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Madeleine Bavent 1607-1647
Published in the Agnostic Journal London, England 27 April 1907 (pages 257-258)
"Died every day she lived."—Macbeth, iv. iii.
Blood! This one word sums up two thousand years of Christianity. The followers of Christ have drenched the world with blood; blood, blood, blood, everywhere blood! Christ himself proclaimed his existence 'midst the blood of innocents and departed this life 'twixt two bleeding malefactors; and from that portentous day, when "ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets," the crimson sweat of Gethsemane has bedewed the world with the scarlet blood of woe, and the black horror of fiends.
"Let's carve him as a dish fir for the gods, not hew him as a carcass fir for hounds," are the words the great bard of Avon places in the mouth of the pagan Brutus; not so, however, the words that issued from the fetid gullet of Christianity—the more brutal the death, the better pleased was the scarlet woman of the seven hills; the more fiendish, were the means, the more glorious the end; the more foul the end, the better pleased was her God—that God who mailed his only begotten Son, as a farmer would a weasel, to a cross of agony—the lintel of Hell!
In the year 415 A.D., the wolfish demoniacs of Alexandria tore to pieces Hypatia, and hurled the statue of Serapis into the flames of general destruction. In 1905 A.D., the yelping Czar-hounds of Russia tortured, with fire and knout, the heroic Marie Spiridonova, and would if they could dash the leaden hammer of orthodoxy into the face of Freethought; but the great norm of Reason is not built of clay, or marble, or granite, nor yet even of bronze; a colossus it stands in the mind of every upright man, and neither sword nor fire can destroy it, let the demons and the wolves howl as they will. Bay Truth, O Christian, as a hound will bay the moon; yet Truth was before the moon, and Truth shall be after the Sun and all his children are once again swallowed up in the endless circles of eternity. The dog and the moon, O Folly, they name is Christianity.
But to commence the subject I wish to deal with, and whish the agonised form of Marie Spiridonova recalls to my memory.
Hypatia was a pagan—little excuse as this may be, yet she was not a Christian; Marie Spiridonova shot a Christian, there was a provocation—little excuse as such a deed may also be in such a country as Russia, where deeds "without a name" are of daily occurrence, yet she destroyed a follower of him who came not to bring peace but the sword. Now listen to what I believe to be the authentic history of another unfortunate woman, this time a Christian, nay, more, a spouse of Christ.
In the city of Rouen in the year 1607 was born Madeleine Bavent, at the age of nine she was left an orphan, and three years later was apprenticed to a worker in linen in the city of her birth. The confessor of this establishment was a Franciscan who was absolute master of this house; three other girls worked there whom he was in the habit of drugging, "he had his will of three of them, and Madeleine, at fourteen, made the fourth." Two years after her initiation into the mysteries of Christ she was received as a novice in the convent of Louviers; she still was perhaps too pure-minded to submit to the strange way of living as practised by the nuns of this house, and incurred the displeasure of the authorities for having endeavoured at communion to hide her bosom with the altar cloth, this offence was aggravated by her further being reluctant to unveil her soul to the Lady Superior, which she preferred to do to an old priest called David.
David was an Adamite, and preached the nudity Adam practised in his innocence; and obedient to his teaching, the Sisters of the convent of Louviers, often to break their souls into discipline would resume the condition of their mother Eve. He did not hide his doctrine from the youthful Madeleine. "The body cannot contaminate the soul; we must, by means of sin, which makes us humble and cures our pride, kill sin." Thus was she ushered into the sisterhood of Christ, and thus did she become the spouse of Jesus, son of the immaculate Mother of God.
She was eighteen years old when David died, but his successor, the curê Picart, in his turn only pursued her with more ardent importunity than ever. At confession he spoke of nothing but love, and made her sacristaness so that he might the more often be alone with her in the convent chapel. She did not like him, but, nevertheless, he assailed her in every fashion; when she was ill; even when she was almost on her deathbed this inhuman monster encompassed her weakened imagination with hellish fears by means of diabolical talismans. These failing, the he himself shammed sickness, and assailing her through compassion, begged her to visit him in his room, a magic potion sealed his wretched deed. She became with child by him, and drugs were provided to attempt to right the wrong he had done her; for converts in those days could well dispense with the necessity of calling in medical aid. What became of the child no one knows, and all that history hands down to us, is that Madeleine herself declared that she subsequently bore several children to this father in God.
