sented the church. Every thing that she said was accompanied with that smile which is the refinement of mystical coquetry. After having detailed the gifts of the Convul sionaries, she ended with this relishing piece of information: "Think not that we are saints, for all that; convulsions are gifts of a gratuitory not of a sanctifying grace; and it has more than once happened that a Convulsionary has fallen into error, and shewn weaknesses which ought to humble us."At length, on Good Friday, the narrator reaped the fruit of his two visits. He arrived at a quarter after two at the house of M. de Vauville, where he saw a numerous assembly. He then gives a list of the profane and of the initiated who were present at the meeting. Among the former we find the Princess de Kinski, the Prince de Monaco, the Comte de Stahremberg, &c. &c. The following terrible scene was presented to the assembly:

Sister Rachel and Sister Félicité had been on the cross for a quarter of an hour. The cross of the former was extended flat on the floor: that of the latter was nearly upright, but sufficiently inclined to be supported against the wall. Rachel's hands were nailed almost horizontally, and her arms were extended, but not wide enough to give her muscles too fatiguing a tension. She wore on her head a cap of blue silk, with white flowers, and a cushion which raised her hair. She is ugly, little, dark, and about thirty-three years old; blood flowed from her feet and hands; her head was inclined; her eyes were closed; and the paleness of death was painted on her visage. The spectators saw a cold sweat flow down which terrified them; M. de Vauville advanced, wiped frequently the face of Rachel, and told us for our satisfaction that she represented the agony of Jesus Christ. I went up to Rachel, and asked her why she closed her eyes; she answered in an infantine manner that she was gone to by-by*. This state of crisis lasted for a quarter of an hour; when, by little and little, the perspiration was dispersed, as well as the paleness. Rachel then opened her eyes, looked at us with a smiling air, lisped some childish words, and thou'd and thee'd (tutoya) the Princess de Kinski. She frequently addressed M. Dubourg, and told him that the faculty wished to explain these miracles, but understood nothing of the matter: but that God would again put her on her feet. M. Dubourg shewed her some sugar-plums, and told her that she should not have any of them because she scolded him. She answered that she would take them when her pretty little hands should be free. After all these contemptible extravagancies, it appeared that Rachel fainted away again, and became dumb and pale. Sion said with an anxious and disturbed air: "My dear father, it is time to take her down." M. de Vauville approached,

*«Elle me répondit qu'elle faisait dodo." Faire dodo is the infantine French for dormir; or, as our children and nurses say, to go to by-by.

with a pair of pincers in his hand, and drew the nails. At the drawing of each nail, Rachel suffered the severest pain; and the convulsive motions of her face, and particularly of her lips, made us shudder. The Princess de Kinski covered her eyes with her hands. A quantity of blood poured from Rachel's wounds; her hands and feet were washed with water drawn from the cistern in the kitchen by Mademoiselle Bibéron; at last the blood appeared to be staunched; she wrapped each foot in linen, and put on her shoes and stockings. No linen was applied to her hands. She had remained suspended to the cross for an hour. Still the cross of Sister Félicité was extended on the floor at the bottom of Rachel's cross; and, in spite of the warnings and precautions of Sister Sion, Rachel, as she walked away, brushed with her gown the fingers of Sister Félicité, who cried out. The face of the latter was ardent and inflamed, and her eyes sparkled: but she kept silence. She remained on the cross a quarter of an hour longer than her companion, gave the same signs of pain when the nails were taken out, and like her bled considerably. - Scarcely had Rachel descended from the cross, when she went towards M. Dubourg, crawling on her knees, and took from him him some sugar-plums; thence crawling towards Madame de Kinski, she rested her head on the knees of that Princess, and bestowed on her sundry infantine caresses. M. de Vauville told us that she was going to dine; that she had been during that morning on foot to Mount Valérien, and had returned without eating. It was three o'clock. At that hour, Rachel gave three wide yawns, which they told me was the conclusion of her convulsions. After having yawned, they put on her ordinary head-dress; and she ate some rice and oysters. I do not know whether she drank wine."

To these abominations the narrator adds what is termed in convulsionary language "the succour of Marie." This holy sister, it appears, was a stout two-handed wench, from thirty to thirty-five years of age, in excellent condition. M. de Vauville spred a mattrass on the ground in a corner of the room; when Sister Marie laid herself on it, first on her stomach and afterward on her back, and submitted to no common portion of bastinade. They administered to her on the chest and breast a number of strokes, with a billet of wood a foot and a half in length and five inches thick. "The blows," said M. de Vauville, " do not wound her bosom, a sign that the bosom of the church is always unhurt through every trial and reverse."-"I can assure you," said Sister Sion," that she does not suffer, although she ap pears to suffer; no one can answer for it better than myself, for I frequently receive such blows, and never feel any pain from them." Then follows an account of some light and trifling succours, such as walking on her hands and arms; and a decent dose of knocks on the skull with a billet of nine inches long and two and a half in thickness, accompanied by another precious discourse from M. de Vauville. At last, from billets M. de V. proceeded to salute her with blows of the fist on both

her

"

her cheeks; and while it was raining and snowing blows, boxes, cuffs, and bastinades on poor Sister Marie, seated on her mattrass, the assembly was astonished at hearing on a sudden the words by order of his Majesty," and yet more by the entrance of a commissary of police with his myrmidons. The party was instantly in the utmost confusion; Sisters Félicité, Rachel, and Sion wept, tore their hair, and shewed every symptom of extreme fear and despair. Sister Marie alone was tranquilly seated on her mattrass; and M. de Vauville, calm amid the general confusion, continued to regale her with some round. boxes on the ear, which he accompanied by a repetition of the Miserere. The principal actors were then hurried off to the Bastille, and the visitors returned to their homes.

