She listened, however, with her arms folded over her bosom and her eyes raised to heaven, and when the madman at last sank exhausted to the ground, she fell upon her knees and said to the bystanders: "Gentlemen, you see here a punishment ordained by God for the sins of my youth. I deserve this humiliation in your presence, and I would endure it before all Paris if I could thus make atonement for my misdeeds." (_Mém. du Baron de Gleichen_, p. 149.) One of the most fearful features of possession is its tendency to spread like contagion over whole communities. Many such cases are recorded in history. The monks of the Convent of Quercy were thus attacked in 1491, and suffered, from the oldest to the youngest, during four months, incredible afflictions. They ran like dogs through the fields, climbed upon trees, imitated the howling of wild beasts, spoke in unknown tongues, and foretold, at the same time, future events. (Goerres, iv. II.) In the year 1566 a similar malady broke out in the Orphan House at Amsterdam, and seventy poor children became possessed. They also climbed up the walls and on the roofs, swallowed hairs, needles, and pieces of glass and iron, and distorted their features and their limbs in a fearful manner. What, however, made the greatest impression upon the good citizens of the town were the magic phenomena connected with their disease. They spoke to the overseer and even to the chief magistrate of their secret affairs, made known plots hatched against the Protestants and foretold events which happened soon after. In a convent of nuns at Yssel in the Netherlands, a single nun, Maria de Sains, caused one of the most fearful calamities among her sisters that has ever been known. Naturally a woman of superior mind, but carried away by evil passions, she finally succumbed to the struggle between the latter and the strict rules of her retreat; she began to accuse herself of horrible crimes and excesses. The whole country was amazed, for she had passed for a great saint, and now, of a sudden, she confessed that she had murdered numberless little children, disinterred corpses, and carried poor girls to the meeting of witches. All these misdeeds, which existed only in her disordered imagination, she ascribed to the agency of a demon, by whom she was possessed, and before many weeks had passed, every nun and lay sister in the ill-fated convent was possessed in precisely the same manner!