._" Her goodness gave
the clergy a chance of getting the upper hand. The power of the laity
entombed with Richelieu, bishops, priests, and monks, were about to
reign. The bold impiety of the magistrate and his friend Yvelin
imperilled so sweet a hope. Groans and wailings went forth to the Good
Queen, not from the victims, but from the knaves thus caught in the
midst of their offences. Up to the Court they went, weeping for the
outrage to their religion.

Yvelin was not prepared for this stroke: he deemed himself firm at
Court, having for ten years borne the title of Surgeon to the Queen.
Before he returned from Louviers to Paris, the weakness of Anne of
Austria had been tempted into granting another commission named by his
opponents, consisting of an old fool in his dotage, one Diafoirus of
Rouen, and his nephew, both attached to the priesthood. These did not
fail to discover that the Louviers affair was supernatural,
transcending all art of man.

Any other than Yvelin would have been discouraged. The Rouen
physicians treated with utter scorn this surgeon, this barber fellow,
this mere sawbones. The Court gave him no encouragement. Still, he
held on his way in a treatise which will live yet. He accepts this
battle of science against priestcraft, declaring, as Wyer did in the
sixteenth century, that "in all such matters the right judge is not
the priest but the man of science." With great difficulty he found
some one bold enough to print, but no one willing to sell his little
work. So in broad daylight the heroic young man set about distributing
it with his own hands. Placing himself on the Pont Neuf, the most
frequented spot in Paris, at the foot of Henry the Fourth's statue, he
gave out copies of his memoir to the passers by. At the end of it they
found a formal statement of the shameful fraud, how in the hand of the
female demons the magistrate had caught the unanswerable evidence of
their dishonour.

* * * * *

Return we to the wretched Madeline. Her enemy, the Penitentiary of
Evreux, by whose influence she had been searched with needles, carried
her off as his prey to the heart of the episcopal dungeons in that
town. Below an underground passage dipped a cave, below the cave a
cell, where the poor human creature lay buried in damps and darkness.
Reckoning upon her speedy death, her dread companions had not even the
kindness to give her a piece of linen for the dressing of her ulce