There was nothing to equal the felicity of our first parents amidst the ministry of the sylphs; they were perishable spirits, but they had incredible skill in building and weaving the light, causing it to flower in a thousand forms, more varied than the most brilliant and fruitful imagination can now conceive. The earthly paradise—so named because it reposed upon the earthly atmosphere—was therefore a domain of enchantments. Adam and Eve slept in palaces of pearls and sapphires; roses sprang up around them and formed a carpet for their feet; they glided over waters in sea-shells drawn by swans; birds communed with them in delicious speech of music; flowers stooped to caress them. But all this was lost by the fall, which cast our progenitors down on earth, and the material bodies which clothed them henceforth are those skins of beasts mentioned in the Bible. They were alone and naked, where no one obeyed their caprice of thought. They forgot their life in Eden, or viewed it only as a dream seen through the glass of memory. But the realms of paradise still and forever extend above the earthly atmosphere, inhabited by sylphs and salamanders, who are thus constituted guardians of man’s domain, like mournful retainers still in the house of a master whose return they expect no more. Imaginations were fired by these astonishing fictions when the visions of the air began to be seen in the full light of day. They signified unquestionably the descent of sylphs and salamanders in search of their former masters. Voyages to the land of sylphs were talked of on all sides, as we talk at the present day of animated tables and fluidic manifestations. The folly took possession even of strong minds, and it was time for an intervention on the part of the Church, which does not relish the supernatural being hawked in the public streets, seeing that such disclosures, by imperilling the respect due to authority and to the hierarchic chain of instruction, cannot be attributed to the spirit of order and light. The cloud-phantoms were therefore arraigned and accused of being hell-born illusions, while the people—anxious to get something into their hands—began a crusade against sorcerers. The public folly turned to a paroxysm of mania; strangers in country places were accused of descending from heaven and were killed without mercy; imbeciles confessed that they had been abducted by sylphs or demons; others who had boasted like this previously either would not or could not unsay it; they were burned or drowned, and, according to Garinet, the number who perished throughout the kingdom almost exceeds belief.[167] It is the common catastrophe of dramas in which the first parts are played by ignorance or fear.