In December 1610 a young woman of Marseilles went on a pilgrimage to Sainte-Baume in Provence, and there fell into ecstasy and convulsions. She was named Magdelaine de la Palud. Louise Capeau, another devotee, was similarly seized some short time after.[280] The Dominicans and Capuchins believed that it was possession by the devil and had recourse to exorcisms. The result was that Magdelaine de la Palud and her fellow-victim presented that spectacle which was renewed so often a century later during the epidemic of convulsions. They screamed, writhed, begged to be beaten and trampled under foot. One day six men walked successively over the breast of Magdelaine without the slightest suffering on her part. While in this state she made confession of the most extraordinary licentiousness, saying that she had given herself, body and soul, to the devil, to whom she had been affianced by a priest named Gaufridi.[281] So far from incarcerating the distracted girl, she obtained a hearing, and the exorcising monks despatched three Capuchins to Marseilles for the purpose of secretly acquainting the ecclesiastical superiors with the state of affairs at Sainte-Baume, the object, if possible, being to bring the curé Gaufridi thither and confront him with the supposed demons.[282] Furthermore, the monks put on record the infernal inspirations of the two hysterics, which were discourses full of ignorant and fanatical devotion, presenting religion as this was understood by the exorcists themselves. In a word, the possessed women seemed to be relating the dreams of those who exorcised them: it was precisely the phenomena of table-rapping and mediums in our own days. The devils assumed names not less incongruous than those of the spirits in America; they declaimed against printing and books, delivering sermons worthy of the most fervent and illiterate Capuchins. In the presence of demons made in their own image and their own likeness, the fathers were confirmed in the fact of the possession and in the veracity of the infernal spirits. The phantoms of their diseased imaginations assumed bodily shape and living manifestation in the two women, whose obscene admissions at once stimulated their curiosity and their indignation, full of secret lust. Such were their dispositions when the unhappy Louis Gaufridi was at length brought before them.