At Loudun, the exorcists maintained that the Ursuline nuns had designated the parish priest Urbain Grandier as the man who had brought demons into their flesh. He was apprehended in December 1633. Eight months later, an extraordinary commission pronounced him a sorcerer, a practitioner of malefice, and the author of the possession; that very day, August 18, 1634, he was put to death.
The rumor had taken root toward the close of 1632. Throughout this town of Poitou, it was whispered that the nuns of the Ursuline convent were possessed. Exorcisms were soon conducted both in private and before the public gaze. Interrogated in Latin, the religious women answered in that tongue, and the names bestowed upon the demons recurred incessantly throughout the rites. Champagnac mocks their lapses in grammar, yet his irony belongs to an author writing two centuries after the event.
The priest Jean Mignon, spiritual director of the community, attributed these phenomena to Grandier and charged him with sorcery. Other ecclesiastics and leading citizens lent their support to the accusation. Champagnac contends that the Capuchins of Loudun, hostile to Grandier, sought the patronage of Father Joseph, Richelieu’s confessor. They wrote to the Cardinal minister alleging that the priest had penned a libellous pamphlet, La Cordonnière de Loudun. The minister thereupon instructed the Councillor of State Laubardemont to investigate the nuns. The chronicler interprets this measure as a deliberate resolve to destroy Grandier; the mission itself and the inquest that ensued form the principal focus of his account.
Grandier was by no means devoid of adversaries before the exorcisms began. The son of a royal notary from Sablé, he had pursued his studies under the Jesuits at Bordeaux. Following his ordination, he obtained two benefices at Loudun: the cure of Saint-Pierre and a prebend at Sainte-Croix. His triumphs in the pulpit and his renown as an orator, according to Champagnac, excited the jealousy of certain clerics. He had also made enemies through legal contests he had won, as well as through a bearing described by the author as proud and haughty.
In 1629, the episcopal court of Poitiers had sentenced him to three months of fasting on bread and water, accompanied by a five-year suspension from the ministry within the diocese and an absolute ban within Loudun. Grandier appealed this sentence before the Presidial of Poitiers and was exonerated, as the narrative relates. He made no secret of his triumph over his adversaries. The chronicle treats this legal reversal as an antecedent that inflamed their rancor; it likewise records other allegations touching his private conduct, the factual standing of which is inextricably bound up with the moral strictures of its author.
The notice further traces their hostility to a sermon delivered by Grandier on the obligation of confessing to one’s own curate at Eastertide. It places around this same juncture his application to become the spiritual director of the Ursulines. He was then accused of scheming to turn the convent into a place of debauchery and of having seduced women within its walls. These imputations regarding his private life emerge in a chapter that commingles ecclesiastical rivalries, disputes over benefices, and judicial record. They delineate the character of his accusers quite as much as that of the accused.
Laubardemont had the curate arrested in December 1633. He assembled depositions in which Mignon and his circle occupied a central place, then repaired to Paris to take counsel of Richelieu. It was not until July 7, 1634, that letters patent were issued directing the trial to proceed. They committed the cause to Laubardemont and twelve judges drawn from neighboring jurisdictions. In Champagnac’s eyes, their selection by Grandier’s adversaries rendered the verdict a foregone conclusion. The proceedings assumed the character of a special commission rather than an ordinary tribunal wherein the priest might have claimed an impartial jurisdiction.
During the confrontations, Grandier was brought face to face with the nuns, yet, according to Champagnac, not one recognized him. The chapter records that six women and sixty witnesses were heard upon allegations of incest, adultery, and sacrilege. It likewise reports the testimony of two women who claimed to have had commerce with him, one of whom charged him with offering her a station among sorceresses. All these elements appear in the chronicle as the materials of the prosecution; the author dismisses them as false or slanderous, without transcribing the depositions themselves.
On August 18, the judges delivered their decree. The chronicler asserts that the declarations of the demons were in truth those of the nuns. They sufficed to convict Grandier of magic, malefice, and possession. The judges condemned him to make the amende honorable and to be burned alive, alongside the purported pacts and magical characters; his ashes were to be scattered to the winds. The sentence thus wedded a supernatural indictment to capital execution.
Ere he was led forth, a surgeon was summoned to the prison. He was commanded to shave Grandier entirely in order to discover the marks of the devil upon his flesh. The prisoner submitted to the operation; the surgeon, however, refused to tear out his fingernails, recoiling in horror from such cruelty. This forced ablution failed to reveal any diabolical marks, yet it served to subject the condemned man to the indignities that preceded his torture.
That same day, within the courthouse of Loudun, his sentence was read aloud before the judges and an assembled multitude. Grandier protested his innocence, declaring that he had never practiced magic. Laubardemont then cleared the chamber and engaged in a lengthy colloquy with him. He urged him to disclose the names of his accomplices in exchange for a possible mitigation of the penalty. Grandier answered that he had none, being innocent. The torture was ordered. Champagnac depicts the instruments employed, yet the narrative has no need to dwell upon these bodily details: it suffices to record that the torment was pressed until the prisoner lost consciousness.
The chronicler distinguishes the question ordinary from a more rigorous interrogation, noting that Grandier swooned repeatedly. The Recollect friars took part in these operations. When the torment ceased, the condemned man was laid upon the flags and once more publicly declared that he was no sorcerer. He maintained this declaration following an ordeal the sheer brutality of which Champagnac recounts in full.
Following the question, Grandier admitted having composed a treatise on clerical celibacy, stating he had written it to persuade a woman he loved, though he would not disclose her name. When he petitioned for the guardian of the Cordeliers as his confessor, he was assigned a Recollect whom he regarded as an enemy. Later, Father Grillau came to bring him his mother’s words and speak to him of faith. The archers thrust him aside when the two men met during the ceremony of the amende honorable.
At five of the clock, Grandier was borne away upon a litter. The sentence was read once more, and he was led past the churches before arriving at the Place Sainte-Croix. According to the chronicle, he had been promised leave to address the crowd and assured that he would be strangled before the pyre was ignited; neither pledge was kept. Whenever he attempted to speak, an exorcist dashed holy water into his face. Bound to the stake, Grandier demanded that the promise of strangulation be honored. Father Lactance, one of the friars whom Champagnac regards as a prime mover of the persecution, fired the wood with his own hand. The curate affirmed for the last time that he knew nothing of the devil, and commended his soul to divine mercy. The flames consumed him alive.
Following his death, the affair continued to hinge upon the testimony of the Ursulines. Champagnac relates that certain nuns later confessed to having slandered Grandier, acknowledging that Mignon and other ecclesiastics had suggested their accusations. He likewise cites Voltaire’s strictures against the accusers, the nuns who claimed to be possessed, Laubardemont, and Richelieu. These stances constitute the retrospective interpretation of the chapter. As for Grandier’s destiny, it closed within the breach separating an extraordinary tribunal that delivered a death sentence from the subsequent recantations of cloistered women, recorded by the chronicle only after the pyre had done its work.