THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES
they not been undeceived by making them recognize the true
God by the charity, the knowledge, the justice, and above all,
by the mercy of his ministers?
The necromancers who cause the devil to appear after a
fatiguing and almost impossible series of the most revolting
evocations, are only children by the side of that St. Anthony
of the legend who drew them from hell by thousands, and
dragged them everywhere after him, like Orpheus, who
attracted to him oaks, rocks and the most savage animals.
Callot alone, initiated by the wandering Bohemians
during his infancy into the mysteries of black sorcery, was
able to understand and reproduce the evocations of the first
hermit. And do you think that in retracing those frightful
dreams of maceration and fasting, the makers of legends have
invented? No; they have remained far below the truth.
The cloisters, in fact, have always been peopled with nameless
spectres, and their walls have palpitated with shadows and
infernal larvae. St. Catherine of Siena on one occasion passed
a week in the midst of an obscene orgy which would have
discouraged the lust of Pietro di Aretino; St. Theresa felt her-
self carried away living into hell, and there suffered, between
walls which ever closed upon her, tortures which only hysteri-
cal women will be able to understand. . . . All that, one will
say, happened in the imagination of the sufferers. But where,
then, would you expect facts of a supernatural order to take
place? What is certain is that all these visionaries have seen
and touched, that they have had the most vivid feeling of a
formidable reality. We speak of it from our own experience,
and there are visions of our own first youth, passed in retreat
and asceticism, whose memory makes us shudder even now.
205