Pierre Dufour, the celebrated bibliomaniac, made a very lengthy and learned investigation as to the connection of sorcery with the social evil, and reaped a veritable harvest of facts, duly authenticated by the histories of trials for the crime of Demonidolatry, arriving at the conclusion that sorcery made fewer dupes than victims. Says Dufour: “Aside from a very small number of credulous magicians and sorcerers, all who were initiated in the mysteries served, or made others serve, in the abominable commerce of debauchery. The _vigil_ offered a fine opportunity as a spot for such turpitudes. Such reunions of hideous companies of libertines and prostitutes was for the profit of certain knaves, and the sorcerers’ assemblage was patronized by many misguided young women, who fell from grace through libidinous fascination.” Meantime, sorcery persisted always, notwithstanding judgments and executions. In the year 1574, on the denunciation of an old demented hag, eighty peasants were burned alive at Valery, in Savoy. Three years later nearly four hundred inhabitants of Haut-Languedoc perished for the same offense. In 1582 an immense number of so-called sorcerers were executed at Avignon. From 1580 to 1595 nine hundred persons accused of witchcraft were put to death. In 1609, in the country of Labourde (Basses Pyrenees), the prisons were overcrowded with men, women and children accused of sorcery. Fires for stake-burnt victims lit up all the villages in the Province, and the courts spared no one. Many of these unfortunates accused themselves of believing in the demons of sorcery and having visited diabolical gatherings (_vigils_), where they had prostituted themselves to incubi. Others, to whom the death penalty was meted out, were innocent persons who had been _informed against_, but these, too, although denying all charges, were condemned to be burnt alive. The same year some of the inhabitants of the country of Labourde, who had sought refuge in Spain, were accused of having carried demons into Navarre. Five of these unfortunates were burnt at the stake by order of the Inquisition, one woman being strangled and burned after her death. Even bodies were exhumed to be given to the flames. Eighteen persons were permitted to make penance for their alleged sorceries.