great difficulty. Some years ago there died, in a state of penitence, a
certain comte de Lautree, who presented several churches with statues
which he had bewitched so as to satanize the faithful. At Bruges a
priest of my acquaintance contaminates the holy ciboria and uses them to
prepare spells and conjurements. Finally one may, among all these, cite
a clear case of possession. It is the case of Cantianille, who in 1865
turned not only the city of Auxerre, but the whole diocese of Sens,
upside down.

"This Cantianille, placed in a convent of Mont-Saint-Sulpice, was
violated, when she was barely fifteen years old, by a priest who
dedicated her to the Devil. This priest himself had been corrupted, in
early childhood, by an ecclesiastic belonging to a sect of possessed
which was created the very day Louis XVI was guillotined.

"What happened in this convent, where many nuns, evidently mad with
hysteria, were associated in erotic devilry and sacrilegious rages with
Cantianille, reads for all the world like the procedure in the trials of
wizards of long ago, the histories of Gaufrédy and Madeleine Palud, of
Urbain Grandier and Madeleine Bavent, or the Jesuit Girard and La
Cadière, histories, by the way, in which much might be said about
hystero-epilepsy on one hand and about Diabolism on the other. At any
rate, Cantianille, after being sent away from the convent, was exorcised
by a certain priest of the diocese, abbé Thorey, who seems to have been
contaminated by his patient. Soon at Auxerre there were such scandalous
scenes, such frenzied outbursts of Diabolism, that the bishop had to
intervene. Cantianille was driven out of the country, abbé Thorey was
disciplined, and the affair went to Rome.

"The curious thing about it is that the bishop, terrified by what he had