'Eutopia nothing to it yields': Thomas Peyton on Paradise and the Fall, 1620

 

 

 

 

 

 

The youthful and pious Thomas Peyton published two books of his intended verse paraphrase of Genesis, The Glasse of Time, in 1620. Peyton was not a very inventive narrator of the sparse story given in Genesis (he got as far as Noah), while as a versifier, it is easy to suspect he was pushing on too quickly, often filling out his lines to meet obvious rhyme words, achieving no sustained style. But his reflections on other people’s reflections on what might have happened to Adam and Eve must have catered to a taste not even the scale of Du Bartas’s Divine Week could satisfy, and his work was reprinted in 1623 and 1625. One can imagine the young Milton looking at it for maybe five minutes, at least until he read something like this suggestion of the devil lying in wait to accost Eve alone
 … watching Time, when Adam stept aside, 
Even but a little from his lovely Bride, 
To pluck perhaps a Nut upon the Trees, 
Or get a combe amongst the honey Bees…

(as stepping aside ‘to pluck a rose’ was a euphemism of the time, this was doubly inept).

 

Peyton hoped that “my speech as generall to all, /May like a Sermon in the Pulpit fall: /And not to wade in curious questions deepe…” - that he would be instructive and not over-curious. “In God’s book we love to pry and peeke’, he wrote, deploringly, while doing exactly that himself. But he was unable to inhabit mentally, and so fill out the life of Adam and Eve in Eden and afterwards; instead he is drawn into rabbinical lore and all the other speculations about their lives after the Fall, as well as such matters as the location of Paradise, or what the forbidden fruit actually was.

His own multiple retelling of possible events after the Fall follows a distraught Adam after his expulsion all the way east (Adam’s quest is to reconnect with the divine light) to the final insurmountable barrier of the River Ganges, where Adam (“some say”) circumcised himself, and then stood in the river until he was “overgrown with green”. Then Peyton withdraws all this agreeably zany rabbinical legend with a comment that it’s unlikely Adam was so long separated from his wife, or even be able to bear to be so far away from Paradise itself, but have stayed close to her and their former dwelling place.

The quest for the site of Paradise takes Peyton rather willingly back on another excursion to the Far East, this time to Zeilan (Ceylon), and Adam’s Peak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam’s_Peak

which Peyton says is surrounded by a freshwater lake eighteen miles across and four foot deep, ‘distilled’ from the tears of the penitent Adam and Eve (we can be generous and imagine that distilling their tears would make the lake freshwater), while a ‘flaming hill’ nearby symbolized the flaming sword guarding paradise (Ceylon does not have volcanic activity).

Describing Ceylon and its climate makes Peyton as paradisal in description of a place as he ever gets – but his account then moves on to Mount Amara in Ethiopia, and finally to Assyria ‘the likeliest place indeede’, and also equipped with a ‘smoky hill’ to memorialize the sword guarding the Tree of Life. On the great mystery of the nature of that carefully guarded ‘Tree of Life’ Peyton offers a suggestion that the tree was probably not yet ripe: for it was a symbol of the Christ to come.  

 

These long sections of his poem where he canvasses various possibilities are only remarkable as illustrations of that characteristic mix of Bible history and world travel they went in for in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. When it comes to the Forbidden Fruit, Peyton learnedly opts, in the end, for the banana, which has to his mind the right combination of taste, scent and multiple cropping, and has a built-in ‘signature’ which shows its nature:

            more like and probable it is: 
If that their iudgements do not erre amis, 
The dainty tree that in their country growes, 
And twice a yeare his pleasant fruite that showes, 
Yeelding a fragrant and a lovely scent, 
If but the same be either crusht or rent: 
A Cucumber much like it is in shew, 
Of pleasing taste, and sweet delightfull hew. 
If with a knife the fruite in two you reave, 
A perfect crosse you shall therein perceave: 
The spatious leaves are full a fadome long· 
In breadth three spans…

It is rather a pity that no artist ever adopted this identification – an Eve by Titian or Rubens tempting Adam with a banana would have been glorious.

But what gives Peyton some individual interest is his gradual superimposition of his own story onto his retelling of Genesis. Evil came into the enclosed and ideal world he shared with his beloved Urania (meaning, of course, the muse of Christian poetry he shared with Du Bartas). Peyton, identifying himself strongly with innocence and true faith, inserts his account of what envious folk did to him, into the main narrative of the Fall under Lucifer’s envious assault.

