having put a stone in her way to trip her up. Amidst roars of laughter she sprawls yelling on the ground. But the ruthless pages flog her up again. The noble handsome grey- hounds help in the chase and bite her in the tenderest places. At last, in sad disorder, amidst the terrible crowd, she reaches the door of her house. It is shut. There with hands and feet she beats away, crying, " Quick, quick, my love, open the door for me ? " There hung she, like the hapless screech-owl whom they nail up on a farm-house door ; and still as hard as ever rained the blows. Within the house all is deaf. Is the husband there ? Or rather, being rich and frightened, does he dread the crowd, lest they should sack his house ?
-which the tyrant Hagenbach drew the honourable ladies of the chief burghers in Alsace, probably in scorn of their rich and royal costume, all silks and gold. In my Qrigines I have also related the strange claim made by the Lord of Pace, in Anjou, on the pretty (and honest) women of the neighbour- hood. They were to bring to the castle fourpence and a chaplet of flowers, and to dance with his officers : a dangerous trip, in which they might well fear some such affronts as those offered by Hagenbach. They were forced to obey by the threat of being stripped and pricked with a goad bearing the impress of the lord's arms.
86 THE WITCH.
And now she has borne such misery, such strokes, such sounding buffets, that she sinks down in a swoon. On the cold stone threshold she finds herself seated, naked, half-dead, her bleeding flesh covered with little else than the waves of her long hair. Some one from the castle says, " No more now ! We do not want her to die."
They leave her alone, to hide herself. But in spirit she can see the merriment going on at the castle. The lord however, somewhat dazed, said that he was sorry for it. But the chaplain says, in his meek way, "If this woman is bedevilled, as they say, my lord, you owe it to your good vassals, you owe it to the whole country, to hand her over to Holy Church. Since all that business with the Templars and the Pope, what way the Demon' is making ! Nothing but fire will do for him." Upon which a Dominican says, " Your reverence has spoken right well. This devilry is a heresy in the highest degree. The bedevilled, like the heretic, should be burnt. Some of our good fathers, however, do not trust themselves now even to the fii-e. "Wisely they desire that, before all things, the soul may be slowly purged, tried, subdued by fastings ; that it may not be burnt in its pride, that it shall not triumph at the stake. If you, madam, in the greatness of your piety, of your charity, would take the trouble to work upon this woman, putting her for some years in pace in a safe
POSSESSION. 87
cell, of which you only should have the key, — by thus keeping up the chastening process you might be doing good to her soul, shaming the Devil, and giving herself up meek and humble into the hands of the Church."
CHAPTER VI.
THE COVENANT.
NOTHING was wanting but the victim. They knew that to bring this woman before her was the most charming present she could receive. Tenderly would she have acknowledged the devotion of anyone who would have given her so great a token of his love, by delivering that poor bleeding body into her hands.
But the prey was aware of the hunters. A few minutes later and she would have been carried off, to be for ever sealed up beneath the stone. Wrapping herself in some rags found by chance iu the stable, she took to herself wings of some kind, and before midnight gained some out-of-the-way spot on a lonely moor all covered with briars and thistles. It was on the skirts of a wood, where by the uncertain light she might gather a few acorns, to swallow them like a beast. Ages had elapsed since evening; she was utterly changed. Beauty and queen of the village no more, she seemed with the change in her spirit to have changed her postures also. Among her acorns she squatted like a boar or a monkey. Thoughts far from human circled within her as she heard, or seemed
THE COVENANT. 89
to hear the hooting of an owl, followed by a burst of shrill laughter. She felt afraid, but perhaps it was the merry mockbird mimicking all those sounds, ac- cording to its wonted fashion.
But the laughter begins again : whence comes it ? She can see nothing. Apparently it comes from an old oak. Distinctly, however, she hears these words : " So, here you are at last ! You have come with an ill grace ; nor would you have come now, if you had not tried the full depth of your last need. You were fain first to run the gauntlet of whips ; to cry out and plead for mercy, haughty as you were ; to be mocked, undone, forsaken, unsheltered even by your husband. Where would you have been this night, if I had not been charitable enough to show you the in pace getting ready for you in the tower ? Late, very late, you are in coming to me, and only after they have called you the old woman. In your youth you did not treat rne well, when I was your wee goblin, so eager to. serve you, Now take your turn, if so I wish it, to serve me and kiss my feet.
" You were mine from birth through your inborn wickedness, through those devilish charms of yours. I was your lover, your husband. • Your own has shut his door against you : I will not shut mine. I welcome you to my domains, my free prairies, my woods. How am I the gainer, you may say ? Could I not long since have had you at any hour ? Were you not
90 THE WITCH.
invaded, possessed, filled with my flame ? I changed your blood and renewed it : not a vein in your body where I do not flow. You know not yourself how utterly you are mine. But our wedding has yet to be celebrated with all the forms. I have some manners, and feel rather scrupulous. Let us be- one for ever- lasting."
" Oh ! sir, in my present state, what should I say ? For a long, long while back have 1 felt, too truly felt, that you were all my fate. With evil intent you caressed me, loaded me with favours, and made me rich, in order at length to cast me down. Yesterday, when the black greyhound bit my poor naked flesh, its teeth scorched me, and I said, "Tis he !' At night when that daughter of Herodias with her foul language scared the company, somebody put them up to the pro- mising her my blood ; and that was you !"
" True ; but 'twas I who saved you and brought you hither. I did everything, as you have guessed. I ruined you, and why ? That I might have you all to myself. To speak frankly, I was tired of your husband. You took to haggling and pettifogging : far otherwise do I go to work ; I want all or none. This is why I have moulded and drilled you, polished and ripened you, for my own behoof. Such, you see, is my delicacy of taste. I don't take, as people imagine, those foolish so\ils who would give themselves up at once. I prefer the choicer spirits, who have reached a certain dainty stage of fury
THE COVENANT. 91
and despair. Stop : I must let you know how pleasant you look at this moment. You are a great beauty, a most desirable soul. I have loved you ever so long, but now I ani hungering for you.
" I will do things on a large scale, not being one of those husbands who reckon with their betrothed. If you wanted only riches, you shoxild have them in a trice. If you wanted to be queen in the stead of Joan of Navarre, that too, though difficult, should be done, and the King would not lose much thereby in the matter of pride and haughtiness. My wife is greater than a queen. But, come, tell me what you wish." " Sir, I ask only for the power of doing evil." " A delightful answer, very delightful ! Have I not cause to love you ? In reality those words contain all the law and all the prophets. Since you have made so good a choice, all the rest shall be thrown in, over and above. You shall learn all my secrets. You shall see into the depths of the earth. The whole world shall come and pour out gold at thy feet. See here, my bride, I give you the true diamond, Vengeance. I know you, rogue ; I know your most hidden desires. Ay, our hearts on that point understand each other well ! Therein at least shall I have full possession of you. You shall behold your enemy on her knees at your feet, begging and praying for mercy, and only too happy to earn her release by doing whatever she has made you do. She will burst into tears ; and you will
92 TI:K WITCH.
graciously say, No : whereon she will cry, ' Death and damnation ! ' . . . Come, I will make this my special business/'
" Sir, I am at your service. I was thankless indeed, •for you have always heaped favours on me. I am yours, my master, my god ! None other do I desire. Sweet are your endearments, and very mild your ser- vice."
