The mischief done, they wanted at least to have it defined, to have the official report of the priests checked by some more serious measure. Seeming though she did to be the party accused, they made her the accuser, and prevailed on Marteli Chantard, the King’s Lieutenant Civil and Criminal, to come and take her deposition. In this document, short and clear, the fact of her seduction is clearly established; likewise the reproaches she uttered against Girard for his lewd endearments, reproaches at which he only laughed; likewise the advice he gave her, to let herself be possessed by the Demon; likewise the means he used for keeping her wounds open, and so on. The King’s officer, the Lieutenant, was bound to carry the matter before his own court. For the spiritual judge in his hurry had failed to go through the forms of ecclesiastic law, and so made his proceedings null. But the lay magistrate lacked the courage for this. He let himself be harnessed to the clerical inquiry, accepted Larmedieu for his colleague, went himself to sit and hear the evidence in the bishop’s court. The clerk of the bishopric wrote it down, and not the clerk of the King’s Lieutenant. Did he write it down faithfully? We have reason to doubt that, when we find him threatening the witnesses, and going every night to show their statements to the Jesuits. The two curates of Cadière’s parish, who were heard first, deposed drily, not in her favour, yet by no means against her, certainly not in favour of the Jesuits. These latter saw that everything was going amiss for them. Lost to all shame, at the risk of angering the people, they determined to break all down. They got from the bishop an order to imprison Cadière and the chief witnesses she wanted to be heard. These were the German lady and Batarelle. The girl herself was placed in the Refuge, a convent-prison; the ladies in a bridewell, the _Good-Shepherd_, where mad women and foul streetwalkers needing punishment were thrown. On the 26th November, Cadière was dragged from her bed and given over to the Ursulines, penitents of Girard’s, who laid her duly on some rotten straw. A fear of them thus established, the witnesses might now be heard. They began with two, choice and respectable. One was the Guiol, notorious for being Girard’s pander, a woman of keen and clever tongue, who was commissioned to hurl the first dart and open the wound of slander. The other was Laugier, the little seamstress, whom Cadière had supported and for whose apprenticeship she had paid. While she lay with child by Girard, this Laugier had cried out against him; now she washed away her fault by sneering at Cadière and defiling her benefactress, but in a very clumsy way, like the shameless wanton she was; ascribing to her impudent speeches quite contrary to her known habits. Then came Mdlle. Gravier and her cousin Reboul--all the _Girardites_, in short, as they were called in Toulon.