After these practices had gone on, with hourly increasing vigour, for some years, the government closed the church-yard of St. Medard, which was become the theatre of exhibitions calculated to mislead the weak-minded, and disgust men of sound intellect. But the sect of the convulsionaries—for it had by this time grown into a strong and regularly organized sect,—was not discouraged by this measure. Earth from the church-yard where the deacon Paris was interred, and water from the spring which had supplied him with drink, became the symbols of this buried idol, and the means of working miracles. Meetings were held in private houses, and there fanaticism, of the darkest, wildest kind, gave full scope to all its gloomy inspirations. A regular system of torture was practised by the deluded votaries; women being the principal sufferers. To be beaten with logs on the tenderest portions of the human frame; to bend the body into a semi-circular form, and allow a weight of fifty pounds to be dropped from the ceiling on to the abdomen; to lie with a plank on the same part, while several men stood on it; to be tied up with the head downwards; and to have the breasts and nipples torn with pincers; were among the inflictions to which females submitted, and apparently with delight. The blows were inflicted by vigorous young men, who were called Secouristes. The highly sublimed madness of some pushed them to still more dreadful extremities; it prompted them to be tied on spits, and exposed to the flames, or to be nailed by the hands and feet to a cross. The performance of these unnatural acts was denominated “the work.”