Memorials of Human Superstition: being a paraphrase and commentary on the Historia Flagellantium of the Abbé Boileau, Doctor of the SorbonneLolme, Jean Louis de
History
Memorials of Human Superstition: being a paraphrase and commentary on the Historia Flagellantium of the Abbé Boileau, Doctor of the Sorbonne
Lolme, Jean Louis de
Boileau, Jacques, 1635-1716. Historia flagellantium; Flagellants
Having well laid her scheme
in that respect, and resolved that her rival should undergo the
correction, not by proxy, like King Henry the Fourth, but in her
own person, the Marchioness, one day she knew the Lady of Liancourt
was to visit at a Castle a few miles distant from her own, got into
her coach and six, accompanied by four Men behind, and three armed
Servants on horseback; and care had been previously taken to lay in a
stock of good disciplines, which were placed in the coach-box. Having
arrived too late at the place on the highway at which she proposed
to meet her antagonist, the Marchioness alighted at the house of the
Curate of the Parish, in order to wait for her return, and staid
there, under some pretence, several hours, till at last a Servant who
had been left on the watch, came in haste, and brought tidings that
the Lady Liancourt’s coach was in sight: the Marchioness thereupon
got into her coach with the utmost speed, and arrived just in time
to throw herself across the way, and stop the other Lady; when the
Servants, who had been properly directed beforehand, without loss
of time took the latter out of her coach, immediately proceeding
to execute the orders they had received: and, from the complaint
afterwards preferred by the suffering Lady, it really seems that
they endeavoured to discharge their duty in such a manner as might
convince their Mistress of their zeal in serving her.
The affair soon made a great noise, and the King, who heard of it,
immediately sent express orders to the Husbands of the Ladies to
take no share in the quarrel. The Lady of Liancourt applied to the
ordinary course of law, and brought a criminal action against the
Marchioness, before the Parliament of Paris; the consequence of which
was, that the latter was condemned to ask her pardon in open Court
upon her knees, and to pay her about two thousand pounds damages,
besides being banished from the whole extent of the jurisdiction of
the Parliament. The Servants, who are generally very severely dealt
with in France, when they suffer themselves to become the instruments
of the violence of their Masters, were sent to the Gallies. And Miss
De Villemartin, who had been co-spectatress of the flagellation, in
the same coach with the Marchioness, and had shared her triumph, was
summoned to appear personally in Court, there to be _admonished_,
and condemned to pay a fine of twenty livres, ‘for the bread of the
prisoners[105].’
* * * * *
That part of the bodies of their enemies, to which Captain St.
Loe, and the above-named Marchioness, directed the corrections and
insults by which they proposed to humble them, naturally leads us to
remark the opposite lights in which that part has been considered by
Mankind, and to notice the fantastical and contradictory disposition
of the human mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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