Those who would wish to pursue this terribly absurd account are referred to that part of the Correspondence which relates the events at Paris, which ought surely to be styled illiterate rather than literary, for the year 1761. Succours of the sword and fire are administered; and the frightful picture of criminal and horrid superstition, which we have ventured to lay before our readers, will be found a mere etching compared with that which follows. "Those," concludes Condamine," are mistaken, who think that all this is the work of God, and say in evidence of the miracle, that these women did not suffer, but felt pleasure in their torments: this, indeed, would have been a miracle: but, as I have seen them testify every mark of agony, the only miracle to which I can bear witness is that of the constancy and courage which fanaticism is able to inspire." To this remark, we must add that women were the only victims of this blind fury for self-torture.

M. le Paige, advocate to the parliament, inflicted a number of strokes with a billet on his wife, two or three days before her accouchement, and she died a week after that event. Father Cottu said, "She was happily delivered; the blows did her no harm; she only died eight days afterward."

M. de Grandelas, a physician, was at the bed-side of Sister Françoise at the moment of her death. "God be praised," she cried; "all is over; here at last is the grand convulsion." Father Cottu, who was at the other side of her bed, persuaded that she would recover her health and be radically cured on a sudden, as she had often been before, if some kind friend would only apply some strokes with a billet, ran to fetch that weapon, and was preparing to ease the dying woman, when the physician stopped him, and said, "Eh, Sir, what are you going to do?"-"To console and to cure her."-" How, to cure her?"-" Yes, Sir, by a remedy that has often suc ceeded.”—“ We really are unacquainted among the faculty

with any such remedy, and she shall have none of it, with your leave."-" She shall have none of it, if you are so determined but consider well, Sir, what you are about; you are the author of her death, and you will answer for it before. God." She expired a quarter of an hour afterward, and Father Cottu was convinced that she died for want of a few knocks with a billet of wood.

Readers who are fond of contrast, and have no objection to strong light and shade, will turn with complacency from the above narrative to the amusement selected by Voltaire for the ladies who visited Délices. This patriarch had made the acquisition of a certain Danish Cyllarus, extremely advanced in years; and, reversing the maxim contained in the third Georgic, which says,

"Hunc quoque, ubi aut morbo gravis, aut jam segnior annis Deficit, abde domo," &c.

and that'

"Frigidus in Venerem senior, frustraque laborem Ingratum trahit," &c.

forgetting, we say, or not wishing to remember these wholesome axioms, the patriarch took a singular delight in leading out his female visitors, and forcibly compelling them to witness what he called le grand spectacle.

The liberality of Voltaire is extraordinary. When he settled at Ferney, his annual income exceeded one hundred thou sand livres, and he had lodged in a single commercial house at Lyons a capital of eight hundred thousand livres. In a very short time these funds were exhausted; and the Duke of Wurtemberg, instead of remitting to him the thirty thousand livres which he stipulated annually to send, had acquired a certain foolish habit of forwarding to him an account of his fêtes, and their concomitant expences. The patriarch, however, rose superior to the effects of his liberalities and imprudences; his letters supported their usual and characteristic fund of gaiety; and his genius set all to rights again. Mankind have full cause to regret the appearance of this extraordinary man: but, in lamenting the dangerous arms of wit and ridicule with which he waged war on many of our nearest and dearest feelings, we certainly cannot but acknowlege that the persecutions directed against religious opinion, and the crying injustice of legal sentences common in France, called for an avenger and an exposer of their misdoings. Not to mention the violent pos session of Favart's wife by the Maréchal de Saxe, countenanced and supported by the high authorities, the death of the unfor

tunate

tunate Calas was alone sufficient to stir even indifference itself into mutiny. Every criminal code, adopted by a people who wish to be exempted from the imputation of barbarism, should be founded on the maxim that, in the uncertainty of proofs, it were better to suffer twenty guilty men to escape the rigour of the law, than to expose a single innocent man to become its victim: but, when we behold a man and a father, in the decrepitude of age, torn from the bosom of his family, in which he had lived honoured and in tranquillity, and among whom he had promised himself to die in peace, accused of a crime at which nature shudders, and sent to the scaffold by hearsays and whispers, who does not tremble at the idea of the fate which obscure futurity may reserve for himself? To the eternal execration deserved by the Judges of Toulouse, may be added the detestation of those base Judges who permitted the character of the honest Bordeu to be whispered away, his life to be endangered, and his finances ruined, and who inflicted no punishment on the vile author of his misfortunes. On the ninth day of March 1763, a decree was passed to wipe off the stain froin the memory of the unhappy Calas. At the same time, it was resolved to petition the King to prohibit, by an express declaration, the procession which took place every year at Toulouse in odium of the Calvinists, which kept alive that barbarous hatred, so contrary to the principles of religion and Christian charity" This decree,' continues M. GRIMM, was passed on the same day and at the same hour on which Calas died in tortures three years before. Nothing afflicts me so much as this solemn puerility in a cause of this nature; it inspires me with a horror beyond expression; it seems as if I saw children playing with the poignards and instruments of the executioner.'

'A

To the credit of M. de Voltaire, he suffered none of these flagitious sentences to escape his indignation, and lost no opportunity of heaping infamy on the heads of their authors. most affecting letter from M. de Voltaire has been published, from which it appears that another Protestant family of Languedoc experienced almost at the same time a similar injustice from the parliament of Toulouse. Oh! fatal impunity! This family, whose name is Sirven, has also fled for protection to M. de Voltaire.

That these instances of flagitious intolerance, frequently recurring, aided the birth of what is termed French philosophy, we are fully persuaded. Religion is so consolatory to man, and it is so necessary to him in all the cross accidents of his life, that nothing less than extreme profligacy, attired in its mask and stole, could possibly have uprooted it from the hearts of the

many.