Geneva. The Jansenist party had thus all the
energy, strength, and prestige, which persecution
never fails to confer. But they had little else.
The great and well-known names of the Port-
Royal Society, which had so long made head
against the Jesuit and ultramontane doctrines
and party—the Arnaulds, Nicole, and others—
were gone. And Jansenism in the hands of
inferior men had undergone the usual fate of
sects, kept alive only by the violent stimulus of
opposition and persecution.

Things were in this position, when, on the 1st,
of May, 1727, an ecclesiastic in deacon's orders,
of the name of Paris, died in the remote and
obscure Faubourg of Saint-Marceau. A violent
Jansenist, he had lived a life of ascetic devotion
and unbounded charity, having retired to that
wretched part of the city in order to spend all
his property in relieving the poor. When he
had given away nearly all, he bought a stocking-
frame, that by the produce of his labour he might
still be able to assist others as well as maintain
himself. He had made himself remarkable as a
very violent "appelant," or opposer of the
famous bull, and for these combined reasons had
obtained among the inhabitants of the Rue
Mouffetard, in which he lived, a high reputation
for sanctity. There existed, and I believe there still
exists, amid the miserable and squalid houses of
the ill-famed Rue Mouffetard, now peopled mainly
by the chiffonniers, or rag-pickers of Paris, a
small but very ancient little church, dedicated
to Saint Médard. And behind this obscure
church there was—but, in obedience to sanitary
laws, is no longer—a still more obscure little
burial-ground. And in this secluded spot the
saintly Deacon Paris was buried.

The death of such a man at thirty-seven
years of age, hastened as it seems to have been
by the privations to which he submitted
himself, made of course a considerable sensation in
the neighbourhood. And several of the poor
and the infirm, whom he had fed, went, in
conformity with ordinary Roman Catholic
practice, to pray and recite litanies at his tomb.

This tomb, it may be mentioned, seems to
have been what is called an altar tomb, large,
but not very high, being raised above the
surface of the soil about one foot only. And it,
was on and around this, that in the first instance
began those strange scenes which shortly
excited the most intense interest throughout all
France. As usual in these cases, the great
majority of the daily increasing concourse
around the saintly deacon's tomb were women,
and mostly young women. The ecclesiastics,
who "directed" the consciences of these
devotees, were continually enlarging on the great
ecclesiastical topic of the day, and insisting that
the acceptance of the bull was the death-blow to
all true religion. "France was abandoned by
God to the fatal false teaching of hireling
shepherds whose own the sheep were not; these
were the 'latter days' in which so many
terrible things were to happen; the elect must flee
from the wrath to come." The recitals of
various cases of persecution on the part of the
government contributed an element of real fact
to the excitement thus occasioned. And under
these circumstances it was far from strange, or
out of the well-known path of ordinary cause
and effect, that one day, not long after Deacon
Paris' s death, one of the girls among the
company of fervent devotees around his tomb had
an attack of hysterical convulsions.

As little will it surprise any one conversant
with the nature of such affections to hear that
very shortly other girls began to manifest similar
phenomena. The next step was, that these
attacks of convulsion were looked for and
expected as the consequence of a visit to the
deacon's tomb. Of course the result duly
followed the expectation. Then, the cry of "A
miracle!" was raised; and those most violently
convulsed were deemed most acceptable to, and
most highly favoured by, Heaven. Nothing more
was needed to multiply the number of "convul-
sionnaires," to excite them to emulation in the
violence of their attacks, and to call forth an
immense amount of that strange and ill-defined
condition of mind, in which good faith and
conscious imposture are separated from each
other by so very uncertain and often
imperceptible a line, and that curious physical
condition of the nervous system in which the action
of the volition on the body, and of bodily
irregularities on the volition, are mixed and confused
in a manner which has often baffled science in
its endeavours to assign to either action its due
share as a causing agent.

Soon, crowds began to assemble to witness the
strange things which were reported to take place
in the remote little cemetery of Saint-Médard. A
morbid vanity and emulation were excited among
the devotees. Several girls began to acquire
notoriety on account of the superior energy and
violence of their convulsive contortions. For some
time the practices were confined to prayers
addressed to the deceased deacon, to prostrations
on his tomb, and to the hysteric convulsions
which appeared to result from so doing. But as
the attention of all Paris and, indeed, more or
less of all France became aroused, and as the
miraculous nature of these phenomena became
a hotly debated party question between the
Molinists, who denied it, and the Jansenists,
who maintained it, the "convulsionnaires"
gradually raised their pretensions, and increased
the strangeness and violence of their
performances.

Cures began to take place. The deaf, the
lame, the blind, the epileptic, were brought to
the tomb, and declared themselves cured, or
more or less relieved of their infirmities. All
Paris was filled with stories, as Voltaire
scoffingly puts it, "of deaf people who had heard a
word or two, of blind who had received some
glimmer of light, and of lamiters who for a few
steps had walked upright." Testimony to these
miracles was, of course, not wanting. Declarations
sworn to in due form before judicial
authorities by numbers, in almost every class of
life, were abundant. The miracles were amply
attested, says the same witty scoffer, "by