CHAPTER V
PHENOMENA OF MEDIOMANIA
IN the year 1772 a certain parishioner of Saint-Mandé, named Loiseaut, being at church, believed that he saw an extraordinary person kneeling close by him; this was a very swarthy man, whose only garment was a pair of coarse worsted drawers. His beard was long, his hair woolly, and about his neck there was a ruddy circular scar. He carried a book, having the following inscription emblazoned in golden letters: Ecce Agnus Dei.
Loiseaut observed with astonishment that no one but himself seemed aware of this strange presence, but he finished his devotions and returned home, where the same personage was awaiting him. He drew nearer to ask who he was and what might his business be, when the fantastic visitor vanished. Loiseaut retired to bed in a fever and unable to sleep. The same night he found his room illuminated suddenly by a ruddy glow; he sprang up in bed, believing that the place was on fire; and then on a table in the very centre of the room he saw a gold plate, wherein the head of his visitor was swimming in blood, encompassed by a red nimbus. The eyes rolled terribly, the mouth opened, a strange and hissing voice said: “I await the heads of kings, the heads of the courtesans of kings; I await Herod and Herodias.” The nimbus faded and the sick man saw no more.1
Some days after he had recovered sufficiently to resume his usual occupations, as he was crossing the Place Louis XV, a beggar accosted him, and Loiseaut, without looking, threw a coin into his hat. “Thank you,” said the recipient, “it is a king's head; but here,” and he pointed towards the middle place of the thoroughfare, “there will fall another, and it is that for which I am waiting.” Loiseaut looked with astonishment towards the speaker and uttered a cry when he recognised the strange figure of his vision. “Be silent,” said the mendicant; “they will take you for a fool, as no one but yourself can see me. You have recognised me, I know, and to you I confess that I am John Baptist, the Precursor. I am here to predict the punishment which will befall the successors of Herod and the heirs of Caiaphas; you may repeat all that I tell you.”
From this time forward Loiseaut believed that St. John was present visibly at his side, almost from day to day. The vision spoke to him long and frequently on the woes which would befall France and the Church. Loiseaut related his vision to several persons, who were not only impressed hut became seers on their own part. They formed among themselves a mystical society which met in great secrecy. It was their custom to sit in a circle, holding hands and awaiting communications in silence. This might continue for hours, and then the figure of the Baptist would appear in the midst of them. They fell, concurrently or successively, into the magnetic sleep, and saw passing before their eyes the future scenes of the Revolution, with the restoration which would come thereafter.
The spiritual director of this sect or circle was a monk named Dom Gerle, who became also their leader on the death of Loiseaut in 1788.1 At the epoch of the Revolution, however, having been won over by republican enthusiasm, Dom Gerle was expelled by the other members, acting on the inspirations of their chief somnambulist, who was known as Sister Françoise André. He had a somnambulist of his own, and in a Parisian garret he followed what was then the new craft of a mesmerist. The seeress in question was an old and nearly blind woman, named Catherine Théot; she prophesied, and her predictions were realised; she cured many who were sick; and as her forecasts had a political cast invariably, the police of the Comité de salut public were not slow in taking up the matter.
One evening Catherine Théot was in an ecstasy, surrounded by her adepts. “Hearken,” she exclaimed, “I hear the sound of his footsteps; he is the mysterious chosen one of Providence, the angel of revolution, at once its saviour and victim, king of ruins and regeneration. Do you see him? He draws nigh. He also has been encircled by the ruddy nimbus of the Precursor; it is he who shall bear all crimes of those who are about to immolate him. Great are thy destinies, O thou who shalt close the abyss by casting thyself therein. Do you not behold him, adorned as if for a festival, carrying flowers in his hands—garlands which are crowns of his martyrdom.” Then sobbing and melting into tears: “How cruel is thine ordeal, my son; and how many ingrates shall curse thy memory through the ages. Rise up, and kneel down: he comes; the king comes—he is the king of bloody sacrifices.”
