The possession of Marthe Brossier and the royal physicians' tests, Paris, 1599

1598. Romorantin, in Berry. Marthe Brossier begins to suffer fits and accuses Anne Chevion of bewitching her. Then comes the road: Angers, Saumur, Cléry, Orléans, with public exorcisms at every stop.

At Angers, Bishop Charles Miron tested her. For days she drank only holy water, without reacting, yet plain water in a holy-water vessel set her off. An iron key wrapped in taffeta like a relic made her react as if it were the True Cross. When he read "Arma virumque cano" as though it were an exorcism, she fell to the ground. He sent her home.

She reached Paris in early March 1599, days after the Parlement registered the Edict of Nantes. The Capuchins exorcised her in public. A voice calling itself Beelzebub ranted against the Huguenots.

At the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève she "tumbled her selfe backward," then, on her back, "in foure or fiue skips remoued her selfe from the Altar to the Chappell-dore," "which indeed did astonish all the companie." She breathed deep, "quaking in her flankes, (like a horse after he hath runne)." Her eyes turned in her head. A voice rose from her belly with her mouth shut. She seemed to understand Greek and English.

30 March 1599. On the orders of Henri de Gondi, Bishop of Paris, the physicians Marescot, Ellain, Hautin, Riolan and Duret examined her. The next day Duret "pricked her with a pin, betweene the thumbe and the forefinger." When the physicians tried to halt the exorcisms, the Bishop overruled them. On 2 and 3 April a second group of doctors, chosen by the clergy, declared the possession real.

About mid-April, Henri IV had her taken into the Grand Châtelet. Bishops, councillors and many ladies came to see her. The verdict was blunt. "Nihil à Daemone: Multa ficta: A morbo pauca." Nothing from the devil. Much feigned. A little from illness. The belly voice was ventriloquism, "Talking in their Bellies." She had never spoken anything but French "and the proper speech of Romorantin."

24 May 1599. The Parlement of Paris sent her and her father back to Romorantin, and warned him, on pain of corporal punishment, not to let her wander. In July, Marescot's opinion was printed as the Discours veritable. Abraham Hartwell soon put it into English.

Pierre de Bérulle, writing as Léon d'Alexis, defended the possession in print. Clergy protested that a secular court had taken over a church matter. Politics ran underneath. The Capuchins and Catholic League sympathisers had turned Beelzebub against the Edict of Nantes, and the king stepped in to protect it.

The story did not end there. Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld took her to Rome, where she performed during the 1600 Papal Jubilee. In 1604, in Milan, she was still speaking as Beelzebub's mouthpiece.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley later noted that she owned an account of Nicole Obry, the 1566 Miracle of Laon, a possible model. Hartwell dedicated his translation to Richard Bancroft, then campaigning with Harsnett against the Puritan exorcist John Darrell. That campaign produced Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, which Shakespeare drew on for King Lear. Today, writers on the placebo cite the sham water and the wrapped key as an ancestor of the placebo control. Whether she was a deceiver or a believer remains an open question.