La Voisin, like all the sorceresses, practised medicine. Among her papers were found recipes for the cure of pimples, a remedy for headache, the prescription for 'a quintessence of hellebore which kept the Dean of Westminster alive for 166 years.' She was a midwife, and especially a procurer of abortion. 'Above the room (where she gave consultations) there was a sort of loft in which she procured abortions, and behind the room there was a recess with a stove, in which were found the charred remains of small human bones.' Little children were burned in this stove. One day, in an effusive moment, La Voisin confessed that 'she had burnt in the stove, or buried in the garden, the bodies of more than 2500 children prematurely born.' Here again we come upon surprising particulars. The witch was very insistent that children thus brought into the world should be baptized before death. One evening La Lepère, a midwife friend of La Voisin, happened to be in the famous room with the witch's husband. La Voisin, who was in the loft, came down suddenly in joyous haste and with radiant countenance, crying: 'What luck! the child has been dipped!' Such was the strange and horrible creature--the last of the great sorceresses who haunted the imagination of Michelet--the extraordinary woman whose crimes sent a shudder through the man who had heard the confessions of the most redoubtable criminals of his time--Nicolas de la Reynie. We have a portrait of La Voisin by Antoine Coypel. She is represented on the way to execution in the linen shift of condemned criminals. Contemporaries depict her as a small stoutish woman, rather pretty, owing to her eyes, which were extraordinarily bright and piercing. The artist has given her a froglike expression, but no doubt he sketched her under the influence of a preconceived idea. Madame de Sévigné, who had a singular taste for this sort of spectacle, saw her mount to the stake: 'La Voisin,' she wrote, 'very prettily surrendered her soul to the devil.' The confessor of the sorceress has given his testimony to her edifying end: 'I am loaded with so many crimes,' she said with simple and profound emotion, 'that I could not wish God to work a miracle to snatch me from the flames, because I cannot suffer too much for the sins I have committed.' _The Magician Lesage_ La Voisin's principal coadjutor was the magician Lesage. He was one by himself in this world of sorceresses, alchemists, and magicians. A sceptic among believers, he duped the women with whom he worked as well as the fashionable ladies who came to avail themselves of his art.