who exacted that such of them as, notwithstanding their mishandling, were still able to move, should banish themselves from that part of the country.”  Monstrelet winds up this shocking narrative by informing us “that it ought not to be concealed that the whole accusation was a stratagem of wicked men for their own covetous purposes, and in order, by these false accusations and forced confessions, to destroy the life, fame, and fortune of wealthy persons.”

Delrio himself confesses that Franciscus Balduinus gives an account of the pretended punishment, but real persecution, of these Waldenses, in similar terms with Monstrelet, whose suspicions are distinctly spoken out, and adds that the Parliament of Paris, having heard the affair by appeal, had declared the sentence illegal and the judges iniquitous, by an arret dated 20th May, 1491.  The Jesuit Delrio quotes the passage, but adheres with lingering reluctance to the truth of the accusation.  “The Waldenses (of whom the Albigenses are a species) were,” he says, “never free from the most wretched excess of fascination;” and finally, though he allows the conduct of the judges to have been most odious, he cannot prevail on himself to acquit the parties charged by such interested accusers with horrors which should hardly have been found proved even upon the most distinct evidence.  He appeals on this occasion to Florimond’s work on Antichrist.  The introduction of that work deserves to be quoted, as strongly illustrative of the condition to which the country was reduced, and calculated to make an impression the very reverse probably of that which the writer would have desired:—­

“All those who have afforded us some signs of the approach of Antichrist agree that the increase of sorcery and witchcraft is to distinguish the melancholy period of his advent; and was ever age so afflicted with them as ours?  The seats destined for criminals before our judicatories are blackened with persons accused of this guilt.  There are not judges enough to try them.  Our dungeons are gorged with them.  No day passes that we do not render our tribunals bloody by the dooms which we pronounce, or in which we do not return to our homes discountenanced and terrified at the horrible contents of the confessions which it has been our duty to hear.  And the devil is accounted so good a master that we cannot commit so great a number of his slaves to the flames but what there shall arise from their ashes a number sufficient to supply their place."[48]

[Footnote 48:  Florimond, “Concerning the Antichrist,” cap. 7, n. 5, quoted by Delrio, “De Magia,” p. 820.]