t and safe retreats? Nor, indeed, is
experience opposed to the possibility of the highest fervour
of an unnatural enthusiasm being compatible with more human
passions. The virgin who,

'Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis
Ignotus pecori,'

as eulogised by the virgin-chorus in the beautiful
epithalamium of Catullus, might be recognised in the
youthful 'religieuse' if only human passion could be
excluded; but the story of Heloise and Abelard is not a
solitary proof of the superiority of human nature over an
impossible and artificial spirituality.

[126] As Tartuffe privately confesses,

'L'amour qui nous attache aux beautes eternelles
N'etouffe pas en nous l'amour des temporelles.

* * * * *

Pour etre devot, je n'en suis pas moins homme.'

The Superior was not averse to the publication of these events,
having the example and reputation of Loudun before her. Little is
new in the possession and exorcism: for the most part they are a
repetition of those of Aix and Loudun. During a brief interval
the devils were less outrageous: for the Cardinal-minister was
meditating a reform of the monastic establishments. Upon his
death they commenced again with equal violence. Picart was now
dead--but not so the persecution of his victim. The priests
recommenced miracle-working with renewed vigour.[127] Saved from
immediate death by a fortunate or, as it may be deemed,
unfortunate sensitiveness to bodily pain, she was condemned for
the rest of her life to solitary confinement in a fearful
dungeon, in the language of her judges to an _in pace_. There
lying tortured, powerless in a loathsome cell, their prisoner was
alternately coaxed and threatened into admitting all sorts of
crimes, and implicating whom they wished.[128] The further
cruelties to which the lust, and afterwards the malignancy, of
her gaolers submitted her were not brought to an end by the
interference of parliament in August 1647, when the destruction
of the Louviers establishment was decreed. The guilty escaped by
securing, by intimidation, the silence of their prisoner, who
remained a living corpse in the dungeons of the episcopal palace
of Rouen. The bones of Picart were exhumed, and publicly burned;
the cure Boulle, an accomplice, was dragged on a hurdle to the
fish-market, and there burned at the stake. So terminated this
last of the trilogical series. But the