reputation by utilising his prophetic and aërial powers to warn the Pope (probably Alexander VI.) to avoid a particularly scandalous assignation, where an injured husband lay in wait for the sovereign Pontiff with a stiletto.

In all this-which sounds indeed very like buffoonery-we recognise a feeling grotesque indeed, but certainly more healthy than the gloomy mania which a hundred years later was to fill Germany with funeral pyres, and to cause Protestants and Romanists to vie with one another in their holocausts, until the Prince Bishop of Bamberg was warned that if he burned more folk none would be left to pay his taxes. Right to the end of the seventeenth century the madness continued. The horrible "black masses" of Paris involved in their guilt the cultured courtiers-even the mistresses of Le Roi Soleil, and in 1670 the Parliament of Normandy indignantly protested against the cassation by the king's council of their condemnation to death of thirty-four "sorcerers." The last burning of a witch took place in Switzerland in 1782! But to return to Franche Comté. From kings' councils and their impertinent cassations that pleasant land was emancipated. It was still a Spanish possession, and consequently the Inquisition was in full force there. It had a Parliament of its own, at Dôle, distinguished, as we shall see, for fanaticism, and was entirely free from the generally sober and rational influence of the

Parliament of Paris. Had the latter possessed any jurisdiction, the sentence passed on an unhappy merchant of Mattaincourt could never have been carried out. It was based on the crassest ignorance. He had, it was proved, signed a deed at Besançon, and another at Geneva, sixty miles away, on the same day. Flat sorcery, as ever was committed! The poor man of course had signed at Besançon according to Pope Gregory's reformed calendar, and at Protestant Geneva, which rejected the insidious Papal innovation, under the old or Julian reckoning, which was retained in England until 1752. There were really ten days between the two signatures, but it mattered notthey burned him.

Naturally enough, the Free County under the direction of Maître Boguet became also the home of the loup-garou - the were-wolf. He was discovered in scores, perhaps not always as the result of mania or delusion. Times of extreme misery, even in civilised nations, have often given rise to the report, if not the actuality, of cannibalism: such stories are current of the darkest days of Scottish history, and it is possible that the half- frenzied wretches who were driven to such expedients for food did disguise themselves in the skins of beasts to avoid detection. At all events, numerous persons were brought to justice (or what passed under that name) on like charges, and were burned. In some cases, chiefly those of women, their im

patient fellow-citizens lynched them offhand.

But it was not only in Burgundy that the devil's sway was exerted. He was even more powerful in war-wasted Lorraine, wedged in between France with her Huguenot wars, and Germany with her half-brigand black Reiters; not, indeed, the cockpit but the camping-ground of Europeand camping meant much in those days. The unhappy peasant who saw his crops destroyed and his household stuff plundered year after year, now by German mercenaries marching to help or to hinder Henry of Navarre, now by Spanish regulars marching to crush the Dutchmen, took refuge not in sorcery but in suicide. The number of selfmurderers became appalling. It was a veritable epidemic. But to the virtuous Nicolas Rémy, procureur - général of ducal justice, with his own little Parliament at Nancy to look to, and no fear of Paris before his eyes, it was all the sorcery or suicide, it was equally the work of the devil. He had himself an ancient grudge against the evil one for bowling rocks at his legs when he was a student. And besides, Lorraine was of old time the home of magic even in high places. Andri des Bordes and Melchior de la Vallée, great officials of the ducal court, had committed the real offence of preventing a marriage between the daughter of Henry II. and the heir of Lorraine. The latter, on succeeding to the throne, did not

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forget the injury. De la Vallée had "a bath of a hundred burning faggots" for sorcery of some kind. Des Bordes was accused of having made the embroidered figures on a piece of tapestry bow their heads to him, and of having caused Henry II. to be waited on at a picnic by three dead men from the nearest gallows-and he confessed it all! Evidently the devil's army were too numerous in Lorraine, and Rémy, a really pious and able man, succeeded in reducing their number by nine hundred in the fifteen years between 1591 and 1606.

