But if we can to some extent account for the excess of cruelty which blind frenzy inflicted on the inflexible martyr to his faith, it is certainly more difficult to explain the severity exercised upon the more pliable, whom the arguments of ghostly advisers, or the terrors of the _Place de Grève_, had induced to recant. Generally the judge did nothing more in their behalf than commute their punishment by ordering them to be strangled before their bodies were consigned to the flames.[78] Yet in one exceptional case--that of a servant whose master, a gentleman and one of the men-at-arms of the Regent of Scotland, was burned alive--the court went to such a length of leniency as to let the repentant heretic off with the sentence that he first be beaten with rods at the cart's end, and afterwards have his tongue cut out.[79] Even the clearest evidence of insanity did not suffice to remove or even mitigate the penalties of impiety. A poor, crazy woman, who had broken the consecrated wafer when administered to her in her illness, and had applied to it some offensive but absurd epithet, was unhesitatingly condemned to the stake. An appeal to a superior court procuring no reversal of her sentence, she was burned at Tours in the year 1533.[80]
Other marks of a low stage of civilization were not wanting. The belief in judicial astrology was almost universal.[81] Pretenders like Nostradamus obtained respect and wealth at the hands of their dupes. All France trembled with Catharine de' Medici, when the astrologer gave out that the queen would see all her sons kings, and every one foreboded the speedy extinction of the royal line. The "prophecy," as it was gravely styled, obtained public recognition, and was discussed in diplomatic papers. When two of the queen's sons had in fact become kings of France, and a third had been elected to the throne of Poland, while the marriage of the fourth with Queen Elizabeth was under consideration, Catharine's allies saw grounds to congratulate her that the prediction which had so disquieted her was likely to obtain a more pleasing fulfilment than in the successive deaths of her male descendants.[82]
A still more pernicious form of superstition was noticeable in the credit enjoyed by charms and incantations, not merely among illiterate rustics, but even with persons of high social station. No phase of the magic art led to the commission of more terrible crimes or revealed a worse side of human character than that which pretended to secure the happiness or accomplish the ruin, to prolong the life or hasten the death, of the objects of private love or hatred. While systematically practising upon the credulity of his dupes, the professed master of this ill-omened art frequently resorted to assassination by poison or dagger in the accomplishment of his schemes. Sorcery by means of waxen images was particularly in vogue. Thus, the Queen of Navarre, the sister of Francis the First, in her singular collection of tales, the "Heptameron," gives a circumstantial account of the mode in which her own life was sought by this species of witchcraft.[83] Five puppets had been provided: three, representing enemies (the queen being one of the number), had their arms hanging down; the other two, representing persons whose favor was desired, had them raised aloft. With certain cabalistic words and occult rites the puppets were next secretly hidden beneath an altar whereon the mass was celebrated, and the mysterious "sacrifice" was believed to complete the efficacy of the charm. It was no new superstition imported from abroad, but one that had existed in France for centuries.[84]