The authentic documents pertaining to the great trial of the Marechale d’Ancre, during the regency of Marie de Medicis, disclose that the unfortunate woman perished through the fault of the priests with whom, like a true Italian, she surrounded herself. She was accused by the people of Paris of sorcery, because it had been asserted that she had used, after the ceremony of exorcism, newly-killed white cocks. Believing herself constantly bewitched, and being in very delicate health, the Marechale had the ceremony of exorcism publicly applied to herself in the Church of the Augustins; as to the birds, she used them as an application to the forehead on account of dreadful pains in the head, and had been advised to do so by Montalto, the Jew physician of the queen, and the Italian priests. In the sixteenth century, the Curé de Barjota, of the diocese of Callahora, Spain, became the world’s wonder for his magical powers. His most extraordinary feat consisted, it was said, in transporting himself to any distant country, witnessing political and other events, and then returning home to predict them in his own country. He had a familiar demon, who served him faithfully for long years, says the _Chronicle_, but the curé turned ungrateful and cheated him. Having been apprised by his demon of a conspiracy against the Pope’s life, in consequence of an intrigue of the latter with a fair lady, the curé transported himself to Rome (in his double, of course) and thus saved his Holiness’ life. After which he repented, confessed his sins to the gallant Pope, and _got absolution_. “On his return he was delivered, as a matter of form, into the custody of the inquisitors of Logroño, but was acquitted and restored to his liberty very soon.” Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a _demon_ named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva’s life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuença, in which town the trial of the physician took place, January the 29th 1530.