in his Discours des Spectres, a closely printed quarto of nearly 1000 pages, by Pierre le Loyer, Conseiller du Roy au Siege Presidial d’Angers. {269} Le Loyer says, ’De gayete de coeur semble m’estre voulu engager au combat contre ceux qui impugnent les spectres!’ As Le Loyer observes, ghosts seldom come into court in civil cases, except when indicted as nuisances, namely, when they make a hired house uninhabitable by their frolics.  Then the tenant often wants to quit the house, and to have his contract annulled.  The landlord resists, an action is brought, and is generally settled in accordance with the suggestion of Alphenus, in his Digests, book ii.  Alphenus says, in brief, that the fear must be a genuine fear, and that reason for no ordinary dread must be proved.  Hence Arnault Ferton, in his Customal of Burgundy, advises that ’legitimate dread of phantasms which trouble men’s rest and make night hideous’ is reason good for leaving a house, and declining to pay rent after the day of departure.  Covarruvias, a Spanish legist, already quoted, agrees with Arnault Ferton.  The Parliament of Grenada, in one or two cases, decided in favour of the tenant, and against the landlord of houses where spectres racketed.  Le Loyer now reports the pleadings in a famous case, of which he does not give the date.  Incidentally, however, we learn that it can hardly have been earlier than 1550.  The cause was heard, on appeal, before the Parlement de Paris.

Pierre Piquet, guardian of Nicolas Macquereau (a minor), let to Giles Bolacre a house in the suburbs of Tours.  Poor Bolacre was promptly disturbed by a noise and routing of invisible spirits, which suffered neither himself nor his family to sleep o’ nights.  He then cited Piquet, also Daniel Macquereau, who was concerned in the letting of the house, before the local seat of Themis.  The case was heard, and the judge at Tours broke the lease, the hauntings being insupportable nuisances.  But this he did without letters royal.  The lessors then appealed, and the case came before the Cour de Parlement in Paris.  Maitre Chopin was for the lessors, Nau appeared for the tenant.  Chopin first took the formal point, the Tours judge was formally wrong in breaking a covenant without letters royal, a thing particularly bad in the case of a minor, Nicolas Macquereau.

So much for the point of form; as to the matter, Maitre Chopin laughed at the bare idea of noisy spirits.  This is notable because, in an age when witches were burned frequently, the idea of a haunted house could be treated by the learned counsel as a mere waggery.  Yet the belief in haunted houses has survived the legal prosecution of witches.  ’The judge in Tours has merely and mischievously encouraged superstition.’  All ghosts, brownies, lutins, are mere bugbears of children; here Maitre Chopin quotes Plato, and Philo Judaeus in the original, also Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Quintilian, Dioscorides.  Perhaps Bolacre and his family suffer from nightmare.  If so, a physician, not a solicitor, is their man.  Or again, granting that their house is haunted, they should appeal to the clergy, not to the law.