Word: grandiere
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Dates: during 1952-1952
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...Prioress' Revenge. Yet it was Sister Jeanne, prioress of the Ursulines, who brought the long delusion of Grandier to an end. In Huxley's interpretation, her native hysteria was aggravated by the abnegations of convent life; she began to have daydreams, and later night sweats, about the handsome priest. She offered him the post of director of her convent, and Grandier refused. Thereupon, as Huxley reads the evidence, Sister Jeanne's fantasies turned into a mania for sadistic revenge...
Appointing a confessor who was a sworn enemy of Grandier, Sister Jeanne began to confide to him her symptoms of a demonic infestation that clearly indicated Grandier as the infester. Soon 16 other nuns, under the vivid suggestion of their prioress' example, found themselves with demon: here Leviathan in the center of a forehead; there, Enemy of the Virgin in the neck; Asmodeus (in Hebraic lore, king of the demons) snuggled in a groin; Concupiscence at home in the left...
Clearly the demons had to be exorcised. Grandier's enemies opened the exorcisms to the public, who were properly edified to watch the nuns scream, throw convulsions, expose their navels to the priests and to the crowd. At last, with the circus in full swing, word of it reached Richelieu. The order came quickly to arrest Grandier and try him for witchcraft...
...Aftermath. Grandier was seized, probed to the bone with a long needle for "devil's pain-free spots," put to the "question extraordinary" (a procedure in which the victim's legs were systematically splintered), adjudged guilty and burned at the stake...
...devils, even after their supposed master was dead, went right on with their deviltry. The day after the execution, one of two friars who had helped torture Grandier came down sick, passed into convulsions and not long afterward died in despair, knocking the crucifix from his confessor's hand. His colleague lasted a few years more, but soon went insane, and died so. Father Jean-Joseph Surin, the great Jesuit contemplative who finally cured Sister Jeanne, did so only at the cost of becoming himself possessed. Sister Jeanne, however, with her flair for the dramatic, became a celebrity...