Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/482

 ±66 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. demons in his service, with some other invokers of demons, the Demoiselle Marie de Blansy, Perrin Hemery, a locksmith, and Guillaume Floret, a clerk, offered to cure the king, and were given a trial. They asked to have twelve men loaded with iron chains placed at their disposal ; these they surrounded with an enclosure, and, after telling them not to be afraid, proceeded with all the invocations they could muster, but accomplished no results. They excused their failure bv alle^in^ that the men had crossed them- selves, but this availed them nothing. Floret confessed to the Prevot of Paris that the whole affair was a deception, and on March 2i, 1404, they were all duly burned. It was probably this case which induced Cardinal Louis of Bourbon, in his provincial synod of Langres, in 1404, to prohibit strictly all sorcery and divi- nation, and to warn his flock to place no trust in such arts, as their practitioners were mostly deceivers whose only object was to trick them out of their money. Priests, moreover, were strictly ordered, as had already been done by the Council of Soissons the year be- fore, to report to the episcopal ordinaries all cases coining to their knowledge and all persons defamed for such practices. Had this policy been carried out, of treating sorcerers as sharpers, and of instituting an episcopal police to replace the Inquisition, at this time rapidly falling into desuetude, it might have averted the evils which followed, but the well-meant effort of Cardinal Louis was followed by no results. The belief in sorcery continued to strengthen, and when Jean Petit undertook to justify Jean sans Peur for the assassination of the Duke of Orleans, it was almost a matter of course that he should accuse the murdered prince of encompassing the king's insanity by magic, of which the most minute details were given, including the names of the two demons, Hynars and Astramein, whose assistance had been successfully invoked.* In England, sorcery, as we have seen, had thus far attracted 8.— Juvenal des Ursins, Hist, de Charles VI. ann. 1403. — Raynald. ann. 1404, No. 22-3. — Concil. Suessionens. ann. 1403 c. 7. — Monstrelet, I. 39 (Ed. Buchon, 1843, pp. 80-3).— Chron. de P. Cochon (Ed. Vallet de Viriville, p. 385). Valentine of Milan, wife of Louis of Orleans, and her father, Galeazzo Vis- conti, had the reputation of being addicted to magic and of being privy to the attempt on the life of the king (ubi sup.).
 * Religieux de S. Denis, Hist, de Charles VI., Liv. xvn. ch. i., Liv. xviii. ch.