It is not certain that Peyton would have seen any incongruity in this, had it been pointed out to him, rather, it is all one (as far as he’s concerned), and his own life experience validates the Bible truths. Peyton is not in the least abashed about his faith, which is of the right kind, as is his art: God sends Urania down to him on a mission up there in importance to Peyton with the ministry of Christ: 

That thou my Breast dost with Urania fill, 
Sending her Downe as thou didst send thy Son … 

Whatever it was happened to Peyton, it was clearly something he felt very aggrieved about, but it is never made entirely clear what it actually was. A self-righteous and touchy man (I infer), it may have been the case that adverse comment on his opinions, which he considered to distort them, prompted him to sound off about Envy, whose venom which has besmirched even his beloved Urania:

Urania (deere) thy very case is mine, 
How did my Foes still to this day combine, 
Backe sliding friends (much like to slippery Eels) 
Have undermin’d, to turne up both mine heeles: 
With fawning tearmes my company have sought, 
Inverted that (which yet) I never thought; 
Reported words, the which were never spake… 

Nothing about The Glasse of Time itself strikes me as heterodox. When he invents, he tends to do so under the influence of Spenser, in highly descriptive allegory. We hear a lot about the daughters of God, the allegorical figures of Mercy, Justice, Charity and Truth. Here, God just sounds indecisive when faced by female tears (of course, the compassion is His own, talked out of Him by His justice):

But God himselfe his daughter deare that sees, 
With weeping eyes before his face to crave, 
That but on Eve he would compassion have: 
Began to stay his minde, to alter cleane, 
And to the woman now began to leane: 
But that hard by stood Justice in the place, 
And urg’d him much to prosecute the case: 
When all the reason Mercy well could render, 
Was that her selfe was of the female gender …

And this following passage is not well handled, in which a fit of papal petulance about a lost peacock (Peyton repeatedly denounces both Catholics and ‘Puritants’) unluckily collides with God’s reaction to the disappearance of the Forbidden apple (wasn’t it a banana?):

What may we thinke of that ambitious Pope, 
Which dar’d to scoffe under heauens glorious Cope, 
Against that God, that in his sacred frowne 
Turns up his heeles, and hurles his pride soone downe? 
When having mist a simple childish toy, 
A Peacocke bird which seem’d his onely joy. 
Distempered much began in heate to chide, 
That few men could his holy presence bide. 
And afterward asham’d of what was past, 
To shew his choller not long time did last; 
Excusde himselfe, that he might angry be, 
As well for that, as was the Trinitie. 
When discontented for an Apple lost, 
Both Eve and Adam to their paine and cost, 
From Paradise were thrust quite out and beaten, 
And much disgrac’t for one poore Apple eaten …

Peyton’s major problem was most likely vexatious litigation, causing him great losses to his estate, and spells in prison (I assume that people he had thought his friends, turned legal opponents, had paid for him to be arrested).

Nay thou thy selfe, noble Urania deere, 
Since first thy landing and arrival heere, 
Hast thou not beene on every side turmoyl’d, 
Tost too and fro, by Envy overtoyl’d? 
Whose viprous tongue within a sacred place, 
Hath belcht her venome, aim’d at thy disgrace; 
Like to the Divell in Paradise at first,  
That banefull poyson in his Brest hath nurst, 
To wrong thy person, weaken much thy state, 
Enrich himselfe to satisfie his hate, 
 Tooke all advantage working on thy youth, 
Suggested lies instead of naked truth: 
Lock’t thee up close (Immur’d) within a Wall, 
When not a Groate was due to him at all; 
But by the order of this noble Land, 
He in that place for debt to-thee should stand. 

But holy God, what will become of those, 
Which in an open publike place shall chose, 
To give occasion first to shew their gall, 
Do call a man both this and that and all, 
And afterwards shall lye upon the catch, 
Their friends estate, into their hands to snatch, 
By Deedes, Conveyance, Obligations, Bonds, 
To wring and wrest, to make them sell their Lands, 
Before such time as any thing is due, 
To clap up such with Cerberus his crue, 
In wofull prison sick to lye and rot … 

Complaints about how he had been treated continue, and with him, his Muse suffers

 … all the spight against me she [Envy] can use, 
May waste my State, and hinder thee my Muse. 

                        … by her I am misused, 
Hurried about by slandrous tongues abused, 
Kept long from home, unto my great expence, 
Weakened my Lands and living ever since, 
On all sides crost (by Greatnesse) over sway’d, 

… So deerest Muse here in this mortall life,  
That swarmes in troupes of those delight in strife, 
Which never rest till all my state be spent, 
But at my Ruine all their aime is bent, 

The importance to Peyton of money, and hanging on to the wealth you have, impinges on his Paradise narrative. His Garden of Eden is surprisingly opulent; Adam has wealth just lying about. Then of course he loses it all, and hangs about in the vicinity, hoping to get it back:

.. all the world thou hadst in ample store, 
Plenty of wealth and gold at thy command, 
And all the creatures in the earth to stand, 
Before thy face subjected to thy will, 
And thou the Lord of Paradise yet still.