And so she worships him, tumbling on all-fours. At first she pays him, after the forms of the Temple, such homage as betokens the utter abandonment of the will. Her master, the Prince of this World, the Prince of the Winds, breathes upon her in his turn, like an eager spirit. She receives at once the three sacraments, in reverse order — baptism, priesthood, and marriage. In this new Church, the exact opposite of the other, everything must be done the wrong way. Meekly, patiently, she endures the cruel initiation,* borne up by that one word, " Vengeance ! "
Far from being crushed or weakened by the infernal thunderbolt, she arose with an awful vigour and flash- ing eyes. The moon, which for a moment had chastely covered herself, took flight on seeing her again. Blown out to an amazing degree by the hellish vapour, filled
* This will be explained further on. We must guard against the pedantic additions of the sixteenth century •writers.
THE COVENANT. 93
with fire, with fury, and with some new ineffable desire, she grew for a while enormous with excess of fulness, and displayed a terrible beauty. She looked around her, and all nature was changed. The trees had gotten a tongue, and told of things gone by. The herbs be- came simples. The plants which yesterday she trod upon as so much hay, were now as people discoursing on the art of medicine.
She awoke on the morrow far, very far, from her enemies, in a state of thorough security. She had been sought after, but they had only found some scattered shreds of her unlucky green gown. Had she in her despair flung herself headlong into the torrent ? Or had she been carried off alive by the Devil ? No one could tell. Either way she was certainly damned, which greatly consoled the lady for having failed to find her.
Had they seen her they would hardly have known her again, she was so changed. Only the eyes re- mained, not brilliant, but armed with a very strange and a rather deterring glimmer. She herself was afraid of frightening : she never lowered them, but looked sideways, so that the full force of their beams might be lost by slanting them. From the sudden browning of her hue people would have said that she had passed through the flame. But the more watchful felt that the flame was rather in herself, that she bore about her an impure and scorching heat. The fiery dart with
9-i THE WITCH.
which Satan had pierced her was still there, and, as through a baleful lamp, shot forth a wild, but fear- fully witching sheen. Shrinking from her, you would yet stand still, with a strange trouble filling your every sense.
She saw herself at the mouth of one of those trog- lodyte caves, such as you find without number in the hills of the Centre and the West of France. It was in the borderland, then wild, between the country of Merlin and the country of Melusina. Some moors stretching out of sight still tear witness to the ancient wars, the unceasing havoc, the many horrors, which prevented the country being peopled again. There the Devil was in his home. Of the few inhabitants most were his zealous worshippers. Whatever attractions he might have found in the rough brakes of Lorraine, the black pine-forests of the Jura, or the briny deserts of Burgos, his preferences lay, perhaps, in our western marches. There might be found not only the visionary shepherd, that Satanic union of the goat and the goat- herd, but also a closer conspiracy with nature, a deeper insight into remedies and poisons, a mysterious con- nection, whose links we know not, with Toledo the learned, the University of the Devil.
The winter was setting in : its breath having first stripped the trees, had heaped together the leaves and small boughs of dead wood. All this she found pre- pared for her at the mouth of her gloomy den. By a
THE COVENANT. 95
wood and moor, half a mile across, you came down within reach of some villages, which had grown up beside a watercourse. " Behold your kingdom ! " said the voice within her. " To-day a beggar, to-morrow you shall be queen of the whole land."
CHAPTER VII.
THE KING OF THE DEAD.
AT first she was not much affected by promises like these. A lonely hermitage without God, amidst the great monotonous breezes of the West, amidst me- mories all the more ruthless for that mighty solitude, of such heavy losses, such sharp affronts ; a widowhood so hard and sudden, away from the husband who had left her to her shame — all this was enough to bow her down. Plaything of fate, she seemed like the wretched weed upon the moor, having no root, but tossed to and fro, lashed and cruelly cut by the north-east winds ; or rather, perhaps, like the grey, many-cornered coral, which only sticks fast to get more easily broken. The children trampled on her; the people said, with a laugh, " She is the bride of the winds/'
Wildly she laughed at herself when she thought on the comparison. But, from the depth of her dark cave, she heard, —
"Ignorant and witless, you know not what you say. The plant thus tossing to and fro may well look down upon the rank and vulgar herbs. If it tosses, it is, at least, all self-contained — itself both flower and seed. Do thou be like it ; be thine own root, and even
THE KIXG OF THE DEAD. 97
in the whirlwind thou wilt still bear thy blossom : our own flowers for ourselves, as they come forth from the dust of tombs and the ashes of volcanoes.
" To thee, first flower of Satan, do I this day grant the knowledge of my former name, my olden power. I was, I am, the King of the Dead. Ay, have I not been sadly slandered? 'Tis I who alone can make them reappear ; a boon untold, for which I surely de- served an altar."
To pierce the future and to call up the past, to fore- stal and to live again the swift-flying moments, to enlarge the present with that which has been and that which will be — these are the two things forbidden to the Middle Ages ; but forbidden in vain. Nature is invincible; nothing can be gained in such a quarter. He who thus errs is a man. It is not for him to be rooted to his furrow, with eyes cast down, looking no where beyond the steps he takes behind his oxen. No : we will go forward with head upraised, looking further and looking deeper ! This earth that we measure out with so much care, we kick our feet upon withal, and keep ever saying to it, " What dost thou hold in thy bowels ? What secrets lie therein ? Thou givest us back the grain we entrust to thee ; but not that human seed, those beloved dead, we have lent into thy charge. Our friends, our loves, that lie there, will they never bud again ? Oh, that we might see them, if only for one hour, if only for one moment !
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98 THE WITCH.
" Some day we ourselves shall reach the unknown land, whither they have already gone. But shall we see them again there ? Shall we dwell with them ? Where are they, and what are they doing ? They must be kept very close prisoners, these dear dead of mine, to give me not one token ! And how can I make them hear me? My father, too, whose only hope I was, who loved me with so mighty a love, why cotncs he never to me ? Ah, me ! on either side is bondage, imprisonment, mutual ignorance ; a dismal night, where we look in vain for one glimmer ! "*
These everlasting thoughts of Nature, from having in olden times been simply mournful, became in the Middle Ages painful, bitter, weakening, and the heart thereby grew smaller. It seems as if they had reckoned on flattening the soul, on pressing and squeezing it down to the compass of a bier. The burial of the serf be- tween four deal boards was well suited to such an end : it haunted one with the notion of being smothered. A person thus enclosed, if ever he returned in one's dreams, would no longer appear as a thin luminous shadow encircled by a halo of Elysium, but only as the wretched sport of some hellish griffin-cat. What a hateful and impious idea, that my good, kind father, my mother so revered by all, should become the play- thing of such a beast ! You may laugh now, but for
* The glimmer shines forth in Dumesnil's Immortalite, and La Foi Nouvette, in the Ciel et Terre of Reynaud, Henry Mar- tin. <tc.
