hich
blind frenzy inflicted on the inflexible martyr to his faith, it is
certainly more difficult to explain the severity exercised upon the more
pliable, whom the arguments of ghostly advisers, or the terrors of the
_Place de Greve_, had induced to recant. Generally the judge did nothing
more in their behalf than commute their punishment by ordering them to
be strangled before their bodies were consigned to the flames.[78] Yet
in one exceptional case--that of a servant whose master, a gentleman and
one of the men-at-arms of the Regent of Scotland, was burned alive--the
court went to such a length of leniency as to let the repentant heretic
off with the sentence that he first be beaten with rods at the cart's
end, and afterwards have his tongue cut out.[79] Even the clearest
evidence of insanity did not suffice to remove or even mitigate the
penalties of impiety. A poor, crazy woman, who had broken the
consecrated wafer when administered to her in her illness, and had
applied to it some offensive but absurd epithet, was unhesitatingly
condemned to the stake. An appeal to a superior court procuring no
reversal of her sentence, she was burned at Tours in the year 1533.[80]

[Sidenote: Belief in astrology.]

[Sidenote: Predictions of Nostradamus.]

Other marks of a low stage of civilization were not wanting. The belief
in judicial astrology was almost universal.[81] Pretenders like
Nostradamus obtained respect and wealth at the hands of their dupes. All
France trembled with Catharine de' Medici, when the astrologer gave out
that the queen would see all her sons kings, and every one foreboded the
speedy extinction of the royal line. The "prophecy," as it was gravely
styled, obtained public recognition, and was discussed in diplomatic
papers. When two of the queen's sons had in fact become kings of France,
and a third had been elected to the throne of Poland, while the marriage
of the fourth with Queen Elizabeth was under consideration, Catharine's
allies saw grounds to congratulate her that the prediction which had so
disquieted her was likely to obtain a more pleasing fulfilment than in
the successive deaths of her male descendants.[82]

A still more pernicious form of superstition was noticeable in the
credit enjoyed by charms and incantations, not merely among illiterate
rustics, but even with persons of high social station. No phase of the
magic art led to the commission of more terrible crimes or revealed a
worse s