 … How is thy ground exceeding rich and faire· 
A region seasoned with a temperate aire, 
Thy channels crawling full of golden Ore …

One might think the excluded Adam could pick wealth enough off the outside walls of this opulent Paradise:

The lofty walls were all of Jasper built, 
Lin’d thick with gold, and covered rich with gilt 
Like a quadrangle seated on a hill, 
With twelve brave gates the curious eye to fill, 
The sacred luster as the glistring Zone, 
And every gate fram’d of a severall stone…

I deduce that Peyton got married too. He makes some passing remarks about having, regrettably, less time for Urania than he’d wish: “And what if Hymen something doe annoy / Thy tender Fruit, yet shalt thou live in joy…” 

One of his favourite motifs as he deals with the Bible patriarchs is to praise their continence of life until marriage at mature years, marriage contracted out of a spirit of duty to the church rather than any youthful lust. 

 

Though I can’t quite see exactly how it connects to his legal problems, Peyton seems to have got into a quarrel about Eve, perhaps with a clergyman who then litigated with a mind to “Enrich himselfe to satisfie his hate”.

Prior to the Fall, Eve is (conventionally enough), for Adam a “Glittring sugred hooke, / She drawes thy love to mind her speeches more, / Then God himselfe that gave thee her in store.” Peyton does not attempt to describe her, he actually pays more attention to the beauty of Adam:

As the two lights within the Firmament,  
So hath thy God his glory to thee lent, 
Compoz’d thy body exquisite and rare, 
That all his works cannot to thee compare, 
Like his owne Image, drawne thy shape divine, 
With curious Pencill shadowed forth thy line: 
Within thy Nosthrils blowne his holy breath, 
Impal’d thy head with that inspiring wreath, 
Which binds thy front, and elevates thine eyes …

I suppose Peyton imagines Adam with a kind of Bacchic wreath. But the second book includes a sudden upsurge of sympathetic interest in Eve. As Peyton tells it, Adam (after the Fall), quite ignorant of what he is doing, has sex with his wife:

                                    upon a time it fell, 
The circumstance I must forbeare to tell, 
Playing with Eve within that shady bowre, 
And in his armes his loveliest sweetest flowre, 
Embracing, toying, smiling, kissing sweete, 
The sports most chaste unto a Spouse bed meete, 
Thinking the time he had with her beguil’d, 
Forgets himselfe, and she conceives with child. 

Peyton is fond of projecting innocence onto Adam – alone in Paradise prior to the creation of Eve, in one of the many similes Peyton proudly points out to us in his margins, he’s like a school boy, peeking in every bush for birds’ nests. Adam’s eyes do not seem very much opened by having tasted the Fruit of Knowledge. After this inadvertent coupling, Adam is baffled by Eve’s behaviour – she keeps eating bizarre things, and demanding that Adam find a way back into Paradise and get her the stuff she really has a fancy for:

Strange is the change she in her selfe doth find, 
An extreme Passion working in her mind, 
Longing oft times some sops in Tarre to lick, 
Her bodies altred, and her stomack sick, 
Black ugly Berries, fulsome unripe Plums, 
And every thing that in her way next comes, 
The goodly fruits which are within the walls, 
Of Paradise, she to her husband calls, 
Desires, intreates him, as he loves his Wife, 
Forth with to hast, and fetch to save her life. 

But this erratic and conventionally anti-feministic Eve, cursed by God after the disobedience with ‘Sick loathsome vomits’ in pregnancy, suddenly starts to receive what seems to be Peyton’s sincere tribute. When Adam returns from one of his excursions for Twiglets, he finds that she has given birth in his absence, and Eve explains to Adam:

She knew not well how first to her it came, 
But that she thought although her sence was weake, 
This was the Seed the Serpents head should breake, 
Told him in words and gentle speeches mild, 
That by the Lord she had conceiv’d that Child.

Peyton underlines his point, insisting that Eve would not have known where her baby had come about, and that her deduction was pious and correct. He suddenly breaks out in anger:

How damn’d prophane are those accursed lips,  
Which in Gods Church shall make such dangerous slips, 
Within the same to belch to thy disgrace, 
Even in a sacred and most publike place, 
Behinde thy back when thou art dead and past, 
And canst not answere what their mouth out cast, 
Thus to be lye, mens soules to sin allure, 
Wresting thy speech with banefull breath impure: 
Not terrifide with Heavens all threatning Rod, 
But dares to teach (that thou didst sweare by God  
Thou hadst a Child) and oftentimes to speake it, 
If it were true, unto the world to breake it, 
Is worse then was that Serpent damn’d accurst, 
In Paradise which wrong’d thy Person first. 