THE KING OF THE DEAD. 99
a thousand years it was no laughing matter : they wept bitterly. And even now the heart swells with wrath, the very pen grates angrily upon the paper, as one writes down these blasphemous doings.
Moreover, it was surely a cruel device to transfer the Festival of the Dead from the Spring, where an- tiquity had placed it, to November. In May, where it fell at first, they were buried among the flowers. In March, wherein it was afterwards placed, it became the signal for labour and the lark. The dead and the seed of corn entered the earth together with the same hope. But in November, when all the work is done, the weather close and gloomy for many days to come ; when the folk return to their homes ; when a man, re- seating himself by the hearth, looks across on that place for evermore empty — ah, me ! at such a time how great the sorrow grows ! Clearly, in choosing a moment already in itself so funereal, for the obsequies of Nature, they feared that a man would not find cause enough of sorrow in himself!
The coolest, the busiest of men, however taken up they be with life's distracting cares, have, at least, their sadder moments. In the dark wintry morning, in the night that comes on so swift to swallow iis up in its shadow, ten years, nay, twenty years hence, strange feeble voices will rise up in your heart : " Good morning, dear friend, 'tis we ! You are alive, are working as hard as ever. So much the better ! You
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100 THE WITCH.
do not feel our loss so heavily, and you have learned to do without us ; but we cannot, we never can, do without you. The ranks are closed, the gap is all but filled. The house that was ours is full, and we have blessed it. All is well, is better than when your father carried you about ; better than when your little girl said, in her turn, to you, ' Papa, carry me.' But, lo ! you are in tears. Enough, till we meet again ! "
Alas, and are they gone ? That wail was sweet and piercing : but was it just ? No. Let me forget my- self a thousand times rather than I should forget them ! And yet, cost what it will to say so, say it we must, that certain traces are fading off, are already less clear to see ; that certain features are not indeed effaced, but grown paler and more dim. A hard, a bitter, a humbling thought it is, to find oneself so weak and fleeting, wavering as unremembered water ; to feel that in time one loses that treasure of grief which one had hoped to preserve for ever. Give it me back, I pray : I am too much bounden to so rich a fountain of tears. Trace me again, I implore you, those features I love so well. Could you not help me at least to dream of them by night ?
More than one such prayer is spoken in the month of November. And amidst the striking of the bells and the dropping of the leaves, they clear out of church, saying one to anotherin low tones : "I say, neighbour; up there lives a woman of whom folk speak well and ill. For
THE KING OP THE DEAD. 101
myself, I dare say nothing ; but she has power over the world below. She calls up the dead, and they come. Oh, if she might — without sin, you know, without angering God — make my friends come to me ! I am alone, as you must know, and have lost everything in this world. But who knows what this woman is, whether of hell or heaven ? I won't go (he is dying of curiosity all the while) ; I won't. I have no wish to endanger my soul : besides, the wood yonder is haunted. Many's the time that things unfit to see have been found on the moor. Haven't you heard about Jacqueline, who was there one evening looking for one of her sheep ? Well, when she returned, she was crazy. I won't go."
Thus unknown to each other, many of the men at least went thither. For as yet the women hardly dared so great a risk. They remark the dangers of the road, ask many questions of those who return therefrom. The new Pythoness is not like her of Endor, who raised up Samuel at the prayer of Saul. Instead of showing you the ghosts, she gives you cabalistic words and powerful potions to bring them back in your dreams. Ah, how many a sorrow has recourse to these ! The grandmother herself, tottering with her eighty years, would behold her grandson again. By an unwonted effort, yet not without a pang of shame at sinning on the edge of the grave, she drags herself to the spot. She is troubled by the savage look of a place all rough with yews and thorns, by the rude,
102 THE WITCH.
dark beauty of that relentless Proserpine. Prostrate, trembling, grovelling on the ground, the poor old woman weeps and prays. Answer there is none. But when she dares to lift herself up a little, she sees that Hell itself has been a- weeping.
It is simply Nature recovering herself. Proserpine blushes self-indignantly thereat. " Degenerate soul ! " she calls herself, " why this weakness ? You came hither with the firm desire of doing nought but evil. Is this your master's lesson ? How he will laugh at you for this ! "
" Nay! Am I not the great shepherd of the shades, making them come and go, opening unto them the gate of dreams ? Your Dante, when he drew my like- ness, forgot my attributes. When he gave me that useless tail, he did not see that I held the shepherd's staff of Osiris ; that from Mercury I had inherited his caduceus. In vain have they thought to build up an insurmountable wall between the two worlds ; 1 have wings to my heels, I have flown over. By a kindly rebellion of that slandered Spirit, of that ruthless monster, succour has been given to those who mourned ; mothers, lovers, have found comfort. He has taken pity on them in defiance of their new god."
The scribes of the Middle Ages, being all of the priestly class, never cared to acknowledge the deep but silent changes of the popular mind. It is clear that from thenceforth compassion goes over to Satan's side.
THE KING OF THE DEAD. 103
The Virgin herself, ideal as she is of grace, makes no answer to such a want of the heart. Neither does the Church, who expressly forbids the calling up of the dead. While all books delight in keeping up either the swinish demon of earlier times, or the griffin butcher of the second period, Satan has changed his shape for those- who cannot write. He retains somewhat of the ancient Pluto ; but his pale nor wholly ruthless ma- jesty, that permitted the dead to come back, the living once more to see the dead, passes ever more and more into the nature of his father, or his grandfather, Osiris, the shepherd of souls.
Through this one change come many others. Men with their mouths acknowledge the hell official and the boiling caldrons; but in their hearts do they truly believe therein ? Would it be so easy to win these infernal favours for hearts beset with hateful tra- ditions of a hell of torments ? The one idea neutra- lizes without wholly effacing the other, and between them grows up a vague mixed image, resembling more and more nearly the hell of Virgil. A mighty solace was here offered to the human heart. Blessed above all was the relief thus given to the poor women, whom that dreadful dogma about the punishment of their loved dead had kept drowned in tears and inconsolable. The whole of their lifetime had been but one long sigh.
