Corruption and superstition are well paired together. The epoch of the dissolute Renaissance, equally persecuting and credulous, was certainly not that of the second birth of reason. Catherine de Médicis was a sorceress, Charles IX consulted necromancers, Henry III played at devotion and debauch. It was the heyday then of astrologers, though a few of them were tortured from time to time, to make them change their predictions. There were, moreover, the court sorcerers, who dabbled a little in poisoning and deserved the hangman’s rope. _Trois-Échelles_, the magician of Charles IX, was a juggler and rogue; one day he made confession to the King and his misdeeds were not peccadillos; the King forgave him, but promised his cure on the gallows if he had a relapse; he did relapse, and was hanged in due course.[260] When the League vowed the death of the weakly and miserable Henri III it had recourse to witchcraft and Black Magic. L’Étoile[261] declares that a wax image of the King was set on the altars where priests of the League said Mass, and that the image was stabbed with a knife during a prayer embodying maledictions and anathemas. When the King failed to die with sufficient celerity, it was concluded that he was also a sorcerer. Pamphlets were published representing Henri III as holding conventions where the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah were but the prelude of more frightful and unheard of outrages. Included among the King’s minions there was said to be one who was the devil in person, and young virgins were abducted and prostituted by force to Beelzebub.[262] The people believed these fables, and a fanatic was found at last to execute the threats of sorcery. Jacques Clément suffered from visions and imperious voices, which commanded him to kill the King; he sought regicide like a martyr and died laughing like the heroes of Scandinavian mythology. Scandal-mongering chronicles have pretended that a great lady of the court supplemented the inspirations of the monk’s solitude by the magnetism of her caresses; but the anecdote is wanting in probability. It was the monk’s continence which promoted his exaltation, and had he begun to lead the blind life of passion an unsatiable appetite for pleasure would have possessed his entire nature and he would not have been willing to die. Whilst religious wars incarnadined the world, secret illuministic associations, which were nothing but theurgic and magical schools, were incorporated in Germany. The most ancient of these seems to have been that of the Rosicrucians, whose symbols go back to the times of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, as we see by the allegories in the poem of Dante and by the emblems in the _Romance of the Rose_.