As far as this is coherent, it indicates a fierce dispute about Genesis 4, 1 (“And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord”), in which Peyton took the text at face value, and someone else, a clergyman, asserted that Eve was telling a profane lie (with the possibility that this other person asserted the common enough notion that the real father of Cain was the devil).

For Peyton, however, such opinions are another assault upon well-meaning inexperience: it’s what happened at the Fall, it is what happened when he was ensnared by litigants. The plain words of a pure mind, such as his, or Eve’s, get ‘inverted’ or ‘wrested’ into something scandalous to the person that uttered them. He continues with a vision of Eve in heaven:

Deare Eve, thy worth I ever must admire, 
Thou sitst above within the Angels Quire, 
Tuning thy voyce unto their sacred layes, 
To sound forth Glory to the Prince of prayse.

while her detractors (like his, for so we can extrapolate)

“headlong downe to damned divels shall reele: 
Whilst Eve shall sit triumphant on the skies, 
Viewing their fall, hearing their moanes and cryes, 
Joying to see the sacred Truth prevaile, 
Her meaning clear’d, her foes to weepe and waile.

Eve goes on to have “about some threescore more / Of sons and daughters”. For Peyton, Cain’s story is just another example of the poisonous nature of Envy, a man who set out well, but was then polluted (Peyton makes a parallel with Faustus).

I’m sorry to say that Peyton opts completely for the mark of Cain as being black skin:

That Cains most fearefull punishment and marke, 
For raking up his brother in the darke 
Was that his skin was all to blackensse turn’d, 
Like to a Coale within the fire halfe burn’d.

He scoffs at the notion that dark skin is something to do with climate:

If this be true, how is it that there bee 
In Africa, America, to see 
Under the line both people white and faire, 
As many men that now in Europe are …(?)

Here’s early modern racism in a couplet:

“The Southerne man, a black deformed Elfe, 
The Northerne white like unto God himselfe …”

I will end with Peyton at his most paranoid. In this personal anecdote, even as he is working with Urania on this divine poem of his (it’s a wonder he didn’t get it printed in white ink), his enemies gather outside, just as happened to Lot in Sodom. But his good friend God (that would be the white one) sends him a dream that makes him wake up, secure his doors, and escape:

(Ah dearest God) even whilst my Muse was working 
Upon this Place, how were my foes all lurking 
About my house, to undermine my state, 
With secret traines, close to my dores and gate. 
But thou didst wake when I was fast asleepe, 
To make me know that thou dost alwayes keepe, 
Thy sheepe from danger of a Wolfe most fierce, 
Which in my bloud (next to my state) would pierce 
Then didst thou give me at that instant howre, 
A Vision strange to shew thy secret powre, 
That in a dreame when once my body wak’t, 
My inward thoughts and all my sences shak’t; 
But Reason guides and swayes me downe her streame, 
To make me prize it 'bove an usuall dreame. 
Whereat I went, lockt up my dores most sure, 
To keepe me safe from treacherous pawes impure, 
Which never yet in all my life was done, 
The hatefull lawes of cruell foes to shun; 
But (Heavenly God) when least I knew of harme, 
How did they then about my house all swarme 
On every side, with raving speeches hot, 
Like Sodomits about the walls of Lot,  
Till thou protectedst broughtst me safely out, 
From the curst fury of that griping Rout; 
Stroke them with blindnesse all like Tygers lay; 
While thou conveydst my body sure away, 
To sound thy prayse, and blaze thy glorious name, 
To end (this worke) to thy renowned fame. 

My illustrations are from the book: the title page ‘vinnet’, as he calls it (‘vignette’), with Time leading forth Truth, Noah’s Ark, either Paradise or the heavenly Jerusalem, pious scenes, and himself. Then we have bowlers sinfully bowling on the Sabbath when others are in church (Peyton has much to say about this, and how God has punished even Geneva, which allowed shooting on Sundays, by bringing war to it), a temptation scene with Time and his glass rather oddly intruded, and the death of Adam and Eve, four of Seth’s sons bearing them away.

 

 

 

 

La Devineresse, 1679

La Jobin and the Marquis, with body parts falling down the chimney

La Divineresse, ou les faux Enchantements was a play first performed in 1679, created by the younger Corneille (Thomas) and Jean Donneau de Visé.

