Europe's inner demons

Practically all Lamothe-Langon’s voluminous manuscripts were destroyed after his death, but fortunately this particular problem can be solved without recourse to manuscript sources. In the preface to his history Lamothe-Langon mentions that he knew (how could he fail to?) the famous Historia Inquisitionis of the seventeenth-century Dutch Protestant Philipp van Limborch, and that he had been particularly struck by the appendix, which contains a number of sentences passed by the inquisitors of Toulouse.⁽³¹⁾

The documents in this Liber Sententiarium Inquisitionis Tholosanae not only give the text of the sermons and sentences but list the various clerics who were present on each occasion; and they also mention that royal officials and capitouls were in attendance. Lamothe-Langon would have needed to look no further for the framework of his fabrication. The sermon by which Bernard Guidonis in 1322 sentenced a number of heretics to various penalties, for instance, would have provided an admirable model for the imaginary sermon which Lamothe-Langon attributes to Bernard’s nephew Pierre.⁽³²⁾

Two other works mentioned by Lamothe-Langon will have supplied him with the names of the personages who are supposed to have been involved. An old and well-known history of Toulouse, La Faille’s Annales de la Ville de Toulouse, gives the names of the six capitouls for 1335, in almost exactly the same order.⁽³³⁾

The fatal error concerning Pierre Guidonis, on the other hand, can be traced back to Percin’s list of inquisitors of Toulouse, published in 1693.⁽³⁴⁾ It is typical of Lamothe-Langon that, having taken both the name and the date from Percin, and constructed a whole melodrama around them, he should add: “By an inexplicable oversight, Father Percin did not include in his list Pierre Guidonis, who was functioning as an inquisitor in 1334.”⁽³⁵⁾

To find models for the witches’ confessions he will naturally have had to look to a later historical period, when the new stereotype of the witch was fully developed. An obvious source would be Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges, which was published in 1612. This celebrated work, which has always been easily available, reveals in great detail the beliefs of a witch-hunting magistrate at the height of the great witch-hunt, and the correspondence with Lamothe-Langon’s account is exact. The initial appearance of the Devil in the form of a black man; the pact, concluded at midnight; the witch transported by a mere effort of will to a sabbat held usually on Friday nights, though in the most varied places; the Devil in the form of a gigantic black goat, presiding over the sabbat and copulating with the women participants; the promiscuous mating between the men and women present; the banquet where new-born babies are devoured, and disgusting liquids are drunk, but where no salt is ever to be seen; the cooking of poisonous herbs and of substances from exhumed corpses; the poisoning of human beings and of cattle, and the destruction of crops by means of poisonous mists — all these details are to be found in the pages of de Lancre,⁽³⁶⁾ and they also figure in the fictitious confessions of Lamothe-Langon’s witches.

As for the names of the two witches, Georgel and Delort, it seems that Lamothe-Langon took them neither from the fourteenth century nor from the seventeenth but from his own times. Both are decidedly rare names in France — but both were borne by literary personages who lived in Paris at the same time as Lamothe-Langon and who worked in the same fields as he. They were the abbé Jean-François Georgel, whose six volumes of memoirs, published posthumously in 1817-18, are almost as fanciful as the memoirs that Lamothe-Langon was to produce in such abundance; and Joseph Delort, who was a contemporary of Lamothe-Langon’s, and came from the same region.⁽³⁷⁾ Delort achieved precisely the kind of career that Lamothe-Langon had hoped for: he became a successful civil servant, rising to be deputy head of the section for science, literature and the arts. He also wrote historical works of a decidedly romantic kind, at the same time as Lamothe-Langon was producing his historical romances. Lamothe-Langon cannot have failed to know the works of Georgel and Delort, and everything suggests that the names of his two witches represents the private joke of a man who — as the Naundorff episode also shows — was quite a joker.