The Sibyl was musing over her master's words,
104 THE WITCH.
when a very light step became audible. Tl.e day has scarcely dawned : it is after Christmas, about the first day of the new year. Over the crisp and rimy grass approaches a small, fair woman, all a-trembling, who has no sooner reached the spot, than she swoons and loses her breath. Her black gown tells plainly of her widowhood. To the piercing gaze of Medea, without moving or speaking, she reveals all. there is no mys- tery about her shrinking figure. The other says. to her with a loud voice : " You need not tell mo, little dumb creature, for you would never get to the end of it. I will speak for you. Well, you are dying of love ! " Recovering a little, she clasps her hands together, and sinking almost on her knees, tells every- thing, making a full confession. She had suffered, wept, prayed, and would have silently suffered on. But these winter feasts, these family re-unions, the ill-concealed happiness of other women who, without pity for her, showed off their lawful loves, had driven the burning arrow again into her heart. Alas, what could she do ? If he might but return and comfort her for one moment ! " Be it even at the cost of my life; let me die, but only let me see him once more ! "
" Go back to your house: shut the door carefully : put up the shutter even against any curious neighbour. Throw off your mourning, and put on your wedding- clothes ; place a cover for him on the table ; but yet he will not come. You will sing the song he made for
THE KING OF THE DEAD. 105
you, and sang to you so often, but yet he will not come. Then you shall draw out of your box the last dress he wore, and, kissing it, say, ' So much the worse for thee if thou wilt not come ! ' And presently when you have drunk this wine, bitter, but very sleepful, you will lie down as a wedded bride. Then assuredly he will come to you/' . The little creature would have been no woman, if next morning she had not shown her joy and tender- ness by owning the miracle in whispers to her best friend. " Say nought of it, I beg. But he himself told me, that if I wore this gown and slept a deep sleep every Sunday, he would return/'
A happiness not without some danger. Where would the rash woman be, if the Church learned that she was no longer a widow ; that re-awakened by her love, the spirit came to console her ?
But strange to tell, the secret is kept. There is an understanding among them all, to hide so sweet a mystery. For who has no concern therein? Who has not lost and mourned? Who would not gladly see this bridge created between two worlds ? '" 0 thou beneficent Witch ! Blessed be thou, spirit of the nether world ! "
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PRINCE OF NATURE.
HARD is the long sad winter of the North-west. Even after its departure it renews its visits, like a drowsy sorrow which ever and again comes back and rages afresh. One morning everything wakes up decked with bright needles. In this cruel mocking splendour that makes one shiver through and through, the whole vegetable world seems turned mineral, loses its sweet diversity, and freezes into a mass of rough crystals.
The poor Sibyl, as she sits benumbed by her hearth of leaves, scourged by the flaying north-east winds, feels at her heart a cruel pang, for she feels herself all alone. But that very thought again brings her relief. With returning pride returns a vigour that warms her heart and lights up her soul. Intent, quick, and sharp, her sight becomes as piercing as those needles ; and the world, the cruel world that caused her suffer- ing, is to her transparent as glass. Anon she rejoices over it, as over a conquest of her making.
For is she not a queen, a queen with courtiers of her own ? The crows have clearly some connection with her. In grave, dignified body they come like ancient
THE PRINCE OF NATURE. 107
augurs, to talk to her of passing things. The wolves passing by salute her timidly with sidelong glances. The bear, then oftener seen than now, would some- times, in his heavily good-natured way, seat himself awkwardly at the threshold of her den, like a hermit calling on a fellow-hermit, just as we often see him in the Lives of the Desert Fathers.
All those birds and beasts with whom men only made acquaintance in hunting or slaying them, were outlawed as much as she. With all these she comes to an understanding; for Satan as the chief outlaw, imparts to his own the pleasures of natural freedom, the wild delight of living in a world sufficient unto itself.
Rough freedom of loneliness, all hail ! The whole earth seems still clothed in a white shroud, held in bondage by a load of ice, of pitiless crystals, so uni- form, sharp, and agonizing. After the year 1200 especially, the world is shut in like a transparent tomb, wherein all things look terribly motionless, hard, and stiff.
The Gothic Church has been called a "crystalliza- tion;" and so it truly is. About 1300, architecture gave up all its old variety of form and living fancies, .to repeat itself for evermore, to vie with the mono- tonous prisms of Spitzbergen, to become the true and awful likeness of that hard crystal city, in which a dreadful dogma thought to bury all life away.
108 THE WITCH.
But for all the props, buttresses, flying-buttresses, that keep the monument up, one thing there is that makes it totter. There is no loud battering from with- out, but a certain softness in the very foundations, which attacks the crystal with an imperceptible thaw. What thing do I mean ? The humble stream of warm tears shed by a whole world, until they have become a very sea of wailings. What do I call it ? A breath of the future, a stirring of the natural life, which shall presently rise again in irresistible might. The fan- tastic building of which more than one side is already sinking, says, not without terror, to itself, " It is the breath of Satan."
Beneath this Hecla-glacier lies a volcano which has no need of bursting out ; a mild, slow, gentle heat, which caresses it from below, and, calling it nearer, says in a whisper, " Corne down/'
The Witch has something to laugh at, if from the gloom she can see how utterly Dante and St. Thomas,* in the bright light yonder, ignore the true position of things. They fancy that the Devil wins his way by cunning or by terror. They make him grotesque and coarse, as in his childhood, when Jesus could still send him into the herd of swine. Or else they make him subtle as a logician of the schools, or a fault-finding
* St. Thomas Aquinas, the " Angelic Doctor," who died ia 1274.— TRANS.
THE PRINCE OF NATURE. 109
lawyer. If he had been no better than this compound of beast and disputant, — if he had only lived in the mire or on fine-drawn quibbles about nothing, he would very soon have died of hunger.
People were too ready to crow over him, when he was shewn by Bartulus* pleading against the woman--- that is, the Virgin — who gets him nonsuited and con- demned with costs. At that time, indeed, the very contrary was happening on earth. By a master-stroke of his he had won over the plaintiff herself, his fair antagonist, the Woman ; had seduced her, not indeed by verbal pleadings, but by arguments not less real than they were charming and irresistible. He put into her hands the fruits of science and of nature.
No need for controversies, for pleas of any kind : he simply shows himself. In the East, the new-found Paradise, he begins to work. From that Asian world, which men had thought to destroy, there springs forth a peerless day-dawn, whose beams travel afar until they pierce the deep winter of the West. There dawns on us a world of nature and of art, accursed of the ignorant indeed, but now at length come forward to vanquish its late victors in a pleasant war of love and motherly endearments. All are conquered, all rave about it; they will have nothing but Asia herself. With her hands full she comes to meet us. Her tissues, shawls, her carpets so agreeably soft, so
* Bartolus or Bartoli, a lawyer and law-writer of the four- teenth century. — TKANS.
110 THE WITCH.
wondrously harmonized, her bright and well-wrought blades, her richly damascened arms, make us aware of our own barbarism. Moreover, little as that may seem, these accursed lands of the " miscreant," ruled by Satan, are visibly blessed with the fairest fruits of nature, that elixir of the powers of God; with the first of vegetables, coffee ; with the first of beasts, the Arab horse. "What am I saying? — with a whole world of treasures, silk, sugar, and a host of herbs all-powerful to relieve the heart, to soothe and lighten our suf- ferings.
All this breaks upon our view about the year 1300. Spain herself, whose brain is wholly fashioned out of Moors and Jews, for all that she is again subdued by the barbarous children of the Goth, bears witness in behalf of those miscreants. Wherever the Mussulman children of the Devil are at work, all is prosperous, the springs well forth, the ground is covered with flowers. A right worthy and harmless travail decks it with those wondrous vineyards, through which men recruit them- selves, drowning all care, and seeming to drink in draughts of very goodness and heavenly compassion.