"Picart, already an oldish man, dreaded Madeleine's fickleness, fearing she might form a new connexion with some other confessor, to whom she could pour out her remorse. He adopted a hateful means of attaching her irrevocably to himself. He made her swear an oath pledging herself to die when he should die, and be with him where he should go. The poor faint-hearted creature endured agonies of terror. Would he drag her with him into the tomb? Would he set her in Hell alongside of himself? She fully believed herself a lost soul. She became his chattel, his familiar spirit bound to do his will, and he used her and abused her for every vile purpose. He prostituted her in a four-fold orgy, carried out with his vicar Boullé and another woman. He made use of her to win over the other nuns by a magic talisman. The sacred wafer, dipped in Madeleine's blood and buried in the convent garden, was a sure way of agitating their senses and eluding their wits."
It was this same year that Urban Grandier was burnt as a sorcerer, and all France was ringing with the accounts of the devils of Loudon. Madeleine felt herself possessed, she was assailed by devils and pursued by a cat with fiery eyes, then the other sisters caught the hysterical contagion. About this time Picart died, and his death lessened the danger of the irregularities of the convent being disclosed; so another visionary was found to fight the devils which had taken possession of Madeleine; her name was Anne, and on her introduction to the convent this pair fell to sacrificing each other with outrageous calumnies.
The Penitentiary of Evereux, by the advice of the bishop of Evereux, condemned Madeleine without a hearing, and ordered than an examination of her body was to be made so that the Satanic sign-manual might be discovered. This examination was carried out by the Sisters of her convent; these virgin-nuns, after stripping the unfortunate girl naked, first examined her in a most revolting manner, and then drove into her quivering flesh long needles in order to discover the devil's spot which would reveal itself by its insensibility to pain. But every stab hurt, and they failed to prove her a witch, yet, nevertheless, they had the satisfaction of gloating over her tears and cries of agony.
These means failing, her tormentors ordered her to be immured in an in pace for life. The Penitentiary now carried her off as his prey, and deposited her in the dungeon of the episcopal palace, a low subterranean gallery, damp and filthy. Here she suffered from horrible ulcers, lying, as she did, in her own excrements. The perpetual darkness was disturbed by a dreadful scampering of rats, the object of much terror in prisons at that time, as they often gnawed off the helpless prisoners' ears and noses.
Every day the Penitentiary would come into an other cellar overhead, and speak down an orifice leading into the in pace, extracting from her what confessions he would for the condemnation of others he was then victimizing.
To terminate her wretched existence she swallowed spiders and gulped down pounded glass; but in vain; then with an old blunt knife she tried to cut her throat, but could not succeed. Next she attempted to drive it into her bowels, again in vain; the wound soon healed. Then followed the crowning horror of her martyrdom. The brutal servants of the bishop's household, despite the horror of the place and the disgusting condition of the wretched woman, would come and take their pleasure of her deeming any outrage on a witch a permissible and godly act.
Henceforth she may be justly regarded as mad; acting like a maniac she signed interminable lists of crimes she had never committed—lying, slandering, and bearing false witness against others; for every time it was desired to ruin a victim she was hailed to Louviers to accuse him. On her evidence a wretched man named Duval was burnt at the stake. Shortly after his death she confessed to the atrocity of her evidence. "From henceforth the universe rejected the odious creature and spued her out; her only world was her dungeon." In 1647 the Parlement under Mazarin decreed that the Sodom of Louviers should be destroyed, and the women dispersed. This was carried out during the month of August of the above year; but when they came to Madeleine's dungeon on the 21st of the month to open the doors of her prison all they found was a carcass of rotten flesh and mouldering bones.
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