JamesConnor

The Witch

Historians are the worst gossips.

John Padburg, SJ

It seemed certain that the boy would die. Mysterious childhood ailments abounded, but this one was mysterious indeed.   The boy Blaise was only two years old, the first and only son of Etienne and Antoinette Pascal, when suddenly he began to waste away, becoming emaciated, as one en chartre, or “in prison.”  He seemed dejected; he could not stand the sight of liquids, nor take water in any form.   He seemed afraid of water, obsessed by a sudden hydrophobia that set him shrieking with fear at the sight of it.  What’s more, he couldn’t bear to see his parents together.  His mother, by herself, was fine, as was his father, but the two of them together sent him into rages.  Was he possessed?  Was he bewitched?  It was the seventeenth century, and most people in town would think so, so it is likely that, given the prominence of the Pascal family, rumors about the boy and his illness fluttered about Clermont like birds.  

The boy’s father Etienne was uncertain.  He was too much the scientific intellectual to believe easily in witchcraft.  He was, by his own account, an honnéte homme, an honest man, one of the new bourgeoisie intelligentsia who served his king and his God, and who made a little money on the side doing it. He was a worldly man, though pious, a rational man, a philosophical man who doubted all the superstitious frippery of the simple people.  But still, the boy was wasting away, and if the father did not find a cure, and find it soon, the son would die. 

The town gossips suspected first this crone, then that one, finally culling out an old woman who had once worked for the Pascals, possibly as a sevreuse, one who took in the children of the wealthy during their time of weaning, who would put up with their tantrums and their weeping, one who, because of her age, could not be a wet nurse and who was therefore the child’s first teacher about the hardness of the world.[1]  This particular old woman had once received the Pascals’ charity, a fact which, oddly enough, became the source of her grievance against Etienne, the tax judge of Clermont.  Because of her prior relationship, she had expected a favorable judgment by monsieur the judge, but was disappointed, and grumbled about his hard heartedness. And so the people put together the pieces.  An old woman, a grievance, a mysterious illness—it had to be witchcraft.  Or so everyone thought.  Etienne stopped her in the street one day and told her that if she were indeed responsible, he would take her to court and see her punished. He demanded that she cure his son at once, and without further witchcraft.

The old woman, cowed, apologized over and over, and said that certainly, she would do what she could.  Still, life for life, death for death.  Some other poor soul would have to sacrifice its life for the boy.  After all, the spell had been a killing spell, and could only be satisfied by a death.  Pascal ridiculed her, and asked if she wanted one of his horses to kill, but the old woman pushed on.  She said no, a cat would do as well.  In time, the bargain was set; Etienne returned to his home and the witch cast about for a cat to steal.  As she was leaving a home she had entered to find a cat, she met someone on the stairs who opposed her.  Afraid of being caught as a witch, or at least as a thief, she threw the cat out the window.  Cats are legend when it comes to surviving falls, and the window was not very high off the ground, but when the old woman found the cat outside the window, it was already dead. 

To complete the cure, the witch then gathered common herbs from the garden and after mixing them with flour, placed them on the boy’s navel.  Suddenly, little Blaise fell into a coma, and looked as if he were dead.  Etienne called for the doctor, who arrived and examined him, and then told the distraught parents that their son had indeed died. Meanwhile, the witch had gone off for a time, but after a while, she returned.  She knocked on the door and the servants ushered her into the child’s bedroom.  Overcome with grief and anger, Etienne, the philosopher, the honnéte homme, the honest man, ran to the woman and knocked her to the ground with his fist.  Standing over her, he shouted at her, and cursed her. But the witch pleaded, assuring him that his son was not dead, that they should not put him in a shroud, and certainly not bury him, that this lethargy was part of the cure, and that if they only had a bit more patience, they would see that Blaise would awaken soon, and begin to heal.

The spell required that they wait until midnight, when suddenly, she said, the boy would awaken and return to himself. That afternoon and into the night, the Pascals, Etienne and Antoinette, with their few servants and possibly even their daughter Gilberte, the woman who would eventually write down the story as part of a biography of her brother Blaise, stayed by his bedside and prayed, taking cold comfort in what the witch had told them, that the boy was not dead, but only asleep.   Midnight passed, and nothing happened.  One o’clock, and still nothing.  Two o’clock.  Three; four, five, six.  The family began to despair, when around six thirty in the morning, the boy stirred, and finally his eyes fluttered awake.  The first thing he saw was his father and mother next to the bed, standing together, and he began to cry, as he had done in the past, so they knew that he was not yet cured.  He still feared water, but after a week, Etienne returned home one evening to find Blaise sitting in his mother’s lap, pouring water from one glass to another.  He tried to approach his son, but Blaise began to cry.  This situation continued for another few days, when Etienne found them once again, mother and child, and approached, but this time, Blaise did not object, and put on weight from that point on, until he looked as if he had never been sick.

When pressed, the witch admitted that she had placed the spell on the boy after Etienne had refused her application, and when pressed further, she admitted that her suit had not been just, and that she had hoped her previous association with monsieur the judge would get her what she wanted anyway.  The ways of the Evil One are indeed slippery, people told themselves, and were satisfied.