To whom does Satan bring the foaming cup of life ? In this fasting world, which has so long been fasting from reason, what man was there strong enough to take all this in without growing giddy, without getting drunken and risking the loss of his wits ?
Is there yet a brain so far from being petrified or
THE PRINCE OF NATURE. Ill
I
crystallized by the teaching of St. Thomas, as to re- main open to the living world, to its vegetative forces ? Three magicians, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Arnaud of Villeneuve.* by strong efforts make their way to Nature's secrets ; but those lusty intellects lack flexibility and popular power. Satan falls back on his own Eve. The woman is still the most natural thing in the world; still keeps her hold on those traits of roguish innocence one sees in a kitten or a child of very high spirit. Besides, she figures much better in that world-comedy, that mighty game wherewith the universal Proteus disports himself.
But being light and changeful, she is all the less liable to be carked and hardened by pain ! This wo- man, whom we have seen outlawed from the world, and rooted on her wild moor, affords a case in point. Have we yet to learn whether, bruised and soured as she is, with her heart full of hate, she will re-enter the natural world and the pleasant paths of life ? Assuredly her return thither will not find her in good tune, will happen mainly through a round of ill. In the coming and going of the storm she is all the more scared and violent for being so very weak.
When in the mild warmth of spring, from the air, the depths of the earth, from the flowers and their languages, a new revelation rises round her on every
* Three eminent schoolmen of the thirteenth century, whose scientific researches pointed the way to future discoveries. — TRANS.
112 THE WITCH.
side, she is taken dizzy at the first. Her swelling bosom overflows. The Sibyl of science has her tortures, like her of Cumse or of Delphi. The school- men find their fun in saying, " It is the wind and nought else that blows her out. Her lover, the Prince of the Air, fills her with dreams and delusions, with wind, with smoke, with emptiness." Foolish irony ! So far from this being the true cause of her drunken- ness, it is nothing empty, it is a real, a substantial thing, which has loaded her bosom all too quickly.
Have you ever seen the agave, that hard wild African shrub, so sharp, bitter, and tearing, with huge bristles instead of leaves ? Ten years through it loves and dies. At length one day the amorous shoot, which has so long been gathering in the rough thing, goes off with a noise like gunfire, and darts skyward. And this shoot becomes a whole tree, not less than thirty feet high, and bristling with sad flowers.
Some such analogy does the gloomy Sibyl feel, when one morning of a spring-time, late in coming, and therefore impetuous at the last, there takes place all around her a vast explosion of life.
And all things look at her, and all things bloom for her. For every thing that has life says softly, " Whoso understands me, I am his."
What a contrast ! Here is the wife of the desert and of despair, bred up in hate and vengeance, and lo ! all these innocent things agree to smile upon her !
THE PRINCE OF NATURE. 113
The trees, soothed by the south wind, pay her gentle homage. Each herb of the field, with its own special virtue of scent, or remedy, or poison — very often the three things are one — offers itself to her, saying, " Gather me."
All things are clearly in love. " Are they not mocking me ? I had been readier for hell than for this strange festival. 0 spirit, art thou indeed that spirit of dread whom once I knew, the traces of whose cruelty I bear about me — what am I saying, and where are my senses ? — the wound of whose dealing scorches me still ?
" Ah, no ! JTis not the spirit whom I hoped for in my rage ; ' he who always says, No ! ' This other one utters a yes of love, of drunken dizziness. What ails him ? Is he the mad, the dazed soul of life ?
" They spoke of the great Pan as dead. But here he is in the guise of Bacchus, of Priapus, eager with long-delayed desire, threatening, scorching, teeming. No, no ! Be this cup far from me ! Trouble only should I drink from it, — who knows ? A despair yet sharper than my past despairs."
Meanwhile wherever the woman appears, she becomes the one great object of love. She is followed by all. and for her sake all despise their own proper kind. What they say about the black he-goat, her pretended favourite, may be applied to all. The horse neighs for her, breaking everything and putting her in danger. The awful king of the prairie, the black bull, bellows
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with grief, should she pass him by at a distance. And, behold, yon bird despondingly turns away from his hen, and with whirring wings hastes to convince the woman of his love !
Such is the new tyranny of her master, who, by the funniest hap of all, foregoes the part accredited to him as king of the dead, to burst forth a very king of life.
" No ! " she says ; " leave me to my hatred : I ask for nothing more. Let me be feared and fearful ! The beauty I would have, is only that which dwells in these black serpents of my hair, in this countenance furrowed with grief, and the scars of thy thunderbolt." But the Lord of Evil replies with cunning softness : " Oh, but you are only the more beautiful, the more impressible, for this fieiy rage of yours ! Ay, call out and curse on, beneath one and the same goad ! 'Tis but one storm calling another. Swift and smooth is the passage from wrath to pleasure."
Neither her fury nor her pride would have saved her from such allurements. But she is saved by the bound- lessness of her desire. There is nought will satisfy her. Each kind of life for her is all too bounded, wanting in power. Away from her, steed and bull and loving bird ! Away, ye creatures all ! for one who desires the Infi- nite, how weak ye are !
She has a woman's longing ; but for what ? Even for the whole, the great all- containing whole. Satan did not foresee that no one creature would content her.
THE PRINCE OF NATURE. 115
That which he could not do, is done for her in some ineffable way. Overcome by a desire so wide and deep, a longing boundless as the sea, she falls asleep. At such a moment, all else forgot, no touch of hate, no thought of vengeance left in her, she slumbers on the plain, innocent in her own despite, stretched out in easy luxuriance like a sheep or a dove.
She sleeps, she dreams ; a delightful dream ! It seemed as if the wondrous might of universal life had been swallowed up within her; as if life and death and all things thenceforth lay fast in her bowels ; as if in return for all her suffering, she was teeming at last with Nature herself.
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CHAPTER IX.
THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN.
THAT still and dismal scene of the Bride of Corinth, is repeated literally from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. While it was yet night, just before the day- break, the two lovers, Man and Nature, meet again, embrace with rapture, and, at that same moment — horrible to tell ! — behold themselves attacked by fearful plagues. "We seem still to hear the loved one saying to her lover, " It is all over : thy hair will be white to-morrow. I am dead, and thou too wilt die."
Three dreadful blows happen in these three centu- ries. In the first we have a loathsome changing of the outer man, diseases of the skin, above all, leprosy. In the second, the evil turns inwards, becomes a gro- tesque excitement of the nerves, a fit of epileptic dancing. Then all grows calm, but the blood is changed, and ulcers prepare the way for syphilis, the scourge of the fifteenth century.