At this moment the door opened quickly; a man entered enveloped in a cloak and having his hat drawn over his eyes. Those who were present rose up; Catherine Théot stretched forth her arms towards the newcomer and said as her hands trembled: “I knew that you must come, and I have awaited your coming. He who is at my right side, but unseen by you, shewed you to me yesterday, when an accusation was lodged against us. We are accused of conspiring for the king, and of a king I have indeed spoken; it is he whom the Precursor reveals to me at this present moment, having a crown steeped in blood, and I know over whose head it is placed—your own, Maximilian.”
At this name the unknown started, as if a red-hot steel had entered his breast. He cast a swift and anxious glance about him, after which his expression became again impassible.
“What would you say? I fail to understand,” he murmured in a short and abrupt manner.
“I would say,” replied Catherine Théot, “that the sun will beam brightly on that day when a man clothed in blue and bearing a sceptre of flowers shall be for one moment the king and saviour of the world. I would say that you shall be great as Moses and as Orpehus, when, trampling on the head of that monster which is ready to devour you, you shall testify to headsmen and to victims that God is. Cease from this masking, Robespierre; shew us rather without paling that valiant head which God is about to cast in the empty scale of his balance. The head of Louis XVI is heavy and yours can only be its counterpoise.”
“Do you threaten?” asked Robespierre coldly, letting his cloak fall. “Do you think by this juggling to startle my patriotism and influence my conscience? Do you hope by fanatical measures and old wives' fables to surprise my resolves as you have played the spy on my proceedings? You have looked for me, it would seem, and woe to you because you have looked. Since you compel the curiosity-seeker, the anonymous visitor and observer, to be Maximilian Robespierre, representative of the people, as such I denounce you to the committee of public weal, and I shall proceed to have you arrested.”
Having said these words, Robespierre cast his cloak round his powdered head and walked stiffly to the door. No one dared to detain and none to address him. Catherine Théot clasped her hands and said: “Respect his will, for he is king and pontiff of the new age. If he strike us, it is that God wills to strike us; lay bare the throat before the knife of Providence.”
The initiates of Catherine Théot waited expecting their arrest through the whole night, but no one appeared. They separated on the following day. Two or three further days and nights elapsed, during which the members of the sect made no attempt at concealment. On the fifth day Catherine Théot and those who were called her accomplices were denounced to the Jacobins by a secret enemy of Robespierre who insinuated skilfully to his hearers certain doubts against the tribune—a dictatorship had been mentioned, the very name of king was pronounced. Robespierre knew, and how came he to tolerate it? Robespierre shrugged his shoulders, but on the morrow Catherine Théot, Dom Gerle and some others were arrested and consigned to those prisons which, once entered, opened only to furnish his daily task to the headsman.
The story of Robespierre's interview with Catherine Théot had transpired one knows not how.1 Already the counter-police of the Thermidorians were watching the presumed dictator, whom they accused of mysticism because he believed in God. Robespierre, notwithstanding, was neither the friend nor enemy of the sect of New Johannites. He went to Catherine Théot that he might take account of phenomena, and dissatisfied at having been recognised he departed with threats which he did not attempt to fulfil; those who converted the conventicle of the old monk and ecstatic into a sect of conspiracy hoped to derive from the proceeding a doubt or an opportunity for ridicule attaching to the reputation of the incorruptible Maximilian. The prophecy of Catherine Théot was fulfilled by the inauguration of the worship of the Surpeme Being and the swift reaction of Thermidor.
During this time the sect which had gathered about Sister André, whose revelations were recorded by a Sieur Ducy, continued their visions and miracles. The fixed notion which they cherished was to preserve the legitimacy by the future reign of Louis XVII.1 Times out of number they saved in dream the poor little orphan of the Temple and believed also that they had saved him literally. Old prophecies promised the throne of the lilies to a young man who had been once a captive. So Bridget, St. Hildegarde, Bernard Tollard, Lichtemberger—all foretold a miraculous restoration after great disasters.2 The Neo-Johannites were the interpreters and multipliers of these forecasts; a Louis XVII never failed them; they had seven or eight in succession, all perfectly authentic and not less perfectly preserved. It is to the influence of this sect that we owe at a later period the revelations of the peasant Martin de Gallardon and the prodigies of Vintras.
