oad through Paris, where all heads were full
of the witch-business, spirit conjuration, devil-covenants of La
Voisin, Vigoureux, and the wicked priest Le Sage; and as it does lie in
our eternal nature that the bent towards the supernatural and the
marvellous overpasses all reason, people soon believed nothing less
than that which Desgrais had only said in his impatience--namely, that
the very devil himself must protect those rascals, and that they had
sold their souls to him. We can readily understand that Desgrais's
story soon received many absurd embellishments. It was printed, and
hawked about the town, with a woodcut at the top representing a
horrible devil-form sinking into the ground before the terrified
Desgrais. Quite enough to frighten the people, and so terrify
Desgrais's men that they lost all courage, and went about the streets
behung with amulets, and sprinkled with holy water.

Argenson, seeing that the Chambre Ardente was unsuccessful, applied to
the King to constitute--with special reference to this novel
description of crime--a tribunal armed with greater powers for tracking
and punishing offenders. The King, thinking he had already given powers
too ample to the Chambre Ardente, and shocked at the horrors of the
numberless executions, carried out by the bloodthirsty La Regnie,
refused.

Then another method of influencing His Majesty was devised.

In the apartments of Madame de Maintenon,--where the King was in the
habit of spending much of his time in the afternoons,--and also, very
often, would be at work with his Ministers till late at night--a
poetical petition was laid before him, on the part of the "Endangered
Lovers," who complained that when "galanterie" rendered it incumbent on
them to be the bearers of some valuable present to the ladies of their
hearts, they had always to do it at the risk of their lives. They said,
that, of course, it was honour and delight to pour out their blood for
the lady of their heart, in knightly encounter, but that the
treacherous attack of the assassin, against which it was impossible to
guard, was quite a different matter. They expressed their hope that
Louis, the bright pole-star of love and gallantry, might deign--arising
and shining in fullest splendour--to dispel the darkness of night, and
thus reveal the black mysteries hidden thereby; that the God-like hero,
who had hurled his foes to the dust, would now once more wave his
flashing faulchion, and, as did H