My purpose here is to try to read this text against texts which are far more familiar to me, the Jacobean and Caroline witch plays. One first finding instantly suggests itself - just as Heywood and Brome converted the cruelly credited accusations and the slow-moving central process to resolve the 1633-4 Lancashire case into a ‘merry and excellent’ comedy, so Corneille and his co-adjutor opted to write a comedy, one that is as free as possible from polemic, or from promoting any metaphysical alarm. 

King Charles might have found a model for state intervention in local witchcraft trials and verdicts (as happened in 1634) either in some of the later actions of his father, or from learning of processes abroad, specifically in France. Across the channel, if provincial courts passed guilty verdicts in witchcraft trials, the Parlement de Paris would overturn these verdicts. Witchcraft remained an uncontested verity: but the central authorities would quench or nullify all local action about particular instances of it.

Then, in ‘the affair of the poisons’, sorcery was discovered to be happening in Paris, and at Versailles. Ian Bostridge suggests that the surviving documents perhaps give us access into a world of ‘elite’ witchcraft. Privileged clients, male and female, were apparently willing to credit a wide range of paranormal powers and pay to have them harnessed to their desires. La Bosse, La Voisin, La Vigoreaux and other practitioners seem to have been dispensing love philtres, fortune-telling (by palmistry, mainly), and selling all kinds of charms and amulets. These ‘sorceresses’ also seem to have been the agents for more dangerous services. The double moral weight of Louis’ authoritarianism and that the church seem to have promoted recourse in some people to acts of desecration, in having black masses performed. For women in trouble with unwanted pregnancies, La Voisin facilitated abortions, then illegal. Switching to the other obvious category of person a woman might desperately want to be rid of, these urban wise women offered methods of causing husbands who refused to die to depart with a more convenient speed - either by magic purportedly promoting this desired effect, or by poison. La Bosse was conclusively proved by an entrapment to deal in poison. Numbers of female clients were susceptible to this fantasy of murder with responsibility as it were magically transferred to its facilitators.

As with Simon Forman and the Countess of Essex in London forty years before, credulity and cruel desperation reached to the top of the social ladder. Louis XIV’s chief investigator, La Reynie, was soon eliciting (by ‘enhanced interrogation’, as the Pentagon might say) from the arrested ‘sorceresses’ and their associates, the names of people from the highest social circles, including the Sun King’s own former maitresse en titre, Madame de Montespan. The story concocted was predictable (being the kind of thing that was said about the Earl of Somerset and James I): that she had won his love in the first place by magic, had subsequently tried to regain it by more magic, and that she had a hand in the death of a rival, the Duchess of Fontanges, when that occured right in the middle of the poisons affair.

As soon as aristocrats were named, Louis had set about a cover up - all testimonies naming courtiers, and records of the questioning of those courtiers who did not flee the scene rather than testify, were to be kept by his investigator La Reynie on separate sheets of paper. A coherent and continuous account of the evidence against the expendables, without obvious redactions, could then be produced. Famously, when the king finally called off the whole investigation, he personally burned all the evidence against the favoured denizens of his Versailles - that La Reynie had made copies was unknown to him, and from their rediscovery comes the knowledge scholars have of these murky events and allegations.

And so, in a Paris gripped, mortified, appalled by these findings (for elite Parisian gossip served as effectively as Twitter might do now, and names leaked out from the ‘Chambre Ardente’ hearings despite everything), and when ten expendable persons had already been put to death, the play, La Divineresse was performed. Like The Late Lancashire Witches, it was well-timed, and a great success. Its lengthy series of 175 performances was rather more like what we’d understand nowadays as a good theatre run than the wonder of three consecutive afternoons which was the exceptional achievement of the Heywood-Brome play.

Poisons? Abortions? Black masses and acts of desecration? Non, non, et non! Against a background of wild stories - many of which probably originated with wretched people under torture trying to prolong their own lives by naming aristocrats as their former clients - and operations of the melodramatic court, that newly-revived ‘Chambre Ardente’ - black-draped, flambeau-lit, inquisatorial and (notionally) secret, Donneau and Corneille opted for a drawing room / quack’s consultation room comedy. There is no black magic here: there is only macabre fraud and gullibility. They recommend their piece as highly didactic, salutory, a helpful exposure of the realities of professed practitioners of magic.

Their play is described critically as a pièce à tiroirs, a chest of drawers, as La Jobin’s clients (like those of Jonson’s Alchemist) arrive one by one. Each embedded scene contains its own little set of contents. The diablèrie is in the heads of the clients. La Jobin is lucid, acute, and, when not entire in control, a brilliant improviser. She is assisted by subordinates, who, to impress new clients, say and hint far more about their mistress’s dark powers than she herself does. La Jobin plays up to their expectations while parting them from their money.

