-saints' day with two
gentlemen his friends, resolved to pursue the spirit, and fire upon it
with a brace of good pistols. A few days after they arrived, they
heard a great noise above the room where the owner of the chateau
slept; his two friends went up thither, holding a pistol in one hand
and a candle in the other; and a sort of black phantom with horns and
a tail presented itself, and began to gambol about before them.

One of them fired off his pistol; the spectre, instead of falling,
turns and skips before him: the gentleman tries to seize it, but the
spirit escapes by the back staircase; the gentleman follows it, but
loses sight of it, and after several turnings, the spectre throws
itself into a granary, and disappears at the moment its pursuer
reckoned on seizing and stopping it. A light was brought, and it was
remarked that where the spectre had disappeared there was a trapdoor,
which had been bolted after it entered; they forced open the trap,
and found the pretended spirit. He owned all his artifices, and that
what had rendered him proof against the pistol shot was buffalo's hide
tightly fitted to his body.

Cardinal de Retz,[321] in his Memoirs, relates very agreeably the
alarm which seized himself and those with him on meeting a company of
black Augustine friars, who came to bathe in the river by night, and
whom they took for a troop of quite another description.

A physician, in a dissertation which he has given on spirits or
ghosts, says that a maid servant in the Rue St. Victor, who had gone
down into the cellar, came back very much frightened, saying she had
seen a spectre standing upright between two barrels. Some persons who
were bolder went down, and saw the same thing. It was a dead body,
which had fallen from a cart coming from the Hotel-Dieu. It had slid
down by the cellar window (or grating), and had remained standing
between two casks. All these collective facts, instead of confirming
one another, and establishing the reality of those ghosts which appear
in certain houses, and keep away those who would willingly dwell in
them, are only calculated, on the contrary, to render such stories in
general very doubtful; for on what account should those people who
have been buried and turned to dust for a long time find themselves
able to walk about with their chains? How do they drag them? How do
they speak? What do they want? Is it sepulture? Are they not interred?
If they are heathens and reprobat