, tampered
with them, threatened them, and, if they were against Girard, coolly
debarred their entrance by thrusting them out of doors.

Thus the clerical judge and the King's officer were only as puppets in
the Jesuits' hands. The whole town saw this and trembled. During
December, January, and February, the Cadiere family drew up and
diffused a complaint touching the way in which justice was denied them
and witnesses suborned. The Jesuits themselves felt that the place
would no longer hold them. They evoked help from a higher quarter.
This seemed best available in the shape of a decree of the Great
Council, which would have brought the matter before itself and hushed
up everything, as Mazarin had done in the Louviers affair. But the
Chancellor was D'Aguesseau; and the Jesuits had no wish to let the
matter go up to Paris. They kept it still in Provence. On the 16th
January, 1731, they got the King to determine that the Parliament of
Provence, where they had plenty of friends, should pass sentence on
the inquiry which two of its councillors were conducting at Toulon.

M. Faucon, a layman, and M. de Charleval, a councillor of the Church,
came in fact and straightway marched down among the Jesuits. These
eager commissioners made so little secret of their loud and bitter
partiality, as to toss out an order for Cadiere's remand, just as they
might have done to an accused prisoner; whilst Girard was most
politely called up and allowed to go free, to keep on saying mass and
hearing confessions. And so the plaintiff was kept under lock and key,
in her enemies' hands, exposed to all manner of cruelty from Girard's
devotees.

From these honest Ursulines she met with just such a reception as if
they had been charged to bring about her death. The room they gave her
was the cell of a mad nun who made everything filthy. In the nun's old
straw, in the midst of a frightful stench, she lay. Her kinsmen on the
morrow had much ado to get in a coverlet and mattress for her use. For
her nurse and keeper she was allowed a poor tool of Girard's, a
lay-sister, daughter to that very Guiol who had betrayed her; a girl
right worthy of her mother, capable of any wickedness, a source of
danger to her modesty, perhaps even to her life. They submitted her to
a course of penance in her case specially painful, refusing her the
right of confessing herself or taking the sacrament. She relapsed into
her illness from the time she was debarred the latter