"As to the notion of an earlier secretion of treasures, the memory of which had perished, he urges that St. Denis having belonged to the Benedictines from its very erection, no motive for secretion existed and had there been any, the tradition or record of it would have been preserved, while at least four successive reconstructions would certainly have brought any such treasure to light. The mob of 1793, moreover, actually ransacked the vaults, after the removal of the bodies, for the very purpose of discovering such secret hoards. St. Denis, in short, is the very last place in the world for treasure-trove, and as for the central crypt, which the sorceress claims to break into, it was rifled in 1793 when it contained fifty-three bodies which left no vacant space. "The Archbishop need scarcely have troubled himself with this demonstration. Public ridicule has made an end of the project, and even if Madame Caillavah carried out her threat of a lawsuit, no tribunal would hold her entitled to carry on excavations _ad libitum_, with a risk, perhaps, of herself and her workmen being buried under the ruins of the finest of French cathedrals. In debating the Fine Arts Department estimates, M. Delattre, Deputy for St. Denis, animadverted on the divining rod experiments in the cathedral. M. Tirard replied that the Government had had no share in this ridiculous business. The treaty with the sorceress was concluded in January, 1881, by an official who had since been superannuated, but was not acted upon till she could deposit two hundred francs guarantee, and as soon as he himself heard of the experiments he put a peremptory stop to them. "It is important here to observe that it afterwards transpired that the object of Madame Caillavah's lawsuit was not so much to obtain damages for any breach of contract as to vindicate her private and public character and her professional reputation as a so-called 'diviner' from the odium, scorn, and defamation which the repudiation of the treaty so universally entailed. The sad result of all this was that the unfortunate and sensitive lady was not able to withstand the opprobrium that was heaped upon her, nor 'the ridicule that made an end of her project.' This maligned and misunderstood lady (who, as expressly stated, 'had no doubt brought a good pedigree with her') after a few months of sorrow, and conscious of her rectitude, at length succumbed and, as reported, ultimately died of a 'broken heart.'" [1] "_Corpuscular philosophy_, that which attempts to account for the phenomena of nature, by the motion, figure, rest, position, etc., of the minute particles of matter."--_Webster's Dictionary_. [2] Andrew Lang writes in a chapter on the divining rod in _Custom and Myth_: