Ten years after the death of Grandier, the Loudun scandals were renewed in Normandy, where the nuns of Louviers accused two priests of having bewitched them. Of these priests, one was already dead, but they violated the sanctity of the tomb to disinter his corpse. The details of the possession were identical with those of Loudun and Sainte-Baume. The hysterical women translated into foul language the nightmares of their directors. Both priests were condemned to the flames, and—to increase the horror—a living man and a corpse were bound to the same stake. The punishment of Mezentius, that fiction of a pagan poet, came so to be realised by Christians; a Christian people assisted coldly at the sacrilegious execution, and the ministers did not realise that in thus profaning at once the priestly office and the dead, they gave a frightful precedent to impiety. When the call came, the eighteenth century arrived to extinguish the fires with the blood of priests, and, as it happens almost invariably, the good paid for the wicked. At the beginning of that century the burning of human beings still proceeded; though faith was dead, hypocrisy abandoned the youthful Labarre to the most horrible tortures because he refused to uncover when a procession went by. Voltaire was then in evidence and conscious in his heart of a vocation like that of Attila. While human passions were profaning religion, God sent this new destroyer to remove religion from a world which was no longer worthy of it. In 1731, a young woman of Toulon, named Catherine Cadière, accused her confessor, the Jesuit Girard, of seduction and Magic. She was a stigmatised ecstatic who had long passed as a saint. Her history is one of lascivious swoons, secret flagellations and lewd sensations. Where is the sink of infamy with mysteries comparable to those of celibate imagination disordered by dangerous mysticism? The woman was not believed on her mere word and Father Girard escaped condemnation; the scandal for this reason was not less great, but the noise which it made was echoed by a burst of laughter: we have said that Voltaire was among us. Superstitious people till then had explained extraordinary phenomena by the intervention of the devil and of spirits; equally absurd on its own part, the school of Voltaire, in the face of all evidence, denied the phenomena themselves. It was said by the one side that whatsoever we cannot explain comes from the devil; the answer on the other side was, that the things which we cannot explain do not exist. By reproducing under analogous circumstances the same series of eccentric and wonderful facts, Nature protested in the one case against presumptuous ignorance and in the other against deficient science.