“Everybody has heard, I suppose, of the prodigies wrought by touching the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the famous Jansenist saint, and the violent controversy they occasioned between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, the former trying to magnify them into miracles to the honor of their sect, and the Jesuits very unnecessarily and very unwisely, in my judgment, laboring to disprove or discredit them as facts. The prodigies are well authenticated, and I see no way of denying them without throwing doubt on all human testimony. Among them I select those which indicate, on the part of the affected, a surprising power of physical resistance, and among these I select only one, that of Jeanne Moulu, a young woman, from twenty-two to twenty-three years of age, given by the _Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales_. This young woman, in her convulsions, was placed with her back against a wall, and a man of great strength took an andiron weighing some twenty-five pounds, and struck her on her stomach several blows in succession with all his strength, sometimes to the number of one hundred blows and over. A brother gave her sixty blows, and afterwards, trying his blows against the wall, it gave way at the twenty-fifth blow. It was in vain, says Carré de Montgeron, a grave magistrate, that I struck with all my force, the convulsionary complained that my blows brought her no relief, and obliged me to place the andiron in the hands of a large and very strong man found among the spectators. He spared nothing, but put forth all his strength, and dealt such terrible blows on the pit of her stomach that they shook the wall against which she was supported. She made him give her the hundred blows which she had demanded at first, counting for nothing the sixty she had received from me. When the andiron sunk so deep into the pit of her stomach as to seem to reach her back, the young woman would exclaim, ‘That relieves me. Courage, my brother; strike harder, if you can.’ The blows were struck on the naked skin, but without bruising or breaking it in the least. The convulsionary, after this, lay on the floor, and there was placed upon her a heavy plank on which stood a score or more of persons, weighing all together at least four thousand pounds. Then a flint stone, weighing twenty-two pounds, was hurled with full force a hundred times in succession upon her bosom. At each blow, the whole room shook, the floor trembled, and the spectators shuddered at the sound of the frightful blows.