The great folk, her patrons, launch her into strange adventures. For what can she refuse to her terrible protectors, when nothing but the castle saves her from the priest, from the faggot? If the baron, on his return from a crusade, being bent on copying the manners of the Turks, sends for her, and orders her to steal him a few children, what can she do? Raids such as those grand ones in which two thousand pages were sometimes carried off from Greek ground to enter the seraglio, were by no means unknown to the Christians; were known from the tenth century to the barons of England, at a later date to the knights of Rhodes and Malta. The famous Giles of Retz, the only one brought to trial, was punished, not for having stolen his small serfs, a crime not then uncommon, but for having sacrificed them to Satan. She who actually stole them, and was ignorant, doubtless, of their future lot, found herself between two perils: on the one hand the peasant’s fork and scythe; on the other, those torments which awaited her, when recusant, within the tower. Retz’s terrible Italian would have made nothing of pounding her in a mortar.[67] [67] See my _History of France_, and still more the learned and careful account by the lamented Armand Guéraud: _Notice sur Gilles de Rais_, Nantes, 1855. We there find that the purveyors of that horrible child’s charnel-house were mostly men. On all sides the perils and the profits went together. A position more frightfully corrupting could not have been found. The Witches themselves did not deny the absurd powers imputed to them by the people. They averred that by means of a doll stuck over with needles they could weave their spells around whomever they pleased, making him waste away until he died. They averred that mandragora, torn from beneath the gallows by the teeth of a dog, who invariably died therefrom, enabled them to pervert the understanding; to turn men into beasts, to give women over to idiotcy and madness. Still more dreadful was the furious frenzy caused by the Thorn-apple, or Datura, which made men dance themselves to death, and go through a thousand shameful antics, without their own knowledge or remembrance.[68] [68] Pouchet, on the _Solaneæ and General Botany_. Nysten, _Dictionary of Medicine_, article _Datura_. The robbers employed these potions but too often. A butcher of Aix and his wife, whom they wanted to rob of their money, were made to drink of some such, and became so maddened thereby, that they danced all one night naked in a cemetery. * * * * *