Besides the very expressive pièce à tiroirs designation, La Divineresse is also described as thèâtre de machine, a play reliant on spectacle or stage machinery. La Jobin, nothing else but a charlatan and a cheat, has at her command the illusionistic and personnel resources of a theatre. At moments in Jonson’s Alchemist, belief in the project seems to rub off from the clients onto Subtle, who will start talking about the ‘Great Art’ as if he believed in it in some part of his mind separate from knowledge of his own utter fraudulence. Madame Jobin has no such deviations from clear-sightedness. She is a bland promise-making machine - as soon as she knows what the client wants (and one truly believing customer can barely be brought to utter what it is, so confident is she in the supernatural insight a sorceress has to have), La Jobin is ready with assurances. A commercial fairy-godmother, she will condescend to grant the wishes of each client: an ointment that will peel away ugliness from a woman, and then a syrup that will which enable her to sing like an opera singer. A magical hand-grip upon a rapier, the little finger held just so to make the charm operative, that will give the war-loving coward M. Gilet invulnerability. (His enthusiam to show his courage has finally to be reined in with a caution that he must be mindful that she has performed the same service for other men, who also bear charmed lives). One woman client wants larger breasts (and breast augmentation certainly seems to have been part of La Voisin’s stock-in-trade). A male client called La Giraudiere seeks the ability to have sex with any woman he desires. After he has filled the purse of a masquerade devil, La Jobin’s establishment extends to a procession of the women he will have. She barely leaves the stage to make what would be in realistic terms very hasty arrangements for this parade. La Giraudiere is artfully led to understand that he will get to have these women only after six months or maybe more, the spirits involved in such a powerful spell being very difficult to win over.

The main plot strand of the play involves three characters. Madame Noblet comes closest to the realities of the poisons scandal: she wants her old husband out of the way, and for La Jobin to prevent the possible marriage to a countess of the marquis she has decided on as his successor. The countess (of Astragon), in her turn, will only marry the marquis if he can prove to her that La Jobin is a fraud. Despite La Jobin deploying her most elaborate effects to convince him, he perseveres, and eventually succeeds.

Madame Jobin’s business repeatedly involves convincing a woman who is reluctant to marry, or to re-marry, that a suitor really loves her, and only her. The fortune-teller as go-between and match-maker is familiar enough from the kind of accusations made about William Lilly’s manipulation of clients by prediction. In Act 2, a Marquise is convinced of La Jobin’s abilities by witnessing bodily swelling pass from one of her accomplices to another (Julia Prest seems to think this is an oblique allusion to the abortions La Voisin arranged. If this demonstration hints at a pregnancy, it ludicrously transfers to a man). Once she has been convinced, the Marquise is told that she will see her husband-to-be in a magical mirror (this stage property is initially curtained off). Beyond a sheet of what may in performance have been smoked glass, the sorceress has positioned her male client. A love-letter is sent, with an instant delivery and reply accomplished, rather as in ‘Harry Potter’, by means of ‘une maniere de Chat-huan qu’elle a la-dedans’. The Marquise sees the paranormally-delivered letter she has just written arrive; and then she sees a reply being written, and sent by owl-post, so that it falls to her from above.

Later, and more strikingly, a Monsieur Troufignac from Perigord arrives late in the action. His wife has left him, and he wants magic to bring her back. ‘Donnez-moi sept pièces d’or pour les offrir a l’Esprit qui m’amènera votre femme’. No nonsense about offering the spirit your soul, or blood from your body. Only money counts. He cavils at the price: how about four gold pieces? Haven’t you ever heard, she asks him, that seven is a mystical number? This he reluctantly concedes.

La Jobin is reflecting in soliloquy on how how many fools there are, who make her wise in spite of herself, when he re-enters, with news that he has just seen his wife arrive outside, dressed as a man (and he allows that he’s very impressed by the speed with which Jobin’s spirit has coerced her to the house). He leaves the scene, and the information he has just given allows La Jobin to stupefy Madame Troufignac with her occult powers of identification. But the wife herself has arrived with a quite remarkable request to the sorceress: to be transgendered into a man, to escape the disagreeable life of a married woman (‘La condition des femmes est trop malheureuses’). La Jobin tries to normalise this extraordinary woman, telling her to go back to Perigord with her husband. But Madame Troufignac says they can talk about that another day when the money she has purloined from the marital home has run out: for now, she will spend as long as she can in the role of libertine, chasing the women she has noticed seem to be responsive to her new appearance. The practitioner of magic is simply unable to make any money out of this lesbian. As La Jobin works on commission to convince those who doubt the wisdom of marrying, and would profit from Monsieur Troufignac if she did persuade his wife to return, she seems in general to promote and guard marriages. But here, she meets a person beyond her manipulation, a misogamist beyond her  ill-founded assurances (Madame Troufignac would not be interested in having the husband she has left treated with a love philtre, as is offered - that’s of no use to her at all.)