But in these strange confessions of obviously impossible acts there is more than appears on the surface. The avowals were not always extracted under torture-sometimes they were voluntary; and the unanimity of statement as to details on the part of persons who could not have been in communication presents a curious problem. Perhaps the strangest instance of this unanimity is to be found in the famous case of the children of Elfdal, in Sweden. Three hundred of these children declared that they had been conveyed by night to a witches' Sabbath at the "castle of Blockula " (Blocksberg), and we are assured that their narratives corresponded in every respect. Fifteen of them were burned. On the other hand, the good faith of the judges cannot be called in question, at least when they were laymen. Ecclesiastical Inquisitors were certainly accused of hankering

after confiscations. But striking proof of the honesty of the jurisconsults is this: that in the few cases where the victims had the presence of mind to include among those whom they denounced their judges themselves, as having been present at "Sabbaths" or the like, the court was at once conscience-struck-"from the greffier to the procureur on the bench." Could they themselves have been present at such orgies without knowing it? It was held that the cattle eaten at those horrid banquets were found next morning safe and sound in their masters' byres. Why should not they, the judges, have been present unawares? We need not ascribe their terror to mere fear of mob-violence: they believed in the existence of sorcery as much as we do in the truth of the laws of gravitation, and we may not doubt that they were truly and genuinely afraid that they were sorcerers themselves.

But the experience of Pierre de Lancre in this respect was unique. A gay young barrister of Bordeaux, he was sent to his native place in 1603 to search for sorcerers. After discovering a were-wolf or two he fell into the hands, and under the influence, of two pretty "beggar wenches," impudent creatures, with a turn for scandalous narrative. To one of these, nicknamed "Margui," he actutually entrusted the task of examining certain ladies of Bordeaux to see if they had on them the "callous spot by which the devil marked his

"And where was it?" asked the judge. "Chez vous, De Lancre, et dans votre propre chambre," was the astounding reply; and to this amazing piece of impertinence the jurist not only gave credit, but incorporated it in a solemn book which he wrote on "Incredulity and Misbelief."

Of extraordinary self-delusion-if self-delusion it wasthere is no more striking case than that which forms the main subject of the present article. That half-witted peasants should have declared that they had been turned into wolves by the devil; that starving old women should have preferred death, even at the stake, to prolonged agony of famine, is explicable enough. But that we should find men of position, education, and wealth freely confessing to things apparently beyond all possibility of being true, even in the wild world of the early seventeenth century, may give us pause. There is no question here of misery, of carelessness of death, or of desire for death; no question of that hysteria which undoubtedly brought so many wretched women to the fatal pile of faggots. We have to deal with a Parliament as the court; with acute financiers

ruins and demolished; nevertheless they made him to see there an infinity of treasures and riches to seduce him, and thereafter delivered to him the sum of two thousand crowns by him before demanded." This statement was apparently afterwards quoted by the "religious" at the trial of the Dorladys, to their destruction.

Restored to comparative ease and repute, Roulet omitted to practise the virtues which his deliverance should have dictated to him; in particular, his neglect of the duty of almsgiving had wellnigh proved fatal to him. One day an aged mendicant came to his door and would take no refusal. The housewife bade him begone for a vagabond, but he persisted in trying to enter the house. Roulet came out in a rage and pitched him down the steps, where he fell awkwardly, and indeed died on the spot. Terror-struck by what he had done, in a country where chance-medley and murder had but small distinction made between them, Roulet dragged the body away, and with his wife's assistance buried it deep in the garden. That he had killed the devil did not occur to him till afterwards.

That Roulet was not likely to be a good father of a family we can readily understand from what we already know of him. Accordingly it was not long before he was engaged in a violent quarrel with his wife, which drew together a crowd of gossips. With the inconsequence common to her sex, the furious woman, departing

from the immediate cause of quarrel, shrieked at her husband the accusation of having killed a beggar at his own door. The neighbours were all agog. Roulet was not popular, and the news was carried straight to the officers of justice. A domiciliary visit was the result. At his wits' end apparently to escape from what was like to prove a hanging matter, Roulet recounted the whole story as we have given it above, and added his conviction that the beggar was none other than the devil, come to get back some of his own. Now comes the second mystery in the story; for the officers digging in the garden in the place indicated to them by husband and wife, found nothing but "a huge toad very stinking -sure proof that the devil had been buried there. The wretched Roulet escaped altogether. He had only killed the enemy of mankind. était absous par là même."

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But he had to undergo some form of trial; and at this he informed the judge, in order to establish the fact that the devil was really in the business, of his visit to the Dorladys. The old priest, he said, knew about it already, and that religious man, very probably a private enemy of the usurers, seems to have confirmed his statement. Manfredo Dorlady, the elder, and his son, were haled before the courts, their house was searched, and in it was found "an infinity of papers and charts of necromancy." They would hardly have been the children