“Sortez, sortez d’ici, mulots! Ou je vais vous bruler les crocs! Quittez, quittez ces blés! Allez, vous trouverez Dans la cave du curé Plus à boire qu’à manger.”
The form of imprecation varies in different provinces, but usually includes some threat of breaking the bones or burning the beards of the refractory rodents, in case they refuse to quit the close, as in the following summons:
“Taupes et mulots, Sors de mon clos, Ou je te casse les os; Barbassione! Si tu viens dans non clos, Je te brûle la barbe jusqu’aux os.”
The utterance of these words is emphasized by loud and discordant noises of cat-calls, tin horns, and similar instruments of “Callithumpian” music.
Gregory, who was Bishop of Tours in the latter half of the sixth century, states in his _History of the Franks_ (VIII. 35) that bronze talismans representing dormice and serpents were used in Paris to protect the city against the ravages of these creatures; and when the town of Le Mans was rebuilt after its destruction by fire in 1145, a toad with a gold chain round its neck, was enclosed in a block of stone as a preservative against venomous reptiles. (Le Corvasier: _Hist, des Évêques du Mans_, 1648, p. 441. Cf. Desnoyers: _Recherches_, etc., p. 7.)
The use of the above-mentioned means of conjuration is unquestionably of very ancient date. Thus in a treatise on agriculture entitled τὰ γεωπονικά and consisting of twenty books, written in the tenth century by the Bithynian Byzantine, Kassianos Bassos, the following prescription is given for getting rid of field-mice:
“Take a slip of paper and write on it these words: I adjure you, O mice, who dwell here not to injure me yourselves nor to permit any other mouse to do so; and I make over to you this field (describing it). But should I find you staying here after having been warned, with the help of the mother of the gods I will cut you in seven pieces.” The author quotes this recipe, in order, as he says, that nothing may remain unrecorded, but expressly declares that he has no confidence in its efficiency and advises the husbandman to put his trust in good rat-bane. Bassos derived the materials for his popular encyclopædia chiefly from the “Geoponics” composed by Anatolios and Didymos some six centuries earlier, and even most of his citations of classical writers are taken from the same sources. That the above-mentioned exorcism is pagan in its origin is evident from the invocation of the aid of Cybele for the destruction of disobedient vermin. In a Christian conjuration the Mother of God would have been substituted for the mother of the gods, whom the Greeks revered as the personification of all-creating and all-sustaining nature. The resemblance of this formula, which the Greeks may have borrowed with the worship of Cybele from the Phrygians, to the Yankee’s letter of advice is peculiarly interesting.