In this magnetic circle, as in the assemblies of Quakers or Shakers of Great Britain, enthusiasm proved contagious, and was propagated from one to another. After the death of Sister André, second sight and the gift of prophecy devolved upon a certain Legros, who was at Charenton when Martin was incarcerated provisionally therein. He recognised a brother in the Beauceron peasant whom he had never seen. All these partisans, by force of willing Louis XVII, created him in a certain sense; that is to say, they worked such efficacious hallucinations that mediums were made in the image and likeness of the magnetic type, and believing themselves to be literally the royal child escaped from the Temple, they attracted all the reflections of this gentle and frail victim, so that they even remembered circumstances known only to the family of Louis XVI. This phenomenon, however incredible it may appear, is neither impossible nor unheard of. Paracelsus states that if, by an extraordinary effort of will, one can picture oneself as another person, one would know thereby and forthwith the inmost thought of that person, and would attract his most secret memories. Often after a conversation which has placed us in thought-affinity with a companion in conversation, we dream reminiscences of his private life. Among the simulators of Louis XVII we must therefore recognise some who were not impostors, but hallucinated beings, and among these last is the Swiss who is named Naiindorff, a visionary like Swedenborg, one indeed so contagious in his conviction that old servants of the royal family have recognised him and cast themselves weeping at his feet. He bore the particular signs and scars of Louis XVII; he recounted his infancy with a startling appearance of truth and entered into minute details, which are decisive for private remembrances. His very features would have been those of the orphan of Louis XVI, had he really lived. One thing only in fine was wanting for the pretender to have been Louis XVII truly, and that is not to have been Naündorff.1
Such was the contagious magnetic power of this deluded person that even his death did not undeceive any of the believers in his reign to come. We have seen one of the most convinced, to whom we timidly objected—when he spoke of the approaching restoration of what he called the true legitimacy—that his Louis XVII was dead. “Is it then more difficult for God to raise him from death than it was for those who preceded us to save him from the Temple?” Such was the answer given us—and this with a smile so triumphant that almost it seemed disdainful. We had nothing to rejoin on our own part, but were rather compelled to bow in the presence of such a conviction.
1 I have failed to trace this story to its source, but Éliphas Lévi was curiously instructed in the byways of French occult history, and though he could seldom resist the decoration and improvement of his narratives, they had always a basis in fact.
1 Christian Antoine Gerle was born in 1740 and died in 1805. He was a Carthusian, who came into some prominence under the Constituent Assembly. On April 10, 1790, Dom Gerle proposed a decree that “the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church was and should remain always the religion of the nation, and that its worship should be alone authorised”. See Albert Sorel: L'Europe et la Révolution Française, vol. ii, p. 121. He was imprisoned at the Conciergerie but was liberated, and during the reign of Napoleon he was appointed to an office in the Home Department.
1 She is said to have been imprisoned in the Bastille, but this seems to be an error, for it is certain that she died in the Conciergerie at the age of 70. She called herself the mother of God, prophesied the speedy advent of a Messiah and promised that eternal life would then begin for the elect.
1 See my Studies in Mysticism, pp. 99-111, for a summary account of the Saviours of Louis XVII.
2 St. Hildegarde died in 1179 at the age of 81. She wrote three books of Revelations, which were approved by the Council of Trèves, and Latin authorities have termed her one of the most illustrious mystics of Germany. In the fifteenth century the Council of Basle approved the Revelations of St. Bridget, who was born about 1307 and she died on July 23, 1373. A translation in full of her memorial was published at Avignon in four small volumes, dated 1850.
1 Out of a great body of claimants, computed by one writer to have been forty and by another two hundred in number, there are four who may rank as competitors at least one with another for recognition as the escaped Dauphin : they are the Baron de Richemont, Augustus Mèves, Eleazar Williams and Naündorff