Among the chief diseases of the Middle Ages, so far as one can look therein, to speak generally, had been hunger, weakness, poverty of blood, that kind of consumption which is visible in the sculptures of that time. The blood was like clear water, and scro-
THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN. 117
fulous ailments were rife everywhere. Barring the well-paid doctors, Jew or Arab, of the kings, the art of medicine was practised only with holy water at the church door. Thither on Sundays, after the service, would come a crowd of sick, to whom words like these were spoken : " You have sinned and God has afflicted you. Be thankful : so much the less will you suffer in the next world. Resign yourselves to suffer and to die. The Church has prayers for the dead." Weak, languishing, hopeless, witli no desire to live, they followed this counsel faithfully, and let life go its way. A fatal discouragement, a wretched state of things, that would have prolonged without end these ages of lead, and debarred them from all progress ! Worst of all things is it to resign oneself so readily, to welcome death with so much docility, to have strength for nothing, to desire nothing. Of more worth was that new era, that close of the Middle Ages, which at the cost of cruel sufferings first enabled us to regain our former energy ; namely, the resurrection of desire.
Some Arab writers have asserted that the widespread eruption of skin-diseases which marks the thirteenth century, was caused by the taking of certain stimu- lants to re-awaken and renew the defaults of passion. Undoubtedly the burning spices brought over from the East, tended somewhat to such an issue. The inven- tion of distilling and of divers fermented drinks may also have worked in the same direction.
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But a greater and far more general fermentation was going on. During the sharp inward struggle between two worlds and two spirits, a third surviving silenced both. As the fading faith and the newborn reason were disputing together, somebody stepping between them caught hold of man. You ask who ? A spirit unclean and raging, the spirit of sour desires, bubbling painfully within.
Debarred from all outlet, whether of bodily enjoy- ment, or the free flow of soul, the sap of life thus closely rammed together, was sure to corrupt itself. Bereft of light, of sound, of speech, it spoke through pains and ominous excrescences. Then happened a new and dreadful thing. The desire put off without being diminished, finds itself stopped short by a cruel enchantment, a shocking metamorphosis.* Love was advancing blindly with open arms. It recoils groaning ; but in vain would it flee : the fire of the blood keeps raging; the flesh eats itself away in sharp titillations,
* Leprosy has been traced to Asia and the Crusades ; but Europe had it in herself. The war declared by the Middle Ages against the flesh and all cleanliness bore its fruits. More than one saint boasted of having never washed even his hands. And how much did the rest wash ? To have stripped for a moment would have been sinful. The worldlings carefully follow the teaching of the monks. This subtle and refined society, which sacrificed marriage and seemed inspired only with the poetry of adultery, preserved a strange scruple on a point so harmless. It dreaded all cleansing, as so much defile- ment. There was no bathing for a thousand years !
THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN. 119
and sharper within rages the coal of fire, made fiercer by despair.
What remedy does Christian Europe find for this twofold ill ? Death and captivity ; nothing more. When the bitter celibacy, the hopeless love, the passion irritable and ever-goading, bring you into a morbid state ; when your blood is decomposing, then you shall go down into an In pace, or build your hut in the desert. You must live with the handbell in your hand, that all may flee before you. " No human being must see you : no consolation may be yours. If you come near, "'tis death."
Leprosy is the last stage, the apogee of this scourge ; but a thousand other ills, less hideous but still cruel, raged everywhere. The purest and the most fair were stricken with sad eruptions, which men regarded as sin made visible, or the chastisement of God. Then people did what the love of life had never made them do : they forsook the old sacred medicine, the bootless holy water, and went off to the Witch. Fvom habit and fear as well, they still repaired to church; but thenceforth their true church was with her, on the moor, in the forest, in the desert. To her they carried their vows.
Prayers for healing, prayers for pleasure. On the first effervescing of their heated blood, folk went to the Sibyl, in great secrecy, at uncertain hours. a What
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shall I do ? and what is this I feel within me ? I burn : give me some lenitive. I burn : grant me that which causes my intolerable desire."
A bold, a blatnable journey, for which they re- proach themselves at night. Let this new fatality be never so urgent, this fire be never so torturing, the Saints themselves never so powerless ; still, have not the indictment of the Templars and the proceedings of Pope Boniface unveiled the Sodom lying hid beneath the altar ? But a wizard Pope, a friend of the Devil, who also carried him away, effects a change in all their ideas. Was it not with the Demon's help that John XXIL, the son of a shoemaker, a Pope no more of Home, succeeded in amassing in his town of Avignon more gold than the Emperor and all the kings ? As the Pope is, so is the bishop. Did not Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, procure from the Devil the death of the King's daughters ? No death we ask for — we ; but pleasant things — for life, for health, for beauty, and for pleasure: the things of God which God refuses. What shall we do ? Might we but win them through the grace of the Prince of this World!
When the great and mighty doctor of the Renais- sance, Paracelsus, cast all the wise books of ancient medicine into the tire, Latin, and Jewish, and Arabic, all at once, he declared that he had learned none but
THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN. — 121
the popular medicine, that of the good women,* the shepherds, and the headsmen, the latter of whom made often good horse-doctors and clever surgeons, resetting bones broken or put out of joint.
I make no doubt but that his admirable and masterly work on The Diseases of Women — the first then written on a theme so large, so deep, so tender — came forth from his special experience of those women to whom others went for aid ; of the witches, namely, who always acted as the midwives : for never in those days was a male physician admitted to the woman's side, to win her trust in him, to listen to her secrets. The writches alone attended her, and became, especially for women, the chief and only physician.
"What we know for surest with regard to their medi- cinal practice is, that for ends the most different, alike to stimulate and to soothe, they made use of one large family of doubtful and very dangerous plants, called, by reason of the services they rendered, The Comforters, or Solanese.f
* The name given in fear and politeness to the witches.
•f Man's ingratitude is painful to see. A thousand other plants have come into use : a hundred exotic vegetables have become the fashion. But the good once done by these poor Comforters is clean forgotten ! — Kay, who now remembers or even acknowledges the old debt of humanity to harmless nature ? The Asdepias acida, Sarcostemma, or flesh-plant, which for five thousand years was the Holy Wafer of the East, its very palpable God, eaten gladly by five hundred millions of
122 THE WITCH.
A vast and popular family, many kinds of which ahound to excess under our feet, in the hedges, every- where— a family so numerous that of one kind alone we have eight hundred varieties.* There is nothing easier, nothing more common, to find. But these plants are mostly dangerous in the using. It needs some boldness to measure out a dose, the boldness, perhaps, of genius.
Let us, step by step, mount the ladder of their powers. -f The first are simply pot-herbs, good for food, such as the mad-apples and the tomatoes, mis- called "love-apples." Other, of the harmless kinds, are sweetness and tranquillity itself, as the white mul- lens, or lady's fox-gloves, so good for fomentations.
Going higher up, you come on a plant already sus-
men, — this plant, in the Middle Ages called the Poison-queller (vince-venenum), meets with not one word of historical com- ment in our books of Botany. Perhaps two thousand years hence they will forget the wheat. See Langlois on the Soma of India and the Horn of Persia. Mem. de VAcademie des Inscriptions, xix. 326.
