For the first four or five years of the regency of Mary of Medicis, the Bastile seems to have contained no prisoner of note. At the end of that time it received an individual who, though he had no rank to boast of, professed to be in the service of a potent master. The belief in magic was almost general at that period. We have seen that Biron attributed his crimes to the influence of magic upon him. All the world was running mad after charms, spells, and philtres; the boldest of the throng had a violent curiosity to see the devil. Among those who preyed upon the credulity of the crowd, history has preserved the names of two—one was called Cesar, the other was Ruggieri, a Florentine. It is to the extraordinary mode in which they are asserted to have quitted the world, that we are indebted for our knowledge of them. Cesar is gravely stated to have had the power of calling down hail and thunder at his pleasure. He had a familiar spirit, and a dog, who seems to have been a sort of minor fiend, acting as messenger, to carry his letters, and bring back answers. Cesar was a manufacturer of love potions, to make young girls enamoured of young men; and, on occasion, could help a cowardly enemy to destroy without risk the man whom he hated. It was charged against him, that he had formed a charmed image for the purpose of making a gentleman waste away. This was a very common practice when sorcery and witchcraft were in vogue. But it seems probable that the crime which brought him to the Bastile was an indiscretion which he committed with respect to one of the gentle sex. He was accustomed to attend the witches’ sabbath; and he boasted that, at one of those unholy meetings, a great lady of the court had granted him the last favour which a female can bestow. Such a vaunt was well calculated to bring him into durance. It did that, and more. On the eleventh of March, 1615, all Paris was astonished, by learning that, in the dead of the night, the devil had come, with a tremendous din, and strangled Cesar in his bed. Four days afterwards, his satanic majesty, who appears to have wanted the services of two magicians at once, snatched away, in the same manner, the soul of the Florentine Ruggieri, who was then residing in the house of a French marshal. It is not difficult to account for these supposed supernatural events.