The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,157

was able to interfere. I had witnessed two mass burnings in Treves, of the most despicable suffering made all the worse by the Protestant clerics who are as fierce as the Catholics and in complete agreement with them that Satan is afoot in the land and waging his victories through the most unlikely of townsfolk—mere simpletons in some cases, though in most merely honest housewives, bakers, carpenters, beggars, and the like.

How curious it is that these religious people believe the devil to be so stupid that he should seek to corrupt only the poor and powerless—why not the king of France for once?—and the population at large to be so weak.

But we have pondered these things many times, you and I. I was drawn here, rather than home to Amsterdam for which I long with all my soul, because the circumstances of this trial were well-known far and wide, and are most peculiar in that it is a great Comtesse who is accused, and not the village midwife, a stammering fool wont to name every other poor soul as her accomplice and so forth and so on.

But I have found many of the same elements which are found elsewhere in that there is present here the popular inquisitor, Father Louvier, who has bragged for a decade that he had burned hundreds of witches, and will find witches here if they be here to be found. And there is present also a popular book on witchcraft and demonology by this very same man, much circulated throughout France, and read with extreme fascination by half-literate persons who pore over its lengthy descriptions of demons as if they were biblical Scripture, when in fact they are stupid filth.

And oh, I must not fail to make mention of the engravings in this fine text which is passed from hand to hand with such reverence, for they are the cause of much clamor, being skillfully done pictures of devils dancing by moonlight, and old hags feasting upon babies or flying about on brooms.

This book has held this town spellbound, and it will surprise no one of our order that it was the old Comtesse who produced it, the very accuser of her daughter-in-law, who has said straight out on the church steps that were it not for this worthy book she should not have known a witch was living in her very midst.

Ah, Stefan, give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.

But again, I stray from my story.

I arrived here at four o’clock this evening, coming through the mountains and down south towards the valley, a slow and laborious journey on horseback indeed. And once in sight of the town, which hovered above me like a great fortress, for that is what it once was, I straightaway divested myself of all those documents which might prove me to be other than as I have presented myself—a Catholic priest and student of the witchcraft pestilence, making his way through the countryside to study convicted witches so that he might better weed them out of his own parish at home.

Placing all of my extraneous and incriminating possessions in the strongbox, I buried it safely in the woods. Then wearing my finest clerical garb and silver crucifix and other accoutrements to present me as a rich cleric, I rode up and towards the gates, and past the towers of the Château de Montcleve, the former home of the unfortunate Comtesse whom I knew only by the title of the Bride of Satan, or the Witch of Montcleve.

Straightaway, I began to question those I met as to why there was such a great pyre set in the very middle of the open place before the cathedral doors, and why the peddlers had set up their stands to sell their drinks and cakes when there was no fair to be seen, and what was the reason for the viewing stands having been built to the north of the church and beside it against the walls of the jail? And why are the four inn yards of the town overflowing with horses and coaches, and why are so many milling and talking and pointing to the high barred window of the jail above the viewing stand, and then to the loathsome pyre?

Was it to do with the Feast of St. Michael,