The Aix-en-Provence Possessions and the Burning of Louis Gaufridy

Marseille, 1606. Madeleine Demandols de La Palud, a young noblewoman, entered the Ursuline convent. She fell ill, went home, and came back in March 1607. Her confessor was Louis Gaufridy, parish priest of Les Accoules. Madeleine later confessed to the superior, Catherine de Gaumer, that there had been intimacy between them.

Summer, 1609. The fits began. Madeleine fell into violent convulsions and spoke in multiple voices. She screamed obscenities. A second nun, Sister Louise Capeau, spoke in a deep bass voice. The symptoms spread to other nuns.

The demons gave their names. Madeleine's was Beelzebub. Capeau's was Verrine. Leviathan and Asmodée were named too. The women described the witches' sabbath, its hierarchy, its sexual acts, its cannibalism and blasphemy. At its head, they said, stood Gaufridy. Prince of Magicians.

Madeleine was moved to the Aix Ursulines under a new confessor, Jean-Baptiste Romillon. Late in 1610 the inquisitor Sébastien Michaëlis and Fr. François Domptius exorcised both women in public at the Sainte-Baume sanctuary. They recorded the acts day by day.

At the end of 1610 Gaufridy came to Sainte-Baume to exorcise the women himself. The demons ridiculed the priest. They accused him of witchcraft to his face. On 27 December 1610, Verrine spoke through Capeau and announced that "the Antichrist is born seven years before the great day of the Lord." Michaëlis would report that 6,660 demons left Madeleine's body. Asked about contradictions, Capeau had an answer ready. "The Devil is the Father of Lies."

The Parlement of Provence opened proceedings on 17 February 1611. The royal physician Jacques Fontaine and other doctors found devil's marks on Madeleine and on the priest. Gaufridy was tortured by strappado and squassation. The manuscript record holds 121 confessions. "I confess there were twelve priests at the Sabbath…seated at the highest degree as Princes." In court he strongly recanted. The signed confession stayed in evidence.

On 18 April 1611 he was found guilty of witchcraft. On 30 April he was dragged through the streets of Aix for five hours to the Place des Prêcheurs. Some sources say he was strangled before his body was burned to ashes. Others say he was burned alive. Madeleine's symptoms stopped. The marks on her body, it was said, vanished.

Marseille stood by Gaufridy. The city feared the reach of the Inquisition. The Bishop of Marseille blamed the monks' hostility to secular priests, and the Franciscans, rivals of the Dominicans, backed the accused. Some readers dismissed the printed accounts as "modern devil romances". Jules Michelet later blamed the nuns' "monotonous lives and excessive imagination". The historian Joris Astier notes that the marks disappeared once the verdict was in, and reads the affair through the end-times fears of its age.

Before this case, the testimony of a person thought to be possessed was not considered reliable. Madeleine's was accepted. That precedent returned at Loudun, where Urbain Grandier was executed in 1634. The possession spread to Lille in 1613. Capeau stayed possessed until her death. Madeleine was accused of witchcraft herself in 1642 and 1652. She was found to bear the devil's mark, imprisoned, and died in 1670.