* M. d'Orbigny's Dictionary of Natural History, article Morelles.
t I have found this ladder nowhere else. It is the more important, because the witches who made these essays at the risk of passing for poisoners, certainly began with the weakest, and rose gradually to the strongest. Each step of power thus gives its relative date, and helps us in this dark subject to set up a kind of chronology. I shall complete it in the following chapters, when I come to speak of the Mandragora and the Datura. I have chiefly followed Pouchet's Solanees and Bo- tanique Generale.
THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN. 123
picious, which many think a poison, a plant which at first seems like honey and afterwards tastes bitter, re- minding one of Jonathan's saying, " I have eaten a little honey, and therefore shall I die." But this death is serviceable, a dying away of pain. The " bitter- sweet " should have been the first experiment of that bold homoeopathy which rose, little by little, up to the most dangerous poisons. The slight irritation and the tingling which it causes might point it out as a remedy for the prevalent diseases of that time, those, namely, of the skin.
The pretty maiden who found herself woefully adorned with uncouth red patches, with pimples, or with ringworm, would come crying for such relief. In the case of an elder woman the hurt would be yet more painful. The bosom, most delicate thing in na- ture, with its innermost vessels forming a matchless flower, becomes, through its injeetive and congestive tendencies, the most perfect instrument for causing pain. Sharp, ruthless, restless are the pains she suf- fers. Gladly would she accept all kinds of poison. Instead of bargaining with the Witch, she only puts her poor hard breast between her hands.
From the bittersweet, too weak for such, we rise to the dark nightshades, which have rather more effect. For a few days the woman is soothed. Anon she comes back weeping. " Very well, to-night you may come again. I will fetch you something, as you wish me ; but it will be a strong poison."
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It \vas a heavy risk for the Witch. At that time they never thought that poisons could act as remedies, if applied outwardly or taken in very weak doses. The plants they compounded together under the name of witches' herbs, seemed to be but ministers of death. Such as were found in her hands would have proved her, in their opinion, a poisoner or a dealer in accursed charms. A blind crowd, all the more cruel for its growing fears, might fell her with a shower of stones, or make her undergo the trial by water — the noyade. Or even — most dreadful doom of all ! — they might drag her with a rope round her neck to the church- yard, where a pious festival was held and the people edified by seeing her thrown to the flames.
However, she runs the risk, and fetches home the dreadful plant. The other woman comes back to her abode by night or morning, whenever she is least afraid of being met. But a young shepherd, who saw her there, told the village, " If you had seen her as I did, gliding among the rubbish of the ruined hut, looking about her on all sides, muttering I know not what ! Oh, but she has frightened me very much ! If she had seen me, I was a lost man. She would have changed me into a lizard, a toad, or a bat. She took a paltry herb — the paltriest I ever saw — of a pale sickly yellow, with red and black marks, like the flames, as they say, of hell. The horror of the thing is, that the whole stalk was hairy like a man, with long, black, sticky hairs. She plucked it roughly,
THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN. 125
with a grunt, and suddenly I saw her no more. She could not have run away so quick ; she must have flown. What a dreadful thing that woman is ! How dangerous to the whole country ! "
Certainly the plant inspires dread. It is the hen- bane, a cruel and dangerous poison, but a powerful emollient, a soft sedative poultice, which melts, un- bends, lulls to sleep the pain, often taking it quite away.
Another of these poisons — the Belladonna, so called, undoubtedly, in thankful acknowledgment, had great power in laying the convulsions that sometimes super- vened in childbirth, and added a new danger, a new fear, to the danger and the fear of that most trying moment. A motherly hand instilled the gentle poison, casting the mother hej-self into a sleep, and smoothing the infant's passage, after the manner of the modern chloroform, into the world.*
Belladonna cures the dancing-fits while making you dance. A daring homoeopathy this, which at first must frighten : it is medicine reversed, contrary in most things to that which alone the Christians studied, which alone they valued, after the example of the Jews and Arabs.
How did men come to this result? Undoubtedly by the simple effect of the great Satanic principle, that
* Madame La Chapelle and M. Chaussier have renewed to good purpose these practices of the older medicine. Pouchet, Solanees.
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everything must be done the wrong way, the very op- posite way to that followed by the holy people. These latter have a dread of poisons. Satan uses them and turns them into remedies. The Church thinks by spiritual means, by sacraments and prayers, to act even on the body. Satan, on the other hand, uses material means to act even upon the soul, making you drink of forgetfulness, love, reverie, and every passion. To the blessing of the priest he opposes the magnetic passes made by the soft hands of women, who cheat you of your pains.
By a change of system, and yet more of dress, as in the substitution Of linen for wool, the skin-diseases lost their intensity. Leprosy abated, but seemed to go inwards and beget deeper ills. The fourteenth cen- tury wavered between three scourges — the epileptic dancings, the plague, and the sores which, according to Paracelsus, led the way to syphilis.
The first danger was not the least. About 1350 it broke out in a frightful manner with the dance of St. Guy, and was singular especially in this, that it did not act upon each person separately. As if carried on by one same galvanic current, the sick caught each other by the hand, formed immense chains, and spun and spun round till they died. The spectators, who laughed at first, presently catching the contagion, let them- selves go, fell into the mighty current, increased the terrible choir.
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What would have happened if the evil had held on as long as leprosy did even in its decline ?
It was the first step, as it were, towards epilepsy. If that generation of sufferers had not been cured, it would have begotten another decidedly epileptic. What a frightful prospect ! Think of Europe covered with fools, with idiots, with raging madmen ! We are not told how the evil was treated and checked. The remedy prescribed by most, the falling upon these jumpers with kicks and cuffings, was entirely fitted to increase the frenzy and turn it into downright epilepsy.* Doubtless there was some other remedy, of which people were loth to speak. At the time when witchcraft took its first great flight, the wide-spread use of the Solanece, above all, of belladonna, vulgarized the medicine which really checked those affections. At the great popular gatherings of the Sabbath, of which we shall presently speak, the witches' herb, mixed with mead, beer, cider, -j- or perry (the strong drinks of the West), set the multitude dancing a dance luxurious indeed, but far from epileptic.
But the greatest revolution caused by the witches, the greatest step the wrong way against the spirit of the Middle Ages, was what may be called the reenfeoff- ment of the stomach and the digestive organs. They
* We should think that few physicians would quite agree with M. Michelet. — TRANS.
t Cider was first made in the twelfth century.
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had the boldness to say, " There is nothing foul or unclean." Thenceforth the study of matter was free and boundless. Medicine became a possibility.
That this principle was greatly abused, we do not deny ; but the principle is none the less clear. There is nothing foul but moral evil. In the natural world all things are pure : nothing may be withheld from our studious regard, nothing be forbidden by an idle spi- ritualism, still less by a silly disgust.
It was here especially that the Middle Ages showed themselves in their true light, as anti-natural, out of Nature's oneness drawing distinctions of castes, of priestly orders. Not only do they count the spirit noble, and the body ignoble ; but even parts of the body are called noble, while others are not, being evidently plebeian. In like manner heaven is noble, and hell is not;jbut why? — "Because heaven is high up." .But in truth it is neither high, nor low, being above and beneath alike. And what is hell ? Nothing at all. Equally foolish are they about the world at large an the smaller world of men.
