We have now noted these alleged phenomena, literally 'from China to
Peru'. Let us next take an old French case of a noisy sprite in the
nunnery of St. Pierre de Lyon. The account is by Adrien de
Montalembert, almoner to Francis I. {110c} The Bibliography of this
very rare tract is curious and deserves attention. When Lenglet
Dufresnoy was compiling, in 1751, his Dissertations sur les
Apparitions he reprinted the tract from the Paris quarto of 1528, in
black letter. This example had been in the Tellier collection, and
Dufresnoy seems to have borrowed it from the Royal Convent of St.
Genevieve. Knowing that Cardinal Tencin had some acquaintance with
the subject, Dufresnoy wrote to him, and publishes (vol. i. cxli.)
his answer, dated October 18, 1751, Lyons. The cardinal replied
that, besides the Paris edition of 1528, there was a Rouen reprint,
of 1529, by Rolin Gautier, with engravings. Brunet says, that there
are engravings in the Paris edition of 1528, perhaps these were
absent from the Tellier example. That of Rouen, which Cardinal
Tencin collated, was in the Abbey of St. Peter, in Lyons. Some
leaves had been thumbed out of existence, and their place was
supplied in manuscript. The only difference was in chapter xxviii.
where the printed Rouen text may have varied. In the MS. at all
events, it is stated that on March 21, the spirit of Sister Alix de
Telieux struck thirty-three great strokes on the refectory of her
convent, 'mighty and marvellous,' implying that her thirty-three
years of purgatory were commuted into thirty-three days. A bright
light, scarcely endurable, then appeared, and remained for some
eight minutes. The nuns then went into chapel and sang a Te Deum.
At the end of the volume, a later hand added, in manuscript, that
the truth of the contemporary record was confirmed by the tradition
of the oldest sisters who had received it from eye-witnesses of the
earlier generation. The writer says that she had great difficulty
in finding the printed copy, but that when young, in 1630, she
received the tale from a nun, then aged ninety-four. This nun would
be born in 1536, ten years after these events. She got the story
from her aunt, a nun, Gabrielle de Beaudeduit, qui etoit de ce tems-
la. There is no doubt that the sisters firmly and piously believed
in the story, which has the contemporary evidence of Adrien de
Montalembert. Dufresnoy learned that a manuscript copy of the tract
was in the library of the Jesuits of Lyons. He was unaware of an
edition in 12mo of 1580, cited by Brunet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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