Bodin gravely recounts how witches on the Sabbath flew through the air on broomsticks. He adds: 'What we have said of the travels of the witches, both in body and in spirit, and the frequent and memorable experiences of the same, show as in broad daylight, and bring to the test of touch and sight, the error of those who have written that the flights of witches are imaginary, and nothing but a trance.' This last opinion had been maintained by John Wier, physician to the Duke of Cleves, in a book which is almost a work of genius for that period. Bodin devoted all his energy to its refutation, for to throw any doubt upon the fact that the devil transports witches from one place to another would be, he said, to bring gospel history into ridicule. Coming to study the maladies attributed to the incantations of sorcerers--consumption, hysteria, melancholy, delusions, debility--John Wier found the remedies to consist in a regular life, in conformity with the laws of God, and in the skill of physicians. What an abominable doctrine! says Bodin. He had lost all respect, then, for anything. Bodin was beside himself. John Wier, he says, wrote under the dictation of Satan. Moreover, had he not himself confessed that he was a disciple of Agrippa, 'the greatest sorcerer that ever was'? When Agrippa died in the hospital of Grenoble, a black dog which he called 'Monsieur' instantly went and sprang into the river. Wier declared, it is true, that this dog was not the devil, but there was not a single sensible person who believed him. Without taking a side in this famous dispute between Bodin and John Wier, we are bound to state that the writings of the latter had no success, at any rate in France, while Bodin's book became a classic. Bossuet, for all his powerful intellect, firmly believed in sorcery. At the close of the seventeenth century, Bonet was obliged to go to a Protestant republic to get his treatise on medicine printed, in which he spoke lightly of magic and demoniacal possession. We have to come far into the eighteenth century to find one Abraham de Saint-André--and he was physician to Louis XV--daring, in his famous _Letters_, to cast doubt on the magic and witchcraft of sorcerers. The following case, tried at the period in which the events of our story occurred, and reproduced here after the archives of the Bastille, will enable us to understand the ardour of belief with which the sorcerers themselves were animated.