The discourse of misogamy, professions of reluctance to marry, or of a woman’s desire to remain a widow, is prominent in the play. It is as if a mutual scepticism can only be banished by practices that, in a proper view of the reality of things, demand their own scepticism. But then again, contrary to the suggestion I have just made (that the scepticism of the misogamist requires magic to deceive it), it might be inferred from this play that the feeble nature of the fraudulent contrivances that impart belief expresses how little we require to instil belief that a would-be partner is the ideal. (Off-hand, I can only think of Massinger’s The Picture as mixing misogamy and magic.)

Up to date as it seems to be about the daunting price of marriage (especially for women), the play also sounds modern about money. La Jobin makes her promises in return for a fee. In place of the diabolic contract, it’s a situation where any unscrupulous but moneyed client secures illicit aid. The clients arrive at the consulting rooms pre-corrupted by the money that promises to secure their wishes for them. Handing it over is a transfer of sin to an experienced sinner - or we can see it as a version of confession (‘I wish to do these amoral things in the future’, they confide), with a absolving penance beforehand (‘then part with your money’). La Jobin has a brother, introduced to us as anxious about the damage to his reputation in the tax office done by having a sister who is a reputed sorceress is doing. In some gently subversive humour, his sister convinces him that switching to assisting her in her trade would only be a small change, and he’d make more money than he does as a ‘pauvre Procureur Fiscal’. He does indeed join in with her fleecing of her clients. It is this brother that the Marquis forces to confess at pistol point to end the action. At the denouement, what seems to be a devil is revealed to be Gosselin, the taxman. While Gosselin sustains his role, his sister’s theatrical tricks back him up, with lights emerging from a hellish trapdoor. ‘Vostre Enfer ridicule ny tous vos eclairs ne m’etonnent pas’, affirms the Marquis. The only credible tormenter left is the taxman. La Jobin seems to hint that she would make the silence of those who have seen her exposure worthwhile, but the Countess says that ‘Il faut que la chose eclate, afin que personne n’y soit plus trompe’. 

But I am omitting the spectacular elements. Stolen property is located (La Jobin arranged the disappearance anyway) when a vision of the missing pistolets is given by means of a gauzy curtain on which they are painted, which flaps down from a ‘zigzag’. More impressive is the elaborate means she uses to convince the sceptical Marquis: parts of a dismembered body fall down the chimney, assemble into a kind of golem, which then walks to the middle of the theatre, and disappears through the floor. That’s the scene illustrated at the top of this post. One assumes that the back of the chimney was black cloth with long vertical slits. Puppeteers behind might control the fall of fake legs and arms, and then start to assemble them, until a performer can rise up in place of the composite puppet. In the subsequent scene, La Jobin’s brother says he helped move the pretend body-parts. The highlight of Act V was a big scene with a talking head and a terrified female client who is persuaded to touch it.

The scholars writing about this play point out some resemblances between the duped clients in this play and those who consulted La Voisin and her like. Like M. Gilet, the Marquis de Feuquieres wanted invulnerability from La Vigoreaux; the Duchess of Foix wanted larger breasts; and various clients asked, like the Marquis in this play, to talk to the devil.

As with The Late Lancashire Witches, there has been some scholarly surmise that there was an element of official collusion in the appearance of this play, even a suggestion that La Reynie personally encouraged the authors. The play is certainly in line with the 1682 royal legislation against sorcery, which was aimed at people who pretend to undertake magic, at poisoners, and at those who commit acts of desecration. Yet it seems odd that a play so resolutely insistent on simple fraudulence should be written and produced when La Voisin was shortly to be burned at the stake. The play makes La Jobin guilty of exploiting other people’s stupidity, and allows her to leave the scene at the end, vaguely promising restitution, and pursued by those who suddenly doubt that she can deliver their foolish dreams. No judge, no magistrate, no cleric is referred to, the only tribunal is public opinion after exposure, the only investigator the Marquis, whose motivation comes from the challenge set by the Countess, not personal zeal.

