re de Montgeron, a magistrate of
rank and high character, Counsellor of the Parliament of Paris. An
enthusiast, and a weak logician, as hot enthusiasts generally are,
Montgeron's honesty is admitted to be beyond question. Converted to
Jansenism on the seventh of September, 1731, in the church-yard of St.
Medard, by the strange scenes there passing, he expended his fortune,
sacrificed his liberty, and devoted years of his life, in the
preparation and publication of one of the most extraordinary works that
ever issued from the press.[4] It consists of three quarto volumes, of
some nine hundred closely printed pages each. Crowded with repetitions,
and teeming with false reasoning, these volumes nevertheless contain,
backed by certificates without number, such an elaborate aggregation of
concurrent testimony as I think human industry never before brought
together to prove any contested class of phenomena.

Not less zealous, if less voluminous, were the writers opposed to what
was called "the work of the convulsions." Of these one of the chief was
Dom La Taste, Bishop of Bethleem, author of the "Lettres Theologiques,"
and of the "Memoire Theologique," in both of which the extravagances of
the Convulsionists are severely handled; a second was the Abbe d'Asfeld,
who, in 1738, published his "Vains Efforts des Discernans," in the same
strain; and another, M. Poncet, who put forth an elaborate reply to the
Succorists, entitled "Reponse des Anti-Secouristes a la Reclamation."

The convulsions, commencing in the year 1731, almost immediately assumed
an epidemical character, spreading so rapidly that in a few months the
affected reached the number of eight hundred. These were to be found not
only on the tomb and in the cemetery itself, but in the streets, lanes,
and houses adjoining. Many, after returning from the exciting scenes of
St. Medard, were seized with convulsions in their own dwellings.

The numbers and the excitement went on increasing, and conversions to
Jansenism were counted by thousands; the scenes became daily more
extravagant, and the phenomena more extraordinary, until the King, moved
either by the representations of physicians or by the remonstrances of
Jesuit theologians, caused the cemetery to be closed on the twenty-ninth
of January, 1732.[5]

Not for such interdiction, however, did the phenomena, once in progress,
intermit. For fifteen years, or longer,[6] the symptoms continued, with
more or less violence.