When I speak of vision, I do not mean the admirable manner in which our eyes perceive objects, and in which the pictures of all that we see are painted on the retina — a divine picture designed according to all the laws of mathematics, which is, consequently, like everything else from the hand of the Eternal geometrician; in spite of those who explain it, and who pretend to believe, that the eye is not intended to see, the ear to hear, or the feet to walk. This matter has been so learnedly treated by so many great geniuses, that there is no further remnant to glean after their harvests.

I do not pretend to speak of the heresy of which Pope John XXII. was accused, who pretended that saints will not enjoy beatific vision until after the last judgment. I give up this vision. My subject is the innumerable multitude of visions with which so many holy personages have been favored or tormented; which so many idiots are believed to have seen; with which so many knavish men and women have duped the world, either to get the reputation of being favored by heaven, which is very flattering, or to gain money, which is still more so to rogues in general.

Calmet and Langlet have made ample collections of these visions. The most interesting in my opinion is the one which has produced the greatest effects, since it has tended to reform three parts of the Swiss — that of the young Jacobin Yetzer, with which I have already amused my dear reader. This Yetzer, as you know, saw the Holy Virgin and St. Barbara several times, who informed him of the marks of Jesus Christ. You are not ignorant of how he received, from a Jacobin confessor, a host powdered with arsenic, and how the bishop of Lausanne would have had him burned for complaining that he was poisoned. You have seen, that these abominations were one of the causes of the misfortune which happened to the Bernese, of ceasing to be Catholic, Apostolical, and Roman.

I am sorry that I have no visions of this consequence to tell you of. Yet you will confess, that the vision of the reverend father Cordeliers of Orleans, in 1534, approaches the nearest to it, though still very distant. The criminal process which it occasioned is still in manuscript in the library of the king of France, No. 1770.

The illustrious house of St. Memin did great good to the convent of the Cordeliers, and had their vault in the church. The wife of a lord of St. Memin, provost of Orleans, being dead, her husband, believing that his ancestors had sufficiently impoverished themselves by giving to the monks, gave the brothers a present which did not appear to them considerable enough. These good Franciscans conceived a plan for disinterring the deceased, to force the widower to have her buried again in their holy ground, and to pay them better. The project was not clever, for the lord of St. Memin would not have failed to bury her elsewhere. But folly often mixes with knavery.

At first, the soul of the lady of St. Memin appeared only to two brothers. She said to them: “I am damned, like Judas, because my husband has not given sufficient.” The two knaves who related these words perceived not, that they must do more harm to the convent than good. The aim of the convent was to extort money from the lord of St. Memin, for the repose of his wife’s soul. Now, if Madame de St. Memin was damned, all the money in the world could not save her. They got no more; the Cordeliers lost their labor.