The play is studiously not ‘about’ La Voisin. La Jobin was played by a man. The play isn’t about sorcery, but about not being made ‘jobard’ (gullible) by someone like La Jobin. When witchcraft comes to town, it is a matter of trickery. There’s something like a perception that illicit or unassuaged needs and desires in more or less anyone can be exploited by the crafty. As La Jobin herself reflects, it is fools that teach her to be wise, in spite of herself. In prison cells, accused people made up confessions under duress. La Voisin fought desperately to remain in the coffin in which she had been brought to the stake. In his palace, the Sun King burned testimonies against aristocrats. In theatres, audiences laughed night after night at this comedy of their own folly.

‘Their eyes were holden that they should not know him': J H Glaser's anamorphic Fall, 1638

This is Johann Heinrich Glaser’s anamorphic composition, ‘The Fall’, 1638, dedicated to the Rector of Basle University, a man called Remi Fasch.

I sourced the image in Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ Anamorphic Art (1977), following up a reference in Stuart Clark’s 2007 book, Vanities of the Eye. I post this because I tried to find the image somewhere on the web, but failed apart from a couple of impossibly small-sized reproductions in Google books. (I haven’t been able to source a copy of Fred Leeman’s Hidden Images book of 1976, which may have a better version.)

So, this is two scans merged together of one A3 sized photocopy of a double page reproduction in a book. I then fastened my long strip to a piece of plywood with blu-tack, and tried taking oblique photographs from the principal point of view you must use if the anamorphic face of Christ crowned with thorns is to appear.

 

Well, much has been lost in this series of reproductions. I did my best; it conveys the idea. There’s no angle that gives a better view of the image of Christ, without those alarmingly dissimilar sized eyes that is. Baltrušaitis does not give the original dimensions of the 1638 print. Judging by the size of the letters in the dedicatory inscription that runs along the bottom, I’d guess at twice the size of the reproduction, which is 40cm across in the book. The real thing must work far better than the reproduced version. Clarity in this case is everything, if the eye is to be deceived.

So, within these limitations, I think we can see, reading across from the right, Adam and Eve at the forbidden tree, with a large and properly serpentine (rather than Lamia-like) serpent coiled round the tree trunk, while an owl sits on a branch, and a peacock stands at their feet. Between them, Death rises up as they disobey God.

The animals: an ape gazes at the lake, but it is viewing the ‘vexierbild’, the puzzle-picture from the wrong side: the ape will not see Christ (as if the picture demonstrates that it lacks a soul). On this side of the lake, and nearest the act of transgression, foxes, a bear, a cow, rabbit, a cat and a dog sparring. Behind these animals, a half-hidden row of birds: what might be a toucan (known from the mid 16^th century), two ibises, a cockerel with two rather exotic hens, a bird with a crest, a pheasant, a turkey, and a sprawling alligator. Then at the far left, the angel or cherubim chases Adam and Eve out of Paradise, the serpent wriggles at their feet, ready to start receiving its curse, and Death encourages their flight from Eden into his realm.

The lobe-like shores of the lake are of course where the anamorphic, hidden Christ begins. As a lake in Eden, He enlarges the usual four source streams of Paradise, usually depicted as clear rivulets stemming from a fountain, and usually allegorised as God’s grace flowing out to the whole world (the Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates, as Scafi’s book on Medieval maps explains, being taken to water all countries). Man’s sin has the reservoir of grace ready, the redeemer will not be revealed for millennia, but His mission, for which He is ready, has started.

Glaser has found a new way to put the two Adams into one picture (“First, wee see the difference between the two Adams: the first made sin, and infected all the world with it: The other made no sin, but redeemed all the world from it”, wrote Nicholas Byfield in 1623, it was a favourite thought of Donne’s – and of course many others).

There must be a larger study of unrevealed or half-revealed Christs. That Christ’s divine nature was hidden during His incarnation is one regular idea. But Christ is repeatedly not seen, or unrecognized. My title for this post comes from Luke 24, verse 16, non-recognition on the road to Emmaus; Mary Magdalene does not know him at John 20 14-16. At the start of His mission, in Like 4, 28-30, in one verse, Jesus is about to be cast down from the top of the hill by those angered by His calm self-announcement (after He has read from Isaiah in the synagogue, ‘This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears’), and His apparent refusal to show His ministry in Nazareth: the next verse, He has somehow slipped away through the angry mob: Jesus autem transiens in medio illorum, the line medieval travellers liked to have on their good luck charms.

There ought, really, to be more early modern pictures like this. The Reformation’s iconoclasm made depictions of the godhead controversial. This was a perfect way to compromise (you’d have thought): Puritans, all you see is a landscape, Anglicans, squint in from the left frame. But I guess they were so much one or the other, compromise never appealed that much.

‘And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.’ (Luke 24, 31)