This world is all one piece : each thing in it is at- tached to all the rest. If the stomach is servant of the brain and feeds it, the brain also works none the less for the stomach, perpetually helping to prepare for it the digestive sugar*
There was no lack of injurious treatment. The * This great discovery was made by Claude Bernard.
THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN. 129
witches were called filthy, indecent, shameless, im- moral. Nevertheless, their first steps on that road may be accounted as a happy revolution in things most moral, in charity and kindness. With a monstrous perversion of ideas the Middle Ages viewed the flesh in its representative, woman, — accursed since the days of Eve — as a thing impure. The Virgin, exalted as Virgin more than as Our Lady, far from lifting up the real woman, had caused her abasement, by setting men on the track of a mere scholastic puritanism, where they kept rising higher and higher in subtlety and falsehood.
Woman herself ended by sharing in the hateful prejudice and deeming herself unclean. She hid her- self at the hour of childbed. She blushed at loving and bestowing happiness on others. Sober as she mostly was in comparison with man, living as she mostly did on herbs and fruits, sharing through her diet of milk and vegetables the purity of the most in- nocent breeds, she almost besought forgiveness for being born, for living, for carrying out the conditions of her life.
The medical art of the Middle Ages busied itself peculiarly about the man, a being noble and pure, who alone could become a priest, alone could make God at the altar. It also paid some attention to the beasts, beginning indeed with them ; but of children it thought seldom : of women not at all.
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130 THE WITCH.
The romances, too, with their subtleties pourtray the converse of the world. Outside the courts and high- born adulterers, which form the chief topic of these romances, the woman is always a poor Griselda, born to drain the cup of suffering, to be often beaten, and never cared for.
In order to mind the woman, to trample these usages under foot, and to care for her in spite of herself, nothing less would serve than the Devil, woman's old ally, her trusty friend in Paradise, and the "Witch, that monster who deals with everything the wrong way, exactly con- trariwise to that of the holier people. The poor creature set such little store by herself. She would shrink back, blushing, and loth to say a word. The Witch being clever and evil-hearted, read her to the inmost depths. Ere long she won her to speak out, drew from her her little secret, overcame her refusals, her modest, humble hesitations. Rather than undergo the remedy, she was willing almost to die. But the cruel sorceress made her live.
CHAPTER X.
CHARMS AND PHILTRES.
LET no one hastily conclude from the foregoing chapter that I attempt to whiten, to acquit entirely, the dismal bride of the Devil. If she often did good, she could also do no small amount of ill. There is no great power which is not abused. And this one had three centuries of actual reigning, in the interlude be- tween two worlds, the older dying and the new strug- gling painfully to begin. The Church, which in the quarrels of the sixteenth century will regain some of her strength, at least for fighting, in the fourteenth is down in the mire. Look at the truthful picture drawn by Clemangis. The nobles, so proudly arrayed in their new armour, fall all the more heavily at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt. All who survive end by being prisoners in England. What a theme for ridicule ! The citizens, the very peasants make merry and shrug their shoulders. This general absence of the lords gave, I fancy, no small encouragement to the Sabbath gatherings which had always taken place, but at this time might first have grown into vast popular festivals.
How mighty the power thus wielded by Satan's sweetheart, who cures, foretels, divines, calls up the
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souls of the dead ; who can throw a spell upon you, turn you into a hare or wolf, enable you to find a trea- sure, and, best of all, ensure your being beloved ! It is an awful power which combines all others. How could a stormy soul, a soul most commonly gangrened, and sometimes grown utterly wayward, have helped employing it to wreak her hate and revenge ; some- times even out of a mere delight in malice and un- cleanness ?
All that once was told the confessor, is now imparted to her : not only the sins already done, but those also which folk purpose doing. She holds each by her shameful secret, by the avowal of her uncleanest desires. To her they entrust both their bodily and mental ills ; the lustful heats of a blood inflamed and soured ; the ceaseless prickings of some sharp, urgent, furious desire.
To her they all come : with her there is no shame. In plain blunt words they beseech her for life, for death, for remedies, for poisons. Thither comes a young woman, to ask through her tears for the means of saving her from the fruits of her sin. Thither comes the step-mother — a common theme in the Middle Ages — to say that the child of a former marriage eats well and lives long. Thither comes the sorrowing wife whose children year by year are born only to die. And now, on the other hand, comes a youth to buy at any cost the burning draught that shall trouble the heart of some haughty dame, until, forgetful of the distance
CHARMS AND PHILTRES. 133
between them, she has stooped to look upon her little page.
In these days there are hut two types, two forms of marriage, both of them extreme and outrageous.
The scornful heiress of a fief, who brings her hus- band a crown or a broad estate, an Eleanor of Guyenne for instance, will, under her husband's very eyes, hold her court of lovers, keeping herself under very slight control. Let us leave romances and poems, to look at the reality in its dread march onward to the unbridled rage of the daughters of Philip the Fair, of the cruel Isabella, who by the hands of her lovers impaled Edward II. The insolence of the feudal women breaks out diabolically in the triumphant two-horned bonnet and other brazen-faced fashions.
But in this century, when classes are beginning to mingle slightly, the woman of a lower rank, when she marries a lord, has to fear the hardest trials. So says the truthful history of the humble, the meek, the patient Griselda. In a more popular form it becomes the tale of Blue-Beard, a tale which seems to me quite earnest and historical. The wife so often killed and replaced by him could only have been his vassal. He would have reckoned wholly otherwise with the daugh- ter or sister of a baron, who might avenge her. If I am not misled by a specious conjecture, we must be- lieve that this tale is of the fourteenth century, and
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not of those preceding, in which the lord would never have deigned to take a wife below himself.
Specially remarkable in the moving tale of Griselda is the fact, that throughout her heavy trials, she never seeks support in being devout or in loving another. She is evidently faithful, chaste, and pure. It never comes into her mind to love elsewhere.
Of the two feudal women, the Heiress and Griselda, it is peculiarly the first who has her household of gen- tlemen, her courts of love, who shows favour to the humblest lovers, encouraging them, delivering, as Eleanor did, the famous sentence, soon to become quite classical : " There can be no love between married folk."
Thereupon a secret hope, but hot and violent withal, arises in more than one young heart. If he must give himself to the Devil, he will rush full tilt on this adventurous intrigue. Let the castle be never so surely closed, one fine opening is still left for Satan. In a game so perilous, what chance of success reveals itself? Wisdom answers, None. But what if Satan said, Yes ?
We must remember how great a distance feudal pride set between the nobles themselves. Words are mislead- ing : one cavalier might be far below another.
The knight banneret, who brought a whole army of vassals to his king's side, would look with utter scorn from, one end of his long table on the poor lackland knights seated at the other. How much greater his scorn for the simple varlets, grooms, pages, &c., fed upon his
CHARMS AND PHILTRES. 135
leavings ! Seated at the lowermost end of the table, close to the door, they scraped the dishes sent down to them, often empty, from the personages seated above