Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/172

 blasphemy in which were involved three chaplains, David, Maturin Picard, the curé of Mesnil-Jourdain, and Thomas Boullé, sometime his assistant. Amongst other enormities they had revived the heresy of the Adamites, an early Gnostic sect, and celebrated the Mass in a state of stark nudity amid circumstances of the grossest indecency. Upon one Good Friday Picard and Boullé had compelled her to defile the crucifix and to break a consecrated Host, throwing the fragments upon the ground and trampling them. David and Picard were dead, but Boullé was burned at Rouen, 21 August, 1647.

During the reign of Louis XIV a veritable epidemic of sacrilege seemed to rage throughout Paris. The horrors of the black mass were said in many houses, especially in that of La Voisin (Catherine Deshayes) who lived in the rue Beauregard. The leading spirit of this crew was the infamous abbé Guibourg, a bastard son—so gossip said—of Henri de Montmorency. With him were joined Brigallier, almoner of the Grande Mademoiselle; Bouchot, director of the convent of La Saussaye; Dulong, a canon of Notre-Dame; Dulausens, vicar of Saint-Leu; Dubousquet; Seysson; Dussis; Lempérier; Lépreux; Davot, vicar of Notre-Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle; Mariette, vicar of Saint-Séverin, skilled in maledictions; Lemeignan, vicar of Saint-Eustache, who was convicted of having sacrificed numberless children to Satan; Toumet; Le Franc; Cotton, vicar of St. Paul, who had baptized a baby with the chrism of Extreme Unction and then throttled him upon the altar; Guignard and Sébault of the diocese of Bourges, who officiated at the black mass in the cellars of a house at Paris, and confected filthy charms under conditions of the most fearful impiety.

In the eighteenth century the black mass persisted. In 1728 the police arrested the abbé Lecollet and the abbé Bournement for this profanity; and in 1745 the abbé de Rocheblanche fell under the same suspicion. At the hotel of Madame de Charolais the vilest scenes of the Sabbat were continued. A gang of Satanists celebrated their monstrous orgies at Paris on 22 January, 1793, the night after the murder of Louis XVI. The abbé Fiard in two of his works, Lettres sur le diable, 1791, and La France Trompée … Paris, 8vo, 1803, conclusively shows that eucharistic blasphemies were