?--through the wall? Are you
mad?" cried La Regnie, taking a couple of steps backwards and striking
his hands together.

"From this moment onwards," continued Desgrais, rubbing his brow like a
man tormented by hateful thoughts, "your excellency may call me a
madman or an insane ghost-seer, but it was just as I have told you. I
was standing staring at the wall like one petrified when several men of
the patrol hurried up breathless, and along with them Marquis de la
Fare, who had picked himself up, with his drawn sword in his hand. We
lighted the torches, and sounded the wall backwards and forwards,--not
an indication of a door or a window or an opening. It was a strong
stone wall bounding a yard, and was joined on to a house in which live
people against whom there has never risen the slightest suspicion.
To-day I have again taken a careful survey of the whole place. It must
be the Devil himself who is mystifying us."

Desgrais' story became known in Paris. People's heads were full of the
sorceries and incantations and compacts with Satan of Voisin,
Vigoureuse, and the reprobate priest Le Sage; and as in the eternal
nature of us men, the leaning to the marvellous and the wonderful so
often outweighs all the authority of reason, so the public soon began
to believe simply and solely that as Desgrais in his mortification had
said, Satan himself really did protect the abominable wretches, who
must have sold their souls to him. It will readily be believed that
Desgrais' story received all sorts of ornamental additions. An account
of the adventure, with a woodcut on the title-page representing a grim
Satanic form before which the terrified Desgrais was sinking in the
earth, was printed and largely sold at the street corners. This alone
was enough to overawe the people, and even to rob the myrmidons of the
police of their courage, who now wandered about the streets at night
trembling and quaking, hung about with amulets and soaked in holy
water.

Argenson perceived that the exertions of the _Chambre Ardente_ were of
no avail, and he appealed to the king to appoint a tribunal with still
more extensive powers to deal with this new epidemic of crime, to hunt
up the evil-doers, and to punish them. The king, convinced that he had
already vested too much power in the _Chambre Ardente_ and shaken with
horror at the numberless executions which the bloodthirsty La Regnie
had decreed, flatly refused to entertain the proposed plan.

A